2 50 763 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/e23b30d9c18f6ab55f89c7ca48a7b6e0.pdf ad08d2ad7eb8104d12818bbb29c41235 PDF Text Text 60 SLOVAKIA RISING AGAINST STALINISM: DESTALINIZATION AND THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE SLOVAK NATIONAL UPRISING IN SLOVAK HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE 1960s Scott Brown In the morning hours of 29 August 1944, several thousand Slovak and foreign partisans took up arms against the German soldiers who entered Slovakia the previous day to crush the country's growing anti-German resistance. This armed insurrection marked the start of the Slovak National Uprising (Slovenske narodne povstanie, or SNP), a rebellion centered on the city of Banska Bystrica and directed against the German invaders and the pro-German leaders of the wartime Slovak state. Over the ensuing two months, roughly 60,000 Slovak and foreign partisans, including rebel units of the Slovak Army, fought a loosely coordinated campaign against the German incursion. Outnumbered and outgunned, the partisans steadily lost the territory they had initially controlled, and by the end of October 1944 the German units had quelled the Uprising. Yet the military shortcomings of the SNP paled in comparison to its political significance: the Slovak underground had carried out the largest resistance operation on once (and future) Czechoslovak soil during the Second World War. The Uprising bolstered the position of the Czechoslovak government in exile, which could point to the SNP as proof that Czechoslovakia had contributed militarily to its own liberation. Further-more, in the eyes of Czechs, the Uprising also helped to "redeem" Slovaks for their unilateral declaration of independence in 1939, and for the quasi-fascist government that ruled Slovakia during the war. After the war, the SNP became the centerpiece of a new, reconstructed form of Slovak nationalism that played a major role in precipitating the Czechoslovak Spring of the late 1960s. Nonetheless, Slovak nationalism remained a liability for nearly two decades after the war. The mere existence of the wartime Slovak state left Slovak nationalism suspect, since many Czechs continued �SLOVAKIA 61 to equate it with Slovak separatism and the humiliating loss of Czech independence in 1939. In addition, the persecution of Slovak "bourgeois nationalists" - many of whom had played prominent roles in the Uprising - in the political trials of the 1950s further compromised the legitimacy of Slovak nationalism in a Czechoslovak context. These problematic legacies left Slovak nationalism without a usable past until the rehabilitation of the erstwhile Slovak "bourgeois nationalists" in 1963 afforded the Slovaks a political opening to reevaluate the SNP. In tum, this reinterpretation of the Uprising's historical significance provided the foundation for a new, positive brand of nationalism Slovaks could safely assert. If nothing else, the SNP had given the lie to the notion that Slovak nationalism was incompatible with a Czechoslovak state. Gradually, many Slovak historians, intellectuals and politicians advanced a narrative of the SNP that interpreted the Uprising as the great redemptive act of the Slovak nation. In this view, Slovaks rose up as a nation against the wartime pro-Nazi regime of Jozef Tiso, sacrificing "their own" state in order to resurrect Czechoslovakia and make the new republic their own state. For champions of the Slovak national cause in the 1960s, finding their place in the restored Czechoslovakia entailed recognition of the existence of a separate Slovak nation and the enshrinement of its equality with the other titular nation through the federalization of the state. By reconstructing the history of the Uprising in this way, Slovak nationalists could then lay claim to specific rights as a nation. Like their calls for a Czechoslovak federation later in the decade, Slovak nationalists' demands for legal recognition of Slovak nationhood in the mid- to late 1960s referred directly or indirectly to the Slovak National Uprising for justification. As historians and political figures constructed a new narrative of the Uprising in the 1960s, they toned down old Stalinist and Marxist dogmas. Instead, the language they used to describe the SNP restored Slovaks - and the Slovak nation - to a central role. Important in this regard was how Slovaks writing and speaking about the Uprising during the Czechoslovak Spring began to accentuate the Slovak nation (narod) in retelling the history of the Uprising, placing new stress on the national component of the Slovak National Uprising. Thus, along with their stated desire to seek historical truth and to rectify the "errors" of Stalinism, Slovak historians writing about the �62 SLOVAKIA Uprising in the sixties also contributed to the reconstruction of Slovak nationalism by linking Slovaks' demands for national rights and a just solution to the Slovak question with the progressive and democratic traditions of the Uprising. The process of reinterpreting the Uprising and reconstructing Slovak nationalism - a process that occurred in fits and starts, with much equivocation - shows, in turn, how important Slovak developments of the mid-1960s served as antecedents to the Czechoslovak Spring that blossomed in 1968. One of the crucial, yet underappreciated, facets of this prehistory took shape in the new historiography of the SNP produced in the l 960s. Several groups of historians participated in crafting this new narrative. Younger historians, such as Jozef Jablonicky, perhaps had an advantage of personal detachment, since they had fought in neither the Uprising nor the battles over its history during the Stalinist era. 1 Other important contributors came from the historians who served on the Bamabite Commission and subsequently attempted to produce more "objective" and "factual" histories of the Uprising. 2 But veterans of the Up1 lndeed, Jab lonicky di sti ngui shed himself as arguabl y the most profess iona l and darin g histo ri an with hi s willingness to te ll the story of the significant but politically margin ali zed non-communi st "c ivilian" component of the Slovak resi stance that fought in th e NP. Yet even Jablonicky's work ex hibited an evolution in hi s willingness to challenge former taboos, since his first works from early in the decade did not go quite so far in this regard as hi s later work. See Jozef Jablon icky, Sloven- ska na prelome: Zapas o vit'azstvo narodnej a demokratickej revohicie na Slovensku (Bratislava : Yydavatel'stvo politickej literatury, 1965); and Jozef Jablonicky, Z ilegality do povstania (Kapitoly z obcianskeho odboja) (Bratislava : Epocha, 1969). 2 In Apri l 1963 , the Central Comm ittee of th e Communist Party of Czechos lovakia (Komunis ticka strana Ceskoslovenska, or KSC) convened a working gro up of Slovak and Czech party and academic "experts," popularly known as the " Bamabite Commiss ion," to investi gate th e allegations of " bourgeois nationalism" that had been leve led aga inst Ladi slav ovomesky, Gustav Husak and oth er wartime leaders of the Communist Party of Slovakia (Komunisticka strana S/o venska, or KSS) in th e major Slovak political trial s of the early 1950s. The Bamabite Commission's report, issued in August 1963 , di spro ved the Stalinist-era charges and called for the co mplete political rehabilitation of Husak, Novomesky and the oth er accused Slovak " bourgeois nationa lists." Stanis lav Sikora, " Politicky vyvoj na Slovensku v rokoch I 960- 1967 ," in Miroslav Londak, Stanis lav Sikora an d Elena Londakova, Predjarie: Politicky, ekonomicky a kul!iirny vyvoj na Slovensku v rokoch 1960- 1967 (Bratislava: Veda, 2002), 46-47 . The major schol arl y product that followed from th e work of the Barnabite Comm ission , not to mention one of the best studi es of th e Uprising from this era, was Ferdinand Beer and others, Dejinna kriiovatka: Slovenske ncirod- �SLOVAKIA 63 rising, like Gustav Husak, and older scholars like Samo Falt'an (also a former partisan) participated in this process as well, whether to exonerate themselves for their activities during the SNP, or to offer a mea culpa for their distorted publications from the Stalinist era.3 Many western studies of the Czechoslovak Spring that address the years prior to 1968 offer at best a fleeting mention of the revival of Slovak history and efforts to remove discredited cliches of the 4 Stalinist era from the historical image of the SNP. Nonetheless, the lack of scholarly attention to this important trend in Slovak historiography does a disservice to its importance in Slovak - and Czechoslovak - politics of the mid- to late 1960s. Though de-Stalinization may have begun from on high in the Czechoslovak capital, Slovak historians, writers, intellectuals, politicians and other public figures took full advantage of the chance to break old taboos and raise formerly forbidden issues, none of which was more heretical or politically pregnant than the Slovak question. As the Slovak writer Peter Karvas told Antonin J. Liehrn in 1968, Stalinist propaganda had a banalizing effect on all this; it reduced the Uprising to a historical cliche, and in the end the generation of the Uprising convinced itself that this view was somehow a more noble and correct one. Thus it is neither an accident nor an illusion that the rehabilitation of the ne povstanie - predpoklady a vysledky (Brati slava: Vydavatel's tvo po litic kej literatury, I 964). Important exampl es of these work s we re Samo Falt'an, 0 Slovenskom narodnom povstani (Bra ti slava: Osveta, 1964); a nd Gustav Husak, Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani (Brati slava: Vydavatel'stvo po litickej literatury, 1964). Husak also published a second , slightl y rev ised editi o n of hi s memo ir cum hi story in 1969. nd Gustav Hu sak, Svedectvo o Slovensko narodnom povstani, 2 ed. (Bratislava: Epocha, 1969). 4 H. Gordon Skilling a nd V ladimir V . Ku sin each pro vide a pass in g mention of the importance of SN P hi stori ography in th e m id-sixties. See H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia ·s Interrupted Revolution (Princeto n, N .J .: Princeton Uni ve rsity Press, 1976), 50-51 ; V ladimir V. Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague 3 Spring: The Development of Reform ist Ideas in Czechoslovakia, 1956- 1967 (Ca mbridge: Ca mbrid ge Uni versity Press, 197 1), 70. �64 SLOVAKIA Uprising coincided with a wave of reawakening sweeping across all the Slovak social and intellectual life. 5 Accordingly, chronicling the "history of the history" of the Slovak National Uprising during the 1960s offers a way to challenge these conventional boundaries and interpretations of the Czechoslovak Spring. Tracing the shifts in Slovak historiography and the new brand of Slovak nationalism constructed in the process restores Slovaks to the significant role they played in this upheaval, showing how Slovakia experienced an "early spring" following the renewed effort at de-Stalinization and rehabilitation in 1963 . The Pitfalls of History (and Historiography) Pointing to the "errors" that plagued earlier histories of the Slovak National Uprising, the writer Ladislav Novomesky made a plea to Slovak and Czech historians in 1964. His appeal to the participants at a conference at Smolenice on the Uprising urged historians to pay close attention to the image of the SNP through twenty years of historiography. As part of the process of rectifying the mistakes of Stalinism and rewriting history, Novomesky proposed that historians "delineate the history of the history [emphasis in original]" of the Uprising. 6 As Novomesky's remarks indicated, the political context in which historians worked had left an indelible mark on historiography and on the history of the Slovak National Uprising. Political constraints of the Stalinist era had curtailed the research possibilities available to scholars, who could not access most of the relevant documents and other materials. But political dictates had also imposed ready-made interpretations on historians' narratives. When Novomesky made his pitch to historians to take stock of the historiography of the Uprising, he mainly had in mind the correction of the lies, distortions and half-truths that had colored histories of the Uprising 5 Antonin J. Liehm, The Politics of Culture, trans. Peter Kussi (New York : Grove Press, 1972), 351. 6 Ladislav Novomesky, "Za hi storicku pravdu o Povstani," in Slovenske narodne povstanie ro/..."U 1944 (Sbornik prispevkov z narodnooslobodzovacieho boja 19381945), eds . Cudovit Holotik and Miroslav Kropilak, (Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Slovenskej akademie vied, 1965), 668. �SLOVAKIA 65 since the onset of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s. Revisions to these histories had become possible only with the work of the Bamabite Commission and the first concrete steps at deStalinization in 1963 . As the Slovak writer Michal Chorvath claimed on the Uprising's nineteenth anniversary in August 1963 , the "liquidation of the cult of personality" made it possible for the first time in years "to say about the Slovak National Uprising and its significance for our nation and state what the whole public has already thought for a long time." 7 De-Stalinization thus provided an important stimulus in the midI 960s for historians to attempt a more objective look at the Uprising. But while this political opening afforded scholars an opportunity to contest the older dogmatic accounts of the SNP, the historical image of the Uprising remained deeply politicized in the new narratives of the sixties. In the middle and later years of the decade, many Slovak intellectuals and politicians contested Stalinist-era views in rewriting the history of the SNP, yet the individuals driving these shifts continued to interpret the historical significance of the Uprising in a way that served their contemporary personal and political agendas. For instance, Husak claimed expertise as a historian of the Uprising based on his background as the leading Slovak Communist in the SNP. Yet Husak also traded on his stature as an "authority" on the Uprising (and as the most prominent surviving Slovak victim of the Stalinist era) to mount his political comeback, culminating in his ascent to the post of KSC first secretary in April 1969. As the Czech historian Jan Rychlik notes, the new interpretation of the Uprising formulated in the mid-sixties "had a supremely political character," since it weighed directly on the question of rehabilitation and a return to politics for Husak and Novomesky.8 Nonetheless, a "rehabilitation" of the historical image of the SNP was a necessary part of de-Stalinization in Slovakia after 1963 , because the dictates of Stalinism had skewed earlier narratives. Older histories of the Uprising painted it as the opening act of the national and democratic revolution in Czechoslovakia, depicting the SNP as little more than a stepping stone toward the Communist seizure of 7 Mi cha l Chorvath , "K metodam skum ani a SN P," Ku /uirny i ivot, 3 1 August 1963. Jan Rychlik, Ce.si a Slovaci ve 20. sto /eti: Cesko-slovenske vztahy 1945-/ 992, vo l. 2 (Bra ti slava : Academi c Electroni c Press, 1998), 206. 8 �66 SLOVAKIA power. 9 These Stalinist-era narratives forced the SNP into a doctrinaire Marxist framework. Accordingly, historiography from the 1950s and early 1960s celebrated the toiling masses of the Slovak people (l'ud) , who rejected the "clerico-fascism" of the Tiso regime and adopted an internationalist outlook in fightin g side by side with the fraternal Czech nation, aided by the heroic Soviet Union, in order to create a new Czechoslovak Republic oriented towards the international Communist movement centered in Moscow. The heavy-handed Marxist language employed in these older narratives practically wrote Slovaks out of their own Uprising as it lionized the role of the Red Army and even of Czech partisans in the SNP, treating the contributions of Slovaks as an afterthought. Writing in samizdat in 1980, Jablonicky, the leading Slovak historian of the Uprising, divided historiography of the SNP into three distinct periods. Jablonicky characterized the first period, from 1949 to 1962, as one of "deformation," a time when historians falsified the history of the SNP to suit the dogmas of Stalinism and the attack on Slovak "bourgeois nationalism," which claimed as victims many prominent communist veterans of the Slovak resistance, including Husak, Novomesky and Karol Smidke. 10 Beginning with the work of the Barnabite Commission, a second period, which Jablonicky called "rehabilitation" took shape in 1963 . Though it lasted only until the installation of the Husak regime in April 1969, this era witnessed a burst of scholarship on the Uprising distinguished by its pursuit of "historical truth," including efforts to docu9 See, for instance, Jaros lav Kubat, ed., Slovenske narodni po vstani - Vyznamna etapa narodne osvobozeneckeho boje ceskoslovenskeho lidu: Material pro lektory a propagandisty k 15. vyroci SNP (Prague: Statn i nak ladatelstvi poli ticke literatu ry, 1959) . 10 Smidke had been a member the illegal KSS Centra l Committee that orga nized the Uprising, as we ll as the co-creator of the Christmas Agreement. Du ring the early stages of the campa ign aga inst the "bourgeois nationalists," Smidke faced accusations of collaboration, along with Vladimir Clementi s, Husak and Novo mesky, and lost his party and governmenta l posts, inc ludi ng his position as chairman of the Slovak Nati onal Council. Sm idke avo ided jo ining his supposed co llaborators in the dock at the poli tical tria ls of the ea rl y fifti es only due to hi s death in an automobile acc ident in late 1952, th ough various witnesses c laimed it had been a planned murder. He was posthumously rehabilitated with the other Slovak "bourgeois nati onalists" in December 1963. Jan Pesek, " Karo l Smidke," ed. Ja n Pesek, Akteri jednej ery na Slovensku: Personiflkacia politickeho vyvoja (Presov: Vydavatel'stvo Michala Vaska, 2003), 328-330. �SLOVAKIA 67 ment the role of non-Communists in the SNP. With the onset of "normalization" in 1970, a third period commenced, bringing a return to deformations and the silencing of "inconvenient historians" a group that included Jablonicky - and lasted until the fall of the communist regime in 1989. 11 Though Jablonicky's periodization conforms to wide trends in historiography on the Uprising, his characterization of the second period oversimplifies the contours of this pivotal era. Scholarship on the SNP produced from 1963 to 1969 witnessed a new push for historical truth and objectivity, with historians drawing on previously inaccessible documents, filling in former "blank spots" and challenging earlier dogmatic interpretations of the Uprising. However, the general trend toward historical fidelity did not follow the linear trajectory Jablonicky describes. While many historians sought accuracy and improved professional practices, others held fast to old dogmas, resulting in a multiplicity of narratives and interpretations of the SNP. Moreover, the ambiguities inherent in the quest for historical truth cut through the scholarship of individual historians. In May 1963 , Jan Kfen, a Czech historian who served as one of the experts on the Bamabite Commission, explained the challenges ahead for historians after Stalinism: The battle against dogmatism is, in my opmzon, above all an internal matter of every historian, a question of his theoretical level, his ideological potential. Like all progress in science, the overcoming of dogmatism is not possible without abilities and talent. Untalented thinking is always dogmatic, stereotypical and toady ish. 12 Yet Kfen overstated the importance of professional abilities, as many talented historians struggled to discard political considerations in order to write better histories. For instance, while Jablonicky's Slovensko na prelome, published in 1965, stressed the importance of the Uprising for inaugurating a new chapter in Czech-Slovak rela11 Jozef Ja bl oni cky, Glosy o historiograjii SNP: Zneuiivanie a f alfovanie dej in SNP (Brati slava: NVK In te rn ati onal, 1994), I 0, 13. 12 Jan Kfe n, " Kult a hi stori e," Kulttirna tvorba, 23 May 1963. �68 SLOVAKIA tions, Jablonicky equivocated in repeating the best orthodox cliches about nefarious Slovak and Czech bourgeoisies and the leading role of Communists in the resistance. 13 To Jablonicky's credit, he penned perhaps the decade ' s most important historiographical contribution in 1969, Z illegality do povstania, which offered the most stunning refutation of dogmatic interpretations of the Uprising and destroyed several taboos in praising the non-communist resistance and units of the Slovak Army for their roles in the Uprising while simultaneously portraying its communist leaders in an unflattering light. In a samizdat essay from 1979, Jablonicky even offered a mea culpa for his early scholarship in which he acknowledges the shortcomings of his first works. As Jablonicky recalled, conversations with dozens of former partisans and victims of Stalinism "gradually opened my eyes" as a young historian in the 1960s, leading him to appreciate the importance of the non-communist resistance. 14 Of course, Jablonicky was not alone. At a conference of Slovak historians in June 1963, Milos Gosiorovsky presented a harsh evaluation of his own works on the Uprising from the Stalinist era, criticizing his monographs Ilegalny boj KSS and Slovenske narodne povstanie for presenting a "substantially deformed" picture of the 15 SNP. A year later, Samo Falt'an described how the dictates of editorial boards and the pressures of self-censorship had handicapped evaluations of the Uprising in the Stalinist era, preventing him from including anything critical in his book Partizanska vojna na Slovensku, published in 1959 . 16 As the confessions of Gosiorovsky and Falt'an revealed, the most prominent Slovak historians had been especially susceptible to pressures for ideological conformity, which 13 Jablonicky, Slovensko na prelome, 3 1, 148- 149. Vilem Precan, " Historik proti nas iliu - Jozef Jabloni cky," in Jozef Jablonicky, Samizdat o odboji: Stiidie a clanky, vol. 2 (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2006), 12; Jablonicky, Glosy o historiografii SNP, 6 1. 15 Frantisek Bokes, "Vaine zhromazdeni e Slovenskej hi stori ckej spolocnosti ," Historicky casopis 12, no. 4 (1963): 650; Milos Gosiorovsky, !legalny boj KSS a Slovenske narodne povstanie (Bratislava: Nakladatel'stvo Pravda, 1949); Milos Gosiorovsky, Slovenske narodne povstanie (Bra ti slava : Slovenske vydava tel'stvo politi ckej literatury, 1954). 16 Samo Falt'an, "Niektore otazky okolo hodnoteni a Slovenskeho narodneho povstania," Historicky casop is 12, no. 2 ( 1964): 161 , 164; Samo Falt'an, Partizanska vojna na Slovensku (Bratislava: Osveta, 1959). 14 �SLOVAKIA 69 seemed to spur their self-conscious push for objectivity in the more relaxed Slovak political climate of the mid-l 960s. Just as Slovak historians in the l 960s recognized the harmful effects of Stalinism on scholarship on the Uprising, scholars writing about the sixties acknowledge the importance of historiography for the larger crisis gestating in Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, scholarship about the l 960s has pronounced limitations when it comes to historiography from the 1960s. Non-Slovak writers treat the history of the Uprising as but one issue among many new historiographical developments in Czechoslovakia, an approach characterristic of the wider tendency to trivialize the role of Slovaks and the Slovak question in the l 960s. 17 While the Slovak National Uprising was hardly the only historical theme to gamer renewed interest from historians in the mid-sixties - or even the only topic from Slovak history - it was unique in the political purposes to which prominent Slovaks put it in justifying contemporary demands for a resolution of the Slovak question in line with the ostensible aims of the Uprising. More obvious, however, was the extent to which the new historiography on the SNP from the 1960s broke with old dogmas. The doctrinaire narrative of the Uprising from the Stalinist era marginalized the role of Slovaks in the Slovak National Uprising. An instructional manual for lecturers and propagandists published in advance of the SNP's fifteenth anniversary - and, tellingly, written in Czech inflated the importance of Soviet and Czech contributions to the Uprising: In August 1944 the Slovak nation, emboldened by the heroic battle of the Soviet p eople in the Great Patriotic War, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, alongside the Soviet Army advancing to victory, together with the fraternal Czech nation, rose up with weapons in 17 See, fo r instance, th e scant treatm ent prov ided in Stanl ey Z. Pec h, " Fe rment in Czec hoslova k Marxist Hi stori ograph y," Canadian Slavonic Papers l 0, no. 4 (Dece mber 1968): 502-522; Ga lia Gol an, The Czechoslovak Refo rm Movement: Communism in Crisis. 1962- / 968 ; and Skillin g, Czechoslovakia 's Interrupted Revolution. By contrast, M. Mark Stolarik observed how hi stori ans, beginning with Husak and the th eme of the SNP, increasingly reasserted Slovak nati onali sm in their th work . M. Mark Stolarik , "The Painful Birth of Slovak Histori ography in the 20 Century," Zeitschriftfiir Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 50, no. 2 (2 00 I): 176 . �70 SLOVAKIA hand against the German occupiers and their domestic fascist supporters in order to contribute to the liberation of their own homeland - the Czechoslovak Republic. 18 Amid the rambling succession of clauses inserted to show obligatory deference to the Soviet Union and the KSC and to flatter Czechs, the propaganda manual, like the Stalinist-era interpretations of the SNP it typifies, lost sight of the Slovaks, who nearly disappeared from the history of their own Uprising. At the same time, older orthodoxy ascribed the Marxist categories of proletarian internationalism and class struggle to the Uprising. In their work on international participation in the SNP, the Czech Jii'i Dolezal and the Slovak Jozef Hroziencik credited the liberation of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Army on the international stage, and to the working class at home. The Uprising occurred as a consequence, Dolezal and Hroziencik argued, of "the strengthening of the working class and its ideological leadership in the nation," along with the blossoming of the idea of internationalism within the proletariat. 19 Near the end of the Stalinist era, an editorial in 1962 from the KSC Central Committee daily Rude pravo made the dubious claim that, "on an ideological plane," the Uprising "aimed mainly at developing a unified economy," along with combining all other aspects of Slovak and Czech society after liberation - making the SNP appear as the first step toward amalgamating Slovaks and Czechs into a single Czechoslovak nation.2° Conventional interpretations from the Stalinist era thus reduced the Uprising to little more than the opening act in the Czechoslovak revolution and a prelude to the communist takeover in 1948.21 Such a view seemed at odds with the reality of communist electoral strength in the elections of 1946, when the party made considerable gains over its interwar showing, yet still suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the Democratic Party. 18 Kubat, Slovenske narodni povstani, 3. Jifi Dolezal and Jozef Hroziencik, Medzinarodna solidarita v Slovenskom narodnom povstani (Bratislava: Osveta, 1959), 35, 219 20 " Rozvij ime spolecne dilo," Rude pravo, 29 August 1962. 21 Doleza l and Hroziencik, Medzinarodna solidarita , 74. 19 �SLOVAKIA 71 Coming to Terms with the Past: De-Stalinization and the Uprising Rewriting the history of the Slovak National Uprising first required important political developments to transpire, and the process drew succor from new efforts at de-Stalinization in 1963 . But the impact of the Bamabite Commission also revealed the crucial role historians played in this process. As Ferdinand Beer, Antonin Bencik, Frantisek Janacek and Jan Kfon recalled, their work on the Bamabite Commission offered historians a rare chance to play an important role in current events: ft was - as far as we know - the first time such a large group of scholars was asked to do this kind of work. This experience left its mark on their whole way of doing work and became, at least for historians, one of those rare occasions when they could not only reconstruct history, but also help to make it. 22 The recollections of these historians also spoke to the transformative effect the Bamabite Commission had on its member-scholars, which proved a formative experience for the way they approached their craft thereafter. Because it focused not only on the political trials of the early 1950s, but also on the activities of the "bourgeois nationalists" during the SNP, the Bamabite Commission employed several professional historians who consequently gained access to documents formerly off limits to researchers, including the files of the "bourgeois nationalists" and materials concerning the cases of Vladimir Clementis and others.23 A document collection on the SNP, originally planned to appear in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the Uprising in 1964 and intended to span 300 to 400 pages when conceived in the spring of 1963, soon ballooned to more than a thousand pages and took an extra year to produce. As Vilem Precan, the Czech editor of the volume, recounts in hi s preface, the renewed interest in the Uprising first observed during celebrations of its nineteenth anniversary, coupled with the political fallout of the 22 23 Beer and others, "Svedectvi z Barnabitek," Kulturni tvorba, 2 May 1968. Sikora, " Po liticky vyvoj na Slovensku," 38. �72 SLOVAKIA Barnabite Commission's report, created "editorial possibilities" that compelled him to broaden the scope of the project. Precan had to sift through piles of newly available documents and include as many of these materials as he could, a daunting task that kept him from completing the volume until 1965 - a full year behind schedule.24 Confronted with documentary evidence of the fabrications from the political trials, the historian-members of the Bamabite Commission were floored by the level of deceit, which exceeded their wildest imagination. Confronting such proof of the crimes of Stalinism had a galvanizing effect on Slovak and Czech historians similar to the jolt Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" had given to Soviet Communists in 1956. As a group of historians recalled in the spring of 1968, "In a certain sense, all of us inside the walls of the former Bamabite monastery went through our own 20 th Congress." 25 For these historians at least, there could be no going back to the old, dogmatic interpretations of Slovak history, especially where the Uprising was concerned. Sensing the opportunity de-Stalinization and the Barnabite Commission had created, historians took the initiative in probing sensitive issues like the Slovak question and the wartime resistance in Slovakia. As early as March of 1963, Falt'an had urged a drastic reexamination of the Uprising, one that would break out of the "black-and-white pigeonholes" of historiography from the Stalinist era to "evaluate objectively and justly" such topics as the role of (non-communist) Slovak regulars from the 1st Czechoslovak Army in the SNP. 26 Further steps in this direction came in the summer of 1963, when historians openly connected the significance of their professional work to the concurrent process of rehabilitation. Miroslav Kropilak opened the Slovak Historical Society ' s conference in June 1963 by reminding his fellow historians of their shared obligation in reassessing "wrongly interpreted" segments of their history. 27 The congress helped to engage Slovak historians in the task 24 Vilem Precan, "S lovo cita tel'ovi," in Slovenske narodne povstanie - Dokumenty, ed. Precan, 5-6. 25 Beer and others, " Svedectvi z Barnabitek. " 26 Samo Falt'an, " Histori a a dn esok," Kulturny i ivot, 23 March 1963 . 27 Kropilak's ex hortati on to eliminate th e "unscienti fic methods" of research employed in studi es of recent Slovak history marked an about fac e from his own presentation at the Fourth Congress of Slovak Histori ans a year earli er in Kosice. At Kosi- �SLOVAKIA 73 of eliminating vestiges of the "cult of personality," and it created space, as the historian Marek Havrila remarked, for the "de-ideologizing" (odideologizovanie) of history and the "academifying" (zvedectenie) of the discipline.28 Rewriting History: New (and Old) Narratives of the Uprising Historians began to rewrite the history of the Uprising in time for its twentieth anniversary in 1964, reflecting not only the opportunities created by the Bamabite Commission, but also the heightened interest in commemorating this milestone. Many historians took seriously the need for better scholarship on the Uprising and strove to make use both of newly available materials as well as the relaxation of political constraints. But other historians largely paid lip service to the tasks of writing new, post-Stalinist narratives of the SNP, hewing closely to older, more dogmatic interpretations. On the whole, the new historiography of the Uprising produced in the 1960s yielded improved histories, but it remained bound to the shifting politics of the day. A key development early in this process was an academic conference held at Smolenice on 8-10 June 1964, when several Slovak and Czech historians presented their latest research on the Uprising. The conference marked important progress on the "arduous journey" historians had traveled, as Kropilak recalled in his foreword to the published volume of conference papers, since it brought a "difficult acknowledgment of the unexamined truths, half-truths and untruths" that had characterized historiography of the Uprising from the Stalinist era.29 In a similar vein, Alexander Dubcek, who became KSS first secretary amid the political shakeup of the previous year, ce in I 962 , Kropil ak gave a paper on the anti fas ci st move ment in Eastern Slovakia th at uphe ld communist orthodoxy. He credited the party for building the resistance from the grass roots until the Upri sing, but made no mention of th e contributions of non-Co mmuni sts in the Slova k res istance. Bokes, " Va ine zhromazdenie," 650 ; "Stvrty sjazd slovenskych hi storik ov," Historicky casopis I 0, no. 4 ( 1962): 632. 28 Marek Havril a, " K ni ektory m pro blemom vyv inu slovenskej hi storiografie a slovenskej histori ckej spolocnosti pri SA V v 50. a 60. rokoch 20. storocia," Historicky casopis 55 , no. I (2007) : 28, 32. 29 Mi ros lav Kropil ak, " Uvod," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku I 944, eds. Hol otik and Kropilak, 5. �74 SLOVAKIA opened the conference proceedings by exhorting historians to undertake "a really broad and deep critical analysis of all problems" concerning this significant chapter in recent Slovak history, and Dubcek also reminded historians that the rectification of earlier mistakes was not simply a question of the past, but also a living concern of the present and future .30 As if Dubcek's point could somehow be lost on his audience, the participation of Husak and Novomesky at Smolenice underscored the topicality of scholarship on the SNP. Indeed, Husak expressed his belief on the final day that the conference itself was a sign of the times, since a definite measure of political relaxation in Slovakia was a precondition for historians to address openly the pitfalls of Stalinist-era historiography, and to shed new light on the history of the Uprising. 31 The papers presented at Smolenice aimed mainly at debunking the myths and errors of the Stalinist-era narrative of the SNP. For instance, Falt'an directly criticized the Ninth KSS Congress for having "artificially created" a circle of "bourgeois nationalist traitors and agents of imperialism" that included Husak, Novomesky and Smidke as its leading figures. This trio of Slovak Communists had created the illegal Fifth KSS Central Committee in 1943 , following the arrest of members of the Fourth KSS Central Committee, and had played a major role in organizing the Uprising. Yet the members of the Fifth KSS Central Committee came under fire after the communist takeover of 1948 for their collaboration with nonCommunists, which provided one justification for their persecution as Slovak "bourgeois nationalists." Falt'an portrayed the Slovak Communists who had helped to orchestrate the SNP as both patriotic and communist, rendering the wartime KSS leadership as neither "bourgeois" nor "nationalist" in an effort to break with the dogmatic interpretations that had marred previous historiography.32 Another crucial component of this attempt to cast aside Stalinistera narratives was the effort historians made to address lacunae in scholarship on the Uprising. To this end, the Slovak historian Milos 30 Alexander Dubcek, "Marx isticka histori ografia a nasa revolucna minulost'," in S/ovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Holotik and Kropil ak, I 8. 31 Gustav Husak, " K ni ektorym otazkam Slovenskeho narodn eho povstania," in S/ovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Holotik and Kropilak, 652-653. 32 Samo Falt'an, " Slovenske narodn e povstani e a jeho problemy," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Holotik and Kropilak, 222, 234. �SLOVAKIA 75 Tichy called attention to the contributions of non-Communists in the SNP. Though the Communists had been the only party in Slovakia that opposed the breakup of the republic and the Tiso government from the outset, Tichy emphasized how the non-communist parties could not be treated as monolithic supporters of Slovak separatism. Thus, Tichy took care to note how segments of the Social Democratic Party, along with individual members of other "bourgeois" (meaning non-communist) parties had held views similar to those of Slovak Communists with respect to the creation of a pro-German Slovak state. It was noteworthy for Tichy even to mention these nonCommunists who went on to join the wartime resistance, since, as he noted, the record of the non-communist resistance had been thoroughly trivialized and falsified in earlier historiography.33 Tichy struck one of the first important blows against the Stalinist narrative of the Uprising by virtue of recognizing the existence of noncommunist opposition to the Slovak state, though it was not until Jablonicky published Z ilegality do povstania at the end of the decade that this "civilian" segment of the wartime Slovak resistance gained the recognition it deserved. Even though historians consciously sought objectivity and historical fidelity at Smolen ice, they did not reject all elements of the Stalinist-era narrative of the SNP. Thus, while Falt'an preached the importance of historical truth in denouncing the lies that characterrized earlier histories, he sought this "truth" within a distinctly Marxist framework. Comparing the Slovak National Uprising of 1944 to the Warsaw Uprising of the same year, Falt'an placed the Slovak revolt on a qualitatively higher plane than the Polish insurrection, since the SNP had, in Falt'an 's estimation, the superior class orientation. Whereas the Polish "reactionary bourgeoisie" had "abused" popular hatred of Nazi Germany in order to serve its own "political speculations" and "anti-Soviet aims," the Slovak people had taken up arms under the leadership of "revolutionary forces" headed by the KSS .34 Marxist hermeneutics continued to color other interpretations of the Uprising advanced at Smolenice. Like Falt'an, Tichy took great 33 Milos Tic hy, " Hl avne etapy fo rmy a probl emy narodn ooslobodzo vac ieho hnuti a na Slove nsku do vzniku Povstani a," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Ho lotik and Kropilak, 65, 7 1. 34 Fa lt'a n, "S lovens ke narodn e povstanie a jeho pro bl emy," 27 1. �76 SLOVAKIA pains to emphasize the class dimension of the Slovak people's rejection of the pre-Munich First Republic. Tichy claimed the Slovak people (l'ud) had directed their hatred not at the fraternal Czech nation, but rather against the "politics of the ruling Czech bourgeoisie." 35 Similarly, Frantisek Janacek, a Czech historian and former member of the Barnabite Commission, conceded the importance of the national element in the Uprising, yet he suggested there was less real significance to such national sentiment in and of itself than in the political objectives to which Slovak Communists could put it in the SNP. Thus, Janacek upheld a doctrinaire Marxist interpretation of national sentiment in deeming it instrumental to revolutionary ends. He argued the initiative the Communists exhibited on the Slovak question had made the KSS a vanguard force that Slovaks recognized as a "national" (narodm) party. 36 Husak also hewed closely to this orthodox narrative of the Uprising instead of accentuating the national dimension of the SNP, averring at Smolenice that "the Slovak National Uprising was above all a political conception, the political revolution of the Slovak people." 37 Even as historians embarked on a pursuit for the truth about the SNP at Smolenice, they continued to parrot old party cliches about the Uprising. Indeed, historical fidelity coexisted alongside shifting political dictates in the historiography of the SNP throughout the l 960s, demonstrating how historians' professed desire for objectivity toward the past ran aground on their inability to remain aloof from the politics of the present. In O Slovenskom narodnom povstani, published in 1964, Falt'an culled new facts and documents in a quest to tell the truth about the Uprising, albeit a truth with a clear agenda. Falt'an's book expanded on the ideas he presented at Smolenice, as he continued his efforts to vindicate the Slovak Communists who had been condemned as "bourgeois nationalists" in the 1950s. But while Falt'an made skillful use of wartime documents to present a more historically accurate picture of the Slovak resistance, the same tired cliches about international solidarity and the Soviet Union 35 Tichy, " Hlavne etapy formy a problemy narodnooslobodzovacieho hnutia na Slovensku," 68-69. 36 Frantisek Janacek, " Dve promeny slovenske otazky (Mezi Mnichovem a Slovenskym narodnim povsta nim)," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku /944 , eds. Holotik and Kropilak, 618 , 628. 37 Husak, "K ni ektorym otazkam Slovenskeho narodneho povstania," 657. �SLOVAKIA 77 still peppered his work. He claimed the Uprising, among other things, "was the expression of great faith in the Soviet people," showing how de-Stalinization and a more relaxed political environment did not relieve Slovaks and Czechs of the duty to show deference to their Soviet allies - an obligation that remained in force even at the height of liberalization in 1968.38 Even the most groundbreaking histories of the Uprising from the mid-sixties exhibited a multiplicity of agendas. In Dejinna kriiovatka, a group of Slovak and Czech historians drew on their work on the Bamabite Commission in an attempt to "rehabilitate" the historical image of the SNP. Their work helped to expose the distortions of the Stalinist era, but it also restored the Slovak question to a prominent role in the new, post-Stalinist narrative of the Uprising. Dejinna kriiovatka appeared in a modest printing of 10,000 copies, yet it gained renown as the first attempt at a comprehensive history of the Slovak National Uprising that consciously rejected the Stalinist narrative and addressed several lacunae in scholarship on the Uprising. And yet, for all its significance as a landmark of Slovak historiography, Dejinna kriiovatka continued to uphold a Marxist worldview in interpreting the SNP as an affirmation of socialist revolution as well as a manifestation of how attractive communist ideas were to the average Slovaks who formed the core of the partisan masses in the Uprising.39 A similar emphasis on the communist aims of the Uprising appeared in Husak's Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani. To his credit, Husak addressed some previously neglected or trivialized facets of the Uprising, pointing out the contributions of the noncommunist opposition within the antifascist camp, the existence of 40 which had been all but denied in Stalinist-era scholarship. Yet Husak's motives for calling attention to this marginalized component of the resistance were also self-serving. Lauding the role of the nonCommunists in the Uprising allowed Husak to validate the strategy of cooperating with non-Communists that he and other KSS leaders had pursued. Husak's intent in writing his recollection of the Uprising seemed to be to vindicate himself, not only in terms of the 38 Falt'an, 0 Slovenskom narodnom povstani, 8, I 03. Beer and others, Dejinna kriiovatka, 125-126, 252. 40 Husak, Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani, 36-37. 39 �78 SLOVAKIA historical record, but also in the eyes of the party. As such, Husak stuck close to the communist interpretation of the SNP as a revolt directed against the ruling Slovak and Czech bourgeoisies, while simultaneously heralding the Communist Party (a self-referential bit of praise, considering his role as a member of the wartime KSS leadership) for leading the Uprising and launching the national and democratic revolution in Slovakia. 41 Husak's book also created a sensation after it appeared in August of 1964. The responses from Slovak and Czech intellectuals and historians ranged from the fawning to the damning, but most reviews 42 emphasized its positive contributions to scholarship on the SNP. These early favorable reviews led many Slovaks to view Husak, not only as a prominent figure in the Uprising, but as Jablonicky observed years later, they also encouraged both defenders and detractors of Husak to think of him "as a promising politician possibly on the rise in Slovakia."43 Husak's account of the Uprising conferred considerable authority on him, though not all historians accepted his portrayal of the SNP without reservation. The Czech scholar Josef Domansky offered the first critical remarks on Husak's book, noting one shortcoming was its "methodological non-clarity" resulting from the blurred division between Husak the memoirist and Husak the historian. On the whole, Domansky judged the book positively, even if it had its flaw s, and he regarded it as part of the new trend in historiography that helped to clarify the importance of the Slovak question and to transcend the oversimplifications of earlier scholarship on the Uprising.44 Yet Husak's book became a cause celebre among Slovak - and Czech - intellectuals when it came under fire from on high . Antonin Novotny had little patience for Husak, since Novotny had resisted the rehabilitation of Husak and other victims of Stalinism. When KSS leaders refused to rein in Husak, Novotny commissioned a party hack, the Czech historian Vaclav Kral , to write a scathing review in 41 Ibid., 129, 133 , 139. See, for instance, Anna Stvrtecka, "O dokum entoc h a fa ktoc h," Kultiirny i ivot, 27 August I 965 ; and Jifi Doleza l, " Dvakrat o S P," Mezinarodni politika I 0, no. I 0 (October 1964): 472. 43 Jablonicky, "S lovenske narodne povstani e a tri etapy jeho hodnoteni a," 452 . 44 Josef Domansky, " Nad knihou o Slovenskem narodnim povs tani," Nova mys/ 20, no. I ( 1965): 133- 134. 42 �SLOVAKIA 79 order to discredit Husak.45 The KSC cultural weekly Kulturni tvorba published Kral 's review in February 1966, almost two years after Husak' s book appeared in print, and focused, in Kral ' s words, "on a series of theses and questions that are insufficiently or incorrectly developed in Husak's book." Yet Kral's dissection of Husak' s narrative contained thinly veiled criticism of Husak's wartime activities as a member of the KSS Central Committee that organized the • · 46 Upnsmg. Though the high-level political machinations behind Kral ' s review were not common knowledge at the time, the response from Slovak and Czech historians was irate. Anton Bencik, Vaclav Kura) and Jaromir Navratil - one Slovak and two Czech historians - published a reply to Kral in defense of Husak' s work, which stressed the importance of Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani as a harbinger of the new developments in historiography following the KSC's renunciation of "bourgeois nationalism" in 1963 . "The publication of Husak's book was indisputably an event," they offered in their response, yet the renown Husak had achieved with this work was only possible because it corresponded to contemporary knowledge of the Uprising and had been accepted by the historical community. Indeed, Husak 's book had been vetted in several reviews, which generally judged it favorably , albeit with some criticism of individual facets . Bencik, Kura! and Navratil also found it puzzling how Kral had remained silent during the historiographical discussions of Husak 's book when it first appeared, and was only then speaking out against the work, long after the fact. The timing was peculiar, though Bencik, Kura) and Navratil did not press their • • 47 susp1c10ns. 45 Vac lav Kra l, "O os udu jedne recenze," Kulturni tvorba, 25 April 1968. Vaclav Kra l, "O Husakove svedectvi troc hu j inak," Kul!urni tvorba, 24 February 1966. 47 Anton Benci k, Vaclav Ku ra ] and Jaromir Navratil , "Jes te o Husakove svedectvi a nejen o nem," Kulturni tvorba, 3 1 March 1966. The rev iew was reprinted a week later in th e Slovak cul tura l magaz ine Predvoj. Anton Benc ik , Vac lav Ku ra ] and Jaro mir Nav ratil , "Este o Husakovom Svedectve a nielen o i\om," Predvoj , 7 April 1966. 46 �80 SLOVAKIA Toward Better Histories? On the whole, Slovak historiography of the SNP during the sixties struggled to find its way, as the competing impulses of communist orthodoxy and professional integrity pulled individual historians in opposite directions. While some scholars, like Jablonicky, or the historians who worked on the Bamabite Commission, proved relatively successful at eschewing dogma in writing new narratives more concerned with fidelity to the historical record, it proved impossible even for these more commendable histories to avoid all the cliches about the Uprising that had marked Stalinist-era scholarship. Yet historiography did not exist in a vacuum, and Slovak historians - as well as journalists, writers, politicians and other public figures addressing the theme of the SNP - also played an active role in using the history of the Uprising to reshape contemporary politics. The Slovak National Uprising was an episode from recent history, and the new vitality of scholarship on it during the midsixties ensured the Uprising remained living history for the remainder of the decade. Rewriting the history of the SNP allowed Slovak (and Czech) scholars to press for the rehabilitation of its persecuted leaders. But the new narrative of the Uprising also helped to "rehabilitate" the idea of the Slovak nation in public discourse, which in tum created an opening for politically engaged Slovaks to advance a nationalist agenda. Ultimately, this agenda would aim at a new approach to the Slovak question in the form of a federation, but in the interim, it entailed the promotion of a Slovak national consciousness firmly rooted in the new, "rehabilitated" historical image of the Uprising. � 60 SLOVAKIA RISING AGAINST STALINISM: DESTALINIZATION AND THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE SLOVAK NATIONAL UPRISING IN SLOVAK HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE 1960s Scott Brown In the morning hours of 29 August 1944, several thousand Slovak and foreign partisans took up arms against the German soldiers who entered Slovakia the previous day to crush the country's growing anti-German resistance. This armed insurrection marked the start of the Slovak National Uprising (Slovenske narodne povstanie, or SNP), a rebellion centered on the city of Banska Bystrica and directed against the German invaders and the pro-German leaders of the wartime Slovak state. Over the ensuing two months, roughly 60,000 Slovak and foreign partisans, including rebel units of the Slovak Army, fought a loosely coordinated campaign against the German incursion. Outnumbered and outgunned, the partisans steadily lost the territory they had initially controlled, and by the end of October 1944 the German units had quelled the Uprising. Yet the military shortcomings of the SNP paled in comparison to its political significance: the Slovak underground had carried out the largest resistance operation on once (and future) Czechoslovak soil during the Second World War. The Uprising bolstered the position of the Czechoslovak government in exile, which could point to the SNP as proof that Czechoslovakia had contributed militarily to its own liberation. Further-more, in the eyes of Czechs, the Uprising also helped to "redeem" Slovaks for their unilateral declaration of independence in 1939, and for the quasi-fascist government that ruled Slovakia during the war. After the war, the SNP became the centerpiece of a new, reconstructed form of Slovak nationalism that played a major role in precipitating the Czechoslovak Spring of the late 1960s. Nonetheless, Slovak nationalism remained a liability for nearly two decades after the war. The mere existence of the wartime Slovak state left Slovak nationalism suspect, since many Czechs continued �SLOVAKIA 61 to equate it with Slovak separatism and the humiliating loss of Czech independence in 1939. In addition, the persecution of Slovak "bourgeois nationalists" - many of whom had played prominent roles in the Uprising - in the political trials of the 1950s further compromised the legitimacy of Slovak nationalism in a Czechoslovak context. These problematic legacies left Slovak nationalism without a usable past until the rehabilitation of the erstwhile Slovak "bourgeois nationalists" in 1963 afforded the Slovaks a political opening to reevaluate the SNP. In tum, this reinterpretation of the Uprising's historical significance provided the foundation for a new, positive brand of nationalism Slovaks could safely assert. If nothing else, the SNP had given the lie to the notion that Slovak nationalism was incompatible with a Czechoslovak state. Gradually, many Slovak historians, intellectuals and politicians advanced a narrative of the SNP that interpreted the Uprising as the great redemptive act of the Slovak nation. In this view, Slovaks rose up as a nation against the wartime pro-Nazi regime of Jozef Tiso, sacrificing "their own" state in order to resurrect Czechoslovakia and make the new republic their own state. For champions of the Slovak national cause in the 1960s, finding their place in the restored Czechoslovakia entailed recognition of the existence of a separate Slovak nation and the enshrinement of its equality with the other titular nation through the federalization of the state. By reconstructing the history of the Uprising in this way, Slovak nationalists could then lay claim to specific rights as a nation. Like their calls for a Czechoslovak federation later in the decade, Slovak nationalists' demands for legal recognition of Slovak nationhood in the mid- to late 1960s referred directly or indirectly to the Slovak National Uprising for justification. As historians and political figures constructed a new narrative of the Uprising in the 1960s, they toned down old Stalinist and Marxist dogmas. Instead, the language they used to describe the SNP restored Slovaks - and the Slovak nation - to a central role. Important in this regard was how Slovaks writing and speaking about the Uprising during the Czechoslovak Spring began to accentuate the Slovak nation (narod) in retelling the history of the Uprising, placing new stress on the national component of the Slovak National Uprising. Thus, along with their stated desire to seek historical truth and to rectify the "errors" of Stalinism, Slovak historians writing about the �62 SLOVAKIA Uprising in the sixties also contributed to the reconstruction of Slovak nationalism by linking Slovaks' demands for national rights and a just solution to the Slovak question with the progressive and democratic traditions of the Uprising. The process of reinterpreting the Uprising and reconstructing Slovak nationalism - a process that occurred in fits and starts, with much equivocation - shows, in turn, how important Slovak developments of the mid-1960s served as antecedents to the Czechoslovak Spring that blossomed in 1968. One of the crucial, yet underappreciated, facets of this prehistory took shape in the new historiography of the SNP produced in the l 960s. Several groups of historians participated in crafting this new narrative. Younger historians, such as Jozef Jablonicky, perhaps had an advantage of personal detachment, since they had fought in neither the Uprising nor the battles over its history during the Stalinist era. 1 Other important contributors came from the historians who served on the Bamabite Commission and subsequently attempted to produce more "objective" and "factual" histories of the Uprising. 2 But veterans of the Up1 lndeed, Jab lonicky di sti ngui shed himself as arguabl y the most profess iona l and darin g histo ri an with hi s willingness to te ll the story of the significant but politically margin ali zed non-communi st "c ivilian" component of the Slovak resi stance that fought in th e NP. Yet even Jablonicky's work ex hibited an evolution in hi s willingness to challenge former taboos, since his first works from early in the decade did not go quite so far in this regard as hi s later work. See Jozef Jablon icky, Sloven- ska na prelome: Zapas o vit'azstvo narodnej a demokratickej revohicie na Slovensku (Bratislava : Yydavatel'stvo politickej literatury, 1965); and Jozef Jablonicky, Z ilegality do povstania (Kapitoly z obcianskeho odboja) (Bratislava : Epocha, 1969). 2 In Apri l 1963 , the Central Comm ittee of th e Communist Party of Czechos lovakia (Komunis ticka strana Ceskoslovenska, or KSC) convened a working gro up of Slovak and Czech party and academic "experts," popularly known as the " Bamabite Commiss ion," to investi gate th e allegations of " bourgeois nationalism" that had been leve led aga inst Ladi slav ovomesky, Gustav Husak and oth er wartime leaders of the Communist Party of Slovakia (Komunisticka strana S/o venska, or KSS) in th e major Slovak political trial s of the early 1950s. The Bamabite Commission's report, issued in August 1963 , di spro ved the Stalinist-era charges and called for the co mplete political rehabilitation of Husak, Novomesky and the oth er accused Slovak " bourgeois nationa lists." Stanis lav Sikora, " Politicky vyvoj na Slovensku v rokoch I 960- 1967 ," in Miroslav Londak, Stanis lav Sikora an d Elena Londakova, Predjarie: Politicky, ekonomicky a kul!iirny vyvoj na Slovensku v rokoch 1960- 1967 (Bratislava: Veda, 2002), 46-47 . The major schol arl y product that followed from th e work of the Barnabite Comm ission , not to mention one of the best studi es of th e Uprising from this era, was Ferdinand Beer and others, Dejinna kriiovatka: Slovenske ncirod- �SLOVAKIA 63 rising, like Gustav Husak, and older scholars like Samo Falt'an (also a former partisan) participated in this process as well, whether to exonerate themselves for their activities during the SNP, or to offer a mea culpa for their distorted publications from the Stalinist era.3 Many western studies of the Czechoslovak Spring that address the years prior to 1968 offer at best a fleeting mention of the revival of Slovak history and efforts to remove discredited cliches of the 4 Stalinist era from the historical image of the SNP. Nonetheless, the lack of scholarly attention to this important trend in Slovak historiography does a disservice to its importance in Slovak - and Czechoslovak - politics of the mid- to late 1960s. Though de-Stalinization may have begun from on high in the Czechoslovak capital, Slovak historians, writers, intellectuals, politicians and other public figures took full advantage of the chance to break old taboos and raise formerly forbidden issues, none of which was more heretical or politically pregnant than the Slovak question. As the Slovak writer Peter Karvas told Antonin J. Liehrn in 1968, Stalinist propaganda had a banalizing effect on all this; it reduced the Uprising to a historical cliche, and in the end the generation of the Uprising convinced itself that this view was somehow a more noble and correct one. Thus it is neither an accident nor an illusion that the rehabilitation of the ne povstanie - predpoklady a vysledky (Brati slava: Vydavatel's tvo po litic kej literatury, I 964). Important exampl es of these work s we re Samo Falt'an, 0 Slovenskom narodnom povstani (Bra ti slava: Osveta, 1964); a nd Gustav Husak, Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani (Brati slava: Vydavatel'stvo po litickej literatury, 1964). Husak also published a second , slightl y rev ised editi o n of hi s memo ir cum hi story in 1969. nd Gustav Hu sak, Svedectvo o Slovensko narodnom povstani, 2 ed. (Bratislava: Epocha, 1969). 4 H. Gordon Skilling a nd V ladimir V . Ku sin each pro vide a pass in g mention of the importance of SN P hi stori ography in th e m id-sixties. See H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia ·s Interrupted Revolution (Princeto n, N .J .: Princeton Uni ve rsity Press, 1976), 50-51 ; V ladimir V. Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague 3 Spring: The Development of Reform ist Ideas in Czechoslovakia, 1956- 1967 (Ca mbridge: Ca mbrid ge Uni versity Press, 197 1), 70. �64 SLOVAKIA Uprising coincided with a wave of reawakening sweeping across all the Slovak social and intellectual life. 5 Accordingly, chronicling the "history of the history" of the Slovak National Uprising during the 1960s offers a way to challenge these conventional boundaries and interpretations of the Czechoslovak Spring. Tracing the shifts in Slovak historiography and the new brand of Slovak nationalism constructed in the process restores Slovaks to the significant role they played in this upheaval, showing how Slovakia experienced an "early spring" following the renewed effort at de-Stalinization and rehabilitation in 1963 . The Pitfalls of History (and Historiography) Pointing to the "errors" that plagued earlier histories of the Slovak National Uprising, the writer Ladislav Novomesky made a plea to Slovak and Czech historians in 1964. His appeal to the participants at a conference at Smolenice on the Uprising urged historians to pay close attention to the image of the SNP through twenty years of historiography. As part of the process of rectifying the mistakes of Stalinism and rewriting history, Novomesky proposed that historians "delineate the history of the history [emphasis in original]" of the Uprising. 6 As Novomesky's remarks indicated, the political context in which historians worked had left an indelible mark on historiography and on the history of the Slovak National Uprising. Political constraints of the Stalinist era had curtailed the research possibilities available to scholars, who could not access most of the relevant documents and other materials. But political dictates had also imposed ready-made interpretations on historians' narratives. When Novomesky made his pitch to historians to take stock of the historiography of the Uprising, he mainly had in mind the correction of the lies, distortions and half-truths that had colored histories of the Uprising 5 Antonin J. Liehm, The Politics of Culture, trans. Peter Kussi (New York : Grove Press, 1972), 351. 6 Ladislav Novomesky, "Za hi storicku pravdu o Povstani," in Slovenske narodne povstanie ro/..."U 1944 (Sbornik prispevkov z narodnooslobodzovacieho boja 19381945), eds . Cudovit Holotik and Miroslav Kropilak, (Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Slovenskej akademie vied, 1965), 668. �SLOVAKIA 65 since the onset of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s. Revisions to these histories had become possible only with the work of the Bamabite Commission and the first concrete steps at deStalinization in 1963 . As the Slovak writer Michal Chorvath claimed on the Uprising's nineteenth anniversary in August 1963 , the "liquidation of the cult of personality" made it possible for the first time in years "to say about the Slovak National Uprising and its significance for our nation and state what the whole public has already thought for a long time." 7 De-Stalinization thus provided an important stimulus in the midI 960s for historians to attempt a more objective look at the Uprising. But while this political opening afforded scholars an opportunity to contest the older dogmatic accounts of the SNP, the historical image of the Uprising remained deeply politicized in the new narratives of the sixties. In the middle and later years of the decade, many Slovak intellectuals and politicians contested Stalinist-era views in rewriting the history of the SNP, yet the individuals driving these shifts continued to interpret the historical significance of the Uprising in a way that served their contemporary personal and political agendas. For instance, Husak claimed expertise as a historian of the Uprising based on his background as the leading Slovak Communist in the SNP. Yet Husak also traded on his stature as an "authority" on the Uprising (and as the most prominent surviving Slovak victim of the Stalinist era) to mount his political comeback, culminating in his ascent to the post of KSC first secretary in April 1969. As the Czech historian Jan Rychlik notes, the new interpretation of the Uprising formulated in the mid-sixties "had a supremely political character," since it weighed directly on the question of rehabilitation and a return to politics for Husak and Novomesky.8 Nonetheless, a "rehabilitation" of the historical image of the SNP was a necessary part of de-Stalinization in Slovakia after 1963 , because the dictates of Stalinism had skewed earlier narratives. Older histories of the Uprising painted it as the opening act of the national and democratic revolution in Czechoslovakia, depicting the SNP as little more than a stepping stone toward the Communist seizure of 7 Mi cha l Chorvath , "K metodam skum ani a SN P," Ku /uirny i ivot, 3 1 August 1963. Jan Rychlik, Ce.si a Slovaci ve 20. sto /eti: Cesko-slovenske vztahy 1945-/ 992, vo l. 2 (Bra ti slava : Academi c Electroni c Press, 1998), 206. 8 �66 SLOVAKIA power. 9 These Stalinist-era narratives forced the SNP into a doctrinaire Marxist framework. Accordingly, historiography from the 1950s and early 1960s celebrated the toiling masses of the Slovak people (l'ud) , who rejected the "clerico-fascism" of the Tiso regime and adopted an internationalist outlook in fightin g side by side with the fraternal Czech nation, aided by the heroic Soviet Union, in order to create a new Czechoslovak Republic oriented towards the international Communist movement centered in Moscow. The heavy-handed Marxist language employed in these older narratives practically wrote Slovaks out of their own Uprising as it lionized the role of the Red Army and even of Czech partisans in the SNP, treating the contributions of Slovaks as an afterthought. Writing in samizdat in 1980, Jablonicky, the leading Slovak historian of the Uprising, divided historiography of the SNP into three distinct periods. Jablonicky characterized the first period, from 1949 to 1962, as one of "deformation," a time when historians falsified the history of the SNP to suit the dogmas of Stalinism and the attack on Slovak "bourgeois nationalism," which claimed as victims many prominent communist veterans of the Slovak resistance, including Husak, Novomesky and Karol Smidke. 10 Beginning with the work of the Barnabite Commission, a second period, which Jablonicky called "rehabilitation" took shape in 1963 . Though it lasted only until the installation of the Husak regime in April 1969, this era witnessed a burst of scholarship on the Uprising distinguished by its pursuit of "historical truth," including efforts to docu9 See, for instance, Jaros lav Kubat, ed., Slovenske narodni po vstani - Vyznamna etapa narodne osvobozeneckeho boje ceskoslovenskeho lidu: Material pro lektory a propagandisty k 15. vyroci SNP (Prague: Statn i nak ladatelstvi poli ticke literatu ry, 1959) . 10 Smidke had been a member the illegal KSS Centra l Committee that orga nized the Uprising, as we ll as the co-creator of the Christmas Agreement. Du ring the early stages of the campa ign aga inst the "bourgeois nationalists," Smidke faced accusations of collaboration, along with Vladimir Clementi s, Husak and Novo mesky, and lost his party and governmenta l posts, inc ludi ng his position as chairman of the Slovak Nati onal Council. Sm idke avo ided jo ining his supposed co llaborators in the dock at the poli tical tria ls of the ea rl y fifti es only due to hi s death in an automobile acc ident in late 1952, th ough various witnesses c laimed it had been a planned murder. He was posthumously rehabilitated with the other Slovak "bourgeois nati onalists" in December 1963. Jan Pesek, " Karo l Smidke," ed. Ja n Pesek, Akteri jednej ery na Slovensku: Personiflkacia politickeho vyvoja (Presov: Vydavatel'stvo Michala Vaska, 2003), 328-330. �SLOVAKIA 67 ment the role of non-Communists in the SNP. With the onset of "normalization" in 1970, a third period commenced, bringing a return to deformations and the silencing of "inconvenient historians" a group that included Jablonicky - and lasted until the fall of the communist regime in 1989. 11 Though Jablonicky's periodization conforms to wide trends in historiography on the Uprising, his characterization of the second period oversimplifies the contours of this pivotal era. Scholarship on the SNP produced from 1963 to 1969 witnessed a new push for historical truth and objectivity, with historians drawing on previously inaccessible documents, filling in former "blank spots" and challenging earlier dogmatic interpretations of the Uprising. However, the general trend toward historical fidelity did not follow the linear trajectory Jablonicky describes. While many historians sought accuracy and improved professional practices, others held fast to old dogmas, resulting in a multiplicity of narratives and interpretations of the SNP. Moreover, the ambiguities inherent in the quest for historical truth cut through the scholarship of individual historians. In May 1963 , Jan Kfen, a Czech historian who served as one of the experts on the Bamabite Commission, explained the challenges ahead for historians after Stalinism: The battle against dogmatism is, in my opmzon, above all an internal matter of every historian, a question of his theoretical level, his ideological potential. Like all progress in science, the overcoming of dogmatism is not possible without abilities and talent. Untalented thinking is always dogmatic, stereotypical and toady ish. 12 Yet Kfen overstated the importance of professional abilities, as many talented historians struggled to discard political considerations in order to write better histories. For instance, while Jablonicky's Slovensko na prelome, published in 1965, stressed the importance of the Uprising for inaugurating a new chapter in Czech-Slovak rela11 Jozef Ja bl oni cky, Glosy o historiograjii SNP: Zneuiivanie a f alfovanie dej in SNP (Brati slava: NVK In te rn ati onal, 1994), I 0, 13. 12 Jan Kfe n, " Kult a hi stori e," Kulttirna tvorba, 23 May 1963. �68 SLOVAKIA tions, Jablonicky equivocated in repeating the best orthodox cliches about nefarious Slovak and Czech bourgeoisies and the leading role of Communists in the resistance. 13 To Jablonicky's credit, he penned perhaps the decade ' s most important historiographical contribution in 1969, Z illegality do povstania, which offered the most stunning refutation of dogmatic interpretations of the Uprising and destroyed several taboos in praising the non-communist resistance and units of the Slovak Army for their roles in the Uprising while simultaneously portraying its communist leaders in an unflattering light. In a samizdat essay from 1979, Jablonicky even offered a mea culpa for his early scholarship in which he acknowledges the shortcomings of his first works. As Jablonicky recalled, conversations with dozens of former partisans and victims of Stalinism "gradually opened my eyes" as a young historian in the 1960s, leading him to appreciate the importance of the non-communist resistance. 14 Of course, Jablonicky was not alone. At a conference of Slovak historians in June 1963, Milos Gosiorovsky presented a harsh evaluation of his own works on the Uprising from the Stalinist era, criticizing his monographs Ilegalny boj KSS and Slovenske narodne povstanie for presenting a "substantially deformed" picture of the 15 SNP. A year later, Samo Falt'an described how the dictates of editorial boards and the pressures of self-censorship had handicapped evaluations of the Uprising in the Stalinist era, preventing him from including anything critical in his book Partizanska vojna na Slovensku, published in 1959 . 16 As the confessions of Gosiorovsky and Falt'an revealed, the most prominent Slovak historians had been especially susceptible to pressures for ideological conformity, which 13 Jablonicky, Slovensko na prelome, 3 1, 148- 149. Vilem Precan, " Historik proti nas iliu - Jozef Jabloni cky," in Jozef Jablonicky, Samizdat o odboji: Stiidie a clanky, vol. 2 (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2006), 12; Jablonicky, Glosy o historiografii SNP, 6 1. 15 Frantisek Bokes, "Vaine zhromazdeni e Slovenskej hi stori ckej spolocnosti ," Historicky casopis 12, no. 4 (1963): 650; Milos Gosiorovsky, !legalny boj KSS a Slovenske narodne povstanie (Bratislava: Nakladatel'stvo Pravda, 1949); Milos Gosiorovsky, Slovenske narodne povstanie (Bra ti slava : Slovenske vydava tel'stvo politi ckej literatury, 1954). 16 Samo Falt'an, "Niektore otazky okolo hodnoteni a Slovenskeho narodneho povstania," Historicky casop is 12, no. 2 ( 1964): 161 , 164; Samo Falt'an, Partizanska vojna na Slovensku (Bratislava: Osveta, 1959). 14 �SLOVAKIA 69 seemed to spur their self-conscious push for objectivity in the more relaxed Slovak political climate of the mid-l 960s. Just as Slovak historians in the l 960s recognized the harmful effects of Stalinism on scholarship on the Uprising, scholars writing about the sixties acknowledge the importance of historiography for the larger crisis gestating in Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, scholarship about the l 960s has pronounced limitations when it comes to historiography from the 1960s. Non-Slovak writers treat the history of the Uprising as but one issue among many new historiographical developments in Czechoslovakia, an approach characterristic of the wider tendency to trivialize the role of Slovaks and the Slovak question in the l 960s. 17 While the Slovak National Uprising was hardly the only historical theme to gamer renewed interest from historians in the mid-sixties - or even the only topic from Slovak history - it was unique in the political purposes to which prominent Slovaks put it in justifying contemporary demands for a resolution of the Slovak question in line with the ostensible aims of the Uprising. More obvious, however, was the extent to which the new historiography on the SNP from the 1960s broke with old dogmas. The doctrinaire narrative of the Uprising from the Stalinist era marginalized the role of Slovaks in the Slovak National Uprising. An instructional manual for lecturers and propagandists published in advance of the SNP's fifteenth anniversary - and, tellingly, written in Czech inflated the importance of Soviet and Czech contributions to the Uprising: In August 1944 the Slovak nation, emboldened by the heroic battle of the Soviet p eople in the Great Patriotic War, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, alongside the Soviet Army advancing to victory, together with the fraternal Czech nation, rose up with weapons in 17 See, fo r instance, th e scant treatm ent prov ided in Stanl ey Z. Pec h, " Fe rment in Czec hoslova k Marxist Hi stori ograph y," Canadian Slavonic Papers l 0, no. 4 (Dece mber 1968): 502-522; Ga lia Gol an, The Czechoslovak Refo rm Movement: Communism in Crisis. 1962- / 968 ; and Skillin g, Czechoslovakia 's Interrupted Revolution. By contrast, M. Mark Stolarik observed how hi stori ans, beginning with Husak and the th eme of the SNP, increasingly reasserted Slovak nati onali sm in their th work . M. Mark Stolarik , "The Painful Birth of Slovak Histori ography in the 20 Century," Zeitschriftfiir Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 50, no. 2 (2 00 I): 176 . �70 SLOVAKIA hand against the German occupiers and their domestic fascist supporters in order to contribute to the liberation of their own homeland - the Czechoslovak Republic. 18 Amid the rambling succession of clauses inserted to show obligatory deference to the Soviet Union and the KSC and to flatter Czechs, the propaganda manual, like the Stalinist-era interpretations of the SNP it typifies, lost sight of the Slovaks, who nearly disappeared from the history of their own Uprising. At the same time, older orthodoxy ascribed the Marxist categories of proletarian internationalism and class struggle to the Uprising. In their work on international participation in the SNP, the Czech Jii'i Dolezal and the Slovak Jozef Hroziencik credited the liberation of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Army on the international stage, and to the working class at home. The Uprising occurred as a consequence, Dolezal and Hroziencik argued, of "the strengthening of the working class and its ideological leadership in the nation," along with the blossoming of the idea of internationalism within the proletariat. 19 Near the end of the Stalinist era, an editorial in 1962 from the KSC Central Committee daily Rude pravo made the dubious claim that, "on an ideological plane," the Uprising "aimed mainly at developing a unified economy," along with combining all other aspects of Slovak and Czech society after liberation - making the SNP appear as the first step toward amalgamating Slovaks and Czechs into a single Czechoslovak nation.2° Conventional interpretations from the Stalinist era thus reduced the Uprising to little more than the opening act in the Czechoslovak revolution and a prelude to the communist takeover in 1948.21 Such a view seemed at odds with the reality of communist electoral strength in the elections of 1946, when the party made considerable gains over its interwar showing, yet still suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the Democratic Party. 18 Kubat, Slovenske narodni povstani, 3. Jifi Dolezal and Jozef Hroziencik, Medzinarodna solidarita v Slovenskom narodnom povstani (Bratislava: Osveta, 1959), 35, 219 20 " Rozvij ime spolecne dilo," Rude pravo, 29 August 1962. 21 Doleza l and Hroziencik, Medzinarodna solidarita , 74. 19 �SLOVAKIA 71 Coming to Terms with the Past: De-Stalinization and the Uprising Rewriting the history of the Slovak National Uprising first required important political developments to transpire, and the process drew succor from new efforts at de-Stalinization in 1963 . But the impact of the Bamabite Commission also revealed the crucial role historians played in this process. As Ferdinand Beer, Antonin Bencik, Frantisek Janacek and Jan Kfon recalled, their work on the Bamabite Commission offered historians a rare chance to play an important role in current events: ft was - as far as we know - the first time such a large group of scholars was asked to do this kind of work. This experience left its mark on their whole way of doing work and became, at least for historians, one of those rare occasions when they could not only reconstruct history, but also help to make it. 22 The recollections of these historians also spoke to the transformative effect the Bamabite Commission had on its member-scholars, which proved a formative experience for the way they approached their craft thereafter. Because it focused not only on the political trials of the early 1950s, but also on the activities of the "bourgeois nationalists" during the SNP, the Bamabite Commission employed several professional historians who consequently gained access to documents formerly off limits to researchers, including the files of the "bourgeois nationalists" and materials concerning the cases of Vladimir Clementis and others.23 A document collection on the SNP, originally planned to appear in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the Uprising in 1964 and intended to span 300 to 400 pages when conceived in the spring of 1963, soon ballooned to more than a thousand pages and took an extra year to produce. As Vilem Precan, the Czech editor of the volume, recounts in hi s preface, the renewed interest in the Uprising first observed during celebrations of its nineteenth anniversary, coupled with the political fallout of the 22 23 Beer and others, "Svedectvi z Barnabitek," Kulturni tvorba, 2 May 1968. Sikora, " Po liticky vyvoj na Slovensku," 38. �72 SLOVAKIA Barnabite Commission's report, created "editorial possibilities" that compelled him to broaden the scope of the project. Precan had to sift through piles of newly available documents and include as many of these materials as he could, a daunting task that kept him from completing the volume until 1965 - a full year behind schedule.24 Confronted with documentary evidence of the fabrications from the political trials, the historian-members of the Bamabite Commission were floored by the level of deceit, which exceeded their wildest imagination. Confronting such proof of the crimes of Stalinism had a galvanizing effect on Slovak and Czech historians similar to the jolt Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" had given to Soviet Communists in 1956. As a group of historians recalled in the spring of 1968, "In a certain sense, all of us inside the walls of the former Bamabite monastery went through our own 20 th Congress." 25 For these historians at least, there could be no going back to the old, dogmatic interpretations of Slovak history, especially where the Uprising was concerned. Sensing the opportunity de-Stalinization and the Barnabite Commission had created, historians took the initiative in probing sensitive issues like the Slovak question and the wartime resistance in Slovakia. As early as March of 1963, Falt'an had urged a drastic reexamination of the Uprising, one that would break out of the "black-and-white pigeonholes" of historiography from the Stalinist era to "evaluate objectively and justly" such topics as the role of (non-communist) Slovak regulars from the 1st Czechoslovak Army in the SNP. 26 Further steps in this direction came in the summer of 1963, when historians openly connected the significance of their professional work to the concurrent process of rehabilitation. Miroslav Kropilak opened the Slovak Historical Society ' s conference in June 1963 by reminding his fellow historians of their shared obligation in reassessing "wrongly interpreted" segments of their history. 27 The congress helped to engage Slovak historians in the task 24 Vilem Precan, "S lovo cita tel'ovi," in Slovenske narodne povstanie - Dokumenty, ed. Precan, 5-6. 25 Beer and others, " Svedectvi z Barnabitek. " 26 Samo Falt'an, " Histori a a dn esok," Kulturny i ivot, 23 March 1963 . 27 Kropilak's ex hortati on to eliminate th e "unscienti fic methods" of research employed in studi es of recent Slovak history marked an about fac e from his own presentation at the Fourth Congress of Slovak Histori ans a year earli er in Kosice. At Kosi- �SLOVAKIA 73 of eliminating vestiges of the "cult of personality," and it created space, as the historian Marek Havrila remarked, for the "de-ideologizing" (odideologizovanie) of history and the "academifying" (zvedectenie) of the discipline.28 Rewriting History: New (and Old) Narratives of the Uprising Historians began to rewrite the history of the Uprising in time for its twentieth anniversary in 1964, reflecting not only the opportunities created by the Bamabite Commission, but also the heightened interest in commemorating this milestone. Many historians took seriously the need for better scholarship on the Uprising and strove to make use both of newly available materials as well as the relaxation of political constraints. But other historians largely paid lip service to the tasks of writing new, post-Stalinist narratives of the SNP, hewing closely to older, more dogmatic interpretations. On the whole, the new historiography of the Uprising produced in the 1960s yielded improved histories, but it remained bound to the shifting politics of the day. A key development early in this process was an academic conference held at Smolenice on 8-10 June 1964, when several Slovak and Czech historians presented their latest research on the Uprising. The conference marked important progress on the "arduous journey" historians had traveled, as Kropilak recalled in his foreword to the published volume of conference papers, since it brought a "difficult acknowledgment of the unexamined truths, half-truths and untruths" that had characterized historiography of the Uprising from the Stalinist era.29 In a similar vein, Alexander Dubcek, who became KSS first secretary amid the political shakeup of the previous year, ce in I 962 , Kropil ak gave a paper on the anti fas ci st move ment in Eastern Slovakia th at uphe ld communist orthodoxy. He credited the party for building the resistance from the grass roots until the Upri sing, but made no mention of th e contributions of non-Co mmuni sts in the Slova k res istance. Bokes, " Va ine zhromazdenie," 650 ; "Stvrty sjazd slovenskych hi storik ov," Historicky casopis I 0, no. 4 ( 1962): 632. 28 Marek Havril a, " K ni ektory m pro blemom vyv inu slovenskej hi storiografie a slovenskej histori ckej spolocnosti pri SA V v 50. a 60. rokoch 20. storocia," Historicky casopis 55 , no. I (2007) : 28, 32. 29 Mi ros lav Kropil ak, " Uvod," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku I 944, eds. Hol otik and Kropilak, 5. �74 SLOVAKIA opened the conference proceedings by exhorting historians to undertake "a really broad and deep critical analysis of all problems" concerning this significant chapter in recent Slovak history, and Dubcek also reminded historians that the rectification of earlier mistakes was not simply a question of the past, but also a living concern of the present and future .30 As if Dubcek's point could somehow be lost on his audience, the participation of Husak and Novomesky at Smolenice underscored the topicality of scholarship on the SNP. Indeed, Husak expressed his belief on the final day that the conference itself was a sign of the times, since a definite measure of political relaxation in Slovakia was a precondition for historians to address openly the pitfalls of Stalinist-era historiography, and to shed new light on the history of the Uprising. 31 The papers presented at Smolenice aimed mainly at debunking the myths and errors of the Stalinist-era narrative of the SNP. For instance, Falt'an directly criticized the Ninth KSS Congress for having "artificially created" a circle of "bourgeois nationalist traitors and agents of imperialism" that included Husak, Novomesky and Smidke as its leading figures. This trio of Slovak Communists had created the illegal Fifth KSS Central Committee in 1943 , following the arrest of members of the Fourth KSS Central Committee, and had played a major role in organizing the Uprising. Yet the members of the Fifth KSS Central Committee came under fire after the communist takeover of 1948 for their collaboration with nonCommunists, which provided one justification for their persecution as Slovak "bourgeois nationalists." Falt'an portrayed the Slovak Communists who had helped to orchestrate the SNP as both patriotic and communist, rendering the wartime KSS leadership as neither "bourgeois" nor "nationalist" in an effort to break with the dogmatic interpretations that had marred previous historiography.32 Another crucial component of this attempt to cast aside Stalinistera narratives was the effort historians made to address lacunae in scholarship on the Uprising. To this end, the Slovak historian Milos 30 Alexander Dubcek, "Marx isticka histori ografia a nasa revolucna minulost'," in S/ovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Holotik and Kropil ak, I 8. 31 Gustav Husak, " K ni ektorym otazkam Slovenskeho narodn eho povstania," in S/ovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Holotik and Kropilak, 652-653. 32 Samo Falt'an, " Slovenske narodn e povstani e a jeho problemy," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Holotik and Kropilak, 222, 234. �SLOVAKIA 75 Tichy called attention to the contributions of non-Communists in the SNP. Though the Communists had been the only party in Slovakia that opposed the breakup of the republic and the Tiso government from the outset, Tichy emphasized how the non-communist parties could not be treated as monolithic supporters of Slovak separatism. Thus, Tichy took care to note how segments of the Social Democratic Party, along with individual members of other "bourgeois" (meaning non-communist) parties had held views similar to those of Slovak Communists with respect to the creation of a pro-German Slovak state. It was noteworthy for Tichy even to mention these nonCommunists who went on to join the wartime resistance, since, as he noted, the record of the non-communist resistance had been thoroughly trivialized and falsified in earlier historiography.33 Tichy struck one of the first important blows against the Stalinist narrative of the Uprising by virtue of recognizing the existence of noncommunist opposition to the Slovak state, though it was not until Jablonicky published Z ilegality do povstania at the end of the decade that this "civilian" segment of the wartime Slovak resistance gained the recognition it deserved. Even though historians consciously sought objectivity and historical fidelity at Smolen ice, they did not reject all elements of the Stalinist-era narrative of the SNP. Thus, while Falt'an preached the importance of historical truth in denouncing the lies that characterrized earlier histories, he sought this "truth" within a distinctly Marxist framework. Comparing the Slovak National Uprising of 1944 to the Warsaw Uprising of the same year, Falt'an placed the Slovak revolt on a qualitatively higher plane than the Polish insurrection, since the SNP had, in Falt'an 's estimation, the superior class orientation. Whereas the Polish "reactionary bourgeoisie" had "abused" popular hatred of Nazi Germany in order to serve its own "political speculations" and "anti-Soviet aims," the Slovak people had taken up arms under the leadership of "revolutionary forces" headed by the KSS .34 Marxist hermeneutics continued to color other interpretations of the Uprising advanced at Smolenice. Like Falt'an, Tichy took great 33 Milos Tic hy, " Hl avne etapy fo rmy a probl emy narodn ooslobodzo vac ieho hnuti a na Slove nsku do vzniku Povstani a," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Ho lotik and Kropilak, 65, 7 1. 34 Fa lt'a n, "S lovens ke narodn e povstanie a jeho pro bl emy," 27 1. �76 SLOVAKIA pains to emphasize the class dimension of the Slovak people's rejection of the pre-Munich First Republic. Tichy claimed the Slovak people (l'ud) had directed their hatred not at the fraternal Czech nation, but rather against the "politics of the ruling Czech bourgeoisie." 35 Similarly, Frantisek Janacek, a Czech historian and former member of the Barnabite Commission, conceded the importance of the national element in the Uprising, yet he suggested there was less real significance to such national sentiment in and of itself than in the political objectives to which Slovak Communists could put it in the SNP. Thus, Janacek upheld a doctrinaire Marxist interpretation of national sentiment in deeming it instrumental to revolutionary ends. He argued the initiative the Communists exhibited on the Slovak question had made the KSS a vanguard force that Slovaks recognized as a "national" (narodm) party. 36 Husak also hewed closely to this orthodox narrative of the Uprising instead of accentuating the national dimension of the SNP, averring at Smolenice that "the Slovak National Uprising was above all a political conception, the political revolution of the Slovak people." 37 Even as historians embarked on a pursuit for the truth about the SNP at Smolenice, they continued to parrot old party cliches about the Uprising. Indeed, historical fidelity coexisted alongside shifting political dictates in the historiography of the SNP throughout the l 960s, demonstrating how historians' professed desire for objectivity toward the past ran aground on their inability to remain aloof from the politics of the present. In O Slovenskom narodnom povstani, published in 1964, Falt'an culled new facts and documents in a quest to tell the truth about the Uprising, albeit a truth with a clear agenda. Falt'an's book expanded on the ideas he presented at Smolenice, as he continued his efforts to vindicate the Slovak Communists who had been condemned as "bourgeois nationalists" in the 1950s. But while Falt'an made skillful use of wartime documents to present a more historically accurate picture of the Slovak resistance, the same tired cliches about international solidarity and the Soviet Union 35 Tichy, " Hlavne etapy formy a problemy narodnooslobodzovacieho hnutia na Slovensku," 68-69. 36 Frantisek Janacek, " Dve promeny slovenske otazky (Mezi Mnichovem a Slovenskym narodnim povsta nim)," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku /944 , eds. Holotik and Kropilak, 618 , 628. 37 Husak, "K ni ektorym otazkam Slovenskeho narodneho povstania," 657. �SLOVAKIA 77 still peppered his work. He claimed the Uprising, among other things, "was the expression of great faith in the Soviet people," showing how de-Stalinization and a more relaxed political environment did not relieve Slovaks and Czechs of the duty to show deference to their Soviet allies - an obligation that remained in force even at the height of liberalization in 1968.38 Even the most groundbreaking histories of the Uprising from the mid-sixties exhibited a multiplicity of agendas. In Dejinna kriiovatka, a group of Slovak and Czech historians drew on their work on the Bamabite Commission in an attempt to "rehabilitate" the historical image of the SNP. Their work helped to expose the distortions of the Stalinist era, but it also restored the Slovak question to a prominent role in the new, post-Stalinist narrative of the Uprising. Dejinna kriiovatka appeared in a modest printing of 10,000 copies, yet it gained renown as the first attempt at a comprehensive history of the Slovak National Uprising that consciously rejected the Stalinist narrative and addressed several lacunae in scholarship on the Uprising. And yet, for all its significance as a landmark of Slovak historiography, Dejinna kriiovatka continued to uphold a Marxist worldview in interpreting the SNP as an affirmation of socialist revolution as well as a manifestation of how attractive communist ideas were to the average Slovaks who formed the core of the partisan masses in the Uprising.39 A similar emphasis on the communist aims of the Uprising appeared in Husak's Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani. To his credit, Husak addressed some previously neglected or trivialized facets of the Uprising, pointing out the contributions of the noncommunist opposition within the antifascist camp, the existence of 40 which had been all but denied in Stalinist-era scholarship. Yet Husak's motives for calling attention to this marginalized component of the resistance were also self-serving. Lauding the role of the nonCommunists in the Uprising allowed Husak to validate the strategy of cooperating with non-Communists that he and other KSS leaders had pursued. Husak's intent in writing his recollection of the Uprising seemed to be to vindicate himself, not only in terms of the 38 Falt'an, 0 Slovenskom narodnom povstani, 8, I 03. Beer and others, Dejinna kriiovatka, 125-126, 252. 40 Husak, Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani, 36-37. 39 �78 SLOVAKIA historical record, but also in the eyes of the party. As such, Husak stuck close to the communist interpretation of the SNP as a revolt directed against the ruling Slovak and Czech bourgeoisies, while simultaneously heralding the Communist Party (a self-referential bit of praise, considering his role as a member of the wartime KSS leadership) for leading the Uprising and launching the national and democratic revolution in Slovakia. 41 Husak's book also created a sensation after it appeared in August of 1964. The responses from Slovak and Czech intellectuals and historians ranged from the fawning to the damning, but most reviews 42 emphasized its positive contributions to scholarship on the SNP. These early favorable reviews led many Slovaks to view Husak, not only as a prominent figure in the Uprising, but as Jablonicky observed years later, they also encouraged both defenders and detractors of Husak to think of him "as a promising politician possibly on the rise in Slovakia."43 Husak's account of the Uprising conferred considerable authority on him, though not all historians accepted his portrayal of the SNP without reservation. The Czech scholar Josef Domansky offered the first critical remarks on Husak's book, noting one shortcoming was its "methodological non-clarity" resulting from the blurred division between Husak the memoirist and Husak the historian. On the whole, Domansky judged the book positively, even if it had its flaw s, and he regarded it as part of the new trend in historiography that helped to clarify the importance of the Slovak question and to transcend the oversimplifications of earlier scholarship on the Uprising.44 Yet Husak's book became a cause celebre among Slovak - and Czech - intellectuals when it came under fire from on high . Antonin Novotny had little patience for Husak, since Novotny had resisted the rehabilitation of Husak and other victims of Stalinism. When KSS leaders refused to rein in Husak, Novotny commissioned a party hack, the Czech historian Vaclav Kral , to write a scathing review in 41 Ibid., 129, 133 , 139. See, for instance, Anna Stvrtecka, "O dokum entoc h a fa ktoc h," Kultiirny i ivot, 27 August I 965 ; and Jifi Doleza l, " Dvakrat o S P," Mezinarodni politika I 0, no. I 0 (October 1964): 472. 43 Jablonicky, "S lovenske narodne povstani e a tri etapy jeho hodnoteni a," 452 . 44 Josef Domansky, " Nad knihou o Slovenskem narodnim povs tani," Nova mys/ 20, no. I ( 1965): 133- 134. 42 �SLOVAKIA 79 order to discredit Husak.45 The KSC cultural weekly Kulturni tvorba published Kral 's review in February 1966, almost two years after Husak' s book appeared in print, and focused, in Kral ' s words, "on a series of theses and questions that are insufficiently or incorrectly developed in Husak's book." Yet Kral's dissection of Husak' s narrative contained thinly veiled criticism of Husak's wartime activities as a member of the KSS Central Committee that organized the • · 46 Upnsmg. Though the high-level political machinations behind Kral ' s review were not common knowledge at the time, the response from Slovak and Czech historians was irate. Anton Bencik, Vaclav Kura) and Jaromir Navratil - one Slovak and two Czech historians - published a reply to Kral in defense of Husak' s work, which stressed the importance of Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani as a harbinger of the new developments in historiography following the KSC's renunciation of "bourgeois nationalism" in 1963 . "The publication of Husak's book was indisputably an event," they offered in their response, yet the renown Husak had achieved with this work was only possible because it corresponded to contemporary knowledge of the Uprising and had been accepted by the historical community. Indeed, Husak 's book had been vetted in several reviews, which generally judged it favorably , albeit with some criticism of individual facets . Bencik, Kura! and Navratil also found it puzzling how Kral had remained silent during the historiographical discussions of Husak 's book when it first appeared, and was only then speaking out against the work, long after the fact. The timing was peculiar, though Bencik, Kura) and Navratil did not press their • • 47 susp1c10ns. 45 Vac lav Kra l, "O os udu jedne recenze," Kulturni tvorba, 25 April 1968. Vaclav Kra l, "O Husakove svedectvi troc hu j inak," Kul!urni tvorba, 24 February 1966. 47 Anton Benci k, Vaclav Ku ra ] and Jaromir Navratil , "Jes te o Husakove svedectvi a nejen o nem," Kulturni tvorba, 3 1 March 1966. The rev iew was reprinted a week later in th e Slovak cul tura l magaz ine Predvoj. Anton Benc ik , Vac lav Ku ra ] and Jaro mir Nav ratil , "Este o Husakovom Svedectve a nielen o i\om," Predvoj , 7 April 1966. 46 �80 SLOVAKIA Toward Better Histories? On the whole, Slovak historiography of the SNP during the sixties struggled to find its way, as the competing impulses of communist orthodoxy and professional integrity pulled individual historians in opposite directions. While some scholars, like Jablonicky, or the historians who worked on the Bamabite Commission, proved relatively successful at eschewing dogma in writing new narratives more concerned with fidelity to the historical record, it proved impossible even for these more commendable histories to avoid all the cliches about the Uprising that had marked Stalinist-era scholarship. Yet historiography did not exist in a vacuum, and Slovak historians - as well as journalists, writers, politicians and other public figures addressing the theme of the SNP - also played an active role in using the history of the Uprising to reshape contemporary politics. The Slovak National Uprising was an episode from recent history, and the new vitality of scholarship on it during the midsixties ensured the Uprising remained living history for the remainder of the decade. Rewriting the history of the SNP allowed Slovak (and Czech) scholars to press for the rehabilitation of its persecuted leaders. But the new narrative of the Uprising also helped to "rehabilitate" the idea of the Slovak nation in public discourse, which in tum created an opening for politically engaged Slovaks to advance a nationalist agenda. Ultimately, this agenda would aim at a new approach to the Slovak question in the form of a federation, but in the interim, it entailed the promotion of a Slovak national consciousness firmly rooted in the new, "rehabilitated" historical image of the Uprising. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2010, Vol. 40 Description An account of the resource Vol. 40 (No. 74-75), 2010. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 60 SLOVAKIA RISING AGAINST STALINISM: DESTALINIZATION AND THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE SLOVAK NATIONAL UPRISING IN SLOVAK HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE 1960s Scott Brown In the morning hours of 29 August 1944, several thousand Slovak and foreign partisans took up arms against the German soldiers who entered Slovakia the previous day to crush the country's growing anti-German resistance. This armed insurrection marked the start of the Slovak National Uprising (Slovenske narodne povstanie, or SNP), a rebellion centered on the city of Banska Bystrica and directed against the German invaders and the pro-German leaders of the wartime Slovak state. Over the ensuing two months, roughly 60,000 Slovak and foreign partisans, including rebel units of the Slovak Army, fought a loosely coordinated campaign against the German incursion. Outnumbered and outgunned, the partisans steadily lost the territory they had initially controlled, and by the end of October 1944 the German units had quelled the Uprising. Yet the military shortcomings of the SNP paled in comparison to its political significance: the Slovak underground had carried out the largest resistance operation on once (and future) Czechoslovak soil during the Second World War. The Uprising bolstered the position of the Czechoslovak government in exile, which could point to the SNP as proof that Czechoslovakia had contributed militarily to its own liberation. Further-more, in the eyes of Czechs, the Uprising also helped to "redeem" Slovaks for their unilateral declaration of independence in 1939, and for the quasi-fascist government that ruled Slovakia during the war. After the war, the SNP became the centerpiece of a new, reconstructed form of Slovak nationalism that played a major role in precipitating the Czechoslovak Spring of the late 1960s. Nonetheless, Slovak nationalism remained a liability for nearly two decades after the war. The mere existence of the wartime Slovak state left Slovak nationalism suspect, since many Czechs continued SLOVAKIA 61 to equate it with Slovak separatism and the humiliating loss of Czech independence in 1939. In addition, the persecution of Slovak "bourgeois nationalists" - many of whom had played prominent roles in the Uprising - in the political trials of the 1950s further compromised the legitimacy of Slovak nationalism in a Czechoslovak context. These problematic legacies left Slovak nationalism without a usable past until the rehabilitation of the erstwhile Slovak "bourgeois nationalists" in 1963 afforded the Slovaks a political opening to reevaluate the SNP. In tum, this reinterpretation of the Uprising's historical significance provided the foundation for a new, positive brand of nationalism Slovaks could safely assert. If nothing else, the SNP had given the lie to the notion that Slovak nationalism was incompatible with a Czechoslovak state. Gradually, many Slovak historians, intellectuals and politicians advanced a narrative of the SNP that interpreted the Uprising as the great redemptive act of the Slovak nation. In this view, Slovaks rose up as a nation against the wartime pro-Nazi regime of Jozef Tiso, sacrificing "their own" state in order to resurrect Czechoslovakia and make the new republic their own state. For champions of the Slovak national cause in the 1960s, finding their place in the restored Czechoslovakia entailed recognition of the existence of a separate Slovak nation and the enshrinement of its equality with the other titular nation through the federalization of the state. By reconstructing the history of the Uprising in this way, Slovak nationalists could then lay claim to specific rights as a nation. Like their calls for a Czechoslovak federation later in the decade, Slovak nationalists' demands for legal recognition of Slovak nationhood in the mid- to late 1960s referred directly or indirectly to the Slovak National Uprising for justification. As historians and political figures constructed a new narrative of the Uprising in the 1960s, they toned down old Stalinist and Marxist dogmas. Instead, the language they used to describe the SNP restored Slovaks - and the Slovak nation - to a central role. Important in this regard was how Slovaks writing and speaking about the Uprising during the Czechoslovak Spring began to accentuate the Slovak nation (narod) in retelling the history of the Uprising, placing new stress on the national component of the Slovak National Uprising. Thus, along with their stated desire to seek historical truth and to rectify the "errors" of Stalinism, Slovak historians writing about the 62 SLOVAKIA Uprising in the sixties also contributed to the reconstruction of Slovak nationalism by linking Slovaks' demands for national rights and a just solution to the Slovak question with the progressive and democratic traditions of the Uprising. The process of reinterpreting the Uprising and reconstructing Slovak nationalism - a process that occurred in fits and starts, with much equivocation - shows, in turn, how important Slovak developments of the mid-1960s served as antecedents to the Czechoslovak Spring that blossomed in 1968. One of the crucial, yet underappreciated, facets of this prehistory took shape in the new historiography of the SNP produced in the l 960s. Several groups of historians participated in crafting this new narrative. Younger historians, such as Jozef Jablonicky, perhaps had an advantage of personal detachment, since they had fought in neither the Uprising nor the battles over its history during the Stalinist era. 1 Other important contributors came from the historians who served on the Bamabite Commission and subsequently attempted to produce more "objective" and "factual" histories of the Uprising. 2 But veterans of the Up1 lndeed, Jab lonicky di sti ngui shed himself as arguabl y the most profess iona l and darin g histo ri an with hi s willingness to te ll the story of the significant but politically margin ali zed non-communi st "c ivilian" component of the Slovak resi stance that fought in th e NP. Yet even Jablonicky's work ex hibited an evolution in hi s willingness to challenge former taboos, since his first works from early in the decade did not go quite so far in this regard as hi s later work. See Jozef Jablon icky, Sloven- ska na prelome: Zapas o vit'azstvo narodnej a demokratickej revohicie na Slovensku (Bratislava : Yydavatel'stvo politickej literatury, 1965); and Jozef Jablonicky, Z ilegality do povstania (Kapitoly z obcianskeho odboja) (Bratislava : Epocha, 1969). 2 In Apri l 1963 , the Central Comm ittee of th e Communist Party of Czechos lovakia (Komunis ticka strana Ceskoslovenska, or KSC) convened a working gro up of Slovak and Czech party and academic "experts," popularly known as the " Bamabite Commiss ion," to investi gate th e allegations of " bourgeois nationalism" that had been leve led aga inst Ladi slav ovomesky, Gustav Husak and oth er wartime leaders of the Communist Party of Slovakia (Komunisticka strana S/o venska, or KSS) in th e major Slovak political trial s of the early 1950s. The Bamabite Commission's report, issued in August 1963 , di spro ved the Stalinist-era charges and called for the co mplete political rehabilitation of Husak, Novomesky and the oth er accused Slovak " bourgeois nationa lists." Stanis lav Sikora, " Politicky vyvoj na Slovensku v rokoch I 960- 1967 ," in Miroslav Londak, Stanis lav Sikora an d Elena Londakova, Predjarie: Politicky, ekonomicky a kul!iirny vyvoj na Slovensku v rokoch 1960- 1967 (Bratislava: Veda, 2002), 46-47 . The major schol arl y product that followed from th e work of the Barnabite Comm ission , not to mention one of the best studi es of th e Uprising from this era, was Ferdinand Beer and others, Dejinna kriiovatka: Slovenske ncirod- SLOVAKIA 63 rising, like Gustav Husak, and older scholars like Samo Falt'an (also a former partisan) participated in this process as well, whether to exonerate themselves for their activities during the SNP, or to offer a mea culpa for their distorted publications from the Stalinist era.3 Many western studies of the Czechoslovak Spring that address the years prior to 1968 offer at best a fleeting mention of the revival of Slovak history and efforts to remove discredited cliches of the 4 Stalinist era from the historical image of the SNP. Nonetheless, the lack of scholarly attention to this important trend in Slovak historiography does a disservice to its importance in Slovak - and Czechoslovak - politics of the mid- to late 1960s. Though de-Stalinization may have begun from on high in the Czechoslovak capital, Slovak historians, writers, intellectuals, politicians and other public figures took full advantage of the chance to break old taboos and raise formerly forbidden issues, none of which was more heretical or politically pregnant than the Slovak question. As the Slovak writer Peter Karvas told Antonin J. Liehrn in 1968, Stalinist propaganda had a banalizing effect on all this; it reduced the Uprising to a historical cliche, and in the end the generation of the Uprising convinced itself that this view was somehow a more noble and correct one. Thus it is neither an accident nor an illusion that the rehabilitation of the ne povstanie - predpoklady a vysledky (Brati slava: Vydavatel's tvo po litic kej literatury, I 964). Important exampl es of these work s we re Samo Falt'an, 0 Slovenskom narodnom povstani (Bra ti slava: Osveta, 1964); a nd Gustav Husak, Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani (Brati slava: Vydavatel'stvo po litickej literatury, 1964). Husak also published a second , slightl y rev ised editi o n of hi s memo ir cum hi story in 1969. nd Gustav Hu sak, Svedectvo o Slovensko narodnom povstani, 2 ed. (Bratislava: Epocha, 1969). 4 H. Gordon Skilling a nd V ladimir V . Ku sin each pro vide a pass in g mention of the importance of SN P hi stori ography in th e m id-sixties. See H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia ·s Interrupted Revolution (Princeto n, N .J .: Princeton Uni ve rsity Press, 1976), 50-51 ; V ladimir V. Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague 3 Spring: The Development of Reform ist Ideas in Czechoslovakia, 1956- 1967 (Ca mbridge: Ca mbrid ge Uni versity Press, 197 1), 70. 64 SLOVAKIA Uprising coincided with a wave of reawakening sweeping across all the Slovak social and intellectual life. 5 Accordingly, chronicling the "history of the history" of the Slovak National Uprising during the 1960s offers a way to challenge these conventional boundaries and interpretations of the Czechoslovak Spring. Tracing the shifts in Slovak historiography and the new brand of Slovak nationalism constructed in the process restores Slovaks to the significant role they played in this upheaval, showing how Slovakia experienced an "early spring" following the renewed effort at de-Stalinization and rehabilitation in 1963 . The Pitfalls of History (and Historiography) Pointing to the "errors" that plagued earlier histories of the Slovak National Uprising, the writer Ladislav Novomesky made a plea to Slovak and Czech historians in 1964. His appeal to the participants at a conference at Smolenice on the Uprising urged historians to pay close attention to the image of the SNP through twenty years of historiography. As part of the process of rectifying the mistakes of Stalinism and rewriting history, Novomesky proposed that historians "delineate the history of the history [emphasis in original]" of the Uprising. 6 As Novomesky's remarks indicated, the political context in which historians worked had left an indelible mark on historiography and on the history of the Slovak National Uprising. Political constraints of the Stalinist era had curtailed the research possibilities available to scholars, who could not access most of the relevant documents and other materials. But political dictates had also imposed ready-made interpretations on historians' narratives. When Novomesky made his pitch to historians to take stock of the historiography of the Uprising, he mainly had in mind the correction of the lies, distortions and half-truths that had colored histories of the Uprising 5 Antonin J. Liehm, The Politics of Culture, trans. Peter Kussi (New York : Grove Press, 1972), 351. 6 Ladislav Novomesky, "Za hi storicku pravdu o Povstani," in Slovenske narodne povstanie ro/..."U 1944 (Sbornik prispevkov z narodnooslobodzovacieho boja 19381945), eds . Cudovit Holotik and Miroslav Kropilak, (Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Slovenskej akademie vied, 1965), 668. SLOVAKIA 65 since the onset of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s. Revisions to these histories had become possible only with the work of the Bamabite Commission and the first concrete steps at deStalinization in 1963 . As the Slovak writer Michal Chorvath claimed on the Uprising's nineteenth anniversary in August 1963 , the "liquidation of the cult of personality" made it possible for the first time in years "to say about the Slovak National Uprising and its significance for our nation and state what the whole public has already thought for a long time." 7 De-Stalinization thus provided an important stimulus in the midI 960s for historians to attempt a more objective look at the Uprising. But while this political opening afforded scholars an opportunity to contest the older dogmatic accounts of the SNP, the historical image of the Uprising remained deeply politicized in the new narratives of the sixties. In the middle and later years of the decade, many Slovak intellectuals and politicians contested Stalinist-era views in rewriting the history of the SNP, yet the individuals driving these shifts continued to interpret the historical significance of the Uprising in a way that served their contemporary personal and political agendas. For instance, Husak claimed expertise as a historian of the Uprising based on his background as the leading Slovak Communist in the SNP. Yet Husak also traded on his stature as an "authority" on the Uprising (and as the most prominent surviving Slovak victim of the Stalinist era) to mount his political comeback, culminating in his ascent to the post of KSC first secretary in April 1969. As the Czech historian Jan Rychlik notes, the new interpretation of the Uprising formulated in the mid-sixties "had a supremely political character," since it weighed directly on the question of rehabilitation and a return to politics for Husak and Novomesky.8 Nonetheless, a "rehabilitation" of the historical image of the SNP was a necessary part of de-Stalinization in Slovakia after 1963 , because the dictates of Stalinism had skewed earlier narratives. Older histories of the Uprising painted it as the opening act of the national and democratic revolution in Czechoslovakia, depicting the SNP as little more than a stepping stone toward the Communist seizure of 7 Mi cha l Chorvath , "K metodam skum ani a SN P," Ku /uirny i ivot, 3 1 August 1963. Jan Rychlik, Ce.si a Slovaci ve 20. sto /eti: Cesko-slovenske vztahy 1945-/ 992, vo l. 2 (Bra ti slava : Academi c Electroni c Press, 1998), 206. 8 66 SLOVAKIA power. 9 These Stalinist-era narratives forced the SNP into a doctrinaire Marxist framework. Accordingly, historiography from the 1950s and early 1960s celebrated the toiling masses of the Slovak people (l'ud) , who rejected the "clerico-fascism" of the Tiso regime and adopted an internationalist outlook in fightin g side by side with the fraternal Czech nation, aided by the heroic Soviet Union, in order to create a new Czechoslovak Republic oriented towards the international Communist movement centered in Moscow. The heavy-handed Marxist language employed in these older narratives practically wrote Slovaks out of their own Uprising as it lionized the role of the Red Army and even of Czech partisans in the SNP, treating the contributions of Slovaks as an afterthought. Writing in samizdat in 1980, Jablonicky, the leading Slovak historian of the Uprising, divided historiography of the SNP into three distinct periods. Jablonicky characterized the first period, from 1949 to 1962, as one of "deformation," a time when historians falsified the history of the SNP to suit the dogmas of Stalinism and the attack on Slovak "bourgeois nationalism," which claimed as victims many prominent communist veterans of the Slovak resistance, including Husak, Novomesky and Karol Smidke. 10 Beginning with the work of the Barnabite Commission, a second period, which Jablonicky called "rehabilitation" took shape in 1963 . Though it lasted only until the installation of the Husak regime in April 1969, this era witnessed a burst of scholarship on the Uprising distinguished by its pursuit of "historical truth," including efforts to docu9 See, for instance, Jaros lav Kubat, ed., Slovenske narodni po vstani - Vyznamna etapa narodne osvobozeneckeho boje ceskoslovenskeho lidu: Material pro lektory a propagandisty k 15. vyroci SNP (Prague: Statn i nak ladatelstvi poli ticke literatu ry, 1959) . 10 Smidke had been a member the illegal KSS Centra l Committee that orga nized the Uprising, as we ll as the co-creator of the Christmas Agreement. Du ring the early stages of the campa ign aga inst the "bourgeois nationalists," Smidke faced accusations of collaboration, along with Vladimir Clementi s, Husak and Novo mesky, and lost his party and governmenta l posts, inc ludi ng his position as chairman of the Slovak Nati onal Council. Sm idke avo ided jo ining his supposed co llaborators in the dock at the poli tical tria ls of the ea rl y fifti es only due to hi s death in an automobile acc ident in late 1952, th ough various witnesses c laimed it had been a planned murder. He was posthumously rehabilitated with the other Slovak "bourgeois nati onalists" in December 1963. Jan Pesek, " Karo l Smidke," ed. Ja n Pesek, Akteri jednej ery na Slovensku: Personiflkacia politickeho vyvoja (Presov: Vydavatel'stvo Michala Vaska, 2003), 328-330. SLOVAKIA 67 ment the role of non-Communists in the SNP. With the onset of "normalization" in 1970, a third period commenced, bringing a return to deformations and the silencing of "inconvenient historians" a group that included Jablonicky - and lasted until the fall of the communist regime in 1989. 11 Though Jablonicky's periodization conforms to wide trends in historiography on the Uprising, his characterization of the second period oversimplifies the contours of this pivotal era. Scholarship on the SNP produced from 1963 to 1969 witnessed a new push for historical truth and objectivity, with historians drawing on previously inaccessible documents, filling in former "blank spots" and challenging earlier dogmatic interpretations of the Uprising. However, the general trend toward historical fidelity did not follow the linear trajectory Jablonicky describes. While many historians sought accuracy and improved professional practices, others held fast to old dogmas, resulting in a multiplicity of narratives and interpretations of the SNP. Moreover, the ambiguities inherent in the quest for historical truth cut through the scholarship of individual historians. In May 1963 , Jan Kfen, a Czech historian who served as one of the experts on the Bamabite Commission, explained the challenges ahead for historians after Stalinism: The battle against dogmatism is, in my opmzon, above all an internal matter of every historian, a question of his theoretical level, his ideological potential. Like all progress in science, the overcoming of dogmatism is not possible without abilities and talent. Untalented thinking is always dogmatic, stereotypical and toady ish. 12 Yet Kfen overstated the importance of professional abilities, as many talented historians struggled to discard political considerations in order to write better histories. For instance, while Jablonicky's Slovensko na prelome, published in 1965, stressed the importance of the Uprising for inaugurating a new chapter in Czech-Slovak rela11 Jozef Ja bl oni cky, Glosy o historiograjii SNP: Zneuiivanie a f alfovanie dej in SNP (Brati slava: NVK In te rn ati onal, 1994), I 0, 13. 12 Jan Kfe n, " Kult a hi stori e," Kulttirna tvorba, 23 May 1963. 68 SLOVAKIA tions, Jablonicky equivocated in repeating the best orthodox cliches about nefarious Slovak and Czech bourgeoisies and the leading role of Communists in the resistance. 13 To Jablonicky's credit, he penned perhaps the decade ' s most important historiographical contribution in 1969, Z illegality do povstania, which offered the most stunning refutation of dogmatic interpretations of the Uprising and destroyed several taboos in praising the non-communist resistance and units of the Slovak Army for their roles in the Uprising while simultaneously portraying its communist leaders in an unflattering light. In a samizdat essay from 1979, Jablonicky even offered a mea culpa for his early scholarship in which he acknowledges the shortcomings of his first works. As Jablonicky recalled, conversations with dozens of former partisans and victims of Stalinism "gradually opened my eyes" as a young historian in the 1960s, leading him to appreciate the importance of the non-communist resistance. 14 Of course, Jablonicky was not alone. At a conference of Slovak historians in June 1963, Milos Gosiorovsky presented a harsh evaluation of his own works on the Uprising from the Stalinist era, criticizing his monographs Ilegalny boj KSS and Slovenske narodne povstanie for presenting a "substantially deformed" picture of the 15 SNP. A year later, Samo Falt'an described how the dictates of editorial boards and the pressures of self-censorship had handicapped evaluations of the Uprising in the Stalinist era, preventing him from including anything critical in his book Partizanska vojna na Slovensku, published in 1959 . 16 As the confessions of Gosiorovsky and Falt'an revealed, the most prominent Slovak historians had been especially susceptible to pressures for ideological conformity, which 13 Jablonicky, Slovensko na prelome, 3 1, 148- 149. Vilem Precan, " Historik proti nas iliu - Jozef Jabloni cky," in Jozef Jablonicky, Samizdat o odboji: Stiidie a clanky, vol. 2 (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2006), 12; Jablonicky, Glosy o historiografii SNP, 6 1. 15 Frantisek Bokes, "Vaine zhromazdeni e Slovenskej hi stori ckej spolocnosti ," Historicky casopis 12, no. 4 (1963): 650; Milos Gosiorovsky, !legalny boj KSS a Slovenske narodne povstanie (Bratislava: Nakladatel'stvo Pravda, 1949); Milos Gosiorovsky, Slovenske narodne povstanie (Bra ti slava : Slovenske vydava tel'stvo politi ckej literatury, 1954). 16 Samo Falt'an, "Niektore otazky okolo hodnoteni a Slovenskeho narodneho povstania," Historicky casop is 12, no. 2 ( 1964): 161 , 164; Samo Falt'an, Partizanska vojna na Slovensku (Bratislava: Osveta, 1959). 14 SLOVAKIA 69 seemed to spur their self-conscious push for objectivity in the more relaxed Slovak political climate of the mid-l 960s. Just as Slovak historians in the l 960s recognized the harmful effects of Stalinism on scholarship on the Uprising, scholars writing about the sixties acknowledge the importance of historiography for the larger crisis gestating in Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, scholarship about the l 960s has pronounced limitations when it comes to historiography from the 1960s. Non-Slovak writers treat the history of the Uprising as but one issue among many new historiographical developments in Czechoslovakia, an approach characterristic of the wider tendency to trivialize the role of Slovaks and the Slovak question in the l 960s. 17 While the Slovak National Uprising was hardly the only historical theme to gamer renewed interest from historians in the mid-sixties - or even the only topic from Slovak history - it was unique in the political purposes to which prominent Slovaks put it in justifying contemporary demands for a resolution of the Slovak question in line with the ostensible aims of the Uprising. More obvious, however, was the extent to which the new historiography on the SNP from the 1960s broke with old dogmas. The doctrinaire narrative of the Uprising from the Stalinist era marginalized the role of Slovaks in the Slovak National Uprising. An instructional manual for lecturers and propagandists published in advance of the SNP's fifteenth anniversary - and, tellingly, written in Czech inflated the importance of Soviet and Czech contributions to the Uprising: In August 1944 the Slovak nation, emboldened by the heroic battle of the Soviet p eople in the Great Patriotic War, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, alongside the Soviet Army advancing to victory, together with the fraternal Czech nation, rose up with weapons in 17 See, fo r instance, th e scant treatm ent prov ided in Stanl ey Z. Pec h, " Fe rment in Czec hoslova k Marxist Hi stori ograph y," Canadian Slavonic Papers l 0, no. 4 (Dece mber 1968): 502-522; Ga lia Gol an, The Czechoslovak Refo rm Movement: Communism in Crisis. 1962- / 968 ; and Skillin g, Czechoslovakia 's Interrupted Revolution. By contrast, M. Mark Stolarik observed how hi stori ans, beginning with Husak and the th eme of the SNP, increasingly reasserted Slovak nati onali sm in their th work . M. Mark Stolarik , "The Painful Birth of Slovak Histori ography in the 20 Century," Zeitschriftfiir Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 50, no. 2 (2 00 I): 176 . 70 SLOVAKIA hand against the German occupiers and their domestic fascist supporters in order to contribute to the liberation of their own homeland - the Czechoslovak Republic. 18 Amid the rambling succession of clauses inserted to show obligatory deference to the Soviet Union and the KSC and to flatter Czechs, the propaganda manual, like the Stalinist-era interpretations of the SNP it typifies, lost sight of the Slovaks, who nearly disappeared from the history of their own Uprising. At the same time, older orthodoxy ascribed the Marxist categories of proletarian internationalism and class struggle to the Uprising. In their work on international participation in the SNP, the Czech Jii'i Dolezal and the Slovak Jozef Hroziencik credited the liberation of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Army on the international stage, and to the working class at home. The Uprising occurred as a consequence, Dolezal and Hroziencik argued, of "the strengthening of the working class and its ideological leadership in the nation," along with the blossoming of the idea of internationalism within the proletariat. 19 Near the end of the Stalinist era, an editorial in 1962 from the KSC Central Committee daily Rude pravo made the dubious claim that, "on an ideological plane," the Uprising "aimed mainly at developing a unified economy," along with combining all other aspects of Slovak and Czech society after liberation - making the SNP appear as the first step toward amalgamating Slovaks and Czechs into a single Czechoslovak nation.2° Conventional interpretations from the Stalinist era thus reduced the Uprising to little more than the opening act in the Czechoslovak revolution and a prelude to the communist takeover in 1948.21 Such a view seemed at odds with the reality of communist electoral strength in the elections of 1946, when the party made considerable gains over its interwar showing, yet still suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the Democratic Party. 18 Kubat, Slovenske narodni povstani, 3. Jifi Dolezal and Jozef Hroziencik, Medzinarodna solidarita v Slovenskom narodnom povstani (Bratislava: Osveta, 1959), 35, 219 20 " Rozvij ime spolecne dilo," Rude pravo, 29 August 1962. 21 Doleza l and Hroziencik, Medzinarodna solidarita , 74. 19 SLOVAKIA 71 Coming to Terms with the Past: De-Stalinization and the Uprising Rewriting the history of the Slovak National Uprising first required important political developments to transpire, and the process drew succor from new efforts at de-Stalinization in 1963 . But the impact of the Bamabite Commission also revealed the crucial role historians played in this process. As Ferdinand Beer, Antonin Bencik, Frantisek Janacek and Jan Kfon recalled, their work on the Bamabite Commission offered historians a rare chance to play an important role in current events: ft was - as far as we know - the first time such a large group of scholars was asked to do this kind of work. This experience left its mark on their whole way of doing work and became, at least for historians, one of those rare occasions when they could not only reconstruct history, but also help to make it. 22 The recollections of these historians also spoke to the transformative effect the Bamabite Commission had on its member-scholars, which proved a formative experience for the way they approached their craft thereafter. Because it focused not only on the political trials of the early 1950s, but also on the activities of the "bourgeois nationalists" during the SNP, the Bamabite Commission employed several professional historians who consequently gained access to documents formerly off limits to researchers, including the files of the "bourgeois nationalists" and materials concerning the cases of Vladimir Clementis and others.23 A document collection on the SNP, originally planned to appear in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the Uprising in 1964 and intended to span 300 to 400 pages when conceived in the spring of 1963, soon ballooned to more than a thousand pages and took an extra year to produce. As Vilem Precan, the Czech editor of the volume, recounts in hi s preface, the renewed interest in the Uprising first observed during celebrations of its nineteenth anniversary, coupled with the political fallout of the 22 23 Beer and others, "Svedectvi z Barnabitek," Kulturni tvorba, 2 May 1968. Sikora, " Po liticky vyvoj na Slovensku," 38. 72 SLOVAKIA Barnabite Commission's report, created "editorial possibilities" that compelled him to broaden the scope of the project. Precan had to sift through piles of newly available documents and include as many of these materials as he could, a daunting task that kept him from completing the volume until 1965 - a full year behind schedule.24 Confronted with documentary evidence of the fabrications from the political trials, the historian-members of the Bamabite Commission were floored by the level of deceit, which exceeded their wildest imagination. Confronting such proof of the crimes of Stalinism had a galvanizing effect on Slovak and Czech historians similar to the jolt Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" had given to Soviet Communists in 1956. As a group of historians recalled in the spring of 1968, "In a certain sense, all of us inside the walls of the former Bamabite monastery went through our own 20 th Congress." 25 For these historians at least, there could be no going back to the old, dogmatic interpretations of Slovak history, especially where the Uprising was concerned. Sensing the opportunity de-Stalinization and the Barnabite Commission had created, historians took the initiative in probing sensitive issues like the Slovak question and the wartime resistance in Slovakia. As early as March of 1963, Falt'an had urged a drastic reexamination of the Uprising, one that would break out of the "black-and-white pigeonholes" of historiography from the Stalinist era to "evaluate objectively and justly" such topics as the role of (non-communist) Slovak regulars from the 1st Czechoslovak Army in the SNP. 26 Further steps in this direction came in the summer of 1963, when historians openly connected the significance of their professional work to the concurrent process of rehabilitation. Miroslav Kropilak opened the Slovak Historical Society ' s conference in June 1963 by reminding his fellow historians of their shared obligation in reassessing "wrongly interpreted" segments of their history. 27 The congress helped to engage Slovak historians in the task 24 Vilem Precan, "S lovo cita tel'ovi," in Slovenske narodne povstanie - Dokumenty, ed. Precan, 5-6. 25 Beer and others, " Svedectvi z Barnabitek. " 26 Samo Falt'an, " Histori a a dn esok," Kulturny i ivot, 23 March 1963 . 27 Kropilak's ex hortati on to eliminate th e "unscienti fic methods" of research employed in studi es of recent Slovak history marked an about fac e from his own presentation at the Fourth Congress of Slovak Histori ans a year earli er in Kosice. At Kosi- SLOVAKIA 73 of eliminating vestiges of the "cult of personality," and it created space, as the historian Marek Havrila remarked, for the "de-ideologizing" (odideologizovanie) of history and the "academifying" (zvedectenie) of the discipline.28 Rewriting History: New (and Old) Narratives of the Uprising Historians began to rewrite the history of the Uprising in time for its twentieth anniversary in 1964, reflecting not only the opportunities created by the Bamabite Commission, but also the heightened interest in commemorating this milestone. Many historians took seriously the need for better scholarship on the Uprising and strove to make use both of newly available materials as well as the relaxation of political constraints. But other historians largely paid lip service to the tasks of writing new, post-Stalinist narratives of the SNP, hewing closely to older, more dogmatic interpretations. On the whole, the new historiography of the Uprising produced in the 1960s yielded improved histories, but it remained bound to the shifting politics of the day. A key development early in this process was an academic conference held at Smolenice on 8-10 June 1964, when several Slovak and Czech historians presented their latest research on the Uprising. The conference marked important progress on the "arduous journey" historians had traveled, as Kropilak recalled in his foreword to the published volume of conference papers, since it brought a "difficult acknowledgment of the unexamined truths, half-truths and untruths" that had characterized historiography of the Uprising from the Stalinist era.29 In a similar vein, Alexander Dubcek, who became KSS first secretary amid the political shakeup of the previous year, ce in I 962 , Kropil ak gave a paper on the anti fas ci st move ment in Eastern Slovakia th at uphe ld communist orthodoxy. He credited the party for building the resistance from the grass roots until the Upri sing, but made no mention of th e contributions of non-Co mmuni sts in the Slova k res istance. Bokes, " Va ine zhromazdenie," 650 ; "Stvrty sjazd slovenskych hi storik ov," Historicky casopis I 0, no. 4 ( 1962): 632. 28 Marek Havril a, " K ni ektory m pro blemom vyv inu slovenskej hi storiografie a slovenskej histori ckej spolocnosti pri SA V v 50. a 60. rokoch 20. storocia," Historicky casopis 55 , no. I (2007) : 28, 32. 29 Mi ros lav Kropil ak, " Uvod," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku I 944, eds. Hol otik and Kropilak, 5. 74 SLOVAKIA opened the conference proceedings by exhorting historians to undertake "a really broad and deep critical analysis of all problems" concerning this significant chapter in recent Slovak history, and Dubcek also reminded historians that the rectification of earlier mistakes was not simply a question of the past, but also a living concern of the present and future .30 As if Dubcek's point could somehow be lost on his audience, the participation of Husak and Novomesky at Smolenice underscored the topicality of scholarship on the SNP. Indeed, Husak expressed his belief on the final day that the conference itself was a sign of the times, since a definite measure of political relaxation in Slovakia was a precondition for historians to address openly the pitfalls of Stalinist-era historiography, and to shed new light on the history of the Uprising. 31 The papers presented at Smolenice aimed mainly at debunking the myths and errors of the Stalinist-era narrative of the SNP. For instance, Falt'an directly criticized the Ninth KSS Congress for having "artificially created" a circle of "bourgeois nationalist traitors and agents of imperialism" that included Husak, Novomesky and Smidke as its leading figures. This trio of Slovak Communists had created the illegal Fifth KSS Central Committee in 1943 , following the arrest of members of the Fourth KSS Central Committee, and had played a major role in organizing the Uprising. Yet the members of the Fifth KSS Central Committee came under fire after the communist takeover of 1948 for their collaboration with nonCommunists, which provided one justification for their persecution as Slovak "bourgeois nationalists." Falt'an portrayed the Slovak Communists who had helped to orchestrate the SNP as both patriotic and communist, rendering the wartime KSS leadership as neither "bourgeois" nor "nationalist" in an effort to break with the dogmatic interpretations that had marred previous historiography.32 Another crucial component of this attempt to cast aside Stalinistera narratives was the effort historians made to address lacunae in scholarship on the Uprising. To this end, the Slovak historian Milos 30 Alexander Dubcek, "Marx isticka histori ografia a nasa revolucna minulost'," in S/ovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Holotik and Kropil ak, I 8. 31 Gustav Husak, " K ni ektorym otazkam Slovenskeho narodn eho povstania," in S/ovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Holotik and Kropilak, 652-653. 32 Samo Falt'an, " Slovenske narodn e povstani e a jeho problemy," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Holotik and Kropilak, 222, 234. SLOVAKIA 75 Tichy called attention to the contributions of non-Communists in the SNP. Though the Communists had been the only party in Slovakia that opposed the breakup of the republic and the Tiso government from the outset, Tichy emphasized how the non-communist parties could not be treated as monolithic supporters of Slovak separatism. Thus, Tichy took care to note how segments of the Social Democratic Party, along with individual members of other "bourgeois" (meaning non-communist) parties had held views similar to those of Slovak Communists with respect to the creation of a pro-German Slovak state. It was noteworthy for Tichy even to mention these nonCommunists who went on to join the wartime resistance, since, as he noted, the record of the non-communist resistance had been thoroughly trivialized and falsified in earlier historiography.33 Tichy struck one of the first important blows against the Stalinist narrative of the Uprising by virtue of recognizing the existence of noncommunist opposition to the Slovak state, though it was not until Jablonicky published Z ilegality do povstania at the end of the decade that this "civilian" segment of the wartime Slovak resistance gained the recognition it deserved. Even though historians consciously sought objectivity and historical fidelity at Smolen ice, they did not reject all elements of the Stalinist-era narrative of the SNP. Thus, while Falt'an preached the importance of historical truth in denouncing the lies that characterrized earlier histories, he sought this "truth" within a distinctly Marxist framework. Comparing the Slovak National Uprising of 1944 to the Warsaw Uprising of the same year, Falt'an placed the Slovak revolt on a qualitatively higher plane than the Polish insurrection, since the SNP had, in Falt'an 's estimation, the superior class orientation. Whereas the Polish "reactionary bourgeoisie" had "abused" popular hatred of Nazi Germany in order to serve its own "political speculations" and "anti-Soviet aims," the Slovak people had taken up arms under the leadership of "revolutionary forces" headed by the KSS .34 Marxist hermeneutics continued to color other interpretations of the Uprising advanced at Smolenice. Like Falt'an, Tichy took great 33 Milos Tic hy, " Hl avne etapy fo rmy a probl emy narodn ooslobodzo vac ieho hnuti a na Slove nsku do vzniku Povstani a," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku / 944, eds. Ho lotik and Kropilak, 65, 7 1. 34 Fa lt'a n, "S lovens ke narodn e povstanie a jeho pro bl emy," 27 1. 76 SLOVAKIA pains to emphasize the class dimension of the Slovak people's rejection of the pre-Munich First Republic. Tichy claimed the Slovak people (l'ud) had directed their hatred not at the fraternal Czech nation, but rather against the "politics of the ruling Czech bourgeoisie." 35 Similarly, Frantisek Janacek, a Czech historian and former member of the Barnabite Commission, conceded the importance of the national element in the Uprising, yet he suggested there was less real significance to such national sentiment in and of itself than in the political objectives to which Slovak Communists could put it in the SNP. Thus, Janacek upheld a doctrinaire Marxist interpretation of national sentiment in deeming it instrumental to revolutionary ends. He argued the initiative the Communists exhibited on the Slovak question had made the KSS a vanguard force that Slovaks recognized as a "national" (narodm) party. 36 Husak also hewed closely to this orthodox narrative of the Uprising instead of accentuating the national dimension of the SNP, averring at Smolenice that "the Slovak National Uprising was above all a political conception, the political revolution of the Slovak people." 37 Even as historians embarked on a pursuit for the truth about the SNP at Smolenice, they continued to parrot old party cliches about the Uprising. Indeed, historical fidelity coexisted alongside shifting political dictates in the historiography of the SNP throughout the l 960s, demonstrating how historians' professed desire for objectivity toward the past ran aground on their inability to remain aloof from the politics of the present. In O Slovenskom narodnom povstani, published in 1964, Falt'an culled new facts and documents in a quest to tell the truth about the Uprising, albeit a truth with a clear agenda. Falt'an's book expanded on the ideas he presented at Smolenice, as he continued his efforts to vindicate the Slovak Communists who had been condemned as "bourgeois nationalists" in the 1950s. But while Falt'an made skillful use of wartime documents to present a more historically accurate picture of the Slovak resistance, the same tired cliches about international solidarity and the Soviet Union 35 Tichy, " Hlavne etapy formy a problemy narodnooslobodzovacieho hnutia na Slovensku," 68-69. 36 Frantisek Janacek, " Dve promeny slovenske otazky (Mezi Mnichovem a Slovenskym narodnim povsta nim)," in Slovenske narodne povstanie roku /944 , eds. Holotik and Kropilak, 618 , 628. 37 Husak, "K ni ektorym otazkam Slovenskeho narodneho povstania," 657. SLOVAKIA 77 still peppered his work. He claimed the Uprising, among other things, "was the expression of great faith in the Soviet people," showing how de-Stalinization and a more relaxed political environment did not relieve Slovaks and Czechs of the duty to show deference to their Soviet allies - an obligation that remained in force even at the height of liberalization in 1968.38 Even the most groundbreaking histories of the Uprising from the mid-sixties exhibited a multiplicity of agendas. In Dejinna kriiovatka, a group of Slovak and Czech historians drew on their work on the Bamabite Commission in an attempt to "rehabilitate" the historical image of the SNP. Their work helped to expose the distortions of the Stalinist era, but it also restored the Slovak question to a prominent role in the new, post-Stalinist narrative of the Uprising. Dejinna kriiovatka appeared in a modest printing of 10,000 copies, yet it gained renown as the first attempt at a comprehensive history of the Slovak National Uprising that consciously rejected the Stalinist narrative and addressed several lacunae in scholarship on the Uprising. And yet, for all its significance as a landmark of Slovak historiography, Dejinna kriiovatka continued to uphold a Marxist worldview in interpreting the SNP as an affirmation of socialist revolution as well as a manifestation of how attractive communist ideas were to the average Slovaks who formed the core of the partisan masses in the Uprising.39 A similar emphasis on the communist aims of the Uprising appeared in Husak's Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani. To his credit, Husak addressed some previously neglected or trivialized facets of the Uprising, pointing out the contributions of the noncommunist opposition within the antifascist camp, the existence of 40 which had been all but denied in Stalinist-era scholarship. Yet Husak's motives for calling attention to this marginalized component of the resistance were also self-serving. Lauding the role of the nonCommunists in the Uprising allowed Husak to validate the strategy of cooperating with non-Communists that he and other KSS leaders had pursued. Husak's intent in writing his recollection of the Uprising seemed to be to vindicate himself, not only in terms of the 38 Falt'an, 0 Slovenskom narodnom povstani, 8, I 03. Beer and others, Dejinna kriiovatka, 125-126, 252. 40 Husak, Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani, 36-37. 39 78 SLOVAKIA historical record, but also in the eyes of the party. As such, Husak stuck close to the communist interpretation of the SNP as a revolt directed against the ruling Slovak and Czech bourgeoisies, while simultaneously heralding the Communist Party (a self-referential bit of praise, considering his role as a member of the wartime KSS leadership) for leading the Uprising and launching the national and democratic revolution in Slovakia. 41 Husak's book also created a sensation after it appeared in August of 1964. The responses from Slovak and Czech intellectuals and historians ranged from the fawning to the damning, but most reviews 42 emphasized its positive contributions to scholarship on the SNP. These early favorable reviews led many Slovaks to view Husak, not only as a prominent figure in the Uprising, but as Jablonicky observed years later, they also encouraged both defenders and detractors of Husak to think of him "as a promising politician possibly on the rise in Slovakia."43 Husak's account of the Uprising conferred considerable authority on him, though not all historians accepted his portrayal of the SNP without reservation. The Czech scholar Josef Domansky offered the first critical remarks on Husak's book, noting one shortcoming was its "methodological non-clarity" resulting from the blurred division between Husak the memoirist and Husak the historian. On the whole, Domansky judged the book positively, even if it had its flaw s, and he regarded it as part of the new trend in historiography that helped to clarify the importance of the Slovak question and to transcend the oversimplifications of earlier scholarship on the Uprising.44 Yet Husak's book became a cause celebre among Slovak - and Czech - intellectuals when it came under fire from on high . Antonin Novotny had little patience for Husak, since Novotny had resisted the rehabilitation of Husak and other victims of Stalinism. When KSS leaders refused to rein in Husak, Novotny commissioned a party hack, the Czech historian Vaclav Kral , to write a scathing review in 41 Ibid., 129, 133 , 139. See, for instance, Anna Stvrtecka, "O dokum entoc h a fa ktoc h," Kultiirny i ivot, 27 August I 965 ; and Jifi Doleza l, " Dvakrat o S P," Mezinarodni politika I 0, no. I 0 (October 1964): 472. 43 Jablonicky, "S lovenske narodne povstani e a tri etapy jeho hodnoteni a," 452 . 44 Josef Domansky, " Nad knihou o Slovenskem narodnim povs tani," Nova mys/ 20, no. I ( 1965): 133- 134. 42 SLOVAKIA 79 order to discredit Husak.45 The KSC cultural weekly Kulturni tvorba published Kral 's review in February 1966, almost two years after Husak' s book appeared in print, and focused, in Kral ' s words, "on a series of theses and questions that are insufficiently or incorrectly developed in Husak's book." Yet Kral's dissection of Husak' s narrative contained thinly veiled criticism of Husak's wartime activities as a member of the KSS Central Committee that organized the • · 46 Upnsmg. Though the high-level political machinations behind Kral ' s review were not common knowledge at the time, the response from Slovak and Czech historians was irate. Anton Bencik, Vaclav Kura) and Jaromir Navratil - one Slovak and two Czech historians - published a reply to Kral in defense of Husak' s work, which stressed the importance of Svedectvo o Slovenskom narodnom povstani as a harbinger of the new developments in historiography following the KSC's renunciation of "bourgeois nationalism" in 1963 . "The publication of Husak's book was indisputably an event," they offered in their response, yet the renown Husak had achieved with this work was only possible because it corresponded to contemporary knowledge of the Uprising and had been accepted by the historical community. Indeed, Husak 's book had been vetted in several reviews, which generally judged it favorably , albeit with some criticism of individual facets . Bencik, Kura! and Navratil also found it puzzling how Kral had remained silent during the historiographical discussions of Husak 's book when it first appeared, and was only then speaking out against the work, long after the fact. The timing was peculiar, though Bencik, Kura) and Navratil did not press their • • 47 susp1c10ns. 45 Vac lav Kra l, "O os udu jedne recenze," Kulturni tvorba, 25 April 1968. Vaclav Kra l, "O Husakove svedectvi troc hu j inak," Kul!urni tvorba, 24 February 1966. 47 Anton Benci k, Vaclav Ku ra ] and Jaromir Navratil , "Jes te o Husakove svedectvi a nejen o nem," Kulturni tvorba, 3 1 March 1966. The rev iew was reprinted a week later in th e Slovak cul tura l magaz ine Predvoj. Anton Benc ik , Vac lav Ku ra ] and Jaro mir Nav ratil , "Este o Husakovom Svedectve a nielen o i\om," Predvoj , 7 April 1966. 46 80 SLOVAKIA Toward Better Histories? On the whole, Slovak historiography of the SNP during the sixties struggled to find its way, as the competing impulses of communist orthodoxy and professional integrity pulled individual historians in opposite directions. While some scholars, like Jablonicky, or the historians who worked on the Bamabite Commission, proved relatively successful at eschewing dogma in writing new narratives more concerned with fidelity to the historical record, it proved impossible even for these more commendable histories to avoid all the cliches about the Uprising that had marked Stalinist-era scholarship. Yet historiography did not exist in a vacuum, and Slovak historians - as well as journalists, writers, politicians and other public figures addressing the theme of the SNP - also played an active role in using the history of the Uprising to reshape contemporary politics. The Slovak National Uprising was an episode from recent history, and the new vitality of scholarship on it during the midsixties ensured the Uprising remained living history for the remainder of the decade. Rewriting the history of the SNP allowed Slovak (and Czech) scholars to press for the rehabilitation of its persecuted leaders. But the new narrative of the Uprising also helped to "rehabilitate" the idea of the Slovak nation in public discourse, which in tum created an opening for politically engaged Slovaks to advance a nationalist agenda. Ultimately, this agenda would aim at a new approach to the Slovak question in the form of a federation, but in the interim, it entailed the promotion of a Slovak national consciousness firmly rooted in the new, "rehabilitated" historical image of the Uprising.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rising Against Stalinism: Destalinization and the Reinterpretation of the Slovak National Uprising in Slovak Historiography of the 1960s Description An account of the resource Scott Brown Slovakia, Vol. 40 (No. 74-75), 2010 pp. 60-80 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brown, Scott A., 1981- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/4b1065536d042f64530048acc0e18dd7.pdf 11f6405210b8e969acee1fcd584bbede PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 81 MYTHS REGARDING THE ANTI-COMMUNIST RESISTANCE IN SLOV AKIA 1 Jan Carnogursky The preparation and course of the Velvet Revolution in Slovakia has gradually become known. The response to the fall of Communism across Europe has shown that the participation and contribution to the overthrow of Communism and the establishment of democracy is part of the legitimacy of Europe today, and a starting point for confident behaviour. The overthrow of Communism was a prerequisite for the unification of Europe in general and the unification of Germany in particular. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was shown that Eastern Europe did not have any objections to the unification of Germany, unlike Great Britain and France. But that is not the point any more. The media 's revelation of the anti-Communist resistance in Slovakia created many myths which still distort our knowledge about the anti-Communist resistance in Slovakia. I will try to correct at least some of them. I have to note that some of the myths are positive, some negative. 1. Few Chartists in Slovakia. Almost every report on the anti-Communist resistance in Slovakia, specifically on the Velvet Revolution, begins with the statement that there were only a few Chartists (Members of Charter 77) in Slovakia. Indeed, there were not even ten of them . The myth is that there should have been many more. The reason is simple: Charter 77 reflected the Czech, and especially Prague ' s, terms of resistance against Communism. It did not represent the Slovak. Charter 77 included legalistically-conceived demands to respect human rights, which referred to Czechoslovak Decree No. 120/1 976 on the "Covenant on Human Rights." Its provisions were based on the conclusions 1 Speech delivered to th e Eco nomi c C lub of Bra ti slava on October 29, 2009. �82 SLOVAKIA of the Helsinki Conference of 197 5. Charter 77 could count on media and diplomatic support from the West throughout its existence. Charter 77 had existed for less than three months when the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans van der Broek, during his visit to Prague, received the spokesman of the Charter, Professor Jan Patocka. Subsequently, Jan Patocka suffered from a heart attack and died during an interrogation by State Security (StB) - the secret police, but that's another story. Whenever the police arrested or detained a signatory of the Charter, the Western media reported it within a few hours . Slovakia could not count on similar media support. There were no Western correspondents in Bratislava. They were accredited only in Prague. Similarly, Bratislava had no Western diplomatic offices . The US Consulate General was closed most of the time, and only once a month or two American diplomats from Prague commuted for the day to their building in Bratislava. Let me illustrate. The Candle Demonstration on Hviezdoslav Square in March of 1988, with 5,000 participants, was a much greater manifestation against the communist regime than Charter 77. However, in the following days, the western press reported only a few lines about it. It could not be compared with the constant news about Charter 77. The internal structure of Charter 77 reflected the social situation in the Czech Republic. Among three spokesmen of the Charter, one was a purged Communist, one a practicing Christian, and one was a secular intellectual. Until November of 1989, purged Communists in Slovakia were unable to form their own resistance group against Communism. Alexander Dubcek was isolated. The creative intelligentsia also failed to form any significant alignment against the regime. The centre of resistance against Communism in Slovakia was in the Christian church, with all of its particularities. Until 1989, Charter 77 was signed by about 1,300 to 2,000 people, 200 to 300 of whom were active. The underground Catholic church in Slovakia involved much larger numbers of people. The Candle Demonstration was attended by thousands, while Charter 77 was never able to organize such a massive public demonstration . Charter 77 played an important role in the opposition against Communism, as it influenced the trends and forms of resistance. It was also able to give legitimacy to other forms of resistance and, in �SLOVAKIA 83 such a case, foreign observers did not have any doubts despite communist propaganda (e.g. Ivan Polansky's case in Slovakia). Resistance against a continental dictatorial regime, such as Communism, always had to be based on the deepest national traditions of any society. Using theoretical and political criteria for evaluating resistance against Communism is ridiculous. Such resistance could be easily suppressed by the StB . Slovak resistance against Communism was, therefore, based on Slovak national traditions and historical experience. Czech resistance, on the other hand, was based on Czech national traditions and historical experience. Czech forms of resistance against Communism could not, therefore, be mechanically transferred to Slovakia and used to compare the intensity of Slovak resistance. If we were to proceed in the same way, for example, when comparing and assessing Polish and Czech resistance against Communism, Czech resistance would come out as negligibly weak. 2. Milder "Normalization" in Slovakia. Another myth claims that "normalization" in Slovakia was milder than in the Czech Republic. It is based on the same unscientific observation as the previous claim that there were only few Chartists in Slovakia. Yes, many Party members were purged from cultural institutions and were forced to work in various research institutions where they were stuck, and could only do office work, and were expected to keep quiet. That is how, after having been purged from the Party, the Ideological Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia, Miroslav Kusy, could work in some sort of research institute and the historian Jozef Jablonicky in a local historical institute. And the list could be continued. When they did not obey, the regime went further and sent them to do manual work, as happened to Miroslav Kusy. This, however, only concerned a numerically insignificant group of excluded Party members, formerly of high rank which, by the way, they received through their membership in the Party, and who had no social support in Slovakia. The regime knew that it did not have to fear them and, therefore, pushed them further. This was the major difference with the Czech Republic, where purged Party members represented a greater threat, and the regime had more to fear. It must not be forgotten that in the Czech Republic �84 SLOVAKIA there was a group of more conservative Communists grouped around Antonin Kapek, Alois Indra and later Miroslav Stepan and others, who knew their former colleagues well and let them feel it. This becomes obvious after reading just a few issues of the daily Tribuna, which started publication after the Warsaw pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1968 by the Bureau for the Management of Party Activity in the Czech Republic. In Slovakia, the regime mostly feared the Christian underground network, and particularly the underground church. It showed it no mercy. Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec, who was an underground bishop, was forced to work as an elevator repairman until his retirement. The present Archbishop of Kosice, Alojz Tkac, operated a streetcar. Bishop Rudolf Balaz of Banska Bystrica was a teamster. Trials for obstructing StB surveillance of churches occurred in Slovakia throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with unconditional sentences meted out. Furthermore, doctors and teachers were fired because of their church attendance. The myth of milder "normalization" in Slovakia does not take any of this into account. 3. The Candle Demonstration. The Candle Demonstration on March 25 , 1988, was the first mass public protest since 1969 against the regime in the former Czechoslovakia. It was organized on the initiative of Marian St'astny, then the President of the Slovak World Congress. His intention was to organize demonstrations on the 25th of March 1988 in front of Czechoslovak embassies in several Western countries as an appeal to respect the civil rights of his people. In the end, the only demonstration that took place was in Bratislava. However, it was based on completely different principles compared to those applicable in the Czech Republic or in Western Europe. The demonstrators demanded three things: allowing the Pope to appoint Catholic bishops in Slovakia, full religious freedom, and respect for human rights . This combination is unimaginable in the Czech Republic or in any Western country. But just such a combination was demanded by simple believers on the one hand, and by the urban intelligentsia on the other. This becomes clear after one reads Martin Simecka's report on the participants in the Candle Demonstration for the samizdat press shortly thereafter. The demonstration did not require any �SLOVAKIA 85 leading speaker, as he would have been immediately arrested by the police. The demonstration itself did not give any excuse to the police to intervene and when, despite that, the police sprayed the demonstrators with water cannons and arrested them, the illegality of the reaction was even more evident. In his book A Carnival of Revolution (also published in Czech), the American historian Padraic Kenney charted a time-table of events in Eastern Europe from 1975 until 1989. The table shows that the Candle Demonstration in Bratislava and a demonstration in Budapest on the 15th of March 1988 were the first mass demonstrations in the former Eastern Bloc. I will return later to the Budapest demonstration. Of course, the Candle Demonstration evoked responses in the Czech and Slovak samizdat press, setting a standard for other manifestations against the regime. As to the number of participants, the Candle Demonstration was not outnumbered until demonstrations in Prague took place in October of 1988 in honour of the anniversary of the Republic . The Candle Demonstration, however, has been mentioned only marginally in scholarly works, especially in the Czech Republic, and in the evaluation of the antiCommunist resistance in Czechoslovakia as a whole. 4. State Symbols and Anniversaries. Anniversaries commemorating national and state history have the greatest mobilizing potential in any society. Perhaps some of them are emblazoned with legends, but they are able to attract people to commemorate, and, on the other hand to demonstrate against a ruling regime if they think that it flouts tradition. They are associated with patriotism in the best sense of the word. The opposition in the surrounding countries, as well as in the Czech Republic, used such anniversaries to organize demonstrations against the ruling communist regimes. In Budapest, there was a demonstration on the 15th of March, which hearkened back to the Revolution of 1848. In Prague, October 28 was the anniversary of the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, and in Poland there are many such anniversaries. The taking of one ' s life for the common good also has a great potential to mobilize people. The self-immolation of Jan Palach in Prague in January of 1969 is a good example. In November of 1989, a false rumor circulated in Prague about the death of a student during �86 SLOVAKIA a demonstration on the 17th of November, commemorating the Nazi suppression of a student demonstration in 1939. It was sufficient to spark demonstrations across the country. Slovakia did not have such an anniversary. Slovakia also does not perceive the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 as being a historical event with significant mobilization potential. But this is not the place to discuss the causes . State traditions could only apply to the Slovak Republic which existed from 1939 to 1945, and which was allied with Nazi Germany. Those traditions could not be used. The Slovak National Uprising of 1944 did not leave any clear message - again this is not the place to discuss the reasons - and its message was in any case attributed to the communist regime. The death of General M. R. Stefanik had a certain mobilizing potential in itself, which was used by the Slovak opposition at Brad lo in May of 1989. Mobilizing impulses which had the greatest potential in the surrounding countries and nations could not be applied in Slovakia. Slovak resistance against Communism, therefore, had to be based on some other mobilizing principle. And that, in every society, is religion. However, it is a more abstract principle compared to significant national and state anniversaries. To organize opposition around religion is, therefore, more difficult. On the other hand, the mobilizing potential of religion does have distortions that are threatened by national and state anniversaries. So far, no one has appreciated that the Candle Demonstration outshone public demonstrations throughout Europe against oppressive regimes based on national and state anniversaries. 5. Velehrad, The Petition of Moravian Catholics. In 1985, a commemoration was held in Moravian Velehrad on the occasion of the 1100th anniversary of the death of Saint Methodius in Great Moravia. The ceremony was attended by about 150,000 - 200,000 believers, most of them from Slovakia. The Vatican State Secretary, Cardinal Cassaroli, attended. It was a significant anniversary, generally recognized by the people and, of course, remembered in Catholic churches throughout the country. For that reason, the communist regime could not ignore it and sent to Velehrad the Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic, Milan Klusak. In his speech, the minister tried to diminish the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to simply that of a linguistic and cultural mission. For example, �SLOVAKIA 87 he did not call them Saints Cyril and Methodius, but only Cyril and Methodius . The audience booed him, shouting "Saints Cyril and Methodius" and the gathering turned into a demonstration against the regime. In the autumn 1987, a Moravian farmer, Augustin Navratil, addressed to the communist authorities 31 requests of Moravian Catholics pertaining to religious freedom. The requests were written in simple, understandable language. After being supported by Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek of Prague, Navratil began to collect signatures for his petition. By the beginning of 1988, half a million people had signed the petition, two thirds of them from Slovakia. This petition was the largest in the Communist Bloc. The signatures revealed that the underground church was active in all of Slovakia and that it had a clear leadership. Of course, such leadership had to remain underground, and could not, for example, emulate Charter 77. However, the number of signatures and their method of collection sent a signal to the regime that there was an invisible enemy which could, under certain circumstances, rise up and become uncontrollable. Velehrad, as well as the petition of the Moravian Catholics, are also only marginally mentioned in the analysis of anti-Communist resistance in the whole of Czechoslovakia. 6. Cooperation of Dissenters. During "normalization," dissent against the regime developed simultaneously in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic . In Slovakia, it was specifically Christian dissent and so-called "civil" dissent. Each of them was based on its own conditions and initially operated only internally. From the end of the 1970s, the StB in Slovakia had concluded that there was a risk of a major strengthening of dissenters if the Christian dissidents were to join with civil dissidents in Slovakia and the Slovak and Czech di ssidents within Czechoslovakia. Within its capabilities, the StB tried to maintain the isolation of individual dissident movements. There was some interaction between them, but it was too weak to unite them. In the mid 1980' s, contacts and mutual assistance intensified so much that it finally allowed the coordination of such dissident movements. In Slovakia, the newly-born Green Movement, as well as independent artists, began to partake in civil and Christian dissent. Christian activists began to meet on �88 SLOVAKIA a regular basis with purged Party members. The now-deceased Milan Simecka, a Moravian living in Bratislava, connected the Slovak and Czech dissents and encouraged many activists from Slovakia to travel to meetings in Prague. It must be said that the connection between the Czech and Slovak Catholic dissents had existed for a long time, following the message of the Croatian Jesuit priest Tomislav Poglajen - Kolakovic in the l 940 's . Very little has been written about Kolakovic. His followers spent many years in Slovak and Czech prisons. After having been released, they used to meet regularly and maintained the Slovak-Czech dialogue, which has lasted until the present day. The cooperation of dissidents in the 1980's helped to prepare the way for the November, 1989 revolution in Slovakia. 7. The Assistance of Czech Dissents. The appearance of Charter 77 was a milestone in the anti-Communist movement in Czechoslovakia. The Charter showed that public opposition against a regime is possible, but at the price of great sacrifice. Samizdat journals began to appear as a result. Petitions were organized for the freeing of political prisoners, and so on. The samizdat periodical press in Slovakia followed the lead of samizdat periodical press in the Czech Republic. Czech forms of resistance against Communism, which were transferable to Slovakia, became a source of inspiration. The State Security in Slovakia tried to label any opposition as a continuation of the Slovak People 's Party, clerical fascism and so on. For foreign defenders of dissdents, it was difficult to tell when communist propaganda was truthful and when it was lying. That was also the case with Ivan Polansky, who was arrested in 1987 and accused of supporting and spreading fascism. Ivan Polansky had prepared a samizdat volume on the Reverend Andrej Hlinka, founder of the Slovak People's Party, and a police search of Polansky's house also revealed materials concerning Jozef Tiso, president of the wartime Slovak Republic. In the end, Charter 77 stood up for Ivan Polansky and the publishers of the Czech samizdat press signed a declaration in which they dared the police to arrest them for carrying out the same activities as Polansky. Whether Ivan Polansky was a clerical fascist or not, it was enough for Wes tern publicists to believe that he was not, and they gave him full publicity �SLOVAKIA 89 and diplomatic support. This was similar to events in February of 1988, when the communist daily Pravda in Bratislava and its counterpart Rude Pravo in Prague published a series of articles denouncing Pavo) Camogursky, the author's father. The articles focused on the activities of Pavo! Carnogursky during the first Slovak Republic. Vaclav Havel, the most prominent of the Czech dissidents, persuaded his followers to sign a declaration in support of Pavo! Camogursky. Havel also used his contacts to transmit messages about Pavo! Carnogursky through various channels in the Prague diplomatic corps. In Slovakia, none of that was possible. The assistance of the Czech dissents significantly improved the chances of the defense of Slovak dissidents in case they were arrested. 8. The Speed of the Fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia. The comparison of the speed of the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and, perhaps in other countries, has also become mythical. Based on such comparisons, Czechoslovakia comes out the best since the regime fell in about two weeks. Perhaps it would be useful to have a closer look at the reality. The regime fell quickly in Czechoslovakia for two reasons, one external and one internal. The external reason was that by the 17th of November, 1989 the Berlin wall had already fallen in Eastern Germany, the non-communist government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki was already established in Poland, Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika was already working in the Soviet Union and Hungary was allowing East Germans to escape into Austria. Thus, Czechoslovakia was already de facto surrounded by non-Communist Poland and countries with qualitatively different styles of Communism (the Democratic Republic of Germany, the Soviet Union and Hungary). In geopolitical terms, there was nothing the Czechoslovak communist regime could do than to give up. Furthermore, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia could not rely on internal support, because it had none. Communists were also not willing to fight for their regime. Resistance would mean ineviable defeat for the Communists, followed by their imprisonment and punishment. None of them was willing to take such a risk. The internal reason was the unity of the opposition. This unity consisted in the fact that the opposition in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic wan- �90 SLOVAKIA ted only free elections, a parliamentary democracy, a market economy and European integration. The Slovak opposition did not demand a change in Slovakia's national status. The only small difference lay in its support of Alexander Dubcek' s candidacy for the post of the President of the Republic. The Slovak opposition however, represented by VPN (Public Against Violence), supported Vaclav Havel 's candidacy. Opposition in Czechoslovakia in November and December 1989 was almost exclusively based on demonstrations in cities that were attended by thousands of people. Had any media reports on major differences in the attitude of Czech and Slovak oppositions penetrated the public, it could have significantly reduced the willingness of people to demonstrate in city squares. It was also important that Vaclav Havel was adopted as a generally-recognized symbol of the Velvet Revolution. If any other groups had made other demands, for example purged Slovak Party members pushing Dubcek' s candidacy for the post of the President, they would have failed. Their position was weak because, in previous years, they had not joined in the resistance against the communist regime. Later proponents of the independence of Slovakia had no record of showing resistance against Communism in the form of samizdat or other ways. Therefore, they were ignored in the first few months following the revolution. Prematurely raising requirements for a change in the national status of Czechoslovakia could have significantly weakened the pressure on the communist regime and, in fact, would have given it new legitimacy. The main challenge in November and December of 1989 was to overthrow Communism. Harmonization and balancing of the national form of resistance against Communism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia also contributed to the rapidity of the fall of Communism. After the creation of Charter 77, the Czech opposition against Communism took the lead in the Republic. Based on future analyses, historians will perhaps come to the conclusion that a certain balance was established sometime around 1987 between the Slovak and Czech opposition. In Slovakia, the Greens came out with the publication Bratislava nahlas (Bratislava Aloud), which preceded the results of the Green Movement in the Czech Republic. This was followed by the petition of Moravian Catholics and the Candle Demonstration. American historian Padraic Kenney wrote that in the mid 1980's an exhaustion and weariness of the original anti-Communist movements occurred in �SLOVAKIA 91 several former communist countries and the initiative was then taken by new, emerging, movements . This finding could perhaps also apply to Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia has a complicated history because it consisted of two founding nations which were linguistically close, but differed culturally . The course of the resistance against Communism, and eventually the breakdown of the Republic, have created new, and seemingly better, relations between the Slovaks and the Czechs. However, these remain to be tested during future crises. ��REVIEW ESSAY �� SLOVAKIA 81 MYTHS REGARDING THE ANTI-COMMUNIST RESISTANCE IN SLOV AKIA 1 Jan Carnogursky The preparation and course of the Velvet Revolution in Slovakia has gradually become known. The response to the fall of Communism across Europe has shown that the participation and contribution to the overthrow of Communism and the establishment of democracy is part of the legitimacy of Europe today, and a starting point for confident behaviour. The overthrow of Communism was a prerequisite for the unification of Europe in general and the unification of Germany in particular. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was shown that Eastern Europe did not have any objections to the unification of Germany, unlike Great Britain and France. But that is not the point any more. The media 's revelation of the anti-Communist resistance in Slovakia created many myths which still distort our knowledge about the anti-Communist resistance in Slovakia. I will try to correct at least some of them. I have to note that some of the myths are positive, some negative. 1. Few Chartists in Slovakia. Almost every report on the anti-Communist resistance in Slovakia, specifically on the Velvet Revolution, begins with the statement that there were only a few Chartists (Members of Charter 77) in Slovakia. Indeed, there were not even ten of them . The myth is that there should have been many more. The reason is simple: Charter 77 reflected the Czech, and especially Prague ' s, terms of resistance against Communism. It did not represent the Slovak. Charter 77 included legalistically-conceived demands to respect human rights, which referred to Czechoslovak Decree No. 120/1 976 on the "Covenant on Human Rights." Its provisions were based on the conclusions 1 Speech delivered to th e Eco nomi c C lub of Bra ti slava on October 29, 2009. �82 SLOVAKIA of the Helsinki Conference of 197 5. Charter 77 could count on media and diplomatic support from the West throughout its existence. Charter 77 had existed for less than three months when the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans van der Broek, during his visit to Prague, received the spokesman of the Charter, Professor Jan Patocka. Subsequently, Jan Patocka suffered from a heart attack and died during an interrogation by State Security (StB) - the secret police, but that's another story. Whenever the police arrested or detained a signatory of the Charter, the Western media reported it within a few hours . Slovakia could not count on similar media support. There were no Western correspondents in Bratislava. They were accredited only in Prague. Similarly, Bratislava had no Western diplomatic offices . The US Consulate General was closed most of the time, and only once a month or two American diplomats from Prague commuted for the day to their building in Bratislava. Let me illustrate. The Candle Demonstration on Hviezdoslav Square in March of 1988, with 5,000 participants, was a much greater manifestation against the communist regime than Charter 77. However, in the following days, the western press reported only a few lines about it. It could not be compared with the constant news about Charter 77. The internal structure of Charter 77 reflected the social situation in the Czech Republic. Among three spokesmen of the Charter, one was a purged Communist, one a practicing Christian, and one was a secular intellectual. Until November of 1989, purged Communists in Slovakia were unable to form their own resistance group against Communism. Alexander Dubcek was isolated. The creative intelligentsia also failed to form any significant alignment against the regime. The centre of resistance against Communism in Slovakia was in the Christian church, with all of its particularities. Until 1989, Charter 77 was signed by about 1,300 to 2,000 people, 200 to 300 of whom were active. The underground Catholic church in Slovakia involved much larger numbers of people. The Candle Demonstration was attended by thousands, while Charter 77 was never able to organize such a massive public demonstration . Charter 77 played an important role in the opposition against Communism, as it influenced the trends and forms of resistance. It was also able to give legitimacy to other forms of resistance and, in �SLOVAKIA 83 such a case, foreign observers did not have any doubts despite communist propaganda (e.g. Ivan Polansky's case in Slovakia). Resistance against a continental dictatorial regime, such as Communism, always had to be based on the deepest national traditions of any society. Using theoretical and political criteria for evaluating resistance against Communism is ridiculous. Such resistance could be easily suppressed by the StB . Slovak resistance against Communism was, therefore, based on Slovak national traditions and historical experience. Czech resistance, on the other hand, was based on Czech national traditions and historical experience. Czech forms of resistance against Communism could not, therefore, be mechanically transferred to Slovakia and used to compare the intensity of Slovak resistance. If we were to proceed in the same way, for example, when comparing and assessing Polish and Czech resistance against Communism, Czech resistance would come out as negligibly weak. 2. Milder "Normalization" in Slovakia. Another myth claims that "normalization" in Slovakia was milder than in the Czech Republic. It is based on the same unscientific observation as the previous claim that there were only few Chartists in Slovakia. Yes, many Party members were purged from cultural institutions and were forced to work in various research institutions where they were stuck, and could only do office work, and were expected to keep quiet. That is how, after having been purged from the Party, the Ideological Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia, Miroslav Kusy, could work in some sort of research institute and the historian Jozef Jablonicky in a local historical institute. And the list could be continued. When they did not obey, the regime went further and sent them to do manual work, as happened to Miroslav Kusy. This, however, only concerned a numerically insignificant group of excluded Party members, formerly of high rank which, by the way, they received through their membership in the Party, and who had no social support in Slovakia. The regime knew that it did not have to fear them and, therefore, pushed them further. This was the major difference with the Czech Republic, where purged Party members represented a greater threat, and the regime had more to fear. It must not be forgotten that in the Czech Republic �84 SLOVAKIA there was a group of more conservative Communists grouped around Antonin Kapek, Alois Indra and later Miroslav Stepan and others, who knew their former colleagues well and let them feel it. This becomes obvious after reading just a few issues of the daily Tribuna, which started publication after the Warsaw pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1968 by the Bureau for the Management of Party Activity in the Czech Republic. In Slovakia, the regime mostly feared the Christian underground network, and particularly the underground church. It showed it no mercy. Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec, who was an underground bishop, was forced to work as an elevator repairman until his retirement. The present Archbishop of Kosice, Alojz Tkac, operated a streetcar. Bishop Rudolf Balaz of Banska Bystrica was a teamster. Trials for obstructing StB surveillance of churches occurred in Slovakia throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with unconditional sentences meted out. Furthermore, doctors and teachers were fired because of their church attendance. The myth of milder "normalization" in Slovakia does not take any of this into account. 3. The Candle Demonstration. The Candle Demonstration on March 25 , 1988, was the first mass public protest since 1969 against the regime in the former Czechoslovakia. It was organized on the initiative of Marian St'astny, then the President of the Slovak World Congress. His intention was to organize demonstrations on the 25th of March 1988 in front of Czechoslovak embassies in several Western countries as an appeal to respect the civil rights of his people. In the end, the only demonstration that took place was in Bratislava. However, it was based on completely different principles compared to those applicable in the Czech Republic or in Western Europe. The demonstrators demanded three things: allowing the Pope to appoint Catholic bishops in Slovakia, full religious freedom, and respect for human rights . This combination is unimaginable in the Czech Republic or in any Western country. But just such a combination was demanded by simple believers on the one hand, and by the urban intelligentsia on the other. This becomes clear after one reads Martin Simecka's report on the participants in the Candle Demonstration for the samizdat press shortly thereafter. The demonstration did not require any �SLOVAKIA 85 leading speaker, as he would have been immediately arrested by the police. The demonstration itself did not give any excuse to the police to intervene and when, despite that, the police sprayed the demonstrators with water cannons and arrested them, the illegality of the reaction was even more evident. In his book A Carnival of Revolution (also published in Czech), the American historian Padraic Kenney charted a time-table of events in Eastern Europe from 1975 until 1989. The table shows that the Candle Demonstration in Bratislava and a demonstration in Budapest on the 15th of March 1988 were the first mass demonstrations in the former Eastern Bloc. I will return later to the Budapest demonstration. Of course, the Candle Demonstration evoked responses in the Czech and Slovak samizdat press, setting a standard for other manifestations against the regime. As to the number of participants, the Candle Demonstration was not outnumbered until demonstrations in Prague took place in October of 1988 in honour of the anniversary of the Republic . The Candle Demonstration, however, has been mentioned only marginally in scholarly works, especially in the Czech Republic, and in the evaluation of the antiCommunist resistance in Czechoslovakia as a whole. 4. State Symbols and Anniversaries. Anniversaries commemorating national and state history have the greatest mobilizing potential in any society. Perhaps some of them are emblazoned with legends, but they are able to attract people to commemorate, and, on the other hand to demonstrate against a ruling regime if they think that it flouts tradition. They are associated with patriotism in the best sense of the word. The opposition in the surrounding countries, as well as in the Czech Republic, used such anniversaries to organize demonstrations against the ruling communist regimes. In Budapest, there was a demonstration on the 15th of March, which hearkened back to the Revolution of 1848. In Prague, October 28 was the anniversary of the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, and in Poland there are many such anniversaries. The taking of one ' s life for the common good also has a great potential to mobilize people. The self-immolation of Jan Palach in Prague in January of 1969 is a good example. In November of 1989, a false rumor circulated in Prague about the death of a student during �86 SLOVAKIA a demonstration on the 17th of November, commemorating the Nazi suppression of a student demonstration in 1939. It was sufficient to spark demonstrations across the country. Slovakia did not have such an anniversary. Slovakia also does not perceive the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 as being a historical event with significant mobilization potential. But this is not the place to discuss the causes . State traditions could only apply to the Slovak Republic which existed from 1939 to 1945, and which was allied with Nazi Germany. Those traditions could not be used. The Slovak National Uprising of 1944 did not leave any clear message - again this is not the place to discuss the reasons - and its message was in any case attributed to the communist regime. The death of General M. R. Stefanik had a certain mobilizing potential in itself, which was used by the Slovak opposition at Brad lo in May of 1989. Mobilizing impulses which had the greatest potential in the surrounding countries and nations could not be applied in Slovakia. Slovak resistance against Communism, therefore, had to be based on some other mobilizing principle. And that, in every society, is religion. However, it is a more abstract principle compared to significant national and state anniversaries. To organize opposition around religion is, therefore, more difficult. On the other hand, the mobilizing potential of religion does have distortions that are threatened by national and state anniversaries. So far, no one has appreciated that the Candle Demonstration outshone public demonstrations throughout Europe against oppressive regimes based on national and state anniversaries. 5. Velehrad, The Petition of Moravian Catholics. In 1985, a commemoration was held in Moravian Velehrad on the occasion of the 1100th anniversary of the death of Saint Methodius in Great Moravia. The ceremony was attended by about 150,000 - 200,000 believers, most of them from Slovakia. The Vatican State Secretary, Cardinal Cassaroli, attended. It was a significant anniversary, generally recognized by the people and, of course, remembered in Catholic churches throughout the country. For that reason, the communist regime could not ignore it and sent to Velehrad the Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic, Milan Klusak. In his speech, the minister tried to diminish the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to simply that of a linguistic and cultural mission. For example, �SLOVAKIA 87 he did not call them Saints Cyril and Methodius, but only Cyril and Methodius . The audience booed him, shouting "Saints Cyril and Methodius" and the gathering turned into a demonstration against the regime. In the autumn 1987, a Moravian farmer, Augustin Navratil, addressed to the communist authorities 31 requests of Moravian Catholics pertaining to religious freedom. The requests were written in simple, understandable language. After being supported by Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek of Prague, Navratil began to collect signatures for his petition. By the beginning of 1988, half a million people had signed the petition, two thirds of them from Slovakia. This petition was the largest in the Communist Bloc. The signatures revealed that the underground church was active in all of Slovakia and that it had a clear leadership. Of course, such leadership had to remain underground, and could not, for example, emulate Charter 77. However, the number of signatures and their method of collection sent a signal to the regime that there was an invisible enemy which could, under certain circumstances, rise up and become uncontrollable. Velehrad, as well as the petition of the Moravian Catholics, are also only marginally mentioned in the analysis of anti-Communist resistance in the whole of Czechoslovakia. 6. Cooperation of Dissenters. During "normalization," dissent against the regime developed simultaneously in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic . In Slovakia, it was specifically Christian dissent and so-called "civil" dissent. Each of them was based on its own conditions and initially operated only internally. From the end of the 1970s, the StB in Slovakia had concluded that there was a risk of a major strengthening of dissenters if the Christian dissidents were to join with civil dissidents in Slovakia and the Slovak and Czech di ssidents within Czechoslovakia. Within its capabilities, the StB tried to maintain the isolation of individual dissident movements. There was some interaction between them, but it was too weak to unite them. In the mid 1980' s, contacts and mutual assistance intensified so much that it finally allowed the coordination of such dissident movements. In Slovakia, the newly-born Green Movement, as well as independent artists, began to partake in civil and Christian dissent. Christian activists began to meet on �88 SLOVAKIA a regular basis with purged Party members. The now-deceased Milan Simecka, a Moravian living in Bratislava, connected the Slovak and Czech dissents and encouraged many activists from Slovakia to travel to meetings in Prague. It must be said that the connection between the Czech and Slovak Catholic dissents had existed for a long time, following the message of the Croatian Jesuit priest Tomislav Poglajen - Kolakovic in the l 940 's . Very little has been written about Kolakovic. His followers spent many years in Slovak and Czech prisons. After having been released, they used to meet regularly and maintained the Slovak-Czech dialogue, which has lasted until the present day. The cooperation of dissidents in the 1980's helped to prepare the way for the November, 1989 revolution in Slovakia. 7. The Assistance of Czech Dissents. The appearance of Charter 77 was a milestone in the anti-Communist movement in Czechoslovakia. The Charter showed that public opposition against a regime is possible, but at the price of great sacrifice. Samizdat journals began to appear as a result. Petitions were organized for the freeing of political prisoners, and so on. The samizdat periodical press in Slovakia followed the lead of samizdat periodical press in the Czech Republic. Czech forms of resistance against Communism, which were transferable to Slovakia, became a source of inspiration. The State Security in Slovakia tried to label any opposition as a continuation of the Slovak People 's Party, clerical fascism and so on. For foreign defenders of dissdents, it was difficult to tell when communist propaganda was truthful and when it was lying. That was also the case with Ivan Polansky, who was arrested in 1987 and accused of supporting and spreading fascism. Ivan Polansky had prepared a samizdat volume on the Reverend Andrej Hlinka, founder of the Slovak People's Party, and a police search of Polansky's house also revealed materials concerning Jozef Tiso, president of the wartime Slovak Republic. In the end, Charter 77 stood up for Ivan Polansky and the publishers of the Czech samizdat press signed a declaration in which they dared the police to arrest them for carrying out the same activities as Polansky. Whether Ivan Polansky was a clerical fascist or not, it was enough for Wes tern publicists to believe that he was not, and they gave him full publicity �SLOVAKIA 89 and diplomatic support. This was similar to events in February of 1988, when the communist daily Pravda in Bratislava and its counterpart Rude Pravo in Prague published a series of articles denouncing Pavo) Camogursky, the author's father. The articles focused on the activities of Pavo! Carnogursky during the first Slovak Republic. Vaclav Havel, the most prominent of the Czech dissidents, persuaded his followers to sign a declaration in support of Pavo! Camogursky. Havel also used his contacts to transmit messages about Pavo! Carnogursky through various channels in the Prague diplomatic corps. In Slovakia, none of that was possible. The assistance of the Czech dissents significantly improved the chances of the defense of Slovak dissidents in case they were arrested. 8. The Speed of the Fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia. The comparison of the speed of the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and, perhaps in other countries, has also become mythical. Based on such comparisons, Czechoslovakia comes out the best since the regime fell in about two weeks. Perhaps it would be useful to have a closer look at the reality. The regime fell quickly in Czechoslovakia for two reasons, one external and one internal. The external reason was that by the 17th of November, 1989 the Berlin wall had already fallen in Eastern Germany, the non-communist government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki was already established in Poland, Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika was already working in the Soviet Union and Hungary was allowing East Germans to escape into Austria. Thus, Czechoslovakia was already de facto surrounded by non-Communist Poland and countries with qualitatively different styles of Communism (the Democratic Republic of Germany, the Soviet Union and Hungary). In geopolitical terms, there was nothing the Czechoslovak communist regime could do than to give up. Furthermore, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia could not rely on internal support, because it had none. Communists were also not willing to fight for their regime. Resistance would mean ineviable defeat for the Communists, followed by their imprisonment and punishment. None of them was willing to take such a risk. The internal reason was the unity of the opposition. This unity consisted in the fact that the opposition in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic wan- �90 SLOVAKIA ted only free elections, a parliamentary democracy, a market economy and European integration. The Slovak opposition did not demand a change in Slovakia's national status. The only small difference lay in its support of Alexander Dubcek' s candidacy for the post of the President of the Republic. The Slovak opposition however, represented by VPN (Public Against Violence), supported Vaclav Havel 's candidacy. Opposition in Czechoslovakia in November and December 1989 was almost exclusively based on demonstrations in cities that were attended by thousands of people. Had any media reports on major differences in the attitude of Czech and Slovak oppositions penetrated the public, it could have significantly reduced the willingness of people to demonstrate in city squares. It was also important that Vaclav Havel was adopted as a generally-recognized symbol of the Velvet Revolution. If any other groups had made other demands, for example purged Slovak Party members pushing Dubcek' s candidacy for the post of the President, they would have failed. Their position was weak because, in previous years, they had not joined in the resistance against the communist regime. Later proponents of the independence of Slovakia had no record of showing resistance against Communism in the form of samizdat or other ways. Therefore, they were ignored in the first few months following the revolution. Prematurely raising requirements for a change in the national status of Czechoslovakia could have significantly weakened the pressure on the communist regime and, in fact, would have given it new legitimacy. The main challenge in November and December of 1989 was to overthrow Communism. Harmonization and balancing of the national form of resistance against Communism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia also contributed to the rapidity of the fall of Communism. After the creation of Charter 77, the Czech opposition against Communism took the lead in the Republic. Based on future analyses, historians will perhaps come to the conclusion that a certain balance was established sometime around 1987 between the Slovak and Czech opposition. In Slovakia, the Greens came out with the publication Bratislava nahlas (Bratislava Aloud), which preceded the results of the Green Movement in the Czech Republic. This was followed by the petition of Moravian Catholics and the Candle Demonstration. American historian Padraic Kenney wrote that in the mid 1980's an exhaustion and weariness of the original anti-Communist movements occurred in �SLOVAKIA 91 several former communist countries and the initiative was then taken by new, emerging, movements . This finding could perhaps also apply to Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia has a complicated history because it consisted of two founding nations which were linguistically close, but differed culturally . The course of the resistance against Communism, and eventually the breakdown of the Republic, have created new, and seemingly better, relations between the Slovaks and the Czechs. However, these remain to be tested during future crises. ��REVIEW ESSAY �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2010, Vol. 40 Description An account of the resource Vol. 40 (No. 74-75), 2010. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 81 MYTHS REGARDING THE ANTI-COMMUNIST RESISTANCE IN SLOV AKIA 1 Jan Carnogursky The preparation and course of the Velvet Revolution in Slovakia has gradually become known. The response to the fall of Communism across Europe has shown that the participation and contribution to the overthrow of Communism and the establishment of democracy is part of the legitimacy of Europe today, and a starting point for confident behaviour. The overthrow of Communism was a prerequisite for the unification of Europe in general and the unification of Germany in particular. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was shown that Eastern Europe did not have any objections to the unification of Germany, unlike Great Britain and France. But that is not the point any more. The media 's revelation of the anti-Communist resistance in Slovakia created many myths which still distort our knowledge about the anti-Communist resistance in Slovakia. I will try to correct at least some of them. I have to note that some of the myths are positive, some negative. 1. Few Chartists in Slovakia. Almost every report on the anti-Communist resistance in Slovakia, specifically on the Velvet Revolution, begins with the statement that there were only a few Chartists (Members of Charter 77) in Slovakia. Indeed, there were not even ten of them . The myth is that there should have been many more. The reason is simple: Charter 77 reflected the Czech, and especially Prague ' s, terms of resistance against Communism. It did not represent the Slovak. Charter 77 included legalistically-conceived demands to respect human rights, which referred to Czechoslovak Decree No. 120/1 976 on the "Covenant on Human Rights." Its provisions were based on the conclusions 1 Speech delivered to th e Eco nomi c C lub of Bra ti slava on October 29, 2009. 82 SLOVAKIA of the Helsinki Conference of 197 5. Charter 77 could count on media and diplomatic support from the West throughout its existence. Charter 77 had existed for less than three months when the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans van der Broek, during his visit to Prague, received the spokesman of the Charter, Professor Jan Patocka. Subsequently, Jan Patocka suffered from a heart attack and died during an interrogation by State Security (StB) - the secret police, but that's another story. Whenever the police arrested or detained a signatory of the Charter, the Western media reported it within a few hours . Slovakia could not count on similar media support. There were no Western correspondents in Bratislava. They were accredited only in Prague. Similarly, Bratislava had no Western diplomatic offices . The US Consulate General was closed most of the time, and only once a month or two American diplomats from Prague commuted for the day to their building in Bratislava. Let me illustrate. The Candle Demonstration on Hviezdoslav Square in March of 1988, with 5,000 participants, was a much greater manifestation against the communist regime than Charter 77. However, in the following days, the western press reported only a few lines about it. It could not be compared with the constant news about Charter 77. The internal structure of Charter 77 reflected the social situation in the Czech Republic. Among three spokesmen of the Charter, one was a purged Communist, one a practicing Christian, and one was a secular intellectual. Until November of 1989, purged Communists in Slovakia were unable to form their own resistance group against Communism. Alexander Dubcek was isolated. The creative intelligentsia also failed to form any significant alignment against the regime. The centre of resistance against Communism in Slovakia was in the Christian church, with all of its particularities. Until 1989, Charter 77 was signed by about 1,300 to 2,000 people, 200 to 300 of whom were active. The underground Catholic church in Slovakia involved much larger numbers of people. The Candle Demonstration was attended by thousands, while Charter 77 was never able to organize such a massive public demonstration . Charter 77 played an important role in the opposition against Communism, as it influenced the trends and forms of resistance. It was also able to give legitimacy to other forms of resistance and, in SLOVAKIA 83 such a case, foreign observers did not have any doubts despite communist propaganda (e.g. Ivan Polansky's case in Slovakia). Resistance against a continental dictatorial regime, such as Communism, always had to be based on the deepest national traditions of any society. Using theoretical and political criteria for evaluating resistance against Communism is ridiculous. Such resistance could be easily suppressed by the StB . Slovak resistance against Communism was, therefore, based on Slovak national traditions and historical experience. Czech resistance, on the other hand, was based on Czech national traditions and historical experience. Czech forms of resistance against Communism could not, therefore, be mechanically transferred to Slovakia and used to compare the intensity of Slovak resistance. If we were to proceed in the same way, for example, when comparing and assessing Polish and Czech resistance against Communism, Czech resistance would come out as negligibly weak. 2. Milder "Normalization" in Slovakia. Another myth claims that "normalization" in Slovakia was milder than in the Czech Republic. It is based on the same unscientific observation as the previous claim that there were only few Chartists in Slovakia. Yes, many Party members were purged from cultural institutions and were forced to work in various research institutions where they were stuck, and could only do office work, and were expected to keep quiet. That is how, after having been purged from the Party, the Ideological Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia, Miroslav Kusy, could work in some sort of research institute and the historian Jozef Jablonicky in a local historical institute. And the list could be continued. When they did not obey, the regime went further and sent them to do manual work, as happened to Miroslav Kusy. This, however, only concerned a numerically insignificant group of excluded Party members, formerly of high rank which, by the way, they received through their membership in the Party, and who had no social support in Slovakia. The regime knew that it did not have to fear them and, therefore, pushed them further. This was the major difference with the Czech Republic, where purged Party members represented a greater threat, and the regime had more to fear. It must not be forgotten that in the Czech Republic 84 SLOVAKIA there was a group of more conservative Communists grouped around Antonin Kapek, Alois Indra and later Miroslav Stepan and others, who knew their former colleagues well and let them feel it. This becomes obvious after reading just a few issues of the daily Tribuna, which started publication after the Warsaw pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1968 by the Bureau for the Management of Party Activity in the Czech Republic. In Slovakia, the regime mostly feared the Christian underground network, and particularly the underground church. It showed it no mercy. Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec, who was an underground bishop, was forced to work as an elevator repairman until his retirement. The present Archbishop of Kosice, Alojz Tkac, operated a streetcar. Bishop Rudolf Balaz of Banska Bystrica was a teamster. Trials for obstructing StB surveillance of churches occurred in Slovakia throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with unconditional sentences meted out. Furthermore, doctors and teachers were fired because of their church attendance. The myth of milder "normalization" in Slovakia does not take any of this into account. 3. The Candle Demonstration. The Candle Demonstration on March 25 , 1988, was the first mass public protest since 1969 against the regime in the former Czechoslovakia. It was organized on the initiative of Marian St'astny, then the President of the Slovak World Congress. His intention was to organize demonstrations on the 25th of March 1988 in front of Czechoslovak embassies in several Western countries as an appeal to respect the civil rights of his people. In the end, the only demonstration that took place was in Bratislava. However, it was based on completely different principles compared to those applicable in the Czech Republic or in Western Europe. The demonstrators demanded three things: allowing the Pope to appoint Catholic bishops in Slovakia, full religious freedom, and respect for human rights . This combination is unimaginable in the Czech Republic or in any Western country. But just such a combination was demanded by simple believers on the one hand, and by the urban intelligentsia on the other. This becomes clear after one reads Martin Simecka's report on the participants in the Candle Demonstration for the samizdat press shortly thereafter. The demonstration did not require any SLOVAKIA 85 leading speaker, as he would have been immediately arrested by the police. The demonstration itself did not give any excuse to the police to intervene and when, despite that, the police sprayed the demonstrators with water cannons and arrested them, the illegality of the reaction was even more evident. In his book A Carnival of Revolution (also published in Czech), the American historian Padraic Kenney charted a time-table of events in Eastern Europe from 1975 until 1989. The table shows that the Candle Demonstration in Bratislava and a demonstration in Budapest on the 15th of March 1988 were the first mass demonstrations in the former Eastern Bloc. I will return later to the Budapest demonstration. Of course, the Candle Demonstration evoked responses in the Czech and Slovak samizdat press, setting a standard for other manifestations against the regime. As to the number of participants, the Candle Demonstration was not outnumbered until demonstrations in Prague took place in October of 1988 in honour of the anniversary of the Republic . The Candle Demonstration, however, has been mentioned only marginally in scholarly works, especially in the Czech Republic, and in the evaluation of the antiCommunist resistance in Czechoslovakia as a whole. 4. State Symbols and Anniversaries. Anniversaries commemorating national and state history have the greatest mobilizing potential in any society. Perhaps some of them are emblazoned with legends, but they are able to attract people to commemorate, and, on the other hand to demonstrate against a ruling regime if they think that it flouts tradition. They are associated with patriotism in the best sense of the word. The opposition in the surrounding countries, as well as in the Czech Republic, used such anniversaries to organize demonstrations against the ruling communist regimes. In Budapest, there was a demonstration on the 15th of March, which hearkened back to the Revolution of 1848. In Prague, October 28 was the anniversary of the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, and in Poland there are many such anniversaries. The taking of one ' s life for the common good also has a great potential to mobilize people. The self-immolation of Jan Palach in Prague in January of 1969 is a good example. In November of 1989, a false rumor circulated in Prague about the death of a student during 86 SLOVAKIA a demonstration on the 17th of November, commemorating the Nazi suppression of a student demonstration in 1939. It was sufficient to spark demonstrations across the country. Slovakia did not have such an anniversary. Slovakia also does not perceive the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 as being a historical event with significant mobilization potential. But this is not the place to discuss the causes . State traditions could only apply to the Slovak Republic which existed from 1939 to 1945, and which was allied with Nazi Germany. Those traditions could not be used. The Slovak National Uprising of 1944 did not leave any clear message - again this is not the place to discuss the reasons - and its message was in any case attributed to the communist regime. The death of General M. R. Stefanik had a certain mobilizing potential in itself, which was used by the Slovak opposition at Brad lo in May of 1989. Mobilizing impulses which had the greatest potential in the surrounding countries and nations could not be applied in Slovakia. Slovak resistance against Communism, therefore, had to be based on some other mobilizing principle. And that, in every society, is religion. However, it is a more abstract principle compared to significant national and state anniversaries. To organize opposition around religion is, therefore, more difficult. On the other hand, the mobilizing potential of religion does have distortions that are threatened by national and state anniversaries. So far, no one has appreciated that the Candle Demonstration outshone public demonstrations throughout Europe against oppressive regimes based on national and state anniversaries. 5. Velehrad, The Petition of Moravian Catholics. In 1985, a commemoration was held in Moravian Velehrad on the occasion of the 1100th anniversary of the death of Saint Methodius in Great Moravia. The ceremony was attended by about 150,000 - 200,000 believers, most of them from Slovakia. The Vatican State Secretary, Cardinal Cassaroli, attended. It was a significant anniversary, generally recognized by the people and, of course, remembered in Catholic churches throughout the country. For that reason, the communist regime could not ignore it and sent to Velehrad the Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic, Milan Klusak. In his speech, the minister tried to diminish the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to simply that of a linguistic and cultural mission. For example, SLOVAKIA 87 he did not call them Saints Cyril and Methodius, but only Cyril and Methodius . The audience booed him, shouting "Saints Cyril and Methodius" and the gathering turned into a demonstration against the regime. In the autumn 1987, a Moravian farmer, Augustin Navratil, addressed to the communist authorities 31 requests of Moravian Catholics pertaining to religious freedom. The requests were written in simple, understandable language. After being supported by Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek of Prague, Navratil began to collect signatures for his petition. By the beginning of 1988, half a million people had signed the petition, two thirds of them from Slovakia. This petition was the largest in the Communist Bloc. The signatures revealed that the underground church was active in all of Slovakia and that it had a clear leadership. Of course, such leadership had to remain underground, and could not, for example, emulate Charter 77. However, the number of signatures and their method of collection sent a signal to the regime that there was an invisible enemy which could, under certain circumstances, rise up and become uncontrollable. Velehrad, as well as the petition of the Moravian Catholics, are also only marginally mentioned in the analysis of anti-Communist resistance in the whole of Czechoslovakia. 6. Cooperation of Dissenters. During "normalization," dissent against the regime developed simultaneously in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic . In Slovakia, it was specifically Christian dissent and so-called "civil" dissent. Each of them was based on its own conditions and initially operated only internally. From the end of the 1970s, the StB in Slovakia had concluded that there was a risk of a major strengthening of dissenters if the Christian dissidents were to join with civil dissidents in Slovakia and the Slovak and Czech di ssidents within Czechoslovakia. Within its capabilities, the StB tried to maintain the isolation of individual dissident movements. There was some interaction between them, but it was too weak to unite them. In the mid 1980' s, contacts and mutual assistance intensified so much that it finally allowed the coordination of such dissident movements. In Slovakia, the newly-born Green Movement, as well as independent artists, began to partake in civil and Christian dissent. Christian activists began to meet on 88 SLOVAKIA a regular basis with purged Party members. The now-deceased Milan Simecka, a Moravian living in Bratislava, connected the Slovak and Czech dissents and encouraged many activists from Slovakia to travel to meetings in Prague. It must be said that the connection between the Czech and Slovak Catholic dissents had existed for a long time, following the message of the Croatian Jesuit priest Tomislav Poglajen - Kolakovic in the l 940 's . Very little has been written about Kolakovic. His followers spent many years in Slovak and Czech prisons. After having been released, they used to meet regularly and maintained the Slovak-Czech dialogue, which has lasted until the present day. The cooperation of dissidents in the 1980's helped to prepare the way for the November, 1989 revolution in Slovakia. 7. The Assistance of Czech Dissents. The appearance of Charter 77 was a milestone in the anti-Communist movement in Czechoslovakia. The Charter showed that public opposition against a regime is possible, but at the price of great sacrifice. Samizdat journals began to appear as a result. Petitions were organized for the freeing of political prisoners, and so on. The samizdat periodical press in Slovakia followed the lead of samizdat periodical press in the Czech Republic. Czech forms of resistance against Communism, which were transferable to Slovakia, became a source of inspiration. The State Security in Slovakia tried to label any opposition as a continuation of the Slovak People 's Party, clerical fascism and so on. For foreign defenders of dissdents, it was difficult to tell when communist propaganda was truthful and when it was lying. That was also the case with Ivan Polansky, who was arrested in 1987 and accused of supporting and spreading fascism. Ivan Polansky had prepared a samizdat volume on the Reverend Andrej Hlinka, founder of the Slovak People's Party, and a police search of Polansky's house also revealed materials concerning Jozef Tiso, president of the wartime Slovak Republic. In the end, Charter 77 stood up for Ivan Polansky and the publishers of the Czech samizdat press signed a declaration in which they dared the police to arrest them for carrying out the same activities as Polansky. Whether Ivan Polansky was a clerical fascist or not, it was enough for Wes tern publicists to believe that he was not, and they gave him full publicity SLOVAKIA 89 and diplomatic support. This was similar to events in February of 1988, when the communist daily Pravda in Bratislava and its counterpart Rude Pravo in Prague published a series of articles denouncing Pavo) Camogursky, the author's father. The articles focused on the activities of Pavo! Carnogursky during the first Slovak Republic. Vaclav Havel, the most prominent of the Czech dissidents, persuaded his followers to sign a declaration in support of Pavo! Camogursky. Havel also used his contacts to transmit messages about Pavo! Carnogursky through various channels in the Prague diplomatic corps. In Slovakia, none of that was possible. The assistance of the Czech dissents significantly improved the chances of the defense of Slovak dissidents in case they were arrested. 8. The Speed of the Fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia. The comparison of the speed of the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and, perhaps in other countries, has also become mythical. Based on such comparisons, Czechoslovakia comes out the best since the regime fell in about two weeks. Perhaps it would be useful to have a closer look at the reality. The regime fell quickly in Czechoslovakia for two reasons, one external and one internal. The external reason was that by the 17th of November, 1989 the Berlin wall had already fallen in Eastern Germany, the non-communist government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki was already established in Poland, Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika was already working in the Soviet Union and Hungary was allowing East Germans to escape into Austria. Thus, Czechoslovakia was already de facto surrounded by non-Communist Poland and countries with qualitatively different styles of Communism (the Democratic Republic of Germany, the Soviet Union and Hungary). In geopolitical terms, there was nothing the Czechoslovak communist regime could do than to give up. Furthermore, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia could not rely on internal support, because it had none. Communists were also not willing to fight for their regime. Resistance would mean ineviable defeat for the Communists, followed by their imprisonment and punishment. None of them was willing to take such a risk. The internal reason was the unity of the opposition. This unity consisted in the fact that the opposition in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic wan- 90 SLOVAKIA ted only free elections, a parliamentary democracy, a market economy and European integration. The Slovak opposition did not demand a change in Slovakia's national status. The only small difference lay in its support of Alexander Dubcek' s candidacy for the post of the President of the Republic. The Slovak opposition however, represented by VPN (Public Against Violence), supported Vaclav Havel 's candidacy. Opposition in Czechoslovakia in November and December 1989 was almost exclusively based on demonstrations in cities that were attended by thousands of people. Had any media reports on major differences in the attitude of Czech and Slovak oppositions penetrated the public, it could have significantly reduced the willingness of people to demonstrate in city squares. It was also important that Vaclav Havel was adopted as a generally-recognized symbol of the Velvet Revolution. If any other groups had made other demands, for example purged Slovak Party members pushing Dubcek' s candidacy for the post of the President, they would have failed. Their position was weak because, in previous years, they had not joined in the resistance against the communist regime. Later proponents of the independence of Slovakia had no record of showing resistance against Communism in the form of samizdat or other ways. Therefore, they were ignored in the first few months following the revolution. Prematurely raising requirements for a change in the national status of Czechoslovakia could have significantly weakened the pressure on the communist regime and, in fact, would have given it new legitimacy. The main challenge in November and December of 1989 was to overthrow Communism. Harmonization and balancing of the national form of resistance against Communism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia also contributed to the rapidity of the fall of Communism. After the creation of Charter 77, the Czech opposition against Communism took the lead in the Republic. Based on future analyses, historians will perhaps come to the conclusion that a certain balance was established sometime around 1987 between the Slovak and Czech opposition. In Slovakia, the Greens came out with the publication Bratislava nahlas (Bratislava Aloud), which preceded the results of the Green Movement in the Czech Republic. This was followed by the petition of Moravian Catholics and the Candle Demonstration. American historian Padraic Kenney wrote that in the mid 1980's an exhaustion and weariness of the original anti-Communist movements occurred in SLOVAKIA 91 several former communist countries and the initiative was then taken by new, emerging, movements . This finding could perhaps also apply to Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia has a complicated history because it consisted of two founding nations which were linguistically close, but differed culturally . The course of the resistance against Communism, and eventually the breakdown of the Republic, have created new, and seemingly better, relations between the Slovaks and the Czechs. However, these remain to be tested during future crises. REVIEW ESSAY  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Myths Regarding the Anti-Communist Resistance in Slovakia Description An account of the resource Ján Čarnogurský Slovakia, Vol. 40 (No. 74-75), 2010 pp. 81-91 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Čarnogurský, Ján, 1944- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 SNK https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/05fe4f2f83dc4f2aa778c108aefd8aec.pdf c0a4fb8581aad0734d386ff72b9d397f PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 95 SLOVAK-POLISH RELATIONS Joanna Glowinska, ed., Stosunki polsko-slowackie w I polowie XX wieku. Wroclaw: Instytut Pami~ci Narodowej Wroclaw, 2006. 118 pp., list of abbreviations, name index. Petr Blazek, Pawel Jaworski, and Lukasz Kaminski , eds., Mirdzy przymusowq przyjainiq a prawdziwq solidarnosciq. Czesi - Polacy Slowacy, 1938-39 - 1945 - 1989, Cz~sc I. Warszawa: Instytut Pami~ci Narodowej , 2007 . 152 pp., name index. Grzegorz Motyka, ed., Sluiby bezpieczenstwa Polski i Czechoslowacji wobec Ukrainc6w (1945-1989) . Z warsztat6w badawczych. Warszawa: Instytut Pami~ci Narodowej , 2005 . 381 pp., list of abbreviations, name index. MARCEL JESENSKY University of Ottawa lnstytut Pamirci Narodowej (the Institute of National Remembrance) in Warsaw was established by the Polish Parliament in 1998 to preserve the memory of the 1939-1989 period. It is also engages in public education, research and dissemination of its findings. The three publications under review cover various aspects of Slovak Czech - Polish bilateral and trilateral relations in the 20th century. Polish-Slovak Relations in the First Half of the 20th Century, edited by Joanna Glowinska presents materials from a 2006 PolishSlovak conference held in Opole, Poland. Despite the fact that Polish-Slovak relations in the first half of the 20th century remained in the shadow of Polish-Czech relations, publications like this could signal the beginnings of a "catch-up" process. The book offers the contributions of four Slovak and three Polish historians on a wide range of topics. For the Polish contributors, Dariusz Dllbrowski examined Eastern Slovakia as a subject of PolishHungarian activities before WW II, Mateusz Gniazdowski reviewed relations between Slovak autonomists and the so-called Sanacja government of Jozef Pilsudski , and Ewa Orlof discussed relations between the Polish and Slovak governments from 15 March to 1 Sep- �96 SLOVAKIA tember 1939. For the Slovak contributors, Ivan A. Petransky evaluated the history of the Slovak Republic in 1939 - 1945, Dusan Seges discussed relations between the Polish exile government and Slovak politicians during WW II, Martin Lacko scrutinized the activities of Slovak soldiers in Poland in 1939 and 1941 and Juraj Marusiak reconsidered the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 and its consequences and the role of the Poles in the Uprising. Lukasz Kaminski concluded the conference with a comparison of Polish and Slovak positions at the end of WW II. Two additional pieces were particularly interesting. One was a review of the Polish "awakening movement" among the highlanders of the Slovak-Polish borderland (Gorals) by Mateusz Gniazdowski. The Gorals fascinated Polish "awakeners" and they considered them to be Poles because of the closeness of their dialect to the Polish language (asserting as obvious the link between language and nationality). But the majority of the Gorals in Slovakia lacked any Polish national consciousness and claimed Slovak nationality. Some Polish "awakeners" maintained the naive view that the Polish-Slovak rapprochement would persuade the Slovaks to accept Polish ethno-linguistic argumentation with the consequent border readjustment in the Slovak-Polish borderland. Thus one of the interesting paradoxes of Polish-Slovak relations in the interwar period was the fact that the persons who supported and shaped the Polish policy of rapprochement with the Slovaks advocated, at the same time, irredentism in the common borderland. Secondly, Dusan Seges's penetrating analysis of multifaceted and evolving contacts between the Polish and Slovak political authorities during WW II made a strong argument for the need to consider Slovak-Polish relations as a distinct problem, not as one element of Polish-Czechoslovak relations during wartime. It is hardly surprising that, on some historical questions, the Slovak and Polish perspectives could not be reconciled. This was demonstrated in Kaminski's concluding remarks that "Slovakia saw the war end with the losses of territories that had never been an integral part of the country, neither in a historical nor in a cultural sense." The issue of the Polish-Slovak borderland and its population remains particularly challenging, but the era of a single "correct" historical perspective has ended. The publication Between the Forced Sympathy and the Real Soli- �SLOVAKIA 97 darity. Czechs - Poles - Slovaks, 1938-39 - 1945 - 1989, Part I, contains 18 contributions of historians from Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Great Britain made within the "Enemies or Allies during WWII" segment of the November 2004 conference in Wroclaw, Poland. The History Institute of Wroclaw University and the Institute of National Remembrance jointly sponsored the conference in collaboration with the Institute For Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Thus, Slawomir M. Nowinowski presented an introductory overview of Polish-Czechoslovak relations at the outset of WW II, Jaroslav Boucek gave a picture of Poland in the work of the Czech historian Jan Slavik (1885-1978) and Anna Cichocka reviewed the portrayal of Czechoslovakia on the pages of the Polish journal Polityka in 193 8-193 9. Furthermore, Piotr Kolakowski focused his attention on the activities of Polish military intelligence against Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1930s, Robert Kowalski described Polish-Slovak relations against a background of German diplomatic activities in 1939, Pavel Micianik inspected the activities of the Slovak army during the campaign against Poland and Jan Nemecek examined the relations between the Polish and Czechoslovak governments in exile. In addition, Jacek Piotrowski observed exiled Polish president Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz and the plans for a Polish-Czechoslovak federation , Dariusz Miszewski talked about general Kazimierz Sosnkowski's views on the strategic importance of Czechoslovakia for Poland' s security in 1938-1943, Pawel Jaworski pondered on the Polish-Czechoslovak contacts in Sweden during WWII and Dusan Seges explored Karol Sidor's contacts with Kazimierz Papee in the Vatican through the memorandum La question slovaque from June of 1943. Subsequently, Roman Baron clarified the mutual perceptions of the Czechs and Poles from the perspective of Polish and Czechoslovak political emigres, Martin D. Brown shed light on the Foreign Office ' s influence on shaping British-PolishCzechoslovak relations, Radoslaw Zurawski elucidated on the Foreign Office' s role in Polish-Czechoslovak relations (November 1940-August 1942) and Vit Smetana expounded on the issue of Czecho-slovak-Polish confederation and the big powers. Finally, Jaroslav Vaculik illustrated the activities of the Czechoslovak army group in Volhynia in 1939-1940, Mecislav Barak gave details about two concepts of resistance in Tes in Silesia (Zaolzie) in 193 8-1945 and Petr Koura talked about the picture of Poland in the Czech un- �98 SLOVAKIA derground press in 1939-1945. The majority of the participants reflected, from various perspectives, upon the issues of competing Slovak, Czech and Polish territorial claims in Tesin Silesia (Zaolzie), Spis and Orava, and on Slovak-Czech-Polish regional cooperation with the emphasis on the role of Slovakia and its presence or absence. The presentations made several interesting observations and I would like to focus on two of them. Slawomir Nowikowski observed that the Zaolzie region played the role of a barometer in Polish-Czechoslovak relations in 19181938. It was a striking revelation that the Poles seemed unaware of the extent of hostility generated in Czechoslovakia by Polish territorial aspirations in Zaolzie, Spis and Orava. Accordingly, the search for a consensus in the Czechoslovak-Polish territorial issues in 19181938 appeared like squaring the circle. The Czechoslovak-Polish territorial disputes became insignificant after 1945 in comparison with the Polish territorial loses incurred in its eastern regions. Mecislav Borak demonstrated divergent attitudes of the Communists towards the territorial ambitions of their governments. While the Polish Communists condemned and distanced themselves verbally from the prewar Polish governments' foreign policies, they never abandoned Polish territorial claims in Tesin. The Polish Communists adopted the view of their bourgeois predecessors, upholding in their activities the right of self-determination of all Poles. This attitude sharply contrasted with that of the Slovak and Czech Communists who supported the abandonment of Slovak territorial claims in the Northern Spis and Orava regions. This publication advances further Slovak-Czech-Polish exchanges of views on their shared past, particularly in less researched and published topics. A divergence of views should not hamper the continuing evaluation and re-evaluation of the shared Slovak-Czech-Polish past. The publication's plentiful collection of new and older archival resources will certainly help researchers and historians dealing with the Slovak, Czech and Polish histories. Therefore, the publication is recommended reading for professional and amateur historians. The IPN 's Monografie series is dedicated to the modem history of Poland (1939-1989). Its publication The Security Services of Poland and Czechoslovakia against the Ukrainians (1945-1989) presents eight works of Polish and Czech authors dealing with the �SLOVAKIA 99 Polish and Czechoslovak special services and their activities against the Ukrainian minority and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Resistance Anny (UPA). Grzegorz Motyka introduced the activities of the security services of Poland and Czechoslovakia against the Ukrainians, Jan Pisulinski spoke about Rzeszow's security office and its activities against the Ukrainians in 1944-1956, Tomasz Balbus described anti-communist actions of the Ukrainians in south-west Poland in 1945-1954 and Mariusz Zaj<l_czkowski glanced at Polish-Czechoslovak security cooperation in the case of Jan Szpontak. Marcin Majewski, meanwhile, spoke about the case of Teodor Oak and the security operation "Paj<l,ki," Igor Halagida discussed the cooperation of the Polish State Security (SB) and the Soviet KGB against the Ukrainian minority in the 1960s, Grzegorz Motyka and Mariusz Zaj<l_czkowski documented attempts at re-writing history in the Peoples' Republic of Poland, Ondrej Koutek commented on the activities of the Czechoslovak security services against the Ukrainians in 1945-1989 and Lubos Vesely expounded on the war with the banderovci in post-war Czechoslovakia. The contribution of Tomasz Balbus attracted my attention. The governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia resolved to keep all aspects of Ukrainian nationalist expression under control and to manipulate it for their own purposes. The Polish government successfully created and maintained the perception, widely shared by the Poles until today, that the OUN-UPA activities targeted primarily the Polish population. In reality the Ukrainian nationalists hoped to liberate the Ukraine from the Soviet Union and to create an independent country. The publication concludes the current stage of research conduced by the Office of Public Education of the IPN on the Polish-Ukrainian relations in 1939-1989. Historians of Central and East Europe will find plentiful archival resources in The Security Services of Poland and Czechoslovakia Against the Ukrainians (I 945-1989). However, many interesting questions remain on the activities of the Ukrainian resistance in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Taking into account the fact that their resistance activities made substantial contact with Slovakia, Slovak scholars should also be involved in such research. �� SLOVAKIA 95 SLOVAK-POLISH RELATIONS Joanna Glowinska, ed., Stosunki polsko-slowackie w I polowie XX wieku. Wroclaw: Instytut Pami~ci Narodowej Wroclaw, 2006. 118 pp., list of abbreviations, name index. Petr Blazek, Pawel Jaworski, and Lukasz Kaminski , eds., Mirdzy przymusowq przyjainiq a prawdziwq solidarnosciq. Czesi - Polacy Slowacy, 1938-39 - 1945 - 1989, Cz~sc I. Warszawa: Instytut Pami~ci Narodowej , 2007 . 152 pp., name index. Grzegorz Motyka, ed., Sluiby bezpieczenstwa Polski i Czechoslowacji wobec Ukrainc6w (1945-1989) . Z warsztat6w badawczych. Warszawa: Instytut Pami~ci Narodowej , 2005 . 381 pp., list of abbreviations, name index. MARCEL JESENSKY University of Ottawa lnstytut Pamirci Narodowej (the Institute of National Remembrance) in Warsaw was established by the Polish Parliament in 1998 to preserve the memory of the 1939-1989 period. It is also engages in public education, research and dissemination of its findings. The three publications under review cover various aspects of Slovak Czech - Polish bilateral and trilateral relations in the 20th century. Polish-Slovak Relations in the First Half of the 20th Century, edited by Joanna Glowinska presents materials from a 2006 PolishSlovak conference held in Opole, Poland. Despite the fact that Polish-Slovak relations in the first half of the 20th century remained in the shadow of Polish-Czech relations, publications like this could signal the beginnings of a "catch-up" process. The book offers the contributions of four Slovak and three Polish historians on a wide range of topics. For the Polish contributors, Dariusz Dllbrowski examined Eastern Slovakia as a subject of PolishHungarian activities before WW II, Mateusz Gniazdowski reviewed relations between Slovak autonomists and the so-called Sanacja government of Jozef Pilsudski , and Ewa Orlof discussed relations between the Polish and Slovak governments from 15 March to 1 Sep- �96 SLOVAKIA tember 1939. For the Slovak contributors, Ivan A. Petransky evaluated the history of the Slovak Republic in 1939 - 1945, Dusan Seges discussed relations between the Polish exile government and Slovak politicians during WW II, Martin Lacko scrutinized the activities of Slovak soldiers in Poland in 1939 and 1941 and Juraj Marusiak reconsidered the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 and its consequences and the role of the Poles in the Uprising. Lukasz Kaminski concluded the conference with a comparison of Polish and Slovak positions at the end of WW II. Two additional pieces were particularly interesting. One was a review of the Polish "awakening movement" among the highlanders of the Slovak-Polish borderland (Gorals) by Mateusz Gniazdowski. The Gorals fascinated Polish "awakeners" and they considered them to be Poles because of the closeness of their dialect to the Polish language (asserting as obvious the link between language and nationality). But the majority of the Gorals in Slovakia lacked any Polish national consciousness and claimed Slovak nationality. Some Polish "awakeners" maintained the naive view that the Polish-Slovak rapprochement would persuade the Slovaks to accept Polish ethno-linguistic argumentation with the consequent border readjustment in the Slovak-Polish borderland. Thus one of the interesting paradoxes of Polish-Slovak relations in the interwar period was the fact that the persons who supported and shaped the Polish policy of rapprochement with the Slovaks advocated, at the same time, irredentism in the common borderland. Secondly, Dusan Seges's penetrating analysis of multifaceted and evolving contacts between the Polish and Slovak political authorities during WW II made a strong argument for the need to consider Slovak-Polish relations as a distinct problem, not as one element of Polish-Czechoslovak relations during wartime. It is hardly surprising that, on some historical questions, the Slovak and Polish perspectives could not be reconciled. This was demonstrated in Kaminski's concluding remarks that "Slovakia saw the war end with the losses of territories that had never been an integral part of the country, neither in a historical nor in a cultural sense." The issue of the Polish-Slovak borderland and its population remains particularly challenging, but the era of a single "correct" historical perspective has ended. The publication Between the Forced Sympathy and the Real Soli- �SLOVAKIA 97 darity. Czechs - Poles - Slovaks, 1938-39 - 1945 - 1989, Part I, contains 18 contributions of historians from Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Great Britain made within the "Enemies or Allies during WWII" segment of the November 2004 conference in Wroclaw, Poland. The History Institute of Wroclaw University and the Institute of National Remembrance jointly sponsored the conference in collaboration with the Institute For Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Thus, Slawomir M. Nowinowski presented an introductory overview of Polish-Czechoslovak relations at the outset of WW II, Jaroslav Boucek gave a picture of Poland in the work of the Czech historian Jan Slavik (1885-1978) and Anna Cichocka reviewed the portrayal of Czechoslovakia on the pages of the Polish journal Polityka in 193 8-193 9. Furthermore, Piotr Kolakowski focused his attention on the activities of Polish military intelligence against Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1930s, Robert Kowalski described Polish-Slovak relations against a background of German diplomatic activities in 1939, Pavel Micianik inspected the activities of the Slovak army during the campaign against Poland and Jan Nemecek examined the relations between the Polish and Czechoslovak governments in exile. In addition, Jacek Piotrowski observed exiled Polish president Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz and the plans for a Polish-Czechoslovak federation , Dariusz Miszewski talked about general Kazimierz Sosnkowski's views on the strategic importance of Czechoslovakia for Poland' s security in 1938-1943, Pawel Jaworski pondered on the Polish-Czechoslovak contacts in Sweden during WWII and Dusan Seges explored Karol Sidor's contacts with Kazimierz Papee in the Vatican through the memorandum La question slovaque from June of 1943. Subsequently, Roman Baron clarified the mutual perceptions of the Czechs and Poles from the perspective of Polish and Czechoslovak political emigres, Martin D. Brown shed light on the Foreign Office ' s influence on shaping British-PolishCzechoslovak relations, Radoslaw Zurawski elucidated on the Foreign Office' s role in Polish-Czechoslovak relations (November 1940-August 1942) and Vit Smetana expounded on the issue of Czecho-slovak-Polish confederation and the big powers. Finally, Jaroslav Vaculik illustrated the activities of the Czechoslovak army group in Volhynia in 1939-1940, Mecislav Barak gave details about two concepts of resistance in Tes in Silesia (Zaolzie) in 193 8-1945 and Petr Koura talked about the picture of Poland in the Czech un- �98 SLOVAKIA derground press in 1939-1945. The majority of the participants reflected, from various perspectives, upon the issues of competing Slovak, Czech and Polish territorial claims in Tesin Silesia (Zaolzie), Spis and Orava, and on Slovak-Czech-Polish regional cooperation with the emphasis on the role of Slovakia and its presence or absence. The presentations made several interesting observations and I would like to focus on two of them. Slawomir Nowikowski observed that the Zaolzie region played the role of a barometer in Polish-Czechoslovak relations in 19181938. It was a striking revelation that the Poles seemed unaware of the extent of hostility generated in Czechoslovakia by Polish territorial aspirations in Zaolzie, Spis and Orava. Accordingly, the search for a consensus in the Czechoslovak-Polish territorial issues in 19181938 appeared like squaring the circle. The Czechoslovak-Polish territorial disputes became insignificant after 1945 in comparison with the Polish territorial loses incurred in its eastern regions. Mecislav Borak demonstrated divergent attitudes of the Communists towards the territorial ambitions of their governments. While the Polish Communists condemned and distanced themselves verbally from the prewar Polish governments' foreign policies, they never abandoned Polish territorial claims in Tesin. The Polish Communists adopted the view of their bourgeois predecessors, upholding in their activities the right of self-determination of all Poles. This attitude sharply contrasted with that of the Slovak and Czech Communists who supported the abandonment of Slovak territorial claims in the Northern Spis and Orava regions. This publication advances further Slovak-Czech-Polish exchanges of views on their shared past, particularly in less researched and published topics. A divergence of views should not hamper the continuing evaluation and re-evaluation of the shared Slovak-Czech-Polish past. The publication's plentiful collection of new and older archival resources will certainly help researchers and historians dealing with the Slovak, Czech and Polish histories. Therefore, the publication is recommended reading for professional and amateur historians. The IPN 's Monografie series is dedicated to the modem history of Poland (1939-1989). Its publication The Security Services of Poland and Czechoslovakia against the Ukrainians (1945-1989) presents eight works of Polish and Czech authors dealing with the �SLOVAKIA 99 Polish and Czechoslovak special services and their activities against the Ukrainian minority and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Resistance Anny (UPA). Grzegorz Motyka introduced the activities of the security services of Poland and Czechoslovakia against the Ukrainians, Jan Pisulinski spoke about Rzeszow's security office and its activities against the Ukrainians in 1944-1956, Tomasz Balbus described anti-communist actions of the Ukrainians in south-west Poland in 1945-1954 and Mariusz Zaj<l_czkowski glanced at Polish-Czechoslovak security cooperation in the case of Jan Szpontak. Marcin Majewski, meanwhile, spoke about the case of Teodor Oak and the security operation "Paj<l,ki," Igor Halagida discussed the cooperation of the Polish State Security (SB) and the Soviet KGB against the Ukrainian minority in the 1960s, Grzegorz Motyka and Mariusz Zaj<l_czkowski documented attempts at re-writing history in the Peoples' Republic of Poland, Ondrej Koutek commented on the activities of the Czechoslovak security services against the Ukrainians in 1945-1989 and Lubos Vesely expounded on the war with the banderovci in post-war Czechoslovakia. The contribution of Tomasz Balbus attracted my attention. The governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia resolved to keep all aspects of Ukrainian nationalist expression under control and to manipulate it for their own purposes. The Polish government successfully created and maintained the perception, widely shared by the Poles until today, that the OUN-UPA activities targeted primarily the Polish population. In reality the Ukrainian nationalists hoped to liberate the Ukraine from the Soviet Union and to create an independent country. The publication concludes the current stage of research conduced by the Office of Public Education of the IPN on the Polish-Ukrainian relations in 1939-1989. Historians of Central and East Europe will find plentiful archival resources in The Security Services of Poland and Czechoslovakia Against the Ukrainians (I 945-1989). However, many interesting questions remain on the activities of the Ukrainian resistance in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Taking into account the fact that their resistance activities made substantial contact with Slovakia, Slovak scholars should also be involved in such research. �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2010, Vol. 40 Description An account of the resource Vol. 40 (No. 74-75), 2010. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 95 SLOVAK-POLISH RELATIONS Joanna Glowinska, ed., Stosunki polsko-slowackie w I polowie XX wieku. Wroclaw: Instytut Pami~ci Narodowej Wroclaw, 2006. 118 pp., list of abbreviations, name index. Petr Blazek, Pawel Jaworski, and Lukasz Kaminski , eds., Mirdzy przymusowq przyjainiq a prawdziwq solidarnosciq. Czesi - Polacy Slowacy, 1938-39 - 1945 - 1989, Cz~sc I. Warszawa: Instytut Pami~ci Narodowej , 2007 . 152 pp., name index. Grzegorz Motyka, ed., Sluiby bezpieczenstwa Polski i Czechoslowacji wobec Ukrainc6w (1945-1989) . Z warsztat6w badawczych. Warszawa: Instytut Pami~ci Narodowej , 2005 . 381 pp., list of abbreviations, name index. MARCEL JESENSKY University of Ottawa lnstytut Pamirci Narodowej (the Institute of National Remembrance) in Warsaw was established by the Polish Parliament in 1998 to preserve the memory of the 1939-1989 period. It is also engages in public education, research and dissemination of its findings. The three publications under review cover various aspects of Slovak Czech - Polish bilateral and trilateral relations in the 20th century. Polish-Slovak Relations in the First Half of the 20th Century, edited by Joanna Glowinska presents materials from a 2006 PolishSlovak conference held in Opole, Poland. Despite the fact that Polish-Slovak relations in the first half of the 20th century remained in the shadow of Polish-Czech relations, publications like this could signal the beginnings of a "catch-up" process. The book offers the contributions of four Slovak and three Polish historians on a wide range of topics. For the Polish contributors, Dariusz Dllbrowski examined Eastern Slovakia as a subject of PolishHungarian activities before WW II, Mateusz Gniazdowski reviewed relations between Slovak autonomists and the so-called Sanacja government of Jozef Pilsudski , and Ewa Orlof discussed relations between the Polish and Slovak governments from 15 March to 1 Sep- 96 SLOVAKIA tember 1939. For the Slovak contributors, Ivan A. Petransky evaluated the history of the Slovak Republic in 1939 - 1945, Dusan Seges discussed relations between the Polish exile government and Slovak politicians during WW II, Martin Lacko scrutinized the activities of Slovak soldiers in Poland in 1939 and 1941 and Juraj Marusiak reconsidered the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 and its consequences and the role of the Poles in the Uprising. Lukasz Kaminski concluded the conference with a comparison of Polish and Slovak positions at the end of WW II. Two additional pieces were particularly interesting. One was a review of the Polish "awakening movement" among the highlanders of the Slovak-Polish borderland (Gorals) by Mateusz Gniazdowski. The Gorals fascinated Polish "awakeners" and they considered them to be Poles because of the closeness of their dialect to the Polish language (asserting as obvious the link between language and nationality). But the majority of the Gorals in Slovakia lacked any Polish national consciousness and claimed Slovak nationality. Some Polish "awakeners" maintained the naive view that the Polish-Slovak rapprochement would persuade the Slovaks to accept Polish ethno-linguistic argumentation with the consequent border readjustment in the Slovak-Polish borderland. Thus one of the interesting paradoxes of Polish-Slovak relations in the interwar period was the fact that the persons who supported and shaped the Polish policy of rapprochement with the Slovaks advocated, at the same time, irredentism in the common borderland. Secondly, Dusan Seges's penetrating analysis of multifaceted and evolving contacts between the Polish and Slovak political authorities during WW II made a strong argument for the need to consider Slovak-Polish relations as a distinct problem, not as one element of Polish-Czechoslovak relations during wartime. It is hardly surprising that, on some historical questions, the Slovak and Polish perspectives could not be reconciled. This was demonstrated in Kaminski's concluding remarks that "Slovakia saw the war end with the losses of territories that had never been an integral part of the country, neither in a historical nor in a cultural sense." The issue of the Polish-Slovak borderland and its population remains particularly challenging, but the era of a single "correct" historical perspective has ended. The publication Between the Forced Sympathy and the Real Soli- SLOVAKIA 97 darity. Czechs - Poles - Slovaks, 1938-39 - 1945 - 1989, Part I, contains 18 contributions of historians from Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Great Britain made within the "Enemies or Allies during WWII" segment of the November 2004 conference in Wroclaw, Poland. The History Institute of Wroclaw University and the Institute of National Remembrance jointly sponsored the conference in collaboration with the Institute For Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Thus, Slawomir M. Nowinowski presented an introductory overview of Polish-Czechoslovak relations at the outset of WW II, Jaroslav Boucek gave a picture of Poland in the work of the Czech historian Jan Slavik (1885-1978) and Anna Cichocka reviewed the portrayal of Czechoslovakia on the pages of the Polish journal Polityka in 193 8-193 9. Furthermore, Piotr Kolakowski focused his attention on the activities of Polish military intelligence against Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1930s, Robert Kowalski described Polish-Slovak relations against a background of German diplomatic activities in 1939, Pavel Micianik inspected the activities of the Slovak army during the campaign against Poland and Jan Nemecek examined the relations between the Polish and Czechoslovak governments in exile. In addition, Jacek Piotrowski observed exiled Polish president Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz and the plans for a Polish-Czechoslovak federation , Dariusz Miszewski talked about general Kazimierz Sosnkowski's views on the strategic importance of Czechoslovakia for Poland' s security in 1938-1943, Pawel Jaworski pondered on the Polish-Czechoslovak contacts in Sweden during WWII and Dusan Seges explored Karol Sidor's contacts with Kazimierz Papee in the Vatican through the memorandum La question slovaque from June of 1943. Subsequently, Roman Baron clarified the mutual perceptions of the Czechs and Poles from the perspective of Polish and Czechoslovak political emigres, Martin D. Brown shed light on the Foreign Office ' s influence on shaping British-PolishCzechoslovak relations, Radoslaw Zurawski elucidated on the Foreign Office' s role in Polish-Czechoslovak relations (November 1940-August 1942) and Vit Smetana expounded on the issue of Czecho-slovak-Polish confederation and the big powers. Finally, Jaroslav Vaculik illustrated the activities of the Czechoslovak army group in Volhynia in 1939-1940, Mecislav Barak gave details about two concepts of resistance in Tes in Silesia (Zaolzie) in 193 8-1945 and Petr Koura talked about the picture of Poland in the Czech un- 98 SLOVAKIA derground press in 1939-1945. The majority of the participants reflected, from various perspectives, upon the issues of competing Slovak, Czech and Polish territorial claims in Tesin Silesia (Zaolzie), Spis and Orava, and on Slovak-Czech-Polish regional cooperation with the emphasis on the role of Slovakia and its presence or absence. The presentations made several interesting observations and I would like to focus on two of them. Slawomir Nowikowski observed that the Zaolzie region played the role of a barometer in Polish-Czechoslovak relations in 19181938. It was a striking revelation that the Poles seemed unaware of the extent of hostility generated in Czechoslovakia by Polish territorial aspirations in Zaolzie, Spis and Orava. Accordingly, the search for a consensus in the Czechoslovak-Polish territorial issues in 19181938 appeared like squaring the circle. The Czechoslovak-Polish territorial disputes became insignificant after 1945 in comparison with the Polish territorial loses incurred in its eastern regions. Mecislav Borak demonstrated divergent attitudes of the Communists towards the territorial ambitions of their governments. While the Polish Communists condemned and distanced themselves verbally from the prewar Polish governments' foreign policies, they never abandoned Polish territorial claims in Tesin. The Polish Communists adopted the view of their bourgeois predecessors, upholding in their activities the right of self-determination of all Poles. This attitude sharply contrasted with that of the Slovak and Czech Communists who supported the abandonment of Slovak territorial claims in the Northern Spis and Orava regions. This publication advances further Slovak-Czech-Polish exchanges of views on their shared past, particularly in less researched and published topics. A divergence of views should not hamper the continuing evaluation and re-evaluation of the shared Slovak-Czech-Polish past. The publication's plentiful collection of new and older archival resources will certainly help researchers and historians dealing with the Slovak, Czech and Polish histories. Therefore, the publication is recommended reading for professional and amateur historians. The IPN 's Monografie series is dedicated to the modem history of Poland (1939-1989). Its publication The Security Services of Poland and Czechoslovakia against the Ukrainians (1945-1989) presents eight works of Polish and Czech authors dealing with the SLOVAKIA 99 Polish and Czechoslovak special services and their activities against the Ukrainian minority and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Resistance Anny (UPA). Grzegorz Motyka introduced the activities of the security services of Poland and Czechoslovakia against the Ukrainians, Jan Pisulinski spoke about Rzeszow's security office and its activities against the Ukrainians in 1944-1956, Tomasz Balbus described anti-communist actions of the Ukrainians in south-west Poland in 1945-1954 and Mariusz Zaj<l_czkowski glanced at Polish-Czechoslovak security cooperation in the case of Jan Szpontak. Marcin Majewski, meanwhile, spoke about the case of Teodor Oak and the security operation "Paj<l,ki," Igor Halagida discussed the cooperation of the Polish State Security (SB) and the Soviet KGB against the Ukrainian minority in the 1960s, Grzegorz Motyka and Mariusz Zaj<l_czkowski documented attempts at re-writing history in the Peoples' Republic of Poland, Ondrej Koutek commented on the activities of the Czechoslovak security services against the Ukrainians in 1945-1989 and Lubos Vesely expounded on the war with the banderovci in post-war Czechoslovakia. The contribution of Tomasz Balbus attracted my attention. The governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia resolved to keep all aspects of Ukrainian nationalist expression under control and to manipulate it for their own purposes. The Polish government successfully created and maintained the perception, widely shared by the Poles until today, that the OUN-UPA activities targeted primarily the Polish population. In reality the Ukrainian nationalists hoped to liberate the Ukraine from the Soviet Union and to create an independent country. The publication concludes the current stage of research conduced by the Office of Public Education of the IPN on the Polish-Ukrainian relations in 1939-1989. Historians of Central and East Europe will find plentiful archival resources in The Security Services of Poland and Czechoslovakia Against the Ukrainians (I 945-1989). However, many interesting questions remain on the activities of the Ukrainian resistance in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Taking into account the fact that their resistance activities made substantial contact with Slovakia, Slovak scholars should also be involved in such research.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Review Essay: Slovak-Polish Relations Description An account of the resource Marcel Jesenský Slovakia, Vol. 40 (No. 74-75), 2010 pp. 95-99 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jesenský, Marcel Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/dc4c8882b864b26602b53f8832e69f24.pdf 395f55d674e2e1cd0c8467de9b7ffe0f PDF Text Text REVIEWS ��SLOVAKIA 103 Nauka reci slovenskej [Nauka reci slovenskej vistavena od Ludevita Stura], Ludevit Stur, Vol. l : Faksimile povodneho vydania na vydanie pripravili Eubomir Durovic and Slavomir Ondrejovic. Bratislava: VEDA, 2006. 228 pages, facsimile of the 1846 grammar text. Nauka reci slovenskej : Komentare, Bibliograjia, Vol. 2, Eugen Jona, Eubomir Durovic, Slavomir Ondrejovic. Bratislava: VEDA, 2006 . 323 pp., commentary, bibliography, and various indices. GERALD J. SABO , S.J. John Carroll University This two-volume publication is a singular event. The first volume is a facsimile edition of the 1846 grammar by Eudovit Stur (1815-56), whose availability inside Slovakia is quite limited, and outside Slovakia is virtually non-existent. The second volume enhances the grammar with background information, providing detailed analysis of and commentary by eminent Slovak linguists, among them Eubomir Durovic. Both volumes appear on the 160th anniversary of the grammar' s original publication, but also the 150th anniversary of Stur's accidental death. Lutheran pastors and Catholic priests worked on the codification of Slovak from the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth. In the l 720s the Slovak Lutheran pastors and scholars Matej Bel and Daniel Krrnan published the Bible in the primarily Czech linguistic form espoused by Slovak Lutherans. In his 1746 grammar the Lutheran pastor Pavel Dolezal presented Slovak and Czech as two dialects of one language- Czechoslovak. In the 1750s the Catholic Camaldolese monks translated the Bible into Slovak for their own useespecially in readings for the liturgical year, a significant accomplishment that would be discovered only in the mid-twentieth century. In the late 1780s the Catholic priest Anton Bemolak initiated the extensive Catholic efforts for codifying Slovak and then promoted his codified norm. For his codification Bemolak drew upon the Slovak that had been nurtured through the activities and �104 SLOVAKIA publications of the Jesuit university in Trnava since 1635 , and that in the twentieth century Slovak linguists would call "Cultural WestSlovak." Among Bernolak's various language-related writings, he realized a grammar and even a five-language dictionary in six large volumes, completed and published in the 1820s by the priest Jur[ aj] Palkovic. Through their writings, two priests helped spread Bernolak's codified Slovak- Juraj Fandly in his prose works, and Jan Holly in his extensive epic and lyric poetry. Thanks to Holly, Fandly, and others, Bernolak-Slovak (bernolakovcina) became the acceptable and promoted means of expression among Slovak Catholics through the 1840s. During this period, Lutherans continued to publish various literary and other works in biblictina ("Biblical language," in effect, the version of Czech used in the Bohemian Brethren 's Kralice Bible of the late sixteenth century with varying mixtures of Slovak language elements through the nineteenth century). The extent of such writing is clear from the four-volume biographic compilation of Slovak Lutheran poets (1806-12) by the pastor Bohuslav Tablic. Although Slovak Lutherans were a decided minority in the Slovak region of the Kingdom of Hungary, despite their quite modest numbers they remained a well-educated group that strove to retain this distinction in contrast to the much more numerous but less-educated fellow Christian-Catholics. Indeed, the Lutherans especially employed and espoused biblictina in their cultural and liturgical activities to emphasize their relationship with Czech Protestants, thereby increasing their group's numerical strength and enhancing their cultural status. Given this, the Lutherans' reasoning could well have been why should they adopt a linguistic norm created and promoted by the majority Catholic population that was not as educated or cultivated as they? In 1803 Slovak Lutherans established a Chair of Czechoslovak Language and Literature at their lycee in Bratislava. Jiri [Juraj] Palkovic was the first and only holder of this Chair ( 1803-50), and helped to foster Slovak Lutheran publications and cultural exchange. At the Lutheran lycee in Bratislava students and staff became the nucleus for the Lutheran promotion of Slavic/Slovak consciousness in response to the increasing Magyarization in Slovakia. I:udovit Stur studied at the lycee between 1829 and 1834. After his student years from 1835-3 7, Stur was vice-president of the Czecho-Slavic Society, whose 1836 almanach Plody (Fruits) of various writings �SLOVAKIA 105 also represented a manifesto of Slovak national consciousness and identity. On April I 0, 1836 Stur wrote to the Protestant Czech/Moravian cultural figure and historian Frantisek Palacky emphasizing the need for unity among Slovaks and Czechs. As Stt'.ir pointed out, the Czech language used by Lutherans in the Slovak area was not accessible to Catholic Slovaks, and thus there was a need for some combination of the Czech and Slovak language to provide for Slovak and Czech unity and understanding. The Czechs were unwilling to accept Stur's proposal. Although on February I, 1837 Stur became an unremunerated deputy to Jiff Palkovic, on April 5th the Czecho-Slavic society halted its activites because of a government ban on student societies. Stur served as a deputy to Palkovic during 1837-38 and 1840-43 , with his university study at Halle between those periods. After a lengthy investigation, on December 31, 1843 the Bratislava convention of the Lutheran Church relieved Stur of his position as Palkovic's deputy, after which he devoted himself to scholarly, journalistic, and political activity. By 1843 Stur had come to view Slovak as a distinct Slavic language, especially vis-a-vis Czech. According to the Lutheran poet Samo Hrobon, on February 14, 1843 a meeting of various Lutheran lycee students/alumni and their professor L. Stur marked the "day of resurrection of Slovak" (J6na, vol. 2: 31 ). In mid-July of 1843 Stur met with the Lutheran pastors Jozef Miloslav Hurban and Michal Miloslav Hodza at Hurban's parish in Hlboke for the purpose of creating a di stinct Slovak norm. A day after that discussion the three met with the Catholic priest-poet Jan Holly at the latter's parish in Dobra Yoda and received Holly's blessing for their endeavor. At the founding gathering in Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas for the journal Tatrin during August 26-28, 1844, Stur's Slovak norm was publicly proclaimed (Durovic, vol. 2: 59). In codifying Slovak as a distinct language, Stur prepared two texts: one explaining the need for writing in Slovak and a grammar of Slovak based on the Central Slovak dialect of Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas (Durovic, vol. 2: 62). Both these texts would be published only in 1846. In vo lume 2 of this publication, three linguists focus on Stur and his grammar. Eugen J6na's study provides a very detailed commentary on Stur, hi s evolving writing activity related to Slovak, especially the two texts of 1846, as well as the influences on Stur's cultural, political, and linguistic thinking (pp. 11-47). Cubomir Durovic has �106 SLOVAKIA the most extensive study (51-257). In his introduction, Durovic discusses Stur's grammar and Slovak in relation to the two editions ( 1809 and 1819) of the Czech/Bohemian grammar by Josef Dobrovsky and various Slovak Lutheran cultural publications (58-63) . This is followed by an extensive and meticulous analysis of Stur's grammar (64-194) with reference to various nineteenth - and twentiethcentury linguistic writings listed at the end (195-196). Completing f:>urovic's study are three indices in relation to his commentary on Stur's grammar proper: an index of words, morphemes, and phonemes (195-227); a "phonematicifonematicky" index of interpreted morphemes and words (229-3 I); and a topic/subject index (233-57). Slavo Ondrejovic concludes this volume with two bibliographies: one of Stur's personal and linguistic works published from 1841 through 2003 (259-68), and a select one on writings about Stur that concern language and linguistic questions published from 1817 through 2006 (269-323). In their introduction to the second volume, Durovic and Ondrejovic have noted the need for such a publication and the lengthy process involved in realizing this work. Specialists in Slovak linguistics, especially in the historical development of contemporary Slovak, will appreciate their efforts for many years to come. Likewise, Slovakia-based, but especially international specialists in Slovak culture and history, will also enhance their understanding of the codifycation of Slovak by Stur and his Lutheran colleagues. Andras Gero, The Jewish Criterion in Hungary, translated from the Magyar by Alan Campbell. Boulder, Colorado, Social Science Monographs: Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 2007. 153 pp., notes, biographical notes, photographs, index. YESHA YAHU A. JELINEK Beer-Sheva, Israel This is both a confusing and challenging book. The challenge comes in trying to clarify the definition of a Jew. The confusion comes in trying to define a Jew from Hungary. Of the book's five chapters, the first two were the most confusing. Gero first sets out to discuss Hungarian Jewry. However, he does not differentiate (as do all Slavic languages) between "Hunga- �SLOVAKIA 107 rian" and "Magyar." "Hungary" until 1918 was a geographico-political term for the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen. "Magyar" referred to the largest ethnic (and ruling) group in the Kingdom of Hungary. For contemporary Magyars, as for Gero, such a differentiation does not exist. He equated "Hungary" with "Magyarorszag" (the land of the Magyars). Therefore, when Gero analyzes the "Hungarian Jew" (Magyar Zsid6 ), we do not really understand who he has in mind. Jews appeared on the territory between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans in the Roman period, much earlier than the Slavs or Magyars. They inhabited the Kingdom of Hungary, initially ruled by the Arpad dynasty and later the Habsburgs . They were not considered to be Magyars. Only in the 19 th century did the Magyars try to "Magyarize" the Jews, as well as the other non-Magyar nationalities. Gero knows these facts, but avoids them. For Gero, there were only "Hungarian Jews" in the entire Kingdom of Hungary. He seems to be entirely unaware of ethnic divisions within Jewry- the existence of Slovak, Rusin , Croat, Transylvanian, etc. Jews. While Gero devotes much space to a rather intelligent discussion of the living conditions, historical environment, and ethnic survival of Magyar Jews, he ignores the fact that Jews in Hungary lived among different nations. He is aware of the oppresssive Magyar nationalism, and criticizes it severely in his last three chapters, but remains unaware of the varieties of Judaism within the Kingdom. The challenging part of this book is the thoughtful discussion of Jewish existence in Hungary and the relations of Jews with the Gentile majority. This discussion forces the reader to re-evaluate quite a few accepted notions about Jewish life in Hungary. Unfortunately, Gero is not familiar with the history of the various Jewish groups in the Kingdom of Hungary. This becomes clear when one compares Jewish life on the Pannonian Plain (today's Hungary) with that of Upper Hungary (Slovakia) or with Sub-Carpathian Rus. Furthermore, he erroneously refers to Hungarian Jews "leaving the ghetto" in the 19 th century. Only Bratislava and a few cities in the Burgenland had "ghettos." That is why Jews who left Moravia for Hungary, or Galicia for Hungary in the 19 th century, suddenly found much greater freedom than they had ever fe lt before. Gero 's lack of knowledge about the Slovak and Rusin portions of the Kingdom of Hungary becomes clear when he discusses Jewish �108 SLOVAKIA conversions to Christianity and the rise of Zionism. For instance, while conversion to Christianity on the Pannonian Plain was not uncommon, it was rare in Upper Hungary or in Sub-Carpathian Rus. When discussing Zionism, Gero neglected its manifestations on Slovak territory and did not perceive that it was weak in the Magyar counties because it was persecuted by the Hungarian government. On the other hand, in Upper Hungary, where Zionizm was weak, Chasidism was strong. Chasidic rabbis were bitter enemies of Zionism. Therefore, one must tread carefully when discussing the strength or weakness of Zionism in Hungary. The most challenging part of Gero's book deals with the rise of anti-Semitism at the end of the 19 th century. Here he deals with the riddle of who is a Jew and when is he considered as such, and under what conditions . Most of Gero's arguments deal only with the Magyar portion of Hungary, which is a pity, because, if he had dug deeper, he could have made the case that it was largely the Magyars who taught the other ethnic groups to hate the Jews. Tiso, Jozef Prejavy a clanky. Vol. I (1913-1938). Ed. Miroslav Fabricius and Ladislav Susko. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press and Historicky ustav SA V, 2002 . 567 pp. Tiso, Jozef Prejavy a clanky. Vol. 2: (193 8-1944). Ed. Miroslav Fabricius and Katarina Hradska. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press and Historicky ustav SAV, 2007 . 696 pp. DANIEL E. MILLER University of West Florida, Pensacola The editors of this set of two volumes assembled the speeches and articles of Jozef Tiso (1887-1947) to provide researchers with a valuable source for the history of Slovak politics covering the periods from shortly before the Great War until the Munich Agreement and then from October 1938 until just before 29 August 1944, the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising. Each volume has a very brief introduction and a table of contents that lists the numbered documents in chronological order (this review cites the volume and document numbers). The first volume contains 267 documents and five addenda; the second, 389 documents and 10 addenda. Together, �SLOVAKIA 109 they contain 671 documents on 1,226 pages with no introductions or summaries for each document to color the readers ' opinions. The editors cited multiple sources for each selection, including Slovak archives and newspapers throughout Slovakia. They included explanatory notes, some of which are rather detailed, about individuals, groups, events, terms, and foreign phrases (as a theologian, Tiso had a propensity to use Latin phrases). Some footnotes point out discrepancies in the speeches as they appeared in the various periodicals. In their efforts to be thorough, the editors included journalists' paraphrased summaries of Tiso's speeches when actual texts were unavailable. Furthermore, they did not overlook minor comments, the shortest of which is a mere two lines (l/ 177). Significant gaps raise questions about the completeness of the collection. At the beginning of his career as a priest, Tiso 's publications were understandably sparse, but several selections toward the end of the Great War and immediately afterward are missing. At least a dozen of Tiso's articles appeared in 1917 and 1918 in Papok Kozlonye [Priests' Bulletin] and Duchovny pastier [Spiritual Shepherd], all of which James Mace Ward cites in his dissertation, "No Saint: Jozef Tiso, 1887-1947" (Stanford University, 2008, pp. 63-65), with proper notations about pseudonyms and, in some cases, authorship. By his own admission, after the war Tiso edited and wrote articles for Nyitra/Nitra. In contrast, the first volume of Tiso ' s speeches and articles for the same period contain only a few articles. Oddly enough, there are only five entries in 1929 and 1930 and seven in 1931 , all speeches, aside from one, and an average of 23 entries per year for the previous five years and 15 for the following five years. Additional citations are in Ward's work, including police reports. Police agents attended every open party meeting for all political parties during the First Republic, and they reported the comments of speakers, the reactions of the crowds, and any incidents . The material from these reports is no less valid than the redacted summaries of Tiso ' s speeches that appeared in the press, and they would have filled the voids in Tiso ' s public addresses in these two volumes . While Tiso indeed might have been preoccupied in 1929-1931 , undoubtedly more publications and addresses exist, especially in light of the 1917-1 8 omissions. At times, Tiso ' s silence was intentional. In his 65 months as president of the Slovak Republic, Tiso produced an average of sli- �110 SLOVAKIA ghtly more than five speeches and articles each month, but the frequency declined over time. Most likely, Tiso withdrew from public view with the mounting legitimacy crisis in the Slovak Republic resulting from Germany's losses on the Eastern Front, as well as the prospect of the Allies recreating Czechoslovakia at the war's end and criminalizing Slovakia 's clerical-fascist regime. As a result, in the first eight months of 1944, there are only 23 entries, That is less than three speeches and articles for each month . The speeches and articles in these two volumes portray Tiso as priest, ideologist, party politician, parliamentarian, cabinet minister, and president. The value of this collection is greater than the sum of its parts. Certainly, researchers are relieved that they have the bulk of Tiso 's works at their fingertips and need not spend countless hours scouring sources and fearing that they overlooked something. Furthermore, the assemblage of Tiso 's works in one venue facilitates fresh perspectives on his career. A change in Tiso 's speaking style is apparent in the two volumes. The paucity of his speeches before he became a cabinet minister in 1927 is striking, and it is unfortunate that more texts and transcripts of speeches do not exist from this time. Nevertheless, it is impossible that Tiso could have built his popularity solely on the basis of articles, and the police reports could have made the evidence from this period more balanced . Tiso's speeches in the decade from 1927 until 1938 were disciplined- they had a single topic and a logical argument. This is especially true of his carefully crafted speeches in the National Assembly and before selected audiences. As president, Tiso addressed a wide variety of audiences with speeches that lacked focus and often contained topics not well suited for his listeners. As a result, he analyzed the development of the Slovak Republic with respect to the fate of other East-Central European states while addressing Catholics on a pilgrimage (Il/135). When celebrating the electrification of a district, he spoke about the wonders of electricity, encouraged factory workers and farmers to cooperate in building the state, and admonished listeners about observing the laws regarding economic matters (II/221 ). At a religious gathering in 1942, he criticized efforts to count all Greek-Catholic Slovaks as Rusyns and shortly afterward justified the confiscation of Jewish property with the slogan "Slovakia for Slovaks" (II/282). Aside from being an undisciplined extemporaneous speaker, one possible explanation for the �SLOVAKIA 111 change in style was Tiso ' s need to account for the policies of the state in the simplest terms for the broadest range of listeners. Between 1918 and 1938, Tiso's public comments and writings focused in part or exclusively on the need for Slovak autonomy as fulfilling the promise of the Pittsburgh Agreement. The tenor of his mesages heightened over the years, and in February 193 7 he referred to Czechoslovakia as an "aberration of democracy" (1/243), although he uttered plenty of vituperative condemnations of the First Republic both before and afterward. Despite efforts to cooperate with supporters of Slovak autonomy in the camp of Lutheran Slovaks within the Slovak National Party and even Hungarian politicians in the 1930s, Tiso tirelessly strove to bind Slovak identity with the Catholic faith, to link the leadership of the nation to the Catholic clergy, and to advance his Hlinka' s Slovak People's Party as the only major political party to recognize and defend the Slovak nation as unique. After the Munich Agreement, Tiso became minister for Slovak affairs and then on October 6, 1938 premier of an autonomous Slovakia. During this time, Tiso concentrated on policy and restructuring the political system, which essentially made Slovakia a oneparty state. After Slovak independence on 14 March 1939, Tiso served as prime minister and then, beginning in October 1939, he became the republic ' s president. Tiso now sought to legitimize the new republic, justifying its independence and thanking Adolf Hitler for extending his protection to the Slovaks. Tiso linked Slovakia to Germany's successes and Germany's leadership in the construction of a new Europe. Beginning in 1943, roughly coinciding with the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, Tiso's references to Hitler and Germany became sparse, and Tiso did not mention either in his address in 1944 on the fifth anniversary of the Slovak state (ll/374). Tiso obviously wanted to distance himself from Hitler, but fewer references to his patron also suggest the limits of Tiso's acceptance of his own earlier rhetoric. Throughout the war, Tiso's description of Slovakia ' s mission on the Eastern Front as a struggle against Bolshevism, with its Jewish and anti-Christian influences, remained constant. In the final document dated 6 August 1944, Tiso ended with a prophetic statement: "we cannot deny that the Bolsheviks are at the border and that they promise the scaffold!" (II/389) . The two volumes reveal much about the development of Tiso's anti-Semitism. There are few references to Jews in Tiso ' s statements �112 SLOVAKIA between the world wars, and at one point in 1934, he even invited Jews, Germans, Hungarians, and Czechs in Slovakia to join with Slovaks in demanding autonomy (l/202). Nevertheless, there are occasional anti-Jewish comments, such as Ti so's call for land from the church estates parceled under the land reform to go to Catholic farmers , not Jews, nonbelievers, and speculators (l/78). During the Second Czecho-Slovak Republic, Tiso identified Jews as a foreign element whose presence in Slovak society must be proportionate to their numbers. Nevertheless, he warned that Jews should not become the objects of "hatred and sadistic tendencies" (I/32). His rhetoric against Jews heightened when Slovakia became independent, and in August 1942 he justified the removal of Jews from Slovak society as the elimination of an enemy, an act of self-defense in keeping with Christian morals. Loving oneself is a precept from God, according to Tiso, "and I think there is no need to convince anyone that the Jewish element endangers the life of a Slovak" (11/287). There is little evidence in these two volumes to suggest that Tiso 's antiSemitism was anything but genuine, but the addition of Tiso's intensely anti-Semitic Ny itra/Nitra articles make his hatred of Jews indisputable. The editors are preparing a third vo lume to cover the conversations of Hitler and Tiso as well as Tiso 's statements from the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising on 29 August 1944 through his 1946-1947 trial. They indicated their intent to include in the third volume addenda for the first two volumes and expressed their wish that historians inform them of additional documents. The inclusion of missing items- those signed with a pseudonym or abbreviated name and those whose authorship is disputable- is absoutely essential , not only for the convenience of researchers, but also for the sake of objectivity. Perhaps they can be in a section of their own. The editors had planned to include three indexes in the second volume, and one can assume that these essential tools for researchers will appear in the planned third volume. Specialists on Slovak affairs in the Habsburg Monarchy, the First Czechoslovak Republic, and the first Slovak Republic are greatly indebted to Fabricius, Susko, Hradska, and the others who contributed to the production of these two volumes . They anxiously await the appearance of the third volume in this indispensable series. �SLOVAKIA 113 Max Domarus, Th e Complete Hitler: A Digital Desktop Reference to His Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945. Wauconda, Ill. : Bolchazy-Carducci, 2007. (CD-ROM edition). VASILLIS VOURKOUTIOTIS University of Ottawa While documentary collections concerning the Third Reich are not, generally speaking, difficult to come by, few students are exposed to the actual words of Adolf Hitler except as summarized by other compilers in wider works . The exception to this has been Max Domtarus' four-volume collection of Hitler's speeches. The compilation of this resource was linked to the history it attempted to capture. In 1932, Max Domarus was only twenty-two years old. Yet, he realized that in Adolf Hitler, Germany and the world were faced with a new phenomenon whose significance should not be underestimated. He began, in that year, to collect and compile as many of Hitler's speeches as he could find , and continued the project through the war years until Hitler' s death in 1945 . After the war, Domarus supplemented his collection as much as possible, and the resulting work, which included his annotations and commentary, was a four-volume set published in German. For each year in question, the reader is offered a detailed summary of events, and photographs from the Domarus archive. Full endnotes for each section yield bibliographical citations, as well as additional explanatory commentary. Each volume also contains a list of abbreviations which users will find helpful. Although some of Domarus' commentaries have been superceded by historical research, his perceptions remain as interesting in several instances as the speeches they comment upon. The four-volume set, even though it only covers Hitler's speeches from 1932 onward, remains the best single collection of the dictator's words. With this CD, Domarus's publishers have brought an important printed historical resource into the modem information age. An English-language translation accompanies the original German text, bringing to the user eight volumes of material in a single disk. Although presented in a chronological format, the speeches are in a searchable PDF format, allowing the student or researcher the ability to scan years of �114 SLOVAKIA material for keywords . For those with the language abilities and desire, the English version can be easily compared for accuracy with the German original. Given how long Hitler could speak for at a single event, it is not surprising that Domarus felt the need to offer exerpts rather than a stenographic record. This may strike some as a potential drawback, and might lead some researches to seek the full text of a particular speech of interest. The vast majority of users, however, will not find this a significant issue; Domarus' work has remained the standard reference for university libraries since its first publication in 1962 with good reason. Two versions of the CD ROM exist, the Standard and ePremium. In addition to the advantages of the Standard, the ePremium addition allows the user to print, copy and paste text directly from the PDF files into one's own documents, and add commentary to the texts. These enhancements will be of interest to those who work closely enough with the material in their own research. On the whole, in making both the English and German versions of Domarus' compilations available in such a format, the publishers have not only made an important work more accessible, but also provided a service to both students and academics alike. James Ramon Felak After Hitler, Before Stalin: Catholics, Communists, and Democrats in Slovakia, 1945-1948. Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. xv-261 pp. , notes, bibliography, index. M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Having perceived a negl ected period of history, James R. Felak set out to tell the story of the role of Catholicism in Slovakia in the period 1945-48, especially its relationship with the Communist and Democratic Parties. The essence of the book is that, even though both the Communists and the Lutheran leaders of the Democratic Party were either hostile to or suspicious of the Roman Catholic Church, both courted Roman Catholic voters in order to attain political power in post-war Slovakia. Having combed the relevant Slovak archives, and read the Communist, Lutheran and Roman Catholic press, along with most secondary sources on the subject, Felak carefully related what actually �SLOVAKIA 115 transpired in Slovakia in the three years after the Second World War. He pointed out that the post-war National Front government that came into existence on April 3, 1945, reduced the pre-war political parties of Czechoslovakia from 16 to 5, and in Slovakia permitted only the Communists and Democrats. The two strongest pre-war political parties, Hlinka Slovak People's Party and the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party were banned as "collaborationist". That meant that the minority Lutherans could (and did) join the newly-formed Democratic Party, but the majority Catholics were disenfranchised. As a result, both the Communists and Democrats courted Catholic voters in anticipation of the May, 1946 elections, while simultaneously attacking the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, the self-appointed Slovak National Council, with its executive Board of Commissioners, nationalized all religious schools, seized most Catholic institutions, severely limited the size of the Catholic press and imprisoned two Slovak bishops. On the other hand, the Communists tried to persuade Catholic voters to vote for their party, because the Democrats were largely Lutherans . Indeed, the Communists even supported the creation of a Christian Republican Party, but the Catholics and Communists could not agree on its name, and this project fell through. The Lutherans, on the other hand, also wooed the Catholics by promising to split future political representation and patronage with them on the basis of a 7:3 ratio in favor of the Catholics. The Catholics found this promise more enticing than Communist overtures and, as a result, the Catholic and Lutheran politicians reached the so-called April Agreement on March 31, 1946. Since they were now united, the Catholics and Lutherans both supported the Democratic Party and won the 1946 elections with a convincing majority of 62%. Since they had lost the elections, the Communist Party of Slovakia went on the offensive. With the collusion of the government in Prague, where the Communists had more influence, and where certain Czech parties resented Slovak home-rule, Slovak Communists, led by Gustav Husak, negotiated the "Third Prague Agreement" of June 27, 1946, by which the Slovak National Council and the Board of Commissioners subordinated themselves to the Prague government. Then the Slovak Communists decided to try for treason the Reverend Jozef Tiso, former president of the first Slovak Republic ( 1939-1945). They saw to it that the National Court was domina- �116 SLOVAKIA ted by Communists who, as expected, found Tiso guilty and sentenced him to death on April 15, 1947. The hapless Democrats on the executive of the Board of Commissioners failed to recommend clemency and left the final verdict to the government in Prague, which upheld the verdict, as did president Benes, and Tiso was hanged on April 17. After this fiasco, Slovak Catholics lost faith in the Democratic Party, just as the Communists began their offensive against it. In the summer and fall of 194 7 the Communists fabricated an anti-state conspiracy against certain Catholic Democrats. On this basis Gustav Husak on October 31 staged a mini-coup in Slovakia by (with Prague support) illegally dissolving and then reappointing the Board of Commissioners in favor of the Communists. This was a prelude to similar tactics by the Communists in Prague in February of 1948, when three non-Communist parties resigned from the government in the hope of toppling it. Instead, the Communists, led by Klement Gottwald offered to form a new government and president Edvard Benes approved it. Thus, by February of 1948 the Communists had completed their takeover of both the Slovak and Czechoslovak governments and instituted totalitarian rule for the next 40 years, during which they tried (but failed) to completely destroy the Roman Catholic church in Czechoslovakia. Felak's book is well-written and comprehensive. Perhaps his greatest contribution is that he laid to rest the oft-repeated Slovak complaint that president Benes arranged for Tiso's death. Instead, as Felak convincingly shows, it was the incompetence of the Lutheradominated executive of the Board of Commissioners which was most responsible because of its inability to reach a consensus on the issue of clemency. They essentially "passed the buck" to Prague, where Tiso had few friends and that sealed his doom. In spite of Felak's meticulous scholarship, the book contained a few glitches and one omission. The slang expression "First off "appeared a few times (p.6), Stanislav Kirschbaum's first name was shortened to Stanley in footnote 5 on page 217, the surname Viktorin was misspelled Victory (p.63), and Banovce nad Bebravou was identified as Tiso's home town (p.100), when that honor goes to Vel'ka Bytca. Perhaps the greatest omission is the revelation that Ferdinand Durcansky, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the first Slovak Republic, who fled to the west after the war and tried to �SLOVAKIA 117 organize an anti-state underground movement in post-war Slovakia, was actually controlled by Kim Philby, the notorious British spy who was, in fact, working for the KGB . Mark Aarons and John Loftus, on the basis of research in the files of the CIA in Washington, revealed this interesting detail in their Ratlines: How the Vatican Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets (London, 1991 ), pp. 21 19 and footnotes 46-50, page 334. Thus, the anti-state conspiracy of 1947 was carefully staged from abroad by the KGB as an excuse for the communist takeover of Slovakia. Edward Snajdr, Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2008 . xiii242 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, list of interviews, index. JURAJ HOCMAN University of Ottawa Edward Snajdr, an American cultural anthropologist at New York University, examined Slovakia's emerging civic environmental protection movement in the communist era and its rapid disappearance during the country 's post-communist transformation (19851995). The author did his fieldwork in situ and that is why it is particularly interesting to read about his experience. In the first two chapters, Snajdr focuses on urban and extraurban contexts of social life in communist Slovakia while providing general, yet adequate, historical background. The author traces the origins of environmental movements among young Slovaks and Czechs that had begun with associations such as SZOPK (Slovensky zvaz ochrancov prfrody a kraj iny - the Slovak Union of Protectors of Nature and the Countryside) in Slovakia and Brontosaurus in the Czech lands. He contrasts the difference between the effectiveness of state legislation designed to protect the environment in the massively and insensitively industrialized Slovakia, with spontaneous projects of young people whose aims were to improve the quality of the environment that surrounded them. Despite their local character, those efforts were not only efficient, but also inspirational. Snajdr then proceeds to the period from 1985 to 1989 during which environmentalist activities spread to the politics of discontent with the communist regime. He stresses the significance of the acce- �118 SLOVAKIA lerated drive for environmental protection in Slovakia during the period of perestroika and glasnost in the case of the samizdat Bratislava Nahlas (Bratislava Aloud). This publication, which voiced the concerns of ordinary citizens regarding disrespectful and harmful socio-economic policies of the communist regime, was prohibited by state authorities. Its editor, Jan Budaj, who became one of the most visible leaders of the "Velvet Revolution" in Slovakia in the fall of 1989, as well as the samizdat' s distributors, were harassed by the communist secret police (the StB). The fall of the communist regime might have become the new beginning of a friendlier approach to environmental protection in Slovakia. That is where the second part of the story begins. A new political reality in Eastern Europe, which was closely tied to nationalism, brought a new perspective on how to cope with the legacy of communism and its negative ecological effects. The members of the Slovak Green Party (Strana zelenych), which was formed in November of 1989, and was represented in the new Slovak parliament, took a firm stand against the completion of the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros dam on the Danube river, which formed the Slovak-Hungarian border. This started as a joint venture of the communist governments of Czechoslovakia and Hungary under a treaty signed in I 977. Hungary withdrew from the project at the end of the 1980s, bowing to pressure from ecologists at home and abroad. To Slovaks, as Snajdr observes, the project was a matter of national prestige and a rallying point against warnings of environmental risks that stood in the forefront of Hungary 's concerns. Snajdr elaborates on how its chief engineer, Julius Binder, defended the completion of the Slovak part of the project and gained the support of the Slovak public. From then on the Greens (Zeleni), who, in the meantime, split into two groups, the Czecho-Slovak federalists and the Slovak nationalists, started slipping into political obscurity and eventually returned to small and isolated projects of landscape revitalization at various locations . Thus, "nation won over nature" and Slovakia, together with representatives of the ecology movement, entered into an age of post-ecology. The book paints a credible picture of a former communist regime unconcerned with the ecological impact of insensitive industrialization and socio-economic modernization. The first part of the study, which analyzes the evolution of environmental protection, is more �SLOVAKIA 119 cohesive than the second. If the second part appears a bit fragmentary, it is due to the overall ruptured character of the ecology movement in Slovakia in the second half of the 1990s. Though the sympathies of the author towards a cleaner environment cannot be overlooked, he did not take sides in intra and extra-national political conflicts. Apart from a few minor aberrations, such as the subtler use of the geographic term the Czech lands or the Czech Republic instead of Bohemia when referring to the second half of the 20 th century; and the incorrect transliteration of Gabcikovo-Nagymaros instead of GNagymaros, and Kvacian (gen . or accus; Slovak) instead of Kvacany (nom.), the book profits from its narrative and analysis based on the author's knowledge of theory and his authentic experience. It is an insightful contribution to the discourse on the continuing multilayered evolution of post-communist states and societies in Eastern Europe, in which ecology has played an important part. With Slovakia now being a member of the European Union and a signatory of international treaties on environmental protection, it would be interesting to discover whether the previous gap between government and civic initiatives has remained the same or has disappeared. � REVIEWS ��SLOVAKIA 103 Nauka reci slovenskej [Nauka reci slovenskej vistavena od Ludevita Stura], Ludevit Stur, Vol. l : Faksimile povodneho vydania na vydanie pripravili Eubomir Durovic and Slavomir Ondrejovic. Bratislava: VEDA, 2006. 228 pages, facsimile of the 1846 grammar text. Nauka reci slovenskej : Komentare, Bibliograjia, Vol. 2, Eugen Jona, Eubomir Durovic, Slavomir Ondrejovic. Bratislava: VEDA, 2006 . 323 pp., commentary, bibliography, and various indices. GERALD J. SABO , S.J. John Carroll University This two-volume publication is a singular event. The first volume is a facsimile edition of the 1846 grammar by Eudovit Stur (1815-56), whose availability inside Slovakia is quite limited, and outside Slovakia is virtually non-existent. The second volume enhances the grammar with background information, providing detailed analysis of and commentary by eminent Slovak linguists, among them Eubomir Durovic. Both volumes appear on the 160th anniversary of the grammar' s original publication, but also the 150th anniversary of Stur's accidental death. Lutheran pastors and Catholic priests worked on the codification of Slovak from the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth. In the l 720s the Slovak Lutheran pastors and scholars Matej Bel and Daniel Krrnan published the Bible in the primarily Czech linguistic form espoused by Slovak Lutherans. In his 1746 grammar the Lutheran pastor Pavel Dolezal presented Slovak and Czech as two dialects of one language- Czechoslovak. In the 1750s the Catholic Camaldolese monks translated the Bible into Slovak for their own useespecially in readings for the liturgical year, a significant accomplishment that would be discovered only in the mid-twentieth century. In the late 1780s the Catholic priest Anton Bemolak initiated the extensive Catholic efforts for codifying Slovak and then promoted his codified norm. For his codification Bemolak drew upon the Slovak that had been nurtured through the activities and �104 SLOVAKIA publications of the Jesuit university in Trnava since 1635 , and that in the twentieth century Slovak linguists would call "Cultural WestSlovak." Among Bernolak's various language-related writings, he realized a grammar and even a five-language dictionary in six large volumes, completed and published in the 1820s by the priest Jur[ aj] Palkovic. Through their writings, two priests helped spread Bernolak's codified Slovak- Juraj Fandly in his prose works, and Jan Holly in his extensive epic and lyric poetry. Thanks to Holly, Fandly, and others, Bernolak-Slovak (bernolakovcina) became the acceptable and promoted means of expression among Slovak Catholics through the 1840s. During this period, Lutherans continued to publish various literary and other works in biblictina ("Biblical language," in effect, the version of Czech used in the Bohemian Brethren 's Kralice Bible of the late sixteenth century with varying mixtures of Slovak language elements through the nineteenth century). The extent of such writing is clear from the four-volume biographic compilation of Slovak Lutheran poets (1806-12) by the pastor Bohuslav Tablic. Although Slovak Lutherans were a decided minority in the Slovak region of the Kingdom of Hungary, despite their quite modest numbers they remained a well-educated group that strove to retain this distinction in contrast to the much more numerous but less-educated fellow Christian-Catholics. Indeed, the Lutherans especially employed and espoused biblictina in their cultural and liturgical activities to emphasize their relationship with Czech Protestants, thereby increasing their group's numerical strength and enhancing their cultural status. Given this, the Lutherans' reasoning could well have been why should they adopt a linguistic norm created and promoted by the majority Catholic population that was not as educated or cultivated as they? In 1803 Slovak Lutherans established a Chair of Czechoslovak Language and Literature at their lycee in Bratislava. Jiri [Juraj] Palkovic was the first and only holder of this Chair ( 1803-50), and helped to foster Slovak Lutheran publications and cultural exchange. At the Lutheran lycee in Bratislava students and staff became the nucleus for the Lutheran promotion of Slavic/Slovak consciousness in response to the increasing Magyarization in Slovakia. I:udovit Stur studied at the lycee between 1829 and 1834. After his student years from 1835-3 7, Stur was vice-president of the Czecho-Slavic Society, whose 1836 almanach Plody (Fruits) of various writings �SLOVAKIA 105 also represented a manifesto of Slovak national consciousness and identity. On April I 0, 1836 Stur wrote to the Protestant Czech/Moravian cultural figure and historian Frantisek Palacky emphasizing the need for unity among Slovaks and Czechs. As Stt'.ir pointed out, the Czech language used by Lutherans in the Slovak area was not accessible to Catholic Slovaks, and thus there was a need for some combination of the Czech and Slovak language to provide for Slovak and Czech unity and understanding. The Czechs were unwilling to accept Stur's proposal. Although on February I, 1837 Stur became an unremunerated deputy to Jiff Palkovic, on April 5th the Czecho-Slavic society halted its activites because of a government ban on student societies. Stur served as a deputy to Palkovic during 1837-38 and 1840-43 , with his university study at Halle between those periods. After a lengthy investigation, on December 31, 1843 the Bratislava convention of the Lutheran Church relieved Stur of his position as Palkovic's deputy, after which he devoted himself to scholarly, journalistic, and political activity. By 1843 Stur had come to view Slovak as a distinct Slavic language, especially vis-a-vis Czech. According to the Lutheran poet Samo Hrobon, on February 14, 1843 a meeting of various Lutheran lycee students/alumni and their professor L. Stur marked the "day of resurrection of Slovak" (J6na, vol. 2: 31 ). In mid-July of 1843 Stur met with the Lutheran pastors Jozef Miloslav Hurban and Michal Miloslav Hodza at Hurban's parish in Hlboke for the purpose of creating a di stinct Slovak norm. A day after that discussion the three met with the Catholic priest-poet Jan Holly at the latter's parish in Dobra Yoda and received Holly's blessing for their endeavor. At the founding gathering in Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas for the journal Tatrin during August 26-28, 1844, Stur's Slovak norm was publicly proclaimed (Durovic, vol. 2: 59). In codifying Slovak as a distinct language, Stur prepared two texts: one explaining the need for writing in Slovak and a grammar of Slovak based on the Central Slovak dialect of Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas (Durovic, vol. 2: 62). Both these texts would be published only in 1846. In vo lume 2 of this publication, three linguists focus on Stur and his grammar. Eugen J6na's study provides a very detailed commentary on Stur, hi s evolving writing activity related to Slovak, especially the two texts of 1846, as well as the influences on Stur's cultural, political, and linguistic thinking (pp. 11-47). Cubomir Durovic has �106 SLOVAKIA the most extensive study (51-257). In his introduction, Durovic discusses Stur's grammar and Slovak in relation to the two editions ( 1809 and 1819) of the Czech/Bohemian grammar by Josef Dobrovsky and various Slovak Lutheran cultural publications (58-63) . This is followed by an extensive and meticulous analysis of Stur's grammar (64-194) with reference to various nineteenth - and twentiethcentury linguistic writings listed at the end (195-196). Completing f:>urovic's study are three indices in relation to his commentary on Stur's grammar proper: an index of words, morphemes, and phonemes (195-227); a "phonematicifonematicky" index of interpreted morphemes and words (229-3 I); and a topic/subject index (233-57). Slavo Ondrejovic concludes this volume with two bibliographies: one of Stur's personal and linguistic works published from 1841 through 2003 (259-68), and a select one on writings about Stur that concern language and linguistic questions published from 1817 through 2006 (269-323). In their introduction to the second volume, Durovic and Ondrejovic have noted the need for such a publication and the lengthy process involved in realizing this work. Specialists in Slovak linguistics, especially in the historical development of contemporary Slovak, will appreciate their efforts for many years to come. Likewise, Slovakia-based, but especially international specialists in Slovak culture and history, will also enhance their understanding of the codifycation of Slovak by Stur and his Lutheran colleagues. Andras Gero, The Jewish Criterion in Hungary, translated from the Magyar by Alan Campbell. Boulder, Colorado, Social Science Monographs: Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 2007. 153 pp., notes, biographical notes, photographs, index. YESHA YAHU A. JELINEK Beer-Sheva, Israel This is both a confusing and challenging book. The challenge comes in trying to clarify the definition of a Jew. The confusion comes in trying to define a Jew from Hungary. Of the book's five chapters, the first two were the most confusing. Gero first sets out to discuss Hungarian Jewry. However, he does not differentiate (as do all Slavic languages) between "Hunga- �SLOVAKIA 107 rian" and "Magyar." "Hungary" until 1918 was a geographico-political term for the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen. "Magyar" referred to the largest ethnic (and ruling) group in the Kingdom of Hungary. For contemporary Magyars, as for Gero, such a differentiation does not exist. He equated "Hungary" with "Magyarorszag" (the land of the Magyars). Therefore, when Gero analyzes the "Hungarian Jew" (Magyar Zsid6 ), we do not really understand who he has in mind. Jews appeared on the territory between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans in the Roman period, much earlier than the Slavs or Magyars. They inhabited the Kingdom of Hungary, initially ruled by the Arpad dynasty and later the Habsburgs . They were not considered to be Magyars. Only in the 19 th century did the Magyars try to "Magyarize" the Jews, as well as the other non-Magyar nationalities. Gero knows these facts, but avoids them. For Gero, there were only "Hungarian Jews" in the entire Kingdom of Hungary. He seems to be entirely unaware of ethnic divisions within Jewry- the existence of Slovak, Rusin , Croat, Transylvanian, etc. Jews. While Gero devotes much space to a rather intelligent discussion of the living conditions, historical environment, and ethnic survival of Magyar Jews, he ignores the fact that Jews in Hungary lived among different nations. He is aware of the oppresssive Magyar nationalism, and criticizes it severely in his last three chapters, but remains unaware of the varieties of Judaism within the Kingdom. The challenging part of this book is the thoughtful discussion of Jewish existence in Hungary and the relations of Jews with the Gentile majority. This discussion forces the reader to re-evaluate quite a few accepted notions about Jewish life in Hungary. Unfortunately, Gero is not familiar with the history of the various Jewish groups in the Kingdom of Hungary. This becomes clear when one compares Jewish life on the Pannonian Plain (today's Hungary) with that of Upper Hungary (Slovakia) or with Sub-Carpathian Rus. Furthermore, he erroneously refers to Hungarian Jews "leaving the ghetto" in the 19 th century. Only Bratislava and a few cities in the Burgenland had "ghettos." That is why Jews who left Moravia for Hungary, or Galicia for Hungary in the 19 th century, suddenly found much greater freedom than they had ever fe lt before. Gero 's lack of knowledge about the Slovak and Rusin portions of the Kingdom of Hungary becomes clear when he discusses Jewish �108 SLOVAKIA conversions to Christianity and the rise of Zionism. For instance, while conversion to Christianity on the Pannonian Plain was not uncommon, it was rare in Upper Hungary or in Sub-Carpathian Rus. When discussing Zionism, Gero neglected its manifestations on Slovak territory and did not perceive that it was weak in the Magyar counties because it was persecuted by the Hungarian government. On the other hand, in Upper Hungary, where Zionizm was weak, Chasidism was strong. Chasidic rabbis were bitter enemies of Zionism. Therefore, one must tread carefully when discussing the strength or weakness of Zionism in Hungary. The most challenging part of Gero's book deals with the rise of anti-Semitism at the end of the 19 th century. Here he deals with the riddle of who is a Jew and when is he considered as such, and under what conditions . Most of Gero's arguments deal only with the Magyar portion of Hungary, which is a pity, because, if he had dug deeper, he could have made the case that it was largely the Magyars who taught the other ethnic groups to hate the Jews. Tiso, Jozef Prejavy a clanky. Vol. I (1913-1938). Ed. Miroslav Fabricius and Ladislav Susko. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press and Historicky ustav SA V, 2002 . 567 pp. Tiso, Jozef Prejavy a clanky. Vol. 2: (193 8-1944). Ed. Miroslav Fabricius and Katarina Hradska. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press and Historicky ustav SAV, 2007 . 696 pp. DANIEL E. MILLER University of West Florida, Pensacola The editors of this set of two volumes assembled the speeches and articles of Jozef Tiso (1887-1947) to provide researchers with a valuable source for the history of Slovak politics covering the periods from shortly before the Great War until the Munich Agreement and then from October 1938 until just before 29 August 1944, the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising. Each volume has a very brief introduction and a table of contents that lists the numbered documents in chronological order (this review cites the volume and document numbers). The first volume contains 267 documents and five addenda; the second, 389 documents and 10 addenda. Together, �SLOVAKIA 109 they contain 671 documents on 1,226 pages with no introductions or summaries for each document to color the readers ' opinions. The editors cited multiple sources for each selection, including Slovak archives and newspapers throughout Slovakia. They included explanatory notes, some of which are rather detailed, about individuals, groups, events, terms, and foreign phrases (as a theologian, Tiso had a propensity to use Latin phrases). Some footnotes point out discrepancies in the speeches as they appeared in the various periodicals. In their efforts to be thorough, the editors included journalists' paraphrased summaries of Tiso's speeches when actual texts were unavailable. Furthermore, they did not overlook minor comments, the shortest of which is a mere two lines (l/ 177). Significant gaps raise questions about the completeness of the collection. At the beginning of his career as a priest, Tiso 's publications were understandably sparse, but several selections toward the end of the Great War and immediately afterward are missing. At least a dozen of Tiso's articles appeared in 1917 and 1918 in Papok Kozlonye [Priests' Bulletin] and Duchovny pastier [Spiritual Shepherd], all of which James Mace Ward cites in his dissertation, "No Saint: Jozef Tiso, 1887-1947" (Stanford University, 2008, pp. 63-65), with proper notations about pseudonyms and, in some cases, authorship. By his own admission, after the war Tiso edited and wrote articles for Nyitra/Nitra. In contrast, the first volume of Tiso ' s speeches and articles for the same period contain only a few articles. Oddly enough, there are only five entries in 1929 and 1930 and seven in 1931 , all speeches, aside from one, and an average of 23 entries per year for the previous five years and 15 for the following five years. Additional citations are in Ward's work, including police reports. Police agents attended every open party meeting for all political parties during the First Republic, and they reported the comments of speakers, the reactions of the crowds, and any incidents . The material from these reports is no less valid than the redacted summaries of Tiso ' s speeches that appeared in the press, and they would have filled the voids in Tiso ' s public addresses in these two volumes . While Tiso indeed might have been preoccupied in 1929-1931 , undoubtedly more publications and addresses exist, especially in light of the 1917-1 8 omissions. At times, Tiso ' s silence was intentional. In his 65 months as president of the Slovak Republic, Tiso produced an average of sli- �110 SLOVAKIA ghtly more than five speeches and articles each month, but the frequency declined over time. Most likely, Tiso withdrew from public view with the mounting legitimacy crisis in the Slovak Republic resulting from Germany's losses on the Eastern Front, as well as the prospect of the Allies recreating Czechoslovakia at the war's end and criminalizing Slovakia 's clerical-fascist regime. As a result, in the first eight months of 1944, there are only 23 entries, That is less than three speeches and articles for each month . The speeches and articles in these two volumes portray Tiso as priest, ideologist, party politician, parliamentarian, cabinet minister, and president. The value of this collection is greater than the sum of its parts. Certainly, researchers are relieved that they have the bulk of Tiso 's works at their fingertips and need not spend countless hours scouring sources and fearing that they overlooked something. Furthermore, the assemblage of Tiso 's works in one venue facilitates fresh perspectives on his career. A change in Tiso 's speaking style is apparent in the two volumes. The paucity of his speeches before he became a cabinet minister in 1927 is striking, and it is unfortunate that more texts and transcripts of speeches do not exist from this time. Nevertheless, it is impossible that Tiso could have built his popularity solely on the basis of articles, and the police reports could have made the evidence from this period more balanced . Tiso's speeches in the decade from 1927 until 1938 were disciplined- they had a single topic and a logical argument. This is especially true of his carefully crafted speeches in the National Assembly and before selected audiences. As president, Tiso addressed a wide variety of audiences with speeches that lacked focus and often contained topics not well suited for his listeners. As a result, he analyzed the development of the Slovak Republic with respect to the fate of other East-Central European states while addressing Catholics on a pilgrimage (Il/135). When celebrating the electrification of a district, he spoke about the wonders of electricity, encouraged factory workers and farmers to cooperate in building the state, and admonished listeners about observing the laws regarding economic matters (II/221 ). At a religious gathering in 1942, he criticized efforts to count all Greek-Catholic Slovaks as Rusyns and shortly afterward justified the confiscation of Jewish property with the slogan "Slovakia for Slovaks" (II/282). Aside from being an undisciplined extemporaneous speaker, one possible explanation for the �SLOVAKIA 111 change in style was Tiso ' s need to account for the policies of the state in the simplest terms for the broadest range of listeners. Between 1918 and 1938, Tiso's public comments and writings focused in part or exclusively on the need for Slovak autonomy as fulfilling the promise of the Pittsburgh Agreement. The tenor of his mesages heightened over the years, and in February 193 7 he referred to Czechoslovakia as an "aberration of democracy" (1/243), although he uttered plenty of vituperative condemnations of the First Republic both before and afterward. Despite efforts to cooperate with supporters of Slovak autonomy in the camp of Lutheran Slovaks within the Slovak National Party and even Hungarian politicians in the 1930s, Tiso tirelessly strove to bind Slovak identity with the Catholic faith, to link the leadership of the nation to the Catholic clergy, and to advance his Hlinka' s Slovak People's Party as the only major political party to recognize and defend the Slovak nation as unique. After the Munich Agreement, Tiso became minister for Slovak affairs and then on October 6, 1938 premier of an autonomous Slovakia. During this time, Tiso concentrated on policy and restructuring the political system, which essentially made Slovakia a oneparty state. After Slovak independence on 14 March 1939, Tiso served as prime minister and then, beginning in October 1939, he became the republic ' s president. Tiso now sought to legitimize the new republic, justifying its independence and thanking Adolf Hitler for extending his protection to the Slovaks. Tiso linked Slovakia to Germany's successes and Germany's leadership in the construction of a new Europe. Beginning in 1943, roughly coinciding with the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, Tiso's references to Hitler and Germany became sparse, and Tiso did not mention either in his address in 1944 on the fifth anniversary of the Slovak state (ll/374). Tiso obviously wanted to distance himself from Hitler, but fewer references to his patron also suggest the limits of Tiso's acceptance of his own earlier rhetoric. Throughout the war, Tiso's description of Slovakia ' s mission on the Eastern Front as a struggle against Bolshevism, with its Jewish and anti-Christian influences, remained constant. In the final document dated 6 August 1944, Tiso ended with a prophetic statement: "we cannot deny that the Bolsheviks are at the border and that they promise the scaffold!" (II/389) . The two volumes reveal much about the development of Tiso's anti-Semitism. There are few references to Jews in Tiso ' s statements �112 SLOVAKIA between the world wars, and at one point in 1934, he even invited Jews, Germans, Hungarians, and Czechs in Slovakia to join with Slovaks in demanding autonomy (l/202). Nevertheless, there are occasional anti-Jewish comments, such as Ti so's call for land from the church estates parceled under the land reform to go to Catholic farmers , not Jews, nonbelievers, and speculators (l/78). During the Second Czecho-Slovak Republic, Tiso identified Jews as a foreign element whose presence in Slovak society must be proportionate to their numbers. Nevertheless, he warned that Jews should not become the objects of "hatred and sadistic tendencies" (I/32). His rhetoric against Jews heightened when Slovakia became independent, and in August 1942 he justified the removal of Jews from Slovak society as the elimination of an enemy, an act of self-defense in keeping with Christian morals. Loving oneself is a precept from God, according to Tiso, "and I think there is no need to convince anyone that the Jewish element endangers the life of a Slovak" (11/287). There is little evidence in these two volumes to suggest that Tiso 's antiSemitism was anything but genuine, but the addition of Tiso's intensely anti-Semitic Ny itra/Nitra articles make his hatred of Jews indisputable. The editors are preparing a third vo lume to cover the conversations of Hitler and Tiso as well as Tiso 's statements from the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising on 29 August 1944 through his 1946-1947 trial. They indicated their intent to include in the third volume addenda for the first two volumes and expressed their wish that historians inform them of additional documents. The inclusion of missing items- those signed with a pseudonym or abbreviated name and those whose authorship is disputable- is absoutely essential , not only for the convenience of researchers, but also for the sake of objectivity. Perhaps they can be in a section of their own. The editors had planned to include three indexes in the second volume, and one can assume that these essential tools for researchers will appear in the planned third volume. Specialists on Slovak affairs in the Habsburg Monarchy, the First Czechoslovak Republic, and the first Slovak Republic are greatly indebted to Fabricius, Susko, Hradska, and the others who contributed to the production of these two volumes . They anxiously await the appearance of the third volume in this indispensable series. �SLOVAKIA 113 Max Domarus, Th e Complete Hitler: A Digital Desktop Reference to His Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945. Wauconda, Ill. : Bolchazy-Carducci, 2007. (CD-ROM edition). VASILLIS VOURKOUTIOTIS University of Ottawa While documentary collections concerning the Third Reich are not, generally speaking, difficult to come by, few students are exposed to the actual words of Adolf Hitler except as summarized by other compilers in wider works . The exception to this has been Max Domtarus' four-volume collection of Hitler's speeches. The compilation of this resource was linked to the history it attempted to capture. In 1932, Max Domarus was only twenty-two years old. Yet, he realized that in Adolf Hitler, Germany and the world were faced with a new phenomenon whose significance should not be underestimated. He began, in that year, to collect and compile as many of Hitler's speeches as he could find , and continued the project through the war years until Hitler' s death in 1945 . After the war, Domarus supplemented his collection as much as possible, and the resulting work, which included his annotations and commentary, was a four-volume set published in German. For each year in question, the reader is offered a detailed summary of events, and photographs from the Domarus archive. Full endnotes for each section yield bibliographical citations, as well as additional explanatory commentary. Each volume also contains a list of abbreviations which users will find helpful. Although some of Domarus' commentaries have been superceded by historical research, his perceptions remain as interesting in several instances as the speeches they comment upon. The four-volume set, even though it only covers Hitler's speeches from 1932 onward, remains the best single collection of the dictator's words. With this CD, Domarus's publishers have brought an important printed historical resource into the modem information age. An English-language translation accompanies the original German text, bringing to the user eight volumes of material in a single disk. Although presented in a chronological format, the speeches are in a searchable PDF format, allowing the student or researcher the ability to scan years of �114 SLOVAKIA material for keywords . For those with the language abilities and desire, the English version can be easily compared for accuracy with the German original. Given how long Hitler could speak for at a single event, it is not surprising that Domarus felt the need to offer exerpts rather than a stenographic record. This may strike some as a potential drawback, and might lead some researches to seek the full text of a particular speech of interest. The vast majority of users, however, will not find this a significant issue; Domarus' work has remained the standard reference for university libraries since its first publication in 1962 with good reason. Two versions of the CD ROM exist, the Standard and ePremium. In addition to the advantages of the Standard, the ePremium addition allows the user to print, copy and paste text directly from the PDF files into one's own documents, and add commentary to the texts. These enhancements will be of interest to those who work closely enough with the material in their own research. On the whole, in making both the English and German versions of Domarus' compilations available in such a format, the publishers have not only made an important work more accessible, but also provided a service to both students and academics alike. James Ramon Felak After Hitler, Before Stalin: Catholics, Communists, and Democrats in Slovakia, 1945-1948. Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. xv-261 pp. , notes, bibliography, index. M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Having perceived a negl ected period of history, James R. Felak set out to tell the story of the role of Catholicism in Slovakia in the period 1945-48, especially its relationship with the Communist and Democratic Parties. The essence of the book is that, even though both the Communists and the Lutheran leaders of the Democratic Party were either hostile to or suspicious of the Roman Catholic Church, both courted Roman Catholic voters in order to attain political power in post-war Slovakia. Having combed the relevant Slovak archives, and read the Communist, Lutheran and Roman Catholic press, along with most secondary sources on the subject, Felak carefully related what actually �SLOVAKIA 115 transpired in Slovakia in the three years after the Second World War. He pointed out that the post-war National Front government that came into existence on April 3, 1945, reduced the pre-war political parties of Czechoslovakia from 16 to 5, and in Slovakia permitted only the Communists and Democrats. The two strongest pre-war political parties, Hlinka Slovak People's Party and the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party were banned as "collaborationist". That meant that the minority Lutherans could (and did) join the newly-formed Democratic Party, but the majority Catholics were disenfranchised. As a result, both the Communists and Democrats courted Catholic voters in anticipation of the May, 1946 elections, while simultaneously attacking the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, the self-appointed Slovak National Council, with its executive Board of Commissioners, nationalized all religious schools, seized most Catholic institutions, severely limited the size of the Catholic press and imprisoned two Slovak bishops. On the other hand, the Communists tried to persuade Catholic voters to vote for their party, because the Democrats were largely Lutherans . Indeed, the Communists even supported the creation of a Christian Republican Party, but the Catholics and Communists could not agree on its name, and this project fell through. The Lutherans, on the other hand, also wooed the Catholics by promising to split future political representation and patronage with them on the basis of a 7:3 ratio in favor of the Catholics. The Catholics found this promise more enticing than Communist overtures and, as a result, the Catholic and Lutheran politicians reached the so-called April Agreement on March 31, 1946. Since they were now united, the Catholics and Lutherans both supported the Democratic Party and won the 1946 elections with a convincing majority of 62%. Since they had lost the elections, the Communist Party of Slovakia went on the offensive. With the collusion of the government in Prague, where the Communists had more influence, and where certain Czech parties resented Slovak home-rule, Slovak Communists, led by Gustav Husak, negotiated the "Third Prague Agreement" of June 27, 1946, by which the Slovak National Council and the Board of Commissioners subordinated themselves to the Prague government. Then the Slovak Communists decided to try for treason the Reverend Jozef Tiso, former president of the first Slovak Republic ( 1939-1945). They saw to it that the National Court was domina- �116 SLOVAKIA ted by Communists who, as expected, found Tiso guilty and sentenced him to death on April 15, 1947. The hapless Democrats on the executive of the Board of Commissioners failed to recommend clemency and left the final verdict to the government in Prague, which upheld the verdict, as did president Benes, and Tiso was hanged on April 17. After this fiasco, Slovak Catholics lost faith in the Democratic Party, just as the Communists began their offensive against it. In the summer and fall of 194 7 the Communists fabricated an anti-state conspiracy against certain Catholic Democrats. On this basis Gustav Husak on October 31 staged a mini-coup in Slovakia by (with Prague support) illegally dissolving and then reappointing the Board of Commissioners in favor of the Communists. This was a prelude to similar tactics by the Communists in Prague in February of 1948, when three non-Communist parties resigned from the government in the hope of toppling it. Instead, the Communists, led by Klement Gottwald offered to form a new government and president Edvard Benes approved it. Thus, by February of 1948 the Communists had completed their takeover of both the Slovak and Czechoslovak governments and instituted totalitarian rule for the next 40 years, during which they tried (but failed) to completely destroy the Roman Catholic church in Czechoslovakia. Felak's book is well-written and comprehensive. Perhaps his greatest contribution is that he laid to rest the oft-repeated Slovak complaint that president Benes arranged for Tiso's death. Instead, as Felak convincingly shows, it was the incompetence of the Lutheradominated executive of the Board of Commissioners which was most responsible because of its inability to reach a consensus on the issue of clemency. They essentially "passed the buck" to Prague, where Tiso had few friends and that sealed his doom. In spite of Felak's meticulous scholarship, the book contained a few glitches and one omission. The slang expression "First off "appeared a few times (p.6), Stanislav Kirschbaum's first name was shortened to Stanley in footnote 5 on page 217, the surname Viktorin was misspelled Victory (p.63), and Banovce nad Bebravou was identified as Tiso's home town (p.100), when that honor goes to Vel'ka Bytca. Perhaps the greatest omission is the revelation that Ferdinand Durcansky, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the first Slovak Republic, who fled to the west after the war and tried to �SLOVAKIA 117 organize an anti-state underground movement in post-war Slovakia, was actually controlled by Kim Philby, the notorious British spy who was, in fact, working for the KGB . Mark Aarons and John Loftus, on the basis of research in the files of the CIA in Washington, revealed this interesting detail in their Ratlines: How the Vatican Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets (London, 1991 ), pp. 21 19 and footnotes 46-50, page 334. Thus, the anti-state conspiracy of 1947 was carefully staged from abroad by the KGB as an excuse for the communist takeover of Slovakia. Edward Snajdr, Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2008 . xiii242 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, list of interviews, index. JURAJ HOCMAN University of Ottawa Edward Snajdr, an American cultural anthropologist at New York University, examined Slovakia's emerging civic environmental protection movement in the communist era and its rapid disappearance during the country 's post-communist transformation (19851995). The author did his fieldwork in situ and that is why it is particularly interesting to read about his experience. In the first two chapters, Snajdr focuses on urban and extraurban contexts of social life in communist Slovakia while providing general, yet adequate, historical background. The author traces the origins of environmental movements among young Slovaks and Czechs that had begun with associations such as SZOPK (Slovensky zvaz ochrancov prfrody a kraj iny - the Slovak Union of Protectors of Nature and the Countryside) in Slovakia and Brontosaurus in the Czech lands. He contrasts the difference between the effectiveness of state legislation designed to protect the environment in the massively and insensitively industrialized Slovakia, with spontaneous projects of young people whose aims were to improve the quality of the environment that surrounded them. Despite their local character, those efforts were not only efficient, but also inspirational. Snajdr then proceeds to the period from 1985 to 1989 during which environmentalist activities spread to the politics of discontent with the communist regime. He stresses the significance of the acce- �118 SLOVAKIA lerated drive for environmental protection in Slovakia during the period of perestroika and glasnost in the case of the samizdat Bratislava Nahlas (Bratislava Aloud). This publication, which voiced the concerns of ordinary citizens regarding disrespectful and harmful socio-economic policies of the communist regime, was prohibited by state authorities. Its editor, Jan Budaj, who became one of the most visible leaders of the "Velvet Revolution" in Slovakia in the fall of 1989, as well as the samizdat' s distributors, were harassed by the communist secret police (the StB). The fall of the communist regime might have become the new beginning of a friendlier approach to environmental protection in Slovakia. That is where the second part of the story begins. A new political reality in Eastern Europe, which was closely tied to nationalism, brought a new perspective on how to cope with the legacy of communism and its negative ecological effects. The members of the Slovak Green Party (Strana zelenych), which was formed in November of 1989, and was represented in the new Slovak parliament, took a firm stand against the completion of the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros dam on the Danube river, which formed the Slovak-Hungarian border. This started as a joint venture of the communist governments of Czechoslovakia and Hungary under a treaty signed in I 977. Hungary withdrew from the project at the end of the 1980s, bowing to pressure from ecologists at home and abroad. To Slovaks, as Snajdr observes, the project was a matter of national prestige and a rallying point against warnings of environmental risks that stood in the forefront of Hungary 's concerns. Snajdr elaborates on how its chief engineer, Julius Binder, defended the completion of the Slovak part of the project and gained the support of the Slovak public. From then on the Greens (Zeleni), who, in the meantime, split into two groups, the Czecho-Slovak federalists and the Slovak nationalists, started slipping into political obscurity and eventually returned to small and isolated projects of landscape revitalization at various locations . Thus, "nation won over nature" and Slovakia, together with representatives of the ecology movement, entered into an age of post-ecology. The book paints a credible picture of a former communist regime unconcerned with the ecological impact of insensitive industrialization and socio-economic modernization. The first part of the study, which analyzes the evolution of environmental protection, is more �SLOVAKIA 119 cohesive than the second. If the second part appears a bit fragmentary, it is due to the overall ruptured character of the ecology movement in Slovakia in the second half of the 1990s. Though the sympathies of the author towards a cleaner environment cannot be overlooked, he did not take sides in intra and extra-national political conflicts. Apart from a few minor aberrations, such as the subtler use of the geographic term the Czech lands or the Czech Republic instead of Bohemia when referring to the second half of the 20 th century; and the incorrect transliteration of Gabcikovo-Nagymaros instead of GNagymaros, and Kvacian (gen . or accus; Slovak) instead of Kvacany (nom.), the book profits from its narrative and analysis based on the author's knowledge of theory and his authentic experience. It is an insightful contribution to the discourse on the continuing multilayered evolution of post-communist states and societies in Eastern Europe, in which ecology has played an important part. With Slovakia now being a member of the European Union and a signatory of international treaties on environmental protection, it would be interesting to discover whether the previous gap between government and civic initiatives has remained the same or has disappeared. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2010, Vol. 40 Description An account of the resource Vol. 40 (No. 74-75), 2010. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document REVIEWS SLOVAKIA 103 Nauka reci slovenskej [Nauka reci slovenskej vistavena od Ludevita Stura], Ludevit Stur, Vol. l : Faksimile povodneho vydania na vydanie pripravili Eubomir Durovic and Slavomir Ondrejovic. Bratislava: VEDA, 2006. 228 pages, facsimile of the 1846 grammar text. Nauka reci slovenskej : Komentare, Bibliograjia, Vol. 2, Eugen Jona, Eubomir Durovic, Slavomir Ondrejovic. Bratislava: VEDA, 2006 . 323 pp., commentary, bibliography, and various indices. GERALD J. SABO , S.J. John Carroll University This two-volume publication is a singular event. The first volume is a facsimile edition of the 1846 grammar by Eudovit Stur (1815-56), whose availability inside Slovakia is quite limited, and outside Slovakia is virtually non-existent. The second volume enhances the grammar with background information, providing detailed analysis of and commentary by eminent Slovak linguists, among them Eubomir Durovic. Both volumes appear on the 160th anniversary of the grammar' s original publication, but also the 150th anniversary of Stur's accidental death. Lutheran pastors and Catholic priests worked on the codification of Slovak from the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth. In the l 720s the Slovak Lutheran pastors and scholars Matej Bel and Daniel Krrnan published the Bible in the primarily Czech linguistic form espoused by Slovak Lutherans. In his 1746 grammar the Lutheran pastor Pavel Dolezal presented Slovak and Czech as two dialects of one language- Czechoslovak. In the 1750s the Catholic Camaldolese monks translated the Bible into Slovak for their own useespecially in readings for the liturgical year, a significant accomplishment that would be discovered only in the mid-twentieth century. In the late 1780s the Catholic priest Anton Bemolak initiated the extensive Catholic efforts for codifying Slovak and then promoted his codified norm. For his codification Bemolak drew upon the Slovak that had been nurtured through the activities and 104 SLOVAKIA publications of the Jesuit university in Trnava since 1635 , and that in the twentieth century Slovak linguists would call "Cultural WestSlovak." Among Bernolak's various language-related writings, he realized a grammar and even a five-language dictionary in six large volumes, completed and published in the 1820s by the priest Jur[ aj] Palkovic. Through their writings, two priests helped spread Bernolak's codified Slovak- Juraj Fandly in his prose works, and Jan Holly in his extensive epic and lyric poetry. Thanks to Holly, Fandly, and others, Bernolak-Slovak (bernolakovcina) became the acceptable and promoted means of expression among Slovak Catholics through the 1840s. During this period, Lutherans continued to publish various literary and other works in biblictina ("Biblical language," in effect, the version of Czech used in the Bohemian Brethren 's Kralice Bible of the late sixteenth century with varying mixtures of Slovak language elements through the nineteenth century). The extent of such writing is clear from the four-volume biographic compilation of Slovak Lutheran poets (1806-12) by the pastor Bohuslav Tablic. Although Slovak Lutherans were a decided minority in the Slovak region of the Kingdom of Hungary, despite their quite modest numbers they remained a well-educated group that strove to retain this distinction in contrast to the much more numerous but less-educated fellow Christian-Catholics. Indeed, the Lutherans especially employed and espoused biblictina in their cultural and liturgical activities to emphasize their relationship with Czech Protestants, thereby increasing their group's numerical strength and enhancing their cultural status. Given this, the Lutherans' reasoning could well have been why should they adopt a linguistic norm created and promoted by the majority Catholic population that was not as educated or cultivated as they? In 1803 Slovak Lutherans established a Chair of Czechoslovak Language and Literature at their lycee in Bratislava. Jiri [Juraj] Palkovic was the first and only holder of this Chair ( 1803-50), and helped to foster Slovak Lutheran publications and cultural exchange. At the Lutheran lycee in Bratislava students and staff became the nucleus for the Lutheran promotion of Slavic/Slovak consciousness in response to the increasing Magyarization in Slovakia. I:udovit Stur studied at the lycee between 1829 and 1834. After his student years from 1835-3 7, Stur was vice-president of the Czecho-Slavic Society, whose 1836 almanach Plody (Fruits) of various writings SLOVAKIA 105 also represented a manifesto of Slovak national consciousness and identity. On April I 0, 1836 Stur wrote to the Protestant Czech/Moravian cultural figure and historian Frantisek Palacky emphasizing the need for unity among Slovaks and Czechs. As Stt'.ir pointed out, the Czech language used by Lutherans in the Slovak area was not accessible to Catholic Slovaks, and thus there was a need for some combination of the Czech and Slovak language to provide for Slovak and Czech unity and understanding. The Czechs were unwilling to accept Stur's proposal. Although on February I, 1837 Stur became an unremunerated deputy to Jiff Palkovic, on April 5th the Czecho-Slavic society halted its activites because of a government ban on student societies. Stur served as a deputy to Palkovic during 1837-38 and 1840-43 , with his university study at Halle between those periods. After a lengthy investigation, on December 31, 1843 the Bratislava convention of the Lutheran Church relieved Stur of his position as Palkovic's deputy, after which he devoted himself to scholarly, journalistic, and political activity. By 1843 Stur had come to view Slovak as a distinct Slavic language, especially vis-a-vis Czech. According to the Lutheran poet Samo Hrobon, on February 14, 1843 a meeting of various Lutheran lycee students/alumni and their professor L. Stur marked the "day of resurrection of Slovak" (J6na, vol. 2: 31 ). In mid-July of 1843 Stur met with the Lutheran pastors Jozef Miloslav Hurban and Michal Miloslav Hodza at Hurban's parish in Hlboke for the purpose of creating a di stinct Slovak norm. A day after that discussion the three met with the Catholic priest-poet Jan Holly at the latter's parish in Dobra Yoda and received Holly's blessing for their endeavor. At the founding gathering in Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas for the journal Tatrin during August 26-28, 1844, Stur's Slovak norm was publicly proclaimed (Durovic, vol. 2: 59). In codifying Slovak as a distinct language, Stur prepared two texts: one explaining the need for writing in Slovak and a grammar of Slovak based on the Central Slovak dialect of Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas (Durovic, vol. 2: 62). Both these texts would be published only in 1846. In vo lume 2 of this publication, three linguists focus on Stur and his grammar. Eugen J6na's study provides a very detailed commentary on Stur, hi s evolving writing activity related to Slovak, especially the two texts of 1846, as well as the influences on Stur's cultural, political, and linguistic thinking (pp. 11-47). Cubomir Durovic has 106 SLOVAKIA the most extensive study (51-257). In his introduction, Durovic discusses Stur's grammar and Slovak in relation to the two editions ( 1809 and 1819) of the Czech/Bohemian grammar by Josef Dobrovsky and various Slovak Lutheran cultural publications (58-63) . This is followed by an extensive and meticulous analysis of Stur's grammar (64-194) with reference to various nineteenth - and twentiethcentury linguistic writings listed at the end (195-196). Completing f:>urovic's study are three indices in relation to his commentary on Stur's grammar proper: an index of words, morphemes, and phonemes (195-227); a "phonematicifonematicky" index of interpreted morphemes and words (229-3 I); and a topic/subject index (233-57). Slavo Ondrejovic concludes this volume with two bibliographies: one of Stur's personal and linguistic works published from 1841 through 2003 (259-68), and a select one on writings about Stur that concern language and linguistic questions published from 1817 through 2006 (269-323). In their introduction to the second volume, Durovic and Ondrejovic have noted the need for such a publication and the lengthy process involved in realizing this work. Specialists in Slovak linguistics, especially in the historical development of contemporary Slovak, will appreciate their efforts for many years to come. Likewise, Slovakia-based, but especially international specialists in Slovak culture and history, will also enhance their understanding of the codifycation of Slovak by Stur and his Lutheran colleagues. Andras Gero, The Jewish Criterion in Hungary, translated from the Magyar by Alan Campbell. Boulder, Colorado, Social Science Monographs: Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 2007. 153 pp., notes, biographical notes, photographs, index. YESHA YAHU A. JELINEK Beer-Sheva, Israel This is both a confusing and challenging book. The challenge comes in trying to clarify the definition of a Jew. The confusion comes in trying to define a Jew from Hungary. Of the book's five chapters, the first two were the most confusing. Gero first sets out to discuss Hungarian Jewry. However, he does not differentiate (as do all Slavic languages) between "Hunga- SLOVAKIA 107 rian" and "Magyar." "Hungary" until 1918 was a geographico-political term for the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen. "Magyar" referred to the largest ethnic (and ruling) group in the Kingdom of Hungary. For contemporary Magyars, as for Gero, such a differentiation does not exist. He equated "Hungary" with "Magyarorszag" (the land of the Magyars). Therefore, when Gero analyzes the "Hungarian Jew" (Magyar Zsid6 ), we do not really understand who he has in mind. Jews appeared on the territory between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans in the Roman period, much earlier than the Slavs or Magyars. They inhabited the Kingdom of Hungary, initially ruled by the Arpad dynasty and later the Habsburgs . They were not considered to be Magyars. Only in the 19 th century did the Magyars try to "Magyarize" the Jews, as well as the other non-Magyar nationalities. Gero knows these facts, but avoids them. For Gero, there were only "Hungarian Jews" in the entire Kingdom of Hungary. He seems to be entirely unaware of ethnic divisions within Jewry- the existence of Slovak, Rusin , Croat, Transylvanian, etc. Jews. While Gero devotes much space to a rather intelligent discussion of the living conditions, historical environment, and ethnic survival of Magyar Jews, he ignores the fact that Jews in Hungary lived among different nations. He is aware of the oppresssive Magyar nationalism, and criticizes it severely in his last three chapters, but remains unaware of the varieties of Judaism within the Kingdom. The challenging part of this book is the thoughtful discussion of Jewish existence in Hungary and the relations of Jews with the Gentile majority. This discussion forces the reader to re-evaluate quite a few accepted notions about Jewish life in Hungary. Unfortunately, Gero is not familiar with the history of the various Jewish groups in the Kingdom of Hungary. This becomes clear when one compares Jewish life on the Pannonian Plain (today's Hungary) with that of Upper Hungary (Slovakia) or with Sub-Carpathian Rus. Furthermore, he erroneously refers to Hungarian Jews "leaving the ghetto" in the 19 th century. Only Bratislava and a few cities in the Burgenland had "ghettos." That is why Jews who left Moravia for Hungary, or Galicia for Hungary in the 19 th century, suddenly found much greater freedom than they had ever fe lt before. Gero 's lack of knowledge about the Slovak and Rusin portions of the Kingdom of Hungary becomes clear when he discusses Jewish 108 SLOVAKIA conversions to Christianity and the rise of Zionism. For instance, while conversion to Christianity on the Pannonian Plain was not uncommon, it was rare in Upper Hungary or in Sub-Carpathian Rus. When discussing Zionism, Gero neglected its manifestations on Slovak territory and did not perceive that it was weak in the Magyar counties because it was persecuted by the Hungarian government. On the other hand, in Upper Hungary, where Zionizm was weak, Chasidism was strong. Chasidic rabbis were bitter enemies of Zionism. Therefore, one must tread carefully when discussing the strength or weakness of Zionism in Hungary. The most challenging part of Gero's book deals with the rise of anti-Semitism at the end of the 19 th century. Here he deals with the riddle of who is a Jew and when is he considered as such, and under what conditions . Most of Gero's arguments deal only with the Magyar portion of Hungary, which is a pity, because, if he had dug deeper, he could have made the case that it was largely the Magyars who taught the other ethnic groups to hate the Jews. Tiso, Jozef Prejavy a clanky. Vol. I (1913-1938). Ed. Miroslav Fabricius and Ladislav Susko. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press and Historicky ustav SA V, 2002 . 567 pp. Tiso, Jozef Prejavy a clanky. Vol. 2: (193 8-1944). Ed. Miroslav Fabricius and Katarina Hradska. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press and Historicky ustav SAV, 2007 . 696 pp. DANIEL E. MILLER University of West Florida, Pensacola The editors of this set of two volumes assembled the speeches and articles of Jozef Tiso (1887-1947) to provide researchers with a valuable source for the history of Slovak politics covering the periods from shortly before the Great War until the Munich Agreement and then from October 1938 until just before 29 August 1944, the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising. Each volume has a very brief introduction and a table of contents that lists the numbered documents in chronological order (this review cites the volume and document numbers). The first volume contains 267 documents and five addenda; the second, 389 documents and 10 addenda. Together, SLOVAKIA 109 they contain 671 documents on 1,226 pages with no introductions or summaries for each document to color the readers ' opinions. The editors cited multiple sources for each selection, including Slovak archives and newspapers throughout Slovakia. They included explanatory notes, some of which are rather detailed, about individuals, groups, events, terms, and foreign phrases (as a theologian, Tiso had a propensity to use Latin phrases). Some footnotes point out discrepancies in the speeches as they appeared in the various periodicals. In their efforts to be thorough, the editors included journalists' paraphrased summaries of Tiso's speeches when actual texts were unavailable. Furthermore, they did not overlook minor comments, the shortest of which is a mere two lines (l/ 177). Significant gaps raise questions about the completeness of the collection. At the beginning of his career as a priest, Tiso 's publications were understandably sparse, but several selections toward the end of the Great War and immediately afterward are missing. At least a dozen of Tiso's articles appeared in 1917 and 1918 in Papok Kozlonye [Priests' Bulletin] and Duchovny pastier [Spiritual Shepherd], all of which James Mace Ward cites in his dissertation, "No Saint: Jozef Tiso, 1887-1947" (Stanford University, 2008, pp. 63-65), with proper notations about pseudonyms and, in some cases, authorship. By his own admission, after the war Tiso edited and wrote articles for Nyitra/Nitra. In contrast, the first volume of Tiso ' s speeches and articles for the same period contain only a few articles. Oddly enough, there are only five entries in 1929 and 1930 and seven in 1931 , all speeches, aside from one, and an average of 23 entries per year for the previous five years and 15 for the following five years. Additional citations are in Ward's work, including police reports. Police agents attended every open party meeting for all political parties during the First Republic, and they reported the comments of speakers, the reactions of the crowds, and any incidents . The material from these reports is no less valid than the redacted summaries of Tiso ' s speeches that appeared in the press, and they would have filled the voids in Tiso ' s public addresses in these two volumes . While Tiso indeed might have been preoccupied in 1929-1931 , undoubtedly more publications and addresses exist, especially in light of the 1917-1 8 omissions. At times, Tiso ' s silence was intentional. In his 65 months as president of the Slovak Republic, Tiso produced an average of sli- 110 SLOVAKIA ghtly more than five speeches and articles each month, but the frequency declined over time. Most likely, Tiso withdrew from public view with the mounting legitimacy crisis in the Slovak Republic resulting from Germany's losses on the Eastern Front, as well as the prospect of the Allies recreating Czechoslovakia at the war's end and criminalizing Slovakia 's clerical-fascist regime. As a result, in the first eight months of 1944, there are only 23 entries, That is less than three speeches and articles for each month . The speeches and articles in these two volumes portray Tiso as priest, ideologist, party politician, parliamentarian, cabinet minister, and president. The value of this collection is greater than the sum of its parts. Certainly, researchers are relieved that they have the bulk of Tiso 's works at their fingertips and need not spend countless hours scouring sources and fearing that they overlooked something. Furthermore, the assemblage of Tiso 's works in one venue facilitates fresh perspectives on his career. A change in Tiso 's speaking style is apparent in the two volumes. The paucity of his speeches before he became a cabinet minister in 1927 is striking, and it is unfortunate that more texts and transcripts of speeches do not exist from this time. Nevertheless, it is impossible that Tiso could have built his popularity solely on the basis of articles, and the police reports could have made the evidence from this period more balanced . Tiso's speeches in the decade from 1927 until 1938 were disciplined- they had a single topic and a logical argument. This is especially true of his carefully crafted speeches in the National Assembly and before selected audiences. As president, Tiso addressed a wide variety of audiences with speeches that lacked focus and often contained topics not well suited for his listeners. As a result, he analyzed the development of the Slovak Republic with respect to the fate of other East-Central European states while addressing Catholics on a pilgrimage (Il/135). When celebrating the electrification of a district, he spoke about the wonders of electricity, encouraged factory workers and farmers to cooperate in building the state, and admonished listeners about observing the laws regarding economic matters (II/221 ). At a religious gathering in 1942, he criticized efforts to count all Greek-Catholic Slovaks as Rusyns and shortly afterward justified the confiscation of Jewish property with the slogan "Slovakia for Slovaks" (II/282). Aside from being an undisciplined extemporaneous speaker, one possible explanation for the SLOVAKIA 111 change in style was Tiso ' s need to account for the policies of the state in the simplest terms for the broadest range of listeners. Between 1918 and 1938, Tiso's public comments and writings focused in part or exclusively on the need for Slovak autonomy as fulfilling the promise of the Pittsburgh Agreement. The tenor of his mesages heightened over the years, and in February 193 7 he referred to Czechoslovakia as an "aberration of democracy" (1/243), although he uttered plenty of vituperative condemnations of the First Republic both before and afterward. Despite efforts to cooperate with supporters of Slovak autonomy in the camp of Lutheran Slovaks within the Slovak National Party and even Hungarian politicians in the 1930s, Tiso tirelessly strove to bind Slovak identity with the Catholic faith, to link the leadership of the nation to the Catholic clergy, and to advance his Hlinka' s Slovak People's Party as the only major political party to recognize and defend the Slovak nation as unique. After the Munich Agreement, Tiso became minister for Slovak affairs and then on October 6, 1938 premier of an autonomous Slovakia. During this time, Tiso concentrated on policy and restructuring the political system, which essentially made Slovakia a oneparty state. After Slovak independence on 14 March 1939, Tiso served as prime minister and then, beginning in October 1939, he became the republic ' s president. Tiso now sought to legitimize the new republic, justifying its independence and thanking Adolf Hitler for extending his protection to the Slovaks. Tiso linked Slovakia to Germany's successes and Germany's leadership in the construction of a new Europe. Beginning in 1943, roughly coinciding with the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, Tiso's references to Hitler and Germany became sparse, and Tiso did not mention either in his address in 1944 on the fifth anniversary of the Slovak state (ll/374). Tiso obviously wanted to distance himself from Hitler, but fewer references to his patron also suggest the limits of Tiso's acceptance of his own earlier rhetoric. Throughout the war, Tiso's description of Slovakia ' s mission on the Eastern Front as a struggle against Bolshevism, with its Jewish and anti-Christian influences, remained constant. In the final document dated 6 August 1944, Tiso ended with a prophetic statement: "we cannot deny that the Bolsheviks are at the border and that they promise the scaffold!" (II/389) . The two volumes reveal much about the development of Tiso's anti-Semitism. There are few references to Jews in Tiso ' s statements 112 SLOVAKIA between the world wars, and at one point in 1934, he even invited Jews, Germans, Hungarians, and Czechs in Slovakia to join with Slovaks in demanding autonomy (l/202). Nevertheless, there are occasional anti-Jewish comments, such as Ti so's call for land from the church estates parceled under the land reform to go to Catholic farmers , not Jews, nonbelievers, and speculators (l/78). During the Second Czecho-Slovak Republic, Tiso identified Jews as a foreign element whose presence in Slovak society must be proportionate to their numbers. Nevertheless, he warned that Jews should not become the objects of "hatred and sadistic tendencies" (I/32). His rhetoric against Jews heightened when Slovakia became independent, and in August 1942 he justified the removal of Jews from Slovak society as the elimination of an enemy, an act of self-defense in keeping with Christian morals. Loving oneself is a precept from God, according to Tiso, "and I think there is no need to convince anyone that the Jewish element endangers the life of a Slovak" (11/287). There is little evidence in these two volumes to suggest that Tiso 's antiSemitism was anything but genuine, but the addition of Tiso's intensely anti-Semitic Ny itra/Nitra articles make his hatred of Jews indisputable. The editors are preparing a third vo lume to cover the conversations of Hitler and Tiso as well as Tiso 's statements from the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising on 29 August 1944 through his 1946-1947 trial. They indicated their intent to include in the third volume addenda for the first two volumes and expressed their wish that historians inform them of additional documents. The inclusion of missing items- those signed with a pseudonym or abbreviated name and those whose authorship is disputable- is absoutely essential , not only for the convenience of researchers, but also for the sake of objectivity. Perhaps they can be in a section of their own. The editors had planned to include three indexes in the second volume, and one can assume that these essential tools for researchers will appear in the planned third volume. Specialists on Slovak affairs in the Habsburg Monarchy, the First Czechoslovak Republic, and the first Slovak Republic are greatly indebted to Fabricius, Susko, Hradska, and the others who contributed to the production of these two volumes . They anxiously await the appearance of the third volume in this indispensable series. SLOVAKIA 113 Max Domarus, Th e Complete Hitler: A Digital Desktop Reference to His Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945. Wauconda, Ill. : Bolchazy-Carducci, 2007. (CD-ROM edition). VASILLIS VOURKOUTIOTIS University of Ottawa While documentary collections concerning the Third Reich are not, generally speaking, difficult to come by, few students are exposed to the actual words of Adolf Hitler except as summarized by other compilers in wider works . The exception to this has been Max Domtarus' four-volume collection of Hitler's speeches. The compilation of this resource was linked to the history it attempted to capture. In 1932, Max Domarus was only twenty-two years old. Yet, he realized that in Adolf Hitler, Germany and the world were faced with a new phenomenon whose significance should not be underestimated. He began, in that year, to collect and compile as many of Hitler's speeches as he could find , and continued the project through the war years until Hitler' s death in 1945 . After the war, Domarus supplemented his collection as much as possible, and the resulting work, which included his annotations and commentary, was a four-volume set published in German. For each year in question, the reader is offered a detailed summary of events, and photographs from the Domarus archive. Full endnotes for each section yield bibliographical citations, as well as additional explanatory commentary. Each volume also contains a list of abbreviations which users will find helpful. Although some of Domarus' commentaries have been superceded by historical research, his perceptions remain as interesting in several instances as the speeches they comment upon. The four-volume set, even though it only covers Hitler's speeches from 1932 onward, remains the best single collection of the dictator's words. With this CD, Domarus's publishers have brought an important printed historical resource into the modem information age. An English-language translation accompanies the original German text, bringing to the user eight volumes of material in a single disk. Although presented in a chronological format, the speeches are in a searchable PDF format, allowing the student or researcher the ability to scan years of 114 SLOVAKIA material for keywords . For those with the language abilities and desire, the English version can be easily compared for accuracy with the German original. Given how long Hitler could speak for at a single event, it is not surprising that Domarus felt the need to offer exerpts rather than a stenographic record. This may strike some as a potential drawback, and might lead some researches to seek the full text of a particular speech of interest. The vast majority of users, however, will not find this a significant issue; Domarus' work has remained the standard reference for university libraries since its first publication in 1962 with good reason. Two versions of the CD ROM exist, the Standard and ePremium. In addition to the advantages of the Standard, the ePremium addition allows the user to print, copy and paste text directly from the PDF files into one's own documents, and add commentary to the texts. These enhancements will be of interest to those who work closely enough with the material in their own research. On the whole, in making both the English and German versions of Domarus' compilations available in such a format, the publishers have not only made an important work more accessible, but also provided a service to both students and academics alike. James Ramon Felak After Hitler, Before Stalin: Catholics, Communists, and Democrats in Slovakia, 1945-1948. Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. xv-261 pp. , notes, bibliography, index. M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Having perceived a negl ected period of history, James R. Felak set out to tell the story of the role of Catholicism in Slovakia in the period 1945-48, especially its relationship with the Communist and Democratic Parties. The essence of the book is that, even though both the Communists and the Lutheran leaders of the Democratic Party were either hostile to or suspicious of the Roman Catholic Church, both courted Roman Catholic voters in order to attain political power in post-war Slovakia. Having combed the relevant Slovak archives, and read the Communist, Lutheran and Roman Catholic press, along with most secondary sources on the subject, Felak carefully related what actually SLOVAKIA 115 transpired in Slovakia in the three years after the Second World War. He pointed out that the post-war National Front government that came into existence on April 3, 1945, reduced the pre-war political parties of Czechoslovakia from 16 to 5, and in Slovakia permitted only the Communists and Democrats. The two strongest pre-war political parties, Hlinka Slovak People's Party and the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party were banned as "collaborationist". That meant that the minority Lutherans could (and did) join the newly-formed Democratic Party, but the majority Catholics were disenfranchised. As a result, both the Communists and Democrats courted Catholic voters in anticipation of the May, 1946 elections, while simultaneously attacking the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, the self-appointed Slovak National Council, with its executive Board of Commissioners, nationalized all religious schools, seized most Catholic institutions, severely limited the size of the Catholic press and imprisoned two Slovak bishops. On the other hand, the Communists tried to persuade Catholic voters to vote for their party, because the Democrats were largely Lutherans . Indeed, the Communists even supported the creation of a Christian Republican Party, but the Catholics and Communists could not agree on its name, and this project fell through. The Lutherans, on the other hand, also wooed the Catholics by promising to split future political representation and patronage with them on the basis of a 7:3 ratio in favor of the Catholics. The Catholics found this promise more enticing than Communist overtures and, as a result, the Catholic and Lutheran politicians reached the so-called April Agreement on March 31, 1946. Since they were now united, the Catholics and Lutherans both supported the Democratic Party and won the 1946 elections with a convincing majority of 62%. Since they had lost the elections, the Communist Party of Slovakia went on the offensive. With the collusion of the government in Prague, where the Communists had more influence, and where certain Czech parties resented Slovak home-rule, Slovak Communists, led by Gustav Husak, negotiated the "Third Prague Agreement" of June 27, 1946, by which the Slovak National Council and the Board of Commissioners subordinated themselves to the Prague government. Then the Slovak Communists decided to try for treason the Reverend Jozef Tiso, former president of the first Slovak Republic ( 1939-1945). They saw to it that the National Court was domina- 116 SLOVAKIA ted by Communists who, as expected, found Tiso guilty and sentenced him to death on April 15, 1947. The hapless Democrats on the executive of the Board of Commissioners failed to recommend clemency and left the final verdict to the government in Prague, which upheld the verdict, as did president Benes, and Tiso was hanged on April 17. After this fiasco, Slovak Catholics lost faith in the Democratic Party, just as the Communists began their offensive against it. In the summer and fall of 194 7 the Communists fabricated an anti-state conspiracy against certain Catholic Democrats. On this basis Gustav Husak on October 31 staged a mini-coup in Slovakia by (with Prague support) illegally dissolving and then reappointing the Board of Commissioners in favor of the Communists. This was a prelude to similar tactics by the Communists in Prague in February of 1948, when three non-Communist parties resigned from the government in the hope of toppling it. Instead, the Communists, led by Klement Gottwald offered to form a new government and president Edvard Benes approved it. Thus, by February of 1948 the Communists had completed their takeover of both the Slovak and Czechoslovak governments and instituted totalitarian rule for the next 40 years, during which they tried (but failed) to completely destroy the Roman Catholic church in Czechoslovakia. Felak's book is well-written and comprehensive. Perhaps his greatest contribution is that he laid to rest the oft-repeated Slovak complaint that president Benes arranged for Tiso's death. Instead, as Felak convincingly shows, it was the incompetence of the Lutheradominated executive of the Board of Commissioners which was most responsible because of its inability to reach a consensus on the issue of clemency. They essentially "passed the buck" to Prague, where Tiso had few friends and that sealed his doom. In spite of Felak's meticulous scholarship, the book contained a few glitches and one omission. The slang expression "First off "appeared a few times (p.6), Stanislav Kirschbaum's first name was shortened to Stanley in footnote 5 on page 217, the surname Viktorin was misspelled Victory (p.63), and Banovce nad Bebravou was identified as Tiso's home town (p.100), when that honor goes to Vel'ka Bytca. Perhaps the greatest omission is the revelation that Ferdinand Durcansky, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the first Slovak Republic, who fled to the west after the war and tried to SLOVAKIA 117 organize an anti-state underground movement in post-war Slovakia, was actually controlled by Kim Philby, the notorious British spy who was, in fact, working for the KGB . Mark Aarons and John Loftus, on the basis of research in the files of the CIA in Washington, revealed this interesting detail in their Ratlines: How the Vatican Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets (London, 1991 ), pp. 21 19 and footnotes 46-50, page 334. Thus, the anti-state conspiracy of 1947 was carefully staged from abroad by the KGB as an excuse for the communist takeover of Slovakia. Edward Snajdr, Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2008 . xiii242 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, list of interviews, index. JURAJ HOCMAN University of Ottawa Edward Snajdr, an American cultural anthropologist at New York University, examined Slovakia's emerging civic environmental protection movement in the communist era and its rapid disappearance during the country 's post-communist transformation (19851995). The author did his fieldwork in situ and that is why it is particularly interesting to read about his experience. In the first two chapters, Snajdr focuses on urban and extraurban contexts of social life in communist Slovakia while providing general, yet adequate, historical background. The author traces the origins of environmental movements among young Slovaks and Czechs that had begun with associations such as SZOPK (Slovensky zvaz ochrancov prfrody a kraj iny - the Slovak Union of Protectors of Nature and the Countryside) in Slovakia and Brontosaurus in the Czech lands. He contrasts the difference between the effectiveness of state legislation designed to protect the environment in the massively and insensitively industrialized Slovakia, with spontaneous projects of young people whose aims were to improve the quality of the environment that surrounded them. Despite their local character, those efforts were not only efficient, but also inspirational. Snajdr then proceeds to the period from 1985 to 1989 during which environmentalist activities spread to the politics of discontent with the communist regime. He stresses the significance of the acce- 118 SLOVAKIA lerated drive for environmental protection in Slovakia during the period of perestroika and glasnost in the case of the samizdat Bratislava Nahlas (Bratislava Aloud). This publication, which voiced the concerns of ordinary citizens regarding disrespectful and harmful socio-economic policies of the communist regime, was prohibited by state authorities. Its editor, Jan Budaj, who became one of the most visible leaders of the "Velvet Revolution" in Slovakia in the fall of 1989, as well as the samizdat' s distributors, were harassed by the communist secret police (the StB). The fall of the communist regime might have become the new beginning of a friendlier approach to environmental protection in Slovakia. That is where the second part of the story begins. A new political reality in Eastern Europe, which was closely tied to nationalism, brought a new perspective on how to cope with the legacy of communism and its negative ecological effects. The members of the Slovak Green Party (Strana zelenych), which was formed in November of 1989, and was represented in the new Slovak parliament, took a firm stand against the completion of the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros dam on the Danube river, which formed the Slovak-Hungarian border. This started as a joint venture of the communist governments of Czechoslovakia and Hungary under a treaty signed in I 977. Hungary withdrew from the project at the end of the 1980s, bowing to pressure from ecologists at home and abroad. To Slovaks, as Snajdr observes, the project was a matter of national prestige and a rallying point against warnings of environmental risks that stood in the forefront of Hungary 's concerns. Snajdr elaborates on how its chief engineer, Julius Binder, defended the completion of the Slovak part of the project and gained the support of the Slovak public. From then on the Greens (Zeleni), who, in the meantime, split into two groups, the Czecho-Slovak federalists and the Slovak nationalists, started slipping into political obscurity and eventually returned to small and isolated projects of landscape revitalization at various locations . Thus, "nation won over nature" and Slovakia, together with representatives of the ecology movement, entered into an age of post-ecology. The book paints a credible picture of a former communist regime unconcerned with the ecological impact of insensitive industrialization and socio-economic modernization. The first part of the study, which analyzes the evolution of environmental protection, is more SLOVAKIA 119 cohesive than the second. If the second part appears a bit fragmentary, it is due to the overall ruptured character of the ecology movement in Slovakia in the second half of the 1990s. Though the sympathies of the author towards a cleaner environment cannot be overlooked, he did not take sides in intra and extra-national political conflicts. Apart from a few minor aberrations, such as the subtler use of the geographic term the Czech lands or the Czech Republic instead of Bohemia when referring to the second half of the 20 th century; and the incorrect transliteration of Gabcikovo-Nagymaros instead of GNagymaros, and Kvacian (gen . or accus; Slovak) instead of Kvacany (nom.), the book profits from its narrative and analysis based on the author's knowledge of theory and his authentic experience. It is an insightful contribution to the discourse on the continuing multilayered evolution of post-communist states and societies in Eastern Europe, in which ecology has played an important part. With Slovakia now being a member of the European Union and a signatory of international treaties on environmental protection, it would be interesting to discover whether the previous gap between government and civic initiatives has remained the same or has disappeared.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Book Reviews, Slovakia, Vol. 40 (No. 74-75) Description An account of the resource includes:<br /><ul><li>Ludevít Štúr (Ľudovít Štúr), Nauka reči slovensky (Gerald J. Sabo), p. 103</li> <li>András Gerö, The Jewish Criterion in Hungary (Yeshayahu A. Jelinek), p. 106</li> <li>Miroslav Fabricius, ed., Tiso, Jozef: Prejavy a články, vol. 1 (1913-1938) and vol. 2 (1938-1944) (Daniel E. Miller), p. 108</li> <li>Max Domarus, The Complete Hitler: A Digital Desktop Reference to His Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945 (Vasillis Vourkoutiotis), p. 113</li> <li>James Roman Felak, After Hitler, Before Stalin: Catholics, Communists, and Democrats in Slovakia, 1945-1948 (M. Mark Stolarik), p. 114</li> <li>Edward Snajdr, Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia (Juraj Hocman), p. 117</li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hocman, Juraj Jelinek, Yeshayahu A. Miller, Daniel E. (Daniel Edward), 1954- Sabo, Gerald J., 1945–2020 Stolarik, M. Mark, 1943- Vourkoutiotis, Vasilis, 1970- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 LCNAF LCNAF+dates https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/b4134cbe012ed95da160e500b7f956ce.pdf 5a5fd563ab9b0ecff7c73ad92c80a00b PDF Text Text 120 SLOVAKIA CONTRIBUTORS EDITA BOSAK is an Associate Professor of History at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is a specialist in I 8th and 19 th Slovak and Central European history, and she has published many articles in this field, as well as on the contemporary Czech and Slovak Roma. At present she is preparing a monograph on Slovak nationalism and Czech-Slovak relations . SCOTT BROWN received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington in 2010. He specializes in the Slovak question in the 1960's. He has published articles on such topics as the federalization debate of 1968 and the parallels between the Czechoslovak Spring and the Velvet Divorce. His current research is focused on Communist-era political cartoons in East-Central Europe. JAN CARNOGURSKY was Minister of Justice of the Slovak Republic from 1998 to 2002. Educated as an attorney (Comenius University, Bratislava, 1971), he specialized in defending political prisoners in communist Czechoslovakia. Disbarred for political reasons in 1981 , Carnogursky became a taxi driver but in 1987 the government forbade him to do even that. In 1988 he started to publish the underground weekly Bratislavske listy, for which he was arrested in 1989. Freed during the "Velet Revolution" of 1989, he was catapulted to the position of Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia. In March of 1990 he founded the Christian Democratic Movement in Slovakia and Chaired that party until 2002. Meanwhile, he served as Deputy Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic in 1990-1991 and as Prime Minister from 1991 to 1992. During 19921998 he served (in opposition) as a deputy in the Slovak Parliament. He is now retired from politics and practices law in Bratislava. �SLOVAKIA 121 MIROSLA V CHROMEK received his M.A. from Comenius University in Bratislava in 2008. He wrote his thesis on the Slovak intellectual and politician Jozef Stasko. He hopes to continue doing research on Slovak emigres in the West after World War II. STEFAN KUCIK, Paed.Dr., is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Catholic University of Ruzomberok, Slovak Republic. He specializes in Slovak history and the history of American and Canadian Slovaks. He is currently completing his Ph.D. at the University of Presov on "The Participation of American and Canadian Slovaks in the Autonomist Movement in Slovakia in 1918 - 1938." JAN PETROVSKY, is an Assistant Lecturer at the Catholic University of Ruzomberok. He wrote his M.A. thesis on Slovak Emigration to North America in the late 19 th and Early 20 th centuries. He is currently teaching English and history at the same university. �122 SLOVAKIA GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts for possible publication should be sent to the editor. Articles should normally not exceed twenty-five pages in length, should be typed double-spaced, should include footnotes at the bottom of the page, and should be submitted as one hard copy and one in electronic format, using either MicrosoftWord or WordPerfect. Text and format should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. Proper orthography and diacritical marks must be supplied for all foreign words. Manuscripts will not be returned unless specifically requested and postage is provided. Books for review are to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book reviews are not encouraged. ��THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA A civic and cultural federation of Americans of Slovak Ancestry Organized in 1907 DANIEL F. TANZONE President W. NINA HOLY Secretary - Treasurer Vice Presidents Gabriel Kovac Martha Kona Executive Board Daniel F. Tanzone, W. Nina Holy, John A. Holy, Eileen S. Wilson, John G. Duch, Esq., Stephanie Seigel, Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, Andrew M. Rajec, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., Larry M. Glugosh, Theresa M. Kluchinski, David M. Blazek, Kenneth A. Arendt, Steven M. Pogorelec, Irene J. Drotleff, Justine Wesnak Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S.A. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. McMurray, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes - Barre, Pennsylvania THE SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $ 10.00 per issue � 120 SLOVAKIA CONTRIBUTORS EDITA BOSAK is an Associate Professor of History at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is a specialist in I 8th and 19 th Slovak and Central European history, and she has published many articles in this field, as well as on the contemporary Czech and Slovak Roma. At present she is preparing a monograph on Slovak nationalism and Czech-Slovak relations . SCOTT BROWN received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington in 2010. He specializes in the Slovak question in the 1960's. He has published articles on such topics as the federalization debate of 1968 and the parallels between the Czechoslovak Spring and the Velvet Divorce. His current research is focused on Communist-era political cartoons in East-Central Europe. JAN CARNOGURSKY was Minister of Justice of the Slovak Republic from 1998 to 2002. Educated as an attorney (Comenius University, Bratislava, 1971), he specialized in defending political prisoners in communist Czechoslovakia. Disbarred for political reasons in 1981 , Carnogursky became a taxi driver but in 1987 the government forbade him to do even that. In 1988 he started to publish the underground weekly Bratislavske listy, for which he was arrested in 1989. Freed during the "Velet Revolution" of 1989, he was catapulted to the position of Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia. In March of 1990 he founded the Christian Democratic Movement in Slovakia and Chaired that party until 2002. Meanwhile, he served as Deputy Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic in 1990-1991 and as Prime Minister from 1991 to 1992. During 19921998 he served (in opposition) as a deputy in the Slovak Parliament. He is now retired from politics and practices law in Bratislava. �SLOVAKIA 121 MIROSLA V CHROMEK received his M.A. from Comenius University in Bratislava in 2008. He wrote his thesis on the Slovak intellectual and politician Jozef Stasko. He hopes to continue doing research on Slovak emigres in the West after World War II. STEFAN KUCIK, Paed.Dr., is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Catholic University of Ruzomberok, Slovak Republic. He specializes in Slovak history and the history of American and Canadian Slovaks. He is currently completing his Ph.D. at the University of Presov on "The Participation of American and Canadian Slovaks in the Autonomist Movement in Slovakia in 1918 - 1938." JAN PETROVSKY, is an Assistant Lecturer at the Catholic University of Ruzomberok. He wrote his M.A. thesis on Slovak Emigration to North America in the late 19 th and Early 20 th centuries. He is currently teaching English and history at the same university. �122 SLOVAKIA GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts for possible publication should be sent to the editor. Articles should normally not exceed twenty-five pages in length, should be typed double-spaced, should include footnotes at the bottom of the page, and should be submitted as one hard copy and one in electronic format, using either MicrosoftWord or WordPerfect. Text and format should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. Proper orthography and diacritical marks must be supplied for all foreign words. Manuscripts will not be returned unless specifically requested and postage is provided. Books for review are to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book reviews are not encouraged. ��THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA A civic and cultural federation of Americans of Slovak Ancestry Organized in 1907 DANIEL F. TANZONE President W. NINA HOLY Secretary - Treasurer Vice Presidents Gabriel Kovac Martha Kona Executive Board Daniel F. Tanzone, W. Nina Holy, John A. Holy, Eileen S. Wilson, John G. Duch, Esq., Stephanie Seigel, Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, Andrew M. Rajec, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., Larry M. Glugosh, Theresa M. Kluchinski, David M. Blazek, Kenneth A. Arendt, Steven M. Pogorelec, Irene J. Drotleff, Justine Wesnak Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S.A. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. McMurray, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes - Barre, Pennsylvania THE SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $ 10.00 per issue � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2010, Vol. 40 Description An account of the resource Vol. 40 (No. 74-75), 2010. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 120 SLOVAKIA CONTRIBUTORS EDITA BOSAK is an Associate Professor of History at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is a specialist in I 8th and 19 th Slovak and Central European history, and she has published many articles in this field, as well as on the contemporary Czech and Slovak Roma. At present she is preparing a monograph on Slovak nationalism and Czech-Slovak relations . SCOTT BROWN received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington in 2010. He specializes in the Slovak question in the 1960's. He has published articles on such topics as the federalization debate of 1968 and the parallels between the Czechoslovak Spring and the Velvet Divorce. His current research is focused on Communist-era political cartoons in East-Central Europe. JAN CARNOGURSKY was Minister of Justice of the Slovak Republic from 1998 to 2002. Educated as an attorney (Comenius University, Bratislava, 1971), he specialized in defending political prisoners in communist Czechoslovakia. Disbarred for political reasons in 1981 , Carnogursky became a taxi driver but in 1987 the government forbade him to do even that. In 1988 he started to publish the underground weekly Bratislavske listy, for which he was arrested in 1989. Freed during the "Velet Revolution" of 1989, he was catapulted to the position of Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia. In March of 1990 he founded the Christian Democratic Movement in Slovakia and Chaired that party until 2002. Meanwhile, he served as Deputy Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic in 1990-1991 and as Prime Minister from 1991 to 1992. During 19921998 he served (in opposition) as a deputy in the Slovak Parliament. He is now retired from politics and practices law in Bratislava. SLOVAKIA 121 MIROSLA V CHROMEK received his M.A. from Comenius University in Bratislava in 2008. He wrote his thesis on the Slovak intellectual and politician Jozef Stasko. He hopes to continue doing research on Slovak emigres in the West after World War II. STEFAN KUCIK, Paed.Dr., is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Catholic University of Ruzomberok, Slovak Republic. He specializes in Slovak history and the history of American and Canadian Slovaks. He is currently completing his Ph.D. at the University of Presov on "The Participation of American and Canadian Slovaks in the Autonomist Movement in Slovakia in 1918 - 1938." JAN PETROVSKY, is an Assistant Lecturer at the Catholic University of Ruzomberok. He wrote his M.A. thesis on Slovak Emigration to North America in the late 19 th and Early 20 th centuries. He is currently teaching English and history at the same university. 122 SLOVAKIA GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts for possible publication should be sent to the editor. Articles should normally not exceed twenty-five pages in length, should be typed double-spaced, should include footnotes at the bottom of the page, and should be submitted as one hard copy and one in electronic format, using either MicrosoftWord or WordPerfect. Text and format should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. Proper orthography and diacritical marks must be supplied for all foreign words. Manuscripts will not be returned unless specifically requested and postage is provided. Books for review are to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book reviews are not encouraged. THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA A civic and cultural federation of Americans of Slovak Ancestry Organized in 1907 DANIEL F. TANZONE President W. NINA HOLY Secretary - Treasurer Vice Presidents Gabriel Kovac Martha Kona Executive Board Daniel F. Tanzone, W. Nina Holy, John A. Holy, Eileen S. Wilson, John G. Duch, Esq., Stephanie Seigel, Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, Andrew M. Rajec, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., Larry M. Glugosh, Theresa M. Kluchinski, David M. Blazek, Kenneth A. Arendt, Steven M. Pogorelec, Irene J. Drotleff, Justine Wesnak Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S.A. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. McMurray, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes - Barre, Pennsylvania THE SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $ 10.00 per issue  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Back Matter, Slovakia, Vol. 40 (No. 74-75) Description An account of the resource includes Contributors; Guidelines for Manuscripts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/f0178ed3bde688ca66bfd471db259fb7.pdf 7ce99fb1536f60761be9983cd8ba8cb4 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA ��SLOVAKIA NUMBERS 72-73 2007 VOLUME XXXIX A scholarly annual devoted to the history, literature and culture of the Slovaks the world over Editor M. MARK STOLAR IK University of Ottawa Editorial Board ROB ERT K. EV ANSON Uni ve rsity of Mi ssouri MI C HAEL NOVAK American Enterpri se Institute PETER PETRO Uni ve rsity of Briti sh Co lumbi a JAM ES R. FELAK Uni ve rsity of Washington PATRICIA KRAFC IK The Evergreen State Co llege C AROLS . LEFF University of Illinoi s Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Madi son Street Passa ic, NJ 07055 , USA Inquiries regardin g subscripti ons should be sent to the above address. The cost of a sing le issue is $ 10.00 Manuscripts fo r possible publication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia 22 Bren-Maur Road, epean, Ontario, Canada , K2J 3Z7 sto larik@ uot tawa.ca ��Table of Contents ARTICLES The Slovak League of America and the Canadian Slovak League in the Struggle for the Self-Determination of the Nation , 1907-1992 M. M ark Stolarik ....... ..... ........................... ......... .......... .......... ...... ... 7 Slovak Partizan Commanders in World War II: The Case of Josef Trojan R. Vladimir Baumgarten .......................... ......... ................... ... ...... 36 Czechoslovakia 1945-1950: A Failure of Intelligence Igor Lukes ................. .. .. ........................... ............................... ....... 50 Janosfk as a Symbol of Freedom in Communist Slovakia Patricia A. Krafcik ............. .............................. .......................... .... 63 A Highway man' s Life: Extant Documents About Janosfk Martin Votruba .. ..... .... .......... ............ .. ............. ... .. ...... ................... 81 The I 988 Pilgrimage at Velehrad : Slovak Catholics and the Creation of a Public Space David Doe/linger ......................... ......................... ................ ......... 99 REVIEW ESSAYS Subcarpathian Rus' and the New Slovak Historiography Paul Robert Magocsi ....................... .................. ................. ......... 119 Zbornfk Filozofickej fakulty Univerzity Komenskeho, PHILOLOGICA LX Jan Simko ..... ............ .. ............................. .. ...... ... ...... ............... ..... 123 �4 SLOVAKIA REVIEWS Jan Steinhtibel, Nitriansk e knieiatstvo M. Mark Stolarik ................................ .... .. .... ... ... .................... ..... 131 Dusan Kovac et. al. , Na zaciatku storocia, 1901-1 914 Gregory C. Ference ....... .... ................ .................. .... .................... 132 Ivan A. Petransky, Stat a katolfcka cirkev na Slovensku, 1945- 1946 Jam es Ram on Pelak ............ ...................... ............... .............. ...... 134 Anton Hykisch, Ak o chutf politika Marcel Jesenskf ............. .............. .......... .... ..... ... ........ ................ . 136 Jan Rychlik, R ozpad Ceskoslovenska Jura} Hocman ........ ......... ....... ................................... ....... ..... .. ...... 138 Contributors ........ ............. ...... ....... .... .... ...... ... ................... .... .............. 14 1 Guidelines for Manuscripts ........... ........................ .. .......... ................. 143 �ARTICLES �� SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA ��SLOVAKIA NUMBERS 72-73 2007 VOLUME XXXIX A scholarly annual devoted to the history, literature and culture of the Slovaks the world over Editor M. MARK STOLAR IK University of Ottawa Editorial Board ROB ERT K. EV ANSON Uni ve rsity of Mi ssouri MI C HAEL NOVAK American Enterpri se Institute PETER PETRO Uni ve rsity of Briti sh Co lumbi a JAM ES R. FELAK Uni ve rsity of Washington PATRICIA KRAFC IK The Evergreen State Co llege C AROLS . LEFF University of Illinoi s Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Madi son Street Passa ic, NJ 07055 , USA Inquiries regardin g subscripti ons should be sent to the above address. The cost of a sing le issue is $ 10.00 Manuscripts fo r possible publication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia 22 Bren-Maur Road, epean, Ontario, Canada , K2J 3Z7 sto larik@ uot tawa.ca ��Table of Contents ARTICLES The Slovak League of America and the Canadian Slovak League in the Struggle for the Self-Determination of the Nation , 1907-1992 M. M ark Stolarik ....... ..... ........................... ......... .......... .......... ...... ... 7 Slovak Partizan Commanders in World War II: The Case of Josef Trojan R. Vladimir Baumgarten .......................... ......... ................... ... ...... 36 Czechoslovakia 1945-1950: A Failure of Intelligence Igor Lukes ................. .. .. ........................... ............................... ....... 50 Janosfk as a Symbol of Freedom in Communist Slovakia Patricia A. Krafcik ............. .............................. .......................... .... 63 A Highway man' s Life: Extant Documents About Janosfk Martin Votruba .. ..... .... .......... ............ .. ............. ... .. ...... ................... 81 The I 988 Pilgrimage at Velehrad : Slovak Catholics and the Creation of a Public Space David Doe/linger ......................... ......................... ................ ......... 99 REVIEW ESSAYS Subcarpathian Rus' and the New Slovak Historiography Paul Robert Magocsi ....................... .................. ................. ......... 119 Zbornfk Filozofickej fakulty Univerzity Komenskeho, PHILOLOGICA LX Jan Simko ..... ............ .. ............................. .. ...... ... ...... ............... ..... 123 �4 SLOVAKIA REVIEWS Jan Steinhtibel, Nitriansk e knieiatstvo M. Mark Stolarik ................................ .... .. .... ... ... .................... ..... 131 Dusan Kovac et. al. , Na zaciatku storocia, 1901-1 914 Gregory C. Ference ....... .... ................ .................. .... .................... 132 Ivan A. Petransky, Stat a katolfcka cirkev na Slovensku, 1945- 1946 Jam es Ram on Pelak ............ ...................... ............... .............. ...... 134 Anton Hykisch, Ak o chutf politika Marcel Jesenskf ............. .............. .......... .... ..... ... ........ ................ . 136 Jan Rychlik, R ozpad Ceskoslovenska Jura} Hocman ........ ......... ....... ................................... ....... ..... .. ...... 138 Contributors ........ ............. ...... ....... .... .... ...... ... ................... .... .............. 14 1 Guidelines for Manuscripts ........... ........................ .. .......... ................. 143 �ARTICLES �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2007, Vol. 39 Description An account of the resource Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA SLOVAKIA NUMBERS 72-73 2007 VOLUME XXXIX A scholarly annual devoted to the history, literature and culture of the Slovaks the world over Editor M. MARK STOLAR IK University of Ottawa Editorial Board ROB ERT K. EV ANSON Uni ve rsity of Mi ssouri MI C HAEL NOVAK American Enterpri se Institute PETER PETRO Uni ve rsity of Briti sh Co lumbi a JAM ES R. FELAK Uni ve rsity of Washington PATRICIA KRAFC IK The Evergreen State Co llege C AROLS . LEFF University of Illinoi s Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Madi son Street Passa ic, NJ 07055 , USA Inquiries regardin g subscripti ons should be sent to the above address. The cost of a sing le issue is $ 10.00 Manuscripts fo r possible publication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia 22 Bren-Maur Road, epean, Ontario, Canada , K2J 3Z7 sto larik@ uot tawa.ca Table of Contents ARTICLES The Slovak League of America and the Canadian Slovak League in the Struggle for the Self-Determination of the Nation , 1907-1992 M. M ark Stolarik ....... ..... ........................... ......... .......... .......... ...... ... 7 Slovak Partizan Commanders in World War II: The Case of Josef Trojan R. Vladimir Baumgarten .......................... ......... ................... ... ...... 36 Czechoslovakia 1945-1950: A Failure of Intelligence Igor Lukes ................. .. .. ........................... ............................... ....... 50 Janosfk as a Symbol of Freedom in Communist Slovakia Patricia A. Krafcik ............. .............................. .......................... .... 63 A Highway man' s Life: Extant Documents About Janosfk Martin Votruba .. ..... .... .......... ............ .. ............. ... .. ...... ................... 81 The I 988 Pilgrimage at Velehrad : Slovak Catholics and the Creation of a Public Space David Doe/linger ......................... ......................... ................ ......... 99 REVIEW ESSAYS Subcarpathian Rus' and the New Slovak Historiography Paul Robert Magocsi ....................... .................. ................. ......... 119 Zbornfk Filozofickej fakulty Univerzity Komenskeho, PHILOLOGICA LX Jan Simko ..... ............ .. ............................. .. ...... ... ...... ............... ..... 123 4 SLOVAKIA REVIEWS Jan Steinhtibel, Nitriansk e knieiatstvo M. Mark Stolarik ................................ .... .. .... ... ... .................... ..... 131 Dusan Kovac et. al. , Na zaciatku storocia, 1901-1 914 Gregory C. Ference ....... .... ................ .................. .... .................... 132 Ivan A. Petransky, Stat a katolfcka cirkev na Slovensku, 1945- 1946 Jam es Ram on Pelak ............ ...................... ............... .............. ...... 134 Anton Hykisch, Ak o chutf politika Marcel Jesenskf ............. .............. .......... .... ..... ... ........ ................ . 136 Jan Rychlik, R ozpad Ceskoslovenska Jura} Hocman ........ ......... ....... ................................... ....... ..... .. ...... 138 Contributors ........ ............. ...... ....... .... .... ...... ... ................... .... .............. 14 1 Guidelines for Manuscripts ........... ........................ .. .......... ................. 143 ARTICLES  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Front Matter, Slovakia, Vol. 39 (No. 72-73) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/d925da0d8a7832d0462546dec79e89fb.pdf f1f8f259cd81edb019364cc519241de2 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 7 THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA AND THE CANADIAN SLOVAK LEAGUE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SELF-DETERMINATION OF THE NATION, 1907-1992 M. Mark Stolarik 1 In the 20th century the American and Canadian Slovak Leagues pl ayed a major role in the struggle for the self-determination of the Slovak nation. Founded by immi grants who so ught a better li ve lyhood in the New World , the Slovak League of America played a leading ro le in the creation of Czecho-S lovakia during the Great War. In the inter-war years , the Slovak League of America, joined by its Canadian offshoot, bombard ed the central government in Prag ue with demands to grant the Slovaks in the newly-created state their promised autonom y. When the Slovaks achi eved autonomy in the fa ll of 1938, both Leagues rejoiced. When the Autonomous Diet procl aimed Slovak independence in March of 1939, both Leagues were caught by surpri se, but, after so me hesitation , they supported it. However, because Slovakia was allied with Nazi Germany , both Leagues had to te mper their support after Canada entered the war against Germany in September of 1939 and the U nited States followed sui t in December of 1941. After the war had ended , however, both the American and the Canadian Slovak Leagues demanded a plebiscite on the future of their countrymen in Europe. Having fai led to achieve thi s goal, both Leag ues, whi ch were buttressed by recently-arrived political emigres after 1945, decl ared their support for a new Slovak liberatio n movement which was first led by the Slovak National Council Abroad and, from 1970 on by the Slovak World 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented to the conference on "Emigration to the Engli sh Speaking world," Catho lic University of Rufo mberok, Slovakia, May 19, 2006. �8 SLOVAKIA Congress. After the Communist government gave up its monopol y of power in 1989, both Leagues sent fact-finding delegation s to Czechoslovakia and both supported the movement for Slova k independence, which became a reality in 1993. Since then , they have continued to help their countrymen to consolidate their independence. Between 1870 and 19 14 approx imate ly half a million Slovaks left their homeland in the Kingdom of Hungary and settled in North America in search of work. Once there, they established three pillars of their new communities- fraternal-benefit societies, parish churches and a newspaper press. Largely of peasant stock from eastern Slovaki a, they sought better wages in the coal mines, steel mills and oil refineries of the American Northeast and Midwest (Connec ti cut , New York, New Jersey, Pennsy lvania, Ohio, Indiana and lllinois). 2 The early arriva ls quickly di scovered that the United State s provided vi1tually no social services. Therefore, these immigrants establi shed their own fratern al-benefit societies which, from monthly membership dues, provided accident, illness or death benefits to their members or families , as well as a pl ace to socialize. By 1890 over fifty such fraternals existed and they then began to federate into nation al organizations such as the National Slovak Society , headquartered in Pittsburgh and the First Catholic Slovak Union, with its headquarters in Cleveland . Since the men initially excluded women from their organizations, Slovak women established the Zivena Beneficial Society in New York in 1891 and Catholic women established the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union in Cleveland in 1892. Lutherans established their own Slovak Evangelical Union in 1893 and Calvini sts their Slovak Cal vin Presbyterian Union in 1902. Even the tiny group of socialists estab li shed their own Slovak Workers Society in 1916. By 1920 American Slovaks had enrolled over 200,000 members in these, and other, fraternal-benefit societies. 3 2 For more details on the process of Slovak migration and resettlement in the United States see my Immigration and Urbanization: Th e Slovak Experience, 1870- 191 8 (New York: AMS Press, I 989), I-7 1. 3 For the story of Slovak fratern al-benefit soc ieties in the United States see my "A Place fo r Everyo ne: Slovak Fratern al-Benefi t Societies," in Scott Cummings, ed ., Self-Help in Urban America: Patterns of Minority Business Enterprise (Port Washington, NY : Kennikat Press, 1980, 130-41 and "Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in North America: An Overview ( 1883- 1993), in Matjaz Klemenc ic ed. , Etnicni fra- �SLOVAKIA 9 Besides the need for social benefits , Slovak immigrants also yearned for religious services in their own language. The fraternalbenefit societies led the way in establishing pari sh churches , in recruiting their priests and in supporting (or not supporting) them. Slovak Roman Catholics established 241 parishes, Lutherans 68 , Calvinists 9 and Greek Catholics (mixed parishes of Rusins and Slovaks) 155 by 1930.4 At least half of the Roman Catholic parishes also established parochial schools which taught their children to read, write and sing in Slovak, while all other subjects were taught in English. The Roman Catholics also established several religious orders to teach their children, as well as Benedictine High School for boys in Cleveland and Danville Academy for girls in Danville, Pen. 5 nsy Ivama. Finally, most of the immigrants from Slovakia yearned for news from their homeland and were also curious about conditions in the New World. Therefore, a small number of intellectuals, who had followed them from Slovakia, established a very vigorous newspaper press. Starting with a mere Bulletin in 1885, American Slovaks developed a full-service press that consisted of dailies, weeklies and monthlies , and that varied in orientation from nationalist to Magyarone, from secular to religious, from socialist to capitalist. By 1914 the combined circulation of the Slovak-American press was over 150,000, which was four times the circulation of the Slovak-langu- terna/izem v priseljenskich deie/ach/Ethnic Fratemalism in Immigra nt Countries (Maribor: University of Maribor, 1996), 147-59. 4 For the process of the creation of parishes, see my Growing Up on the South Side: Three Generations of Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I 880- 1976 (Lewsiburg: Bucknell Uni vers ity Press, 1985), 44-62; for the number of parishes of various denominations see Filip Hrobak, comp., and ed. , Slovak Catholic Parishes and Institutions in the United States and Canada (Cleveland: First Catholic Slovak Union , 1955), 3 I- I65; George Dolak, A History of the Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States of America, /902-1927 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955), 189-206; Jan Body & John Adam , comp. and ed .. History of the Slovak Zion Synod LCA (Pittsburgh: Zion Synod, 1976), 199-200; Kalendar pre slovenskych Kalvfnov, 1927 (P ittsburgh), 97- 147; and Paul R. Magocs i, Our People: CarpathoRusyns and Their Descendants in North America (Toron to: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1984), 14. 5 Hrobak, Parishes and institutions, 169-82. �SLOVAKIA . Hungary. 6 age press m As they were building the pillars of the ir new co mmunities in America, Slovak immigrants did not fo rget their homeland . Indi vidual immigrants sent several hundred million doll ars to support their fa milies in Slovakia in the period 1870-1914. In addition , Slovak fraternal-benefit societies and their leaders rai sed fund s for the Slovak National Museum, for Slovak schools and churches in Hungary, they paid for and published in the ir Almanacs articles written by Slovak inte llectuals, and they established schol arship fund s to support Slovak high-school students in Bohe mi a and Moravia. Most important of all , they fi nancially supported Slovak candidates to the Hungarian Parli ament and rejo iced when, for the first time in hi story, seven nati onall y-conscious Slovaks were elected in 1906.7 Meanwhile, since the 1867 "Compromi se," whereby the ruling Habsburgs of Austri a and the Magyars of Hungary agreed to divide the empire into the Dual Monarchy of Au stri a-Hungary, the Magyars set out to forcibl y assimilate all the non-M agyar nationalities in Hungary. 8 American Slovak leaders were aware of thi s poli cy of "Magyari zation" and joined their counterparts in Slova ki a in trying to combat it. To thi s end American Slovaks, reacting to urgings from Slovak leaders in Europe, organized a " national congress" to be held in Cleveland on May 26, 1907 . On that day over l0,000 countrymen fro m across America packed into Greys Armory and established the Slovak Leag ue of Ameri ca, whi ch would be the cover organization fo r all nationall y-conscious Slovak organizations in the United States. Thi s sa me congress also e lected the Rev. Stefa n Furdek of Cleveland (originally from Trstena, Orava county), fo under of the First Catholic Slovak Union, as its president and Peter V. Rovnianek of Pittsburgh (originally fro m Doln y Hricov, Trencfn county), foun 6 For an over-view see my "The Slovak-American Press," in Sall y M. Miller ed. , The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical A nalysis and Handbook (Westport, CT: Gree nwood Press, 1987), 354-68 ; fo r the circul ation of the Slovak-Ameri can press in 19 14 see my " Slovak Nati onalism in the USA as Refl ected in th e Slovak-American Press, 1885- 1918 ," Canadian Review of Studies in Na tionalism, 3 1 (Nos. 1-2, 2004) , 65-76. 7 Stolarik, Immigration and Urbanization, 185-205 . 8 The best desc ripti on of " Magyarization" is still Scotus Viator (R.W. Seton-Watson), Racial Problems in Hungary (London: Archibald Constable, 1908 ; reprinted by Howard Ferti g, New York, 1972). �SLOVAKIA 11 der of the National Slovak Society , as its first vice-president, as well as the presidents of all the other fraternals as vice-presidents. The League published its formal program of autonomy for the Slovaks in Hungary in September of 1914, just as the world was entering into the first of two world wars that would plague the 20th century. 9 While the League 's official program was autonomy for its countrymen in the Kingdom of Hungary , a small group of Slovaks dissented and called for the destruction of Austria-Hungary and the liberation of their people. These di ssidents were large ly organized in the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol , which had been established in New Jersey in 1896, and which adopted the program of the Czech professsor of philosophy T.G. Masaryk. ' 0 The latter had fled hi s homeland in the fall of 1914 and had started to organize a movement to liberate the linguistically-related Czechs and Slovaks from Au stria-Hungary and to create a new state on its ruin s. Masaryk was assisted in hi s quest by one of hi s form er students, the Paris-based Slovak astronomer, Milan R. Stefanik. Later, Masaryk was joined by another of hi s students, the sociologist Edvard Benes. This trio organized itself into a "Czech Committee" and hoped to persuade the western Allies, if they were victorious over the Central Powers, to dismember AustriaHungary and to allow the Czechs and Slovaks to establish their own state. 11 While Masaryk was an elected member of the Austrian Parliament, and in touch with hi s Czech colleagues, who approved of his plans, he had no mandate from the Slovaks in Hungary to include 9 Fo r the creation of the Slovak League see Jednota (C leveland), May 29, 1907; ~udove noviny (Ska lica), Jun e 4, 1907; Jan Pank uch, Dejiny Clevelandskych a Lakewoodskych Slovakov (C leveland: Jan Pankuch, 1930), 71-3 ; and Kon stantin Cul en, Dejiny Slovakov v A merike, JI (Bratislava: Slovenska Liga, 1942), 11 3-24 ; for the program of autonomy see " Memorandum Slovenskej Ligy v Amerike vydane menom americkyc h Slovakov," in Dr. Yacovsky [Milan Ivanka], Slovaci a Madari: Politicko-historicka uvaha (Pittsburgh: Slovak League of America, I 9 14), 10 I-7. 10 For the ac ti vities of the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol see Milan Getting, A merickf Slovaci a vyvin ceskoslovenskej myslienky v rokoch 19 14-1 9 /8 (Perth Amboy, NJ: Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol , 1933) 11 Masaryk and Benes left us the ir memoirs: T.G . Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations, 19 14-1 918 (London: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927; Edu ard Benes, Souvenirs de g uerre et de revolution (1914-1918), 2 Vols. (Paris: E. Lero ux , 1928). Stefanik left no memoirs but Jan Jurfcek wrote a sy mpathetic biography: M.R. Stefanik: t ivotopisny nacrt (Brati slava: Mlade !eta, 1968). �12 SLOVAKIA them in the proposed state. Therefore, Masaryk sought such a mandate from American Slovak immigrants, most of whom were not yet citizens of the United States, but whose leaders had been in close touch with Slovak leaders in Hungary before the war, and who had a mandate from them to speak on behalf of the Slovak nation . 12 As a result, Masaryk urged his Czech colleagues in the United States to seek out the Slovaks and try to persuade them to join in his liberation movement. American Czechs did so and on October 22, 1915 the Bohemian National Alliance, which was the cover organization of most American Czechs, and the Slovak League of America met and concluded the Cleveland Agreement, which was named after the city in which it was signed. In this Agreement, the two sides pledged to work for the destruction of Austria-Hungary and the creation of a new, federal state consisting "of the Czech and Slovak nations," with "complete national autonomy for Slovakia, with its own Diet, its own state administration, complete cultural freedom .. ..its own financial and political administration," and "with Slovak as the state language ." The Slovak League insisted upon these points because it knew that the Czechs would outnumber the Slovaks in the new state by three-to-one and the League did not want the Czechs to dominate the Slovaks as had the Magyars in Hungary. 13 Had the two sides respected the Cleveland Agreement, the liberation movement might have worked smoothly and led to a harmonious future for the Czechs and Slovaks. Unfortunately, T.G. Masaryk did not believe in the existence of separate Czech and Slovak nations. Perhaps because he was of mixed Slovak (father) and Czech (mother) origin, he believed that the Czechs and Slovaks 12 On August 6, 1906, political leaders in Slovakia sent their counterparts in the USA a letter in which they proposed to share the leadership of the Slovak natio n with them. The letter was published in lmrich Mazar, Dejiny Binghamtonskych Slovakov za dobu styridsat' rokov, I 879-19 I 9 (Bingha mton : Branch I04 of the Slovak League of America, 1919), 2 1-22 . The Czechs recog nized th at Slovak leaders in the USA were authorized to speak on behalf of the Slovaks in Hungary in an editorial that appeared in The Bohemian Review (Chicago), March, 19 18, p.47 . 13 Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 23 , 1915 , p.7 ; Jednota (M iddl etow n, PA ), November 24, 1915, p.4; Narodne noviny (Pittsburgh), November 25, 19 15, p.5 ; the original was published in Dokumenty slovenskej nardonej identity a statnosti, I (Bratislava: Narodne literarne centrum, 1998), 445-7; an English translation can be found in my "The Role of American Slovaks in the Creation of Czecho-S lovakia, 1914-1918," Slovak Studies, VIII (Rome, I 968), p.55. �SLOVAKIA 13 formed one "Czechoslovak" nation and merely spoke two dialects of the same language. Therefore, when he arrived in the United States in the spring of 1918 to seek the recognition of the American government for the liberation movement and was shown the Cleveland Agreement, he proclaimed it "out of date" and proceeded to negotiate a new one with the Slovaks. On May 31st, 1918 Masaryk in Pittsburgh negotiated a weaker agreement with American Slovaks. According to thi s new "Pittsburgh Agreement," the two sides approved a "political program to unite the Czechs and Slovaks into an independent state of Czech and Slovak lands," in which " Slovakia will have its own administration, its own Diet and its own courts." Furthermore, "S lovak will be the official language in the school s, in offices and public life generally." And the "Czecho-Slovak state will be a republic and its Constitution will be a democratic one." Noticeably absent from this Agreement were the phrases "federal state" and "complete national autonomy for Slovakia," and there was no mention of the "Czech and Slovak nations," as there had been in the Cleveland Agreement. 14 Members of the Slovak League of America, led by its president Albert Mamatey of Pittsburgh (originall y from Klastor pod Znievom in Turiec county), signed the Pittsburgh Agreement because by then the liberation movement, led by Masaryk, was in high gear. The newly-formed Czechoslovak Legions in Russia revolted against the Bolsheviks and seized control over the entire Trans-Siberian Railway. These Legions had been organized from prisoners-of-war by Masaryk and Stefanik, and their seizure of the railroad greatly aided the Allied war effort, because they prevented hundreds of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners-of-war from returning to fight on the western front. 15 In addition, si nce Masaryk himself had 14 Jednota, June 5, 191 8, p.5; N:irodne noviny, June 6, 1918 , p.5; Jozef Hu sek, "Prehl'ad vaznejsfch udalostf v hi storii I. Kat. Slovenskej Jednoty, Jednota Katolfcky Kalend:ir, 1931, (Middletown, PA), pp.58-9. Victor S. Mamatey pointed ou t that the date of the Pittsburgh Agreement was May 3 1, 191 8, not May 30 as the calligrapher erroneously wrote it. Cf "Este raz o Pittsburgskej dohode," Premeny (Flushing, NY), 20 (No.3 , 1983), 39. For the full text of the Pittsburgh Agreement see Dokumenty, QJ2&i.t. , 485-6 and for an English translation see my The Role of, QJ2,....ci_t., 56. 15 Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 20, 1918, p.5; New York Times, June 29, 1918, p.3 ; for a detailed di sc ussion of the Czechoslovak Leg ion see J.F.N. Bradley , "The Allies and the Czech Revolt aga inst the Bol sheviks in 191 8," Slavonic and East �14 SLOVAKIA drafted and signed the Pittsburgh Agreement, along with the Bohemian National Alliance and the Union of Czech Catholics, American Slovak leaders felt confident that Masaryk would honor it. Skeptics, such as Jozef Hu sek, editor of Jednota (originall y from Okolicne, Liptov county), the official organ of the First Catholic Slovak Union, the largest Slovak fraternal-benefit society in America, did not tru st Masaryk. lt was Husek who forced Masary k into drafting the Pittsburgh Agreement, and it was Husek who insisted that he sign a calligraphed copy of it on November 14, I 918 , the very day that the newly-created Czecho-Slovak government in Prague e lected Masaryk President of the Republic. After Masaryk signed it a second time, American Slovaks were sati sfied and hoped for the best for their people in the new Czecho-Slovak Republic, which was proclaimed by a gathering of Czec h deputies of the former Austrian Parli ament in Prague on October 28 , 191 8, just as the defeated Austria-Hungary was collapsing. 16 Unfortunately for the future of Czecho-Slovakia, the promi ses made to American Slovaks by T.G. Masary k in the Pittsburgh Agreement were not carried out. Once he had returned in triumph to the newl y-created Republic in Dece mber of 1918 , Masaryk promptl y forgot about the Pittsburgh Agreement. The Czec h deputies in Prague , meanwhile, formed themselves into a "Czechoslovak government" on November 14th and later appointed a Czech-dominated "Constitutional Committee" to draft a Constitution for the new Republic. 17 Hearing of these events, the Slovak League of America sent a five-person delegation to Czecho-Slovakia in the spring of 1919, to remind Masaryk of hi s promises and to demand that the Pittsburgh Agreement be included in the proposed Constitution . Upon their return to the United States, the Executive Board of the Slovak League passed a resolution at its quarterly meeting on October 24, 1919, Europea n Review, 43 (No. I OI , 1965), 175-92 . The lack of the word "S lovak" in Bradley ' s title testifi es to the pro-Czech bias of western hi storian s during the ex istence of Czechoslovakia. 16 Husek, " Prehl'ad," op.cit. , 58-9 ; Joze f Husek, " Pittsburghska Dohoda," Jednota Katolfcky K al endar, 1933, 11 I. 17 For more on these proceedings see Vaclav L. Benes , " Czechoslovak Democracy and Its Problems, 1918-1920," in Victor S. Mamatey & Radomir Lu za, eds. , A History of the Czechoslovak Republic. 19 18- 1948 (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1973), 53-6. �SLOVAKIA 15 calling for the incorporation of the Pittsburgh Agreement into the proposed Czecho-Slovak Constitution. 18 Indeed, at the last meeting of the Czecho-Slovak Nation al Council in America, which had been founded in 1917 to coordinate the work of the Leag ue and of the Bohemian National Alliance, the Slovak delegates asked their Czech colleagues to pass a similar resolution, and the latter gladly complied 19 on November 7, 1919. Thus, American Czechs recogni zed the validity of the Pittsburgh Agreement while the Constitutional Committee did not. Masaryk, on the other hand , when asked by Prime Mini ster Vl astimil Tu s:cir in January of 1920 to comment on the validity of the Pittsburgh Agreement, brushed it aside as " one of many pre-revolutionary program s made beyond the boundaries. It has its hi storical value." 20 As a result, in March of 1920 the Constitutional Committee drafted , and the Prague Parliament adopted , a very centrali st Constitution of the Czechoslovak Republic , which sy mboli ca ll y dropped the hyphen from its name , and proclaimed that " the Czechoslovak Republic is a unified, not a federative state ," that its official language was the "Czechoslovak language" (even thou gh no such lang uage existed) , and Slovakia did not receive its own administration, its own Diet and its own courts, nor did Slovak become the official language of administration, as promised in the Pittsburgh Agreement? In the inter-war period , after some hesitatio n, the Slovak League of America continued to demand the home-rule promi sed the Slovaks by T.G. Masaryk. Albert Mamatey, the president of the League, visited Slovakia with a copy of the Pittsburgh Agreement in the winter of 19 I 9-1920 and was reass ured by Mil an Hodfa, one of the leaders of the Czec hoslovak Agrarian Party, that the Slovaks had nothing to worry about. Indeed , in September of 1920 Mamatey was rewarded for hi s wartime services on behalf of Slovakia by being ap- 18 19 Jednota, October 29, I 9 I 9. p. l The Czechoslovak Review [Formerly the Bohemian Review], December, 1919, p. 394. T.G. Masaryk to Y lastimil Tu sar, February 5. I920 , as published in The Slovaks 20 and the Pittsburgh Pact (Chicago : Slovak Catholic Federation, 1934), p.34. Jii'i Hoetzl and V. Joachim ( Introd uction by) , The Constitution of the Czechoslo vak Republic (Prague: Ed ition de la Soc iete de I'effort de la T checoslovaqu ie. 1920), pp. I 2, 47 . 21 �16 SLOVAKIA pointed the Czechoslo vak Consul in Pittsburgh. 22 He was succeeded as president of the League by hi s colleague Ivan Bielek, the former editor of the American Narodn e noviny, offici al organ of the National Slovak Society.23 Jan A. Kocur, a pre-war immigrant from 24 Turzovka, meanwhile, became the League ' s secretary. Under thi s new leadership the 14th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Pittsburgh, PA on June 28-29, 1922, sent a Memorandum to the National Assembly in Prague in which it demanded that the Pittsburgh Agreement be made a part of the Czechoslovak Constitution .25 Meanwhil e, after some prodding by Jozef Husek, editor of Jednota, as well as by the leadership of the First Catholic Slovak Union and the Slovak Catholic Federation, the 15th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Binghamton , New York on May 27-29, 1924, rejected the philosophy of "Czechoslovakism" as practiced by the Prague government and once again demanded that the provi sions of the Pittsburgh Agreem ent be carried out. 26 In addition , the Slovak League now openl y supported the Slovak People 's Party, led by the Reverend Andrej Hlinka, because that party had adopted the program of the Pittsburgh Agreement. Indeed , in 1926 the Slovak League made Hlinka an honorary member. 27 Interestingly enough, the League was so committed to the Pittsburgh Agreement th at, when the Slovak People ' s Party ag reed to join the center-right Czechoslovak coalition government in 1927-29, the League denounced this step! 28 On the other hand , it heartily approved of the People ' s Party 's withdrawal from the coalition after the October 1929 trial and conviction for treason of Yojtech Tuka, editor of Slo vak, the People 's Party ' s official organ .29 Furthermore, in 1928, on the l 0th anniver22 Joze f Paufo, 75. Rok ov Prvej K atolfckej Slovenskej Jednory (Cleveland: First Catholic Slovak Union, 1965), 160. For a short biograph y of A lbert M amatey see Joze f Paufo, Slovensk f priekopn fci v A merike (Cleveland: First Cath olic Slovak Union, 1972), 269-75. 23 For a short biograph y of Ivan Bielek see Paufo , Slovenskf priekopnfci, p. 25-28. 24 For hi s biography see ilii.d.. , 229. 25 M emorandum Slovenskej Ligy v A merike upravene na vladu a Narodne Shromai denie Cesko-Sl ovenskej Republiky v zaujme vte/enia Pittsburghskej Dohody do ustavy C.-S. Republiky (Pittsburgh: Slovak League of A meri ca, 1922). 26 " Z XV. Kongresu Slovenskej Ligy v A merike." Jednota, June 4, 1924, pp. 1-2, 4. 27 Paufo, 75 roko v, 21 I. 28 lb.id... 223 . 29 " Prehlas od Ivana Bieleka,'· Jednota, October 23 , 1929, p.4. �SLOVAKIA 17 sary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, the League rejected a special commendation from the Czechoslovak government for its role in the liberation of the country.30 Thereafter the League continued to publish and send memoranda to the Czecho-Slovak government, as it had in the l 920's, demanding that it grant the Slovaks the home-rule that Masaryk had promised in the Pittsburgh Agreement. 3 1 During the 1930's the Slovak League and the People ' s Party closely cooperated for the benefit of both sides. At its 19th Congress held in Cleveland on November 19-20, 1934, the assembled delegates elected the American-born Chicago medical doctor Peter P. Hletko as their president and he and his executive board invited the nationalist cultural organization Matica slovenska to send a delegation of scholars and leaders to help American Slovaks to maintain their national identity. The Matica complied in 1935-1936 by sending its director, the writer J.C. Hronsky, the publicist Konstantin Culen, the art historian Jozef Cincfk, and the photographer Karel Plicka. They visited 98 of the largest Slovak-American communities, presented lectures, slides and films about Slovakia, and donated four large libraries to the Slovak communities of New York City, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Chicago. This delegation also gathered a wealth of published and manuscript materials pertaining to the history of American Slovaks , which are now stored in the Slovak National Library.32 The People ' s Party, which was the main supporter of the Matica slovenska, reciprocated in 1938 when it invited the Slovak League to send a delegation to the mother country in order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Pittsburgh Agreement. The 20th congress of the League, held in Pittsburgh on April 28-29, 1938, elected a six-person delegation, which included Peter P. Hletko and Jozef Husek, to travel to Slovakia, and to bring with it the original of 30 "Kongres Slovenskej Ligy," Jednota, June 6, 1928, p. l. See, for example the, fo llow ing: Prehlas Slovenskej Ligy v Amerike upraveny na vsetkych politickych cinitelbv Cesko-Slovenskej Republiky (Pittsburgh: P. Jamriska & Co., 1925); V zaujme pra vdy ! (Pittsburgh: P. Jamriska & Co., 1930); and An Autonomi st [Peter P. Hletko], Slovakia's Plea for Autonomy (Middletown, PA: Slovak Literary Society, I 935). 32 J.C. Hronsky described the Matica's trip and its achieve ments in Cesta slovenskou Amerikou: Cestopisne crty z r. 1935-36. v dvoch dieloch (Turc. Sv. Martin : Matica slovenska, 1940). 31 �18 SLOVAKIA the Pittsburgh Agreement. The delegation went via Poland, in order to first visit the Rev. Andrej Hlinka in Rufomberok, and only then did it proceed to Bratislava and Prague. In Bratislava on June 5th the Slovak League delegation appeared on the balcony of the Slovak National Theater on Hviezdoslav Square, along with Andrej Hlinka and other notables of the People 's Party. Peter P. Hletko then triumphantly held up the original of the Pittsburgh Agreement, to the cheers of over 100,000 people.33 Finally, on October 6, 1938, after the infamous Munich Agreement weakened Czechoslovakia and president Edvard Benes resigned his office and fled to the west, the Slovak People 's Party, with the support of the Agrarian and National Parties and the approval of Prague, proclaimed the autonomy of Slovakia and formed a six-man government headed by Dr. Jozef Tiso. He had succeeded Andrej Hlinka as party leader after the latter' s death on August 16th. The Prague Parliament formally approved Slovak autonomy on November 22nd and re-named the Republic as Czecho-Slovakia, to reflect thi s new reality. Needless to say, the Slovak League of America was overjoyed to see that, after 20 years of strugg le, the provisions of the Pittsburgh Agreement were finally carried out. 34 While the Slovak League was satisfied with the outcome of its efforts on behalf of the Pittsburgh Agreement, Adolph Hitler was not. The German Chancellor was determined to destroy Czecho-Slovakia and to incorporate Bohemia-Moravia into his "Third Reich." Therefore, he had his agents get in touch with the most radical individuals in the People 's Party, who were led by the recently-releasedfrom-prison Vojtech Tuka, and urged them to seek complete Slovak independence. Tuka and his followers began to plot against CzechoSlovakia and the Prague government reacted by declaring martial law on March 11th, by di ssolving the recently-elected Slovak Diet, 33 Hlas l'udu (Toronto), May 27, 1938, pp.l-2 , June 7, 1938, pp.1-4 ; Slovak v Kan ade (Montreal ), June 2, 1938, p. l; Osadne hlasy (Chicago), June 24, 1938, pp.12; Narodne noviny, Jul y 6, 1938, p.5. Photos of the delegation in Poland and in Slovakia can be found in J.M . Kirschbaum, Slovakia: Nation at the Crossroads of Central Europe (New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1960), between pp.264-265. 34 New Yorksky dennfk (New York) , October 9, 1938 , p.1; Kato/icky Sokol (Passaic, NJ) , October 12, 1938, p.l; Narodne no viny, October 12, 1938, p.l; Osadne h/asy, October 14, 1938 , p.l and October 21 , 1938, pp. 1&3 ; Jednota, November 2, 1938, p.3 �SLOVAKIA 19 and by arresting over 200 suspected "plotters" against the Republic. Meanwhile, Hitler's agents summoned the recently-dismissed Prime Minister Jozef Tiso to Berlin on March 13th and gave him an ultimatum: either proclaim independence or watch Slovakia be partitioned by Poland and Hungary. Tiso returned to Bratislava on March 14th, he persuaded President Emil Hacha to reconvene the Slovak Diet, and after Tiso passed on to the Diet Hitler's message, the Diet unanimously declared Slovak independence. Since Czecho-Slovakia no longer existed, Hitler ordered the German army to occupy BohemiaMoravia and turn it into a German " Protectorate." He also recognized the independence of the Slovak Republic, but forced it into a German alliance and put it under German protection. 35 When news of the declaration of Slovak Independence reached American Slovaks, they were at first puzzled and subsequently split into two camps-those who supported Slovak independence and those who did not. This split had first surfaced right after World War I, when certain American Slovaks chose to support the new, centralized Czechoslovak Republic, while others did not. Generally speaking, most Slovak Protestant societies in the USA, as well as those individuals organized in the militantly secular Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol (founded in 1896) supported the new state because they agreed with its official philosophy of "Czechoslovakism," that is, that the Czechs and Slovaks formed one nation but spoke two dialects of the "Czechoslovak" language. 36 The majority of American Slovaks, who were Roman Catholics, and were represented by the First Catholic Slovak Union and the Slovak Catholic Federation, among others, did not. Between 1919 and 1924 the pro-Czechoslovak group controlled the Slovak League. 37 After 1924 the Slovak nationalists regained control over the League, and continue to do so. Therefore, the Protestants and the Sokols (as well as Slovak Communi sts), rejected the independent Slovak Republic and hoped that 35 The best description of this period in Czecho-Slovakia ' s hi story is by Theodor Prochazka, The Second Republic: Th e Disintegration of post-Munich Czechoslovakia (Boulder: East European Monographs, 198 1); for an alternative view see Frantisek Ynuk, " Slovakia' s Six Eventfu l Months," Slovak Studies, 4 ( 1964), 7- I 64. 36 Milan Getting best represented thi s group and described their act ivities in his Americki Slovaci, ~ 37 " Z XV . Kongresu Slovenskej Li gy v Amerike," Q)hci.t. �20 SLOVAKIA Czecho-Slovakia could be resurrected.38 To this end they supported ex-president Edvard Benes's new liberation movement during World War 11. 39 The leadership of the Slovak League, largely representing the majority Roman Catholics, on the other hand, supported the new state. Indeed, Jozef Husek, who was elected president of the League at its 21 st Congress in Cleveland on October 14th, 1938, form all y requested president Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States on April 24, 1939 to grant the Slovak Republic diplomatic recognition.40 Shortly thereafter the Slovak League was heartened by a message ("Posolstvo") sent by Prime Minister Jozef Tiso to American and Canadian Slovaks on May 23rd of 1939. Here Tiso explained in 38 A group of Slovak Protestants (Lutherans, Calvini sts and Congregationalists), led by the Baptist preac her A. P. Slabey, met in Duquesne, PA on May 30th, 1938 and denounced the Hletko- led delegati on of the Slovak League to Slovakja that spring. Cf. Narodne noviny, June 8, 1938 , p.3; In the fall Jan Pankuch, a Lutheran and fo rmer mem ber of the Delegati on, regretted the granting of autonomy to Slovakia. Cf. Hla s (C leveland), October 13, I 938, p. l ; after the Slovak Diet declared independence on Marc h 14th , 1939 . the Lutheran-dominated Nati onal Slovak Society denounced this act. Cf. Narodne noviny, March 15, 1939, p. l , as did the secul arist and Sokol-do minated New Yorksky dennik , March 15, 1939, p. l. Slovak communists also de nounced both Slovak auto no my and independence. Cf. I', udovy dennik (Chicago), October 7, 1938, p. l ; October 8, 1938, p. I; March I6, 1939, p. l 39 Those American Slovaks who opposed Slovak indepe ndence and wished to see Czecho-Slovakja res urrected after th e war initiall y organi zed the mselves into th e Slovak Nati onal Council of America. However, they soon split into fac tions th at either supported ex-president Benes or else Dr. Milan Hodfa or Dr. Stefan Osusky, both of whom had fl ed to the West after the fa ll of France in June of 1940, and both of whom broke with Benes over the future of a res urrected Czecho-S lovakia. While Be nes wanted a return to the cent ra lized pre-M un ich Czechoslovakia, Hodfa and Osusky wished to return to a federated Czecho-S lovilia. Cf. Letters of Jan Dend'ur, Secretary of the Slovak National Council to Vlad imir Hurban, ex-Ambassador of Czechos lovakia in Washington, Papers of Jan Dend'ur, Box I , File A-S , Balch Institute at th e Histori cal Society of Penn sy lvania, Philade lphia; those who supported Benes joined the Czechoslovak Nati onal Co un cil of America and we re led by the Lutheran Rev . Jaros lav Pelikan, Sr. of Chicago. Cf. New York sky dennik, Dece mber 11 , 1941 , p. I. For a descri ption of the Benes-led liberation move ment see Ed uard Taborsky, " Politics in Exile, 1939- 1945 ," in Mamatey & Lufa , A History , QP..ci.1. , 322-42. 40 Letter of Jozef Husek to Frank lin Delano Roosevelt, April 24, 1939, publ ished in Correspondence in re Slovakia and the Declaration of the Aim and Principles of the Slo vak League of A merica (Middletown? Slovak League of America, 1940?), 1718. Husek sent a similar letter to Secretary of State Corde ll Hull on August 4, 1939, ilii.d., 19-20. �SLOVAKIA 21 great detail how and why the Slovak Republic came into being and he asked American and Canadian Slovaks to support it. 4 1 As a result, the 22nd Congress of the Slovak League, which was held on November 14-15 in Cleveland, and which re-elected Husek as its president, passed a resolution in which it fully supported the independent Slovak Republic. Furthermore, it called upon the United States government to grant Slovakia diplomatic recognition, and it deplored ex-president Edvard Benes's American speaking tour, in which he called for the restoration of pre-war Czechoslovakia.42 In the fo llowing October, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt received a IS-person delegation of the Slovak League led by Husek and Hletko during which they pledged their loyalty to the USA . They considered thi s meeting to be a moral victory, even though FDR refu sed to recognize the Slovak Republic. 43 On the other hand, because of attacks launched upon the Slovak League by the supporters of Edvard Benes, Husek and the Slovak League were investigated by the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities. Thereafter they were under FBI surveillance. 44 Since the United States entered the Second World War on the side of the Allies on December 7, 1941 , and since Prime Mini ster Vojtech Tuka of Slovakia foolishly declared war upon the United States shortly there41 Tiso was responding to a letter sent to him by Andrej Potocky, Supreme Secretary of the Canadian Slovak League, askin g for an ex planation as to why the Slovak Diet had declared independence. Cf. And rej Potocky to Jozef Tiso, April 20, 1939 and Tiso's reply, of June 2, 1939, with a copy of the " Posolstvo," in the Papers of Andrej Kucera, lmrich Stolarik Co ll ection, Box 576, fo lder 2, 1939, Slovak Archives, University of Ottawa, Archi ves and Spec ia l Collections, and in the Andrej Potocky Papers, box 282 , folder 4, I 939, lhid. Jozef Husek translated and published it as " Dr. Joseph Tiso to the Slovaks in America," in Correspondence in re Slovakia, QJ2,.Q!., 716. This " Posolstvo" was originall y published in Slovak in several pro-independence newspapers in the USA and Canada. Cf. S lovenske bratstvo (Montreal), Jul y 2 1, and July 31, 1939, p.3 . 42 Jednota, Novem ber 29, 1939, p. 3; H/as Judu, November 18 and 21 , p. I. 43 Jedno ta, October 30, 1940, p. I, November 6, 1940, p.2; Slo venske bratstvo, November I, 1940, p.2. 44 Hlas Judu , October 24, 1939 , p. l ; see also Jozef Husek's letters to Martin Dies, Chairman , Dies House Committee, October 6, 1939 and October 28, 1939, in Correspondence in re Slovakia, QJ2..ci.t. , 23-4. In the summer of 1970 I visited with Dr. Peter P. Hletko in Chi cago and he confi rmed that the FBI had him and Husek under survei llance throughout the war, a lthough Hletko struck up a friendship with those watching him . �22 SLOVAKIA after, the Slovak League had to become more circumspect m its pronouncements. It now pledged absolute loyalty to the United States, although it continued to passively support the Slovak Republic. 45 However, the United States Office of War Information arranged a meeting of all Slovak-American organizations in Pittsburgh on September 14, 1942, and urged them to sign a declaration in which they repudiated the Slovak Republic and pledged their loyalty to the United States and its Allies. 46 By December a dejected Jozef Husek resigned as president of the League.47 He was eventually replaced by the more cautious Msgr. Frantisek Du bosh of Lakewood, Ohio, at the 23rd Congress of the League held in Pittsburgh on February 25-26, 1943. 48 Since the Slovak League could no longer openly support Slovak independence, it had to lower its expectations. At its 23rd Congress it had to develop a new program for Slovakia and, at the same time, deal with the issue of accepting or rejecting two former hi gh-ranking Slovaks in the pre-war Czechoslovak government and bureaucracy who had come to America. One was the former Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, Milan Hodz.a, and the other was the former Czechoslovak Minister to Paris, Stefan Osusky. Both had broken with Edvard Benes after the destruction of Czecho-Slovakia. Hodza now recognized the Slovaks as a distinct nation but favored the resurrection of a federated Czecho-Slovakia within a Central European Federation . Osu sky also recognized the Slovaks as an independent nation and favored the resurrection of a federated Czecho-Slovakia as stipul ated in the Cleveland Agreement of 1915 , which he had helped to draft. After much debate, the League rejected both Hodza and 45 Osadne h/asy, December 19, 194 1, p.2; Jednota , January 7, 1942 , p.8. Pavel Jamriska, the vice-president of the L eague, pledged that " American Slovaks never betrayed and never w ill betray the Slovak nation and Slovakia." Cf. Jednota, January 2 1, 1942, p.4. Jozef Husek president of the League, added that " Slovakia should retain its freedom ," in spite of the war. Jednota, February 25, 1942, p.4. 46 Jednota, September 23, 1942, p. l and October 14, 1942, p.2. Thi s " Resolution " was reprinted in Martin Kvetko and Miroslav J. Licko 's edited Zbornik tivah a osobnych spomienok o S/ovenskom narodnom povstanf (Toronto: Stala konferencia slovenskych demokratickych exu lantov, 1976), pp. 396-7 w ithout any explanation. 47 I.:udo ve zvesti (Toronto), December 12, 1942, p. I and January 16, 1943, p.5. 48 Kanadsky Slovak (Montrea l), March 11 , 1943, p. I ; I.:udove zves ti, March 20 , 1943 , p.5. �SLOVAKIA 23 Osusky as former collaborators of the first Czechoslovak Republic and it returned to its pre-war program of "self-determination" for the Slovaks in the future. 49 When the Slovak National Uprising against the Germans broke out at the end of August, 1944, American Slovaks were once again divided. After some hesitation, the 26th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Pittsburgh on October 18-19, 1944, and most American Catholic organizations , rejected the leadership of the newlyformed Slovak National Council as too "Czechoslovak" and Communi st. 50 Most American Lutherans, National Sokols and Communi sts, on the other hand, cheered and recognized the leadership of the SNC. 51 To complicate matters even more, the People' s Party journali st Peter Prfdavok, who had initially rejected the Slovak Republic and had fled to France and Great Britain in 1939, al so broke with Edvard Benes and in 1943 establi shed a Slovak National Council in London . He immediately contacted the Slovak League of America and , after the 1944 uprising in Slovakia, counseled the Slovak League not to recognize the Slovak National Council in Slovakia. 52 The League did not do so until it heard of the promulgation of the Kosice Programme of April 5, 1945 , which recognized the Slovaks as a di stinct nation and which al so recognized the Slovak National Council as the government of Slovakia. Thi s was a major concession by representatives of Edvard Benes 's victorious government-in-exile, which by then had returned to Slovak ("Czechoslovak") territory on 49 Cudove z vesti, March 20, 1943 and Kanadsky Slovak, March 25 , 1943, p.4. After Osusky broke with Benes he publi shed a series of pamphlets in whi ch he denounced the latter: Pravda vfthzf 1 (Pohlhd do zrkadla druheho odboj a) (London : The Continental Publishers, 1942); Benes and Slovakia (Middletown, PA : First Catholi c Slovak Union, 1943) ; Triedenie duchov nastalo (L ondon : The Continental Publishers, 1943) ; Hodza ' s position was best reported in K anadsky Slovak, M ay 28, 1942, pp. 7 & 10. For Hodza ' s acti vities in the USA see Michal Mudry, Milan Hodi a v Amerike (Chicago: Geringer Press, 1949). For more on Benes's opponents during World War II see Jan Kuklfk and Jan Nemecek, Prati Beneso vi! Ceska a slovenska protibeneso vska opozice v Londy ne /939-1 945 (Praha: Karolinum , 2004). 50 Kanadsky Slovak, November 9, 1944, p.4; Jednota, N ovember 15, 1944, p.2. 51 Cudove zvesti, September 23 , 1944, pp. I & 4. 52 Slovenske bratst vo, M ay 24, 1940, p.2; Slo vensky priekopnfk, November 27, 1942, pp. I & 4; ~udove zvesti, M arch 18, 1944, p.5 ; Jednota, April 16, 1945, p.5; for a short biograph y of Prfdavok see Literarny almanach Slovaka v A merike, 1967 (Middletown, PA), 209- 10. �24 SLOVAKIA the heel s of the Red Army, and which by now included the Communist leader Klement Gottwald. 53 However, this "Washington Declaration" of April 6, 1945 by the Executive of the Slovak League of America was immediately denounced by Jozef Husek and Peter P. Hletko.54 Furthermore, the 27th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October of 1945 also repudiated it. Instead, the Congress reaffirmed the right of the Slovaks in Europe to self-determination. This Congress, which elected the Amercanborn attorney Peter P. Yurchak as its president, also announced a new fund-rai sing campaign to help rebuild post-war Slovakia, as well as to help thousands of political refugees who had fled the resurrected post-war Czechoslovakia.55 Meanwhile, the Slovak League had also sent a three-person delegation to the San Francisco meeting of the newly-founded United Nations from April 25th to June 21st. It was led by the Rev. Jan J. Lach of Whiting, Indiana, in the company of the poet, the Rev . Milos Mlynarovic, and the young Americanborn attorney Edward J. Behuncfk. The League had hoped that its delegation could speak on behalf of the Slovak nation but Jan Masaryk, son of the former president of Czechoslovakia, registered himself as a Slovak (whic h he was not) and, in hi s capacity as Czechoslovakia's new Foreign Minister, claimed that the Slovaks were well-represented at the United Nations, and therefore, did not need the services of the League. Lach was given only the status of an observer and could not participate in the debates about the future of Europe. 56 Meanwhile, Slovaks who had emigrated to Canada also took an interest in the fate of their countrymen. Since the United States Congress had passed three Immigration Acts in the l 920's, which severely restricted further migration from east-central and southern Europe to the United States, about 40,000 Slovaks moved to Canada in search of work in the l 920's and 1930's. Even though the government of Canada wanted them to settle on farms on the Prairies, they 53 For the text of the Kosice Program see "Kosicky vlad ny program," in Dokumenty, II (1998), 407-8 . 54 Osadne hlasy, April 20, 1945 , p.4 and June I, 1945, p.2, June 30, I 945, p.2 ; Kanadsky Slovak, June 14, 1945, p.5. 55 Osadne hlasy, October 26, 1945, p. l ; Kanadsky Slovak, November I, 1945. 56 Jednota , May 23, I 945 , p. l; Osadne hlasy, May 25, 1945, p.4; I'.udove zvesti, June 9, 1945, p.4, and Jul y 2 1, 1945 , p.2. �SLOVAKIA 25 largely headed to the metropolitan areas of Winnipeg, Fort William, Montreal and Toronto. There, they quickly copied their American countrymen and established fraternal-benefit societies, parishes and newspapers. Indeed, they originally joined American-Slovak organizations, subsc ribed to their newspapers and were served by SlovakAmerican priests and mini sters. 57 However, when the Great Depression broke out in 1929, SlovakCanadians di scovered that they had to look out for themselves. For instance, when the Slovak League of America announced that it was raising funds to provide food and clothing for its members who were in dire straits, Canadian members of the Slovak League , who had organized fifteen branches in Canada, applied for thi s " relief. " They were shocked when Jan A. Kocur, the Leag ue 's Secretary , replied that American Slovaks had only enough resources to help themselves, and could not afford to help Slovaks in Canada. 58 Therefore, led by Andrej Kucera of Winnipeg (ori ginall y from Radosovce, in Bratislava county) representatives of three Canadian branches of the Slovak League of America met in Winnipeg in 1932 and organized the Slovak League of Canada which, when it was officially incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1934, had its name changed to the Canadian Slovak League. Meanwhile, in order to help its countrymen to survive the Great Depression, leaders of the Canadian Slovak League organized it into a fratern al-benefit society, as well as a nationalist organization. 59 The national orientation of the Canadian Slovak League mirrored that of its American parent. Thus, in November of 1933 the Central Assembly of the Canadian Slovak League sent president T . G. Masa57 For a brief history of the Slovaks in Canada see the entry by Elena Jakesova and M. Mark Stolarik in the Encyclopedia of Canada 's Peoples, ed. By Paul R. Magocsi (Toronto: Uni versity of Toronto Press, 1999), 11 68-79. For a longer treatment see J. M. Kirschbaum , Slovaks in Canada (Toronto: Canadian Eth ni c Press Association of Ontario, 1967). 58 See the correspondence between Kucera and Kocur in the Papers of Andrej Kucera, Lmrich Stolarik Collection, Box 575, fo lder 7, 1928- 1934, Slovak Archives in the Archives and Special Collections, Uni versity of Ottawa and Kucera 's article on the 10th an ni versary of the fo unding of the CSL, Kanadsky Slovak, December 17, 1942, pp. 1-2. For a fuller description see " Pociatky a rozvoj Kanadskej Slovenskej Ligy ," in lmrich Stolarik ed. , Kanadska Slovenska Liga: 35 rocna: Historicky nacrt (19321967) (Toronto: Kanadska Slovenska Liga, 1967), 18-20. 59 Ibid. 2 1-26. �26 SLOVAKIA ryk of Czechoslovakia a reso lution demanding that the Pittsburgh Agreement be incorporated into the Constitution of the Republic.6() Indeed, in 1935 the two Leagues sent a joint appeal to all voters in Slovaki a to support only those political parties that recognized the Pittsburgh Agreement. 61 After Slovakia achieved its autonomy in the fall of 1938, the Canadian Slovak League, like its American counterpart, welcomed this autonomy and congratulated Dr. Jozef Tiso, its first Prime Minister. 62 After the Slovak Diet proclaimed the independence of Slovakia on March 14th, 1939, Canadian Slovaks, like their American cousins, were initially caught off guard and divided over the issue. To clarify matters, Andrej Potocky (w ho hailed from Sedliacka Dubova, Orava county) , the secretary of the Canadian Slovak League, addressed a letter to Dr. Jozef Tiso and asked him for an explanation. Tiso replied in May in his already-mentioned "Posolstvo" and both Leagues published it in newspapers that supported their politics. 63 Thereafter, both Leagues supported the independent Slovak Republic as much as they could. The Canadian Slovak League, like its American counterpart, also rejected Edvard Benes's World War II liberation movement, as well as Milan Hodfa' s plans for a Central European federation. 64 It seriously considered sending a delegate to the San Francisco meeting of the United Nations in 1945 , but could not afford to do so. 65 Meanwhile, delegates to the 28th Congress of the Slovak League of America, held in Detroit on October 29-30th, 1946 and to the 7th Convention of the Canadian Slovak League held in neighboring Windsor on October 28-30th of the same year, iss ued a joint resolution wherein they rejected the resurrected post-war Cze60 See the "Ustredn a sprava Slov . Ligy v Kanade: Rezolucia" , dated November 6, 1933, Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the Papers of Andrej Kucera, QJlii1. 61 Kucera to Kocur, March 30, 1935, ibid 62 Centra l Assembly of the Canadian Slovak Leag ue to Dr. Jozef Tiso, January 2 1, 1939, i..b.id... 63 Andrej Potocky to Jozef Tiso, April 20, 1939 and Jozef Tiso to Andrej Potocky, June 2, 1939 plus the ' Posolstvo" dated May 23, 1939 in ilii..d. See also Slovenske bratstvo, Jul y 21 , 1939, p.3 and Jul y 28 , 1939, p.3. 64 S lovenske bratstvo, August 4, 1939 , p.4 ; March 15, 1940, p. I; Kanadsky Slovak, August 6, 1942, p.2 and December 9, 1943 , p.2 65 Letter of Msgr. F.J. Dubosh, president of the Slovak league of Ameri ca to Jan Ivan of the Canadian Slovak League, March 25 , 1945 , papers of Andrej Kucera, QJlii1. �SLOVAKIA 27 choslovakia and instead declared their support for the re-establishment of an independent Slovak Republic. 66 This political stand by both Leagues was reinforced by the arrival of post-war political refugees from Slovakia. Several thou sand supporters of the independent Slovak Republic, consisting of government officials, bureaucrats, soldiers and intellectuals fled the advancing Red Army in the winter and spring of 1945 and settled in Upper Austria and, eventually, in the defeated Germany. From there they sent appea ls to both Slovak Leagues for financial and other assistance. The two Leagues responded by sending them material goods, by arranging for surplus Red Cross packages to be distributed among them and, most importantly, by persuading the International Refugee Organization to recognize them as refugees and to help them emigrate out of war-torn Europe.67 One of the Slovak League of America's first successes was the appointment of Dr. Jozef Kirsc hbaum as its official delegate to the IRO in September of 1947.68 Kirschbaum had been the Slovak Charge d ' Affaires in Switzerland for most of the 66 Indeed , the Canadian Slovak League had also deplored the April 6, 1945 "Washington Resolution" of the Slovak League of America. CF. Andrej Kucera to Msgr. F. Dubosh, October 12, 1945, Papers of Andrej Ku cera, lmrich Stolarik Fonds, Box 572, file 1945 , Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library, University of Ottawa; Kanadsky Slov;:ik, November 16, 1946, p.2 and January 2, 1947, p.3. 67 See the " Memorandum" drafted by the writer Milo Urban to the Slovak League of America dated May 30 , 1945, as publi shed on its 20th an ni versary in K anadsky Slovak, May 29, 1965, p. 2 and September 4, 1965, p.3; see also Osadne hlasy, Jul y 6, 1945, p.2, Apri l 4, 1947, p.l and April 11 , 1947, p.2; see also Kanadsky Slovak, Jul y 12, 1945, p.2. A preliminary li st of these refugees in Austria was compiled by the Czechoslovak Ambassador to Switzerland and se nt to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague because the Czechoslovak government wished to " repatriate" some of them. Cf. Slove nsky narodn y arc hfv, PY , beop.- lll dov. , 1945, 6. Sept. , 1945, Ministerstvo zahrani cnfch veci. Praha, 26079/11-2/45 . No-one has yet written a schol arl y acco unt of this phenomenon as it pertains to the Slovaks. However. l:ubomfr Gleiman , one of these refugees, has penned hi s reminiscences in a manuscript entitled "Out of thi s Century ' s Mae lstro m: A Pilgrim 's Story of Disse nt and Surviva l," (Cary , NC: 200 I ). A co py of this manuscript, as well as his father' s diaries from 1944 to 1954, on whi ch the manuscript is partly based, can be found in the Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library, University of Ottawa, Canada. For a general description of the plight of post-war refugees see Mark Wyman , DP: Europe 's Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 (Philadelphia: The Balch Institute Press, 1989). 68 Kanadsky Slovak, May 27, 1948, p.2 and June I 0, 1948, p. l. �28 SLOVAKIA war. Since he had acti vely supported the creation of the Slovak Republic , he refu sed to return to post-war Czechoslovakia. Instead, he worked vigorou sly with both Slovak Leagues to arrange for the emigration of hundreds of Slovaks to the USA and Canada, once these countries opened their borders to post-war refugees in 1947 and 1948. 69 As the refugees began to arrive in the United States and Canada, they quickly joined the two Slovak Leag ues and reinforced their commitment to Slovak independence. The first to come to the USA was the poet, the Rev . Mikul as Sprinc. He arrived in Jul y of 1946, settled in Cleveland, and immediate ly informed the executive of the Slovak League of what had actually transpired during the existence of the Slovak Republic.70 That is why the Slovak League, at its 28th Congress in Detroit called for a plebiscite to be held in Slovakia to decide its future and it also appealed for a fair trial for Dr. Jozef Tiso. 7 1 The latter had evacuated to Austria with the Slovak government in the dying days of the war but was turned over to Czechoslovak authorities by the victorious American Army. 72 Meanwhile, the historian Dr. Frantisek Hrusovsky arrived in the USA at the end of 1947 and he also joined the Slovak League. Indeed, after Jan A. Kocu r died , Hrusovsky was elected the Secretary of the League at its 30th Congress in Chicago in March of 1948. On September 15, 1952, largely on hi s initiative, the Slovak Institute was established at the Slovak Benedictine Abbey in Cleveland, Ohio, 73 and Hrusovsky became its first director. In 1950 Dr. Jozef Pauco gained admittance to the USA. Thi s former editor of the dail y Slovak, official organ of the Slovak Peo- 69 Author interview with J.M. Kirschbaum, November 7, 1998.He recorded his political views and activities in Nas boj o sam ostatnost' Slovenska (C leveland: Slovak Institute, 1958; reprinted and updated by the Matica slovenska, 2000). 70 Paufo , 75. Rokov QJU;lL 353; Sprinc described his trip to the USA in K slobodnym pobreiiam (Scranton, PA : Obrana Press, 1949). 71 See footnote 65 . 72 For Tiso' s activities during and after World War II , as penned by hi s forme r personal secretary, see Karo l Murin, Spomienky a svedectvo (Hami lton,Ontario: Zahranicna Matica slovenska, 1987). 73 Kanadsky Slovak, October 30, 1947 , pp.1 -2, November 6, 1947 , pp.I & 7, March 17, I949, p. 1. For a short biograph y see " Dr. Frantisek Hrusovsky ," in Literarny Almanach Slovaka v Amerik e, 1967 (Middletown, PA), 16 1-2. �SLOVAKIA 29 pie' s Party , initially found employment as assistant editor of the weekly fraternal Jednota , which was published in Middletown, PA. In 1958 he became editor and in 1964 also publisher of the weekly Slovak v Amerike, the oldest Slovak newspaper in America. In 1962 Pauco was elected Secretary of the Slovak League of America, a 74 post which he held until his death in 1975. Finally, in 1952 Dr. Jozef A. Mikus came to the USA. This former Slovak Charge d ' Affaires in Spain fled his homeland after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. He initi ally lived in Paris but after four years he moved to Washington , D.C. For the first five years of his life in the USA he was employed by the Slovak League as its Press Secretary. After that he taught at various American colleges until his retirement. He also remained active within the Slovak League and the Slovak World Congress. 75 While a few post-war Slovak refugees managed to gain entry into the United States after the war, the majority headed for Canada, because the latter opened its doors to refugees first. Among the most important to arrive in 1949 were Dr. Karol Murin, the former personal secretary of president Jozef Tiso, Dr. Jozef Kirschbaum (mentioned earlier) and the publicist and historian Konstantin Culen. 76 In 1950 Karol Sidor, former Slovak Ambassador to the Vatican, and the most prominent of all the emigres, made his way to Montreal. 77 All of them immediately joined the Canadian Slovak League and Culen even became editor of its weekly Kanadsky Slovak from 1952 to 74 Ibid. , 200-2. Kanadsky Slovak, May 18, 1950, p.2. Ibid., 188-9. Kanadsky Slovak, January 24, 1952, p.5 and June 21 , 1952, p.7. The complete life of Jozef Mikus can be reconstructed in "The Jozef Mikus Fonds" located in the Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library , University of Ottawa. 76 Kanadsky S lovak, February 10, 1949, p. I; £udove zvesti, March 12. 1949, p.4, February 25, 1950, p.4. For biographies of Murin and Cu len see Literarny almanach S/ovaka v Amerike, / 967 (Middletown, PA), 129-30 and 194-95. 77 Andrej Kucera to Andrej Potocky, Apri l 6, 1950, Papers of A. Kucera, lmrich Stolarik Collec tion. Box 576, fo lder 7. 1950, Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library , University of Ottawa; Kanadsky Slovak, April 20, 1950, p.5; letter of Karol Sidor to lmrich Stolarik, January 12, 1951 , Joseph Stasko Fonds, Slovenska narodna rada v zahranicf, Box 30, Series II , File 4, Subfile 4.1 , Folder 22, ARCS 92-3 , Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Mori sset Library, University of Ottawa. For more on Sidor see Literamy almanach I 967, 2212. 75 �30 SLOVAKIA 1956. Needless to say, these emigres strengthened the League's commitment to promoting Slovak independence. Indeed, they and their American counterparts started to celebrate the anniversary of Slovak independence (Marc h 14th) as early as 1947.78 Both of the Slovak Leagues, meanwhile, denounced the execution of Dr. Jozef Tiso after he was found gui lty of treason by the Communist-dominated National Court in Bratislava in April of 1947. 79 After the Communist takeover of power in Czechoslovakia in February of 1948, a new wave of political refugees fled to the West. This was a mixture of Slovaks who favored independence and those who did not. Those refugees who had fled to the west after 1945 seized the initiative and re-established the Slovak National Council Abroad in the fall of 1948 and elected Karol Sidor as its president and Peter Pridavok of London as its secretary. 80 Those who wished Czechoslovakia to continue, but were opposed to its communist government, organized themselves into the Council for a Free Czechoslovakia, led by Dr. Jozef Lettrich , the former Chairman of the postwar Democratic Party in Slovakia. 81 Both Slovak Leagues rejected Lettrich and his followers as early as 1946 and instead supported the Slovak National Council Abroad .82 Indeed, both Slovak Leagues had previously also rejected the more radical Slovak Action Committee, founded in Rome in 1946 by Dr. Ferdinand Durcansky, the first Foreign Minister of the Slovak Republic .83 Rivalries between the leaders of the Slovak National Council Abroad and that of the Slovak Action Committee seeped into both Leagues and caused much in- 78 Osadne hlasy, March 14, 1947, p.l ; Kanadsky Slovak, April JO and 17, 1954, pp.2-4. 79 Osadne hlasy, April 25 , 1947, pp. I & 2; Kanadsky Slovak, May 8, 1947, p.l, October 30, 1947, pp. 1-2 and November 6, 1947, pp. I & 7; for the reminiscences of the chief prosecutor and the chief defense attorney at thi s trial see Proces s dr. 1. Tisom (Bratislava: Tatra Press, 1990). 8 Kanadsky Slovak, June 24, 1948 , p.3 , December I6, 1948 , p. I and December 30, 1948, p.3 ; Kirschbaum , Nas boj, QJ1.&iL (2000) , 370- 1. 81 Spetko, "Slovenska exi lova," QJ1.&iL 247-8. 82 Kanadsky Slovak, April 11 , 1946, p.5; Ferdinand Durcansky to Andrej Kucera, September 8, 1949, in Papers of A. Kucera, Correspondence with Refugees in Europe, Box 572, lmrich Stolarik Fonds, Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa. 83 Durcansky, Ibid. For more on Durcansky see Literarny almanach 1967 , 137-9. ° �SLOVAKIA 31 fighting among both in the 1950's. 84 The matter was finally settled in 1960 when the two sides decided to merge into the Slovak Liberation Council, with two co-chairmen: Dr. Jozef Kirschbaum in Toronto (Sidor had died in 1953) and Dr. Ferdinand Durcansky in Munich. 85 Meanwhile, in 1962, Dr. Peter P. Hletko, once again became president of the Slovak League of America, which had undergone some turbulent times. Hletko had succeeded Filip A. Hrobak, editor of Jednota , who had become president in 1950 . The American-born Hrobak was an activist, who had established the Slovak League 's Information Office in Washington in 1952, as well as the Englishlanguage periodical Slovakia in 1950 to champion the independence of his cousins overseas. Meanwhile, Hrobak also had to referee an intense rivalry that broke out between various factions in the League, a rivalry that resulted in the di smissal of Konstantfn Culen from the directorship of the Slovak institute in Cleveland (he had come down from Canada in 1956 and was made director of the Institute shortly after the death of Hrusovsky in the same year) and his banishment from Slovak-American life. 86 Hletko, who had largely been responsible for Culen's dismissal, congratulated the Canadian Slovak League on its 30th anniversary and remarked that it had become " more active" than the Slovak League of America. 87 He may have had in mind the fact that, on March 16th, 1953 (strategically close to the 14th anniversary of Slovak independence on March 14th), the First 84 See the letter of A. Ku cera to Jozef Siksa dated March 20, 1950 as well as the circ ul ar letter of Ferdinand Durcansky dated February 9, 1951, an undated letter from early 195 1, as well as letters from Michael Yargovic , president of the First Catholic Union , dated February 19, 1951 and Fi lip A. Hrobak, president of the Slovak League of America, dated February 20. 1951 , in the Papers of A. Kucera, Qlhci..!.; see also Kanadsky Slovak, January 17, 1952, p.3 and February 14, 1952, p.2, and November 5, 1955, p.2. See also l',udove zves ti. February I, 1958, p.6, and March I, 1958, p.4. 85 Kanadsky Slovak, October 11 , 1958, p.1 , March 2 1, 1959, p.1 , June 4, 1960, p.1 and June 18, 1960, p. I ; l',udove zvesti, September I, 1960, p.6 86 Kanadsky Slovak, June 8, 1950, p.1 , June 2 1, 1952, p.7 , June 27, 1959, p.1 ; I.:udove zvesti, June 17, 1950, p.2 ; for Konstantin Cu len's problems with Hletko and other American Slovak leaders see hi s V zajatf fa losnych legiend od nenavistneho srdca, 11 Vols. (Mim ieographed, New York, 1961). Frantisek Ynuk, in his Z ivotopis Konstantfna Culena (Cleveland: Slovak Institute, 1984), 190-93 also touched on this problem. 87 Kanadsky Slovak, December 15 , 1962, p. I. Filip A. Hrobak, a few years earlier, had expressed simi lar sentiments ; cf. Kanadsky S lovak, July 18, 1959, p. I. �32 SLOVAKIA District Assembly of the Canadian Slovak League had organized a gala banquet at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Leag ue. Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, four cabi net ministers and 25 mem bers of the Canadian Parliament attended! 88 Thi s diplomati c "coup" by the Canadian Slovak League was not matched by its American counterpart. The most the Slovak League of America was able to accomplish on the diplomatic front in the l 950's was to arrange a meeting with officials of Radio Free Europe in 1953 and wi th Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in October of 1956. 89 Nothing came of these meetings. Peter P. Hletko also noticed that the Canadian Slovak League was both younger than its parent organization and had more youthful members. In thi s respect he may have been thinking of Stephen B. Roman, who had come to Oshawa, Canada from Velky Ruskov, Slovakia as a 16 year-old in 1937. Through a seri es of shrewd investments in the 1940's and 1950's, Roman had become a multi-millionaire in Canada's uranium industry. Roman was an active member of the Canadi an Slovak League who had lobbied for the early adm ittance of Slovak post-war political refugees, and who supported the movement for Slovak independence.90 As a devout Greek Catholi c, in 1963 Roman took a leading role in the 1100th anniversary celebrations of the arri val of Sts. Cyril and Methodius on Slovak territory, he contributed to the establishment of the Institute of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Rome in that same year, he was a lay observer to the Second Vatican Council (l 962-1965) and he successfull y lobbied the Vatican to appoint a Slovak Greek Catholic bishop in Canada ( 1965), as well as to create a Slovak Greek Catholic Eparchy (diocese) in Toronto in 1980. 9 1 88 The most comprehensive treatment of th is banquet can be found in " Historicky banket Kanad. Slov. Ligy v Ottawe," in lmrich Stolarik ed., Kanadska Slovenska Liga 35 rocna (Toronto: Canad ian Slovak League, 1967), 268-75. 89 Kanadsk f Slovak, Jul y 18, 1953, p.4 and November 10, 1956, p.5. 90 Slovenske bratstvo (Montreal), Apri l 25 , 1941 , p.3 ; Kanadskf Slovak, April 16, 1943, p.10, December 16, 1943, p.7, May 24, 1945 , p.5, October 4, 1945, September 3, 1955 , p.5, October 20, 1956, p.5, October 19, 1957 , p.3. For a sympathetic biography of Roman see Peter C. Newman, Th e Canadian Establishment, I (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, I975), 269-72. 91 Kanadskf Slovak, November 25 , 1961 , p.2 , Jul y 6, 1963 , p.l, October 3, 1964, p.l, October 17, 1964, p. l , January 9, 196 1, p.l , January 3, 198 1, p. I and February �SLOVAKIA 33 Roman ' s greatest achievement, however, was to establish the Slovak World Congress. Even though he had been a member of the Canadian Slovak League since the early 1940's, Roman lamented the fact that Slovaks in the Western world were divided into so many different organizations.92 He first attempted to bring together the Canadian Slovak League and its rival Canadian Slovak Benefit Society in 1969 but failed .93 Then , angered by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 , Roman decided to approach various individuals and organizations to issue an appeal to all Slovak organizations the world over to unite in the struggle to overthrow Communism in the homeland and to seek self-determination for the Slovak nation. The appeal was signed by the presidents of the Slovak League of America, the Canadian Slovak League, the National Slovak Society, Stephen B. Roman , three bishops and an abbot. As a result, in July of 1970 representatives of dozen s of Slovak organizations the world over, including the Slovak League of America and the Canadian Slovak League, met in New York City and created the Slovak World Congress.94 For the next twenty years the Slovak World Congress, led by Stephen B. Roman, worked to spread the good name of the Slovaks the world over. It held meetings in many of the major cities of the world, including Toronto, New York, Washington, Chicago, Munich and Rome; it sponsored scholarly conferences which published their proceedings; it organized Slovak world youth festival s and it published a monthly Bulletin. The two Slovak Leagues participated in most of these ventures. 95 Indeed , the two Slovak Leagues, at first independently, and later working within the Slovak World Congress, successfully lobbied the Vatican to create an independent archbis- 21, 198 1, p. I. Kanadsky Slovak, January 4, 1945, p. 3. 93 Kanadsky S lovak, Septe mber 20 , 1969 , p. I. Nove mber 15, 1969, p. I, June 6, 1970, p. l. 94 Kanadsky S lovak, March 2 1, 1970. p.l , June 26, 197 1, p. l , Jul y 4, 1970, p. l , Jul y 11 , 1970, p. l. 95 The first ten years of the Congress were described by J.M. Kirschbaum in Desa t' rokov cinnosti SKS (Toronto: Slovak World Congress, 1981 ); a short summary was written by Dusan T6th, the Sec retary-General of the Congress from 1971 to 1990 in Kanadsky Slovak , September 10, 2005, p.4. T here is not yet a scholarl y history of the entire period of the Congress's ex istence. 92 �34 SLOVAKIA hopric and church province in Slovakia. Their dream came true in 1977 , although the communist government blocked the appointment of an archbishop until 1988. 96 Thi s was a sy mbolic victory for the two Leagues and the Slovak World Congress because it gave Slovakia its own church jurisdiction, which implied that the Slovaks could also have their own state. Unfortunately for all concerned, Stephen B. Roman died in 1988, just one year before Czechoslovakia threw off its communist rulers.97 With its patron gone, the Slovak World Congress slowly withered away. The two Slovak Leagues, on the other hand , sprang into action. The Canadian Slovak League sent a delegation to Slovakia in February of 1990, to urge Slovak leaders to seek either more homerule or else complete independence. 98 The Slovak League of America likewise sent a delegation in May of 1990 for the same purpose.99 Both Slovak Leagues started a fund-raising campaign for various Slovak causes, and both rejoiced when Slovakia became independent in 1993. 100 Since then both Leagues have cooperated with the various Slovak governments to spread the good name of the Slovaks the world over and to help Slovakia in its transition from a communist dictatorship to a democratic and capitalist society. It should be apparent, therefore, that the Slovak League of America, and the Canadian Slovak League, remained dedicated to Slovak self-determination throughout the 20th century. During World War I 96 See, for instance, the Memorandum of the Central Assembly of the Canadian Slovak League to the Vati can requesting a Church Province and an Archbi shop for Slovaki a, Kanadsky Slovak, September 25, 1965, p. l . J. M. Kirschbaum had firs t suggested thi s move in 1959, Ibid. , and Peter Mulik, " Usilie o zriaden ie slovenskej cirkev nej provincie od roku 1939 a jej vyvoj po sucasnost:" in Mulik ed., Katolfcka cirkev a Slovaci: Us ilie Slovakov o samostatnti cirkevnti provinciu (Brati slava: Bernolakova spolocnost: 1997), 68. 97 See the special iss ue of the monthly Maria (Toronto), May, 1988 for many eulogies concerning the life and achievements of Stephen B. Roman. 98 Smer (Bratislava), February 15, 1990 and Praca (Brati slava), February 16, 1990. See also Rudolf Schu ster's Ultim atum (Bratislava, 1996), pp.101 -2 and the photo section between pages 96 and 97. 99 Slovak v Amerike, June, 1990. I happened to be a member of this del egation. We traveled all over Slovakia, met with governme nt officials, journalists and students and urged them to seek more self-determ ination or independence. See al so Schuster's Ultimatum, op. cit. , 224-5. 100 Kanadsky Slovak, January 2, 1993 ; Slovak v Amerike, January issue, 1993. �SLOVAKIA 35 the Slovak League of America spoke on behalf of its brethren in Slovakia when the latter could not do so. Since T. G. Masaryk had no mandate from Slovaks in Hungary to create a new state consisting of Czechs and Slovaks, the Slovak League of America gave him that mandate in the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Agreements. Since Masaryk and hi s followers did not respect the promises that they had made guaranteeing Slovaks home-rule in Czechoslovakia, both the Slovak Leag ue of America, and its Canadian offshoot, the Canadian Slovak League, demanded home-rule for the Slovaks in the inter-war period. When Slovakia unexpectedly became independent in 1939, both Leagues, after some hesitation, supported thi s independence. After Czechoslovakia was restored by the victorious Allies, both Slovak Leagues supported a return to Slovak independence, especiall y after the arrival in North America of several thou sa nd political refu gees . During the communist era (1948-1989) both Leagues denounced the communi st regime that ruled over their overseas cousins and they co ntinued to demand Slovak independence. After the Communists gave up their power in 1989, both Leagues urged the Slovaks to either demand more home-rule or else complete independence from the Czechs. When Slovakia finally became independent on January 1, 1993 , both Leagues rejoiced and pledged to help it grow and prosper. � SLOVAKIA 7 THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA AND THE CANADIAN SLOVAK LEAGUE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SELF-DETERMINATION OF THE NATION, 1907-1992 M. Mark Stolarik 1 In the 20th century the American and Canadian Slovak Leagues pl ayed a major role in the struggle for the self-determination of the Slovak nation. Founded by immi grants who so ught a better li ve lyhood in the New World , the Slovak League of America played a leading ro le in the creation of Czecho-S lovakia during the Great War. In the inter-war years , the Slovak League of America, joined by its Canadian offshoot, bombard ed the central government in Prag ue with demands to grant the Slovaks in the newly-created state their promised autonom y. When the Slovaks achi eved autonomy in the fa ll of 1938, both Leagues rejoiced. When the Autonomous Diet procl aimed Slovak independence in March of 1939, both Leagues were caught by surpri se, but, after so me hesitation , they supported it. However, because Slovakia was allied with Nazi Germany , both Leagues had to te mper their support after Canada entered the war against Germany in September of 1939 and the U nited States followed sui t in December of 1941. After the war had ended , however, both the American and the Canadian Slovak Leagues demanded a plebiscite on the future of their countrymen in Europe. Having fai led to achieve thi s goal, both Leag ues, whi ch were buttressed by recently-arrived political emigres after 1945, decl ared their support for a new Slovak liberatio n movement which was first led by the Slovak National Council Abroad and, from 1970 on by the Slovak World 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented to the conference on "Emigration to the Engli sh Speaking world," Catho lic University of Rufo mberok, Slovakia, May 19, 2006. �8 SLOVAKIA Congress. After the Communist government gave up its monopol y of power in 1989, both Leagues sent fact-finding delegation s to Czechoslovakia and both supported the movement for Slova k independence, which became a reality in 1993. Since then , they have continued to help their countrymen to consolidate their independence. Between 1870 and 19 14 approx imate ly half a million Slovaks left their homeland in the Kingdom of Hungary and settled in North America in search of work. Once there, they established three pillars of their new communities- fraternal-benefit societies, parish churches and a newspaper press. Largely of peasant stock from eastern Slovaki a, they sought better wages in the coal mines, steel mills and oil refineries of the American Northeast and Midwest (Connec ti cut , New York, New Jersey, Pennsy lvania, Ohio, Indiana and lllinois). 2 The early arriva ls quickly di scovered that the United State s provided vi1tually no social services. Therefore, these immigrants establi shed their own fratern al-benefit societies which, from monthly membership dues, provided accident, illness or death benefits to their members or families , as well as a pl ace to socialize. By 1890 over fifty such fraternals existed and they then began to federate into nation al organizations such as the National Slovak Society , headquartered in Pittsburgh and the First Catholic Slovak Union, with its headquarters in Cleveland . Since the men initially excluded women from their organizations, Slovak women established the Zivena Beneficial Society in New York in 1891 and Catholic women established the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union in Cleveland in 1892. Lutherans established their own Slovak Evangelical Union in 1893 and Calvini sts their Slovak Cal vin Presbyterian Union in 1902. Even the tiny group of socialists estab li shed their own Slovak Workers Society in 1916. By 1920 American Slovaks had enrolled over 200,000 members in these, and other, fraternal-benefit societies. 3 2 For more details on the process of Slovak migration and resettlement in the United States see my Immigration and Urbanization: Th e Slovak Experience, 1870- 191 8 (New York: AMS Press, I 989), I-7 1. 3 For the story of Slovak fratern al-benefit soc ieties in the United States see my "A Place fo r Everyo ne: Slovak Fratern al-Benefi t Societies," in Scott Cummings, ed ., Self-Help in Urban America: Patterns of Minority Business Enterprise (Port Washington, NY : Kennikat Press, 1980, 130-41 and "Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in North America: An Overview ( 1883- 1993), in Matjaz Klemenc ic ed. , Etnicni fra- �SLOVAKIA 9 Besides the need for social benefits , Slovak immigrants also yearned for religious services in their own language. The fraternalbenefit societies led the way in establishing pari sh churches , in recruiting their priests and in supporting (or not supporting) them. Slovak Roman Catholics established 241 parishes, Lutherans 68 , Calvinists 9 and Greek Catholics (mixed parishes of Rusins and Slovaks) 155 by 1930.4 At least half of the Roman Catholic parishes also established parochial schools which taught their children to read, write and sing in Slovak, while all other subjects were taught in English. The Roman Catholics also established several religious orders to teach their children, as well as Benedictine High School for boys in Cleveland and Danville Academy for girls in Danville, Pen. 5 nsy Ivama. Finally, most of the immigrants from Slovakia yearned for news from their homeland and were also curious about conditions in the New World. Therefore, a small number of intellectuals, who had followed them from Slovakia, established a very vigorous newspaper press. Starting with a mere Bulletin in 1885, American Slovaks developed a full-service press that consisted of dailies, weeklies and monthlies , and that varied in orientation from nationalist to Magyarone, from secular to religious, from socialist to capitalist. By 1914 the combined circulation of the Slovak-American press was over 150,000, which was four times the circulation of the Slovak-langu- terna/izem v priseljenskich deie/ach/Ethnic Fratemalism in Immigra nt Countries (Maribor: University of Maribor, 1996), 147-59. 4 For the process of the creation of parishes, see my Growing Up on the South Side: Three Generations of Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I 880- 1976 (Lewsiburg: Bucknell Uni vers ity Press, 1985), 44-62; for the number of parishes of various denominations see Filip Hrobak, comp., and ed. , Slovak Catholic Parishes and Institutions in the United States and Canada (Cleveland: First Catholic Slovak Union , 1955), 3 I- I65; George Dolak, A History of the Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States of America, /902-1927 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955), 189-206; Jan Body & John Adam , comp. and ed .. History of the Slovak Zion Synod LCA (Pittsburgh: Zion Synod, 1976), 199-200; Kalendar pre slovenskych Kalvfnov, 1927 (P ittsburgh), 97- 147; and Paul R. Magocs i, Our People: CarpathoRusyns and Their Descendants in North America (Toron to: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1984), 14. 5 Hrobak, Parishes and institutions, 169-82. �SLOVAKIA . Hungary. 6 age press m As they were building the pillars of the ir new co mmunities in America, Slovak immigrants did not fo rget their homeland . Indi vidual immigrants sent several hundred million doll ars to support their fa milies in Slovakia in the period 1870-1914. In addition , Slovak fraternal-benefit societies and their leaders rai sed fund s for the Slovak National Museum, for Slovak schools and churches in Hungary, they paid for and published in the ir Almanacs articles written by Slovak inte llectuals, and they established schol arship fund s to support Slovak high-school students in Bohe mi a and Moravia. Most important of all , they fi nancially supported Slovak candidates to the Hungarian Parli ament and rejo iced when, for the first time in hi story, seven nati onall y-conscious Slovaks were elected in 1906.7 Meanwhile, since the 1867 "Compromi se," whereby the ruling Habsburgs of Austri a and the Magyars of Hungary agreed to divide the empire into the Dual Monarchy of Au stri a-Hungary, the Magyars set out to forcibl y assimilate all the non-M agyar nationalities in Hungary. 8 American Slovak leaders were aware of thi s poli cy of "Magyari zation" and joined their counterparts in Slova ki a in trying to combat it. To thi s end American Slovaks, reacting to urgings from Slovak leaders in Europe, organized a " national congress" to be held in Cleveland on May 26, 1907 . On that day over l0,000 countrymen fro m across America packed into Greys Armory and established the Slovak Leag ue of Ameri ca, whi ch would be the cover organization fo r all nationall y-conscious Slovak organizations in the United States. Thi s sa me congress also e lected the Rev. Stefa n Furdek of Cleveland (originally from Trstena, Orava county), fo under of the First Catholic Slovak Union, as its president and Peter V. Rovnianek of Pittsburgh (originally fro m Doln y Hricov, Trencfn county), foun 6 For an over-view see my "The Slovak-American Press," in Sall y M. Miller ed. , The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical A nalysis and Handbook (Westport, CT: Gree nwood Press, 1987), 354-68 ; fo r the circul ation of the Slovak-Ameri can press in 19 14 see my " Slovak Nati onalism in the USA as Refl ected in th e Slovak-American Press, 1885- 1918 ," Canadian Review of Studies in Na tionalism, 3 1 (Nos. 1-2, 2004) , 65-76. 7 Stolarik, Immigration and Urbanization, 185-205 . 8 The best desc ripti on of " Magyarization" is still Scotus Viator (R.W. Seton-Watson), Racial Problems in Hungary (London: Archibald Constable, 1908 ; reprinted by Howard Ferti g, New York, 1972). �SLOVAKIA 11 der of the National Slovak Society , as its first vice-president, as well as the presidents of all the other fraternals as vice-presidents. The League published its formal program of autonomy for the Slovaks in Hungary in September of 1914, just as the world was entering into the first of two world wars that would plague the 20th century. 9 While the League 's official program was autonomy for its countrymen in the Kingdom of Hungary , a small group of Slovaks dissented and called for the destruction of Austria-Hungary and the liberation of their people. These di ssidents were large ly organized in the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol , which had been established in New Jersey in 1896, and which adopted the program of the Czech professsor of philosophy T.G. Masaryk. ' 0 The latter had fled hi s homeland in the fall of 1914 and had started to organize a movement to liberate the linguistically-related Czechs and Slovaks from Au stria-Hungary and to create a new state on its ruin s. Masaryk was assisted in hi s quest by one of hi s form er students, the Paris-based Slovak astronomer, Milan R. Stefanik. Later, Masaryk was joined by another of hi s students, the sociologist Edvard Benes. This trio organized itself into a "Czech Committee" and hoped to persuade the western Allies, if they were victorious over the Central Powers, to dismember AustriaHungary and to allow the Czechs and Slovaks to establish their own state. 11 While Masaryk was an elected member of the Austrian Parliament, and in touch with hi s Czech colleagues, who approved of his plans, he had no mandate from the Slovaks in Hungary to include 9 Fo r the creation of the Slovak League see Jednota (C leveland), May 29, 1907; ~udove noviny (Ska lica), Jun e 4, 1907; Jan Pank uch, Dejiny Clevelandskych a Lakewoodskych Slovakov (C leveland: Jan Pankuch, 1930), 71-3 ; and Kon stantin Cul en, Dejiny Slovakov v A merike, JI (Bratislava: Slovenska Liga, 1942), 11 3-24 ; for the program of autonomy see " Memorandum Slovenskej Ligy v Amerike vydane menom americkyc h Slovakov," in Dr. Yacovsky [Milan Ivanka], Slovaci a Madari: Politicko-historicka uvaha (Pittsburgh: Slovak League of America, I 9 14), 10 I-7. 10 For the ac ti vities of the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol see Milan Getting, A merickf Slovaci a vyvin ceskoslovenskej myslienky v rokoch 19 14-1 9 /8 (Perth Amboy, NJ: Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol , 1933) 11 Masaryk and Benes left us the ir memoirs: T.G . Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations, 19 14-1 918 (London: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927; Edu ard Benes, Souvenirs de g uerre et de revolution (1914-1918), 2 Vols. (Paris: E. Lero ux , 1928). Stefanik left no memoirs but Jan Jurfcek wrote a sy mpathetic biography: M.R. Stefanik: t ivotopisny nacrt (Brati slava: Mlade !eta, 1968). �12 SLOVAKIA them in the proposed state. Therefore, Masaryk sought such a mandate from American Slovak immigrants, most of whom were not yet citizens of the United States, but whose leaders had been in close touch with Slovak leaders in Hungary before the war, and who had a mandate from them to speak on behalf of the Slovak nation . 12 As a result, Masaryk urged his Czech colleagues in the United States to seek out the Slovaks and try to persuade them to join in his liberation movement. American Czechs did so and on October 22, 1915 the Bohemian National Alliance, which was the cover organization of most American Czechs, and the Slovak League of America met and concluded the Cleveland Agreement, which was named after the city in which it was signed. In this Agreement, the two sides pledged to work for the destruction of Austria-Hungary and the creation of a new, federal state consisting "of the Czech and Slovak nations," with "complete national autonomy for Slovakia, with its own Diet, its own state administration, complete cultural freedom .. ..its own financial and political administration," and "with Slovak as the state language ." The Slovak League insisted upon these points because it knew that the Czechs would outnumber the Slovaks in the new state by three-to-one and the League did not want the Czechs to dominate the Slovaks as had the Magyars in Hungary. 13 Had the two sides respected the Cleveland Agreement, the liberation movement might have worked smoothly and led to a harmonious future for the Czechs and Slovaks. Unfortunately, T.G. Masaryk did not believe in the existence of separate Czech and Slovak nations. Perhaps because he was of mixed Slovak (father) and Czech (mother) origin, he believed that the Czechs and Slovaks 12 On August 6, 1906, political leaders in Slovakia sent their counterparts in the USA a letter in which they proposed to share the leadership of the Slovak natio n with them. The letter was published in lmrich Mazar, Dejiny Binghamtonskych Slovakov za dobu styridsat' rokov, I 879-19 I 9 (Bingha mton : Branch I04 of the Slovak League of America, 1919), 2 1-22 . The Czechs recog nized th at Slovak leaders in the USA were authorized to speak on behalf of the Slovaks in Hungary in an editorial that appeared in The Bohemian Review (Chicago), March, 19 18, p.47 . 13 Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 23 , 1915 , p.7 ; Jednota (M iddl etow n, PA ), November 24, 1915, p.4; Narodne noviny (Pittsburgh), November 25, 19 15, p.5 ; the original was published in Dokumenty slovenskej nardonej identity a statnosti, I (Bratislava: Narodne literarne centrum, 1998), 445-7; an English translation can be found in my "The Role of American Slovaks in the Creation of Czecho-S lovakia, 1914-1918," Slovak Studies, VIII (Rome, I 968), p.55. �SLOVAKIA 13 formed one "Czechoslovak" nation and merely spoke two dialects of the same language. Therefore, when he arrived in the United States in the spring of 1918 to seek the recognition of the American government for the liberation movement and was shown the Cleveland Agreement, he proclaimed it "out of date" and proceeded to negotiate a new one with the Slovaks. On May 31st, 1918 Masaryk in Pittsburgh negotiated a weaker agreement with American Slovaks. According to thi s new "Pittsburgh Agreement," the two sides approved a "political program to unite the Czechs and Slovaks into an independent state of Czech and Slovak lands," in which " Slovakia will have its own administration, its own Diet and its own courts." Furthermore, "S lovak will be the official language in the school s, in offices and public life generally." And the "Czecho-Slovak state will be a republic and its Constitution will be a democratic one." Noticeably absent from this Agreement were the phrases "federal state" and "complete national autonomy for Slovakia," and there was no mention of the "Czech and Slovak nations," as there had been in the Cleveland Agreement. 14 Members of the Slovak League of America, led by its president Albert Mamatey of Pittsburgh (originall y from Klastor pod Znievom in Turiec county), signed the Pittsburgh Agreement because by then the liberation movement, led by Masaryk, was in high gear. The newly-formed Czechoslovak Legions in Russia revolted against the Bolsheviks and seized control over the entire Trans-Siberian Railway. These Legions had been organized from prisoners-of-war by Masaryk and Stefanik, and their seizure of the railroad greatly aided the Allied war effort, because they prevented hundreds of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners-of-war from returning to fight on the western front. 15 In addition, si nce Masaryk himself had 14 Jednota, June 5, 191 8, p.5; N:irodne noviny, June 6, 1918 , p.5; Jozef Hu sek, "Prehl'ad vaznejsfch udalostf v hi storii I. Kat. Slovenskej Jednoty, Jednota Katolfcky Kalend:ir, 1931, (Middletown, PA), pp.58-9. Victor S. Mamatey pointed ou t that the date of the Pittsburgh Agreement was May 3 1, 191 8, not May 30 as the calligrapher erroneously wrote it. Cf "Este raz o Pittsburgskej dohode," Premeny (Flushing, NY), 20 (No.3 , 1983), 39. For the full text of the Pittsburgh Agreement see Dokumenty, QJ2&i.t. , 485-6 and for an English translation see my The Role of, QJ2,....ci_t., 56. 15 Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 20, 1918, p.5; New York Times, June 29, 1918, p.3 ; for a detailed di sc ussion of the Czechoslovak Leg ion see J.F.N. Bradley , "The Allies and the Czech Revolt aga inst the Bol sheviks in 191 8," Slavonic and East �14 SLOVAKIA drafted and signed the Pittsburgh Agreement, along with the Bohemian National Alliance and the Union of Czech Catholics, American Slovak leaders felt confident that Masaryk would honor it. Skeptics, such as Jozef Hu sek, editor of Jednota (originall y from Okolicne, Liptov county), the official organ of the First Catholic Slovak Union, the largest Slovak fraternal-benefit society in America, did not tru st Masaryk. lt was Husek who forced Masary k into drafting the Pittsburgh Agreement, and it was Husek who insisted that he sign a calligraphed copy of it on November 14, I 918 , the very day that the newly-created Czecho-Slovak government in Prague e lected Masaryk President of the Republic. After Masaryk signed it a second time, American Slovaks were sati sfied and hoped for the best for their people in the new Czecho-Slovak Republic, which was proclaimed by a gathering of Czec h deputies of the former Austrian Parli ament in Prague on October 28 , 191 8, just as the defeated Austria-Hungary was collapsing. 16 Unfortunately for the future of Czecho-Slovakia, the promi ses made to American Slovaks by T.G. Masary k in the Pittsburgh Agreement were not carried out. Once he had returned in triumph to the newl y-created Republic in Dece mber of 1918 , Masaryk promptl y forgot about the Pittsburgh Agreement. The Czec h deputies in Prague , meanwhile, formed themselves into a "Czechoslovak government" on November 14th and later appointed a Czech-dominated "Constitutional Committee" to draft a Constitution for the new Republic. 17 Hearing of these events, the Slovak League of America sent a five-person delegation to Czecho-Slovakia in the spring of 1919, to remind Masaryk of hi s promises and to demand that the Pittsburgh Agreement be included in the proposed Constitution . Upon their return to the United States, the Executive Board of the Slovak League passed a resolution at its quarterly meeting on October 24, 1919, Europea n Review, 43 (No. I OI , 1965), 175-92 . The lack of the word "S lovak" in Bradley ' s title testifi es to the pro-Czech bias of western hi storian s during the ex istence of Czechoslovakia. 16 Husek, " Prehl'ad," op.cit. , 58-9 ; Joze f Husek, " Pittsburghska Dohoda," Jednota Katolfcky K al endar, 1933, 11 I. 17 For more on these proceedings see Vaclav L. Benes , " Czechoslovak Democracy and Its Problems, 1918-1920," in Victor S. Mamatey & Radomir Lu za, eds. , A History of the Czechoslovak Republic. 19 18- 1948 (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1973), 53-6. �SLOVAKIA 15 calling for the incorporation of the Pittsburgh Agreement into the proposed Czecho-Slovak Constitution. 18 Indeed, at the last meeting of the Czecho-Slovak Nation al Council in America, which had been founded in 1917 to coordinate the work of the Leag ue and of the Bohemian National Alliance, the Slovak delegates asked their Czech colleagues to pass a similar resolution, and the latter gladly complied 19 on November 7, 1919. Thus, American Czechs recogni zed the validity of the Pittsburgh Agreement while the Constitutional Committee did not. Masaryk, on the other hand , when asked by Prime Mini ster Vl astimil Tu s:cir in January of 1920 to comment on the validity of the Pittsburgh Agreement, brushed it aside as " one of many pre-revolutionary program s made beyond the boundaries. It has its hi storical value." 20 As a result, in March of 1920 the Constitutional Committee drafted , and the Prague Parliament adopted , a very centrali st Constitution of the Czechoslovak Republic , which sy mboli ca ll y dropped the hyphen from its name , and proclaimed that " the Czechoslovak Republic is a unified, not a federative state ," that its official language was the "Czechoslovak language" (even thou gh no such lang uage existed) , and Slovakia did not receive its own administration, its own Diet and its own courts, nor did Slovak become the official language of administration, as promised in the Pittsburgh Agreement? In the inter-war period , after some hesitatio n, the Slovak League of America continued to demand the home-rule promi sed the Slovaks by T.G. Masaryk. Albert Mamatey, the president of the League, visited Slovakia with a copy of the Pittsburgh Agreement in the winter of 19 I 9-1920 and was reass ured by Mil an Hodfa, one of the leaders of the Czec hoslovak Agrarian Party, that the Slovaks had nothing to worry about. Indeed , in September of 1920 Mamatey was rewarded for hi s wartime services on behalf of Slovakia by being ap- 18 19 Jednota, October 29, I 9 I 9. p. l The Czechoslovak Review [Formerly the Bohemian Review], December, 1919, p. 394. T.G. Masaryk to Y lastimil Tu sar, February 5. I920 , as published in The Slovaks 20 and the Pittsburgh Pact (Chicago : Slovak Catholic Federation, 1934), p.34. Jii'i Hoetzl and V. Joachim ( Introd uction by) , The Constitution of the Czechoslo vak Republic (Prague: Ed ition de la Soc iete de I'effort de la T checoslovaqu ie. 1920), pp. I 2, 47 . 21 �16 SLOVAKIA pointed the Czechoslo vak Consul in Pittsburgh. 22 He was succeeded as president of the League by hi s colleague Ivan Bielek, the former editor of the American Narodn e noviny, offici al organ of the National Slovak Society.23 Jan A. Kocur, a pre-war immigrant from 24 Turzovka, meanwhile, became the League ' s secretary. Under thi s new leadership the 14th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Pittsburgh, PA on June 28-29, 1922, sent a Memorandum to the National Assembly in Prague in which it demanded that the Pittsburgh Agreement be made a part of the Czechoslovak Constitution .25 Meanwhil e, after some prodding by Jozef Husek, editor of Jednota, as well as by the leadership of the First Catholic Slovak Union and the Slovak Catholic Federation, the 15th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Binghamton , New York on May 27-29, 1924, rejected the philosophy of "Czechoslovakism" as practiced by the Prague government and once again demanded that the provi sions of the Pittsburgh Agreem ent be carried out. 26 In addition , the Slovak League now openl y supported the Slovak People 's Party, led by the Reverend Andrej Hlinka, because that party had adopted the program of the Pittsburgh Agreement. Indeed , in 1926 the Slovak League made Hlinka an honorary member. 27 Interestingly enough, the League was so committed to the Pittsburgh Agreement th at, when the Slovak People ' s Party ag reed to join the center-right Czechoslovak coalition government in 1927-29, the League denounced this step! 28 On the other hand , it heartily approved of the People ' s Party 's withdrawal from the coalition after the October 1929 trial and conviction for treason of Yojtech Tuka, editor of Slo vak, the People 's Party ' s official organ .29 Furthermore, in 1928, on the l 0th anniver22 Joze f Paufo, 75. Rok ov Prvej K atolfckej Slovenskej Jednory (Cleveland: First Catholic Slovak Union, 1965), 160. For a short biograph y of A lbert M amatey see Joze f Paufo, Slovensk f priekopn fci v A merike (Cleveland: First Cath olic Slovak Union, 1972), 269-75. 23 For a short biograph y of Ivan Bielek see Paufo , Slovenskf priekopnfci, p. 25-28. 24 For hi s biography see ilii.d.. , 229. 25 M emorandum Slovenskej Ligy v A merike upravene na vladu a Narodne Shromai denie Cesko-Sl ovenskej Republiky v zaujme vte/enia Pittsburghskej Dohody do ustavy C.-S. Republiky (Pittsburgh: Slovak League of A meri ca, 1922). 26 " Z XV. Kongresu Slovenskej Ligy v A merike." Jednota, June 4, 1924, pp. 1-2, 4. 27 Paufo, 75 roko v, 21 I. 28 lb.id... 223 . 29 " Prehlas od Ivana Bieleka,'· Jednota, October 23 , 1929, p.4. �SLOVAKIA 17 sary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, the League rejected a special commendation from the Czechoslovak government for its role in the liberation of the country.30 Thereafter the League continued to publish and send memoranda to the Czecho-Slovak government, as it had in the l 920's, demanding that it grant the Slovaks the home-rule that Masaryk had promised in the Pittsburgh Agreement. 3 1 During the 1930's the Slovak League and the People ' s Party closely cooperated for the benefit of both sides. At its 19th Congress held in Cleveland on November 19-20, 1934, the assembled delegates elected the American-born Chicago medical doctor Peter P. Hletko as their president and he and his executive board invited the nationalist cultural organization Matica slovenska to send a delegation of scholars and leaders to help American Slovaks to maintain their national identity. The Matica complied in 1935-1936 by sending its director, the writer J.C. Hronsky, the publicist Konstantin Culen, the art historian Jozef Cincfk, and the photographer Karel Plicka. They visited 98 of the largest Slovak-American communities, presented lectures, slides and films about Slovakia, and donated four large libraries to the Slovak communities of New York City, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Chicago. This delegation also gathered a wealth of published and manuscript materials pertaining to the history of American Slovaks , which are now stored in the Slovak National Library.32 The People ' s Party, which was the main supporter of the Matica slovenska, reciprocated in 1938 when it invited the Slovak League to send a delegation to the mother country in order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Pittsburgh Agreement. The 20th congress of the League, held in Pittsburgh on April 28-29, 1938, elected a six-person delegation, which included Peter P. Hletko and Jozef Husek, to travel to Slovakia, and to bring with it the original of 30 "Kongres Slovenskej Ligy," Jednota, June 6, 1928, p. l. See, for example the, fo llow ing: Prehlas Slovenskej Ligy v Amerike upraveny na vsetkych politickych cinitelbv Cesko-Slovenskej Republiky (Pittsburgh: P. Jamriska & Co., 1925); V zaujme pra vdy ! (Pittsburgh: P. Jamriska & Co., 1930); and An Autonomi st [Peter P. Hletko], Slovakia's Plea for Autonomy (Middletown, PA: Slovak Literary Society, I 935). 32 J.C. Hronsky described the Matica's trip and its achieve ments in Cesta slovenskou Amerikou: Cestopisne crty z r. 1935-36. v dvoch dieloch (Turc. Sv. Martin : Matica slovenska, 1940). 31 �18 SLOVAKIA the Pittsburgh Agreement. The delegation went via Poland, in order to first visit the Rev. Andrej Hlinka in Rufomberok, and only then did it proceed to Bratislava and Prague. In Bratislava on June 5th the Slovak League delegation appeared on the balcony of the Slovak National Theater on Hviezdoslav Square, along with Andrej Hlinka and other notables of the People 's Party. Peter P. Hletko then triumphantly held up the original of the Pittsburgh Agreement, to the cheers of over 100,000 people.33 Finally, on October 6, 1938, after the infamous Munich Agreement weakened Czechoslovakia and president Edvard Benes resigned his office and fled to the west, the Slovak People 's Party, with the support of the Agrarian and National Parties and the approval of Prague, proclaimed the autonomy of Slovakia and formed a six-man government headed by Dr. Jozef Tiso. He had succeeded Andrej Hlinka as party leader after the latter' s death on August 16th. The Prague Parliament formally approved Slovak autonomy on November 22nd and re-named the Republic as Czecho-Slovakia, to reflect thi s new reality. Needless to say, the Slovak League of America was overjoyed to see that, after 20 years of strugg le, the provisions of the Pittsburgh Agreement were finally carried out. 34 While the Slovak League was satisfied with the outcome of its efforts on behalf of the Pittsburgh Agreement, Adolph Hitler was not. The German Chancellor was determined to destroy Czecho-Slovakia and to incorporate Bohemia-Moravia into his "Third Reich." Therefore, he had his agents get in touch with the most radical individuals in the People 's Party, who were led by the recently-releasedfrom-prison Vojtech Tuka, and urged them to seek complete Slovak independence. Tuka and his followers began to plot against CzechoSlovakia and the Prague government reacted by declaring martial law on March 11th, by di ssolving the recently-elected Slovak Diet, 33 Hlas l'udu (Toronto), May 27, 1938, pp.l-2 , June 7, 1938, pp.1-4 ; Slovak v Kan ade (Montreal ), June 2, 1938, p. l; Osadne hlasy (Chicago), June 24, 1938, pp.12; Narodne noviny, Jul y 6, 1938, p.5. Photos of the delegation in Poland and in Slovakia can be found in J.M . Kirschbaum, Slovakia: Nation at the Crossroads of Central Europe (New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1960), between pp.264-265. 34 New Yorksky dennfk (New York) , October 9, 1938 , p.1; Kato/icky Sokol (Passaic, NJ) , October 12, 1938, p.l; Narodne no viny, October 12, 1938, p.l; Osadne h/asy, October 14, 1938 , p.l and October 21 , 1938, pp. 1&3 ; Jednota, November 2, 1938, p.3 �SLOVAKIA 19 and by arresting over 200 suspected "plotters" against the Republic. Meanwhile, Hitler's agents summoned the recently-dismissed Prime Minister Jozef Tiso to Berlin on March 13th and gave him an ultimatum: either proclaim independence or watch Slovakia be partitioned by Poland and Hungary. Tiso returned to Bratislava on March 14th, he persuaded President Emil Hacha to reconvene the Slovak Diet, and after Tiso passed on to the Diet Hitler's message, the Diet unanimously declared Slovak independence. Since Czecho-Slovakia no longer existed, Hitler ordered the German army to occupy BohemiaMoravia and turn it into a German " Protectorate." He also recognized the independence of the Slovak Republic, but forced it into a German alliance and put it under German protection. 35 When news of the declaration of Slovak Independence reached American Slovaks, they were at first puzzled and subsequently split into two camps-those who supported Slovak independence and those who did not. This split had first surfaced right after World War I, when certain American Slovaks chose to support the new, centralized Czechoslovak Republic, while others did not. Generally speaking, most Slovak Protestant societies in the USA, as well as those individuals organized in the militantly secular Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol (founded in 1896) supported the new state because they agreed with its official philosophy of "Czechoslovakism," that is, that the Czechs and Slovaks formed one nation but spoke two dialects of the "Czechoslovak" language. 36 The majority of American Slovaks, who were Roman Catholics, and were represented by the First Catholic Slovak Union and the Slovak Catholic Federation, among others, did not. Between 1919 and 1924 the pro-Czechoslovak group controlled the Slovak League. 37 After 1924 the Slovak nationalists regained control over the League, and continue to do so. Therefore, the Protestants and the Sokols (as well as Slovak Communi sts), rejected the independent Slovak Republic and hoped that 35 The best description of this period in Czecho-Slovakia ' s hi story is by Theodor Prochazka, The Second Republic: Th e Disintegration of post-Munich Czechoslovakia (Boulder: East European Monographs, 198 1); for an alternative view see Frantisek Ynuk, " Slovakia' s Six Eventfu l Months," Slovak Studies, 4 ( 1964), 7- I 64. 36 Milan Getting best represented thi s group and described their act ivities in his Americki Slovaci, ~ 37 " Z XV . Kongresu Slovenskej Li gy v Amerike," Q)hci.t. �20 SLOVAKIA Czecho-Slovakia could be resurrected.38 To this end they supported ex-president Edvard Benes's new liberation movement during World War 11. 39 The leadership of the Slovak League, largely representing the majority Roman Catholics, on the other hand, supported the new state. Indeed, Jozef Husek, who was elected president of the League at its 21 st Congress in Cleveland on October 14th, 1938, form all y requested president Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States on April 24, 1939 to grant the Slovak Republic diplomatic recognition.40 Shortly thereafter the Slovak League was heartened by a message ("Posolstvo") sent by Prime Minister Jozef Tiso to American and Canadian Slovaks on May 23rd of 1939. Here Tiso explained in 38 A group of Slovak Protestants (Lutherans, Calvini sts and Congregationalists), led by the Baptist preac her A. P. Slabey, met in Duquesne, PA on May 30th, 1938 and denounced the Hletko- led delegati on of the Slovak League to Slovakja that spring. Cf. Narodne noviny, June 8, 1938 , p.3; In the fall Jan Pankuch, a Lutheran and fo rmer mem ber of the Delegati on, regretted the granting of autonomy to Slovakia. Cf. Hla s (C leveland), October 13, I 938, p. l ; after the Slovak Diet declared independence on Marc h 14th , 1939 . the Lutheran-dominated Nati onal Slovak Society denounced this act. Cf. Narodne noviny, March 15, 1939, p. l , as did the secul arist and Sokol-do minated New Yorksky dennik , March 15, 1939, p. l. Slovak communists also de nounced both Slovak auto no my and independence. Cf. I', udovy dennik (Chicago), October 7, 1938, p. l ; October 8, 1938, p. I; March I6, 1939, p. l 39 Those American Slovaks who opposed Slovak indepe ndence and wished to see Czecho-Slovakja res urrected after th e war initiall y organi zed the mselves into th e Slovak Nati onal Council of America. However, they soon split into fac tions th at either supported ex-president Benes or else Dr. Milan Hodfa or Dr. Stefan Osusky, both of whom had fl ed to the West after the fa ll of France in June of 1940, and both of whom broke with Benes over the future of a res urrected Czecho-S lovakia. While Be nes wanted a return to the cent ra lized pre-M un ich Czechoslovakia, Hodfa and Osusky wished to return to a federated Czecho-S lovilia. Cf. Letters of Jan Dend'ur, Secretary of the Slovak National Council to Vlad imir Hurban, ex-Ambassador of Czechos lovakia in Washington, Papers of Jan Dend'ur, Box I , File A-S , Balch Institute at th e Histori cal Society of Penn sy lvania, Philade lphia; those who supported Benes joined the Czechoslovak Nati onal Co un cil of America and we re led by the Lutheran Rev . Jaros lav Pelikan, Sr. of Chicago. Cf. New York sky dennik, Dece mber 11 , 1941 , p. I. For a descri ption of the Benes-led liberation move ment see Ed uard Taborsky, " Politics in Exile, 1939- 1945 ," in Mamatey & Lufa , A History , QP..ci.1. , 322-42. 40 Letter of Jozef Husek to Frank lin Delano Roosevelt, April 24, 1939, publ ished in Correspondence in re Slovakia and the Declaration of the Aim and Principles of the Slo vak League of A merica (Middletown? Slovak League of America, 1940?), 1718. Husek sent a similar letter to Secretary of State Corde ll Hull on August 4, 1939, ilii.d., 19-20. �SLOVAKIA 21 great detail how and why the Slovak Republic came into being and he asked American and Canadian Slovaks to support it. 4 1 As a result, the 22nd Congress of the Slovak League, which was held on November 14-15 in Cleveland, and which re-elected Husek as its president, passed a resolution in which it fully supported the independent Slovak Republic. Furthermore, it called upon the United States government to grant Slovakia diplomatic recognition, and it deplored ex-president Edvard Benes's American speaking tour, in which he called for the restoration of pre-war Czechoslovakia.42 In the fo llowing October, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt received a IS-person delegation of the Slovak League led by Husek and Hletko during which they pledged their loyalty to the USA . They considered thi s meeting to be a moral victory, even though FDR refu sed to recognize the Slovak Republic. 43 On the other hand, because of attacks launched upon the Slovak League by the supporters of Edvard Benes, Husek and the Slovak League were investigated by the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities. Thereafter they were under FBI surveillance. 44 Since the United States entered the Second World War on the side of the Allies on December 7, 1941 , and since Prime Mini ster Vojtech Tuka of Slovakia foolishly declared war upon the United States shortly there41 Tiso was responding to a letter sent to him by Andrej Potocky, Supreme Secretary of the Canadian Slovak League, askin g for an ex planation as to why the Slovak Diet had declared independence. Cf. And rej Potocky to Jozef Tiso, April 20, 1939 and Tiso's reply, of June 2, 1939, with a copy of the " Posolstvo," in the Papers of Andrej Kucera, lmrich Stolarik Co ll ection, Box 576, fo lder 2, 1939, Slovak Archives, University of Ottawa, Archi ves and Spec ia l Collections, and in the Andrej Potocky Papers, box 282 , folder 4, I 939, lhid. Jozef Husek translated and published it as " Dr. Joseph Tiso to the Slovaks in America," in Correspondence in re Slovakia, QJ2,.Q!., 716. This " Posolstvo" was originall y published in Slovak in several pro-independence newspapers in the USA and Canada. Cf. S lovenske bratstvo (Montreal), Jul y 2 1, and July 31, 1939, p.3 . 42 Jednota, Novem ber 29, 1939, p. 3; H/as Judu, November 18 and 21 , p. I. 43 Jedno ta, October 30, 1940, p. I, November 6, 1940, p.2; Slo venske bratstvo, November I, 1940, p.2. 44 Hlas Judu , October 24, 1939 , p. l ; see also Jozef Husek's letters to Martin Dies, Chairman , Dies House Committee, October 6, 1939 and October 28, 1939, in Correspondence in re Slovakia, QJ2..ci.t. , 23-4. In the summer of 1970 I visited with Dr. Peter P. Hletko in Chi cago and he confi rmed that the FBI had him and Husek under survei llance throughout the war, a lthough Hletko struck up a friendship with those watching him . �22 SLOVAKIA after, the Slovak League had to become more circumspect m its pronouncements. It now pledged absolute loyalty to the United States, although it continued to passively support the Slovak Republic. 45 However, the United States Office of War Information arranged a meeting of all Slovak-American organizations in Pittsburgh on September 14, 1942, and urged them to sign a declaration in which they repudiated the Slovak Republic and pledged their loyalty to the United States and its Allies. 46 By December a dejected Jozef Husek resigned as president of the League.47 He was eventually replaced by the more cautious Msgr. Frantisek Du bosh of Lakewood, Ohio, at the 23rd Congress of the League held in Pittsburgh on February 25-26, 1943. 48 Since the Slovak League could no longer openly support Slovak independence, it had to lower its expectations. At its 23rd Congress it had to develop a new program for Slovakia and, at the same time, deal with the issue of accepting or rejecting two former hi gh-ranking Slovaks in the pre-war Czechoslovak government and bureaucracy who had come to America. One was the former Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, Milan Hodz.a, and the other was the former Czechoslovak Minister to Paris, Stefan Osusky. Both had broken with Edvard Benes after the destruction of Czecho-Slovakia. Hodza now recognized the Slovaks as a distinct nation but favored the resurrection of a federated Czecho-Slovakia within a Central European Federation . Osu sky also recognized the Slovaks as an independent nation and favored the resurrection of a federated Czecho-Slovakia as stipul ated in the Cleveland Agreement of 1915 , which he had helped to draft. After much debate, the League rejected both Hodza and 45 Osadne h/asy, December 19, 194 1, p.2; Jednota , January 7, 1942 , p.8. Pavel Jamriska, the vice-president of the L eague, pledged that " American Slovaks never betrayed and never w ill betray the Slovak nation and Slovakia." Cf. Jednota, January 2 1, 1942, p.4. Jozef Husek president of the League, added that " Slovakia should retain its freedom ," in spite of the war. Jednota, February 25, 1942, p.4. 46 Jednota, September 23, 1942, p. l and October 14, 1942, p.2. Thi s " Resolution " was reprinted in Martin Kvetko and Miroslav J. Licko 's edited Zbornik tivah a osobnych spomienok o S/ovenskom narodnom povstanf (Toronto: Stala konferencia slovenskych demokratickych exu lantov, 1976), pp. 396-7 w ithout any explanation. 47 I.:udo ve zvesti (Toronto), December 12, 1942, p. I and January 16, 1943, p.5. 48 Kanadsky Slovak (Montrea l), March 11 , 1943, p. I ; I.:udove zves ti, March 20 , 1943 , p.5. �SLOVAKIA 23 Osusky as former collaborators of the first Czechoslovak Republic and it returned to its pre-war program of "self-determination" for the Slovaks in the future. 49 When the Slovak National Uprising against the Germans broke out at the end of August, 1944, American Slovaks were once again divided. After some hesitation, the 26th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Pittsburgh on October 18-19, 1944, and most American Catholic organizations , rejected the leadership of the newlyformed Slovak National Council as too "Czechoslovak" and Communi st. 50 Most American Lutherans, National Sokols and Communi sts, on the other hand, cheered and recognized the leadership of the SNC. 51 To complicate matters even more, the People' s Party journali st Peter Prfdavok, who had initially rejected the Slovak Republic and had fled to France and Great Britain in 1939, al so broke with Edvard Benes and in 1943 establi shed a Slovak National Council in London . He immediately contacted the Slovak League of America and , after the 1944 uprising in Slovakia, counseled the Slovak League not to recognize the Slovak National Council in Slovakia. 52 The League did not do so until it heard of the promulgation of the Kosice Programme of April 5, 1945 , which recognized the Slovaks as a di stinct nation and which al so recognized the Slovak National Council as the government of Slovakia. Thi s was a major concession by representatives of Edvard Benes 's victorious government-in-exile, which by then had returned to Slovak ("Czechoslovak") territory on 49 Cudove z vesti, March 20, 1943 and Kanadsky Slovak, March 25 , 1943, p.4. After Osusky broke with Benes he publi shed a series of pamphlets in whi ch he denounced the latter: Pravda vfthzf 1 (Pohlhd do zrkadla druheho odboj a) (London : The Continental Publishers, 1942); Benes and Slovakia (Middletown, PA : First Catholi c Slovak Union, 1943) ; Triedenie duchov nastalo (L ondon : The Continental Publishers, 1943) ; Hodza ' s position was best reported in K anadsky Slovak, M ay 28, 1942, pp. 7 & 10. For Hodza ' s acti vities in the USA see Michal Mudry, Milan Hodi a v Amerike (Chicago: Geringer Press, 1949). For more on Benes's opponents during World War II see Jan Kuklfk and Jan Nemecek, Prati Beneso vi! Ceska a slovenska protibeneso vska opozice v Londy ne /939-1 945 (Praha: Karolinum , 2004). 50 Kanadsky Slovak, November 9, 1944, p.4; Jednota, N ovember 15, 1944, p.2. 51 Cudove zvesti, September 23 , 1944, pp. I & 4. 52 Slovenske bratst vo, M ay 24, 1940, p.2; Slo vensky priekopnfk, November 27, 1942, pp. I & 4; ~udove zvesti, M arch 18, 1944, p.5 ; Jednota, April 16, 1945, p.5; for a short biograph y of Prfdavok see Literarny almanach Slovaka v A merike, 1967 (Middletown, PA), 209- 10. �24 SLOVAKIA the heel s of the Red Army, and which by now included the Communist leader Klement Gottwald. 53 However, this "Washington Declaration" of April 6, 1945 by the Executive of the Slovak League of America was immediately denounced by Jozef Husek and Peter P. Hletko.54 Furthermore, the 27th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October of 1945 also repudiated it. Instead, the Congress reaffirmed the right of the Slovaks in Europe to self-determination. This Congress, which elected the Amercanborn attorney Peter P. Yurchak as its president, also announced a new fund-rai sing campaign to help rebuild post-war Slovakia, as well as to help thousands of political refugees who had fled the resurrected post-war Czechoslovakia.55 Meanwhile, the Slovak League had also sent a three-person delegation to the San Francisco meeting of the newly-founded United Nations from April 25th to June 21st. It was led by the Rev. Jan J. Lach of Whiting, Indiana, in the company of the poet, the Rev . Milos Mlynarovic, and the young Americanborn attorney Edward J. Behuncfk. The League had hoped that its delegation could speak on behalf of the Slovak nation but Jan Masaryk, son of the former president of Czechoslovakia, registered himself as a Slovak (whic h he was not) and, in hi s capacity as Czechoslovakia's new Foreign Minister, claimed that the Slovaks were well-represented at the United Nations, and therefore, did not need the services of the League. Lach was given only the status of an observer and could not participate in the debates about the future of Europe. 56 Meanwhile, Slovaks who had emigrated to Canada also took an interest in the fate of their countrymen. Since the United States Congress had passed three Immigration Acts in the l 920's, which severely restricted further migration from east-central and southern Europe to the United States, about 40,000 Slovaks moved to Canada in search of work in the l 920's and 1930's. Even though the government of Canada wanted them to settle on farms on the Prairies, they 53 For the text of the Kosice Program see "Kosicky vlad ny program," in Dokumenty, II (1998), 407-8 . 54 Osadne hlasy, April 20, 1945 , p.4 and June I, 1945, p.2, June 30, I 945, p.2 ; Kanadsky Slovak, June 14, 1945, p.5. 55 Osadne hlasy, October 26, 1945, p. l ; Kanadsky Slovak, November I, 1945. 56 Jednota , May 23, I 945 , p. l; Osadne hlasy, May 25, 1945, p.4; I'.udove zvesti, June 9, 1945, p.4, and Jul y 2 1, 1945 , p.2. �SLOVAKIA 25 largely headed to the metropolitan areas of Winnipeg, Fort William, Montreal and Toronto. There, they quickly copied their American countrymen and established fraternal-benefit societies, parishes and newspapers. Indeed, they originally joined American-Slovak organizations, subsc ribed to their newspapers and were served by SlovakAmerican priests and mini sters. 57 However, when the Great Depression broke out in 1929, SlovakCanadians di scovered that they had to look out for themselves. For instance, when the Slovak League of America announced that it was raising funds to provide food and clothing for its members who were in dire straits, Canadian members of the Slovak League , who had organized fifteen branches in Canada, applied for thi s " relief. " They were shocked when Jan A. Kocur, the Leag ue 's Secretary , replied that American Slovaks had only enough resources to help themselves, and could not afford to help Slovaks in Canada. 58 Therefore, led by Andrej Kucera of Winnipeg (ori ginall y from Radosovce, in Bratislava county) representatives of three Canadian branches of the Slovak League of America met in Winnipeg in 1932 and organized the Slovak League of Canada which, when it was officially incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1934, had its name changed to the Canadian Slovak League. Meanwhile, in order to help its countrymen to survive the Great Depression, leaders of the Canadian Slovak League organized it into a fratern al-benefit society, as well as a nationalist organization. 59 The national orientation of the Canadian Slovak League mirrored that of its American parent. Thus, in November of 1933 the Central Assembly of the Canadian Slovak League sent president T . G. Masa57 For a brief history of the Slovaks in Canada see the entry by Elena Jakesova and M. Mark Stolarik in the Encyclopedia of Canada 's Peoples, ed. By Paul R. Magocsi (Toronto: Uni versity of Toronto Press, 1999), 11 68-79. For a longer treatment see J. M. Kirschbaum , Slovaks in Canada (Toronto: Canadian Eth ni c Press Association of Ontario, 1967). 58 See the correspondence between Kucera and Kocur in the Papers of Andrej Kucera, Lmrich Stolarik Collection, Box 575, fo lder 7, 1928- 1934, Slovak Archives in the Archives and Special Collections, Uni versity of Ottawa and Kucera 's article on the 10th an ni versary of the fo unding of the CSL, Kanadsky Slovak, December 17, 1942, pp. 1-2. For a fuller description see " Pociatky a rozvoj Kanadskej Slovenskej Ligy ," in lmrich Stolarik ed. , Kanadska Slovenska Liga: 35 rocna: Historicky nacrt (19321967) (Toronto: Kanadska Slovenska Liga, 1967), 18-20. 59 Ibid. 2 1-26. �26 SLOVAKIA ryk of Czechoslovakia a reso lution demanding that the Pittsburgh Agreement be incorporated into the Constitution of the Republic.6() Indeed, in 1935 the two Leagues sent a joint appeal to all voters in Slovaki a to support only those political parties that recognized the Pittsburgh Agreement. 61 After Slovakia achieved its autonomy in the fall of 1938, the Canadian Slovak League, like its American counterpart, welcomed this autonomy and congratulated Dr. Jozef Tiso, its first Prime Minister. 62 After the Slovak Diet proclaimed the independence of Slovakia on March 14th, 1939, Canadian Slovaks, like their American cousins, were initially caught off guard and divided over the issue. To clarify matters, Andrej Potocky (w ho hailed from Sedliacka Dubova, Orava county) , the secretary of the Canadian Slovak League, addressed a letter to Dr. Jozef Tiso and asked him for an explanation. Tiso replied in May in his already-mentioned "Posolstvo" and both Leagues published it in newspapers that supported their politics. 63 Thereafter, both Leagues supported the independent Slovak Republic as much as they could. The Canadian Slovak League, like its American counterpart, also rejected Edvard Benes's World War II liberation movement, as well as Milan Hodfa' s plans for a Central European federation. 64 It seriously considered sending a delegate to the San Francisco meeting of the United Nations in 1945 , but could not afford to do so. 65 Meanwhile, delegates to the 28th Congress of the Slovak League of America, held in Detroit on October 29-30th, 1946 and to the 7th Convention of the Canadian Slovak League held in neighboring Windsor on October 28-30th of the same year, iss ued a joint resolution wherein they rejected the resurrected post-war Cze60 See the "Ustredn a sprava Slov . Ligy v Kanade: Rezolucia" , dated November 6, 1933, Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the Papers of Andrej Kucera, QJlii1. 61 Kucera to Kocur, March 30, 1935, ibid 62 Centra l Assembly of the Canadian Slovak Leag ue to Dr. Jozef Tiso, January 2 1, 1939, i..b.id... 63 Andrej Potocky to Jozef Tiso, April 20, 1939 and Jozef Tiso to Andrej Potocky, June 2, 1939 plus the ' Posolstvo" dated May 23, 1939 in ilii..d. See also Slovenske bratstvo, Jul y 21 , 1939, p.3 and Jul y 28 , 1939, p.3. 64 S lovenske bratstvo, August 4, 1939 , p.4 ; March 15, 1940, p. I; Kanadsky Slovak, August 6, 1942, p.2 and December 9, 1943 , p.2 65 Letter of Msgr. F.J. Dubosh, president of the Slovak league of Ameri ca to Jan Ivan of the Canadian Slovak League, March 25 , 1945 , papers of Andrej Kucera, QJlii1. �SLOVAKIA 27 choslovakia and instead declared their support for the re-establishment of an independent Slovak Republic. 66 This political stand by both Leagues was reinforced by the arrival of post-war political refugees from Slovakia. Several thou sand supporters of the independent Slovak Republic, consisting of government officials, bureaucrats, soldiers and intellectuals fled the advancing Red Army in the winter and spring of 1945 and settled in Upper Austria and, eventually, in the defeated Germany. From there they sent appea ls to both Slovak Leagues for financial and other assistance. The two Leagues responded by sending them material goods, by arranging for surplus Red Cross packages to be distributed among them and, most importantly, by persuading the International Refugee Organization to recognize them as refugees and to help them emigrate out of war-torn Europe.67 One of the Slovak League of America's first successes was the appointment of Dr. Jozef Kirsc hbaum as its official delegate to the IRO in September of 1947.68 Kirschbaum had been the Slovak Charge d ' Affaires in Switzerland for most of the 66 Indeed , the Canadian Slovak League had also deplored the April 6, 1945 "Washington Resolution" of the Slovak League of America. CF. Andrej Kucera to Msgr. F. Dubosh, October 12, 1945, Papers of Andrej Ku cera, lmrich Stolarik Fonds, Box 572, file 1945 , Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library, University of Ottawa; Kanadsky Slov;:ik, November 16, 1946, p.2 and January 2, 1947, p.3. 67 See the " Memorandum" drafted by the writer Milo Urban to the Slovak League of America dated May 30 , 1945, as publi shed on its 20th an ni versary in K anadsky Slovak, May 29, 1965, p. 2 and September 4, 1965, p.3; see also Osadne hlasy, Jul y 6, 1945, p.2, Apri l 4, 1947, p.l and April 11 , 1947, p.2; see also Kanadsky Slovak, Jul y 12, 1945, p.2. A preliminary li st of these refugees in Austria was compiled by the Czechoslovak Ambassador to Switzerland and se nt to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague because the Czechoslovak government wished to " repatriate" some of them. Cf. Slove nsky narodn y arc hfv, PY , beop.- lll dov. , 1945, 6. Sept. , 1945, Ministerstvo zahrani cnfch veci. Praha, 26079/11-2/45 . No-one has yet written a schol arl y acco unt of this phenomenon as it pertains to the Slovaks. However. l:ubomfr Gleiman , one of these refugees, has penned hi s reminiscences in a manuscript entitled "Out of thi s Century ' s Mae lstro m: A Pilgrim 's Story of Disse nt and Surviva l," (Cary , NC: 200 I ). A co py of this manuscript, as well as his father' s diaries from 1944 to 1954, on whi ch the manuscript is partly based, can be found in the Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library, University of Ottawa, Canada. For a general description of the plight of post-war refugees see Mark Wyman , DP: Europe 's Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 (Philadelphia: The Balch Institute Press, 1989). 68 Kanadsky Slovak, May 27, 1948, p.2 and June I 0, 1948, p. l. �28 SLOVAKIA war. Since he had acti vely supported the creation of the Slovak Republic , he refu sed to return to post-war Czechoslovakia. Instead, he worked vigorou sly with both Slovak Leagues to arrange for the emigration of hundreds of Slovaks to the USA and Canada, once these countries opened their borders to post-war refugees in 1947 and 1948. 69 As the refugees began to arrive in the United States and Canada, they quickly joined the two Slovak Leag ues and reinforced their commitment to Slovak independence. The first to come to the USA was the poet, the Rev . Mikul as Sprinc. He arrived in Jul y of 1946, settled in Cleveland, and immediate ly informed the executive of the Slovak League of what had actually transpired during the existence of the Slovak Republic.70 That is why the Slovak League, at its 28th Congress in Detroit called for a plebiscite to be held in Slovakia to decide its future and it also appealed for a fair trial for Dr. Jozef Tiso. 7 1 The latter had evacuated to Austria with the Slovak government in the dying days of the war but was turned over to Czechoslovak authorities by the victorious American Army. 72 Meanwhile, the historian Dr. Frantisek Hrusovsky arrived in the USA at the end of 1947 and he also joined the Slovak League. Indeed, after Jan A. Kocu r died , Hrusovsky was elected the Secretary of the League at its 30th Congress in Chicago in March of 1948. On September 15, 1952, largely on hi s initiative, the Slovak Institute was established at the Slovak Benedictine Abbey in Cleveland, Ohio, 73 and Hrusovsky became its first director. In 1950 Dr. Jozef Pauco gained admittance to the USA. Thi s former editor of the dail y Slovak, official organ of the Slovak Peo- 69 Author interview with J.M. Kirschbaum, November 7, 1998.He recorded his political views and activities in Nas boj o sam ostatnost' Slovenska (C leveland: Slovak Institute, 1958; reprinted and updated by the Matica slovenska, 2000). 70 Paufo , 75. Rokov QJU;lL 353; Sprinc described his trip to the USA in K slobodnym pobreiiam (Scranton, PA : Obrana Press, 1949). 71 See footnote 65 . 72 For Tiso' s activities during and after World War II , as penned by hi s forme r personal secretary, see Karo l Murin, Spomienky a svedectvo (Hami lton,Ontario: Zahranicna Matica slovenska, 1987). 73 Kanadsky Slovak, October 30, 1947 , pp.1 -2, November 6, 1947 , pp.I & 7, March 17, I949, p. 1. For a short biograph y see " Dr. Frantisek Hrusovsky ," in Literarny Almanach Slovaka v Amerik e, 1967 (Middletown, PA), 16 1-2. �SLOVAKIA 29 pie' s Party , initially found employment as assistant editor of the weekly fraternal Jednota , which was published in Middletown, PA. In 1958 he became editor and in 1964 also publisher of the weekly Slovak v Amerike, the oldest Slovak newspaper in America. In 1962 Pauco was elected Secretary of the Slovak League of America, a 74 post which he held until his death in 1975. Finally, in 1952 Dr. Jozef A. Mikus came to the USA. This former Slovak Charge d ' Affaires in Spain fled his homeland after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. He initi ally lived in Paris but after four years he moved to Washington , D.C. For the first five years of his life in the USA he was employed by the Slovak League as its Press Secretary. After that he taught at various American colleges until his retirement. He also remained active within the Slovak League and the Slovak World Congress. 75 While a few post-war Slovak refugees managed to gain entry into the United States after the war, the majority headed for Canada, because the latter opened its doors to refugees first. Among the most important to arrive in 1949 were Dr. Karol Murin, the former personal secretary of president Jozef Tiso, Dr. Jozef Kirschbaum (mentioned earlier) and the publicist and historian Konstantin Culen. 76 In 1950 Karol Sidor, former Slovak Ambassador to the Vatican, and the most prominent of all the emigres, made his way to Montreal. 77 All of them immediately joined the Canadian Slovak League and Culen even became editor of its weekly Kanadsky Slovak from 1952 to 74 Ibid. , 200-2. Kanadsky Slovak, May 18, 1950, p.2. Ibid., 188-9. Kanadsky Slovak, January 24, 1952, p.5 and June 21 , 1952, p.7. The complete life of Jozef Mikus can be reconstructed in "The Jozef Mikus Fonds" located in the Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library , University of Ottawa. 76 Kanadsky S lovak, February 10, 1949, p. I; £udove zvesti, March 12. 1949, p.4, February 25, 1950, p.4. For biographies of Murin and Cu len see Literarny almanach S/ovaka v Amerike, / 967 (Middletown, PA), 129-30 and 194-95. 77 Andrej Kucera to Andrej Potocky, Apri l 6, 1950, Papers of A. Kucera, lmrich Stolarik Collec tion. Box 576, fo lder 7. 1950, Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library , University of Ottawa; Kanadsky Slovak, April 20, 1950, p.5; letter of Karol Sidor to lmrich Stolarik, January 12, 1951 , Joseph Stasko Fonds, Slovenska narodna rada v zahranicf, Box 30, Series II , File 4, Subfile 4.1 , Folder 22, ARCS 92-3 , Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Mori sset Library, University of Ottawa. For more on Sidor see Literamy almanach I 967, 2212. 75 �30 SLOVAKIA 1956. Needless to say, these emigres strengthened the League's commitment to promoting Slovak independence. Indeed, they and their American counterparts started to celebrate the anniversary of Slovak independence (Marc h 14th) as early as 1947.78 Both of the Slovak Leagues, meanwhile, denounced the execution of Dr. Jozef Tiso after he was found gui lty of treason by the Communist-dominated National Court in Bratislava in April of 1947. 79 After the Communist takeover of power in Czechoslovakia in February of 1948, a new wave of political refugees fled to the West. This was a mixture of Slovaks who favored independence and those who did not. Those refugees who had fled to the west after 1945 seized the initiative and re-established the Slovak National Council Abroad in the fall of 1948 and elected Karol Sidor as its president and Peter Pridavok of London as its secretary. 80 Those who wished Czechoslovakia to continue, but were opposed to its communist government, organized themselves into the Council for a Free Czechoslovakia, led by Dr. Jozef Lettrich , the former Chairman of the postwar Democratic Party in Slovakia. 81 Both Slovak Leagues rejected Lettrich and his followers as early as 1946 and instead supported the Slovak National Council Abroad .82 Indeed, both Slovak Leagues had previously also rejected the more radical Slovak Action Committee, founded in Rome in 1946 by Dr. Ferdinand Durcansky, the first Foreign Minister of the Slovak Republic .83 Rivalries between the leaders of the Slovak National Council Abroad and that of the Slovak Action Committee seeped into both Leagues and caused much in- 78 Osadne hlasy, March 14, 1947, p.l ; Kanadsky Slovak, April JO and 17, 1954, pp.2-4. 79 Osadne hlasy, April 25 , 1947, pp. I & 2; Kanadsky Slovak, May 8, 1947, p.l, October 30, 1947, pp. 1-2 and November 6, 1947, pp. I & 7; for the reminiscences of the chief prosecutor and the chief defense attorney at thi s trial see Proces s dr. 1. Tisom (Bratislava: Tatra Press, 1990). 8 Kanadsky Slovak, June 24, 1948 , p.3 , December I6, 1948 , p. I and December 30, 1948, p.3 ; Kirschbaum , Nas boj, QJ1.&iL (2000) , 370- 1. 81 Spetko, "Slovenska exi lova," QJ1.&iL 247-8. 82 Kanadsky Slovak, April 11 , 1946, p.5; Ferdinand Durcansky to Andrej Kucera, September 8, 1949, in Papers of A. Kucera, Correspondence with Refugees in Europe, Box 572, lmrich Stolarik Fonds, Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa. 83 Durcansky, Ibid. For more on Durcansky see Literarny almanach 1967 , 137-9. ° �SLOVAKIA 31 fighting among both in the 1950's. 84 The matter was finally settled in 1960 when the two sides decided to merge into the Slovak Liberation Council, with two co-chairmen: Dr. Jozef Kirschbaum in Toronto (Sidor had died in 1953) and Dr. Ferdinand Durcansky in Munich. 85 Meanwhile, in 1962, Dr. Peter P. Hletko, once again became president of the Slovak League of America, which had undergone some turbulent times. Hletko had succeeded Filip A. Hrobak, editor of Jednota , who had become president in 1950 . The American-born Hrobak was an activist, who had established the Slovak League 's Information Office in Washington in 1952, as well as the Englishlanguage periodical Slovakia in 1950 to champion the independence of his cousins overseas. Meanwhile, Hrobak also had to referee an intense rivalry that broke out between various factions in the League, a rivalry that resulted in the di smissal of Konstantfn Culen from the directorship of the Slovak institute in Cleveland (he had come down from Canada in 1956 and was made director of the Institute shortly after the death of Hrusovsky in the same year) and his banishment from Slovak-American life. 86 Hletko, who had largely been responsible for Culen's dismissal, congratulated the Canadian Slovak League on its 30th anniversary and remarked that it had become " more active" than the Slovak League of America. 87 He may have had in mind the fact that, on March 16th, 1953 (strategically close to the 14th anniversary of Slovak independence on March 14th), the First 84 See the letter of A. Ku cera to Jozef Siksa dated March 20, 1950 as well as the circ ul ar letter of Ferdinand Durcansky dated February 9, 1951, an undated letter from early 195 1, as well as letters from Michael Yargovic , president of the First Catholic Union , dated February 19, 1951 and Fi lip A. Hrobak, president of the Slovak League of America, dated February 20. 1951 , in the Papers of A. Kucera, Qlhci..!.; see also Kanadsky Slovak, January 17, 1952, p.3 and February 14, 1952, p.2, and November 5, 1955, p.2. See also l',udove zves ti. February I, 1958, p.6, and March I, 1958, p.4. 85 Kanadsky Slovak, October 11 , 1958, p.1 , March 2 1, 1959, p.1 , June 4, 1960, p.1 and June 18, 1960, p. I ; l',udove zvesti, September I, 1960, p.6 86 Kanadsky Slovak, June 8, 1950, p.1 , June 2 1, 1952, p.7 , June 27, 1959, p.1 ; I.:udove zvesti, June 17, 1950, p.2 ; for Konstantin Cu len's problems with Hletko and other American Slovak leaders see hi s V zajatf fa losnych legiend od nenavistneho srdca, 11 Vols. (Mim ieographed, New York, 1961). Frantisek Ynuk, in his Z ivotopis Konstantfna Culena (Cleveland: Slovak Institute, 1984), 190-93 also touched on this problem. 87 Kanadsky Slovak, December 15 , 1962, p. I. Filip A. Hrobak, a few years earlier, had expressed simi lar sentiments ; cf. Kanadsky S lovak, July 18, 1959, p. I. �32 SLOVAKIA District Assembly of the Canadian Slovak League had organized a gala banquet at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Leag ue. Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, four cabi net ministers and 25 mem bers of the Canadian Parliament attended! 88 Thi s diplomati c "coup" by the Canadian Slovak League was not matched by its American counterpart. The most the Slovak League of America was able to accomplish on the diplomatic front in the l 950's was to arrange a meeting with officials of Radio Free Europe in 1953 and wi th Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in October of 1956. 89 Nothing came of these meetings. Peter P. Hletko also noticed that the Canadian Slovak League was both younger than its parent organization and had more youthful members. In thi s respect he may have been thinking of Stephen B. Roman, who had come to Oshawa, Canada from Velky Ruskov, Slovakia as a 16 year-old in 1937. Through a seri es of shrewd investments in the 1940's and 1950's, Roman had become a multi-millionaire in Canada's uranium industry. Roman was an active member of the Canadi an Slovak League who had lobbied for the early adm ittance of Slovak post-war political refugees, and who supported the movement for Slovak independence.90 As a devout Greek Catholi c, in 1963 Roman took a leading role in the 1100th anniversary celebrations of the arri val of Sts. Cyril and Methodius on Slovak territory, he contributed to the establishment of the Institute of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Rome in that same year, he was a lay observer to the Second Vatican Council (l 962-1965) and he successfull y lobbied the Vatican to appoint a Slovak Greek Catholic bishop in Canada ( 1965), as well as to create a Slovak Greek Catholic Eparchy (diocese) in Toronto in 1980. 9 1 88 The most comprehensive treatment of th is banquet can be found in " Historicky banket Kanad. Slov. Ligy v Ottawe," in lmrich Stolarik ed., Kanadska Slovenska Liga 35 rocna (Toronto: Canad ian Slovak League, 1967), 268-75. 89 Kanadsk f Slovak, Jul y 18, 1953, p.4 and November 10, 1956, p.5. 90 Slovenske bratstvo (Montreal), Apri l 25 , 1941 , p.3 ; Kanadskf Slovak, April 16, 1943, p.10, December 16, 1943, p.7, May 24, 1945 , p.5, October 4, 1945, September 3, 1955 , p.5, October 20, 1956, p.5, October 19, 1957 , p.3. For a sympathetic biography of Roman see Peter C. Newman, Th e Canadian Establishment, I (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, I975), 269-72. 91 Kanadskf Slovak, November 25 , 1961 , p.2 , Jul y 6, 1963 , p.l, October 3, 1964, p.l, October 17, 1964, p. l , January 9, 196 1, p.l , January 3, 198 1, p. I and February �SLOVAKIA 33 Roman ' s greatest achievement, however, was to establish the Slovak World Congress. Even though he had been a member of the Canadian Slovak League since the early 1940's, Roman lamented the fact that Slovaks in the Western world were divided into so many different organizations.92 He first attempted to bring together the Canadian Slovak League and its rival Canadian Slovak Benefit Society in 1969 but failed .93 Then , angered by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 , Roman decided to approach various individuals and organizations to issue an appeal to all Slovak organizations the world over to unite in the struggle to overthrow Communism in the homeland and to seek self-determination for the Slovak nation. The appeal was signed by the presidents of the Slovak League of America, the Canadian Slovak League, the National Slovak Society, Stephen B. Roman , three bishops and an abbot. As a result, in July of 1970 representatives of dozen s of Slovak organizations the world over, including the Slovak League of America and the Canadian Slovak League, met in New York City and created the Slovak World Congress.94 For the next twenty years the Slovak World Congress, led by Stephen B. Roman, worked to spread the good name of the Slovaks the world over. It held meetings in many of the major cities of the world, including Toronto, New York, Washington, Chicago, Munich and Rome; it sponsored scholarly conferences which published their proceedings; it organized Slovak world youth festival s and it published a monthly Bulletin. The two Slovak Leagues participated in most of these ventures. 95 Indeed , the two Slovak Leagues, at first independently, and later working within the Slovak World Congress, successfully lobbied the Vatican to create an independent archbis- 21, 198 1, p. I. Kanadsky Slovak, January 4, 1945, p. 3. 93 Kanadsky S lovak, Septe mber 20 , 1969 , p. I. Nove mber 15, 1969, p. I, June 6, 1970, p. l. 94 Kanadsky S lovak, March 2 1, 1970. p.l , June 26, 197 1, p. l , Jul y 4, 1970, p. l , Jul y 11 , 1970, p. l. 95 The first ten years of the Congress were described by J.M. Kirschbaum in Desa t' rokov cinnosti SKS (Toronto: Slovak World Congress, 1981 ); a short summary was written by Dusan T6th, the Sec retary-General of the Congress from 1971 to 1990 in Kanadsky Slovak , September 10, 2005, p.4. T here is not yet a scholarl y history of the entire period of the Congress's ex istence. 92 �34 SLOVAKIA hopric and church province in Slovakia. Their dream came true in 1977 , although the communist government blocked the appointment of an archbishop until 1988. 96 Thi s was a sy mbolic victory for the two Leagues and the Slovak World Congress because it gave Slovakia its own church jurisdiction, which implied that the Slovaks could also have their own state. Unfortunately for all concerned, Stephen B. Roman died in 1988, just one year before Czechoslovakia threw off its communist rulers.97 With its patron gone, the Slovak World Congress slowly withered away. The two Slovak Leagues, on the other hand , sprang into action. The Canadian Slovak League sent a delegation to Slovakia in February of 1990, to urge Slovak leaders to seek either more homerule or else complete independence. 98 The Slovak League of America likewise sent a delegation in May of 1990 for the same purpose.99 Both Slovak Leagues started a fund-raising campaign for various Slovak causes, and both rejoiced when Slovakia became independent in 1993. 100 Since then both Leagues have cooperated with the various Slovak governments to spread the good name of the Slovaks the world over and to help Slovakia in its transition from a communist dictatorship to a democratic and capitalist society. It should be apparent, therefore, that the Slovak League of America, and the Canadian Slovak League, remained dedicated to Slovak self-determination throughout the 20th century. During World War I 96 See, for instance, the Memorandum of the Central Assembly of the Canadian Slovak League to the Vati can requesting a Church Province and an Archbi shop for Slovaki a, Kanadsky Slovak, September 25, 1965, p. l . J. M. Kirschbaum had firs t suggested thi s move in 1959, Ibid. , and Peter Mulik, " Usilie o zriaden ie slovenskej cirkev nej provincie od roku 1939 a jej vyvoj po sucasnost:" in Mulik ed., Katolfcka cirkev a Slovaci: Us ilie Slovakov o samostatnti cirkevnti provinciu (Brati slava: Bernolakova spolocnost: 1997), 68. 97 See the special iss ue of the monthly Maria (Toronto), May, 1988 for many eulogies concerning the life and achievements of Stephen B. Roman. 98 Smer (Bratislava), February 15, 1990 and Praca (Brati slava), February 16, 1990. See also Rudolf Schu ster's Ultim atum (Bratislava, 1996), pp.101 -2 and the photo section between pages 96 and 97. 99 Slovak v Amerike, June, 1990. I happened to be a member of this del egation. We traveled all over Slovakia, met with governme nt officials, journalists and students and urged them to seek more self-determ ination or independence. See al so Schuster's Ultimatum, op. cit. , 224-5. 100 Kanadsky Slovak, January 2, 1993 ; Slovak v Amerike, January issue, 1993. �SLOVAKIA 35 the Slovak League of America spoke on behalf of its brethren in Slovakia when the latter could not do so. Since T. G. Masaryk had no mandate from Slovaks in Hungary to create a new state consisting of Czechs and Slovaks, the Slovak League of America gave him that mandate in the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Agreements. Since Masaryk and hi s followers did not respect the promises that they had made guaranteeing Slovaks home-rule in Czechoslovakia, both the Slovak Leag ue of America, and its Canadian offshoot, the Canadian Slovak League, demanded home-rule for the Slovaks in the inter-war period. When Slovakia unexpectedly became independent in 1939, both Leagues, after some hesitation, supported thi s independence. After Czechoslovakia was restored by the victorious Allies, both Slovak Leagues supported a return to Slovak independence, especiall y after the arrival in North America of several thou sa nd political refu gees . During the communist era (1948-1989) both Leagues denounced the communi st regime that ruled over their overseas cousins and they co ntinued to demand Slovak independence. After the Communists gave up their power in 1989, both Leagues urged the Slovaks to either demand more home-rule or else complete independence from the Czechs. When Slovakia finally became independent on January 1, 1993 , both Leagues rejoiced and pledged to help it grow and prosper. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2007, Vol. 39 Description An account of the resource Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 7 THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA AND THE CANADIAN SLOVAK LEAGUE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SELF-DETERMINATION OF THE NATION, 1907-1992 M. Mark Stolarik 1 In the 20th century the American and Canadian Slovak Leagues pl ayed a major role in the struggle for the self-determination of the Slovak nation. Founded by immi grants who so ught a better li ve lyhood in the New World , the Slovak League of America played a leading ro le in the creation of Czecho-S lovakia during the Great War. In the inter-war years , the Slovak League of America, joined by its Canadian offshoot, bombard ed the central government in Prag ue with demands to grant the Slovaks in the newly-created state their promised autonom y. When the Slovaks achi eved autonomy in the fa ll of 1938, both Leagues rejoiced. When the Autonomous Diet procl aimed Slovak independence in March of 1939, both Leagues were caught by surpri se, but, after so me hesitation , they supported it. However, because Slovakia was allied with Nazi Germany , both Leagues had to te mper their support after Canada entered the war against Germany in September of 1939 and the U nited States followed sui t in December of 1941. After the war had ended , however, both the American and the Canadian Slovak Leagues demanded a plebiscite on the future of their countrymen in Europe. Having fai led to achieve thi s goal, both Leag ues, whi ch were buttressed by recently-arrived political emigres after 1945, decl ared their support for a new Slovak liberatio n movement which was first led by the Slovak National Council Abroad and, from 1970 on by the Slovak World 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented to the conference on "Emigration to the Engli sh Speaking world," Catho lic University of Rufo mberok, Slovakia, May 19, 2006. 8 SLOVAKIA Congress. After the Communist government gave up its monopol y of power in 1989, both Leagues sent fact-finding delegation s to Czechoslovakia and both supported the movement for Slova k independence, which became a reality in 1993. Since then , they have continued to help their countrymen to consolidate their independence. Between 1870 and 19 14 approx imate ly half a million Slovaks left their homeland in the Kingdom of Hungary and settled in North America in search of work. Once there, they established three pillars of their new communities- fraternal-benefit societies, parish churches and a newspaper press. Largely of peasant stock from eastern Slovaki a, they sought better wages in the coal mines, steel mills and oil refineries of the American Northeast and Midwest (Connec ti cut , New York, New Jersey, Pennsy lvania, Ohio, Indiana and lllinois). 2 The early arriva ls quickly di scovered that the United State s provided vi1tually no social services. Therefore, these immigrants establi shed their own fratern al-benefit societies which, from monthly membership dues, provided accident, illness or death benefits to their members or families , as well as a pl ace to socialize. By 1890 over fifty such fraternals existed and they then began to federate into nation al organizations such as the National Slovak Society , headquartered in Pittsburgh and the First Catholic Slovak Union, with its headquarters in Cleveland . Since the men initially excluded women from their organizations, Slovak women established the Zivena Beneficial Society in New York in 1891 and Catholic women established the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union in Cleveland in 1892. Lutherans established their own Slovak Evangelical Union in 1893 and Calvini sts their Slovak Cal vin Presbyterian Union in 1902. Even the tiny group of socialists estab li shed their own Slovak Workers Society in 1916. By 1920 American Slovaks had enrolled over 200,000 members in these, and other, fraternal-benefit societies. 3 2 For more details on the process of Slovak migration and resettlement in the United States see my Immigration and Urbanization: Th e Slovak Experience, 1870- 191 8 (New York: AMS Press, I 989), I-7 1. 3 For the story of Slovak fratern al-benefit soc ieties in the United States see my "A Place fo r Everyo ne: Slovak Fratern al-Benefi t Societies," in Scott Cummings, ed ., Self-Help in Urban America: Patterns of Minority Business Enterprise (Port Washington, NY : Kennikat Press, 1980, 130-41 and "Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in North America: An Overview ( 1883- 1993), in Matjaz Klemenc ic ed. , Etnicni fra- SLOVAKIA 9 Besides the need for social benefits , Slovak immigrants also yearned for religious services in their own language. The fraternalbenefit societies led the way in establishing pari sh churches , in recruiting their priests and in supporting (or not supporting) them. Slovak Roman Catholics established 241 parishes, Lutherans 68 , Calvinists 9 and Greek Catholics (mixed parishes of Rusins and Slovaks) 155 by 1930.4 At least half of the Roman Catholic parishes also established parochial schools which taught their children to read, write and sing in Slovak, while all other subjects were taught in English. The Roman Catholics also established several religious orders to teach their children, as well as Benedictine High School for boys in Cleveland and Danville Academy for girls in Danville, Pen. 5 nsy Ivama. Finally, most of the immigrants from Slovakia yearned for news from their homeland and were also curious about conditions in the New World. Therefore, a small number of intellectuals, who had followed them from Slovakia, established a very vigorous newspaper press. Starting with a mere Bulletin in 1885, American Slovaks developed a full-service press that consisted of dailies, weeklies and monthlies , and that varied in orientation from nationalist to Magyarone, from secular to religious, from socialist to capitalist. By 1914 the combined circulation of the Slovak-American press was over 150,000, which was four times the circulation of the Slovak-langu- terna/izem v priseljenskich deie/ach/Ethnic Fratemalism in Immigra nt Countries (Maribor: University of Maribor, 1996), 147-59. 4 For the process of the creation of parishes, see my Growing Up on the South Side: Three Generations of Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I 880- 1976 (Lewsiburg: Bucknell Uni vers ity Press, 1985), 44-62; for the number of parishes of various denominations see Filip Hrobak, comp., and ed. , Slovak Catholic Parishes and Institutions in the United States and Canada (Cleveland: First Catholic Slovak Union , 1955), 3 I- I65; George Dolak, A History of the Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States of America, /902-1927 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955), 189-206; Jan Body & John Adam , comp. and ed .. History of the Slovak Zion Synod LCA (Pittsburgh: Zion Synod, 1976), 199-200; Kalendar pre slovenskych Kalvfnov, 1927 (P ittsburgh), 97- 147; and Paul R. Magocs i, Our People: CarpathoRusyns and Their Descendants in North America (Toron to: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1984), 14. 5 Hrobak, Parishes and institutions, 169-82. SLOVAKIA . Hungary. 6 age press m As they were building the pillars of the ir new co mmunities in America, Slovak immigrants did not fo rget their homeland . Indi vidual immigrants sent several hundred million doll ars to support their fa milies in Slovakia in the period 1870-1914. In addition , Slovak fraternal-benefit societies and their leaders rai sed fund s for the Slovak National Museum, for Slovak schools and churches in Hungary, they paid for and published in the ir Almanacs articles written by Slovak inte llectuals, and they established schol arship fund s to support Slovak high-school students in Bohe mi a and Moravia. Most important of all , they fi nancially supported Slovak candidates to the Hungarian Parli ament and rejo iced when, for the first time in hi story, seven nati onall y-conscious Slovaks were elected in 1906.7 Meanwhile, since the 1867 "Compromi se," whereby the ruling Habsburgs of Austri a and the Magyars of Hungary agreed to divide the empire into the Dual Monarchy of Au stri a-Hungary, the Magyars set out to forcibl y assimilate all the non-M agyar nationalities in Hungary. 8 American Slovak leaders were aware of thi s poli cy of "Magyari zation" and joined their counterparts in Slova ki a in trying to combat it. To thi s end American Slovaks, reacting to urgings from Slovak leaders in Europe, organized a " national congress" to be held in Cleveland on May 26, 1907 . On that day over l0,000 countrymen fro m across America packed into Greys Armory and established the Slovak Leag ue of Ameri ca, whi ch would be the cover organization fo r all nationall y-conscious Slovak organizations in the United States. Thi s sa me congress also e lected the Rev. Stefa n Furdek of Cleveland (originally from Trstena, Orava county), fo under of the First Catholic Slovak Union, as its president and Peter V. Rovnianek of Pittsburgh (originally fro m Doln y Hricov, Trencfn county), foun 6 For an over-view see my "The Slovak-American Press," in Sall y M. Miller ed. , The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical A nalysis and Handbook (Westport, CT: Gree nwood Press, 1987), 354-68 ; fo r the circul ation of the Slovak-Ameri can press in 19 14 see my " Slovak Nati onalism in the USA as Refl ected in th e Slovak-American Press, 1885- 1918 ," Canadian Review of Studies in Na tionalism, 3 1 (Nos. 1-2, 2004) , 65-76. 7 Stolarik, Immigration and Urbanization, 185-205 . 8 The best desc ripti on of " Magyarization" is still Scotus Viator (R.W. Seton-Watson), Racial Problems in Hungary (London: Archibald Constable, 1908 ; reprinted by Howard Ferti g, New York, 1972). SLOVAKIA 11 der of the National Slovak Society , as its first vice-president, as well as the presidents of all the other fraternals as vice-presidents. The League published its formal program of autonomy for the Slovaks in Hungary in September of 1914, just as the world was entering into the first of two world wars that would plague the 20th century. 9 While the League 's official program was autonomy for its countrymen in the Kingdom of Hungary , a small group of Slovaks dissented and called for the destruction of Austria-Hungary and the liberation of their people. These di ssidents were large ly organized in the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol , which had been established in New Jersey in 1896, and which adopted the program of the Czech professsor of philosophy T.G. Masaryk. ' 0 The latter had fled hi s homeland in the fall of 1914 and had started to organize a movement to liberate the linguistically-related Czechs and Slovaks from Au stria-Hungary and to create a new state on its ruin s. Masaryk was assisted in hi s quest by one of hi s form er students, the Paris-based Slovak astronomer, Milan R. Stefanik. Later, Masaryk was joined by another of hi s students, the sociologist Edvard Benes. This trio organized itself into a "Czech Committee" and hoped to persuade the western Allies, if they were victorious over the Central Powers, to dismember AustriaHungary and to allow the Czechs and Slovaks to establish their own state. 11 While Masaryk was an elected member of the Austrian Parliament, and in touch with hi s Czech colleagues, who approved of his plans, he had no mandate from the Slovaks in Hungary to include 9 Fo r the creation of the Slovak League see Jednota (C leveland), May 29, 1907; ~udove noviny (Ska lica), Jun e 4, 1907; Jan Pank uch, Dejiny Clevelandskych a Lakewoodskych Slovakov (C leveland: Jan Pankuch, 1930), 71-3 ; and Kon stantin Cul en, Dejiny Slovakov v A merike, JI (Bratislava: Slovenska Liga, 1942), 11 3-24 ; for the program of autonomy see " Memorandum Slovenskej Ligy v Amerike vydane menom americkyc h Slovakov," in Dr. Yacovsky [Milan Ivanka], Slovaci a Madari: Politicko-historicka uvaha (Pittsburgh: Slovak League of America, I 9 14), 10 I-7. 10 For the ac ti vities of the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol see Milan Getting, A merickf Slovaci a vyvin ceskoslovenskej myslienky v rokoch 19 14-1 9 /8 (Perth Amboy, NJ: Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol , 1933) 11 Masaryk and Benes left us the ir memoirs: T.G . Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations, 19 14-1 918 (London: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927; Edu ard Benes, Souvenirs de g uerre et de revolution (1914-1918), 2 Vols. (Paris: E. Lero ux , 1928). Stefanik left no memoirs but Jan Jurfcek wrote a sy mpathetic biography: M.R. Stefanik: t ivotopisny nacrt (Brati slava: Mlade !eta, 1968). 12 SLOVAKIA them in the proposed state. Therefore, Masaryk sought such a mandate from American Slovak immigrants, most of whom were not yet citizens of the United States, but whose leaders had been in close touch with Slovak leaders in Hungary before the war, and who had a mandate from them to speak on behalf of the Slovak nation . 12 As a result, Masaryk urged his Czech colleagues in the United States to seek out the Slovaks and try to persuade them to join in his liberation movement. American Czechs did so and on October 22, 1915 the Bohemian National Alliance, which was the cover organization of most American Czechs, and the Slovak League of America met and concluded the Cleveland Agreement, which was named after the city in which it was signed. In this Agreement, the two sides pledged to work for the destruction of Austria-Hungary and the creation of a new, federal state consisting "of the Czech and Slovak nations," with "complete national autonomy for Slovakia, with its own Diet, its own state administration, complete cultural freedom .. ..its own financial and political administration," and "with Slovak as the state language ." The Slovak League insisted upon these points because it knew that the Czechs would outnumber the Slovaks in the new state by three-to-one and the League did not want the Czechs to dominate the Slovaks as had the Magyars in Hungary. 13 Had the two sides respected the Cleveland Agreement, the liberation movement might have worked smoothly and led to a harmonious future for the Czechs and Slovaks. Unfortunately, T.G. Masaryk did not believe in the existence of separate Czech and Slovak nations. Perhaps because he was of mixed Slovak (father) and Czech (mother) origin, he believed that the Czechs and Slovaks 12 On August 6, 1906, political leaders in Slovakia sent their counterparts in the USA a letter in which they proposed to share the leadership of the Slovak natio n with them. The letter was published in lmrich Mazar, Dejiny Binghamtonskych Slovakov za dobu styridsat' rokov, I 879-19 I 9 (Bingha mton : Branch I04 of the Slovak League of America, 1919), 2 1-22 . The Czechs recog nized th at Slovak leaders in the USA were authorized to speak on behalf of the Slovaks in Hungary in an editorial that appeared in The Bohemian Review (Chicago), March, 19 18, p.47 . 13 Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 23 , 1915 , p.7 ; Jednota (M iddl etow n, PA ), November 24, 1915, p.4; Narodne noviny (Pittsburgh), November 25, 19 15, p.5 ; the original was published in Dokumenty slovenskej nardonej identity a statnosti, I (Bratislava: Narodne literarne centrum, 1998), 445-7; an English translation can be found in my "The Role of American Slovaks in the Creation of Czecho-S lovakia, 1914-1918," Slovak Studies, VIII (Rome, I 968), p.55. SLOVAKIA 13 formed one "Czechoslovak" nation and merely spoke two dialects of the same language. Therefore, when he arrived in the United States in the spring of 1918 to seek the recognition of the American government for the liberation movement and was shown the Cleveland Agreement, he proclaimed it "out of date" and proceeded to negotiate a new one with the Slovaks. On May 31st, 1918 Masaryk in Pittsburgh negotiated a weaker agreement with American Slovaks. According to thi s new "Pittsburgh Agreement," the two sides approved a "political program to unite the Czechs and Slovaks into an independent state of Czech and Slovak lands," in which " Slovakia will have its own administration, its own Diet and its own courts." Furthermore, "S lovak will be the official language in the school s, in offices and public life generally." And the "Czecho-Slovak state will be a republic and its Constitution will be a democratic one." Noticeably absent from this Agreement were the phrases "federal state" and "complete national autonomy for Slovakia," and there was no mention of the "Czech and Slovak nations," as there had been in the Cleveland Agreement. 14 Members of the Slovak League of America, led by its president Albert Mamatey of Pittsburgh (originall y from Klastor pod Znievom in Turiec county), signed the Pittsburgh Agreement because by then the liberation movement, led by Masaryk, was in high gear. The newly-formed Czechoslovak Legions in Russia revolted against the Bolsheviks and seized control over the entire Trans-Siberian Railway. These Legions had been organized from prisoners-of-war by Masaryk and Stefanik, and their seizure of the railroad greatly aided the Allied war effort, because they prevented hundreds of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners-of-war from returning to fight on the western front. 15 In addition, si nce Masaryk himself had 14 Jednota, June 5, 191 8, p.5; N:irodne noviny, June 6, 1918 , p.5; Jozef Hu sek, "Prehl'ad vaznejsfch udalostf v hi storii I. Kat. Slovenskej Jednoty, Jednota Katolfcky Kalend:ir, 1931, (Middletown, PA), pp.58-9. Victor S. Mamatey pointed ou t that the date of the Pittsburgh Agreement was May 3 1, 191 8, not May 30 as the calligrapher erroneously wrote it. Cf "Este raz o Pittsburgskej dohode," Premeny (Flushing, NY), 20 (No.3 , 1983), 39. For the full text of the Pittsburgh Agreement see Dokumenty, QJ2&i.t. , 485-6 and for an English translation see my The Role of, QJ2,....ci_t., 56. 15 Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 20, 1918, p.5; New York Times, June 29, 1918, p.3 ; for a detailed di sc ussion of the Czechoslovak Leg ion see J.F.N. Bradley , "The Allies and the Czech Revolt aga inst the Bol sheviks in 191 8," Slavonic and East 14 SLOVAKIA drafted and signed the Pittsburgh Agreement, along with the Bohemian National Alliance and the Union of Czech Catholics, American Slovak leaders felt confident that Masaryk would honor it. Skeptics, such as Jozef Hu sek, editor of Jednota (originall y from Okolicne, Liptov county), the official organ of the First Catholic Slovak Union, the largest Slovak fraternal-benefit society in America, did not tru st Masaryk. lt was Husek who forced Masary k into drafting the Pittsburgh Agreement, and it was Husek who insisted that he sign a calligraphed copy of it on November 14, I 918 , the very day that the newly-created Czecho-Slovak government in Prague e lected Masaryk President of the Republic. After Masaryk signed it a second time, American Slovaks were sati sfied and hoped for the best for their people in the new Czecho-Slovak Republic, which was proclaimed by a gathering of Czec h deputies of the former Austrian Parli ament in Prague on October 28 , 191 8, just as the defeated Austria-Hungary was collapsing. 16 Unfortunately for the future of Czecho-Slovakia, the promi ses made to American Slovaks by T.G. Masary k in the Pittsburgh Agreement were not carried out. Once he had returned in triumph to the newl y-created Republic in Dece mber of 1918 , Masaryk promptl y forgot about the Pittsburgh Agreement. The Czec h deputies in Prague , meanwhile, formed themselves into a "Czechoslovak government" on November 14th and later appointed a Czech-dominated "Constitutional Committee" to draft a Constitution for the new Republic. 17 Hearing of these events, the Slovak League of America sent a five-person delegation to Czecho-Slovakia in the spring of 1919, to remind Masaryk of hi s promises and to demand that the Pittsburgh Agreement be included in the proposed Constitution . Upon their return to the United States, the Executive Board of the Slovak League passed a resolution at its quarterly meeting on October 24, 1919, Europea n Review, 43 (No. I OI , 1965), 175-92 . The lack of the word "S lovak" in Bradley ' s title testifi es to the pro-Czech bias of western hi storian s during the ex istence of Czechoslovakia. 16 Husek, " Prehl'ad," op.cit. , 58-9 ; Joze f Husek, " Pittsburghska Dohoda," Jednota Katolfcky K al endar, 1933, 11 I. 17 For more on these proceedings see Vaclav L. Benes , " Czechoslovak Democracy and Its Problems, 1918-1920," in Victor S. Mamatey & Radomir Lu za, eds. , A History of the Czechoslovak Republic. 19 18- 1948 (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1973), 53-6. SLOVAKIA 15 calling for the incorporation of the Pittsburgh Agreement into the proposed Czecho-Slovak Constitution. 18 Indeed, at the last meeting of the Czecho-Slovak Nation al Council in America, which had been founded in 1917 to coordinate the work of the Leag ue and of the Bohemian National Alliance, the Slovak delegates asked their Czech colleagues to pass a similar resolution, and the latter gladly complied 19 on November 7, 1919. Thus, American Czechs recogni zed the validity of the Pittsburgh Agreement while the Constitutional Committee did not. Masaryk, on the other hand , when asked by Prime Mini ster Vl astimil Tu s:cir in January of 1920 to comment on the validity of the Pittsburgh Agreement, brushed it aside as " one of many pre-revolutionary program s made beyond the boundaries. It has its hi storical value." 20 As a result, in March of 1920 the Constitutional Committee drafted , and the Prague Parliament adopted , a very centrali st Constitution of the Czechoslovak Republic , which sy mboli ca ll y dropped the hyphen from its name , and proclaimed that " the Czechoslovak Republic is a unified, not a federative state ," that its official language was the "Czechoslovak language" (even thou gh no such lang uage existed) , and Slovakia did not receive its own administration, its own Diet and its own courts, nor did Slovak become the official language of administration, as promised in the Pittsburgh Agreement? In the inter-war period , after some hesitatio n, the Slovak League of America continued to demand the home-rule promi sed the Slovaks by T.G. Masaryk. Albert Mamatey, the president of the League, visited Slovakia with a copy of the Pittsburgh Agreement in the winter of 19 I 9-1920 and was reass ured by Mil an Hodfa, one of the leaders of the Czec hoslovak Agrarian Party, that the Slovaks had nothing to worry about. Indeed , in September of 1920 Mamatey was rewarded for hi s wartime services on behalf of Slovakia by being ap- 18 19 Jednota, October 29, I 9 I 9. p. l The Czechoslovak Review [Formerly the Bohemian Review], December, 1919, p. 394. T.G. Masaryk to Y lastimil Tu sar, February 5. I920 , as published in The Slovaks 20 and the Pittsburgh Pact (Chicago : Slovak Catholic Federation, 1934), p.34. Jii'i Hoetzl and V. Joachim ( Introd uction by) , The Constitution of the Czechoslo vak Republic (Prague: Ed ition de la Soc iete de I'effort de la T checoslovaqu ie. 1920), pp. I 2, 47 . 21 16 SLOVAKIA pointed the Czechoslo vak Consul in Pittsburgh. 22 He was succeeded as president of the League by hi s colleague Ivan Bielek, the former editor of the American Narodn e noviny, offici al organ of the National Slovak Society.23 Jan A. Kocur, a pre-war immigrant from 24 Turzovka, meanwhile, became the League ' s secretary. Under thi s new leadership the 14th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Pittsburgh, PA on June 28-29, 1922, sent a Memorandum to the National Assembly in Prague in which it demanded that the Pittsburgh Agreement be made a part of the Czechoslovak Constitution .25 Meanwhil e, after some prodding by Jozef Husek, editor of Jednota, as well as by the leadership of the First Catholic Slovak Union and the Slovak Catholic Federation, the 15th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Binghamton , New York on May 27-29, 1924, rejected the philosophy of "Czechoslovakism" as practiced by the Prague government and once again demanded that the provi sions of the Pittsburgh Agreem ent be carried out. 26 In addition , the Slovak League now openl y supported the Slovak People 's Party, led by the Reverend Andrej Hlinka, because that party had adopted the program of the Pittsburgh Agreement. Indeed , in 1926 the Slovak League made Hlinka an honorary member. 27 Interestingly enough, the League was so committed to the Pittsburgh Agreement th at, when the Slovak People ' s Party ag reed to join the center-right Czechoslovak coalition government in 1927-29, the League denounced this step! 28 On the other hand , it heartily approved of the People ' s Party 's withdrawal from the coalition after the October 1929 trial and conviction for treason of Yojtech Tuka, editor of Slo vak, the People 's Party ' s official organ .29 Furthermore, in 1928, on the l 0th anniver22 Joze f Paufo, 75. Rok ov Prvej K atolfckej Slovenskej Jednory (Cleveland: First Catholic Slovak Union, 1965), 160. For a short biograph y of A lbert M amatey see Joze f Paufo, Slovensk f priekopn fci v A merike (Cleveland: First Cath olic Slovak Union, 1972), 269-75. 23 For a short biograph y of Ivan Bielek see Paufo , Slovenskf priekopnfci, p. 25-28. 24 For hi s biography see ilii.d.. , 229. 25 M emorandum Slovenskej Ligy v A merike upravene na vladu a Narodne Shromai denie Cesko-Sl ovenskej Republiky v zaujme vte/enia Pittsburghskej Dohody do ustavy C.-S. Republiky (Pittsburgh: Slovak League of A meri ca, 1922). 26 " Z XV. Kongresu Slovenskej Ligy v A merike." Jednota, June 4, 1924, pp. 1-2, 4. 27 Paufo, 75 roko v, 21 I. 28 lb.id... 223 . 29 " Prehlas od Ivana Bieleka,'· Jednota, October 23 , 1929, p.4. SLOVAKIA 17 sary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, the League rejected a special commendation from the Czechoslovak government for its role in the liberation of the country.30 Thereafter the League continued to publish and send memoranda to the Czecho-Slovak government, as it had in the l 920's, demanding that it grant the Slovaks the home-rule that Masaryk had promised in the Pittsburgh Agreement. 3 1 During the 1930's the Slovak League and the People ' s Party closely cooperated for the benefit of both sides. At its 19th Congress held in Cleveland on November 19-20, 1934, the assembled delegates elected the American-born Chicago medical doctor Peter P. Hletko as their president and he and his executive board invited the nationalist cultural organization Matica slovenska to send a delegation of scholars and leaders to help American Slovaks to maintain their national identity. The Matica complied in 1935-1936 by sending its director, the writer J.C. Hronsky, the publicist Konstantin Culen, the art historian Jozef Cincfk, and the photographer Karel Plicka. They visited 98 of the largest Slovak-American communities, presented lectures, slides and films about Slovakia, and donated four large libraries to the Slovak communities of New York City, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Chicago. This delegation also gathered a wealth of published and manuscript materials pertaining to the history of American Slovaks , which are now stored in the Slovak National Library.32 The People ' s Party, which was the main supporter of the Matica slovenska, reciprocated in 1938 when it invited the Slovak League to send a delegation to the mother country in order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Pittsburgh Agreement. The 20th congress of the League, held in Pittsburgh on April 28-29, 1938, elected a six-person delegation, which included Peter P. Hletko and Jozef Husek, to travel to Slovakia, and to bring with it the original of 30 "Kongres Slovenskej Ligy," Jednota, June 6, 1928, p. l. See, for example the, fo llow ing: Prehlas Slovenskej Ligy v Amerike upraveny na vsetkych politickych cinitelbv Cesko-Slovenskej Republiky (Pittsburgh: P. Jamriska & Co., 1925); V zaujme pra vdy ! (Pittsburgh: P. Jamriska & Co., 1930); and An Autonomi st [Peter P. Hletko], Slovakia's Plea for Autonomy (Middletown, PA: Slovak Literary Society, I 935). 32 J.C. Hronsky described the Matica's trip and its achieve ments in Cesta slovenskou Amerikou: Cestopisne crty z r. 1935-36. v dvoch dieloch (Turc. Sv. Martin : Matica slovenska, 1940). 31 18 SLOVAKIA the Pittsburgh Agreement. The delegation went via Poland, in order to first visit the Rev. Andrej Hlinka in Rufomberok, and only then did it proceed to Bratislava and Prague. In Bratislava on June 5th the Slovak League delegation appeared on the balcony of the Slovak National Theater on Hviezdoslav Square, along with Andrej Hlinka and other notables of the People 's Party. Peter P. Hletko then triumphantly held up the original of the Pittsburgh Agreement, to the cheers of over 100,000 people.33 Finally, on October 6, 1938, after the infamous Munich Agreement weakened Czechoslovakia and president Edvard Benes resigned his office and fled to the west, the Slovak People 's Party, with the support of the Agrarian and National Parties and the approval of Prague, proclaimed the autonomy of Slovakia and formed a six-man government headed by Dr. Jozef Tiso. He had succeeded Andrej Hlinka as party leader after the latter' s death on August 16th. The Prague Parliament formally approved Slovak autonomy on November 22nd and re-named the Republic as Czecho-Slovakia, to reflect thi s new reality. Needless to say, the Slovak League of America was overjoyed to see that, after 20 years of strugg le, the provisions of the Pittsburgh Agreement were finally carried out. 34 While the Slovak League was satisfied with the outcome of its efforts on behalf of the Pittsburgh Agreement, Adolph Hitler was not. The German Chancellor was determined to destroy Czecho-Slovakia and to incorporate Bohemia-Moravia into his "Third Reich." Therefore, he had his agents get in touch with the most radical individuals in the People 's Party, who were led by the recently-releasedfrom-prison Vojtech Tuka, and urged them to seek complete Slovak independence. Tuka and his followers began to plot against CzechoSlovakia and the Prague government reacted by declaring martial law on March 11th, by di ssolving the recently-elected Slovak Diet, 33 Hlas l'udu (Toronto), May 27, 1938, pp.l-2 , June 7, 1938, pp.1-4 ; Slovak v Kan ade (Montreal ), June 2, 1938, p. l; Osadne hlasy (Chicago), June 24, 1938, pp.12; Narodne noviny, Jul y 6, 1938, p.5. Photos of the delegation in Poland and in Slovakia can be found in J.M . Kirschbaum, Slovakia: Nation at the Crossroads of Central Europe (New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1960), between pp.264-265. 34 New Yorksky dennfk (New York) , October 9, 1938 , p.1; Kato/icky Sokol (Passaic, NJ) , October 12, 1938, p.l; Narodne no viny, October 12, 1938, p.l; Osadne h/asy, October 14, 1938 , p.l and October 21 , 1938, pp. 1&3 ; Jednota, November 2, 1938, p.3 SLOVAKIA 19 and by arresting over 200 suspected "plotters" against the Republic. Meanwhile, Hitler's agents summoned the recently-dismissed Prime Minister Jozef Tiso to Berlin on March 13th and gave him an ultimatum: either proclaim independence or watch Slovakia be partitioned by Poland and Hungary. Tiso returned to Bratislava on March 14th, he persuaded President Emil Hacha to reconvene the Slovak Diet, and after Tiso passed on to the Diet Hitler's message, the Diet unanimously declared Slovak independence. Since Czecho-Slovakia no longer existed, Hitler ordered the German army to occupy BohemiaMoravia and turn it into a German " Protectorate." He also recognized the independence of the Slovak Republic, but forced it into a German alliance and put it under German protection. 35 When news of the declaration of Slovak Independence reached American Slovaks, they were at first puzzled and subsequently split into two camps-those who supported Slovak independence and those who did not. This split had first surfaced right after World War I, when certain American Slovaks chose to support the new, centralized Czechoslovak Republic, while others did not. Generally speaking, most Slovak Protestant societies in the USA, as well as those individuals organized in the militantly secular Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol (founded in 1896) supported the new state because they agreed with its official philosophy of "Czechoslovakism," that is, that the Czechs and Slovaks formed one nation but spoke two dialects of the "Czechoslovak" language. 36 The majority of American Slovaks, who were Roman Catholics, and were represented by the First Catholic Slovak Union and the Slovak Catholic Federation, among others, did not. Between 1919 and 1924 the pro-Czechoslovak group controlled the Slovak League. 37 After 1924 the Slovak nationalists regained control over the League, and continue to do so. Therefore, the Protestants and the Sokols (as well as Slovak Communi sts), rejected the independent Slovak Republic and hoped that 35 The best description of this period in Czecho-Slovakia ' s hi story is by Theodor Prochazka, The Second Republic: Th e Disintegration of post-Munich Czechoslovakia (Boulder: East European Monographs, 198 1); for an alternative view see Frantisek Ynuk, " Slovakia' s Six Eventfu l Months," Slovak Studies, 4 ( 1964), 7- I 64. 36 Milan Getting best represented thi s group and described their act ivities in his Americki Slovaci, ~ 37 " Z XV . Kongresu Slovenskej Li gy v Amerike," Q)hci.t. 20 SLOVAKIA Czecho-Slovakia could be resurrected.38 To this end they supported ex-president Edvard Benes's new liberation movement during World War 11. 39 The leadership of the Slovak League, largely representing the majority Roman Catholics, on the other hand, supported the new state. Indeed, Jozef Husek, who was elected president of the League at its 21 st Congress in Cleveland on October 14th, 1938, form all y requested president Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States on April 24, 1939 to grant the Slovak Republic diplomatic recognition.40 Shortly thereafter the Slovak League was heartened by a message ("Posolstvo") sent by Prime Minister Jozef Tiso to American and Canadian Slovaks on May 23rd of 1939. Here Tiso explained in 38 A group of Slovak Protestants (Lutherans, Calvini sts and Congregationalists), led by the Baptist preac her A. P. Slabey, met in Duquesne, PA on May 30th, 1938 and denounced the Hletko- led delegati on of the Slovak League to Slovakja that spring. Cf. Narodne noviny, June 8, 1938 , p.3; In the fall Jan Pankuch, a Lutheran and fo rmer mem ber of the Delegati on, regretted the granting of autonomy to Slovakia. Cf. Hla s (C leveland), October 13, I 938, p. l ; after the Slovak Diet declared independence on Marc h 14th , 1939 . the Lutheran-dominated Nati onal Slovak Society denounced this act. Cf. Narodne noviny, March 15, 1939, p. l , as did the secul arist and Sokol-do minated New Yorksky dennik , March 15, 1939, p. l. Slovak communists also de nounced both Slovak auto no my and independence. Cf. I', udovy dennik (Chicago), October 7, 1938, p. l ; October 8, 1938, p. I; March I6, 1939, p. l 39 Those American Slovaks who opposed Slovak indepe ndence and wished to see Czecho-Slovakja res urrected after th e war initiall y organi zed the mselves into th e Slovak Nati onal Council of America. However, they soon split into fac tions th at either supported ex-president Benes or else Dr. Milan Hodfa or Dr. Stefan Osusky, both of whom had fl ed to the West after the fa ll of France in June of 1940, and both of whom broke with Benes over the future of a res urrected Czecho-S lovakia. While Be nes wanted a return to the cent ra lized pre-M un ich Czechoslovakia, Hodfa and Osusky wished to return to a federated Czecho-S lovilia. Cf. Letters of Jan Dend'ur, Secretary of the Slovak National Council to Vlad imir Hurban, ex-Ambassador of Czechos lovakia in Washington, Papers of Jan Dend'ur, Box I , File A-S , Balch Institute at th e Histori cal Society of Penn sy lvania, Philade lphia; those who supported Benes joined the Czechoslovak Nati onal Co un cil of America and we re led by the Lutheran Rev . Jaros lav Pelikan, Sr. of Chicago. Cf. New York sky dennik, Dece mber 11 , 1941 , p. I. For a descri ption of the Benes-led liberation move ment see Ed uard Taborsky, " Politics in Exile, 1939- 1945 ," in Mamatey & Lufa , A History , QP..ci.1. , 322-42. 40 Letter of Jozef Husek to Frank lin Delano Roosevelt, April 24, 1939, publ ished in Correspondence in re Slovakia and the Declaration of the Aim and Principles of the Slo vak League of A merica (Middletown? Slovak League of America, 1940?), 1718. Husek sent a similar letter to Secretary of State Corde ll Hull on August 4, 1939, ilii.d., 19-20. SLOVAKIA 21 great detail how and why the Slovak Republic came into being and he asked American and Canadian Slovaks to support it. 4 1 As a result, the 22nd Congress of the Slovak League, which was held on November 14-15 in Cleveland, and which re-elected Husek as its president, passed a resolution in which it fully supported the independent Slovak Republic. Furthermore, it called upon the United States government to grant Slovakia diplomatic recognition, and it deplored ex-president Edvard Benes's American speaking tour, in which he called for the restoration of pre-war Czechoslovakia.42 In the fo llowing October, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt received a IS-person delegation of the Slovak League led by Husek and Hletko during which they pledged their loyalty to the USA . They considered thi s meeting to be a moral victory, even though FDR refu sed to recognize the Slovak Republic. 43 On the other hand, because of attacks launched upon the Slovak League by the supporters of Edvard Benes, Husek and the Slovak League were investigated by the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities. Thereafter they were under FBI surveillance. 44 Since the United States entered the Second World War on the side of the Allies on December 7, 1941 , and since Prime Mini ster Vojtech Tuka of Slovakia foolishly declared war upon the United States shortly there41 Tiso was responding to a letter sent to him by Andrej Potocky, Supreme Secretary of the Canadian Slovak League, askin g for an ex planation as to why the Slovak Diet had declared independence. Cf. And rej Potocky to Jozef Tiso, April 20, 1939 and Tiso's reply, of June 2, 1939, with a copy of the " Posolstvo," in the Papers of Andrej Kucera, lmrich Stolarik Co ll ection, Box 576, fo lder 2, 1939, Slovak Archives, University of Ottawa, Archi ves and Spec ia l Collections, and in the Andrej Potocky Papers, box 282 , folder 4, I 939, lhid. Jozef Husek translated and published it as " Dr. Joseph Tiso to the Slovaks in America," in Correspondence in re Slovakia, QJ2,.Q!., 716. This " Posolstvo" was originall y published in Slovak in several pro-independence newspapers in the USA and Canada. Cf. S lovenske bratstvo (Montreal), Jul y 2 1, and July 31, 1939, p.3 . 42 Jednota, Novem ber 29, 1939, p. 3; H/as Judu, November 18 and 21 , p. I. 43 Jedno ta, October 30, 1940, p. I, November 6, 1940, p.2; Slo venske bratstvo, November I, 1940, p.2. 44 Hlas Judu , October 24, 1939 , p. l ; see also Jozef Husek's letters to Martin Dies, Chairman , Dies House Committee, October 6, 1939 and October 28, 1939, in Correspondence in re Slovakia, QJ2..ci.t. , 23-4. In the summer of 1970 I visited with Dr. Peter P. Hletko in Chi cago and he confi rmed that the FBI had him and Husek under survei llance throughout the war, a lthough Hletko struck up a friendship with those watching him . 22 SLOVAKIA after, the Slovak League had to become more circumspect m its pronouncements. It now pledged absolute loyalty to the United States, although it continued to passively support the Slovak Republic. 45 However, the United States Office of War Information arranged a meeting of all Slovak-American organizations in Pittsburgh on September 14, 1942, and urged them to sign a declaration in which they repudiated the Slovak Republic and pledged their loyalty to the United States and its Allies. 46 By December a dejected Jozef Husek resigned as president of the League.47 He was eventually replaced by the more cautious Msgr. Frantisek Du bosh of Lakewood, Ohio, at the 23rd Congress of the League held in Pittsburgh on February 25-26, 1943. 48 Since the Slovak League could no longer openly support Slovak independence, it had to lower its expectations. At its 23rd Congress it had to develop a new program for Slovakia and, at the same time, deal with the issue of accepting or rejecting two former hi gh-ranking Slovaks in the pre-war Czechoslovak government and bureaucracy who had come to America. One was the former Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, Milan Hodz.a, and the other was the former Czechoslovak Minister to Paris, Stefan Osusky. Both had broken with Edvard Benes after the destruction of Czecho-Slovakia. Hodza now recognized the Slovaks as a distinct nation but favored the resurrection of a federated Czecho-Slovakia within a Central European Federation . Osu sky also recognized the Slovaks as an independent nation and favored the resurrection of a federated Czecho-Slovakia as stipul ated in the Cleveland Agreement of 1915 , which he had helped to draft. After much debate, the League rejected both Hodza and 45 Osadne h/asy, December 19, 194 1, p.2; Jednota , January 7, 1942 , p.8. Pavel Jamriska, the vice-president of the L eague, pledged that " American Slovaks never betrayed and never w ill betray the Slovak nation and Slovakia." Cf. Jednota, January 2 1, 1942, p.4. Jozef Husek president of the League, added that " Slovakia should retain its freedom ," in spite of the war. Jednota, February 25, 1942, p.4. 46 Jednota, September 23, 1942, p. l and October 14, 1942, p.2. Thi s " Resolution " was reprinted in Martin Kvetko and Miroslav J. Licko 's edited Zbornik tivah a osobnych spomienok o S/ovenskom narodnom povstanf (Toronto: Stala konferencia slovenskych demokratickych exu lantov, 1976), pp. 396-7 w ithout any explanation. 47 I.:udo ve zvesti (Toronto), December 12, 1942, p. I and January 16, 1943, p.5. 48 Kanadsky Slovak (Montrea l), March 11 , 1943, p. I ; I.:udove zves ti, March 20 , 1943 , p.5. SLOVAKIA 23 Osusky as former collaborators of the first Czechoslovak Republic and it returned to its pre-war program of "self-determination" for the Slovaks in the future. 49 When the Slovak National Uprising against the Germans broke out at the end of August, 1944, American Slovaks were once again divided. After some hesitation, the 26th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Pittsburgh on October 18-19, 1944, and most American Catholic organizations , rejected the leadership of the newlyformed Slovak National Council as too "Czechoslovak" and Communi st. 50 Most American Lutherans, National Sokols and Communi sts, on the other hand, cheered and recognized the leadership of the SNC. 51 To complicate matters even more, the People' s Party journali st Peter Prfdavok, who had initially rejected the Slovak Republic and had fled to France and Great Britain in 1939, al so broke with Edvard Benes and in 1943 establi shed a Slovak National Council in London . He immediately contacted the Slovak League of America and , after the 1944 uprising in Slovakia, counseled the Slovak League not to recognize the Slovak National Council in Slovakia. 52 The League did not do so until it heard of the promulgation of the Kosice Programme of April 5, 1945 , which recognized the Slovaks as a di stinct nation and which al so recognized the Slovak National Council as the government of Slovakia. Thi s was a major concession by representatives of Edvard Benes 's victorious government-in-exile, which by then had returned to Slovak ("Czechoslovak") territory on 49 Cudove z vesti, March 20, 1943 and Kanadsky Slovak, March 25 , 1943, p.4. After Osusky broke with Benes he publi shed a series of pamphlets in whi ch he denounced the latter: Pravda vfthzf 1 (Pohlhd do zrkadla druheho odboj a) (London : The Continental Publishers, 1942); Benes and Slovakia (Middletown, PA : First Catholi c Slovak Union, 1943) ; Triedenie duchov nastalo (L ondon : The Continental Publishers, 1943) ; Hodza ' s position was best reported in K anadsky Slovak, M ay 28, 1942, pp. 7 & 10. For Hodza ' s acti vities in the USA see Michal Mudry, Milan Hodi a v Amerike (Chicago: Geringer Press, 1949). For more on Benes's opponents during World War II see Jan Kuklfk and Jan Nemecek, Prati Beneso vi! Ceska a slovenska protibeneso vska opozice v Londy ne /939-1 945 (Praha: Karolinum , 2004). 50 Kanadsky Slovak, November 9, 1944, p.4; Jednota, N ovember 15, 1944, p.2. 51 Cudove zvesti, September 23 , 1944, pp. I & 4. 52 Slovenske bratst vo, M ay 24, 1940, p.2; Slo vensky priekopnfk, November 27, 1942, pp. I & 4; ~udove zvesti, M arch 18, 1944, p.5 ; Jednota, April 16, 1945, p.5; for a short biograph y of Prfdavok see Literarny almanach Slovaka v A merike, 1967 (Middletown, PA), 209- 10. 24 SLOVAKIA the heel s of the Red Army, and which by now included the Communist leader Klement Gottwald. 53 However, this "Washington Declaration" of April 6, 1945 by the Executive of the Slovak League of America was immediately denounced by Jozef Husek and Peter P. Hletko.54 Furthermore, the 27th Congress of the Slovak League, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October of 1945 also repudiated it. Instead, the Congress reaffirmed the right of the Slovaks in Europe to self-determination. This Congress, which elected the Amercanborn attorney Peter P. Yurchak as its president, also announced a new fund-rai sing campaign to help rebuild post-war Slovakia, as well as to help thousands of political refugees who had fled the resurrected post-war Czechoslovakia.55 Meanwhile, the Slovak League had also sent a three-person delegation to the San Francisco meeting of the newly-founded United Nations from April 25th to June 21st. It was led by the Rev. Jan J. Lach of Whiting, Indiana, in the company of the poet, the Rev . Milos Mlynarovic, and the young Americanborn attorney Edward J. Behuncfk. The League had hoped that its delegation could speak on behalf of the Slovak nation but Jan Masaryk, son of the former president of Czechoslovakia, registered himself as a Slovak (whic h he was not) and, in hi s capacity as Czechoslovakia's new Foreign Minister, claimed that the Slovaks were well-represented at the United Nations, and therefore, did not need the services of the League. Lach was given only the status of an observer and could not participate in the debates about the future of Europe. 56 Meanwhile, Slovaks who had emigrated to Canada also took an interest in the fate of their countrymen. Since the United States Congress had passed three Immigration Acts in the l 920's, which severely restricted further migration from east-central and southern Europe to the United States, about 40,000 Slovaks moved to Canada in search of work in the l 920's and 1930's. Even though the government of Canada wanted them to settle on farms on the Prairies, they 53 For the text of the Kosice Program see "Kosicky vlad ny program," in Dokumenty, II (1998), 407-8 . 54 Osadne hlasy, April 20, 1945 , p.4 and June I, 1945, p.2, June 30, I 945, p.2 ; Kanadsky Slovak, June 14, 1945, p.5. 55 Osadne hlasy, October 26, 1945, p. l ; Kanadsky Slovak, November I, 1945. 56 Jednota , May 23, I 945 , p. l; Osadne hlasy, May 25, 1945, p.4; I'.udove zvesti, June 9, 1945, p.4, and Jul y 2 1, 1945 , p.2. SLOVAKIA 25 largely headed to the metropolitan areas of Winnipeg, Fort William, Montreal and Toronto. There, they quickly copied their American countrymen and established fraternal-benefit societies, parishes and newspapers. Indeed, they originally joined American-Slovak organizations, subsc ribed to their newspapers and were served by SlovakAmerican priests and mini sters. 57 However, when the Great Depression broke out in 1929, SlovakCanadians di scovered that they had to look out for themselves. For instance, when the Slovak League of America announced that it was raising funds to provide food and clothing for its members who were in dire straits, Canadian members of the Slovak League , who had organized fifteen branches in Canada, applied for thi s " relief. " They were shocked when Jan A. Kocur, the Leag ue 's Secretary , replied that American Slovaks had only enough resources to help themselves, and could not afford to help Slovaks in Canada. 58 Therefore, led by Andrej Kucera of Winnipeg (ori ginall y from Radosovce, in Bratislava county) representatives of three Canadian branches of the Slovak League of America met in Winnipeg in 1932 and organized the Slovak League of Canada which, when it was officially incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1934, had its name changed to the Canadian Slovak League. Meanwhile, in order to help its countrymen to survive the Great Depression, leaders of the Canadian Slovak League organized it into a fratern al-benefit society, as well as a nationalist organization. 59 The national orientation of the Canadian Slovak League mirrored that of its American parent. Thus, in November of 1933 the Central Assembly of the Canadian Slovak League sent president T . G. Masa57 For a brief history of the Slovaks in Canada see the entry by Elena Jakesova and M. Mark Stolarik in the Encyclopedia of Canada 's Peoples, ed. By Paul R. Magocsi (Toronto: Uni versity of Toronto Press, 1999), 11 68-79. For a longer treatment see J. M. Kirschbaum , Slovaks in Canada (Toronto: Canadian Eth ni c Press Association of Ontario, 1967). 58 See the correspondence between Kucera and Kocur in the Papers of Andrej Kucera, Lmrich Stolarik Collection, Box 575, fo lder 7, 1928- 1934, Slovak Archives in the Archives and Special Collections, Uni versity of Ottawa and Kucera 's article on the 10th an ni versary of the fo unding of the CSL, Kanadsky Slovak, December 17, 1942, pp. 1-2. For a fuller description see " Pociatky a rozvoj Kanadskej Slovenskej Ligy ," in lmrich Stolarik ed. , Kanadska Slovenska Liga: 35 rocna: Historicky nacrt (19321967) (Toronto: Kanadska Slovenska Liga, 1967), 18-20. 59 Ibid. 2 1-26. 26 SLOVAKIA ryk of Czechoslovakia a reso lution demanding that the Pittsburgh Agreement be incorporated into the Constitution of the Republic.6() Indeed, in 1935 the two Leagues sent a joint appeal to all voters in Slovaki a to support only those political parties that recognized the Pittsburgh Agreement. 61 After Slovakia achieved its autonomy in the fall of 1938, the Canadian Slovak League, like its American counterpart, welcomed this autonomy and congratulated Dr. Jozef Tiso, its first Prime Minister. 62 After the Slovak Diet proclaimed the independence of Slovakia on March 14th, 1939, Canadian Slovaks, like their American cousins, were initially caught off guard and divided over the issue. To clarify matters, Andrej Potocky (w ho hailed from Sedliacka Dubova, Orava county) , the secretary of the Canadian Slovak League, addressed a letter to Dr. Jozef Tiso and asked him for an explanation. Tiso replied in May in his already-mentioned "Posolstvo" and both Leagues published it in newspapers that supported their politics. 63 Thereafter, both Leagues supported the independent Slovak Republic as much as they could. The Canadian Slovak League, like its American counterpart, also rejected Edvard Benes's World War II liberation movement, as well as Milan Hodfa' s plans for a Central European federation. 64 It seriously considered sending a delegate to the San Francisco meeting of the United Nations in 1945 , but could not afford to do so. 65 Meanwhile, delegates to the 28th Congress of the Slovak League of America, held in Detroit on October 29-30th, 1946 and to the 7th Convention of the Canadian Slovak League held in neighboring Windsor on October 28-30th of the same year, iss ued a joint resolution wherein they rejected the resurrected post-war Cze60 See the "Ustredn a sprava Slov . Ligy v Kanade: Rezolucia" , dated November 6, 1933, Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the Papers of Andrej Kucera, QJlii1. 61 Kucera to Kocur, March 30, 1935, ibid 62 Centra l Assembly of the Canadian Slovak Leag ue to Dr. Jozef Tiso, January 2 1, 1939, i..b.id... 63 Andrej Potocky to Jozef Tiso, April 20, 1939 and Jozef Tiso to Andrej Potocky, June 2, 1939 plus the ' Posolstvo" dated May 23, 1939 in ilii..d. See also Slovenske bratstvo, Jul y 21 , 1939, p.3 and Jul y 28 , 1939, p.3. 64 S lovenske bratstvo, August 4, 1939 , p.4 ; March 15, 1940, p. I; Kanadsky Slovak, August 6, 1942, p.2 and December 9, 1943 , p.2 65 Letter of Msgr. F.J. Dubosh, president of the Slovak league of Ameri ca to Jan Ivan of the Canadian Slovak League, March 25 , 1945 , papers of Andrej Kucera, QJlii1. SLOVAKIA 27 choslovakia and instead declared their support for the re-establishment of an independent Slovak Republic. 66 This political stand by both Leagues was reinforced by the arrival of post-war political refugees from Slovakia. Several thou sand supporters of the independent Slovak Republic, consisting of government officials, bureaucrats, soldiers and intellectuals fled the advancing Red Army in the winter and spring of 1945 and settled in Upper Austria and, eventually, in the defeated Germany. From there they sent appea ls to both Slovak Leagues for financial and other assistance. The two Leagues responded by sending them material goods, by arranging for surplus Red Cross packages to be distributed among them and, most importantly, by persuading the International Refugee Organization to recognize them as refugees and to help them emigrate out of war-torn Europe.67 One of the Slovak League of America's first successes was the appointment of Dr. Jozef Kirsc hbaum as its official delegate to the IRO in September of 1947.68 Kirschbaum had been the Slovak Charge d ' Affaires in Switzerland for most of the 66 Indeed , the Canadian Slovak League had also deplored the April 6, 1945 "Washington Resolution" of the Slovak League of America. CF. Andrej Kucera to Msgr. F. Dubosh, October 12, 1945, Papers of Andrej Ku cera, lmrich Stolarik Fonds, Box 572, file 1945 , Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library, University of Ottawa; Kanadsky Slov;:ik, November 16, 1946, p.2 and January 2, 1947, p.3. 67 See the " Memorandum" drafted by the writer Milo Urban to the Slovak League of America dated May 30 , 1945, as publi shed on its 20th an ni versary in K anadsky Slovak, May 29, 1965, p. 2 and September 4, 1965, p.3; see also Osadne hlasy, Jul y 6, 1945, p.2, Apri l 4, 1947, p.l and April 11 , 1947, p.2; see also Kanadsky Slovak, Jul y 12, 1945, p.2. A preliminary li st of these refugees in Austria was compiled by the Czechoslovak Ambassador to Switzerland and se nt to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague because the Czechoslovak government wished to " repatriate" some of them. Cf. Slove nsky narodn y arc hfv, PY , beop.- lll dov. , 1945, 6. Sept. , 1945, Ministerstvo zahrani cnfch veci. Praha, 26079/11-2/45 . No-one has yet written a schol arl y acco unt of this phenomenon as it pertains to the Slovaks. However. l:ubomfr Gleiman , one of these refugees, has penned hi s reminiscences in a manuscript entitled "Out of thi s Century ' s Mae lstro m: A Pilgrim 's Story of Disse nt and Surviva l," (Cary , NC: 200 I ). A co py of this manuscript, as well as his father' s diaries from 1944 to 1954, on whi ch the manuscript is partly based, can be found in the Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library, University of Ottawa, Canada. For a general description of the plight of post-war refugees see Mark Wyman , DP: Europe 's Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 (Philadelphia: The Balch Institute Press, 1989). 68 Kanadsky Slovak, May 27, 1948, p.2 and June I 0, 1948, p. l. 28 SLOVAKIA war. Since he had acti vely supported the creation of the Slovak Republic , he refu sed to return to post-war Czechoslovakia. Instead, he worked vigorou sly with both Slovak Leagues to arrange for the emigration of hundreds of Slovaks to the USA and Canada, once these countries opened their borders to post-war refugees in 1947 and 1948. 69 As the refugees began to arrive in the United States and Canada, they quickly joined the two Slovak Leag ues and reinforced their commitment to Slovak independence. The first to come to the USA was the poet, the Rev . Mikul as Sprinc. He arrived in Jul y of 1946, settled in Cleveland, and immediate ly informed the executive of the Slovak League of what had actually transpired during the existence of the Slovak Republic.70 That is why the Slovak League, at its 28th Congress in Detroit called for a plebiscite to be held in Slovakia to decide its future and it also appealed for a fair trial for Dr. Jozef Tiso. 7 1 The latter had evacuated to Austria with the Slovak government in the dying days of the war but was turned over to Czechoslovak authorities by the victorious American Army. 72 Meanwhile, the historian Dr. Frantisek Hrusovsky arrived in the USA at the end of 1947 and he also joined the Slovak League. Indeed, after Jan A. Kocu r died , Hrusovsky was elected the Secretary of the League at its 30th Congress in Chicago in March of 1948. On September 15, 1952, largely on hi s initiative, the Slovak Institute was established at the Slovak Benedictine Abbey in Cleveland, Ohio, 73 and Hrusovsky became its first director. In 1950 Dr. Jozef Pauco gained admittance to the USA. Thi s former editor of the dail y Slovak, official organ of the Slovak Peo- 69 Author interview with J.M. Kirschbaum, November 7, 1998.He recorded his political views and activities in Nas boj o sam ostatnost' Slovenska (C leveland: Slovak Institute, 1958; reprinted and updated by the Matica slovenska, 2000). 70 Paufo , 75. Rokov QJU;lL 353; Sprinc described his trip to the USA in K slobodnym pobreiiam (Scranton, PA : Obrana Press, 1949). 71 See footnote 65 . 72 For Tiso' s activities during and after World War II , as penned by hi s forme r personal secretary, see Karo l Murin, Spomienky a svedectvo (Hami lton,Ontario: Zahranicna Matica slovenska, 1987). 73 Kanadsky Slovak, October 30, 1947 , pp.1 -2, November 6, 1947 , pp.I & 7, March 17, I949, p. 1. For a short biograph y see " Dr. Frantisek Hrusovsky ," in Literarny Almanach Slovaka v Amerik e, 1967 (Middletown, PA), 16 1-2. SLOVAKIA 29 pie' s Party , initially found employment as assistant editor of the weekly fraternal Jednota , which was published in Middletown, PA. In 1958 he became editor and in 1964 also publisher of the weekly Slovak v Amerike, the oldest Slovak newspaper in America. In 1962 Pauco was elected Secretary of the Slovak League of America, a 74 post which he held until his death in 1975. Finally, in 1952 Dr. Jozef A. Mikus came to the USA. This former Slovak Charge d ' Affaires in Spain fled his homeland after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. He initi ally lived in Paris but after four years he moved to Washington , D.C. For the first five years of his life in the USA he was employed by the Slovak League as its Press Secretary. After that he taught at various American colleges until his retirement. He also remained active within the Slovak League and the Slovak World Congress. 75 While a few post-war Slovak refugees managed to gain entry into the United States after the war, the majority headed for Canada, because the latter opened its doors to refugees first. Among the most important to arrive in 1949 were Dr. Karol Murin, the former personal secretary of president Jozef Tiso, Dr. Jozef Kirschbaum (mentioned earlier) and the publicist and historian Konstantin Culen. 76 In 1950 Karol Sidor, former Slovak Ambassador to the Vatican, and the most prominent of all the emigres, made his way to Montreal. 77 All of them immediately joined the Canadian Slovak League and Culen even became editor of its weekly Kanadsky Slovak from 1952 to 74 Ibid. , 200-2. Kanadsky Slovak, May 18, 1950, p.2. Ibid., 188-9. Kanadsky Slovak, January 24, 1952, p.5 and June 21 , 1952, p.7. The complete life of Jozef Mikus can be reconstructed in "The Jozef Mikus Fonds" located in the Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library , University of Ottawa. 76 Kanadsky S lovak, February 10, 1949, p. I; £udove zvesti, March 12. 1949, p.4, February 25, 1950, p.4. For biographies of Murin and Cu len see Literarny almanach S/ovaka v Amerike, / 967 (Middletown, PA), 129-30 and 194-95. 77 Andrej Kucera to Andrej Potocky, Apri l 6, 1950, Papers of A. Kucera, lmrich Stolarik Collec tion. Box 576, fo lder 7. 1950, Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Morisset Library , University of Ottawa; Kanadsky Slovak, April 20, 1950, p.5; letter of Karol Sidor to lmrich Stolarik, January 12, 1951 , Joseph Stasko Fonds, Slovenska narodna rada v zahranicf, Box 30, Series II , File 4, Subfile 4.1 , Folder 22, ARCS 92-3 , Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, Mori sset Library, University of Ottawa. For more on Sidor see Literamy almanach I 967, 2212. 75 30 SLOVAKIA 1956. Needless to say, these emigres strengthened the League's commitment to promoting Slovak independence. Indeed, they and their American counterparts started to celebrate the anniversary of Slovak independence (Marc h 14th) as early as 1947.78 Both of the Slovak Leagues, meanwhile, denounced the execution of Dr. Jozef Tiso after he was found gui lty of treason by the Communist-dominated National Court in Bratislava in April of 1947. 79 After the Communist takeover of power in Czechoslovakia in February of 1948, a new wave of political refugees fled to the West. This was a mixture of Slovaks who favored independence and those who did not. Those refugees who had fled to the west after 1945 seized the initiative and re-established the Slovak National Council Abroad in the fall of 1948 and elected Karol Sidor as its president and Peter Pridavok of London as its secretary. 80 Those who wished Czechoslovakia to continue, but were opposed to its communist government, organized themselves into the Council for a Free Czechoslovakia, led by Dr. Jozef Lettrich , the former Chairman of the postwar Democratic Party in Slovakia. 81 Both Slovak Leagues rejected Lettrich and his followers as early as 1946 and instead supported the Slovak National Council Abroad .82 Indeed, both Slovak Leagues had previously also rejected the more radical Slovak Action Committee, founded in Rome in 1946 by Dr. Ferdinand Durcansky, the first Foreign Minister of the Slovak Republic .83 Rivalries between the leaders of the Slovak National Council Abroad and that of the Slovak Action Committee seeped into both Leagues and caused much in- 78 Osadne hlasy, March 14, 1947, p.l ; Kanadsky Slovak, April JO and 17, 1954, pp.2-4. 79 Osadne hlasy, April 25 , 1947, pp. I & 2; Kanadsky Slovak, May 8, 1947, p.l, October 30, 1947, pp. 1-2 and November 6, 1947, pp. I & 7; for the reminiscences of the chief prosecutor and the chief defense attorney at thi s trial see Proces s dr. 1. Tisom (Bratislava: Tatra Press, 1990). 8 Kanadsky Slovak, June 24, 1948 , p.3 , December I6, 1948 , p. I and December 30, 1948, p.3 ; Kirschbaum , Nas boj, QJ1.&iL (2000) , 370- 1. 81 Spetko, "Slovenska exi lova," QJ1.&iL 247-8. 82 Kanadsky Slovak, April 11 , 1946, p.5; Ferdinand Durcansky to Andrej Kucera, September 8, 1949, in Papers of A. Kucera, Correspondence with Refugees in Europe, Box 572, lmrich Stolarik Fonds, Slovak Archives, Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa. 83 Durcansky, Ibid. For more on Durcansky see Literarny almanach 1967 , 137-9. ° SLOVAKIA 31 fighting among both in the 1950's. 84 The matter was finally settled in 1960 when the two sides decided to merge into the Slovak Liberation Council, with two co-chairmen: Dr. Jozef Kirschbaum in Toronto (Sidor had died in 1953) and Dr. Ferdinand Durcansky in Munich. 85 Meanwhile, in 1962, Dr. Peter P. Hletko, once again became president of the Slovak League of America, which had undergone some turbulent times. Hletko had succeeded Filip A. Hrobak, editor of Jednota , who had become president in 1950 . The American-born Hrobak was an activist, who had established the Slovak League 's Information Office in Washington in 1952, as well as the Englishlanguage periodical Slovakia in 1950 to champion the independence of his cousins overseas. Meanwhile, Hrobak also had to referee an intense rivalry that broke out between various factions in the League, a rivalry that resulted in the di smissal of Konstantfn Culen from the directorship of the Slovak institute in Cleveland (he had come down from Canada in 1956 and was made director of the Institute shortly after the death of Hrusovsky in the same year) and his banishment from Slovak-American life. 86 Hletko, who had largely been responsible for Culen's dismissal, congratulated the Canadian Slovak League on its 30th anniversary and remarked that it had become " more active" than the Slovak League of America. 87 He may have had in mind the fact that, on March 16th, 1953 (strategically close to the 14th anniversary of Slovak independence on March 14th), the First 84 See the letter of A. Ku cera to Jozef Siksa dated March 20, 1950 as well as the circ ul ar letter of Ferdinand Durcansky dated February 9, 1951, an undated letter from early 195 1, as well as letters from Michael Yargovic , president of the First Catholic Union , dated February 19, 1951 and Fi lip A. Hrobak, president of the Slovak League of America, dated February 20. 1951 , in the Papers of A. Kucera, Qlhci..!.; see also Kanadsky Slovak, January 17, 1952, p.3 and February 14, 1952, p.2, and November 5, 1955, p.2. See also l',udove zves ti. February I, 1958, p.6, and March I, 1958, p.4. 85 Kanadsky Slovak, October 11 , 1958, p.1 , March 2 1, 1959, p.1 , June 4, 1960, p.1 and June 18, 1960, p. I ; l',udove zvesti, September I, 1960, p.6 86 Kanadsky Slovak, June 8, 1950, p.1 , June 2 1, 1952, p.7 , June 27, 1959, p.1 ; I.:udove zvesti, June 17, 1950, p.2 ; for Konstantin Cu len's problems with Hletko and other American Slovak leaders see hi s V zajatf fa losnych legiend od nenavistneho srdca, 11 Vols. (Mim ieographed, New York, 1961). Frantisek Ynuk, in his Z ivotopis Konstantfna Culena (Cleveland: Slovak Institute, 1984), 190-93 also touched on this problem. 87 Kanadsky Slovak, December 15 , 1962, p. I. Filip A. Hrobak, a few years earlier, had expressed simi lar sentiments ; cf. Kanadsky S lovak, July 18, 1959, p. I. 32 SLOVAKIA District Assembly of the Canadian Slovak League had organized a gala banquet at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Leag ue. Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, four cabi net ministers and 25 mem bers of the Canadian Parliament attended! 88 Thi s diplomati c "coup" by the Canadian Slovak League was not matched by its American counterpart. The most the Slovak League of America was able to accomplish on the diplomatic front in the l 950's was to arrange a meeting with officials of Radio Free Europe in 1953 and wi th Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in October of 1956. 89 Nothing came of these meetings. Peter P. Hletko also noticed that the Canadian Slovak League was both younger than its parent organization and had more youthful members. In thi s respect he may have been thinking of Stephen B. Roman, who had come to Oshawa, Canada from Velky Ruskov, Slovakia as a 16 year-old in 1937. Through a seri es of shrewd investments in the 1940's and 1950's, Roman had become a multi-millionaire in Canada's uranium industry. Roman was an active member of the Canadi an Slovak League who had lobbied for the early adm ittance of Slovak post-war political refugees, and who supported the movement for Slovak independence.90 As a devout Greek Catholi c, in 1963 Roman took a leading role in the 1100th anniversary celebrations of the arri val of Sts. Cyril and Methodius on Slovak territory, he contributed to the establishment of the Institute of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Rome in that same year, he was a lay observer to the Second Vatican Council (l 962-1965) and he successfull y lobbied the Vatican to appoint a Slovak Greek Catholic bishop in Canada ( 1965), as well as to create a Slovak Greek Catholic Eparchy (diocese) in Toronto in 1980. 9 1 88 The most comprehensive treatment of th is banquet can be found in " Historicky banket Kanad. Slov. Ligy v Ottawe," in lmrich Stolarik ed., Kanadska Slovenska Liga 35 rocna (Toronto: Canad ian Slovak League, 1967), 268-75. 89 Kanadsk f Slovak, Jul y 18, 1953, p.4 and November 10, 1956, p.5. 90 Slovenske bratstvo (Montreal), Apri l 25 , 1941 , p.3 ; Kanadskf Slovak, April 16, 1943, p.10, December 16, 1943, p.7, May 24, 1945 , p.5, October 4, 1945, September 3, 1955 , p.5, October 20, 1956, p.5, October 19, 1957 , p.3. For a sympathetic biography of Roman see Peter C. Newman, Th e Canadian Establishment, I (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, I975), 269-72. 91 Kanadskf Slovak, November 25 , 1961 , p.2 , Jul y 6, 1963 , p.l, October 3, 1964, p.l, October 17, 1964, p. l , January 9, 196 1, p.l , January 3, 198 1, p. I and February SLOVAKIA 33 Roman ' s greatest achievement, however, was to establish the Slovak World Congress. Even though he had been a member of the Canadian Slovak League since the early 1940's, Roman lamented the fact that Slovaks in the Western world were divided into so many different organizations.92 He first attempted to bring together the Canadian Slovak League and its rival Canadian Slovak Benefit Society in 1969 but failed .93 Then , angered by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 , Roman decided to approach various individuals and organizations to issue an appeal to all Slovak organizations the world over to unite in the struggle to overthrow Communism in the homeland and to seek self-determination for the Slovak nation. The appeal was signed by the presidents of the Slovak League of America, the Canadian Slovak League, the National Slovak Society, Stephen B. Roman , three bishops and an abbot. As a result, in July of 1970 representatives of dozen s of Slovak organizations the world over, including the Slovak League of America and the Canadian Slovak League, met in New York City and created the Slovak World Congress.94 For the next twenty years the Slovak World Congress, led by Stephen B. Roman, worked to spread the good name of the Slovaks the world over. It held meetings in many of the major cities of the world, including Toronto, New York, Washington, Chicago, Munich and Rome; it sponsored scholarly conferences which published their proceedings; it organized Slovak world youth festival s and it published a monthly Bulletin. The two Slovak Leagues participated in most of these ventures. 95 Indeed , the two Slovak Leagues, at first independently, and later working within the Slovak World Congress, successfully lobbied the Vatican to create an independent archbis- 21, 198 1, p. I. Kanadsky Slovak, January 4, 1945, p. 3. 93 Kanadsky S lovak, Septe mber 20 , 1969 , p. I. Nove mber 15, 1969, p. I, June 6, 1970, p. l. 94 Kanadsky S lovak, March 2 1, 1970. p.l , June 26, 197 1, p. l , Jul y 4, 1970, p. l , Jul y 11 , 1970, p. l. 95 The first ten years of the Congress were described by J.M. Kirschbaum in Desa t' rokov cinnosti SKS (Toronto: Slovak World Congress, 1981 ); a short summary was written by Dusan T6th, the Sec retary-General of the Congress from 1971 to 1990 in Kanadsky Slovak , September 10, 2005, p.4. T here is not yet a scholarl y history of the entire period of the Congress's ex istence. 92 34 SLOVAKIA hopric and church province in Slovakia. Their dream came true in 1977 , although the communist government blocked the appointment of an archbishop until 1988. 96 Thi s was a sy mbolic victory for the two Leagues and the Slovak World Congress because it gave Slovakia its own church jurisdiction, which implied that the Slovaks could also have their own state. Unfortunately for all concerned, Stephen B. Roman died in 1988, just one year before Czechoslovakia threw off its communist rulers.97 With its patron gone, the Slovak World Congress slowly withered away. The two Slovak Leagues, on the other hand , sprang into action. The Canadian Slovak League sent a delegation to Slovakia in February of 1990, to urge Slovak leaders to seek either more homerule or else complete independence. 98 The Slovak League of America likewise sent a delegation in May of 1990 for the same purpose.99 Both Slovak Leagues started a fund-raising campaign for various Slovak causes, and both rejoiced when Slovakia became independent in 1993. 100 Since then both Leagues have cooperated with the various Slovak governments to spread the good name of the Slovaks the world over and to help Slovakia in its transition from a communist dictatorship to a democratic and capitalist society. It should be apparent, therefore, that the Slovak League of America, and the Canadian Slovak League, remained dedicated to Slovak self-determination throughout the 20th century. During World War I 96 See, for instance, the Memorandum of the Central Assembly of the Canadian Slovak League to the Vati can requesting a Church Province and an Archbi shop for Slovaki a, Kanadsky Slovak, September 25, 1965, p. l . J. M. Kirschbaum had firs t suggested thi s move in 1959, Ibid. , and Peter Mulik, " Usilie o zriaden ie slovenskej cirkev nej provincie od roku 1939 a jej vyvoj po sucasnost:" in Mulik ed., Katolfcka cirkev a Slovaci: Us ilie Slovakov o samostatnti cirkevnti provinciu (Brati slava: Bernolakova spolocnost: 1997), 68. 97 See the special iss ue of the monthly Maria (Toronto), May, 1988 for many eulogies concerning the life and achievements of Stephen B. Roman. 98 Smer (Bratislava), February 15, 1990 and Praca (Brati slava), February 16, 1990. See also Rudolf Schu ster's Ultim atum (Bratislava, 1996), pp.101 -2 and the photo section between pages 96 and 97. 99 Slovak v Amerike, June, 1990. I happened to be a member of this del egation. We traveled all over Slovakia, met with governme nt officials, journalists and students and urged them to seek more self-determ ination or independence. See al so Schuster's Ultimatum, op. cit. , 224-5. 100 Kanadsky Slovak, January 2, 1993 ; Slovak v Amerike, January issue, 1993. SLOVAKIA 35 the Slovak League of America spoke on behalf of its brethren in Slovakia when the latter could not do so. Since T. G. Masaryk had no mandate from Slovaks in Hungary to create a new state consisting of Czechs and Slovaks, the Slovak League of America gave him that mandate in the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Agreements. Since Masaryk and hi s followers did not respect the promises that they had made guaranteeing Slovaks home-rule in Czechoslovakia, both the Slovak Leag ue of America, and its Canadian offshoot, the Canadian Slovak League, demanded home-rule for the Slovaks in the inter-war period. When Slovakia unexpectedly became independent in 1939, both Leagues, after some hesitation, supported thi s independence. After Czechoslovakia was restored by the victorious Allies, both Slovak Leagues supported a return to Slovak independence, especiall y after the arrival in North America of several thou sa nd political refu gees . During the communist era (1948-1989) both Leagues denounced the communi st regime that ruled over their overseas cousins and they co ntinued to demand Slovak independence. After the Communists gave up their power in 1989, both Leagues urged the Slovaks to either demand more home-rule or else complete independence from the Czechs. When Slovakia finally became independent on January 1, 1993 , both Leagues rejoiced and pledged to help it grow and prosper.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Slovak League of America and the Canadian Slovak League in the Struggle for the Self-Determination of the Nation, 1907-1992 Description An account of the resource M. Mark Stolarik Slovakia, Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007 pp. 7-35 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stolarik, M. Mark, 1943- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/a274d5d6aa7367cd3ddb2e5703fa8992.pdf 6b45fe4cee5511188e2c849bd33571f7 PDF Text Text 36 SLOVAKIA SLOVAK PARTISAN COMMANDERS IN WORLD WAR TI: THE CASE OF JOSEF TROJAN R. Vladimir Baumgarten The Slovak resistance movement, which opposed the Nazis and the Government of the Slovak Repub lic in World War II, was sharply divided into two different and, oftentimes, conflicting orientations. One of them was both pro-Western and pro-Czech. Its adherents were most strongly represented by officers of the Slovak Army. In February of 1944 a group of four dissident lieutenant colonels Jan Golian, Mikulas Ferjencfk, Mirko Yesel and Dezider Kiss-Kalina-established contact with the Czechoslovak Government-in-Ex ile in London. Go lian was designated by the London government to head the uprising, which eventually took place in Aug ust of that year. These officers were unashamed to announce that they wanted a restoration of Czechoslovakia as it had been before the Munich accord of 1938. 1 It never occurred to them that, perhaps many Slovaks were fighting for something different - not the least of which was their recognition as a disti nct nation . The Communists, who represented the other orientation, had taken thi s difference into account. The Slovak Communist Party began its own resistance after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Initiall y, it did not favor the restoration of Czechoslovakia. Although opposed to the Nazis and the domestic regime of priest-president Jozef Tiso, the Communists were inclined toward s either a separate Slovak state or the incorporation of Slovakia as a republic of the Soviet Union. 2 Thi s position changed after the London government concluded a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union 1 Mikulas Ferjencfk, "The Slovak ational Uprising and Mission to the USS R," in Lewis M. White, ed. , On All Fronts: Czechoslovaks in World War II Part II (Washington and New York, 1995), p.231. 2 Gustav Hu sak, "O vyvoji a situac ii na Slovensku" Svedectvi XV (58 ), I 979, pp. 377-378. �SLOVAKIA 37 late in 1943. 3 The Soviet Union favored the restoration of Czechoslovakia, a position that the Slovak Communists now had to take into acco unt. Henceforth the Communists, who made up half of the membership of the underground Slovak National Council, did likewise. It was intended, however, that the mistakes of the past would be avoided , and that Slovakia would play a greater role in the resur4 rected Czechoslovak state. By thi s time the Communists had assumed a predominant role in another resistance element which had begun to emerge. Since 1942, political di ssidents, military deserters, Jews fearing deportation, and escaped prisoners-of-war from France, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had taken refuge in the mountains of Slovakia. They formed the first parti san units in the country. By late summer of 1944 they were reinforced by Soviet partisans parachuted into the country. The latter, consisting of hardened veterans of the war on the Eastern Front, brought the war home to Slovakia. Their activities encouraged German military intervention in the country, causing the Slovak National Upri sing to be launched under premature circumstances .5 3 For detailed descriptions of the Soviet-Czechoslovak agreeme nt, see Edvard Benes, Memoirs (London, I 954 ), pp. I 68- I 96 and Edward Taborsky, President Edward Benes Between &1st and West 1938-/948 (Stanford , I98 I), pp. 159- 174. 4 "The Christmas Agreement of 1943 ," in Joseph Mikus, Slovakia: A Political History 19 18- 1955 (Mil waukee, 1963), Appendi x VI, pp.346-347. 5 These Soviet partisans were commanded by Captain Pyotr Alexeyevitch Yelitchko. They commenced blowing up tun ne ls and bridges, and massac ring members of the German ethnic community in the minin g tow ns of ce ntral Slovaki a. Their ac ti vity culmin ated in the massacre o f members of a German military mi ss ion pass ing throu gh the country. Thi s military miss ion was ori ginally dispatched to Romani a to keep the latter in the war on the Axi s side. Since the Antonesc u regime had been overthrow n, its efforts were futile. As the German military mission passed through Slovakia, its members were intercepted in the vicinity of Turciansky Svaty Martin by Ye litchko's partisans, disg uised as Slovak soldiers. They convinced the Germans th at a bridge further ahead had been destroyed, and that they sho uld be escorted to the barracks for their own protection. It was Ye litchko 's intention that the Germans should be disarmed at the barrac ks and then sent to Partisan Headquarters in Kiev; if this fa iled , they would be exec uted. Lieutenant Colone l Emj l Perko, garrison commander at Turciansky Svaty Martin and a member of the Slovak National Council , feared for the li ves of the members of this German mili tary mission. He was inclined to treat them as guests until the Military Center in Banska Bystrica took them off his hand s. But Perk o's subordin ate, Li eutenant Cyril Ku chta, was more inc lined to �38 SLOVAKIA Throughout the course of the 1944 uprisi ng , relations between the Army and the partisans were oftentimes strai ned. To coordinate military action between the two bodies, a War Council was established. Yet the War Council became meaningless when individual partisan commanders either acted according to their own will or on orders from Partisan Headquarters in Kiev . Initiall y, the partisans were commanded by the Slovak Communist Karo l Smidke; later, the command passed to Soviet Colonel Aleksei N. Asmolov. A comparison of photographs taken of Asmolov is revealing. He arrived in Slovakia as a clean-cut regular Soviet officer; he soon grew a beard and wore a fur cap. Asmolov advised the Slovak military to adapt to the partisan method of warfare. In practice, this would involve breaking down units into smaller size, where they could be absorbed and taken over by the Communists. Relations between the military and the partisans became so tense that, during one meeting of the War Council, Golian (by now promoted to brigadier-general by the London government) referred to the partisans as "Enemy No. I ."6 A fact which is oftentimes overlooked is that not all partisans were Communists . This holds true for three particularly significant commanders: Jan Nalepka, Viliam Zingor and Josef Trojan. The fates of these individuals and the manner in which postwar jurisprudence and historiography came to grips with them merits study. The case of Trojan is particularly interesting for a number of reasons and, therefore, merits special attention. Josef Trojan was of Czech origin. He was born on March 28 , 1906, in Horni Hermanice, in Moravia. The son of a farmer, Trojan married Stanislava Novakova, who bore him three sons and two daughters. One of the daughters, Zdenka Trojanova (194 7-), eventually became a scientist of some di stinction. Trojan's formal education was limited. He attended grade school and agricultural high school in his native village, The latter provided him with enough expertise to work as administrator of the monastery estates in Nova Rise (19261931). Thereafter he was employed by the Bata shoe works, which transferred him to Slovakia. Trojan served as manager in Zlfn (1931follow Yelitchko's orders, and Kuchta was the officer in charge on the fateful ni ght of August 27-28. For an account of what fo llowed, see Jozef Jablonicky, Po vstanie bez Jegiend (Bratislava, 1990), pp.170-173. 6 Ferjenc(k, p.229. �SLOVAKIA 39 1932), Trebic (1932-1934 ), Hostavice (I 934-1938), Os Iany and Simovany during the war years. The Bata shoe works can justifiably boast of having been one of the finest Industries of the First Czechoslovak Republic . Interwar Czechoslovakia had no shortage of flaws, not the least of which was an official denial of Slovak nationality. But the state was sociall y progressive. Although decidedly anti-Bolshevik, the government of the First Republic was by no means hostile to organized labor. Tomas Bata, founder of the shoe works, was a self-made man who appears to have believed that wealth has a certain social function . The workers of the Bata industry enjoyed a comprehensive profit sharing plan, and lower level management was elective. The corporation was considered a model for progressive capitalism in the years between the two world wars. In his capacity as a manager, Trojan brought a number of Czechs into Slovakia. These naturally supported the Slovak National Uprisi ng, which offered a prelude to the liberation of their own nation . They enjoyed a certain liberty to join the Slovak insurgents that their kin in the "Reichsprotectorat" of Bohemia and Moravia were denied : not only were the latter subject to execution by the Nazis if they were caught attempting to cross over, but their families were jeopardized as hostages as well. 7 Trojan began his participation in the uprising as part of partisan group Pavel, which was headquartered in the rebel center of Banska Bystrica. Initially, the command center focused on the north, encouraging partisan activity at Zarnovice, on the Polish border, and even di spatching partisans across the border to establish contact with the Polish resistance. 8 But the situation in the south attained a certain precedence. The significance of this area during the uprisi ng should not be underestimated. Elsewhere in Slovakia, where insurgents had to give up ground, they had mountain ranges to fall back upon, which shielded the central core around Banska Bystrica. The open valleys of the southern lowlands, by contrast, offered a soft underbelly favoring the German advance. A certain amount of local sympathy 7 Karol Fremal , "The Czechs in the Resistance Movement in Slovakia", in Jan Stanislav, et. al. , We Were Not Alone (Banska Bystrica), 1994), pp.21-23 . 8 Documents pertaining to the command structure of Partisan Group Pavel. Archfv Muzea SNP,Fond IV , prir. cfs: 49/76. Pages are unnumbered. �40 SLOVAKIA also favored the Germans. In the so uthwest, an ominous new front was opened by the actions of SS Regiment Schill. Its bloodless takeover of the Nitra garrison, which numbered 2,000, was a major blow to the insurgent cause. The garrison commander, Major Smigovsky, was also a friend of the Schill commander, Obersturmfiihrer Klotz, having served with the latter on the Eastern Front. Henceforth Nitra became a supply center for the Nazi advance on Banska Bystrica. SS Regiment Schill became the most outstanding German military unit in Slovakia, ultimately capturing Banska Bystrica. It was composed largely of noncommissioned officer candidates, and had been assembled within 24 hours among Germans in the Reichsprotectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. These yo un g men were conesquently highly motivated.9 The command of partisan group Pavel di spatched Trojan southward to organize a new partisan detachment in the upper Nitra valley. He commanded approximately 150 men . 10 Troj an made contact with some of hi s Czech associates, and also recruited shoe workers of Batbvany, in southwestern Slovakia. On several occasions the Nitra Brigade held up the drive of SS Regiment Schil l in its advance towards Banska Bystrica. Colonel Ferjencfk, one of the military leaders of the upri sing, later noted that, after the fal l of Turciansky Svaty Martin around September 20, most active cooperation between the partisans and the regular military was terminated. An exception was provided by Trojan's group. 11 Enjoying the benefits of a more enlightened variety of capitalism before the war, these shoe workers were immune to Communi st attempts to recruit them. Although Trojan was not a Communist, he was not adverse to recruiting partisans of Communist or leftist sy mpathies. This particularly held true of a group of Bulgarian exchange students residing in Slovakia. Throughout the interwar period, many Balkan students of 9 Anonymous, "The Waffen SS and the Crushing of the Slovak Military Mutiny" Siegrunen: The Waffen SS in Historical Perspective Volume 5, No.6, undated, pp. 29-30 . Contributors to thi s journal consist large ly of the sons of Waffen SS officers who draw extensively from fam il y papers. 10 Document pertai ning to the history of Partisan Group Pavel , with spec ific reference to Captain Trojan and the struggle in the upper Nitra va lley . Archfv Muzea SNP, Fond IV, prir. cfs: 5 26/75, p.22. 11 Ferjencik, p.228. �SLOVAKIA 41 the mundane sciences (medicine, engineering, etc.) went for their education to the more advanced universities in Czechoslovakia. Most of them studied in Prague or Brno, in the Czech lands. In November 1939, the Nazi rulers of the Reichsprotectorate of Bohemia and Moravia shut down the Czech universities following a student protest. Most of the Bulgarians consequently transferred to Slovak (previously Comenius) Uni ve rsity in Bratislava. At the beginning of the 1940s, their numbers were estimated as between 500 and 600. 12 The life of the average Slovak university student at this time was anything but luxurious, and the Bulgarians received negligible stipends and lived in substandard housing. There was an officially sanctioned Bulgarian student society named after Georgii Rakovski , one of the national awakeners of the nineteenth century. It was nationalist and right-wing in political orientation. Yet a number of students organized their own underground association called B.O.N.S.S. (Bulharsky vseobecny narodny zvaz). Their acknowleged leader was Stojan Panov Stojanov, a student of mechanical engineering. At the time of the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising, Bulgaria changed sides in the wake of the advance of the Soviet military. Even after the German capture of Banska Bystrica (October 27), many of the Bulgarians in Slovakia were willing to support the struggle. The bulk of these Bulgarians, under the leadership of Stojanov, was received into the Nitra Brigade on December 20. Unfortunately , the Nitra Brigade was in a particularly exposed position. Most partisan units had fallen back into the Tatras, where the terrain made their elimination by the German military more difficult than those fighting further to the south. The Nitra Brigade operated in an area where the Hron River valley stood just above the lowlands. On February 13-14, 1945, the Germans struck a decisive blow against the Nitra Brigade in the vicinity of the village of Orovnice. Stojanov and most of his followers were killed. Ten of them were captured and dispatched to Nazi concentration camps. Two among this group survived Dachau , but were too physically debilitated to last long afterwards. Two other Bulgarians man aged to escape the massac re 12 V. Valev , "Bulharskf vysokoskolaci na Slovensku", p.4 and Valerian Bys tricky, "Bulhari v SNP", p. l in Archfv Muzea SNP,Fond IV , prir. cfs: 29/71. Hereafter articles and documents from this collection shall be referred to as SNP Muzeum archives/Bulgarian collecti on. �42 SLOVAKIA and joined the advancing Red Army, although both were killed in action before the end of the war. 13 Josef Trojan had particularly sentimental feelings for these Bulgarian students. It was in thi s spirit that, on February 7, 1946, he submitted a literary contribution entitled "S lavonic Peace." He stresssed the Pan-Slav nature of the struggle, and praised the Red Army. 14 Yet Trojan had a falling out with the incoming Communist government. It was perhaps less a matter of opposition to the government than it was his previous track record, plus the political atmosphere prevailing in Czechoslovakia at this time. At this point the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party requires mention. The chairman of the party was Klement Gottwald, who had spent the war years in Moscow. Those Communists who had done so generally served as wi lling executors of Soviet policy. Yet others had spent the war years in prison or had served in the resistance movements in their native countries. Although they too wished to construct socialism, they wished to do so according to conditions in their native lands. Following Yugoslavia's split with the Kremlin in June ofl 948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered a massive purge of these nationali st elements throughout East Central Europe. Zionism was now targeted as an enemy ideology as well. Although both the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia had endorsed the creation of Israel , when the British began to depart from Palestine, the Soviets began courting the Arabs. Moreover, Stalin had always held a personal distrust of Jews since the time of his conflict with the so-called "Old Bolsheviks," many of whom were Jewish. This realignment was particularly felt in Czechoslovakia, where many of the Jews who had survived the holocaust of World War II joined the Communist Party. The Secretary General of the Party, Rudolf Stansky , was himself Jewish, although he had never considered himself a Jew or a Czech or anything other than a Communist. He had also spent the war years in the Soviet Union. As the Czechoslovak Communi st Party took on an increasingly militant approach to domestic 13 List of Bulgarians killed in Slovakia 1944-45 , in SNP Muzeum arch ives/Bulgarian collection, pp.1-2. 14 Jozef Trojan , "S lovansky mier" (February 7, I946), in SNP Muzeum archives/Bulgarian collection, p.5. �SLOVAKIA 43 affairs, Slansky ordered a wholesale inqui sition against suspected di ssidents. He created a machine of police terror which ultimately destroyed him as well. As those who were arrested were tortured to name other"conspirators," Slanskfs name became prominent. In the subsequent purge which followed , thousand s of innocent lives were destroyed. 15 Josef Trojan was arrested in Prague on the night of December 22, 1949 on the personal orders of Rudolf Slansky. He was charged with having collaborated with the Gestapo. Although Slansky was himself swept away not long afterwards, the machinery of repression had already been set in motion. Among its victims were Gustav Husak and other Slovak Communi st leaders of the 1944 upri sing, who received long terms of impri sonment. Even the death of Stalin early in 1953 did not halt the trend . Trojan was hanged on December 29th of that year. 16 A comparison of the fate of Trojan with those of the other two previously mentioned commanders reveal s a marked contrast, and more than just a few ironies. Jan Nalepka, unlike Trojan, was an intellectual. A poet and a teacher, he was noted for a mischievous disposition as a youth , and he retained hi s precociousness after having entered teachers' college in 1931. A conference of young teac hers in Komorna Lhotka (July 1933) was addressed by Czechoslovak president T . G. Masary k. The latter viewed the educational system as a means of molding young Slovaks into a "Czechoslovak" spirit. But, Nalepka whispered to hi s friend Vladimir Clementis that Slovak students were capable of cultivating their own spirits. 17 Clementis eventually became Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, and likew ise went to the gallows as a result of the "S lansky Affair." Nalepka was a lefti st, but also a nation alist. In February 1939, he began organizing clandestine elements against the governing Slovak People's Party-one month before the latter ass umed the leadership of 15 For the most comprehensive study of what has come to be known as the "Shi nsky Affair," see Jiri Pelikan, ed., The Czechoslovak Political Trials 1950-/ 954. The Suppressed Report of the Dubcek Government 's Commission of Inquiry, 1968 (London, 197 I). 16 Jozef Jablonicky, "Krute osudy ," in Vladimir Babni c, ed. , Na se povstanie (Banska Bystrica, I999), p. I00. 17 Jozef Nalepka, ed. , Jni kapit:foovi J:inovi N:ilepkovi (Spisska Nova Yes, 2002), p.28. �44 SLOVAKIA a se parate Slovak state. Yet the events of March 1939 inc luded a Hungari an invasion of eastern Slovakia. Called up fo r military service, Nalepka participated willingly in the brief border war. He saw no contradiction between thi s action and hi s ow n ideals. Later that year, Slovakia's military alliance with Nazi Germany dictated participati on in the Polish campaign. Nalepka, by then a lieutenant, fou ght with distinction on the northern side of the Carpathi ans. He was decorated by General Ferdinand Catlos, Slovakia's Minister of Defense. The war against Soviet Russia proved more problematic fo r Slovak soldiers. Slovaki a had territori al grievances with Hungary and Poland , but none with the Russians. Nalepka was ass igned to the soca ll ed "Security" Di visio n, whi ch was di spatched to the Pripet Marshes in northern Ukra ine and Be laru s fo r police duties against Soviet partisa ns. 18 He entered into c landes tine co ntact with these parti sans and eventu ally deserted to them, taking hi s men with him. The nature of parti san warfare in the swamps dictated th at Nalepka frequently travelled on horsebac k, carrying an automati c weapon. A photograph of this legend ary pose later inspired a plastic equestri an sc ulpture of him by Slovak sc ulptor Ann a Ki sakova . Nalepka's acti vity also contributed to hi s demj se. He was blled in an encounter with a German patro l outside the vill age of Ovruc on the ni ght of November 17, 1943. Co nsequentl y, Na lepka was un available to partic ipate in the Slovak National Uprising. But hi s survi ving comrades named their parti san brigade after him . The Captain Jan Nalepka Brigade was later parac huted back into Slovak ia to participate in the upri sing. Compared with other units which the Soviets ex ported, and which 18 Sold iers of the Security Division became, by Nazi standards, tota ll y corrupted by fra terni zation with local Ukrainians. Sov iet mili tary mobilization in the early part of the war had carried many yo un g men away. Others were forc ibly recruited by the Germans for labor services in th e Re ich. G ive n a shortage of domestic manpower, Ukra inian wome n rece ived th e Slovak sold iers willingly, if not enthusias ti call y. There was widespread venereal di sease among the Slovaks. Civilian hunger prompted a brisk trade in an exc lusive ly fe male commodity fo r rati ons, to the particul ar profit of Slovak warrant officers in charge of stores. As ide fro m all that, boredom drove many sold iers to alcohol ism. Slovak officers were re luctant to bring charges on such misdemeanors and began covering the m up, because men on punishment were removed from their co mmand without replacement. See Mark W. A. Axworthy, Axis Slovakia: Hitler's Slavic Wedge 1938- 1945 (Bays ide, New York, 2002), p. 148. �SLOVAKIA 45 largely engaged in looting, the Nalepka Brigade conducted itself in an exemplary manner. Together with the 2nd Czechoslovak Paratroopers, it shares credit for the capture of the strategic village of Jalna in the Hron River valley on October 10-12, 1944. This action was the last victory of the insurgents in Slovakia during the up• 19 n• smg. Nalepka died at a convenient time, which enabled him to become a legend in the postwar Communist era. Hi s peasant parents were received with honor in the Soviet Union at memorial services dedicated to the captain. His popularity survived the collapse of the Communist system in East Central Europe. Streets in various Slovak communities are still named after him. Being an established folk hero has its privileges. Viliam Zingor, like Nalepka, was an army deserter. Called up for service on the Eastern Front, he instead took to the mountains in the vicinity of Turciansky Svaty Martin. He was the brother of a nationally renowned hunter. Bohus Zingor was well known among forest rangers, a fact which was of considerable help to his fugitive brother. When Viliam Zingor took to hiding on the Podstranie Mountain, he was befriended and sheltered by forest ranger Ladislav Frimmel. The Zingor brothers and Frimmel organized a network to aid other fugitives. A significant member of this group was Vladimir Iershov, a Slovak professor of Ru ssian extraction. Iershov's area of specialty was escaped Soviet prisoners of war who had made their way to the Slovak highlands. These included people of Russian , Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian nationalities.2° They played a key role in the overall partisan movement during the events of autumn 1944. By March of 1944, Viliam Zingor commanded a significant number of partisans in the vicinity of the Podstranie Mountain. In August, membership was estimated at roughly 100 men. Later that month the group was reinforced by Soviet partisans commanded by Captain Pyotr Alekseyevitch Velitchko, who had parachuted into 19 Ibid, p.292. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Un ion, participants in the Slovak National Uprising from the various republics were acknow ledged and honored simply as citizens of the Soviet Union. At the time of the 60th anniversary in Hanska Bystrica, a number of ambassadors of now sovereign republics participated in the celebrations. The participation of their citizens was duly acknow ledged by the Muzeum SNP, leading to a dramatic increase of nations listed as having contributed to the uprising. 20 �46 SLOVAKIA Slovakia. On August 25 - four days before the formal commencement of the upri sing - Zingor was made commander of the M. R. Stefanik Brigade. This partisan brigade was named after the Slovak member of the founding fathers of Czechoslovakia, who held the rank of brigadier-general in the army of France during the First World War. It was so named in part because of a large number of French members. Earlier in the war, French soldiers who had escaped from prisoner of war camps in Germany made their way eastward. It was their intention to reac h neutral Turkey , from whence they could board ships and make their way back to the Allied side. Most of these Frenchmen were recaptured or interned in either Slovakia or Hungary. The Slovak underground arranged their escape and transfer to the mountains around Turciansky Svaty Martin , where they were absorbed into the partisan movement. These Frenchmen enjoyed a certain independence of command under Lieutenant Georges Barazar de Lannurien. During the opening weeks of the uprising, they halted the German advance in the vicinity of Strecno. 21 Viliam Zingor supported the Democratic Party of Jozef Lettrich (a member of the Slovak National Council during the upri sing) in the years immediately following the war. Consequently, he opposed the incoming Communist government. Mutual antagonism intensified after the Communists consolidated power in February of 1948 . By now the state had recourse against Zingor. It alleged that he and several wartime associates had established a subversive organization. This body was said to be inspired by the "Anglo-American imperialists," now enemies of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia's protector. Zingor and his associates were accused of agitating among the trade union s. It was further alleged that they had disbursed various funds for this purpose. They were put on trial on October 12-2 1, 1950, 21 For an English-language acco unt of the French participation in Slovakia, see Bohus Chnoupek, A Breaking of Seals: The French Resistance in Slovakia (Oxford and New York, 1988). Chnoupek was a Slovak journalist who first publicized the French role at the time of the tenth anniversary of the upri sing. Later, he became Czechoslovakia's foreign minister under the Husak regime. For the most comprehensive work on the subject, see Dusan Halaj et. al., Francuzi v Slovenskom narodnom povstanf (Banska Bystrica, 2003). �SLOVAKIA 47 were found guilty, and were sentenced to death .22 Zingor was executed the following year. Viliam Zingor's rehabilitation came about as a result of the democratic reforms temporarily effected in Czechoslovakia in 1968. At the beginning of that year Slovak Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcek assumed the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party . The way was paved for the redress of many outstanding grievances. Relatives of the defendants in the Zingor trial maintained that allegations concerning the disbursement of funds for illegal purposes were the invention of "agents provocateurs" in the service of State Security. It may be argued that the reviewing court was more generous than just in its evaluation. The hostility of the defendants to the Communist regime was an unquestionable fact. Yet, insofar as no network of conspiratorial activity actually existed, the district court of Banska Bystrica formally overturned the verdicts on April 29, 1968. 23 Czechoslovakia's democratic reforms , popularly known as the "Prague Spring," were abruptly terminated in August of that year. The Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. Within a year Dubcek was forced out of his position as Party Secretary and replaced by Gustav Husak. A one-time Slovak nationalist and former political prisoner, Husak now acknowledged Soviet hegemony as an unavoidable fact and urged his countrymen to do likewise. He thus became the enforcer of Soviet policy in that hapless land . But the status of the Slovaks underwent a revision formally acting in their favor . Czechoslovakia was federalized into two republics - one Czech and the other Slovak although both were subject to a common Communi st Party . Most significantly, the official attitude towards the Slovak Nation al Upri22 Copies of documents pertainin g to both the prosecution of and the verdi ct on the state's case against Zingor may be found in the archives of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banska Bystrica. For the prosecution , see Odpi s zaloby rok 1950 in Archfv Muzea SNP, Fond IV , prir. cfs: 576/9 1, pp. 1-20. For the verdict , see Rozsudok rok 1950, Archiv Muzea SNP, Fond IV, prir. cfs : 575/96, pp. I - 15. 23 Documents pertaining to th e review of the case of the state versus Z ingor and associates may be found in the archives of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banska Bystri ca. For the formal verdict, see Rozsudok rok 1968 in Archfv Muzea SNP, Fond IV, prir. cfs: 5 76/9 1, pp.1 -33 . For the rehabilitati on, see Uznesenie rok 1968 in Archfv Muzea SN P, Fond IV, prir. cfs : 5 76/91 , pp. 1- 10. �48 SLOVAKIA sing changed. Previously vilified, it was now hailed as a cornerstone in relations between the two nationalities. Consequently, Zingor's rehabilitation was permitted to stand, and he began receiving honorable mention in officially sanctioned historical publications. The fact that he had aided escaped Soviet P.O.W.S made him less than objectionable to Czechoslovakia's overlords. Josef Trojan had to wai t another generation before receiving honorable mention in Slovak history books. Ironically, his memory is treated more charitably by Slovak historians such as Jozef Jablonicky than it is among his own Czech people. Trojan's case was reviewed following the collapse of the Communist system in the Velvet Revolution of autumn 1989. He was exonerated on the charge of having collaborated with the Gestapo, and his death penalty was overturned. But a conviction and prison sentence remained in force on the grounds that Trojan "organized murder," in this case hav ing executed members of his own partisan unit. Trojan 's case raises an interesting legal question. Under common maritime law, a captain on an isolated ship has virtually unlimited authority to execute insubordinates. To what extent does this apply to a partisan commander in an insurgent situation, in a country where the successor government disavows the sovereignty of the previous one? Czech historian Jan Rychlik has asserted that, according to a law promulgated on May 8, 1946, acts committed between September 30, 1938 and October 28,1945, which normally would be considered crimes, were not punishable if they contributed to the liberation of the Czech and Slovak peoples. Internal military ordinances permitted the commander to use force (including the use of firearms) under field conditions in which subordinate soldiers refu sed to fulfill orders. The question of the application of these legal norms, however, remained contingent upon the decision of an individual court. 24 A Slovak partisan who knew Trojan both before and after the war concurs with the revised verdict. Jan Kulhan began the war as a Slovak soldier di spatched to the Eastern Front. Like many others, he changed sides, becoming a member of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps commanded by General Ludvik Svoboda. He was di spatched 24 Law of May 8, 1946 (No. 11 5/ 1946) from Collection of Laws, Official Law Gazette. Information provided by Jan Rychlfk, to whom the present author expresses his gratitude. �SLOVAKIA 49 ahead of the front on a mission to destroy German-held oil wells in southern Poland. Kulhan's recollection of Trojan remains a lively and coherent one. According to Kulhan , Trojan actually joined the Communist Party after the war. At this time he was noted as a stern manager, going so far as to insist that employees show up for work. Kulhan asserted that the charge of having collaborated with the Gestapo was a fabrication. Trojan's honeymoon with the Czechoslovak Communist Party was a brief one, and his disillusionment placed him on a collision course. Kulhan also conceded that, given his professional background, Trojan's partisans were perhaps the best shod in the Slovak National Uprising. But several friends of Kulhan's sister were among the partisans who were executed. Kulhan maintain s that Trojan acted wrongfully in this matter. 25 At the time of the writing of this essay, the Czech judicial system maintains an enigmatic silence concerning Trojan, although his case is again open for review. Meanwhile, Slovak historians and octogenarian veterans of World War II alike look forward to the rehabilitation of a man who, although born a Czech , enjoys a certain reputation as a Slovak hero. Yet, judging from the opinion of Kulhan , not all octogenarians agree. It remains for the Czech judicial system to give a complete account of the execution of partisans by Trojan, and the state's case against him. 25 Telephone interview with John Kulhan, August I0 , 2005. Mr. Kulhan is today a U.S. citizen and is currently a nominee fo r the Pres identi al Medal of Freedom. � 36 SLOVAKIA SLOVAK PARTISAN COMMANDERS IN WORLD WAR TI: THE CASE OF JOSEF TROJAN R. Vladimir Baumgarten The Slovak resistance movement, which opposed the Nazis and the Government of the Slovak Repub lic in World War II, was sharply divided into two different and, oftentimes, conflicting orientations. One of them was both pro-Western and pro-Czech. Its adherents were most strongly represented by officers of the Slovak Army. In February of 1944 a group of four dissident lieutenant colonels Jan Golian, Mikulas Ferjencfk, Mirko Yesel and Dezider Kiss-Kalina-established contact with the Czechoslovak Government-in-Ex ile in London. Go lian was designated by the London government to head the uprising, which eventually took place in Aug ust of that year. These officers were unashamed to announce that they wanted a restoration of Czechoslovakia as it had been before the Munich accord of 1938. 1 It never occurred to them that, perhaps many Slovaks were fighting for something different - not the least of which was their recognition as a disti nct nation . The Communists, who represented the other orientation, had taken thi s difference into account. The Slovak Communist Party began its own resistance after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Initiall y, it did not favor the restoration of Czechoslovakia. Although opposed to the Nazis and the domestic regime of priest-president Jozef Tiso, the Communists were inclined toward s either a separate Slovak state or the incorporation of Slovakia as a republic of the Soviet Union. 2 Thi s position changed after the London government concluded a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union 1 Mikulas Ferjencfk, "The Slovak ational Uprising and Mission to the USS R," in Lewis M. White, ed. , On All Fronts: Czechoslovaks in World War II Part II (Washington and New York, 1995), p.231. 2 Gustav Hu sak, "O vyvoji a situac ii na Slovensku" Svedectvi XV (58 ), I 979, pp. 377-378. �SLOVAKIA 37 late in 1943. 3 The Soviet Union favored the restoration of Czechoslovakia, a position that the Slovak Communists now had to take into acco unt. Henceforth the Communists, who made up half of the membership of the underground Slovak National Council, did likewise. It was intended, however, that the mistakes of the past would be avoided , and that Slovakia would play a greater role in the resur4 rected Czechoslovak state. By thi s time the Communists had assumed a predominant role in another resistance element which had begun to emerge. Since 1942, political di ssidents, military deserters, Jews fearing deportation, and escaped prisoners-of-war from France, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had taken refuge in the mountains of Slovakia. They formed the first parti san units in the country. By late summer of 1944 they were reinforced by Soviet partisans parachuted into the country. The latter, consisting of hardened veterans of the war on the Eastern Front, brought the war home to Slovakia. Their activities encouraged German military intervention in the country, causing the Slovak National Upri sing to be launched under premature circumstances .5 3 For detailed descriptions of the Soviet-Czechoslovak agreeme nt, see Edvard Benes, Memoirs (London, I 954 ), pp. I 68- I 96 and Edward Taborsky, President Edward Benes Between &1st and West 1938-/948 (Stanford , I98 I), pp. 159- 174. 4 "The Christmas Agreement of 1943 ," in Joseph Mikus, Slovakia: A Political History 19 18- 1955 (Mil waukee, 1963), Appendi x VI, pp.346-347. 5 These Soviet partisans were commanded by Captain Pyotr Alexeyevitch Yelitchko. They commenced blowing up tun ne ls and bridges, and massac ring members of the German ethnic community in the minin g tow ns of ce ntral Slovaki a. Their ac ti vity culmin ated in the massacre o f members of a German military mi ss ion pass ing throu gh the country. Thi s military miss ion was ori ginally dispatched to Romani a to keep the latter in the war on the Axi s side. Since the Antonesc u regime had been overthrow n, its efforts were futile. As the German military mission passed through Slovakia, its members were intercepted in the vicinity of Turciansky Svaty Martin by Ye litchko's partisans, disg uised as Slovak soldiers. They convinced the Germans th at a bridge further ahead had been destroyed, and that they sho uld be escorted to the barracks for their own protection. It was Ye litchko 's intention that the Germans should be disarmed at the barrac ks and then sent to Partisan Headquarters in Kiev; if this fa iled , they would be exec uted. Lieutenant Colone l Emj l Perko, garrison commander at Turciansky Svaty Martin and a member of the Slovak National Council , feared for the li ves of the members of this German mili tary mission. He was inclined to treat them as guests until the Military Center in Banska Bystrica took them off his hand s. But Perk o's subordin ate, Li eutenant Cyril Ku chta, was more inc lined to �38 SLOVAKIA Throughout the course of the 1944 uprisi ng , relations between the Army and the partisans were oftentimes strai ned. To coordinate military action between the two bodies, a War Council was established. Yet the War Council became meaningless when individual partisan commanders either acted according to their own will or on orders from Partisan Headquarters in Kiev . Initiall y, the partisans were commanded by the Slovak Communist Karo l Smidke; later, the command passed to Soviet Colonel Aleksei N. Asmolov. A comparison of photographs taken of Asmolov is revealing. He arrived in Slovakia as a clean-cut regular Soviet officer; he soon grew a beard and wore a fur cap. Asmolov advised the Slovak military to adapt to the partisan method of warfare. In practice, this would involve breaking down units into smaller size, where they could be absorbed and taken over by the Communists. Relations between the military and the partisans became so tense that, during one meeting of the War Council, Golian (by now promoted to brigadier-general by the London government) referred to the partisans as "Enemy No. I ."6 A fact which is oftentimes overlooked is that not all partisans were Communists . This holds true for three particularly significant commanders: Jan Nalepka, Viliam Zingor and Josef Trojan. The fates of these individuals and the manner in which postwar jurisprudence and historiography came to grips with them merits study. The case of Trojan is particularly interesting for a number of reasons and, therefore, merits special attention. Josef Trojan was of Czech origin. He was born on March 28 , 1906, in Horni Hermanice, in Moravia. The son of a farmer, Trojan married Stanislava Novakova, who bore him three sons and two daughters. One of the daughters, Zdenka Trojanova (194 7-), eventually became a scientist of some di stinction. Trojan's formal education was limited. He attended grade school and agricultural high school in his native village, The latter provided him with enough expertise to work as administrator of the monastery estates in Nova Rise (19261931). Thereafter he was employed by the Bata shoe works, which transferred him to Slovakia. Trojan served as manager in Zlfn (1931follow Yelitchko's orders, and Kuchta was the officer in charge on the fateful ni ght of August 27-28. For an account of what fo llowed, see Jozef Jablonicky, Po vstanie bez Jegiend (Bratislava, 1990), pp.170-173. 6 Ferjenc(k, p.229. �SLOVAKIA 39 1932), Trebic (1932-1934 ), Hostavice (I 934-1938), Os Iany and Simovany during the war years. The Bata shoe works can justifiably boast of having been one of the finest Industries of the First Czechoslovak Republic . Interwar Czechoslovakia had no shortage of flaws, not the least of which was an official denial of Slovak nationality. But the state was sociall y progressive. Although decidedly anti-Bolshevik, the government of the First Republic was by no means hostile to organized labor. Tomas Bata, founder of the shoe works, was a self-made man who appears to have believed that wealth has a certain social function . The workers of the Bata industry enjoyed a comprehensive profit sharing plan, and lower level management was elective. The corporation was considered a model for progressive capitalism in the years between the two world wars. In his capacity as a manager, Trojan brought a number of Czechs into Slovakia. These naturally supported the Slovak National Uprisi ng, which offered a prelude to the liberation of their own nation . They enjoyed a certain liberty to join the Slovak insurgents that their kin in the "Reichsprotectorat" of Bohemia and Moravia were denied : not only were the latter subject to execution by the Nazis if they were caught attempting to cross over, but their families were jeopardized as hostages as well. 7 Trojan began his participation in the uprising as part of partisan group Pavel, which was headquartered in the rebel center of Banska Bystrica. Initially, the command center focused on the north, encouraging partisan activity at Zarnovice, on the Polish border, and even di spatching partisans across the border to establish contact with the Polish resistance. 8 But the situation in the south attained a certain precedence. The significance of this area during the uprisi ng should not be underestimated. Elsewhere in Slovakia, where insurgents had to give up ground, they had mountain ranges to fall back upon, which shielded the central core around Banska Bystrica. The open valleys of the southern lowlands, by contrast, offered a soft underbelly favoring the German advance. A certain amount of local sympathy 7 Karol Fremal , "The Czechs in the Resistance Movement in Slovakia", in Jan Stanislav, et. al. , We Were Not Alone (Banska Bystrica), 1994), pp.21-23 . 8 Documents pertaining to the command structure of Partisan Group Pavel. Archfv Muzea SNP,Fond IV , prir. cfs: 49/76. Pages are unnumbered. �40 SLOVAKIA also favored the Germans. In the so uthwest, an ominous new front was opened by the actions of SS Regiment Schill. Its bloodless takeover of the Nitra garrison, which numbered 2,000, was a major blow to the insurgent cause. The garrison commander, Major Smigovsky, was also a friend of the Schill commander, Obersturmfiihrer Klotz, having served with the latter on the Eastern Front. Henceforth Nitra became a supply center for the Nazi advance on Banska Bystrica. SS Regiment Schill became the most outstanding German military unit in Slovakia, ultimately capturing Banska Bystrica. It was composed largely of noncommissioned officer candidates, and had been assembled within 24 hours among Germans in the Reichsprotectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. These yo un g men were conesquently highly motivated.9 The command of partisan group Pavel di spatched Trojan southward to organize a new partisan detachment in the upper Nitra valley. He commanded approximately 150 men . 10 Troj an made contact with some of hi s Czech associates, and also recruited shoe workers of Batbvany, in southwestern Slovakia. On several occasions the Nitra Brigade held up the drive of SS Regiment Schil l in its advance towards Banska Bystrica. Colonel Ferjencfk, one of the military leaders of the upri sing, later noted that, after the fal l of Turciansky Svaty Martin around September 20, most active cooperation between the partisans and the regular military was terminated. An exception was provided by Trojan's group. 11 Enjoying the benefits of a more enlightened variety of capitalism before the war, these shoe workers were immune to Communi st attempts to recruit them. Although Trojan was not a Communist, he was not adverse to recruiting partisans of Communist or leftist sy mpathies. This particularly held true of a group of Bulgarian exchange students residing in Slovakia. Throughout the interwar period, many Balkan students of 9 Anonymous, "The Waffen SS and the Crushing of the Slovak Military Mutiny" Siegrunen: The Waffen SS in Historical Perspective Volume 5, No.6, undated, pp. 29-30 . Contributors to thi s journal consist large ly of the sons of Waffen SS officers who draw extensively from fam il y papers. 10 Document pertai ning to the history of Partisan Group Pavel , with spec ific reference to Captain Trojan and the struggle in the upper Nitra va lley . Archfv Muzea SNP, Fond IV, prir. cfs: 5 26/75, p.22. 11 Ferjencik, p.228. �SLOVAKIA 41 the mundane sciences (medicine, engineering, etc.) went for their education to the more advanced universities in Czechoslovakia. Most of them studied in Prague or Brno, in the Czech lands. In November 1939, the Nazi rulers of the Reichsprotectorate of Bohemia and Moravia shut down the Czech universities following a student protest. Most of the Bulgarians consequently transferred to Slovak (previously Comenius) Uni ve rsity in Bratislava. At the beginning of the 1940s, their numbers were estimated as between 500 and 600. 12 The life of the average Slovak university student at this time was anything but luxurious, and the Bulgarians received negligible stipends and lived in substandard housing. There was an officially sanctioned Bulgarian student society named after Georgii Rakovski , one of the national awakeners of the nineteenth century. It was nationalist and right-wing in political orientation. Yet a number of students organized their own underground association called B.O.N.S.S. (Bulharsky vseobecny narodny zvaz). Their acknowleged leader was Stojan Panov Stojanov, a student of mechanical engineering. At the time of the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising, Bulgaria changed sides in the wake of the advance of the Soviet military. Even after the German capture of Banska Bystrica (October 27), many of the Bulgarians in Slovakia were willing to support the struggle. The bulk of these Bulgarians, under the leadership of Stojanov, was received into the Nitra Brigade on December 20. Unfortunately , the Nitra Brigade was in a particularly exposed position. Most partisan units had fallen back into the Tatras, where the terrain made their elimination by the German military more difficult than those fighting further to the south. The Nitra Brigade operated in an area where the Hron River valley stood just above the lowlands. On February 13-14, 1945, the Germans struck a decisive blow against the Nitra Brigade in the vicinity of the village of Orovnice. Stojanov and most of his followers were killed. Ten of them were captured and dispatched to Nazi concentration camps. Two among this group survived Dachau , but were too physically debilitated to last long afterwards. Two other Bulgarians man aged to escape the massac re 12 V. Valev , "Bulharskf vysokoskolaci na Slovensku", p.4 and Valerian Bys tricky, "Bulhari v SNP", p. l in Archfv Muzea SNP,Fond IV , prir. cfs: 29/71. Hereafter articles and documents from this collection shall be referred to as SNP Muzeum archives/Bulgarian collecti on. �42 SLOVAKIA and joined the advancing Red Army, although both were killed in action before the end of the war. 13 Josef Trojan had particularly sentimental feelings for these Bulgarian students. It was in thi s spirit that, on February 7, 1946, he submitted a literary contribution entitled "S lavonic Peace." He stresssed the Pan-Slav nature of the struggle, and praised the Red Army. 14 Yet Trojan had a falling out with the incoming Communist government. It was perhaps less a matter of opposition to the government than it was his previous track record, plus the political atmosphere prevailing in Czechoslovakia at this time. At this point the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party requires mention. The chairman of the party was Klement Gottwald, who had spent the war years in Moscow. Those Communists who had done so generally served as wi lling executors of Soviet policy. Yet others had spent the war years in prison or had served in the resistance movements in their native countries. Although they too wished to construct socialism, they wished to do so according to conditions in their native lands. Following Yugoslavia's split with the Kremlin in June ofl 948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered a massive purge of these nationali st elements throughout East Central Europe. Zionism was now targeted as an enemy ideology as well. Although both the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia had endorsed the creation of Israel , when the British began to depart from Palestine, the Soviets began courting the Arabs. Moreover, Stalin had always held a personal distrust of Jews since the time of his conflict with the so-called "Old Bolsheviks," many of whom were Jewish. This realignment was particularly felt in Czechoslovakia, where many of the Jews who had survived the holocaust of World War II joined the Communist Party. The Secretary General of the Party, Rudolf Stansky , was himself Jewish, although he had never considered himself a Jew or a Czech or anything other than a Communist. He had also spent the war years in the Soviet Union. As the Czechoslovak Communi st Party took on an increasingly militant approach to domestic 13 List of Bulgarians killed in Slovakia 1944-45 , in SNP Muzeum arch ives/Bulgarian collection, pp.1-2. 14 Jozef Trojan , "S lovansky mier" (February 7, I946), in SNP Muzeum archives/Bulgarian collection, p.5. �SLOVAKIA 43 affairs, Slansky ordered a wholesale inqui sition against suspected di ssidents. He created a machine of police terror which ultimately destroyed him as well. As those who were arrested were tortured to name other"conspirators," Slanskfs name became prominent. In the subsequent purge which followed , thousand s of innocent lives were destroyed. 15 Josef Trojan was arrested in Prague on the night of December 22, 1949 on the personal orders of Rudolf Slansky. He was charged with having collaborated with the Gestapo. Although Slansky was himself swept away not long afterwards, the machinery of repression had already been set in motion. Among its victims were Gustav Husak and other Slovak Communi st leaders of the 1944 upri sing, who received long terms of impri sonment. Even the death of Stalin early in 1953 did not halt the trend . Trojan was hanged on December 29th of that year. 16 A comparison of the fate of Trojan with those of the other two previously mentioned commanders reveal s a marked contrast, and more than just a few ironies. Jan Nalepka, unlike Trojan, was an intellectual. A poet and a teacher, he was noted for a mischievous disposition as a youth , and he retained hi s precociousness after having entered teachers' college in 1931. A conference of young teac hers in Komorna Lhotka (July 1933) was addressed by Czechoslovak president T . G. Masary k. The latter viewed the educational system as a means of molding young Slovaks into a "Czechoslovak" spirit. But, Nalepka whispered to hi s friend Vladimir Clementis that Slovak students were capable of cultivating their own spirits. 17 Clementis eventually became Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, and likew ise went to the gallows as a result of the "S lansky Affair." Nalepka was a lefti st, but also a nation alist. In February 1939, he began organizing clandestine elements against the governing Slovak People's Party-one month before the latter ass umed the leadership of 15 For the most comprehensive study of what has come to be known as the "Shi nsky Affair," see Jiri Pelikan, ed., The Czechoslovak Political Trials 1950-/ 954. The Suppressed Report of the Dubcek Government 's Commission of Inquiry, 1968 (London, 197 I). 16 Jozef Jablonicky, "Krute osudy ," in Vladimir Babni c, ed. , Na se povstanie (Banska Bystrica, I999), p. I00. 17 Jozef Nalepka, ed. , Jni kapit:foovi J:inovi N:ilepkovi (Spisska Nova Yes, 2002), p.28. �44 SLOVAKIA a se parate Slovak state. Yet the events of March 1939 inc luded a Hungari an invasion of eastern Slovakia. Called up fo r military service, Nalepka participated willingly in the brief border war. He saw no contradiction between thi s action and hi s ow n ideals. Later that year, Slovakia's military alliance with Nazi Germany dictated participati on in the Polish campaign. Nalepka, by then a lieutenant, fou ght with distinction on the northern side of the Carpathi ans. He was decorated by General Ferdinand Catlos, Slovakia's Minister of Defense. The war against Soviet Russia proved more problematic fo r Slovak soldiers. Slovaki a had territori al grievances with Hungary and Poland , but none with the Russians. Nalepka was ass igned to the soca ll ed "Security" Di visio n, whi ch was di spatched to the Pripet Marshes in northern Ukra ine and Be laru s fo r police duties against Soviet partisa ns. 18 He entered into c landes tine co ntact with these parti sans and eventu ally deserted to them, taking hi s men with him. The nature of parti san warfare in the swamps dictated th at Nalepka frequently travelled on horsebac k, carrying an automati c weapon. A photograph of this legend ary pose later inspired a plastic equestri an sc ulpture of him by Slovak sc ulptor Ann a Ki sakova . Nalepka's acti vity also contributed to hi s demj se. He was blled in an encounter with a German patro l outside the vill age of Ovruc on the ni ght of November 17, 1943. Co nsequentl y, Na lepka was un available to partic ipate in the Slovak National Uprising. But hi s survi ving comrades named their parti san brigade after him . The Captain Jan Nalepka Brigade was later parac huted back into Slovak ia to participate in the upri sing. Compared with other units which the Soviets ex ported, and which 18 Sold iers of the Security Division became, by Nazi standards, tota ll y corrupted by fra terni zation with local Ukrainians. Sov iet mili tary mobilization in the early part of the war had carried many yo un g men away. Others were forc ibly recruited by the Germans for labor services in th e Re ich. G ive n a shortage of domestic manpower, Ukra inian wome n rece ived th e Slovak sold iers willingly, if not enthusias ti call y. There was widespread venereal di sease among the Slovaks. Civilian hunger prompted a brisk trade in an exc lusive ly fe male commodity fo r rati ons, to the particul ar profit of Slovak warrant officers in charge of stores. As ide fro m all that, boredom drove many sold iers to alcohol ism. Slovak officers were re luctant to bring charges on such misdemeanors and began covering the m up, because men on punishment were removed from their co mmand without replacement. See Mark W. A. Axworthy, Axis Slovakia: Hitler's Slavic Wedge 1938- 1945 (Bays ide, New York, 2002), p. 148. �SLOVAKIA 45 largely engaged in looting, the Nalepka Brigade conducted itself in an exemplary manner. Together with the 2nd Czechoslovak Paratroopers, it shares credit for the capture of the strategic village of Jalna in the Hron River valley on October 10-12, 1944. This action was the last victory of the insurgents in Slovakia during the up• 19 n• smg. Nalepka died at a convenient time, which enabled him to become a legend in the postwar Communist era. Hi s peasant parents were received with honor in the Soviet Union at memorial services dedicated to the captain. His popularity survived the collapse of the Communist system in East Central Europe. Streets in various Slovak communities are still named after him. Being an established folk hero has its privileges. Viliam Zingor, like Nalepka, was an army deserter. Called up for service on the Eastern Front, he instead took to the mountains in the vicinity of Turciansky Svaty Martin. He was the brother of a nationally renowned hunter. Bohus Zingor was well known among forest rangers, a fact which was of considerable help to his fugitive brother. When Viliam Zingor took to hiding on the Podstranie Mountain, he was befriended and sheltered by forest ranger Ladislav Frimmel. The Zingor brothers and Frimmel organized a network to aid other fugitives. A significant member of this group was Vladimir Iershov, a Slovak professor of Ru ssian extraction. Iershov's area of specialty was escaped Soviet prisoners of war who had made their way to the Slovak highlands. These included people of Russian , Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian nationalities.2° They played a key role in the overall partisan movement during the events of autumn 1944. By March of 1944, Viliam Zingor commanded a significant number of partisans in the vicinity of the Podstranie Mountain. In August, membership was estimated at roughly 100 men. Later that month the group was reinforced by Soviet partisans commanded by Captain Pyotr Alekseyevitch Velitchko, who had parachuted into 19 Ibid, p.292. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Un ion, participants in the Slovak National Uprising from the various republics were acknow ledged and honored simply as citizens of the Soviet Union. At the time of the 60th anniversary in Hanska Bystrica, a number of ambassadors of now sovereign republics participated in the celebrations. The participation of their citizens was duly acknow ledged by the Muzeum SNP, leading to a dramatic increase of nations listed as having contributed to the uprising. 20 �46 SLOVAKIA Slovakia. On August 25 - four days before the formal commencement of the upri sing - Zingor was made commander of the M. R. Stefanik Brigade. This partisan brigade was named after the Slovak member of the founding fathers of Czechoslovakia, who held the rank of brigadier-general in the army of France during the First World War. It was so named in part because of a large number of French members. Earlier in the war, French soldiers who had escaped from prisoner of war camps in Germany made their way eastward. It was their intention to reac h neutral Turkey , from whence they could board ships and make their way back to the Allied side. Most of these Frenchmen were recaptured or interned in either Slovakia or Hungary. The Slovak underground arranged their escape and transfer to the mountains around Turciansky Svaty Martin , where they were absorbed into the partisan movement. These Frenchmen enjoyed a certain independence of command under Lieutenant Georges Barazar de Lannurien. During the opening weeks of the uprising, they halted the German advance in the vicinity of Strecno. 21 Viliam Zingor supported the Democratic Party of Jozef Lettrich (a member of the Slovak National Council during the upri sing) in the years immediately following the war. Consequently, he opposed the incoming Communist government. Mutual antagonism intensified after the Communists consolidated power in February of 1948 . By now the state had recourse against Zingor. It alleged that he and several wartime associates had established a subversive organization. This body was said to be inspired by the "Anglo-American imperialists," now enemies of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia's protector. Zingor and his associates were accused of agitating among the trade union s. It was further alleged that they had disbursed various funds for this purpose. They were put on trial on October 12-2 1, 1950, 21 For an English-language acco unt of the French participation in Slovakia, see Bohus Chnoupek, A Breaking of Seals: The French Resistance in Slovakia (Oxford and New York, 1988). Chnoupek was a Slovak journalist who first publicized the French role at the time of the tenth anniversary of the upri sing. Later, he became Czechoslovakia's foreign minister under the Husak regime. For the most comprehensive work on the subject, see Dusan Halaj et. al., Francuzi v Slovenskom narodnom povstanf (Banska Bystrica, 2003). �SLOVAKIA 47 were found guilty, and were sentenced to death .22 Zingor was executed the following year. Viliam Zingor's rehabilitation came about as a result of the democratic reforms temporarily effected in Czechoslovakia in 1968. At the beginning of that year Slovak Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcek assumed the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party . The way was paved for the redress of many outstanding grievances. Relatives of the defendants in the Zingor trial maintained that allegations concerning the disbursement of funds for illegal purposes were the invention of "agents provocateurs" in the service of State Security. It may be argued that the reviewing court was more generous than just in its evaluation. The hostility of the defendants to the Communist regime was an unquestionable fact. Yet, insofar as no network of conspiratorial activity actually existed, the district court of Banska Bystrica formally overturned the verdicts on April 29, 1968. 23 Czechoslovakia's democratic reforms , popularly known as the "Prague Spring," were abruptly terminated in August of that year. The Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. Within a year Dubcek was forced out of his position as Party Secretary and replaced by Gustav Husak. A one-time Slovak nationalist and former political prisoner, Husak now acknowledged Soviet hegemony as an unavoidable fact and urged his countrymen to do likewise. He thus became the enforcer of Soviet policy in that hapless land . But the status of the Slovaks underwent a revision formally acting in their favor . Czechoslovakia was federalized into two republics - one Czech and the other Slovak although both were subject to a common Communi st Party . Most significantly, the official attitude towards the Slovak Nation al Upri22 Copies of documents pertainin g to both the prosecution of and the verdi ct on the state's case against Zingor may be found in the archives of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banska Bystrica. For the prosecution , see Odpi s zaloby rok 1950 in Archfv Muzea SNP, Fond IV , prir. cfs: 576/9 1, pp. 1-20. For the verdict , see Rozsudok rok 1950, Archiv Muzea SNP, Fond IV, prir. cfs : 575/96, pp. I - 15. 23 Documents pertaining to th e review of the case of the state versus Z ingor and associates may be found in the archives of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banska Bystri ca. For the formal verdict, see Rozsudok rok 1968 in Archfv Muzea SNP, Fond IV, prir. cfs: 5 76/9 1, pp.1 -33 . For the rehabilitati on, see Uznesenie rok 1968 in Archfv Muzea SN P, Fond IV, prir. cfs : 5 76/91 , pp. 1- 10. �48 SLOVAKIA sing changed. Previously vilified, it was now hailed as a cornerstone in relations between the two nationalities. Consequently, Zingor's rehabilitation was permitted to stand, and he began receiving honorable mention in officially sanctioned historical publications. The fact that he had aided escaped Soviet P.O.W.S made him less than objectionable to Czechoslovakia's overlords. Josef Trojan had to wai t another generation before receiving honorable mention in Slovak history books. Ironically, his memory is treated more charitably by Slovak historians such as Jozef Jablonicky than it is among his own Czech people. Trojan's case was reviewed following the collapse of the Communist system in the Velvet Revolution of autumn 1989. He was exonerated on the charge of having collaborated with the Gestapo, and his death penalty was overturned. But a conviction and prison sentence remained in force on the grounds that Trojan "organized murder," in this case hav ing executed members of his own partisan unit. Trojan 's case raises an interesting legal question. Under common maritime law, a captain on an isolated ship has virtually unlimited authority to execute insubordinates. To what extent does this apply to a partisan commander in an insurgent situation, in a country where the successor government disavows the sovereignty of the previous one? Czech historian Jan Rychlik has asserted that, according to a law promulgated on May 8, 1946, acts committed between September 30, 1938 and October 28,1945, which normally would be considered crimes, were not punishable if they contributed to the liberation of the Czech and Slovak peoples. Internal military ordinances permitted the commander to use force (including the use of firearms) under field conditions in which subordinate soldiers refu sed to fulfill orders. The question of the application of these legal norms, however, remained contingent upon the decision of an individual court. 24 A Slovak partisan who knew Trojan both before and after the war concurs with the revised verdict. Jan Kulhan began the war as a Slovak soldier di spatched to the Eastern Front. Like many others, he changed sides, becoming a member of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps commanded by General Ludvik Svoboda. He was di spatched 24 Law of May 8, 1946 (No. 11 5/ 1946) from Collection of Laws, Official Law Gazette. Information provided by Jan Rychlfk, to whom the present author expresses his gratitude. �SLOVAKIA 49 ahead of the front on a mission to destroy German-held oil wells in southern Poland. Kulhan's recollection of Trojan remains a lively and coherent one. According to Kulhan , Trojan actually joined the Communist Party after the war. At this time he was noted as a stern manager, going so far as to insist that employees show up for work. Kulhan asserted that the charge of having collaborated with the Gestapo was a fabrication. Trojan's honeymoon with the Czechoslovak Communist Party was a brief one, and his disillusionment placed him on a collision course. Kulhan also conceded that, given his professional background, Trojan's partisans were perhaps the best shod in the Slovak National Uprising. But several friends of Kulhan's sister were among the partisans who were executed. Kulhan maintain s that Trojan acted wrongfully in this matter. 25 At the time of the writing of this essay, the Czech judicial system maintains an enigmatic silence concerning Trojan, although his case is again open for review. Meanwhile, Slovak historians and octogenarian veterans of World War II alike look forward to the rehabilitation of a man who, although born a Czech , enjoys a certain reputation as a Slovak hero. Yet, judging from the opinion of Kulhan , not all octogenarians agree. It remains for the Czech judicial system to give a complete account of the execution of partisans by Trojan, and the state's case against him. 25 Telephone interview with John Kulhan, August I0 , 2005. Mr. Kulhan is today a U.S. citizen and is currently a nominee fo r the Pres identi al Medal of Freedom. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2007, Vol. 39 Description An account of the resource Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 36 SLOVAKIA SLOVAK PARTISAN COMMANDERS IN WORLD WAR TI: THE CASE OF JOSEF TROJAN R. Vladimir Baumgarten The Slovak resistance movement, which opposed the Nazis and the Government of the Slovak Repub lic in World War II, was sharply divided into two different and, oftentimes, conflicting orientations. One of them was both pro-Western and pro-Czech. Its adherents were most strongly represented by officers of the Slovak Army. In February of 1944 a group of four dissident lieutenant colonels Jan Golian, Mikulas Ferjencfk, Mirko Yesel and Dezider Kiss-Kalina-established contact with the Czechoslovak Government-in-Ex ile in London. Go lian was designated by the London government to head the uprising, which eventually took place in Aug ust of that year. These officers were unashamed to announce that they wanted a restoration of Czechoslovakia as it had been before the Munich accord of 1938. 1 It never occurred to them that, perhaps many Slovaks were fighting for something different - not the least of which was their recognition as a disti nct nation . The Communists, who represented the other orientation, had taken thi s difference into account. The Slovak Communist Party began its own resistance after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Initiall y, it did not favor the restoration of Czechoslovakia. Although opposed to the Nazis and the domestic regime of priest-president Jozef Tiso, the Communists were inclined toward s either a separate Slovak state or the incorporation of Slovakia as a republic of the Soviet Union. 2 Thi s position changed after the London government concluded a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union 1 Mikulas Ferjencfk, "The Slovak ational Uprising and Mission to the USS R," in Lewis M. White, ed. , On All Fronts: Czechoslovaks in World War II Part II (Washington and New York, 1995), p.231. 2 Gustav Hu sak, "O vyvoji a situac ii na Slovensku" Svedectvi XV (58 ), I 979, pp. 377-378. SLOVAKIA 37 late in 1943. 3 The Soviet Union favored the restoration of Czechoslovakia, a position that the Slovak Communists now had to take into acco unt. Henceforth the Communists, who made up half of the membership of the underground Slovak National Council, did likewise. It was intended, however, that the mistakes of the past would be avoided , and that Slovakia would play a greater role in the resur4 rected Czechoslovak state. By thi s time the Communists had assumed a predominant role in another resistance element which had begun to emerge. Since 1942, political di ssidents, military deserters, Jews fearing deportation, and escaped prisoners-of-war from France, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had taken refuge in the mountains of Slovakia. They formed the first parti san units in the country. By late summer of 1944 they were reinforced by Soviet partisans parachuted into the country. The latter, consisting of hardened veterans of the war on the Eastern Front, brought the war home to Slovakia. Their activities encouraged German military intervention in the country, causing the Slovak National Upri sing to be launched under premature circumstances .5 3 For detailed descriptions of the Soviet-Czechoslovak agreeme nt, see Edvard Benes, Memoirs (London, I 954 ), pp. I 68- I 96 and Edward Taborsky, President Edward Benes Between &1st and West 1938-/948 (Stanford , I98 I), pp. 159- 174. 4 "The Christmas Agreement of 1943 ," in Joseph Mikus, Slovakia: A Political History 19 18- 1955 (Mil waukee, 1963), Appendi x VI, pp.346-347. 5 These Soviet partisans were commanded by Captain Pyotr Alexeyevitch Yelitchko. They commenced blowing up tun ne ls and bridges, and massac ring members of the German ethnic community in the minin g tow ns of ce ntral Slovaki a. Their ac ti vity culmin ated in the massacre o f members of a German military mi ss ion pass ing throu gh the country. Thi s military miss ion was ori ginally dispatched to Romani a to keep the latter in the war on the Axi s side. Since the Antonesc u regime had been overthrow n, its efforts were futile. As the German military mission passed through Slovakia, its members were intercepted in the vicinity of Turciansky Svaty Martin by Ye litchko's partisans, disg uised as Slovak soldiers. They convinced the Germans th at a bridge further ahead had been destroyed, and that they sho uld be escorted to the barracks for their own protection. It was Ye litchko 's intention that the Germans should be disarmed at the barrac ks and then sent to Partisan Headquarters in Kiev; if this fa iled , they would be exec uted. Lieutenant Colone l Emj l Perko, garrison commander at Turciansky Svaty Martin and a member of the Slovak National Council , feared for the li ves of the members of this German mili tary mission. He was inclined to treat them as guests until the Military Center in Banska Bystrica took them off his hand s. But Perk o's subordin ate, Li eutenant Cyril Ku chta, was more inc lined to 38 SLOVAKIA Throughout the course of the 1944 uprisi ng , relations between the Army and the partisans were oftentimes strai ned. To coordinate military action between the two bodies, a War Council was established. Yet the War Council became meaningless when individual partisan commanders either acted according to their own will or on orders from Partisan Headquarters in Kiev . Initiall y, the partisans were commanded by the Slovak Communist Karo l Smidke; later, the command passed to Soviet Colonel Aleksei N. Asmolov. A comparison of photographs taken of Asmolov is revealing. He arrived in Slovakia as a clean-cut regular Soviet officer; he soon grew a beard and wore a fur cap. Asmolov advised the Slovak military to adapt to the partisan method of warfare. In practice, this would involve breaking down units into smaller size, where they could be absorbed and taken over by the Communists. Relations between the military and the partisans became so tense that, during one meeting of the War Council, Golian (by now promoted to brigadier-general by the London government) referred to the partisans as "Enemy No. I ."6 A fact which is oftentimes overlooked is that not all partisans were Communists . This holds true for three particularly significant commanders: Jan Nalepka, Viliam Zingor and Josef Trojan. The fates of these individuals and the manner in which postwar jurisprudence and historiography came to grips with them merits study. The case of Trojan is particularly interesting for a number of reasons and, therefore, merits special attention. Josef Trojan was of Czech origin. He was born on March 28 , 1906, in Horni Hermanice, in Moravia. The son of a farmer, Trojan married Stanislava Novakova, who bore him three sons and two daughters. One of the daughters, Zdenka Trojanova (194 7-), eventually became a scientist of some di stinction. Trojan's formal education was limited. He attended grade school and agricultural high school in his native village, The latter provided him with enough expertise to work as administrator of the monastery estates in Nova Rise (19261931). Thereafter he was employed by the Bata shoe works, which transferred him to Slovakia. Trojan served as manager in Zlfn (1931follow Yelitchko's orders, and Kuchta was the officer in charge on the fateful ni ght of August 27-28. For an account of what fo llowed, see Jozef Jablonicky, Po vstanie bez Jegiend (Bratislava, 1990), pp.170-173. 6 Ferjenc(k, p.229. SLOVAKIA 39 1932), Trebic (1932-1934 ), Hostavice (I 934-1938), Os Iany and Simovany during the war years. The Bata shoe works can justifiably boast of having been one of the finest Industries of the First Czechoslovak Republic . Interwar Czechoslovakia had no shortage of flaws, not the least of which was an official denial of Slovak nationality. But the state was sociall y progressive. Although decidedly anti-Bolshevik, the government of the First Republic was by no means hostile to organized labor. Tomas Bata, founder of the shoe works, was a self-made man who appears to have believed that wealth has a certain social function . The workers of the Bata industry enjoyed a comprehensive profit sharing plan, and lower level management was elective. The corporation was considered a model for progressive capitalism in the years between the two world wars. In his capacity as a manager, Trojan brought a number of Czechs into Slovakia. These naturally supported the Slovak National Uprisi ng, which offered a prelude to the liberation of their own nation . They enjoyed a certain liberty to join the Slovak insurgents that their kin in the "Reichsprotectorat" of Bohemia and Moravia were denied : not only were the latter subject to execution by the Nazis if they were caught attempting to cross over, but their families were jeopardized as hostages as well. 7 Trojan began his participation in the uprising as part of partisan group Pavel, which was headquartered in the rebel center of Banska Bystrica. Initially, the command center focused on the north, encouraging partisan activity at Zarnovice, on the Polish border, and even di spatching partisans across the border to establish contact with the Polish resistance. 8 But the situation in the south attained a certain precedence. The significance of this area during the uprisi ng should not be underestimated. Elsewhere in Slovakia, where insurgents had to give up ground, they had mountain ranges to fall back upon, which shielded the central core around Banska Bystrica. The open valleys of the southern lowlands, by contrast, offered a soft underbelly favoring the German advance. A certain amount of local sympathy 7 Karol Fremal , "The Czechs in the Resistance Movement in Slovakia", in Jan Stanislav, et. al. , We Were Not Alone (Banska Bystrica), 1994), pp.21-23 . 8 Documents pertaining to the command structure of Partisan Group Pavel. Archfv Muzea SNP,Fond IV , prir. cfs: 49/76. Pages are unnumbered. 40 SLOVAKIA also favored the Germans. In the so uthwest, an ominous new front was opened by the actions of SS Regiment Schill. Its bloodless takeover of the Nitra garrison, which numbered 2,000, was a major blow to the insurgent cause. The garrison commander, Major Smigovsky, was also a friend of the Schill commander, Obersturmfiihrer Klotz, having served with the latter on the Eastern Front. Henceforth Nitra became a supply center for the Nazi advance on Banska Bystrica. SS Regiment Schill became the most outstanding German military unit in Slovakia, ultimately capturing Banska Bystrica. It was composed largely of noncommissioned officer candidates, and had been assembled within 24 hours among Germans in the Reichsprotectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. These yo un g men were conesquently highly motivated.9 The command of partisan group Pavel di spatched Trojan southward to organize a new partisan detachment in the upper Nitra valley. He commanded approximately 150 men . 10 Troj an made contact with some of hi s Czech associates, and also recruited shoe workers of Batbvany, in southwestern Slovakia. On several occasions the Nitra Brigade held up the drive of SS Regiment Schil l in its advance towards Banska Bystrica. Colonel Ferjencfk, one of the military leaders of the upri sing, later noted that, after the fal l of Turciansky Svaty Martin around September 20, most active cooperation between the partisans and the regular military was terminated. An exception was provided by Trojan's group. 11 Enjoying the benefits of a more enlightened variety of capitalism before the war, these shoe workers were immune to Communi st attempts to recruit them. Although Trojan was not a Communist, he was not adverse to recruiting partisans of Communist or leftist sy mpathies. This particularly held true of a group of Bulgarian exchange students residing in Slovakia. Throughout the interwar period, many Balkan students of 9 Anonymous, "The Waffen SS and the Crushing of the Slovak Military Mutiny" Siegrunen: The Waffen SS in Historical Perspective Volume 5, No.6, undated, pp. 29-30 . Contributors to thi s journal consist large ly of the sons of Waffen SS officers who draw extensively from fam il y papers. 10 Document pertai ning to the history of Partisan Group Pavel , with spec ific reference to Captain Trojan and the struggle in the upper Nitra va lley . Archfv Muzea SNP, Fond IV, prir. cfs: 5 26/75, p.22. 11 Ferjencik, p.228. SLOVAKIA 41 the mundane sciences (medicine, engineering, etc.) went for their education to the more advanced universities in Czechoslovakia. Most of them studied in Prague or Brno, in the Czech lands. In November 1939, the Nazi rulers of the Reichsprotectorate of Bohemia and Moravia shut down the Czech universities following a student protest. Most of the Bulgarians consequently transferred to Slovak (previously Comenius) Uni ve rsity in Bratislava. At the beginning of the 1940s, their numbers were estimated as between 500 and 600. 12 The life of the average Slovak university student at this time was anything but luxurious, and the Bulgarians received negligible stipends and lived in substandard housing. There was an officially sanctioned Bulgarian student society named after Georgii Rakovski , one of the national awakeners of the nineteenth century. It was nationalist and right-wing in political orientation. Yet a number of students organized their own underground association called B.O.N.S.S. (Bulharsky vseobecny narodny zvaz). Their acknowleged leader was Stojan Panov Stojanov, a student of mechanical engineering. At the time of the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising, Bulgaria changed sides in the wake of the advance of the Soviet military. Even after the German capture of Banska Bystrica (October 27), many of the Bulgarians in Slovakia were willing to support the struggle. The bulk of these Bulgarians, under the leadership of Stojanov, was received into the Nitra Brigade on December 20. Unfortunately , the Nitra Brigade was in a particularly exposed position. Most partisan units had fallen back into the Tatras, where the terrain made their elimination by the German military more difficult than those fighting further to the south. The Nitra Brigade operated in an area where the Hron River valley stood just above the lowlands. On February 13-14, 1945, the Germans struck a decisive blow against the Nitra Brigade in the vicinity of the village of Orovnice. Stojanov and most of his followers were killed. Ten of them were captured and dispatched to Nazi concentration camps. Two among this group survived Dachau , but were too physically debilitated to last long afterwards. Two other Bulgarians man aged to escape the massac re 12 V. Valev , "Bulharskf vysokoskolaci na Slovensku", p.4 and Valerian Bys tricky, "Bulhari v SNP", p. l in Archfv Muzea SNP,Fond IV , prir. cfs: 29/71. Hereafter articles and documents from this collection shall be referred to as SNP Muzeum archives/Bulgarian collecti on. 42 SLOVAKIA and joined the advancing Red Army, although both were killed in action before the end of the war. 13 Josef Trojan had particularly sentimental feelings for these Bulgarian students. It was in thi s spirit that, on February 7, 1946, he submitted a literary contribution entitled "S lavonic Peace." He stresssed the Pan-Slav nature of the struggle, and praised the Red Army. 14 Yet Trojan had a falling out with the incoming Communist government. It was perhaps less a matter of opposition to the government than it was his previous track record, plus the political atmosphere prevailing in Czechoslovakia at this time. At this point the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party requires mention. The chairman of the party was Klement Gottwald, who had spent the war years in Moscow. Those Communists who had done so generally served as wi lling executors of Soviet policy. Yet others had spent the war years in prison or had served in the resistance movements in their native countries. Although they too wished to construct socialism, they wished to do so according to conditions in their native lands. Following Yugoslavia's split with the Kremlin in June ofl 948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered a massive purge of these nationali st elements throughout East Central Europe. Zionism was now targeted as an enemy ideology as well. Although both the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia had endorsed the creation of Israel , when the British began to depart from Palestine, the Soviets began courting the Arabs. Moreover, Stalin had always held a personal distrust of Jews since the time of his conflict with the so-called "Old Bolsheviks," many of whom were Jewish. This realignment was particularly felt in Czechoslovakia, where many of the Jews who had survived the holocaust of World War II joined the Communist Party. The Secretary General of the Party, Rudolf Stansky , was himself Jewish, although he had never considered himself a Jew or a Czech or anything other than a Communist. He had also spent the war years in the Soviet Union. As the Czechoslovak Communi st Party took on an increasingly militant approach to domestic 13 List of Bulgarians killed in Slovakia 1944-45 , in SNP Muzeum arch ives/Bulgarian collection, pp.1-2. 14 Jozef Trojan , "S lovansky mier" (February 7, I946), in SNP Muzeum archives/Bulgarian collection, p.5. SLOVAKIA 43 affairs, Slansky ordered a wholesale inqui sition against suspected di ssidents. He created a machine of police terror which ultimately destroyed him as well. As those who were arrested were tortured to name other"conspirators," Slanskfs name became prominent. In the subsequent purge which followed , thousand s of innocent lives were destroyed. 15 Josef Trojan was arrested in Prague on the night of December 22, 1949 on the personal orders of Rudolf Slansky. He was charged with having collaborated with the Gestapo. Although Slansky was himself swept away not long afterwards, the machinery of repression had already been set in motion. Among its victims were Gustav Husak and other Slovak Communi st leaders of the 1944 upri sing, who received long terms of impri sonment. Even the death of Stalin early in 1953 did not halt the trend . Trojan was hanged on December 29th of that year. 16 A comparison of the fate of Trojan with those of the other two previously mentioned commanders reveal s a marked contrast, and more than just a few ironies. Jan Nalepka, unlike Trojan, was an intellectual. A poet and a teacher, he was noted for a mischievous disposition as a youth , and he retained hi s precociousness after having entered teachers' college in 1931. A conference of young teac hers in Komorna Lhotka (July 1933) was addressed by Czechoslovak president T . G. Masary k. The latter viewed the educational system as a means of molding young Slovaks into a "Czechoslovak" spirit. But, Nalepka whispered to hi s friend Vladimir Clementis that Slovak students were capable of cultivating their own spirits. 17 Clementis eventually became Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, and likew ise went to the gallows as a result of the "S lansky Affair." Nalepka was a lefti st, but also a nation alist. In February 1939, he began organizing clandestine elements against the governing Slovak People's Party-one month before the latter ass umed the leadership of 15 For the most comprehensive study of what has come to be known as the "Shi nsky Affair," see Jiri Pelikan, ed., The Czechoslovak Political Trials 1950-/ 954. The Suppressed Report of the Dubcek Government 's Commission of Inquiry, 1968 (London, 197 I). 16 Jozef Jablonicky, "Krute osudy ," in Vladimir Babni c, ed. , Na se povstanie (Banska Bystrica, I999), p. I00. 17 Jozef Nalepka, ed. , Jni kapit:foovi J:inovi N:ilepkovi (Spisska Nova Yes, 2002), p.28. 44 SLOVAKIA a se parate Slovak state. Yet the events of March 1939 inc luded a Hungari an invasion of eastern Slovakia. Called up fo r military service, Nalepka participated willingly in the brief border war. He saw no contradiction between thi s action and hi s ow n ideals. Later that year, Slovakia's military alliance with Nazi Germany dictated participati on in the Polish campaign. Nalepka, by then a lieutenant, fou ght with distinction on the northern side of the Carpathi ans. He was decorated by General Ferdinand Catlos, Slovakia's Minister of Defense. The war against Soviet Russia proved more problematic fo r Slovak soldiers. Slovaki a had territori al grievances with Hungary and Poland , but none with the Russians. Nalepka was ass igned to the soca ll ed "Security" Di visio n, whi ch was di spatched to the Pripet Marshes in northern Ukra ine and Be laru s fo r police duties against Soviet partisa ns. 18 He entered into c landes tine co ntact with these parti sans and eventu ally deserted to them, taking hi s men with him. The nature of parti san warfare in the swamps dictated th at Nalepka frequently travelled on horsebac k, carrying an automati c weapon. A photograph of this legend ary pose later inspired a plastic equestri an sc ulpture of him by Slovak sc ulptor Ann a Ki sakova . Nalepka's acti vity also contributed to hi s demj se. He was blled in an encounter with a German patro l outside the vill age of Ovruc on the ni ght of November 17, 1943. Co nsequentl y, Na lepka was un available to partic ipate in the Slovak National Uprising. But hi s survi ving comrades named their parti san brigade after him . The Captain Jan Nalepka Brigade was later parac huted back into Slovak ia to participate in the upri sing. Compared with other units which the Soviets ex ported, and which 18 Sold iers of the Security Division became, by Nazi standards, tota ll y corrupted by fra terni zation with local Ukrainians. Sov iet mili tary mobilization in the early part of the war had carried many yo un g men away. Others were forc ibly recruited by the Germans for labor services in th e Re ich. G ive n a shortage of domestic manpower, Ukra inian wome n rece ived th e Slovak sold iers willingly, if not enthusias ti call y. There was widespread venereal di sease among the Slovaks. Civilian hunger prompted a brisk trade in an exc lusive ly fe male commodity fo r rati ons, to the particul ar profit of Slovak warrant officers in charge of stores. As ide fro m all that, boredom drove many sold iers to alcohol ism. Slovak officers were re luctant to bring charges on such misdemeanors and began covering the m up, because men on punishment were removed from their co mmand without replacement. See Mark W. A. Axworthy, Axis Slovakia: Hitler's Slavic Wedge 1938- 1945 (Bays ide, New York, 2002), p. 148. SLOVAKIA 45 largely engaged in looting, the Nalepka Brigade conducted itself in an exemplary manner. Together with the 2nd Czechoslovak Paratroopers, it shares credit for the capture of the strategic village of Jalna in the Hron River valley on October 10-12, 1944. This action was the last victory of the insurgents in Slovakia during the up• 19 n• smg. Nalepka died at a convenient time, which enabled him to become a legend in the postwar Communist era. Hi s peasant parents were received with honor in the Soviet Union at memorial services dedicated to the captain. His popularity survived the collapse of the Communist system in East Central Europe. Streets in various Slovak communities are still named after him. Being an established folk hero has its privileges. Viliam Zingor, like Nalepka, was an army deserter. Called up for service on the Eastern Front, he instead took to the mountains in the vicinity of Turciansky Svaty Martin. He was the brother of a nationally renowned hunter. Bohus Zingor was well known among forest rangers, a fact which was of considerable help to his fugitive brother. When Viliam Zingor took to hiding on the Podstranie Mountain, he was befriended and sheltered by forest ranger Ladislav Frimmel. The Zingor brothers and Frimmel organized a network to aid other fugitives. A significant member of this group was Vladimir Iershov, a Slovak professor of Ru ssian extraction. Iershov's area of specialty was escaped Soviet prisoners of war who had made their way to the Slovak highlands. These included people of Russian , Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian nationalities.2° They played a key role in the overall partisan movement during the events of autumn 1944. By March of 1944, Viliam Zingor commanded a significant number of partisans in the vicinity of the Podstranie Mountain. In August, membership was estimated at roughly 100 men. Later that month the group was reinforced by Soviet partisans commanded by Captain Pyotr Alekseyevitch Velitchko, who had parachuted into 19 Ibid, p.292. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Un ion, participants in the Slovak National Uprising from the various republics were acknow ledged and honored simply as citizens of the Soviet Union. At the time of the 60th anniversary in Hanska Bystrica, a number of ambassadors of now sovereign republics participated in the celebrations. The participation of their citizens was duly acknow ledged by the Muzeum SNP, leading to a dramatic increase of nations listed as having contributed to the uprising. 20 46 SLOVAKIA Slovakia. On August 25 - four days before the formal commencement of the upri sing - Zingor was made commander of the M. R. Stefanik Brigade. This partisan brigade was named after the Slovak member of the founding fathers of Czechoslovakia, who held the rank of brigadier-general in the army of France during the First World War. It was so named in part because of a large number of French members. Earlier in the war, French soldiers who had escaped from prisoner of war camps in Germany made their way eastward. It was their intention to reac h neutral Turkey , from whence they could board ships and make their way back to the Allied side. Most of these Frenchmen were recaptured or interned in either Slovakia or Hungary. The Slovak underground arranged their escape and transfer to the mountains around Turciansky Svaty Martin , where they were absorbed into the partisan movement. These Frenchmen enjoyed a certain independence of command under Lieutenant Georges Barazar de Lannurien. During the opening weeks of the uprising, they halted the German advance in the vicinity of Strecno. 21 Viliam Zingor supported the Democratic Party of Jozef Lettrich (a member of the Slovak National Council during the upri sing) in the years immediately following the war. Consequently, he opposed the incoming Communist government. Mutual antagonism intensified after the Communists consolidated power in February of 1948 . By now the state had recourse against Zingor. It alleged that he and several wartime associates had established a subversive organization. This body was said to be inspired by the "Anglo-American imperialists," now enemies of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia's protector. Zingor and his associates were accused of agitating among the trade union s. It was further alleged that they had disbursed various funds for this purpose. They were put on trial on October 12-2 1, 1950, 21 For an English-language acco unt of the French participation in Slovakia, see Bohus Chnoupek, A Breaking of Seals: The French Resistance in Slovakia (Oxford and New York, 1988). Chnoupek was a Slovak journalist who first publicized the French role at the time of the tenth anniversary of the upri sing. Later, he became Czechoslovakia's foreign minister under the Husak regime. For the most comprehensive work on the subject, see Dusan Halaj et. al., Francuzi v Slovenskom narodnom povstanf (Banska Bystrica, 2003). SLOVAKIA 47 were found guilty, and were sentenced to death .22 Zingor was executed the following year. Viliam Zingor's rehabilitation came about as a result of the democratic reforms temporarily effected in Czechoslovakia in 1968. At the beginning of that year Slovak Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcek assumed the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party . The way was paved for the redress of many outstanding grievances. Relatives of the defendants in the Zingor trial maintained that allegations concerning the disbursement of funds for illegal purposes were the invention of "agents provocateurs" in the service of State Security. It may be argued that the reviewing court was more generous than just in its evaluation. The hostility of the defendants to the Communist regime was an unquestionable fact. Yet, insofar as no network of conspiratorial activity actually existed, the district court of Banska Bystrica formally overturned the verdicts on April 29, 1968. 23 Czechoslovakia's democratic reforms , popularly known as the "Prague Spring," were abruptly terminated in August of that year. The Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. Within a year Dubcek was forced out of his position as Party Secretary and replaced by Gustav Husak. A one-time Slovak nationalist and former political prisoner, Husak now acknowledged Soviet hegemony as an unavoidable fact and urged his countrymen to do likewise. He thus became the enforcer of Soviet policy in that hapless land . But the status of the Slovaks underwent a revision formally acting in their favor . Czechoslovakia was federalized into two republics - one Czech and the other Slovak although both were subject to a common Communi st Party . Most significantly, the official attitude towards the Slovak Nation al Upri22 Copies of documents pertainin g to both the prosecution of and the verdi ct on the state's case against Zingor may be found in the archives of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banska Bystrica. For the prosecution , see Odpi s zaloby rok 1950 in Archfv Muzea SNP, Fond IV , prir. cfs: 576/9 1, pp. 1-20. For the verdict , see Rozsudok rok 1950, Archiv Muzea SNP, Fond IV, prir. cfs : 575/96, pp. I - 15. 23 Documents pertaining to th e review of the case of the state versus Z ingor and associates may be found in the archives of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banska Bystri ca. For the formal verdict, see Rozsudok rok 1968 in Archfv Muzea SNP, Fond IV, prir. cfs: 5 76/9 1, pp.1 -33 . For the rehabilitati on, see Uznesenie rok 1968 in Archfv Muzea SN P, Fond IV, prir. cfs : 5 76/91 , pp. 1- 10. 48 SLOVAKIA sing changed. Previously vilified, it was now hailed as a cornerstone in relations between the two nationalities. Consequently, Zingor's rehabilitation was permitted to stand, and he began receiving honorable mention in officially sanctioned historical publications. The fact that he had aided escaped Soviet P.O.W.S made him less than objectionable to Czechoslovakia's overlords. Josef Trojan had to wai t another generation before receiving honorable mention in Slovak history books. Ironically, his memory is treated more charitably by Slovak historians such as Jozef Jablonicky than it is among his own Czech people. Trojan's case was reviewed following the collapse of the Communist system in the Velvet Revolution of autumn 1989. He was exonerated on the charge of having collaborated with the Gestapo, and his death penalty was overturned. But a conviction and prison sentence remained in force on the grounds that Trojan "organized murder," in this case hav ing executed members of his own partisan unit. Trojan 's case raises an interesting legal question. Under common maritime law, a captain on an isolated ship has virtually unlimited authority to execute insubordinates. To what extent does this apply to a partisan commander in an insurgent situation, in a country where the successor government disavows the sovereignty of the previous one? Czech historian Jan Rychlik has asserted that, according to a law promulgated on May 8, 1946, acts committed between September 30, 1938 and October 28,1945, which normally would be considered crimes, were not punishable if they contributed to the liberation of the Czech and Slovak peoples. Internal military ordinances permitted the commander to use force (including the use of firearms) under field conditions in which subordinate soldiers refu sed to fulfill orders. The question of the application of these legal norms, however, remained contingent upon the decision of an individual court. 24 A Slovak partisan who knew Trojan both before and after the war concurs with the revised verdict. Jan Kulhan began the war as a Slovak soldier di spatched to the Eastern Front. Like many others, he changed sides, becoming a member of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps commanded by General Ludvik Svoboda. He was di spatched 24 Law of May 8, 1946 (No. 11 5/ 1946) from Collection of Laws, Official Law Gazette. Information provided by Jan Rychlfk, to whom the present author expresses his gratitude. SLOVAKIA 49 ahead of the front on a mission to destroy German-held oil wells in southern Poland. Kulhan's recollection of Trojan remains a lively and coherent one. According to Kulhan , Trojan actually joined the Communist Party after the war. At this time he was noted as a stern manager, going so far as to insist that employees show up for work. Kulhan asserted that the charge of having collaborated with the Gestapo was a fabrication. Trojan's honeymoon with the Czechoslovak Communist Party was a brief one, and his disillusionment placed him on a collision course. Kulhan also conceded that, given his professional background, Trojan's partisans were perhaps the best shod in the Slovak National Uprising. But several friends of Kulhan's sister were among the partisans who were executed. Kulhan maintain s that Trojan acted wrongfully in this matter. 25 At the time of the writing of this essay, the Czech judicial system maintains an enigmatic silence concerning Trojan, although his case is again open for review. Meanwhile, Slovak historians and octogenarian veterans of World War II alike look forward to the rehabilitation of a man who, although born a Czech , enjoys a certain reputation as a Slovak hero. Yet, judging from the opinion of Kulhan , not all octogenarians agree. It remains for the Czech judicial system to give a complete account of the execution of partisans by Trojan, and the state's case against him. 25 Telephone interview with John Kulhan, August I0 , 2005. Mr. Kulhan is today a U.S. citizen and is currently a nominee fo r the Pres identi al Medal of Freedom.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Slovak Partisan Commanders in World War II: The Case of Josef Trojan Description An account of the resource R. Vladimír Baumgarten Slovakia, Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007 pp. 36-49 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Baumgarten, R. Vladimir Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/5b30d7c559730fe0284be847504b1c99.pdf e38a1fce9cdd2c89b02a9d4a53163b52 PDF Text Text 50 SLOVAKIA CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1945-1950: A FAILURE OF INTELLIGENCE Igor Lukes The outcome of the Czechoslovak political crisis from the end of World War II via the communist Machtergreifung in February 1948, and into the early fifties was not a preordained conclusion . It was not determined solely by the weight of the emerging blocs, it was not driven by the map, nor was it simply for the Kremlin to dictate. On the Czech side, it was mainly the product of unfounded hope (faith in an untested "socialism"), misplaced trust (deification of the Soviet Union and its leaders), and pathological fear of Germany. But the west also contributed to the communist victory by political blunders and amateurism in other field s. This papers focu ses on the U.S. intelligence community in postwar Prague. Looking at Czechoslovakia before the end of the war, and seeking to predict its political course in postwar Europe cou ld lead one to imagine a variety of scenarios. A minority saw the future in dark colors: they thought the country was destined to become a colony of the Soviet Union . They noted that the Czechoslovak political elite, punch-drunk from the Munich catastrophe, had taken steps that tied their country with Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. No one in the west doubted that President Edvard Benes and most of his colleagues in London were ideologically on their side, but it was clear that they still felt deep resentment over the manner in which their diplomatic alliances were imploded by the western appeasers of the Third Reich. They moved closer toward the Soviet Union because of the Munich experience and in order to show the British Foreign Office that when it came to coalitions in the postwar setting they no longer depended exclusively on the west; they had the Soviet card and they wou ld play it as needed to prevent "another Munich". An even greater factor for the pessimists was the country's location on the map and the situation at the front. The Red Army crossed the Czechoslovak border on 6 October 1944, while the allies were recovering from the disastrous Operation Market-Garden . Stalin was inside Czechoslovakia, but the western allies were stil l far away �SLOVAKIA 51 (U.S. Army units would cross onto Czech territory only on 18 April 1945). This led Ambassador William C. Bullitt to predict that after the war the Kremlin would "domin ate Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland , Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia." Bullitt speculated that Moscow had learned from its defeat in Hungary after World War I and would therefore apply different strategies in different countries located in the space between Germany and Ru ssia. 1 The Soviet Union might come with cold steel into the Baltics and Poland, but with treaties and patience to Finland and Czechoslovakia. Two wartime U.S. intelligence analysts observed years later that after the signing of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Agreement of December 1943 they had no illusions about the way Stalin was setting forth his policy toward all the countries of Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia. 2 The political course of Czechoslovakia inspired lots of optimists in the fall of 1944. The allied press was beaming with good new s, predicting that the country's postwar political life would simply pick up where "it was ruthlessly interrupted by the Munich Agreement of September 1938." Some American journalists celebrated a " pattern of cooperation" among the allied governments and proposed that the December 1943 Czechoslovak-Soviet Agreement was a " model " for others to follow. 3 Some suggested that the May 1944 Dutch, Belgian, and Norwegian agreements with the British and the Americans regarding the restoration of their sovereign status after liberation followed in the path originally established by the exiled Czechoslovak government, which had signed half a year before a treaty with the Soviet Union addressing matters of sovereignty and postwar administration. 4 When the country 's President Edvard Benes turned sixty on 28 May 1944, he received telegrams from many leaders of the 1 Willi am C. Bullitt, "The World From Rome: The Ete rn al C ity Fears a Struggle Between Christianity and Comm uni sm," Life Magazine, 4 September 1944. For a Soviet reaction to Bullitt' s ana lysis, see K. Demidov, "Obankrotivshiisia razvedch ik, ,. Pra vda, 4 September 1944. Note the dates. 2 Interview wi th Spencer L. Taggart, Logan, Utah, 23 April 1999 and interview with Paul Zinner, 5 Apri l 2005 , Washington . 3 No au thor, "The Pattern of Cooperati on," New York Times, 18 May 1944. 4 J. Emlyn Williams, " Smaller Allies in Europe Differ in Peace Readiness," Christian Science Monitor. IO May 1944. �52 SLOVAKIA anti-Nazi alliance, and New York Times called him a " prophet of a great cause" and a "fine champion" of democracy.5 Among the optimists was the influential C. L. Sulzberger who summed up the geopolitical situation in the east at the end of August 1944. The future borders of Finland , the Baltic republics, Poland, Hungary and others were at the mercy of Joseph Stalin. But "Mr. Benes has already got - he obtained it three years ago - a Soviet guarantee that Czechoslovakia 's pre-Munich frontiers will be re-established." 6 No doubt, thi s flattered President Benes enormously and reaffirmed him in his determination to establish hi s country as a friend of both the blocs and a bridge between them. The optimistic view that Czechoslovakia, balancing precariously between east and west, would maintain its sovereignty persisted even in the face of hard evidence that its political scene was undergoing dramatic changes in the direction of a gloomy scenario. In early April 1945, when the composition of the new Czechoslovak Government became known, Paul Zinner, an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) analyst in Washington , took the list of its members to the Department of State. He hoped to explain that the new Prime Minister had gained a reputation for being an apologist for even the most odious Soviet foreign policy deci sions. Zinner was di sturbed that the Czechoslovak Ministry of Interior was to be headed by a communist, and the same was true for the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Information, Ministry of Agriculture, and de facto, the Ministry of Defense . All in all, he thought that the government' s composition was a bad omen. But Zinner's State Department colleagues thou ght there was no reaso n to be concerned. They glanced at the list and learned that the country would have Edvard Benes as president and Jan Masaryk as foreign minister. " What could go wrong with such friends at the helm ?" they asked . " We have nothing to fear, " they concluded, di smisssed Zinner's concerns and turned their attention to other matters, including the imminent opening of the United States Embassy in Prague. Zinner recalls leaving the Czech affairs desk with a sense of foreboding and frustration: there seemed little he could do to 5 No author, "Benes at 60," New York Times, 28 May 1944. C. L. Sulzberger, " Frontier Policies of Russia Emerge," New York Times, 28 August 1944. 6 �SLOVAKIA 53 persuade the optimists that the Czechs might ultimately share the fate of the Poles, Hungarians and others in the region. 7 Finally, there were the reali sts, who staked out their territory in the space between the optimists and pessimists. They did not believe it was possible in 1944 to predict Czechoslovakia's future political orientation and course. But they were prepared to say that the country was the most important laboratory for testing east-west relations in the region. Charles E . Bohlen rejected the view expressed by his colleagues that Poland was the country to study in order to discern whether the west could coexist with Stalin. Poland's fate had been sealed, he thought. The real test, Bohlen went on to argue, was Czechoslovakia. Benes had signed the December 1943 treaty with Stalin despite opposition from his British hosts. " If the USSR really implemented that treaty and did not violate it then we would have an indication that it might be possible to get along with the Soviet Union after all. If the Soviet Union should break the treaty - the Czechs having gone as far as anybody could expect them to go - this might be an indication that cooperation with the Soviet Union would not be possible." 8 Other Americans, for instance, Averell Harrimann, shaed thi s view. 9 Bohlen ' s analysis carried the day. The United States would henceforth treat Prague as a testing ground and an observation post. Although it was in Eastern Europe and the spires of the Kremlin cast a shadow over it, the city had the atmosphere of a western outpost. It welcomed the Americans who came to reopen the United States Embassy in May 1945. And Washington reciprocated by building up its diplomatic and intelligence presence in postwar Czechoslovakia to unprecedented levels. In short order, the embassy at the Schoenborn Palace had a staff of more than two hundred employees. There were several reasons why U.S. intelligence in postwar Czechoslovakia could have performed well during the crisis leading up to the Communist Machtergreifung of February 1948. The first 7 Interview with Paul Zinner, 5 April 2005 , Washington. The Harry S. Truman Library . Harry N. Howard , "Oral Hi story Interview ," 7-8 October 1976. lnterview by Richard D. McKinzie. 9 Eduard Mark, "Charles Bohlen and the Acceptable Limits of Soviet Hegemony in Eastern Europe: A Memorandum of 18 October 1945," Diplomatic History 3, 2 (Spring 1979): I05. 8 �54 SLOVAKIA has to do with time and opportunity to launch intelligence operations. The U.S. Army had not played any direct role in the liberation of Poland from Nazism, and the imposition of Soviet rule over the country was violent and rapid. The same was true - with significant regional variations - in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. When American diplomats and intelligence officers arrived in postwar Warsaw they had little or no time to get to know the terrain and to establish contacts to be exploited in the future. Right from the start they operated under significant or even extreme counterintelligence pressure from the domestic and Soviet special services. The opposite was true in Czechoslovakia, where the American intelligence community had plenty of time to prepare for the co ming crisis. Small elements of the U.S. Army had arrived in Prague some two days before the Russians, the U.S. military liberated several prominent Czech cities, and the G.l.s remained deployed in Western Bohemi a for seven months. During thi s time and later - until the spri ng of 1948 - Americans could freely travel in and out of Prague, and U.S. intelligence thus had countless opportunities to set down its roots in Czech soil. Moreover, the Czech co mmunists took until February 1948 to establish their dictatorship. Throughout thi s time each branch of the Prague government included individuals who were happy to provide confidential information to the Americans. President Edvard Benes set the tone when he met with such known U.S. intelligence officials as Allen Dulles, the Englishman Robert Bruce Lockhart, and others. Many other high-ranking government officials, including cabinet ministers, scores of military officers, policemen, secret police agents, and intellige nce service officials were willing to provide information to U.S. intelligence operatives in Prague. These individuals were not agents in the formal meaning of the word. They had not been formally recruited, handled in a clandestine manner, and paid. They provided the Americans with information from various denied areas of official life because there was a community of interest between the United States and their well positioned so urces in Czechoslovakia. From a spymaster's perspective a better environment was hard to imagine. American diplomats and intelligence officers came to postwar Poland and other East European countries only after Russian tanks �SLOVAKIA 55 had helped install a Moscow-vetted government in power. This relegated them to the role of observers. But United States intelligence operatives in postwar Czechoslovakia had had plenty of time to prepare for the Cold War milieu. How did they do in postwar Czechoslovakia? This is the question this paper seeks to address. The chief American diplomat in Prague was Ambassador Laurence A. Steinhardt, whose service in the Soviet Union included the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, and who had, as a result, a skeptical view of all things Soviet. The Kremlin bosses had snubbed him repeatedly, and he disliked them with passion. In Prague Steinhardt surrounded himself with such like-minded anti -Stalinists as Colonel (later General ) Joseph Anthony Michela, US Military Attache, and others . The U.S. Embassy in Prague under Steinhardt had no intention of accommodating any communist or Soviet schemes. The ambassador's ideology and hi s can-do attitude combined to provide a good working atmosphere for American intelligence in Prague. U.S. Intelligence in Prague after the end of World War II was organized around two separate pl atforms, the Military Mission and the United States Embassy. The United States Military Mission was established in Prague only a few weeks after the end of the war. Even in that most abnormal era it was a very unorthodox operation. The commaning officer of the Military Mission was Colonel Charles Katek. 10 He was the first among several larger-than-life Americans who descended upon Prague right after the war's end. When Katek joined the Army, his Ph.D. in hi story from Northwestern University and hi s Czech and German language skills did not go unnoticed. After an officer candidate course, the OSS was a logical destination . Katek and his team of OSS operatives reached Prague on IO May 1945, soon after the Red Army had arrived. In Prague Katek found a luxurious apartment on Loretanske Square, a most prestigious address. He and his colleagues developed it into a salon where so me of the most interesting and influential people gathered regularly. It was well known that Katek was keenly 10 Most of my infonnation is from the Prague archives and from Janet Edwards, Colone l Katek 's daughter, Interv iew, 19 Jul y 2000. The ori ginal name of the fami ly was Kotek; it was changed to Katek in Chicago. Since "Kotek" does not sound particul arly Czech, it remains unclear whether the fam il y had come from Bohemia or Slovakia. �56 SLOVAKIA interested in intelligence; he was remarkably open about it. Among his guests were members of various noble families, such as Schwarzenberg, Lobkowitz, Czernin, Kolowrat, and Nadherny ; government officials, for instance Minister Jan Masaryk, Minister Petr Zenk), Minister Jaroslav Stransky , Minister Adolf Prochazka, and Minister Frantisek Hala; at least a dozen members of parliament, including lvo Duchacek; countless personalities from business circles, and influential political journalists, such as Julius Firt, Ferdinand Peroutka and Pavel Tigrid. Visitors were attracted to the Military Mission by the prospect of friendly conversation and challenging political debates. Of course, no one should underestimate the importance in postwar Prague of good food, exotic alcohol, tobacco, and jazz records, all of which were made plentiful by Colonel Katek 's regular truck deliveries from a U.S. Army base in Nuremberg. Those who came and talked to the Americans at Loretanske Square knew full well that their words would be passed on to the authorities. Katek 's approach was to blur the line between dinner parties and espionage. It made his life both simple and pleasant. The Military Mission had a few sources who were not invited to join the parties on Loretanske Square. Even in such cases Colonel Katek made no attempt to practice the kind of tradecraft that is common in the world of intelligence. He met them durin g office hours at the Mission. The activities around the Military Miss ion in Prague were so notorious that other Americans who served in postwar Czechoslovakia were not quite sure what to think about the situation. 11 They were right to be concerned. The Czech authorities paid attention to what was happening around Colonel Katek. They quickly surmi sed that he was conducting military and political espionage. An StB document notes that in November 1945 thirty-eight Czechs were in the category of regular visitors at the Military Mission. In January 1946 the OBZ insisted that the Mission with its 10 US Army 11 Interview with Louise Schaffner, 30 January 1999. Mrs. Schaffner was a Foreign Service officer in the U. S. Embassy in Prague at the time of the communi st coup d ' etat. �SLOVAKIA 57 officers ran 109 agents. 12 On the basis of my interviews the claim appears to be signifycantly exaggerated. But the Military Mission under Colonel Katek 's direction was very active in gathering intelligence in postwar Prague. Its information came from willing and well-placed sources, not recruited agents. Though it seemed like a good idea at the time, the weakness of this manner of gathering intelligence would be revealed in February 1948. From the summer of 1945 to February 1948, the Military Mission reported information from an impressive array of well-placed sources: aristocrats, ministers, officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Mini stry of Interior, Ministry of Defense generals, high-ranking soldiers and pilots, security officials, and businessmen . It was easy to think that intelligence gathered from such knowledgeable and well-placed individuals was enough for analysts in Washington to create a true and accurate picture of the political crisis in Czechoslovakia. The intelligence section in the Embassy was led by Spencer Taggart. He arrived in Prague in the Spring of 1945 with a clear mission : "I was sent there with a long-term objective - to help the Czechs guard their independence and to promote western democracy." 13 Seen in thi s light, Taggart came to protect and promote the values that were agreeable to the majority of the political class and the population . Therefore, it was not difficult for him to gain access to a number of sources that were both knowledgeable and well informed - he was prepared to identify only four, Petr Zenk! , Major Jaromir Nechansky, Jan Stransky and lvo Duchacek, but there were others. For all their commitment, their well-placed so urces of information, and their knowledge of the terrain, the United States Embassy in Prague was consistently taken by surprise whenever a crisis developed. The first such occasion involved the May 1946 elections that resulted in a swee ping victory for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The OSS and State Department analysts took note of it, of course, but as one member of Katek 's team put it "were we smart enough to realize that thi s was the beginning of the end? I 12 Archives of the Ministry of Interi or, AMI Z-651, file 13. LT COL Bedrich Reicin and CPT Kare l Vas, Main Directorate, OBZ, Ministry of Defense, 302-592-1, no. 150.457/secret report -2c-/ 1946, 24 January 1946. 13 Interview with Spencer L. Taggart, Logan , Utah , 23 April 1999. �58 SLOVAKIA doubt it. " 14 Ambassador Steinhardt had predicted an entirel y different outcome and he adopted an ostrich-like posture when faced with the election results. Another event that clearly and unmi stakabl y indicated th at the Kremlin and the Czechoslovak communists were on the verge of seizing power took place in Ju ly 1947 . It involved the Marshall plan. The Soviets had made clear in early July 1947 that they would take part neither in the conference nor in the Marshall plan itself. But the Czechs, including the leaders of the CPC, were planning to go as late as 7 Jul y 1947. They were invited to the Kremlin , and two days later, an official delegation from Prague was in Moscow. On 10 July 1947 Czechoslovakia announced that it would not be represented in Paris. The American Embassy happened to be rudderless while the Prague Government was performing its backward so mersault on the Marshall Plan : the Ambassador and hi s Deputy Chief of Miss ion , John Bruins, were attending a boar hunt organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Katek and Taggart went with them. Two junior diplomats found out about the reversal and informed Washington . 15 But hav ing arrived from the desk of a junior diplomat it left no lasting footprint in the halls of the Department of State. The story was leaked also to the New York Times. An in-depth article described the Marshall Plan fiasco and the current tense situation in Prague realistically and accurately. But then it quoted "observers here," a reference to U.S. diplomats in Prague, as being skeptical that the Ru ssians would try to impose upon Czechoslovakia " the kind of communist state that preva il s in Rumani a, Bul garia and Poland. " 16 The hopeful view, the paper reported , was that in following its tradition the Kremlin might in fact decide to withdraw altogether back to Ru ssia, lest its people become contaminated with the west. This optimism was anchored in the views of the ambassador, his deputy , but also Katek and Taggart. The Embassy's record during the deci sive days of February 1948 is not impressive. Ambassador Steinhardt was in the United States attending to business at the law firm Guggenheimer, Untermyer & 14 Interview with Walter Taub, Salzburg. Austria. 6 March 2000 . Interview with George Bogardus, Washington, 3 June 1998. 16 James Reston, "Czechs Bow East Politicall y but Back West Inte llectuall y," New York Times, 5 August 1947. 15 �SLOVAKIA 59 Marshall on Pine Street in New York City. He had joined it in 1920 and remained an active partner even after he started, in 1933, his diplomatic career as U. S. Ambassador in Stockholm. Spencer Taggart was on a motoring tour of Italy with his wife. For the ambassador and for Spencer Taggart to be out of the country at the time of the coup was embarrassing. The game was lost now - when the opponent took to the field , the Americans were not even dressed to play. The ambassador and the upper echelons at the Embassy had surrounded themselves primarily with the titled and propertied classes. They failed to notice that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had won real support not only among the working class and trade unionists, but importantly among the intellectual s, traditionally a crucial social group in the Czech lands. Neither the Embassy nor the Military Mission had connections in those circles. The CPC had saturated the democratic parties with its agents; it could anticipate and neutralize their activities. The democrats had not imagined that such conduct was possible. Neither they nor their American friends at the Embassy or Mission had recruited any intelligence assets at the level of the CPC Politburo or even the Central Committee apparat. Steinhardt ' s optimism influenced others in the Embassy and some in the State Department. But leading American diplomats, such as George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, were not at all surprised by the Prague coup. As we have seen, this was not thanks to reports of the U. S. Embassy in Prague or thanks to information from U. S. intelligence. Among those who had been expecting a decisive communist move against Czechoslovakia was Secretary of State Marshall. In his November 1947 memorandum for President Truman he approached the iss ue like a military strategist examining the map. He found that Moscow " will probably have to clamp down on Czechoslovakia, for a relatively free Czechoslovakia could become a threatening salient in Moscow's political position. " 17 As it happened, the Prague coup d'etat was played out as an internal affair, and Moscow could remain in its comfortable position of a sympathetic observer. The result was exactly as Marshall had predicted. 17 The Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Harry S. Truman , Files of the White House Nava l Aide, G. C. M., Secretary of State, Memorandum for the President, 7 November 1947 . �60 SLOVAKIA Marshall 's analysis, based on common sense and years of military experience, offered more insight into the crisis in Prague than that provided by American diplomats and intelligence personnel based in the city. It is a serious indictment of U.S. intelligence performance in postwar Prague that the sec retary of state should have come up with a more accurate assessment of the evolving crisis than trained intelligence personnel with language skills and sources at the highest ranks of the Czechoslovak Government. Even if the communist coup d 'etat in Czechoslovakia did not surprise Secretary Marshall, like many others he considered it a watershed in east-west relations. On 10 March 1948 he stated that the situation in Europe was "very , very serious" and ten days later he called for " urgent and resolute action" if the United States was to defend the west. The United States Embassy in Prague was not in a position to contribute to the effort. The February coup d 'etat brutally revealed the weaknesses of the overt style of intelligence gathering employed by the Military Mission. Almost overnight, the former guests of Colonel Katek had lost their posts in government, security, the military, and the world of business. At least one was dead, some in prison, the majority seeking to escape; the lucky ones were already in the west; some of the prominent habitues of Loretanske Square were under house arrest. None had access to information that would be of interest to the Americans. Neither Katek nor Taggart had thought of putting in place an intelligence-gathering network that would become operational in case of a communist assumption of power. Building one now was next to imposs ible: no Czech with some official standing (except for StB agents) dared to come to the Embassy, and few were willing to risk speaking with American diplomats even in private. Yet this was the time when intelligence was most desperately needed. In June or July 1948, in the first weeks of the Berlin blockade, General Lucius Clay, Commanding General of U.S . Forces in Europe and Military Governor of Germany, summoned Taggart and told him to expect an outbreak of war with the Soviet Union within four months. The general asked him to build in Czechoslovakia a network of intelligence assets who would be equipped with radio stations. It was to remain inactive during peacetime but spring into action in case of hostilities between the United States and the Soviet �SLOVAKIA 61 bloc. Their mission was to gather military intelligence and transmit it to the Americans if the east-west tensions caused an evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Prague. Taggart was eager to carry out his orders, but he was scheduled to leave the Prague post in October 1948 at the latest. When he reviewed the list of people who might help him put together the kind of network General Clay wanted, he selected Major Jaromir Nechansky (born I 916). It was not a lucky choice. Nechansky was a brave, highly motivated , British-trained commando and intelligence officer, but his wartime service in the west, his activities in occupied Czechoslovakia from February to May 1945, and his frequent social contacts with the Americans before the communist take-over made him an obvious target of the Czechoslovak Military Counter Intelligence, Obranne zpravodajstvi, OBZ. In 1946 it concluded: "Nechansky is in frequent contact with Katek ; he most likely works for the Americans." 18 The Americans decided to recruit also Veleslav Wahl. This young man - he was born in 1922 - came from a well-known family that had already experienced more than its share of tragedy: his father, Veleslav, and uncle, Karel, were executed by the Nazis in 1942; his future wife ' s father, Josef Ruzicka, was killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1943. It was unhelpful that Nechansky and Wahl were known to be very close friends since the war. The discovery of one would automatically lead to the arrest of the other. First Nechansky, then Wahl and all the other agents whom the two leaders had recruited on behalf of the Americans, were arrested in early September 1949. They never had a chance. All - men and women - were severely tortured; even the police photographer who took their pictures for the court did not bother to cover up this fact. The trial in April 1950 became an orgy of anti-American propaganda, played out in the communist daily Rude Pravo, but also in other papers. The names of Taggart, hi s assistant Samuel Meryn, and others from the Embassy appeared repeatedly in the manipulated press, accompanied by photographs of radio stations and weapons the StB uncovered in the houses of the would-be agents. The outcome of the tri al had been determined in advance. Nechansky and 18 AMI , Z-651 , fil e 13, OBZ (Main Directorate), Ministry of Defen se, Summary of Reports 302-592- 1. �62 SLOVAKIA Wahl were sentenced to death and executed on I 6 Jul y I 950. All other sentences were draconian. When American intelligence officers arrived in Czechoslovakia in May 1945 it see med th at the cause of western democracy was dealt a lucky hand. They were educated and motivated, they understood the country, its language and hi story , they had time to prepare for the comi ng confrontation with their Soviet opponent, and they enjoyed the unqualified support of Ambassador Steinhardt. Importantly, many in the Czech political and military elites, and significant numbers in the sec urity appara t were approachable by US intelligence personnel seeking classified information. The Americans who were in the business of collecting political, military, and comercial secrets in Prague had access to some of the highest ranking personalities in the Office of the President and Government, including the Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Interior. Some Czechoslovak officials were eager to provide Americans with classified information. Leaking information to American officials was neither dishonorable nor unpatriotic. It was a contribution to the cause of democracy. It would be hard to imagine any other country where there existed such a harmony of interest between American intelligence collectors and their sources. All these factors put together make the swift defeat of democracy in Czechoslovakia and the totalitarian victory in February 1948 all the more humiliating. � 50 SLOVAKIA CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1945-1950: A FAILURE OF INTELLIGENCE Igor Lukes The outcome of the Czechoslovak political crisis from the end of World War II via the communist Machtergreifung in February 1948, and into the early fifties was not a preordained conclusion . It was not determined solely by the weight of the emerging blocs, it was not driven by the map, nor was it simply for the Kremlin to dictate. On the Czech side, it was mainly the product of unfounded hope (faith in an untested "socialism"), misplaced trust (deification of the Soviet Union and its leaders), and pathological fear of Germany. But the west also contributed to the communist victory by political blunders and amateurism in other field s. This papers focu ses on the U.S. intelligence community in postwar Prague. Looking at Czechoslovakia before the end of the war, and seeking to predict its political course in postwar Europe cou ld lead one to imagine a variety of scenarios. A minority saw the future in dark colors: they thought the country was destined to become a colony of the Soviet Union . They noted that the Czechoslovak political elite, punch-drunk from the Munich catastrophe, had taken steps that tied their country with Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. No one in the west doubted that President Edvard Benes and most of his colleagues in London were ideologically on their side, but it was clear that they still felt deep resentment over the manner in which their diplomatic alliances were imploded by the western appeasers of the Third Reich. They moved closer toward the Soviet Union because of the Munich experience and in order to show the British Foreign Office that when it came to coalitions in the postwar setting they no longer depended exclusively on the west; they had the Soviet card and they wou ld play it as needed to prevent "another Munich". An even greater factor for the pessimists was the country's location on the map and the situation at the front. The Red Army crossed the Czechoslovak border on 6 October 1944, while the allies were recovering from the disastrous Operation Market-Garden . Stalin was inside Czechoslovakia, but the western allies were stil l far away �SLOVAKIA 51 (U.S. Army units would cross onto Czech territory only on 18 April 1945). This led Ambassador William C. Bullitt to predict that after the war the Kremlin would "domin ate Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland , Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia." Bullitt speculated that Moscow had learned from its defeat in Hungary after World War I and would therefore apply different strategies in different countries located in the space between Germany and Ru ssia. 1 The Soviet Union might come with cold steel into the Baltics and Poland, but with treaties and patience to Finland and Czechoslovakia. Two wartime U.S. intelligence analysts observed years later that after the signing of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Agreement of December 1943 they had no illusions about the way Stalin was setting forth his policy toward all the countries of Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia. 2 The political course of Czechoslovakia inspired lots of optimists in the fall of 1944. The allied press was beaming with good new s, predicting that the country's postwar political life would simply pick up where "it was ruthlessly interrupted by the Munich Agreement of September 1938." Some American journalists celebrated a " pattern of cooperation" among the allied governments and proposed that the December 1943 Czechoslovak-Soviet Agreement was a " model " for others to follow. 3 Some suggested that the May 1944 Dutch, Belgian, and Norwegian agreements with the British and the Americans regarding the restoration of their sovereign status after liberation followed in the path originally established by the exiled Czechoslovak government, which had signed half a year before a treaty with the Soviet Union addressing matters of sovereignty and postwar administration. 4 When the country 's President Edvard Benes turned sixty on 28 May 1944, he received telegrams from many leaders of the 1 Willi am C. Bullitt, "The World From Rome: The Ete rn al C ity Fears a Struggle Between Christianity and Comm uni sm," Life Magazine, 4 September 1944. For a Soviet reaction to Bullitt' s ana lysis, see K. Demidov, "Obankrotivshiisia razvedch ik, ,. Pra vda, 4 September 1944. Note the dates. 2 Interview wi th Spencer L. Taggart, Logan, Utah, 23 April 1999 and interview with Paul Zinner, 5 Apri l 2005 , Washington . 3 No au thor, "The Pattern of Cooperati on," New York Times, 18 May 1944. 4 J. Emlyn Williams, " Smaller Allies in Europe Differ in Peace Readiness," Christian Science Monitor. IO May 1944. �52 SLOVAKIA anti-Nazi alliance, and New York Times called him a " prophet of a great cause" and a "fine champion" of democracy.5 Among the optimists was the influential C. L. Sulzberger who summed up the geopolitical situation in the east at the end of August 1944. The future borders of Finland , the Baltic republics, Poland, Hungary and others were at the mercy of Joseph Stalin. But "Mr. Benes has already got - he obtained it three years ago - a Soviet guarantee that Czechoslovakia 's pre-Munich frontiers will be re-established." 6 No doubt, thi s flattered President Benes enormously and reaffirmed him in his determination to establish hi s country as a friend of both the blocs and a bridge between them. The optimistic view that Czechoslovakia, balancing precariously between east and west, would maintain its sovereignty persisted even in the face of hard evidence that its political scene was undergoing dramatic changes in the direction of a gloomy scenario. In early April 1945, when the composition of the new Czechoslovak Government became known, Paul Zinner, an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) analyst in Washington , took the list of its members to the Department of State. He hoped to explain that the new Prime Minister had gained a reputation for being an apologist for even the most odious Soviet foreign policy deci sions. Zinner was di sturbed that the Czechoslovak Ministry of Interior was to be headed by a communist, and the same was true for the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Information, Ministry of Agriculture, and de facto, the Ministry of Defense . All in all, he thought that the government' s composition was a bad omen. But Zinner's State Department colleagues thou ght there was no reaso n to be concerned. They glanced at the list and learned that the country would have Edvard Benes as president and Jan Masaryk as foreign minister. " What could go wrong with such friends at the helm ?" they asked . " We have nothing to fear, " they concluded, di smisssed Zinner's concerns and turned their attention to other matters, including the imminent opening of the United States Embassy in Prague. Zinner recalls leaving the Czech affairs desk with a sense of foreboding and frustration: there seemed little he could do to 5 No author, "Benes at 60," New York Times, 28 May 1944. C. L. Sulzberger, " Frontier Policies of Russia Emerge," New York Times, 28 August 1944. 6 �SLOVAKIA 53 persuade the optimists that the Czechs might ultimately share the fate of the Poles, Hungarians and others in the region. 7 Finally, there were the reali sts, who staked out their territory in the space between the optimists and pessimists. They did not believe it was possible in 1944 to predict Czechoslovakia's future political orientation and course. But they were prepared to say that the country was the most important laboratory for testing east-west relations in the region. Charles E . Bohlen rejected the view expressed by his colleagues that Poland was the country to study in order to discern whether the west could coexist with Stalin. Poland's fate had been sealed, he thought. The real test, Bohlen went on to argue, was Czechoslovakia. Benes had signed the December 1943 treaty with Stalin despite opposition from his British hosts. " If the USSR really implemented that treaty and did not violate it then we would have an indication that it might be possible to get along with the Soviet Union after all. If the Soviet Union should break the treaty - the Czechs having gone as far as anybody could expect them to go - this might be an indication that cooperation with the Soviet Union would not be possible." 8 Other Americans, for instance, Averell Harrimann, shaed thi s view. 9 Bohlen ' s analysis carried the day. The United States would henceforth treat Prague as a testing ground and an observation post. Although it was in Eastern Europe and the spires of the Kremlin cast a shadow over it, the city had the atmosphere of a western outpost. It welcomed the Americans who came to reopen the United States Embassy in May 1945. And Washington reciprocated by building up its diplomatic and intelligence presence in postwar Czechoslovakia to unprecedented levels. In short order, the embassy at the Schoenborn Palace had a staff of more than two hundred employees. There were several reasons why U.S. intelligence in postwar Czechoslovakia could have performed well during the crisis leading up to the Communist Machtergreifung of February 1948. The first 7 Interview with Paul Zinner, 5 April 2005 , Washington. The Harry S. Truman Library . Harry N. Howard , "Oral Hi story Interview ," 7-8 October 1976. lnterview by Richard D. McKinzie. 9 Eduard Mark, "Charles Bohlen and the Acceptable Limits of Soviet Hegemony in Eastern Europe: A Memorandum of 18 October 1945," Diplomatic History 3, 2 (Spring 1979): I05. 8 �54 SLOVAKIA has to do with time and opportunity to launch intelligence operations. The U.S. Army had not played any direct role in the liberation of Poland from Nazism, and the imposition of Soviet rule over the country was violent and rapid. The same was true - with significant regional variations - in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. When American diplomats and intelligence officers arrived in postwar Warsaw they had little or no time to get to know the terrain and to establish contacts to be exploited in the future. Right from the start they operated under significant or even extreme counterintelligence pressure from the domestic and Soviet special services. The opposite was true in Czechoslovakia, where the American intelligence community had plenty of time to prepare for the co ming crisis. Small elements of the U.S. Army had arrived in Prague some two days before the Russians, the U.S. military liberated several prominent Czech cities, and the G.l.s remained deployed in Western Bohemi a for seven months. During thi s time and later - until the spri ng of 1948 - Americans could freely travel in and out of Prague, and U.S. intelligence thus had countless opportunities to set down its roots in Czech soil. Moreover, the Czech co mmunists took until February 1948 to establish their dictatorship. Throughout thi s time each branch of the Prague government included individuals who were happy to provide confidential information to the Americans. President Edvard Benes set the tone when he met with such known U.S. intelligence officials as Allen Dulles, the Englishman Robert Bruce Lockhart, and others. Many other high-ranking government officials, including cabinet ministers, scores of military officers, policemen, secret police agents, and intellige nce service officials were willing to provide information to U.S. intelligence operatives in Prague. These individuals were not agents in the formal meaning of the word. They had not been formally recruited, handled in a clandestine manner, and paid. They provided the Americans with information from various denied areas of official life because there was a community of interest between the United States and their well positioned so urces in Czechoslovakia. From a spymaster's perspective a better environment was hard to imagine. American diplomats and intelligence officers came to postwar Poland and other East European countries only after Russian tanks �SLOVAKIA 55 had helped install a Moscow-vetted government in power. This relegated them to the role of observers. But United States intelligence operatives in postwar Czechoslovakia had had plenty of time to prepare for the Cold War milieu. How did they do in postwar Czechoslovakia? This is the question this paper seeks to address. The chief American diplomat in Prague was Ambassador Laurence A. Steinhardt, whose service in the Soviet Union included the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, and who had, as a result, a skeptical view of all things Soviet. The Kremlin bosses had snubbed him repeatedly, and he disliked them with passion. In Prague Steinhardt surrounded himself with such like-minded anti -Stalinists as Colonel (later General ) Joseph Anthony Michela, US Military Attache, and others . The U.S. Embassy in Prague under Steinhardt had no intention of accommodating any communist or Soviet schemes. The ambassador's ideology and hi s can-do attitude combined to provide a good working atmosphere for American intelligence in Prague. U.S. Intelligence in Prague after the end of World War II was organized around two separate pl atforms, the Military Mission and the United States Embassy. The United States Military Mission was established in Prague only a few weeks after the end of the war. Even in that most abnormal era it was a very unorthodox operation. The commaning officer of the Military Mission was Colonel Charles Katek. 10 He was the first among several larger-than-life Americans who descended upon Prague right after the war's end. When Katek joined the Army, his Ph.D. in hi story from Northwestern University and hi s Czech and German language skills did not go unnoticed. After an officer candidate course, the OSS was a logical destination . Katek and his team of OSS operatives reached Prague on IO May 1945, soon after the Red Army had arrived. In Prague Katek found a luxurious apartment on Loretanske Square, a most prestigious address. He and his colleagues developed it into a salon where so me of the most interesting and influential people gathered regularly. It was well known that Katek was keenly 10 Most of my infonnation is from the Prague archives and from Janet Edwards, Colone l Katek 's daughter, Interv iew, 19 Jul y 2000. The ori ginal name of the fami ly was Kotek; it was changed to Katek in Chicago. Since "Kotek" does not sound particul arly Czech, it remains unclear whether the fam il y had come from Bohemia or Slovakia. �56 SLOVAKIA interested in intelligence; he was remarkably open about it. Among his guests were members of various noble families, such as Schwarzenberg, Lobkowitz, Czernin, Kolowrat, and Nadherny ; government officials, for instance Minister Jan Masaryk, Minister Petr Zenk), Minister Jaroslav Stransky , Minister Adolf Prochazka, and Minister Frantisek Hala; at least a dozen members of parliament, including lvo Duchacek; countless personalities from business circles, and influential political journalists, such as Julius Firt, Ferdinand Peroutka and Pavel Tigrid. Visitors were attracted to the Military Mission by the prospect of friendly conversation and challenging political debates. Of course, no one should underestimate the importance in postwar Prague of good food, exotic alcohol, tobacco, and jazz records, all of which were made plentiful by Colonel Katek 's regular truck deliveries from a U.S. Army base in Nuremberg. Those who came and talked to the Americans at Loretanske Square knew full well that their words would be passed on to the authorities. Katek 's approach was to blur the line between dinner parties and espionage. It made his life both simple and pleasant. The Military Mission had a few sources who were not invited to join the parties on Loretanske Square. Even in such cases Colonel Katek made no attempt to practice the kind of tradecraft that is common in the world of intelligence. He met them durin g office hours at the Mission. The activities around the Military Miss ion in Prague were so notorious that other Americans who served in postwar Czechoslovakia were not quite sure what to think about the situation. 11 They were right to be concerned. The Czech authorities paid attention to what was happening around Colonel Katek. They quickly surmi sed that he was conducting military and political espionage. An StB document notes that in November 1945 thirty-eight Czechs were in the category of regular visitors at the Military Mission. In January 1946 the OBZ insisted that the Mission with its 10 US Army 11 Interview with Louise Schaffner, 30 January 1999. Mrs. Schaffner was a Foreign Service officer in the U. S. Embassy in Prague at the time of the communi st coup d ' etat. �SLOVAKIA 57 officers ran 109 agents. 12 On the basis of my interviews the claim appears to be signifycantly exaggerated. But the Military Mission under Colonel Katek 's direction was very active in gathering intelligence in postwar Prague. Its information came from willing and well-placed sources, not recruited agents. Though it seemed like a good idea at the time, the weakness of this manner of gathering intelligence would be revealed in February 1948. From the summer of 1945 to February 1948, the Military Mission reported information from an impressive array of well-placed sources: aristocrats, ministers, officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Mini stry of Interior, Ministry of Defense generals, high-ranking soldiers and pilots, security officials, and businessmen . It was easy to think that intelligence gathered from such knowledgeable and well-placed individuals was enough for analysts in Washington to create a true and accurate picture of the political crisis in Czechoslovakia. The intelligence section in the Embassy was led by Spencer Taggart. He arrived in Prague in the Spring of 1945 with a clear mission : "I was sent there with a long-term objective - to help the Czechs guard their independence and to promote western democracy." 13 Seen in thi s light, Taggart came to protect and promote the values that were agreeable to the majority of the political class and the population . Therefore, it was not difficult for him to gain access to a number of sources that were both knowledgeable and well informed - he was prepared to identify only four, Petr Zenk! , Major Jaromir Nechansky, Jan Stransky and lvo Duchacek, but there were others. For all their commitment, their well-placed so urces of information, and their knowledge of the terrain, the United States Embassy in Prague was consistently taken by surprise whenever a crisis developed. The first such occasion involved the May 1946 elections that resulted in a swee ping victory for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The OSS and State Department analysts took note of it, of course, but as one member of Katek 's team put it "were we smart enough to realize that thi s was the beginning of the end? I 12 Archives of the Ministry of Interi or, AMI Z-651, file 13. LT COL Bedrich Reicin and CPT Kare l Vas, Main Directorate, OBZ, Ministry of Defense, 302-592-1, no. 150.457/secret report -2c-/ 1946, 24 January 1946. 13 Interview with Spencer L. Taggart, Logan , Utah , 23 April 1999. �58 SLOVAKIA doubt it. " 14 Ambassador Steinhardt had predicted an entirel y different outcome and he adopted an ostrich-like posture when faced with the election results. Another event that clearly and unmi stakabl y indicated th at the Kremlin and the Czechoslovak communists were on the verge of seizing power took place in Ju ly 1947 . It involved the Marshall plan. The Soviets had made clear in early July 1947 that they would take part neither in the conference nor in the Marshall plan itself. But the Czechs, including the leaders of the CPC, were planning to go as late as 7 Jul y 1947. They were invited to the Kremlin , and two days later, an official delegation from Prague was in Moscow. On 10 July 1947 Czechoslovakia announced that it would not be represented in Paris. The American Embassy happened to be rudderless while the Prague Government was performing its backward so mersault on the Marshall Plan : the Ambassador and hi s Deputy Chief of Miss ion , John Bruins, were attending a boar hunt organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Katek and Taggart went with them. Two junior diplomats found out about the reversal and informed Washington . 15 But hav ing arrived from the desk of a junior diplomat it left no lasting footprint in the halls of the Department of State. The story was leaked also to the New York Times. An in-depth article described the Marshall Plan fiasco and the current tense situation in Prague realistically and accurately. But then it quoted "observers here," a reference to U.S. diplomats in Prague, as being skeptical that the Ru ssians would try to impose upon Czechoslovakia " the kind of communist state that preva il s in Rumani a, Bul garia and Poland. " 16 The hopeful view, the paper reported , was that in following its tradition the Kremlin might in fact decide to withdraw altogether back to Ru ssia, lest its people become contaminated with the west. This optimism was anchored in the views of the ambassador, his deputy , but also Katek and Taggart. The Embassy's record during the deci sive days of February 1948 is not impressive. Ambassador Steinhardt was in the United States attending to business at the law firm Guggenheimer, Untermyer & 14 Interview with Walter Taub, Salzburg. Austria. 6 March 2000 . Interview with George Bogardus, Washington, 3 June 1998. 16 James Reston, "Czechs Bow East Politicall y but Back West Inte llectuall y," New York Times, 5 August 1947. 15 �SLOVAKIA 59 Marshall on Pine Street in New York City. He had joined it in 1920 and remained an active partner even after he started, in 1933, his diplomatic career as U. S. Ambassador in Stockholm. Spencer Taggart was on a motoring tour of Italy with his wife. For the ambassador and for Spencer Taggart to be out of the country at the time of the coup was embarrassing. The game was lost now - when the opponent took to the field , the Americans were not even dressed to play. The ambassador and the upper echelons at the Embassy had surrounded themselves primarily with the titled and propertied classes. They failed to notice that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had won real support not only among the working class and trade unionists, but importantly among the intellectual s, traditionally a crucial social group in the Czech lands. Neither the Embassy nor the Military Mission had connections in those circles. The CPC had saturated the democratic parties with its agents; it could anticipate and neutralize their activities. The democrats had not imagined that such conduct was possible. Neither they nor their American friends at the Embassy or Mission had recruited any intelligence assets at the level of the CPC Politburo or even the Central Committee apparat. Steinhardt ' s optimism influenced others in the Embassy and some in the State Department. But leading American diplomats, such as George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, were not at all surprised by the Prague coup. As we have seen, this was not thanks to reports of the U. S. Embassy in Prague or thanks to information from U. S. intelligence. Among those who had been expecting a decisive communist move against Czechoslovakia was Secretary of State Marshall. In his November 1947 memorandum for President Truman he approached the iss ue like a military strategist examining the map. He found that Moscow " will probably have to clamp down on Czechoslovakia, for a relatively free Czechoslovakia could become a threatening salient in Moscow's political position. " 17 As it happened, the Prague coup d'etat was played out as an internal affair, and Moscow could remain in its comfortable position of a sympathetic observer. The result was exactly as Marshall had predicted. 17 The Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Harry S. Truman , Files of the White House Nava l Aide, G. C. M., Secretary of State, Memorandum for the President, 7 November 1947 . �60 SLOVAKIA Marshall 's analysis, based on common sense and years of military experience, offered more insight into the crisis in Prague than that provided by American diplomats and intelligence personnel based in the city. It is a serious indictment of U.S. intelligence performance in postwar Prague that the sec retary of state should have come up with a more accurate assessment of the evolving crisis than trained intelligence personnel with language skills and sources at the highest ranks of the Czechoslovak Government. Even if the communist coup d 'etat in Czechoslovakia did not surprise Secretary Marshall, like many others he considered it a watershed in east-west relations. On 10 March 1948 he stated that the situation in Europe was "very , very serious" and ten days later he called for " urgent and resolute action" if the United States was to defend the west. The United States Embassy in Prague was not in a position to contribute to the effort. The February coup d 'etat brutally revealed the weaknesses of the overt style of intelligence gathering employed by the Military Mission. Almost overnight, the former guests of Colonel Katek had lost their posts in government, security, the military, and the world of business. At least one was dead, some in prison, the majority seeking to escape; the lucky ones were already in the west; some of the prominent habitues of Loretanske Square were under house arrest. None had access to information that would be of interest to the Americans. Neither Katek nor Taggart had thought of putting in place an intelligence-gathering network that would become operational in case of a communist assumption of power. Building one now was next to imposs ible: no Czech with some official standing (except for StB agents) dared to come to the Embassy, and few were willing to risk speaking with American diplomats even in private. Yet this was the time when intelligence was most desperately needed. In June or July 1948, in the first weeks of the Berlin blockade, General Lucius Clay, Commanding General of U.S . Forces in Europe and Military Governor of Germany, summoned Taggart and told him to expect an outbreak of war with the Soviet Union within four months. The general asked him to build in Czechoslovakia a network of intelligence assets who would be equipped with radio stations. It was to remain inactive during peacetime but spring into action in case of hostilities between the United States and the Soviet �SLOVAKIA 61 bloc. Their mission was to gather military intelligence and transmit it to the Americans if the east-west tensions caused an evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Prague. Taggart was eager to carry out his orders, but he was scheduled to leave the Prague post in October 1948 at the latest. When he reviewed the list of people who might help him put together the kind of network General Clay wanted, he selected Major Jaromir Nechansky (born I 916). It was not a lucky choice. Nechansky was a brave, highly motivated , British-trained commando and intelligence officer, but his wartime service in the west, his activities in occupied Czechoslovakia from February to May 1945, and his frequent social contacts with the Americans before the communist take-over made him an obvious target of the Czechoslovak Military Counter Intelligence, Obranne zpravodajstvi, OBZ. In 1946 it concluded: "Nechansky is in frequent contact with Katek ; he most likely works for the Americans." 18 The Americans decided to recruit also Veleslav Wahl. This young man - he was born in 1922 - came from a well-known family that had already experienced more than its share of tragedy: his father, Veleslav, and uncle, Karel, were executed by the Nazis in 1942; his future wife ' s father, Josef Ruzicka, was killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1943. It was unhelpful that Nechansky and Wahl were known to be very close friends since the war. The discovery of one would automatically lead to the arrest of the other. First Nechansky, then Wahl and all the other agents whom the two leaders had recruited on behalf of the Americans, were arrested in early September 1949. They never had a chance. All - men and women - were severely tortured; even the police photographer who took their pictures for the court did not bother to cover up this fact. The trial in April 1950 became an orgy of anti-American propaganda, played out in the communist daily Rude Pravo, but also in other papers. The names of Taggart, hi s assistant Samuel Meryn, and others from the Embassy appeared repeatedly in the manipulated press, accompanied by photographs of radio stations and weapons the StB uncovered in the houses of the would-be agents. The outcome of the tri al had been determined in advance. Nechansky and 18 AMI , Z-651 , fil e 13, OBZ (Main Directorate), Ministry of Defen se, Summary of Reports 302-592- 1. �62 SLOVAKIA Wahl were sentenced to death and executed on I 6 Jul y I 950. All other sentences were draconian. When American intelligence officers arrived in Czechoslovakia in May 1945 it see med th at the cause of western democracy was dealt a lucky hand. They were educated and motivated, they understood the country, its language and hi story , they had time to prepare for the comi ng confrontation with their Soviet opponent, and they enjoyed the unqualified support of Ambassador Steinhardt. Importantly, many in the Czech political and military elites, and significant numbers in the sec urity appara t were approachable by US intelligence personnel seeking classified information. The Americans who were in the business of collecting political, military, and comercial secrets in Prague had access to some of the highest ranking personalities in the Office of the President and Government, including the Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Interior. Some Czechoslovak officials were eager to provide Americans with classified information. Leaking information to American officials was neither dishonorable nor unpatriotic. It was a contribution to the cause of democracy. It would be hard to imagine any other country where there existed such a harmony of interest between American intelligence collectors and their sources. All these factors put together make the swift defeat of democracy in Czechoslovakia and the totalitarian victory in February 1948 all the more humiliating. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2007, Vol. 39 Description An account of the resource Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 50 SLOVAKIA CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1945-1950: A FAILURE OF INTELLIGENCE Igor Lukes The outcome of the Czechoslovak political crisis from the end of World War II via the communist Machtergreifung in February 1948, and into the early fifties was not a preordained conclusion . It was not determined solely by the weight of the emerging blocs, it was not driven by the map, nor was it simply for the Kremlin to dictate. On the Czech side, it was mainly the product of unfounded hope (faith in an untested "socialism"), misplaced trust (deification of the Soviet Union and its leaders), and pathological fear of Germany. But the west also contributed to the communist victory by political blunders and amateurism in other field s. This papers focu ses on the U.S. intelligence community in postwar Prague. Looking at Czechoslovakia before the end of the war, and seeking to predict its political course in postwar Europe cou ld lead one to imagine a variety of scenarios. A minority saw the future in dark colors: they thought the country was destined to become a colony of the Soviet Union . They noted that the Czechoslovak political elite, punch-drunk from the Munich catastrophe, had taken steps that tied their country with Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. No one in the west doubted that President Edvard Benes and most of his colleagues in London were ideologically on their side, but it was clear that they still felt deep resentment over the manner in which their diplomatic alliances were imploded by the western appeasers of the Third Reich. They moved closer toward the Soviet Union because of the Munich experience and in order to show the British Foreign Office that when it came to coalitions in the postwar setting they no longer depended exclusively on the west; they had the Soviet card and they wou ld play it as needed to prevent "another Munich". An even greater factor for the pessimists was the country's location on the map and the situation at the front. The Red Army crossed the Czechoslovak border on 6 October 1944, while the allies were recovering from the disastrous Operation Market-Garden . Stalin was inside Czechoslovakia, but the western allies were stil l far away SLOVAKIA 51 (U.S. Army units would cross onto Czech territory only on 18 April 1945). This led Ambassador William C. Bullitt to predict that after the war the Kremlin would "domin ate Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland , Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia." Bullitt speculated that Moscow had learned from its defeat in Hungary after World War I and would therefore apply different strategies in different countries located in the space between Germany and Ru ssia. 1 The Soviet Union might come with cold steel into the Baltics and Poland, but with treaties and patience to Finland and Czechoslovakia. Two wartime U.S. intelligence analysts observed years later that after the signing of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Agreement of December 1943 they had no illusions about the way Stalin was setting forth his policy toward all the countries of Eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia. 2 The political course of Czechoslovakia inspired lots of optimists in the fall of 1944. The allied press was beaming with good new s, predicting that the country's postwar political life would simply pick up where "it was ruthlessly interrupted by the Munich Agreement of September 1938." Some American journalists celebrated a " pattern of cooperation" among the allied governments and proposed that the December 1943 Czechoslovak-Soviet Agreement was a " model " for others to follow. 3 Some suggested that the May 1944 Dutch, Belgian, and Norwegian agreements with the British and the Americans regarding the restoration of their sovereign status after liberation followed in the path originally established by the exiled Czechoslovak government, which had signed half a year before a treaty with the Soviet Union addressing matters of sovereignty and postwar administration. 4 When the country 's President Edvard Benes turned sixty on 28 May 1944, he received telegrams from many leaders of the 1 Willi am C. Bullitt, "The World From Rome: The Ete rn al C ity Fears a Struggle Between Christianity and Comm uni sm," Life Magazine, 4 September 1944. For a Soviet reaction to Bullitt' s ana lysis, see K. Demidov, "Obankrotivshiisia razvedch ik, ,. Pra vda, 4 September 1944. Note the dates. 2 Interview wi th Spencer L. Taggart, Logan, Utah, 23 April 1999 and interview with Paul Zinner, 5 Apri l 2005 , Washington . 3 No au thor, "The Pattern of Cooperati on," New York Times, 18 May 1944. 4 J. Emlyn Williams, " Smaller Allies in Europe Differ in Peace Readiness," Christian Science Monitor. IO May 1944. 52 SLOVAKIA anti-Nazi alliance, and New York Times called him a " prophet of a great cause" and a "fine champion" of democracy.5 Among the optimists was the influential C. L. Sulzberger who summed up the geopolitical situation in the east at the end of August 1944. The future borders of Finland , the Baltic republics, Poland, Hungary and others were at the mercy of Joseph Stalin. But "Mr. Benes has already got - he obtained it three years ago - a Soviet guarantee that Czechoslovakia 's pre-Munich frontiers will be re-established." 6 No doubt, thi s flattered President Benes enormously and reaffirmed him in his determination to establish hi s country as a friend of both the blocs and a bridge between them. The optimistic view that Czechoslovakia, balancing precariously between east and west, would maintain its sovereignty persisted even in the face of hard evidence that its political scene was undergoing dramatic changes in the direction of a gloomy scenario. In early April 1945, when the composition of the new Czechoslovak Government became known, Paul Zinner, an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) analyst in Washington , took the list of its members to the Department of State. He hoped to explain that the new Prime Minister had gained a reputation for being an apologist for even the most odious Soviet foreign policy deci sions. Zinner was di sturbed that the Czechoslovak Ministry of Interior was to be headed by a communist, and the same was true for the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Information, Ministry of Agriculture, and de facto, the Ministry of Defense . All in all, he thought that the government' s composition was a bad omen. But Zinner's State Department colleagues thou ght there was no reaso n to be concerned. They glanced at the list and learned that the country would have Edvard Benes as president and Jan Masaryk as foreign minister. " What could go wrong with such friends at the helm ?" they asked . " We have nothing to fear, " they concluded, di smisssed Zinner's concerns and turned their attention to other matters, including the imminent opening of the United States Embassy in Prague. Zinner recalls leaving the Czech affairs desk with a sense of foreboding and frustration: there seemed little he could do to 5 No author, "Benes at 60," New York Times, 28 May 1944. C. L. Sulzberger, " Frontier Policies of Russia Emerge," New York Times, 28 August 1944. 6 SLOVAKIA 53 persuade the optimists that the Czechs might ultimately share the fate of the Poles, Hungarians and others in the region. 7 Finally, there were the reali sts, who staked out their territory in the space between the optimists and pessimists. They did not believe it was possible in 1944 to predict Czechoslovakia's future political orientation and course. But they were prepared to say that the country was the most important laboratory for testing east-west relations in the region. Charles E . Bohlen rejected the view expressed by his colleagues that Poland was the country to study in order to discern whether the west could coexist with Stalin. Poland's fate had been sealed, he thought. The real test, Bohlen went on to argue, was Czechoslovakia. Benes had signed the December 1943 treaty with Stalin despite opposition from his British hosts. " If the USSR really implemented that treaty and did not violate it then we would have an indication that it might be possible to get along with the Soviet Union after all. If the Soviet Union should break the treaty - the Czechs having gone as far as anybody could expect them to go - this might be an indication that cooperation with the Soviet Union would not be possible." 8 Other Americans, for instance, Averell Harrimann, shaed thi s view. 9 Bohlen ' s analysis carried the day. The United States would henceforth treat Prague as a testing ground and an observation post. Although it was in Eastern Europe and the spires of the Kremlin cast a shadow over it, the city had the atmosphere of a western outpost. It welcomed the Americans who came to reopen the United States Embassy in May 1945. And Washington reciprocated by building up its diplomatic and intelligence presence in postwar Czechoslovakia to unprecedented levels. In short order, the embassy at the Schoenborn Palace had a staff of more than two hundred employees. There were several reasons why U.S. intelligence in postwar Czechoslovakia could have performed well during the crisis leading up to the Communist Machtergreifung of February 1948. The first 7 Interview with Paul Zinner, 5 April 2005 , Washington. The Harry S. Truman Library . Harry N. Howard , "Oral Hi story Interview ," 7-8 October 1976. lnterview by Richard D. McKinzie. 9 Eduard Mark, "Charles Bohlen and the Acceptable Limits of Soviet Hegemony in Eastern Europe: A Memorandum of 18 October 1945," Diplomatic History 3, 2 (Spring 1979): I05. 8 54 SLOVAKIA has to do with time and opportunity to launch intelligence operations. The U.S. Army had not played any direct role in the liberation of Poland from Nazism, and the imposition of Soviet rule over the country was violent and rapid. The same was true - with significant regional variations - in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. When American diplomats and intelligence officers arrived in postwar Warsaw they had little or no time to get to know the terrain and to establish contacts to be exploited in the future. Right from the start they operated under significant or even extreme counterintelligence pressure from the domestic and Soviet special services. The opposite was true in Czechoslovakia, where the American intelligence community had plenty of time to prepare for the co ming crisis. Small elements of the U.S. Army had arrived in Prague some two days before the Russians, the U.S. military liberated several prominent Czech cities, and the G.l.s remained deployed in Western Bohemi a for seven months. During thi s time and later - until the spri ng of 1948 - Americans could freely travel in and out of Prague, and U.S. intelligence thus had countless opportunities to set down its roots in Czech soil. Moreover, the Czech co mmunists took until February 1948 to establish their dictatorship. Throughout thi s time each branch of the Prague government included individuals who were happy to provide confidential information to the Americans. President Edvard Benes set the tone when he met with such known U.S. intelligence officials as Allen Dulles, the Englishman Robert Bruce Lockhart, and others. Many other high-ranking government officials, including cabinet ministers, scores of military officers, policemen, secret police agents, and intellige nce service officials were willing to provide information to U.S. intelligence operatives in Prague. These individuals were not agents in the formal meaning of the word. They had not been formally recruited, handled in a clandestine manner, and paid. They provided the Americans with information from various denied areas of official life because there was a community of interest between the United States and their well positioned so urces in Czechoslovakia. From a spymaster's perspective a better environment was hard to imagine. American diplomats and intelligence officers came to postwar Poland and other East European countries only after Russian tanks SLOVAKIA 55 had helped install a Moscow-vetted government in power. This relegated them to the role of observers. But United States intelligence operatives in postwar Czechoslovakia had had plenty of time to prepare for the Cold War milieu. How did they do in postwar Czechoslovakia? This is the question this paper seeks to address. The chief American diplomat in Prague was Ambassador Laurence A. Steinhardt, whose service in the Soviet Union included the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, and who had, as a result, a skeptical view of all things Soviet. The Kremlin bosses had snubbed him repeatedly, and he disliked them with passion. In Prague Steinhardt surrounded himself with such like-minded anti -Stalinists as Colonel (later General ) Joseph Anthony Michela, US Military Attache, and others . The U.S. Embassy in Prague under Steinhardt had no intention of accommodating any communist or Soviet schemes. The ambassador's ideology and hi s can-do attitude combined to provide a good working atmosphere for American intelligence in Prague. U.S. Intelligence in Prague after the end of World War II was organized around two separate pl atforms, the Military Mission and the United States Embassy. The United States Military Mission was established in Prague only a few weeks after the end of the war. Even in that most abnormal era it was a very unorthodox operation. The commaning officer of the Military Mission was Colonel Charles Katek. 10 He was the first among several larger-than-life Americans who descended upon Prague right after the war's end. When Katek joined the Army, his Ph.D. in hi story from Northwestern University and hi s Czech and German language skills did not go unnoticed. After an officer candidate course, the OSS was a logical destination . Katek and his team of OSS operatives reached Prague on IO May 1945, soon after the Red Army had arrived. In Prague Katek found a luxurious apartment on Loretanske Square, a most prestigious address. He and his colleagues developed it into a salon where so me of the most interesting and influential people gathered regularly. It was well known that Katek was keenly 10 Most of my infonnation is from the Prague archives and from Janet Edwards, Colone l Katek 's daughter, Interv iew, 19 Jul y 2000. The ori ginal name of the fami ly was Kotek; it was changed to Katek in Chicago. Since "Kotek" does not sound particul arly Czech, it remains unclear whether the fam il y had come from Bohemia or Slovakia. 56 SLOVAKIA interested in intelligence; he was remarkably open about it. Among his guests were members of various noble families, such as Schwarzenberg, Lobkowitz, Czernin, Kolowrat, and Nadherny ; government officials, for instance Minister Jan Masaryk, Minister Petr Zenk), Minister Jaroslav Stransky , Minister Adolf Prochazka, and Minister Frantisek Hala; at least a dozen members of parliament, including lvo Duchacek; countless personalities from business circles, and influential political journalists, such as Julius Firt, Ferdinand Peroutka and Pavel Tigrid. Visitors were attracted to the Military Mission by the prospect of friendly conversation and challenging political debates. Of course, no one should underestimate the importance in postwar Prague of good food, exotic alcohol, tobacco, and jazz records, all of which were made plentiful by Colonel Katek 's regular truck deliveries from a U.S. Army base in Nuremberg. Those who came and talked to the Americans at Loretanske Square knew full well that their words would be passed on to the authorities. Katek 's approach was to blur the line between dinner parties and espionage. It made his life both simple and pleasant. The Military Mission had a few sources who were not invited to join the parties on Loretanske Square. Even in such cases Colonel Katek made no attempt to practice the kind of tradecraft that is common in the world of intelligence. He met them durin g office hours at the Mission. The activities around the Military Miss ion in Prague were so notorious that other Americans who served in postwar Czechoslovakia were not quite sure what to think about the situation. 11 They were right to be concerned. The Czech authorities paid attention to what was happening around Colonel Katek. They quickly surmi sed that he was conducting military and political espionage. An StB document notes that in November 1945 thirty-eight Czechs were in the category of regular visitors at the Military Mission. In January 1946 the OBZ insisted that the Mission with its 10 US Army 11 Interview with Louise Schaffner, 30 January 1999. Mrs. Schaffner was a Foreign Service officer in the U. S. Embassy in Prague at the time of the communi st coup d ' etat. SLOVAKIA 57 officers ran 109 agents. 12 On the basis of my interviews the claim appears to be signifycantly exaggerated. But the Military Mission under Colonel Katek 's direction was very active in gathering intelligence in postwar Prague. Its information came from willing and well-placed sources, not recruited agents. Though it seemed like a good idea at the time, the weakness of this manner of gathering intelligence would be revealed in February 1948. From the summer of 1945 to February 1948, the Military Mission reported information from an impressive array of well-placed sources: aristocrats, ministers, officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Mini stry of Interior, Ministry of Defense generals, high-ranking soldiers and pilots, security officials, and businessmen . It was easy to think that intelligence gathered from such knowledgeable and well-placed individuals was enough for analysts in Washington to create a true and accurate picture of the political crisis in Czechoslovakia. The intelligence section in the Embassy was led by Spencer Taggart. He arrived in Prague in the Spring of 1945 with a clear mission : "I was sent there with a long-term objective - to help the Czechs guard their independence and to promote western democracy." 13 Seen in thi s light, Taggart came to protect and promote the values that were agreeable to the majority of the political class and the population . Therefore, it was not difficult for him to gain access to a number of sources that were both knowledgeable and well informed - he was prepared to identify only four, Petr Zenk! , Major Jaromir Nechansky, Jan Stransky and lvo Duchacek, but there were others. For all their commitment, their well-placed so urces of information, and their knowledge of the terrain, the United States Embassy in Prague was consistently taken by surprise whenever a crisis developed. The first such occasion involved the May 1946 elections that resulted in a swee ping victory for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The OSS and State Department analysts took note of it, of course, but as one member of Katek 's team put it "were we smart enough to realize that thi s was the beginning of the end? I 12 Archives of the Ministry of Interi or, AMI Z-651, file 13. LT COL Bedrich Reicin and CPT Kare l Vas, Main Directorate, OBZ, Ministry of Defense, 302-592-1, no. 150.457/secret report -2c-/ 1946, 24 January 1946. 13 Interview with Spencer L. Taggart, Logan , Utah , 23 April 1999. 58 SLOVAKIA doubt it. " 14 Ambassador Steinhardt had predicted an entirel y different outcome and he adopted an ostrich-like posture when faced with the election results. Another event that clearly and unmi stakabl y indicated th at the Kremlin and the Czechoslovak communists were on the verge of seizing power took place in Ju ly 1947 . It involved the Marshall plan. The Soviets had made clear in early July 1947 that they would take part neither in the conference nor in the Marshall plan itself. But the Czechs, including the leaders of the CPC, were planning to go as late as 7 Jul y 1947. They were invited to the Kremlin , and two days later, an official delegation from Prague was in Moscow. On 10 July 1947 Czechoslovakia announced that it would not be represented in Paris. The American Embassy happened to be rudderless while the Prague Government was performing its backward so mersault on the Marshall Plan : the Ambassador and hi s Deputy Chief of Miss ion , John Bruins, were attending a boar hunt organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Katek and Taggart went with them. Two junior diplomats found out about the reversal and informed Washington . 15 But hav ing arrived from the desk of a junior diplomat it left no lasting footprint in the halls of the Department of State. The story was leaked also to the New York Times. An in-depth article described the Marshall Plan fiasco and the current tense situation in Prague realistically and accurately. But then it quoted "observers here," a reference to U.S. diplomats in Prague, as being skeptical that the Ru ssians would try to impose upon Czechoslovakia " the kind of communist state that preva il s in Rumani a, Bul garia and Poland. " 16 The hopeful view, the paper reported , was that in following its tradition the Kremlin might in fact decide to withdraw altogether back to Ru ssia, lest its people become contaminated with the west. This optimism was anchored in the views of the ambassador, his deputy , but also Katek and Taggart. The Embassy's record during the deci sive days of February 1948 is not impressive. Ambassador Steinhardt was in the United States attending to business at the law firm Guggenheimer, Untermyer & 14 Interview with Walter Taub, Salzburg. Austria. 6 March 2000 . Interview with George Bogardus, Washington, 3 June 1998. 16 James Reston, "Czechs Bow East Politicall y but Back West Inte llectuall y," New York Times, 5 August 1947. 15 SLOVAKIA 59 Marshall on Pine Street in New York City. He had joined it in 1920 and remained an active partner even after he started, in 1933, his diplomatic career as U. S. Ambassador in Stockholm. Spencer Taggart was on a motoring tour of Italy with his wife. For the ambassador and for Spencer Taggart to be out of the country at the time of the coup was embarrassing. The game was lost now - when the opponent took to the field , the Americans were not even dressed to play. The ambassador and the upper echelons at the Embassy had surrounded themselves primarily with the titled and propertied classes. They failed to notice that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had won real support not only among the working class and trade unionists, but importantly among the intellectual s, traditionally a crucial social group in the Czech lands. Neither the Embassy nor the Military Mission had connections in those circles. The CPC had saturated the democratic parties with its agents; it could anticipate and neutralize their activities. The democrats had not imagined that such conduct was possible. Neither they nor their American friends at the Embassy or Mission had recruited any intelligence assets at the level of the CPC Politburo or even the Central Committee apparat. Steinhardt ' s optimism influenced others in the Embassy and some in the State Department. But leading American diplomats, such as George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, were not at all surprised by the Prague coup. As we have seen, this was not thanks to reports of the U. S. Embassy in Prague or thanks to information from U. S. intelligence. Among those who had been expecting a decisive communist move against Czechoslovakia was Secretary of State Marshall. In his November 1947 memorandum for President Truman he approached the iss ue like a military strategist examining the map. He found that Moscow " will probably have to clamp down on Czechoslovakia, for a relatively free Czechoslovakia could become a threatening salient in Moscow's political position. " 17 As it happened, the Prague coup d'etat was played out as an internal affair, and Moscow could remain in its comfortable position of a sympathetic observer. The result was exactly as Marshall had predicted. 17 The Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Harry S. Truman , Files of the White House Nava l Aide, G. C. M., Secretary of State, Memorandum for the President, 7 November 1947 . 60 SLOVAKIA Marshall 's analysis, based on common sense and years of military experience, offered more insight into the crisis in Prague than that provided by American diplomats and intelligence personnel based in the city. It is a serious indictment of U.S. intelligence performance in postwar Prague that the sec retary of state should have come up with a more accurate assessment of the evolving crisis than trained intelligence personnel with language skills and sources at the highest ranks of the Czechoslovak Government. Even if the communist coup d 'etat in Czechoslovakia did not surprise Secretary Marshall, like many others he considered it a watershed in east-west relations. On 10 March 1948 he stated that the situation in Europe was "very , very serious" and ten days later he called for " urgent and resolute action" if the United States was to defend the west. The United States Embassy in Prague was not in a position to contribute to the effort. The February coup d 'etat brutally revealed the weaknesses of the overt style of intelligence gathering employed by the Military Mission. Almost overnight, the former guests of Colonel Katek had lost their posts in government, security, the military, and the world of business. At least one was dead, some in prison, the majority seeking to escape; the lucky ones were already in the west; some of the prominent habitues of Loretanske Square were under house arrest. None had access to information that would be of interest to the Americans. Neither Katek nor Taggart had thought of putting in place an intelligence-gathering network that would become operational in case of a communist assumption of power. Building one now was next to imposs ible: no Czech with some official standing (except for StB agents) dared to come to the Embassy, and few were willing to risk speaking with American diplomats even in private. Yet this was the time when intelligence was most desperately needed. In June or July 1948, in the first weeks of the Berlin blockade, General Lucius Clay, Commanding General of U.S . Forces in Europe and Military Governor of Germany, summoned Taggart and told him to expect an outbreak of war with the Soviet Union within four months. The general asked him to build in Czechoslovakia a network of intelligence assets who would be equipped with radio stations. It was to remain inactive during peacetime but spring into action in case of hostilities between the United States and the Soviet SLOVAKIA 61 bloc. Their mission was to gather military intelligence and transmit it to the Americans if the east-west tensions caused an evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Prague. Taggart was eager to carry out his orders, but he was scheduled to leave the Prague post in October 1948 at the latest. When he reviewed the list of people who might help him put together the kind of network General Clay wanted, he selected Major Jaromir Nechansky (born I 916). It was not a lucky choice. Nechansky was a brave, highly motivated , British-trained commando and intelligence officer, but his wartime service in the west, his activities in occupied Czechoslovakia from February to May 1945, and his frequent social contacts with the Americans before the communist take-over made him an obvious target of the Czechoslovak Military Counter Intelligence, Obranne zpravodajstvi, OBZ. In 1946 it concluded: "Nechansky is in frequent contact with Katek ; he most likely works for the Americans." 18 The Americans decided to recruit also Veleslav Wahl. This young man - he was born in 1922 - came from a well-known family that had already experienced more than its share of tragedy: his father, Veleslav, and uncle, Karel, were executed by the Nazis in 1942; his future wife ' s father, Josef Ruzicka, was killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1943. It was unhelpful that Nechansky and Wahl were known to be very close friends since the war. The discovery of one would automatically lead to the arrest of the other. First Nechansky, then Wahl and all the other agents whom the two leaders had recruited on behalf of the Americans, were arrested in early September 1949. They never had a chance. All - men and women - were severely tortured; even the police photographer who took their pictures for the court did not bother to cover up this fact. The trial in April 1950 became an orgy of anti-American propaganda, played out in the communist daily Rude Pravo, but also in other papers. The names of Taggart, hi s assistant Samuel Meryn, and others from the Embassy appeared repeatedly in the manipulated press, accompanied by photographs of radio stations and weapons the StB uncovered in the houses of the would-be agents. The outcome of the tri al had been determined in advance. Nechansky and 18 AMI , Z-651 , fil e 13, OBZ (Main Directorate), Ministry of Defen se, Summary of Reports 302-592- 1. 62 SLOVAKIA Wahl were sentenced to death and executed on I 6 Jul y I 950. All other sentences were draconian. When American intelligence officers arrived in Czechoslovakia in May 1945 it see med th at the cause of western democracy was dealt a lucky hand. They were educated and motivated, they understood the country, its language and hi story , they had time to prepare for the comi ng confrontation with their Soviet opponent, and they enjoyed the unqualified support of Ambassador Steinhardt. Importantly, many in the Czech political and military elites, and significant numbers in the sec urity appara t were approachable by US intelligence personnel seeking classified information. The Americans who were in the business of collecting political, military, and comercial secrets in Prague had access to some of the highest ranking personalities in the Office of the President and Government, including the Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Interior. Some Czechoslovak officials were eager to provide Americans with classified information. Leaking information to American officials was neither dishonorable nor unpatriotic. It was a contribution to the cause of democracy. It would be hard to imagine any other country where there existed such a harmony of interest between American intelligence collectors and their sources. All these factors put together make the swift defeat of democracy in Czechoslovakia and the totalitarian victory in February 1948 all the more humiliating.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Czechoslovakia 1945-1950: A Failure of Intelligence Description An account of the resource Igor Lukes Slovakia, Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007 pp. 50-62 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lukes, Igor Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/c374b16744dd148fe28258d5532cc0d9.pdf 9762bbd6824bc1ff069d948c46a42d14 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA ,, 63 V,, JANOSIK AS A SYMBOL OFFREDOMIN COMMUNIST SLOVAK.IA Patricia A. Krafcik The new millennium has witnessed a continued fascination in Central Europe with the figure of Janosfk, the well-known eighteenth-century Slovak brigand hero. Among the works relating to Janosfk that have appeared thus far, Polish scholar Joanna Goszczynska 's study, Mit Janosika w folklorze i literaturze Slowackiej XIX wieku (The Janosfk Myth in Slovak Folklore and Literature of the Nineteenth Century), examines the emergence of Janosfk from Slovak popular folklore and other sources, as well as the evolution of his figure in nineteenth-century Slovak literature. 1 Geroi iii zboinik? Obraz razboinika v fol 'klore Karpatskogo regiona (Heroes or Bandits? Outlaw Traditions in the Carpathian Region) , edited by Slovak ethnographer Viera Gasparfkova and Russian folklorist Boris N. Putilov, offers a comparative study of Carpathian bandit traditions, including that of Janosfk. 2 In a more popular vein, Zuzana Krizkova 's and Margareta Horvathova's popu lar collection of Janosfk folktales, Jura) Janosik: Rozpnivanie o zbojnfckom kapitanovi (Juraj Janosik : Tales of the Brigand Captain) , intersperses several texts with summaries of historical information from the mid-seventeeth century to just after Janosfk' s execution in Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas in 1713, and is replete with dozens of miniature historical and art prints relating to Slovak hi story prior to and during Janosfk's time.3 In 2005-2006, the Slovak National Gallery and the Slovak National Museum co-sponsored an ex hibition entitled "S lovensky mytu s" 1 Joanna Goszczynska, Mit Janosika w folklorze i literaturze Sfowackiej XIX wieku (Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski , Lnsty tut Filologii Stowianskiej , 200 I). 2 Viera Gasparfkova and Boris N. Putilov, eds. , Geroi iii zboinik ? Obraz razboinika v fol'klore Kmpatskogo regiona (B udapest: European Folklore Insti tute, 2002). This work is published in Russian with a substantial summary in English. 3 Zuzana Kri zkova and Margareta Horvathova, Juraj Janosik: Rozprtivanie o zbojnickom kapittinovi (Bratislava: Perfekt, 2004). �64 SLOVAKIA (Slovak Myth), which included a prominent exhibit devoted to Janosfk: "Mytu s Juraj Janosfk , alebo Janosfko mani a v slove nskom vytvarnom umenf" (The Myth of Juraj Janosfk or Janosfk Mania in Slovak Creati ve Art). 4 As part of this "Janosfk mania" in Slovaki a, two mu sical plays, Poli sh pl ay wright Ernes t Bryll ' s and co mposer Katarzy na Gartnerova's Na skle malbvane: Spevohra v 3 castiach (Painted on Glass: A Musical Play in Three Parts, 1970)5 and Stani slav Stepka's Jaaanosfffk : Sprava o hrdinovi alebo hra na hrdinu (Jaaanosfffk : News about the hero or a play on the hero , 1970)6 have been rev itali zed and restaged. When they first appeared in co mmunist Czechoslovakia of the 1970s-80s, these mu sica l pl ays were wildl y popular. Along with 4 Slovak Nati onal Ga llery at www s ng sk (accessed August 5, 2006). The ex hib ition's accompanying catalog contains an arti cle devoted to Janosik: Hana Hl6skova, "Narodny hrdina Ju raj Janosfk," My ty Nase Slovenske, eds. Edu ard Krekovic, Elena Mannova, and Eva Krekov icova, (Bratislava: Academic Electro nic Press, 2005), 94103 . 5 M albvane na skle premiered in Warsaw in 1970; in Czechoslovaki a in 1972 at the Statni divadl o in Brno under the title Z bojn fci a iandafi ; and in 1974 in Bratislava at the Slovak Natio nal T heater. Perfo rm ances resum ed again fro m October 2005 in Bratislava' s Nova scena theater in a new translation from the Polish by Slovak playwright J.:ubomfr Feldek, with singers and dancers from SCUK, Sl ove nsky l'udovy umelecky ko lektfv (S lovak Folk Artisti c Ensemble). See: http ://mu zikaly .szm.sk/nsm html (accessed August 4, 2006), and more on SCU K's ro le can be found in "I.:udovy umelec ky kolektfv koprodukcny partner di ela" at: http: //www nova-sce ne.sk/ index/php?page-page& itemid-15 (accessed August 6, 2006). For a brief descri ption of the revitalized musical' s fir st-night perform ance on September 22, 2005 at Brati slava's Nova scena theater, see "Prem iera Na skle ma lbvane mala us pech," at : http://koktail pravda sk/sk kfilm.asp?r=sk kfi lm&c-A050923 114927 sk kfi lm p 1Q (accessed Aug ust 6, 2006). The rev iew mentio ns that the spectac ul ar performance was attended by me mbers of the Nati onal Co unc il of the Slovak Repu blic, including its speaker Pavol Hrusovsky. The play is avai lab le on DVD; see: http://www panorama.sk/i ndex.asp?kam-/go/mapa.asp&lang-en&sv-2&mc- I430 &m id=l. 6 Jaaanosfffk premiered in 1970 in Rados ina' s Klu b ml adyc h (fou nded 1963) in th e hometow n of the Radosina Na'ive Theater (RND) which moved its operations that year to Brati slava. http: //www.rnd.sk/?i-program&id- J022 . The play is now run as "Jaaanosfffk (po tridsiatich rokoch)" (Janosik [after thirty years)), thi s rev ised title given to it during an earlier revival in 2000 in Kezmarok. The musical has continued to play in theaters through this past year: see, fo r instance, about a perform ance of the play in Rufo mberok in 2006 at : http ://www.ruzomberok.sk/index novinky.php?novinka-15 3. �SLOVAKIA 65 a third production - I.:ubomfr Feldek's Janosik podl'a Vivaldiho (Jano sfk According to Vivaldi , 1979)7 - they employed in an innovative way folksong, folk dance, and classical mu sic, as well as contemporary rock mu sic elements, and were rife with raucous humor, language play, and scarcely veiled social and political criticism. In them the figure of Janosfk, so beloved in Slovak folklore and literature and so exploited by the communist regime for its own purposes, was demythologized and parodied. By daring to manipulate a fi gure and a myth solidified and sanctified by the regime, the mu sicals in fact functioned as a form of resistance to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and to its many "myths" and false promises. Yet even in a demythologized form, the subversive nature of the bri gand hero as a sy mbol of freedom from oppression and as a challenge to the social order still served as a liberating force .8 The evolution of the Janosik fi gure over the past four centuries is complex, as Martin Votruba demon strates in hi s recent article, "Hang Him High: The Elevation of Janosfk to an Ethnic Icon . "9 Inspired in part by the fate of the hi storical eighteenth-century Juraj Janosik, the folklore and literary fi gure was shaped over the years by many sources: Slovak mythology, pre-eighteenth-century Slovak brigand songs and tales, medieval anecdotes about bandits, eighteenthcentury Slovak "market songs," and the nineteenth-century Romantic literary movement in Europe. As an expression of their zealous patriotism during the mid-nineteenth century's national awakening in Central Europe, the younger generation of Slovak poets surrounding Cudovft Stur adopted and furth er shaped the image of Janosik and hi s "mountain lads" as the nation al sy mbol of the Slovak people 's 7 The play premiered I 979 at Statne divadlo in Kos ice under th e direction of Vaclav Martinec, music by Jaroslav Fi lip. The script was published along with other Feldek plays in the fo llowing vo lume: I.:ubomfr Feldek, Smutne komedie (Brati slava : Slovensky spi sovatel', 1982) 79- 11 9. 8 Eri c Hobsbawm , Bandits (London : Weidenfeld & Nico lson, 2000). Hobsbawm ' s landmark study is devoted to defi ning the archetypal figure of the bri gand hero as a perpetually liberating force. He refers to Janosik as one of the "noble robber" types (47). 9 Martin Yotruba, "Hang Him H igh: The Elevation of Janosik to an Ethnic Icon, " Slavic Review 65: I (2006): 24-44. For more on the historical Janosik, see Patricia A. Krafc ik , "Janosfk: Unrave ling the M an from the Legend, " Slovakia XXX III : 606 I ( 1987- I 988) : 7-22. A lso see Jozef K oc is, Neznamy Janosfk (Marti n: Osveta, I 986) for a more detai led study of Janosik's historical context. �66 SLOVAKIA struggle for liberation from the domination of Austrian and Hungarian rule. Beautiful in their language and hi ghl y emotive in their imagery, poems by Stefan Marko Daxner (1822-92), Samo Chalupka (1812-83), and Jan Botto (1829-81) are still today memorized, recited , and loved by Slovaks. Early twentieth-century Slovak prose writers ' attempts at further romanticizing hi s image by playing up the motifs of Janosfk's gi rlfriend and Janosfk as a seminary student did not tarni sh the Stur poets' image of Janosfk as a noble outlaw, a representati ve of freedom and defender of the oppressed. In the mid-twentieth century, communist Czec hoslovakia embraced the Janosfk myth co ntoured large ly by the Stur poets. Bas ing their version on selected folklore and the Sturists' vision of the hero, communist propagandists attempted to demonstrate that Janosi'.k, honored as the Slovak national sy mbol , had in fact been a proto-revolutionary who advocated preci sely what the communist government advocated: both the destruction of the bourgeo isie and aristocracy and the redi stribution of wealth in the spirit of socialism. After all , in both the folklore and nineteenth -ce ntury literature, Janosfk, the "mountain eagle," was depicted , like Robin Hood , confronting and humiliating noblemen and rich merchants and aiding and rewarding his supporters. Genuine hi storical court documents from his trial also clearly showed that Janosfk had never killed anyone, and had actually given gifts of jewelry to the young women of Terchova. 1 Furthermore, Janosfk's name and hi s image as a defender of the Slovak people had just recently been invoked among Slovak partisans in the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. 11 Finally, Soviet scholars did not shy away from the subj ect of social bandits in these decades, thu s affording it a further official stamp of approva l. Di stingui shed Russian folklori st Petr Grigor' evich Bogatyrev (1893- 1971 ) wrote about brigands before the 1950s and publi shed two excellent books about ° 10 see Andrej M elichercfk, Janosikovska tradfcia na Slovensku (Brati slava : SA YU. 1952) 248-59, for texts of the court documents revea ling inform ation about Janosik's activities. 11 M eli chercfk, Juraj Janosfk: Hrdina Protifeudalneho odboja slovenskeho J'udu, 2nd ed. (Martin: Osveta, 1963) 16 1- 164. See also "Janosfk-partizanska brigada" and "Janosfk- ilegalny casopis protifasisti ckeho frontu," Encyklopedia Slovenska 11 (Bratislava, 1978): 478-479. �SLOVAKIA 67 Slovak outlaws in 1963 and 1976. 12 Even earlier, nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries and Lenin himself had perceived in the Cossac k-bri gands, such as Sten ' ka Razin and Emeliian Pugachev, the people 's inherent revo lutionary spirit. 13 Janosik, in short, was thought to be a safe subject in communist Czechoslovakia, as well as advantageou s to the regime 's ideology, and thu s could be researched and celebrated by a host of writers, poets, artists, dramatists, composers, and scholars during the l 950s- l 980s . Through the ir work, he was elevated to communist sainthood. In Slovakia, the "father of Janosik studies," ethnographer Andrej Melichercfk (1917-1966) , was unquestionabl y the most ardent of them all. Born in the year of the Ru ssian revolution s, Melichercfk was educated at the Philosophical Faculty of Comenius University in Brati slava and was mentored in hi s chosen field of ethnography by Bogatyrev himself. 14 He served as an assistant professo r in ethnography at the university , was a "docent" from 1947, and lectured there to the end of hi s life. He also worked at the Matica slovenska, the key institution for the preservation of Slovak culture, from 1945, and served as its secretary from 1948. At the same time, as a tru sted sudruh (comrade), Melichercfk was asked to organize the Ethnographic Division (N arodnopisny ustav) in the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts and became president of that division in 1950. It was his responsibility in the new communist Slovakia to organize a unified body from diverse individuals, to critique the so-called bourgeois school s of folklore (that is, all folklore studies up to the communist ascend anc y in Czecho slovakia), and to align the work of hi s Academy sc holars with the "progress ive" Soviet ethnographic 12 P. G. Bogatyrev, S/ova tskie epicheskie rasskazy i /iro-epicheskie pesni ("zbojnickij cikl ") (Moskva: AN SSSR , 1963) and Slovatskie narodnye razbojnich 'i pesni i ballady (Moskva: Khudozhestvenna ia literatura, 1976). Bogatyrev helped pave the way for the stud y of the Carpathian brigand phenomenon in such articles as the fo llow ing about the "oprishki " or brigands and their legends in Western Ukraine: P. G. Bogatyrev , "Fo llklornye skazanija ob oprishkakh Zapadnoi Ukra iny," Sove tskaia etnografiia: Sbornik statei V ( 1941 ): 59-80. 13 Patricia A. Krafc ik, "Sten 'ka Ra zin in Ru ss ian Hi storical Fo lksongs : A Robin Hood of the Volga" (PhD diss., Columbia Uni versity, l 980), 3-6. 14 Jan Mjartan, "Za Prof. Dr. And rejom Melichercfkom , l 9I7-I966," Slovensky mirodopis XIV : 4 (1966): 501-505 . Subsequent biographical information is taken from thi s brief artic le. �68 SLOVAKIA school. The Soviet Union, after all , provided a model to be em ulated by the satellite countries in all fields. 15 Melichercfk energetically threw himself into thi s task, publishing a compilation of transl ations into Slovak of selected ethnographic studies from Soviet folklorists which were to serve as a methodolog ical aid for Slovak communist scholars, followed by the publication of a volume of exemplary Soviet-type studies by Slovak folklorists the mselves. Melichercik's personal history helps us understand his determination to do the right thing, to make certain that Slovak fo lkl ore sc holarship approached the folk tradition "correctly," and that it serve not just to inform but also to educate, to shape Slovak citi zens in a proper understanding of their past and "for the building of socialism" in Slovakia. 16 Indeed , thi s is what, according to Soviet culture tsar Andrei Zhdanov ( 18961948), Socialist Realist literature, art, and schol arship were supposed 17 to do. Melichercfk began publishin g hi s research on Janosfk in the 1950s. Until hi s untimely death in I 966 at age forty-nine as a result of so me fatal illness, perhaps contracted during a fi e ld trip with students near Rufomberok, he produced books and articles on the subject of the Slovak brigand hero. 18 He publi shed hi s defi nitive work on Janosfk in 1952, which was, in fact, the first major scholarl y study of the tradition in general , entitled Janos1ko vska tradfcia na 19 Slovensku (The Janosfk Tradition in Slovakia). Here, in great detail , Meli chercfk covered the historical backgro und of soc ial brigandage in Slovakia, the hi storical Juraj Janosfk on whom the image of the ideal brigand was based, and the Janosfk tradition in folklore and in Slovak formal literature. He also included several pages of folksong and folktale texts, as well as documents connected with Janosfk's trial and exec ution in I 7 I 3, and some literary texts. In 1956 Me li chercfk publi shed another major study of the Janosik tradition wh ich appeared in both Slovak and Czech editi ons. It was entitled Juraj Janosik: Hrdina protifeudalneho odboja slovenske- 15 Mjartan, 501-502. Mjartan, 502. 17 Gleb Struve, Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin 1917-1953 (Norman: Un iversity of Oklahoma Press, 197 1) 26 1-262. 18 Martjan, 503. 19 Melichercik, Janosfkovska tradfcia. 16 �SLOVAKIA 69 ho J'udu (Juraj Janosfk: Hero of the Anti-Feudal Struggle of the Slovak People) .20 This time, while repeating some material from his first study, he placed even greater emphasis on the socio-economic conditions that gave ri se to the brigand phenomenon in Slovakia and in the greater Carpathian region. In hi s chapter on the comparative study of the bandit tradition in the Carpathian context, he was a pioneer in widening the scope of the study of that tradition in Slovak scholarship.21 Indeed, from the 1970s to the present, the most fruitful work on the brigand theme has been the comparative study of the bandit tradition within the Carpathian area, supported by the International Commission for the Study of Popular Culture in the Carpathian and Balkan Region , founded in 1976.22 Melichercfk 's study, Juraj Janosfk: Hrdina , was published in a second revised and enlarged edition in 1963 for the 250 th anniversary of Janosfk 's execution.23 Although after this he wrote a few articles and some short pieces about Janosik and other bandits, as well as a substantial textbook on Slovak folklore in general , this second edition of Juraj 24 Janosfk: hrdina was hi s last major statement about his beloved idol. In providing what became the official and definitive description of Janosfk in communist Slovakia, Melichercfk wrote with an almost religious fervor: Janosfk's struggle ended tragically, but the idea of struggle against exp loiters for the truth and for justice and a more beautiful life for the simple working people shone in the consciousness of our people like a bright star in the evening sky. Decades went by, centuries passed, and that struggle - even though its conditions changed - continued. In the memory of the people the figure of Juraj Janosfk revived afresh, and a 20 Juraj Janosik: Hrdina protifeuda/neho odboja s/ovenskeho J'udu (Praha : Nase vojsko, 1956). 21 Melichercfk pursued comparative study a lso in two separate articles: "K otazke vzn iku zbojnfctva v Karpatoc h," Slovensky narodopi s IV: 2 ( I 956) I 63-194 and "Slovensko-Ukrajinske vztahy v zbojnfckom folkl6re ," Slovanske studie I (Bratislava, 1957) 539-548. 22 Milan Lescak, CSc. , ed., lnteretnicke vztahy vo folk/6re karpatskej oblasti (Bratislava: Veda, 1980). Also see note 2 for Gasparfkova and Putilov , eds. , Geroi iii zboinik? Gasparfkova herself has contributed in a major way to brigand study with books and articles over the past several decades, including: Zbojn[k Michal Vdovec v hist6rii a folk/6re gemerskeho l'udu (Bratislava: SA V, 1964 ); Povesti o zbojnikoch zo slovenskych a pol's ky ch Tatier (Bratislava: Veda, 1979); and Janosik: Obraz zbojnika v narodnej kulture (Bratislava: Tatran, 1988). 23 Melichercfk, Juraj Janos{k: Hrdina, 2nd ed. 24 Melichercfk, Slovensky fo lk/6r: Chrestomatia (Bratislava : SA V, 1959). �70 SLOVAKIA beautiful poe m abo ut freedom linked to hi s life took shape and was 25 ex pressed in the Janosfk tradition for over two centuries. Melichercfk offered a biography of the hi storical Juraj Janosfk drawn from ex tant court documents connected to his trial in Liptovsky Mikul as, and viewed Janosfk in folklore and literature as a composite hero whose figure was influenced by many sources. As a communist sc holar, Melichercik emphasized Janosfk 's image as a product of hi storical conditions, that is, an image born of the struggle of the masses of serfs and peasants against their feudal lords. He also recognized the role of the human creative imagination in the contouring of thi s image, shaped by the people as "one of the most beautiful and humani stic types of hero ," reflecting the experience 26 and yearning of the masses for freedom from feudal exploitation. Like mantras, such statements are repeated over and over throughout all of Melichercfk 's writings about Janosfk . Melichercfk 's adoration of Janosik as a proto-revolutionary hero helps explain hi s high praise for the young Stur poets. Their work, he stressed, preserved the simple and pure lines of the folk hero who engaged in an elemental struggle for hi s people and who in a sense died a martyr's terribl e death - executed by being hung on a meat 27 hook piercing the left side of his rib cage. Melichercfk's unwavering devotion to this perception of Janosik also accounts for hi s extraordinarily harsh criticism of prose writers and dramatists from the end of the nineteenth and first few decades of the twentieth century . These writers, he claimed, intentionally di storted and falsified the Janosik tradition by playing down or eliminating the revolutionary content of the tradition and clothing the brigand in "adventure, sentimentality, megalomania, [and] day-dreaming. "28 He had in mind writers such as Pa vol Beblavy in Janosik: Po vest' o hrdinovi a dobrodincovi J'udu (Janosik: Tale of the People' s Hero and Benefactor), 25 Melichercfk , Jura} Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 7. M elichercfk, Jura} Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 158. 27 Yotruba describes how the bri gand fi gure from Slovak fo lklore was adapted by the Stur poets from fo lklore and other sources and further recontoured to fit their purposes, adapting some attributes of the Romantic bri gand hero well-known throu ghout Europe and eliminating a motif found in some previous folklore and poetry which harshly judged the bandits' deeds. The Stur poets, that is, pl ayed a significant role in manipul atin g the figure, rather th an simply "preserving" some sacred original image from the folklore. See Yotruba, 42-43. 28 Melichercfk , Jura} Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 143. 26 �SLOVAKIA 71 which first appeared in installments in Slovenske pohl'ady (IX, 1889); Dobry Slovak in Janosfk, junak slobody (Janosfk, Hero of Freedom) (l 893); Gu stav Marsall-Petrovsky in his two-volume novel Janos[k (1894); and Emo Bohun in his two novel s, Janos1kov poklad (Ja no sfk 's Treasure Hoard ) (1926) and Dedics tvo Janostkovho pokladu (The Legacy of Jano sfk's Treasure Hoard) . About these, 29 Melichercfk had only the most negative observations. Melichercfk adopted the bitter tone of a real zealot when he focused on Slovak drama , in much of which he saw further destruction of what he considered the authentic folk tradition . He lashed out at Viliam Pauliny-T6th, for example, as the first to recontour Janosik in hi s play Janosik (1862) as a Roman Catholic seminary student, the so n of wealthy peasants, and an educated "gentleman bri ga nd ," 30 thereby di storting the "authentic " brigand figure. Evoking the language of di sease, he insisted that these bourgeoi s writers tried to "infect" the people 's consciousness "with traditions that are entirely harmful and hostile" because they wanted to divert the attention of the working masses away from their most important interests, that is, away from the class strugg le, and to "prevent them from correctly recognizing and assessi ng their own capabilities for resistance and 31 their successes in the past. " He added further: It is eno ugh o nl y to reca ll what efforts the Slovak bourgeoisie expended in order to infect our people with the idea th at the ir basic characteristics were humility, co mpli ance, resignation to the will of God , that they were a so{!, patient, God-fearing people, humbl y obli gated to the lords, and so on. - Melichercfk injected a positive note, however, pointing out a few works which he considered reflected the genuine folk hero who "goes into brigandage with stron g conviction to puni sh injustice perpetrated by the lords on the poor Slovak people, "33 as in Jiff Mahen 's play Janos[k. Tragedie o peti dejstv[ch (Janosfk - A Tragedy in Five Acts.) 34 He was pleased that these elements in Mahen 's play served as a basis for so me other dramatic and mu sical re-wor- 29 Melichercfk. Jura) Janosfk: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 142-147. Melichercfk. Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 150. 31 Melichercfk , Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 157. 32 Melichercfk . Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 157. 33 Melichercfk. Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 15 I. 34 Jirf Mahen, Janosfk. Tragedie o peti dejstvfch (Prah a, 1910). 30 �72 SLOVAKIA 35 kings of the Janosfk story. Jan Cikker's 1953 opera Jura Janosik, according to Melichercfk, captured so accurately the "entire magnitude of the concept the Janosfk rebellion and its revolutionary message" that in hi s estimation it qualified as a folk opera - that is, an authentic expression of the masses - in terms of its theme and 36 music. Melichercfk ended hi s di sc uss ion of Janosfk in literature and the arts with the hope that arti sts would produce an abundance of Janosfk images so that these "will decorate buildings, parks, and squares of our nation and Janosfk wi ll live everywhere as a sy mbol of struggle and freedom , as a great message from the past for us and 37 for future generations. " He also offered a challenge to Slovak dramati sts that they take up the task of writing a "genuine Slovak folk play" about Janosfk. 38 Although thi s last task would indeed be taken up and fulfilled by dramatists, it would not be carried out in the way Melichercfk had hoped. In the cynical years after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, dram atists responded to Melichercfk 's call and wrote musical plays about Janosfk. Stepka's Jaaanosfffk: News About the Hero or a Play on the Hero, Bryll 's and Gartnerova's Painted on Glass, and Feldek's Janosik According to Vivaldi were produced and performed for co untl ess Slovak audiences. These plays, however, manipul ated the conventi onal image defined by Melichercfk and offered audiences radically new ways of considering not only the figure of Janosfk and the brigand tradition, but their own social, political, and existential reality. As for the depiction of Janosfk him self, it was as if tired of occ upying the glorious, but increas ingly cramped role of the almost superhum an hero officially sanctioned by the communist governme nt, he broke free from th at role 's confines and assumed another g ui se - as an ordinary man with ordinary weaknesses, coming from a well-meaning, but simple-minded family, and, at best, a reluctant bandit. The debunking and parodying of the conventional and officially approved myth of Janosfk in the musicals occurred in the context of a broad postmodern movement apparent throughout Central Europe 35 Jan Cikker, Juro Janosik: Opera v 6 obrazoch (Libretto: Stefan Hoza), l 953 . Melichercfk, Jura) Janosik: hrdina, 2nd ed ., 153. 37 Melichercfk , Jura) Janosik: hrdina, 2nd ed. , 154. 38 Melichercfk, Jura) Janosfk: hrdina, 2nd ed. , 152. 36 �SLOVAKIA 73 which had begun at the end of the 1950s. Slovak literary scholar Peter Petro refers to the period of the I 960s as a "turbulent decade," a period of experimentation , which gradua lly undercut the official Socialist Realism and pushed the limits of the permissible in literature. 39 The impul se to parody and debunk carried over into the 1970s and 1980s. It was strengthened by pressures of the "normalization," which took place directly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and was connected to the reemergence of surrealism influenced by the surrealist movement during World War 11. 40 Central to thi s movement was new activity in the theater and in dramatic productions. Playwrights, utilizing the language of surrealism and the grotesque, sought to expose the absurdity of the political system by undermining its values and utopian premises which had claimed that "it is possible to control everything, even the dreams and hopes of the citizens. "41 Productions were characterized by fragmentation of the main motifs into parts and the insertion of poetry, mu sic , and dance. Humor, irony, skepticism , interaction with the spectators, direct appeals to the audience's imagination, word games, verbal improvisation-and all of this intended to unmask falsehoods, to shatter ideological stereotypes--characterized plays of this pe42 riod. It was in this context that Bryll, Feldek, and Stepka conceived their musicals and chose the officially sanctioned and exploited image of the Slovak national hero in their subversive work. Bryll's Painted on Glass was translated from the 1970 original Polish libretto and performed in Slovakia from the mid-l 970s. 43 Its title refers to the widespread folk art of painting colorful images on glass, popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and well 39 Peter Petro, A History of Sl ovak Literature (Montreal & Kingston, London , Buffalo: McGill-Queens University Press), 143-44. 40 Petro, 143. 41 Halina Janaszek-lvanicov, "Post-Modernism in the West Slavonic Literature in the Context of Euro-Atlantic Changes of the Postmodern Paradigms," Part Ill : "Five tides of postmodernism in Polish, Czech, and Slovak Literature," at: http: //src- h. sla v. hokuda i.ac. jp/pub Iictn/N o.64/ janaszek/ janaszek. htm I. 42 Janaszek-I van icov. 43 111 Slovakia the play premiered at the Slovak National Theater Oct. 19, 1974, where it ran for three decades. It was pulled from the stage briefly in 1983 when Ernest Bryll was forced to leave Poland for crit icizi ng the political situatio n. Bratislava's Novii scena theater has staged the play in an updated form since 2005. http://mu zikal y. szm.sk/nsm.html �74 SLOVAKIA known for preserving images of Janosik and hi s brigands and various 44 moments related to the conventional myth. Reproducing these images in dramatic action with song and dance, Painted on Glass broke with Melichercik 's communist definition of the myth by disclosing both Janosik's very ordinary human yearnings and failings. Janosfk's love for Anicka is unfulfilled, the gendarmes are not the hero 's eternal class enemies, but also human beings; and Death personified awaits the hero, as it does all of us. Light humor, rousing folk dance, memorable songs, and poking holes in the conventional myth all blended in Painted on Glass, and the figure of Janosfk was endeared to the audience which identified with the demythologized hero. The music of Bryll' s play, composed by Katarzyna Gartnerova, was a delightful hybrid of rhythmic rock and folk, and gave new voice to the expression of the Janosik tradition in the 1970s and 1980s. Feldek chose the title for hi s play, Janosik According to Vivaldi, because he wanted to indicate that in the eighteenth century Slovaks li ved "not only in Yratna dolina (ie., in the isolated depth s of Slovakia) but also in Europe. "45 Action in the play alternates between Slovakia and the Viennese court of Charles YI (d. 1740), where the emperor's daughter, the young Maria Theresa (1717- 1780), is heard in the background playing the mu sic of Antonio Vivaldi (16801743), then popular throughout Europe. Feldek worked from actu al hi storical documents linked to Janosfk's trial , but wove an amusing and fantastical version of the myth . Here, Uhorcfk is portrayed as the real bandit hero, and he and hi s wife Katarfnka manipulate Janosik into becoming the brigand captain. In quick order, however, Janosfk tires of stealing, as he tell s Katarfnka in very contemporary sounding terms: "We rob from morning to night and then again from night to morning and I'm as tired as a dog. And I swear that people would do better if they didn 't carry all thi s silly gold with them" (Zbfjame od rana do vecera a potom este aj od vecera do rana, unaveny so m ako pes. Prisaham bohu, casto si hovorfm , ze by tf 44 See introductory texts and reproductions of glass-painted images of Janosfk and brigands in IIena Pi sutova, Painted Dreams: Slovak Folk Painting on Glass in the 2dh Century (Bratislava: Tatran, 1983), and Katarfna Ciema, Janosik v Slovenskom vytvamom umenf (Bratislava: Slovenska narodna galeria, 1988). This last is the catalog to an exhibition of the same name, held in March - May 1988. 45 Feldek, 125. �SLOVAKIA 75 l'udi a urobili Iepsie, keby so sebou nenosili tolko toho poondiateho zlata.)46 In the end Katarfnka angri ly insi sts that the people should celebrate Uhorcfk ' s memory, not Janosik's. At the same time, in the absence of a male heir to the throne, Charles VI decides that Uhorcik is his illegitimate son and should be the next emperor. Feldek plays with the myth , the hi story, and language, as, fo r instance, in Charles Vi 's interview with the w idow of one of hi s Au stri an genera ls, Madame Schardonova, whose existence is attested in the hi storical doc uments since she actuall y was robbed by Janosfk in Slovakia. Her stilted Slovak, prono unced with a German acce nt, is hil ario us, because a ll of her mi stake s ac tu a ll y convey other ridiculous meanings. Instead of saying "I am a widow " (som vdova), she says "I 47 am water" (som voda) ; instead of complimenting Charles for his nobility (s l'achetn y), she compliments him for being "tendinous" (... 48 aky ste sl'achovity). Painted on Glass offers great humor and new twists on the convention al elements of the communist interpretation of Janosfk so well defi ned by Melichercik. Perhaps most radical in its depiction of Janosfk and the brigand myth is Stepka 's Jaaanosfffk, pl ayed by his own troupe, the Rados inske naivne divadlo (Radosi na Nai·ve Theater). Its unu sual title was inspired by Slovak actor and director Pal'o Bielik 's famo us two-part film , Janosik ( 1963), in which Janosik's name is called out in the mountains and echoes lo udl y with a prolonged stress on the vowels. Whil e Melichercfk had approached the Janosik tradition with the utmo st gravity, Stepka kept hi s co mmuni st-era audience laughing throughout the entire musical. His language is rich with puns and humorously distorted references from fo lkl ore, literature, and especiall y from dail y life in com munist Slovakia. Ribald sex ual innuendoes are woven into the entire script. Janosik appears onl y in the last third of the play , during which the punning continues. Hi s family members - mothe r Dag mar, fathe r Jon athan , and sister He len a occ upy center stage through the play and are depicted as slow, thickwitted , shrewd, but also likeab le peasants. Their plight as serfs under the control of a Hungarian count, Artus Revay, is treated with humor and irony. The Radosina Na"ive Theater company performed and still 46 Feldek, 96. Feldek, 93. 48 Feldek, 93 . 47 �76 SLOVAKIA performs the play with few props and simple Slovak folk costumes with so me ac tors wearing regular contemporary clothes . The tone and atmosphere, free and characterized by improvisation , suggests an amateur village production with simple, barel y literate actors - but in fact the theater' s actors are professionals who bring their ro les to li fe exceedingly well. 49 The writer of thi s article attended a performance of Jaaanosfffk in Slovakia in 1983, which was played with great g usto and hilarious improvi sation . That perform ance diverged somewhat from the published script of 1970, but thi s is to be expected , considering that improvisation is integra l to the pl ay, contributing to its "amateur" quality , and insurin g that there be room for some actor-audience interaction. The very first lines of Jaaanosfffk immediatel y set the tone for the ling ui stic and cultu ral manipulation to come: Instead of the co nventional opening of a Slovak fo lktale - "Kde bolo, tam bolo" (Once upon a time ... ; litera ll y: Where it was, there it was) - two narrators begin with "Kde bolelo, tam bolelo" (Where it hurt, there it hurt), a play on the traditional phrase and suggesting that much more would be turned on its head before the end of the performance.so Janosfk's Slovak mother and father are given spurious genealogies by the narrators - Pani Dagmar Janosfkov a, nee Trautenbergerova, and Jon ath an Jano sfk , whose real s urname, we are told , is Weissmann_s, To suggest th at the Slovak national hero is actually of German de sce nt is, of course, hi ghly ironical and am usin g. When Helena and Dagmar are visited by a local constable sent by the count, they are pleased to welcome him in, having locked father in the cellar. The constable tell s Dagmar that he is on the lookout for a rebel , specifically her hu sband , who is inciting or rou sing the serfs (" Poddanych buri .. . "), and she responds cynicall y that her husband 49 Stanis lav Stepka's Radosinske naivne div adlo produced a CD of Jaacinosfffk and a DVD of three pl ays, including Jaaanosffik. For availability, see : http://www. panorama. sk/index.asp?kam-/go/mapa.asp&lan g-s k&sv-2&mc- 12 I9 ~. 50 Stani slav Stepka, Jaaanosfffk: Sprava o hrdinovi alebo hra na hrdinu (Bratislava: Tatran , 1983) 19. All quotes are take n from the publi shed sc ript. Ac tors in the perfo rmance attended by the writer of this artic le fo llowed thi s sc ript closely, but not exactly. And this published script differs slightl y from the DVD version of the musical from 2004. 51 Jaaanosfffk, 23. �SLOVAKIA 77 "no longer arouses anything" ("Prosfm vas, on uz nic nevzburi. . ") and is willing to sign her name to that. 52 The constable summons Dagmar and Helena to the manor house, informing them that the Count Revay, a "candidate of the amorous sciences" (kandidat milostnych vied) - a satirical reference to scholarl y titles in communist Slovakia - wants them to come and "sew sacks" (obsfvat' vrecia), connoting here some kind of sex ual activity. In response, Helena blithely asks: "Which amorous lord ordered this, the young one or the old one?" When the constable says "the old one," Helena responds with complete confidence: "Mamicka, then that must mean the invitation 's for you. "53 Unlike in the conventional myth, the women here clearly do not feel threatened by the count's demand , and in fact they act as though it has happened repeatedly and welcome it eagerly. When the constable leaves, Helena and Dagmar di scuss how fine it is that the aristocracy, the lords, want only what is good for the serfs - surely a satirical reference to the contemporary situation with the communist government as the aristocracy and the serfs as the ordinary citizens. Helena means to say "They come here, advise us, and look around (pride, poradf, pohl'adf)," but, to the audience's surprise and amusement, in her simple-mindedness she says instead that "they come, advise us, and caress" (pride, poradi, pohladf)." 54 Dagmar then echoes, anachronistically for the eighteenth century, the sentiments of contemporary communist brigade workers perpetually urged to find ways to work harder, ways to over-fulfill the Plan: Let me pose this question to you, my daughter: are we really working on the estate like we should? Are we working a full eighteen hours? Couldn't we manage to work more? Sometimes we sing. Couldn't we work another eight or nine hours? We work only six days. And the seventh is the Sabbath. But couldn 't we work thirty-six days a month and then celebrate the Sabbath with whatever is left? And what about order at the workplace? Do we keep all our bundles in one place? So, see. We 55 need to think all thi s over sometime. 52 J aaanosifik, 22. Jaaanosffik, 22. 54 Jaaanosffik, 23. 55 Jti:i:inos([fk, 23. As an example of d ivergence from the written script of 1970, the 1983 viny l disc recordi ng of the musical , for instance, prov ides an al ternati ve statement in thi s section of the play. Dagmar asks: "Couldn 't we work six days a week and celebrate for seven?" This, again, is reflective of the improvisational nature of the script. 53 �78 SLOVAKIA These words, all too familiar to the audience daily subjected to pressure to achieve communist "excellence," provoked uproarious laughter from the audience. More bitter self-recognition for the Slovak audience in communist times - oftentimes struggling to procure even the basics, yet reassured by the government that they had the best possible living situation - resulted from Dagmar' s observation that they already had acquired everything they could possibly need: "We already have everything - a table, a chair, a bowl , a crucifix, and eventually even a house with doors. My God!" (A mame uz vsetko, aha - stol, stolicka, miska, krfzik , pomaly uz aj <lorn s dvermi. Boze!)56 Only after all this does the youthful Janosfk appear. Sister Helena, a family friend Samo, as well as Janosfk ' s girlfriend Anicka, and eventually his own mother all push him to become a brigand for the material benefits this will bring them, echoing a situation again all too familiar to the audience: that the only way to acquire goods , especially luxury goods, is by theft in one way or another. Janosfk acquiesces reluctantly, and only after complaining: Do I have to be a man? Do I have to be a hero? Do I have to be an example? You'll be at home lying in your feather quilts, and I have to offer up my kidneys [to the executioner's hook]? I don't want to be a hero, I want to be an ordinary man. . . I don't want to enter into reading books, I want to live out my life beautifully . . . This literature will live off me for 300 years , but I won ' t make it to thirty . . . I don ' t want to 57 enter history with a bullet between my shoulders. Janosfk, however, appears in the final scene with Uhorcfk, grudgingly about to begin his career, while Uhorcfk berates him for tossing aside his weapon and for showing no interest in banditry . Uhorcfk then initiates the highway robbery of two aristocratic travelers, a mother and daughter, with the traditional demand found in folktale s: "Your money or your life. . . " (Bohu dusu a nam dukaty. Literally: Hand over your soul to God and your money to us.) , but add s "and your citizenship documents" (a obcianske preukazy), much like the police could demand of anyone on the street in communist Slovakia. 58 The women, instead of fearing or hating Janosik, are enamored with hi s dashing appearance and charm - "Mama, so these are those famous brigands! My God, what beau56 Jaaanosfffk, 23. Jaaanosfffk, 33. 58 Jaaanosfffk, 34. 57 �SLOVAKIA 79 tiful folk garb they have" (Mamicka, tak toto su tf zbojnfci? Boze, ake krasne kroje maju.) - and he and Uhorcfk treat the robbery like a customs check. This certainly resonated with Slovaks, as well as foreigners, who passed repeatedly through Czechoslovak customs in communist times and often felt robbed and violated. 59 During the robbery, however, Janosik begins to wax poetic about the bandit life, and Uhorcik again reprimands him for getting distracted, but in a way which again sounds ironical in reference to brigandage and echoes a typical warning to the communist worker: "Duri, you keep forgetting your obligation" (Duri, zabudas na povinnost:)60 This Janosik is not Melichercfk's noble social brigand, a fighter against feudal lords, protector of the poor and oppressed. Stepka 's musical, as well as Bryll's and Feldek's, presented the Slovak public in the 1970s and 1980s not with a communist superhero, but with an ordinary guy, much of whose life and environment resonated with those of the audience. Janosik's experiences and the struggles of his time depicted in the musicals were a reflection of their own life. The outlines of the conventional myth were brought into question and turned upside down , and social and political issues that could not be criticized openly were spoofed. Audiences who experienced the plays together could leave the theater, having, in a sense, expressed and shared publicly their plight under the communist regime. Through irony and laughter, they could feel stronger in their resolve to resist. By employing the Janosik figure and myth, wrenching it free from the regime's ideology, the dramatists held up a mirror to the audience so that they could see themselves more clearly and could come to an understanding about how they might better deal with their social and political reality. Through humor and satire and breaking with the Soviet - and communist-approved conventional interpretation, the dramatists allowed Janosik once again to reach out to his people, to inspire in them the courage to resist the new authorities. Because Melichercik had so successfully portrayed Janosik as an acceptable proto-communist hero, the brigand's image in these musicals passed under the censors' radar screens. Once again, in a way not anticipated by Melichercik, Janosik was there to contribute to the 59 60 Jaaanosfffk, 34. Jaaanosfffk, 35. �80 SLOVAKIA social and political resistance, to help undermine the system. Once again, in a way not anticipated by Melichercik, Janosik was a symbol of freedom - this time for a new generation in a new time and against a new oppressor. Feldek suggested just exactly that when in an interview in 1979, he said of his work: "There is no such thing as a historical play . We write and play alway s for the contemporary audience and for the present. The hi storical subject in a good 'historical' play is only a pretext - almost like the subject of animals in a fable. The viewer should leave my play with the sense that this was about us. "61 And by the end of the next decade, 1989, the communist system finally collapsed from within and the barbed wire was torn down - perhaps with just a little help from Janosik. 61 Feldek, 126. � SLOVAKIA ,, 63 V,, JANOSIK AS A SYMBOL OFFREDOMIN COMMUNIST SLOVAK.IA Patricia A. Krafcik The new millennium has witnessed a continued fascination in Central Europe with the figure of Janosfk, the well-known eighteenth-century Slovak brigand hero. Among the works relating to Janosfk that have appeared thus far, Polish scholar Joanna Goszczynska 's study, Mit Janosika w folklorze i literaturze Slowackiej XIX wieku (The Janosfk Myth in Slovak Folklore and Literature of the Nineteenth Century), examines the emergence of Janosfk from Slovak popular folklore and other sources, as well as the evolution of his figure in nineteenth-century Slovak literature. 1 Geroi iii zboinik? Obraz razboinika v fol 'klore Karpatskogo regiona (Heroes or Bandits? Outlaw Traditions in the Carpathian Region) , edited by Slovak ethnographer Viera Gasparfkova and Russian folklorist Boris N. Putilov, offers a comparative study of Carpathian bandit traditions, including that of Janosfk. 2 In a more popular vein, Zuzana Krizkova 's and Margareta Horvathova's popu lar collection of Janosfk folktales, Jura) Janosik: Rozpnivanie o zbojnfckom kapitanovi (Juraj Janosik : Tales of the Brigand Captain) , intersperses several texts with summaries of historical information from the mid-seventeeth century to just after Janosfk' s execution in Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas in 1713, and is replete with dozens of miniature historical and art prints relating to Slovak hi story prior to and during Janosfk's time.3 In 2005-2006, the Slovak National Gallery and the Slovak National Museum co-sponsored an ex hibition entitled "S lovensky mytu s" 1 Joanna Goszczynska, Mit Janosika w folklorze i literaturze Sfowackiej XIX wieku (Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski , Lnsty tut Filologii Stowianskiej , 200 I). 2 Viera Gasparfkova and Boris N. Putilov, eds. , Geroi iii zboinik ? Obraz razboinika v fol'klore Kmpatskogo regiona (B udapest: European Folklore Insti tute, 2002). This work is published in Russian with a substantial summary in English. 3 Zuzana Kri zkova and Margareta Horvathova, Juraj Janosik: Rozprtivanie o zbojnickom kapittinovi (Bratislava: Perfekt, 2004). �64 SLOVAKIA (Slovak Myth), which included a prominent exhibit devoted to Janosfk: "Mytu s Juraj Janosfk , alebo Janosfko mani a v slove nskom vytvarnom umenf" (The Myth of Juraj Janosfk or Janosfk Mania in Slovak Creati ve Art). 4 As part of this "Janosfk mania" in Slovaki a, two mu sical plays, Poli sh pl ay wright Ernes t Bryll ' s and co mposer Katarzy na Gartnerova's Na skle malbvane: Spevohra v 3 castiach (Painted on Glass: A Musical Play in Three Parts, 1970)5 and Stani slav Stepka's Jaaanosfffk : Sprava o hrdinovi alebo hra na hrdinu (Jaaanosfffk : News about the hero or a play on the hero , 1970)6 have been rev itali zed and restaged. When they first appeared in co mmunist Czechoslovakia of the 1970s-80s, these mu sica l pl ays were wildl y popular. Along with 4 Slovak Nati onal Ga llery at www s ng sk (accessed August 5, 2006). The ex hib ition's accompanying catalog contains an arti cle devoted to Janosik: Hana Hl6skova, "Narodny hrdina Ju raj Janosfk," My ty Nase Slovenske, eds. Edu ard Krekovic, Elena Mannova, and Eva Krekov icova, (Bratislava: Academic Electro nic Press, 2005), 94103 . 5 M albvane na skle premiered in Warsaw in 1970; in Czechoslovaki a in 1972 at the Statni divadl o in Brno under the title Z bojn fci a iandafi ; and in 1974 in Bratislava at the Slovak Natio nal T heater. Perfo rm ances resum ed again fro m October 2005 in Bratislava' s Nova scena theater in a new translation from the Polish by Slovak playwright J.:ubomfr Feldek, with singers and dancers from SCUK, Sl ove nsky l'udovy umelecky ko lektfv (S lovak Folk Artisti c Ensemble). See: http ://mu zikaly .szm.sk/nsm html (accessed August 4, 2006), and more on SCU K's ro le can be found in "I.:udovy umelec ky kolektfv koprodukcny partner di ela" at: http: //www nova-sce ne.sk/ index/php?page-page& itemid-15 (accessed August 6, 2006). For a brief descri ption of the revitalized musical' s fir st-night perform ance on September 22, 2005 at Brati slava's Nova scena theater, see "Prem iera Na skle ma lbvane mala us pech," at : http://koktail pravda sk/sk kfilm.asp?r=sk kfi lm&c-A050923 114927 sk kfi lm p 1Q (accessed Aug ust 6, 2006). The rev iew mentio ns that the spectac ul ar performance was attended by me mbers of the Nati onal Co unc il of the Slovak Repu blic, including its speaker Pavol Hrusovsky. The play is avai lab le on DVD; see: http://www panorama.sk/i ndex.asp?kam-/go/mapa.asp&lang-en&sv-2&mc- I430 &m id=l. 6 Jaaanosfffk premiered in 1970 in Rados ina' s Klu b ml adyc h (fou nded 1963) in th e hometow n of the Radosina Na'ive Theater (RND) which moved its operations that year to Brati slava. http: //www.rnd.sk/?i-program&id- J022 . The play is now run as "Jaaanosfffk (po tridsiatich rokoch)" (Janosik [after thirty years)), thi s rev ised title given to it during an earlier revival in 2000 in Kezmarok. The musical has continued to play in theaters through this past year: see, fo r instance, about a perform ance of the play in Rufo mberok in 2006 at : http ://www.ruzomberok.sk/index novinky.php?novinka-15 3. �SLOVAKIA 65 a third production - I.:ubomfr Feldek's Janosik podl'a Vivaldiho (Jano sfk According to Vivaldi , 1979)7 - they employed in an innovative way folksong, folk dance, and classical mu sic, as well as contemporary rock mu sic elements, and were rife with raucous humor, language play, and scarcely veiled social and political criticism. In them the figure of Janosfk, so beloved in Slovak folklore and literature and so exploited by the communist regime for its own purposes, was demythologized and parodied. By daring to manipulate a fi gure and a myth solidified and sanctified by the regime, the mu sicals in fact functioned as a form of resistance to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and to its many "myths" and false promises. Yet even in a demythologized form, the subversive nature of the bri gand hero as a sy mbol of freedom from oppression and as a challenge to the social order still served as a liberating force .8 The evolution of the Janosik fi gure over the past four centuries is complex, as Martin Votruba demon strates in hi s recent article, "Hang Him High: The Elevation of Janosfk to an Ethnic Icon . "9 Inspired in part by the fate of the hi storical eighteenth-century Juraj Janosik, the folklore and literary fi gure was shaped over the years by many sources: Slovak mythology, pre-eighteenth-century Slovak brigand songs and tales, medieval anecdotes about bandits, eighteenthcentury Slovak "market songs," and the nineteenth-century Romantic literary movement in Europe. As an expression of their zealous patriotism during the mid-nineteenth century's national awakening in Central Europe, the younger generation of Slovak poets surrounding Cudovft Stur adopted and furth er shaped the image of Janosik and hi s "mountain lads" as the nation al sy mbol of the Slovak people 's 7 The play premiered I 979 at Statne divadlo in Kos ice under th e direction of Vaclav Martinec, music by Jaroslav Fi lip. The script was published along with other Feldek plays in the fo llowing vo lume: I.:ubomfr Feldek, Smutne komedie (Brati slava : Slovensky spi sovatel', 1982) 79- 11 9. 8 Eri c Hobsbawm , Bandits (London : Weidenfeld & Nico lson, 2000). Hobsbawm ' s landmark study is devoted to defi ning the archetypal figure of the bri gand hero as a perpetually liberating force. He refers to Janosik as one of the "noble robber" types (47). 9 Martin Yotruba, "Hang Him H igh: The Elevation of Janosik to an Ethnic Icon, " Slavic Review 65: I (2006): 24-44. For more on the historical Janosik, see Patricia A. Krafc ik , "Janosfk: Unrave ling the M an from the Legend, " Slovakia XXX III : 606 I ( 1987- I 988) : 7-22. A lso see Jozef K oc is, Neznamy Janosfk (Marti n: Osveta, I 986) for a more detai led study of Janosik's historical context. �66 SLOVAKIA struggle for liberation from the domination of Austrian and Hungarian rule. Beautiful in their language and hi ghl y emotive in their imagery, poems by Stefan Marko Daxner (1822-92), Samo Chalupka (1812-83), and Jan Botto (1829-81) are still today memorized, recited , and loved by Slovaks. Early twentieth-century Slovak prose writers ' attempts at further romanticizing hi s image by playing up the motifs of Janosfk's gi rlfriend and Janosfk as a seminary student did not tarni sh the Stur poets' image of Janosfk as a noble outlaw, a representati ve of freedom and defender of the oppressed. In the mid-twentieth century, communist Czec hoslovakia embraced the Janosfk myth co ntoured large ly by the Stur poets. Bas ing their version on selected folklore and the Sturists' vision of the hero, communist propagandists attempted to demonstrate that Janosi'.k, honored as the Slovak national sy mbol , had in fact been a proto-revolutionary who advocated preci sely what the communist government advocated: both the destruction of the bourgeo isie and aristocracy and the redi stribution of wealth in the spirit of socialism. After all , in both the folklore and nineteenth -ce ntury literature, Janosfk, the "mountain eagle," was depicted , like Robin Hood , confronting and humiliating noblemen and rich merchants and aiding and rewarding his supporters. Genuine hi storical court documents from his trial also clearly showed that Janosfk had never killed anyone, and had actually given gifts of jewelry to the young women of Terchova. 1 Furthermore, Janosfk's name and hi s image as a defender of the Slovak people had just recently been invoked among Slovak partisans in the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. 11 Finally, Soviet scholars did not shy away from the subj ect of social bandits in these decades, thu s affording it a further official stamp of approva l. Di stingui shed Russian folklori st Petr Grigor' evich Bogatyrev (1893- 1971 ) wrote about brigands before the 1950s and publi shed two excellent books about ° 10 see Andrej M elichercfk, Janosikovska tradfcia na Slovensku (Brati slava : SA YU. 1952) 248-59, for texts of the court documents revea ling inform ation about Janosik's activities. 11 M eli chercfk, Juraj Janosfk: Hrdina Protifeudalneho odboja slovenskeho J'udu, 2nd ed. (Martin: Osveta, 1963) 16 1- 164. See also "Janosfk-partizanska brigada" and "Janosfk- ilegalny casopis protifasisti ckeho frontu," Encyklopedia Slovenska 11 (Bratislava, 1978): 478-479. �SLOVAKIA 67 Slovak outlaws in 1963 and 1976. 12 Even earlier, nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries and Lenin himself had perceived in the Cossac k-bri gands, such as Sten ' ka Razin and Emeliian Pugachev, the people 's inherent revo lutionary spirit. 13 Janosik, in short, was thought to be a safe subject in communist Czechoslovakia, as well as advantageou s to the regime 's ideology, and thu s could be researched and celebrated by a host of writers, poets, artists, dramatists, composers, and scholars during the l 950s- l 980s . Through the ir work, he was elevated to communist sainthood. In Slovakia, the "father of Janosik studies," ethnographer Andrej Melichercfk (1917-1966) , was unquestionabl y the most ardent of them all. Born in the year of the Ru ssian revolution s, Melichercfk was educated at the Philosophical Faculty of Comenius University in Brati slava and was mentored in hi s chosen field of ethnography by Bogatyrev himself. 14 He served as an assistant professo r in ethnography at the university , was a "docent" from 1947, and lectured there to the end of hi s life. He also worked at the Matica slovenska, the key institution for the preservation of Slovak culture, from 1945, and served as its secretary from 1948. At the same time, as a tru sted sudruh (comrade), Melichercfk was asked to organize the Ethnographic Division (N arodnopisny ustav) in the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts and became president of that division in 1950. It was his responsibility in the new communist Slovakia to organize a unified body from diverse individuals, to critique the so-called bourgeois school s of folklore (that is, all folklore studies up to the communist ascend anc y in Czecho slovakia), and to align the work of hi s Academy sc holars with the "progress ive" Soviet ethnographic 12 P. G. Bogatyrev, S/ova tskie epicheskie rasskazy i /iro-epicheskie pesni ("zbojnickij cikl ") (Moskva: AN SSSR , 1963) and Slovatskie narodnye razbojnich 'i pesni i ballady (Moskva: Khudozhestvenna ia literatura, 1976). Bogatyrev helped pave the way for the stud y of the Carpathian brigand phenomenon in such articles as the fo llow ing about the "oprishki " or brigands and their legends in Western Ukraine: P. G. Bogatyrev , "Fo llklornye skazanija ob oprishkakh Zapadnoi Ukra iny," Sove tskaia etnografiia: Sbornik statei V ( 1941 ): 59-80. 13 Patricia A. Krafc ik, "Sten 'ka Ra zin in Ru ss ian Hi storical Fo lksongs : A Robin Hood of the Volga" (PhD diss., Columbia Uni versity, l 980), 3-6. 14 Jan Mjartan, "Za Prof. Dr. And rejom Melichercfkom , l 9I7-I966," Slovensky mirodopis XIV : 4 (1966): 501-505 . Subsequent biographical information is taken from thi s brief artic le. �68 SLOVAKIA school. The Soviet Union, after all , provided a model to be em ulated by the satellite countries in all fields. 15 Melichercfk energetically threw himself into thi s task, publishing a compilation of transl ations into Slovak of selected ethnographic studies from Soviet folklorists which were to serve as a methodolog ical aid for Slovak communist scholars, followed by the publication of a volume of exemplary Soviet-type studies by Slovak folklorists the mselves. Melichercik's personal history helps us understand his determination to do the right thing, to make certain that Slovak fo lkl ore sc holarship approached the folk tradition "correctly," and that it serve not just to inform but also to educate, to shape Slovak citi zens in a proper understanding of their past and "for the building of socialism" in Slovakia. 16 Indeed , thi s is what, according to Soviet culture tsar Andrei Zhdanov ( 18961948), Socialist Realist literature, art, and schol arship were supposed 17 to do. Melichercfk began publishin g hi s research on Janosfk in the 1950s. Until hi s untimely death in I 966 at age forty-nine as a result of so me fatal illness, perhaps contracted during a fi e ld trip with students near Rufomberok, he produced books and articles on the subject of the Slovak brigand hero. 18 He publi shed hi s defi nitive work on Janosfk in 1952, which was, in fact, the first major scholarl y study of the tradition in general , entitled Janos1ko vska tradfcia na 19 Slovensku (The Janosfk Tradition in Slovakia). Here, in great detail , Meli chercfk covered the historical backgro und of soc ial brigandage in Slovakia, the hi storical Juraj Janosfk on whom the image of the ideal brigand was based, and the Janosfk tradition in folklore and in Slovak formal literature. He also included several pages of folksong and folktale texts, as well as documents connected with Janosfk's trial and exec ution in I 7 I 3, and some literary texts. In 1956 Me li chercfk publi shed another major study of the Janosik tradition wh ich appeared in both Slovak and Czech editi ons. It was entitled Juraj Janosik: Hrdina protifeudalneho odboja slovenske- 15 Mjartan, 501-502. Mjartan, 502. 17 Gleb Struve, Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin 1917-1953 (Norman: Un iversity of Oklahoma Press, 197 1) 26 1-262. 18 Martjan, 503. 19 Melichercik, Janosfkovska tradfcia. 16 �SLOVAKIA 69 ho J'udu (Juraj Janosfk: Hero of the Anti-Feudal Struggle of the Slovak People) .20 This time, while repeating some material from his first study, he placed even greater emphasis on the socio-economic conditions that gave ri se to the brigand phenomenon in Slovakia and in the greater Carpathian region. In hi s chapter on the comparative study of the bandit tradition in the Carpathian context, he was a pioneer in widening the scope of the study of that tradition in Slovak scholarship.21 Indeed, from the 1970s to the present, the most fruitful work on the brigand theme has been the comparative study of the bandit tradition within the Carpathian area, supported by the International Commission for the Study of Popular Culture in the Carpathian and Balkan Region , founded in 1976.22 Melichercfk 's study, Juraj Janosfk: Hrdina , was published in a second revised and enlarged edition in 1963 for the 250 th anniversary of Janosfk 's execution.23 Although after this he wrote a few articles and some short pieces about Janosik and other bandits, as well as a substantial textbook on Slovak folklore in general , this second edition of Juraj 24 Janosfk: hrdina was hi s last major statement about his beloved idol. In providing what became the official and definitive description of Janosfk in communist Slovakia, Melichercfk wrote with an almost religious fervor: Janosfk's struggle ended tragically, but the idea of struggle against exp loiters for the truth and for justice and a more beautiful life for the simple working people shone in the consciousness of our people like a bright star in the evening sky. Decades went by, centuries passed, and that struggle - even though its conditions changed - continued. In the memory of the people the figure of Juraj Janosfk revived afresh, and a 20 Juraj Janosik: Hrdina protifeuda/neho odboja s/ovenskeho J'udu (Praha : Nase vojsko, 1956). 21 Melichercfk pursued comparative study a lso in two separate articles: "K otazke vzn iku zbojnfctva v Karpatoc h," Slovensky narodopi s IV: 2 ( I 956) I 63-194 and "Slovensko-Ukrajinske vztahy v zbojnfckom folkl6re ," Slovanske studie I (Bratislava, 1957) 539-548. 22 Milan Lescak, CSc. , ed., lnteretnicke vztahy vo folk/6re karpatskej oblasti (Bratislava: Veda, 1980). Also see note 2 for Gasparfkova and Putilov , eds. , Geroi iii zboinik? Gasparfkova herself has contributed in a major way to brigand study with books and articles over the past several decades, including: Zbojn[k Michal Vdovec v hist6rii a folk/6re gemerskeho l'udu (Bratislava: SA V, 1964 ); Povesti o zbojnikoch zo slovenskych a pol's ky ch Tatier (Bratislava: Veda, 1979); and Janosik: Obraz zbojnika v narodnej kulture (Bratislava: Tatran, 1988). 23 Melichercfk, Juraj Janos{k: Hrdina, 2nd ed. 24 Melichercfk, Slovensky fo lk/6r: Chrestomatia (Bratislava : SA V, 1959). �70 SLOVAKIA beautiful poe m abo ut freedom linked to hi s life took shape and was 25 ex pressed in the Janosfk tradition for over two centuries. Melichercfk offered a biography of the hi storical Juraj Janosfk drawn from ex tant court documents connected to his trial in Liptovsky Mikul as, and viewed Janosfk in folklore and literature as a composite hero whose figure was influenced by many sources. As a communist sc holar, Melichercik emphasized Janosfk 's image as a product of hi storical conditions, that is, an image born of the struggle of the masses of serfs and peasants against their feudal lords. He also recognized the role of the human creative imagination in the contouring of thi s image, shaped by the people as "one of the most beautiful and humani stic types of hero ," reflecting the experience 26 and yearning of the masses for freedom from feudal exploitation. Like mantras, such statements are repeated over and over throughout all of Melichercfk 's writings about Janosfk . Melichercfk 's adoration of Janosik as a proto-revolutionary hero helps explain hi s high praise for the young Stur poets. Their work, he stressed, preserved the simple and pure lines of the folk hero who engaged in an elemental struggle for hi s people and who in a sense died a martyr's terribl e death - executed by being hung on a meat 27 hook piercing the left side of his rib cage. Melichercfk's unwavering devotion to this perception of Janosik also accounts for hi s extraordinarily harsh criticism of prose writers and dramatists from the end of the nineteenth and first few decades of the twentieth century . These writers, he claimed, intentionally di storted and falsified the Janosik tradition by playing down or eliminating the revolutionary content of the tradition and clothing the brigand in "adventure, sentimentality, megalomania, [and] day-dreaming. "28 He had in mind writers such as Pa vol Beblavy in Janosik: Po vest' o hrdinovi a dobrodincovi J'udu (Janosik: Tale of the People' s Hero and Benefactor), 25 Melichercfk , Jura} Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 7. M elichercfk, Jura} Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 158. 27 Yotruba describes how the bri gand fi gure from Slovak fo lklore was adapted by the Stur poets from fo lklore and other sources and further recontoured to fit their purposes, adapting some attributes of the Romantic bri gand hero well-known throu ghout Europe and eliminating a motif found in some previous folklore and poetry which harshly judged the bandits' deeds. The Stur poets, that is, pl ayed a significant role in manipul atin g the figure, rather th an simply "preserving" some sacred original image from the folklore. See Yotruba, 42-43. 28 Melichercfk , Jura} Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 143. 26 �SLOVAKIA 71 which first appeared in installments in Slovenske pohl'ady (IX, 1889); Dobry Slovak in Janosfk, junak slobody (Janosfk, Hero of Freedom) (l 893); Gu stav Marsall-Petrovsky in his two-volume novel Janos[k (1894); and Emo Bohun in his two novel s, Janos1kov poklad (Ja no sfk 's Treasure Hoard ) (1926) and Dedics tvo Janostkovho pokladu (The Legacy of Jano sfk's Treasure Hoard) . About these, 29 Melichercfk had only the most negative observations. Melichercfk adopted the bitter tone of a real zealot when he focused on Slovak drama , in much of which he saw further destruction of what he considered the authentic folk tradition . He lashed out at Viliam Pauliny-T6th, for example, as the first to recontour Janosik in hi s play Janosik (1862) as a Roman Catholic seminary student, the so n of wealthy peasants, and an educated "gentleman bri ga nd ," 30 thereby di storting the "authentic " brigand figure. Evoking the language of di sease, he insisted that these bourgeoi s writers tried to "infect" the people 's consciousness "with traditions that are entirely harmful and hostile" because they wanted to divert the attention of the working masses away from their most important interests, that is, away from the class strugg le, and to "prevent them from correctly recognizing and assessi ng their own capabilities for resistance and 31 their successes in the past. " He added further: It is eno ugh o nl y to reca ll what efforts the Slovak bourgeoisie expended in order to infect our people with the idea th at the ir basic characteristics were humility, co mpli ance, resignation to the will of God , that they were a so{!, patient, God-fearing people, humbl y obli gated to the lords, and so on. - Melichercfk injected a positive note, however, pointing out a few works which he considered reflected the genuine folk hero who "goes into brigandage with stron g conviction to puni sh injustice perpetrated by the lords on the poor Slovak people, "33 as in Jiff Mahen 's play Janos[k. Tragedie o peti dejstv[ch (Janosfk - A Tragedy in Five Acts.) 34 He was pleased that these elements in Mahen 's play served as a basis for so me other dramatic and mu sical re-wor- 29 Melichercfk. Jura) Janosfk: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 142-147. Melichercfk. Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 150. 31 Melichercfk , Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 157. 32 Melichercfk . Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 157. 33 Melichercfk. Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 15 I. 34 Jirf Mahen, Janosfk. Tragedie o peti dejstvfch (Prah a, 1910). 30 �72 SLOVAKIA 35 kings of the Janosfk story. Jan Cikker's 1953 opera Jura Janosik, according to Melichercfk, captured so accurately the "entire magnitude of the concept the Janosfk rebellion and its revolutionary message" that in hi s estimation it qualified as a folk opera - that is, an authentic expression of the masses - in terms of its theme and 36 music. Melichercfk ended hi s di sc uss ion of Janosfk in literature and the arts with the hope that arti sts would produce an abundance of Janosfk images so that these "will decorate buildings, parks, and squares of our nation and Janosfk wi ll live everywhere as a sy mbol of struggle and freedom , as a great message from the past for us and 37 for future generations. " He also offered a challenge to Slovak dramati sts that they take up the task of writing a "genuine Slovak folk play" about Janosfk. 38 Although thi s last task would indeed be taken up and fulfilled by dramatists, it would not be carried out in the way Melichercfk had hoped. In the cynical years after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, dram atists responded to Melichercfk 's call and wrote musical plays about Janosfk. Stepka's Jaaanosfffk: News About the Hero or a Play on the Hero, Bryll 's and Gartnerova's Painted on Glass, and Feldek's Janosik According to Vivaldi were produced and performed for co untl ess Slovak audiences. These plays, however, manipul ated the conventi onal image defined by Melichercfk and offered audiences radically new ways of considering not only the figure of Janosfk and the brigand tradition, but their own social, political, and existential reality. As for the depiction of Janosfk him self, it was as if tired of occ upying the glorious, but increas ingly cramped role of the almost superhum an hero officially sanctioned by the communist governme nt, he broke free from th at role 's confines and assumed another g ui se - as an ordinary man with ordinary weaknesses, coming from a well-meaning, but simple-minded family, and, at best, a reluctant bandit. The debunking and parodying of the conventional and officially approved myth of Janosfk in the musicals occurred in the context of a broad postmodern movement apparent throughout Central Europe 35 Jan Cikker, Juro Janosik: Opera v 6 obrazoch (Libretto: Stefan Hoza), l 953 . Melichercfk, Jura) Janosik: hrdina, 2nd ed ., 153. 37 Melichercfk , Jura) Janosik: hrdina, 2nd ed. , 154. 38 Melichercfk, Jura) Janosfk: hrdina, 2nd ed. , 152. 36 �SLOVAKIA 73 which had begun at the end of the 1950s. Slovak literary scholar Peter Petro refers to the period of the I 960s as a "turbulent decade," a period of experimentation , which gradua lly undercut the official Socialist Realism and pushed the limits of the permissible in literature. 39 The impul se to parody and debunk carried over into the 1970s and 1980s. It was strengthened by pressures of the "normalization," which took place directly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and was connected to the reemergence of surrealism influenced by the surrealist movement during World War 11. 40 Central to thi s movement was new activity in the theater and in dramatic productions. Playwrights, utilizing the language of surrealism and the grotesque, sought to expose the absurdity of the political system by undermining its values and utopian premises which had claimed that "it is possible to control everything, even the dreams and hopes of the citizens. "41 Productions were characterized by fragmentation of the main motifs into parts and the insertion of poetry, mu sic , and dance. Humor, irony, skepticism , interaction with the spectators, direct appeals to the audience's imagination, word games, verbal improvisation-and all of this intended to unmask falsehoods, to shatter ideological stereotypes--characterized plays of this pe42 riod. It was in this context that Bryll, Feldek, and Stepka conceived their musicals and chose the officially sanctioned and exploited image of the Slovak national hero in their subversive work. Bryll's Painted on Glass was translated from the 1970 original Polish libretto and performed in Slovakia from the mid-l 970s. 43 Its title refers to the widespread folk art of painting colorful images on glass, popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and well 39 Peter Petro, A History of Sl ovak Literature (Montreal & Kingston, London , Buffalo: McGill-Queens University Press), 143-44. 40 Petro, 143. 41 Halina Janaszek-lvanicov, "Post-Modernism in the West Slavonic Literature in the Context of Euro-Atlantic Changes of the Postmodern Paradigms," Part Ill : "Five tides of postmodernism in Polish, Czech, and Slovak Literature," at: http: //src- h. sla v. hokuda i.ac. jp/pub Iictn/N o.64/ janaszek/ janaszek. htm I. 42 Janaszek-I van icov. 43 111 Slovakia the play premiered at the Slovak National Theater Oct. 19, 1974, where it ran for three decades. It was pulled from the stage briefly in 1983 when Ernest Bryll was forced to leave Poland for crit icizi ng the political situatio n. Bratislava's Novii scena theater has staged the play in an updated form since 2005. http://mu zikal y. szm.sk/nsm.html �74 SLOVAKIA known for preserving images of Janosik and hi s brigands and various 44 moments related to the conventional myth. Reproducing these images in dramatic action with song and dance, Painted on Glass broke with Melichercik 's communist definition of the myth by disclosing both Janosik's very ordinary human yearnings and failings. Janosfk's love for Anicka is unfulfilled, the gendarmes are not the hero 's eternal class enemies, but also human beings; and Death personified awaits the hero, as it does all of us. Light humor, rousing folk dance, memorable songs, and poking holes in the conventional myth all blended in Painted on Glass, and the figure of Janosfk was endeared to the audience which identified with the demythologized hero. The music of Bryll' s play, composed by Katarzyna Gartnerova, was a delightful hybrid of rhythmic rock and folk, and gave new voice to the expression of the Janosik tradition in the 1970s and 1980s. Feldek chose the title for hi s play, Janosik According to Vivaldi, because he wanted to indicate that in the eighteenth century Slovaks li ved "not only in Yratna dolina (ie., in the isolated depth s of Slovakia) but also in Europe. "45 Action in the play alternates between Slovakia and the Viennese court of Charles YI (d. 1740), where the emperor's daughter, the young Maria Theresa (1717- 1780), is heard in the background playing the mu sic of Antonio Vivaldi (16801743), then popular throughout Europe. Feldek worked from actu al hi storical documents linked to Janosfk's trial , but wove an amusing and fantastical version of the myth . Here, Uhorcfk is portrayed as the real bandit hero, and he and hi s wife Katarfnka manipulate Janosik into becoming the brigand captain. In quick order, however, Janosfk tires of stealing, as he tell s Katarfnka in very contemporary sounding terms: "We rob from morning to night and then again from night to morning and I'm as tired as a dog. And I swear that people would do better if they didn 't carry all thi s silly gold with them" (Zbfjame od rana do vecera a potom este aj od vecera do rana, unaveny so m ako pes. Prisaham bohu, casto si hovorfm , ze by tf 44 See introductory texts and reproductions of glass-painted images of Janosfk and brigands in IIena Pi sutova, Painted Dreams: Slovak Folk Painting on Glass in the 2dh Century (Bratislava: Tatran, 1983), and Katarfna Ciema, Janosik v Slovenskom vytvamom umenf (Bratislava: Slovenska narodna galeria, 1988). This last is the catalog to an exhibition of the same name, held in March - May 1988. 45 Feldek, 125. �SLOVAKIA 75 l'udi a urobili Iepsie, keby so sebou nenosili tolko toho poondiateho zlata.)46 In the end Katarfnka angri ly insi sts that the people should celebrate Uhorcfk ' s memory, not Janosik's. At the same time, in the absence of a male heir to the throne, Charles VI decides that Uhorcik is his illegitimate son and should be the next emperor. Feldek plays with the myth , the hi story, and language, as, fo r instance, in Charles Vi 's interview with the w idow of one of hi s Au stri an genera ls, Madame Schardonova, whose existence is attested in the hi storical doc uments since she actuall y was robbed by Janosfk in Slovakia. Her stilted Slovak, prono unced with a German acce nt, is hil ario us, because a ll of her mi stake s ac tu a ll y convey other ridiculous meanings. Instead of saying "I am a widow " (som vdova), she says "I 47 am water" (som voda) ; instead of complimenting Charles for his nobility (s l'achetn y), she compliments him for being "tendinous" (... 48 aky ste sl'achovity). Painted on Glass offers great humor and new twists on the convention al elements of the communist interpretation of Janosfk so well defi ned by Melichercik. Perhaps most radical in its depiction of Janosfk and the brigand myth is Stepka 's Jaaanosfffk, pl ayed by his own troupe, the Rados inske naivne divadlo (Radosi na Nai·ve Theater). Its unu sual title was inspired by Slovak actor and director Pal'o Bielik 's famo us two-part film , Janosik ( 1963), in which Janosik's name is called out in the mountains and echoes lo udl y with a prolonged stress on the vowels. Whil e Melichercfk had approached the Janosik tradition with the utmo st gravity, Stepka kept hi s co mmuni st-era audience laughing throughout the entire musical. His language is rich with puns and humorously distorted references from fo lkl ore, literature, and especiall y from dail y life in com munist Slovakia. Ribald sex ual innuendoes are woven into the entire script. Janosik appears onl y in the last third of the play , during which the punning continues. Hi s family members - mothe r Dag mar, fathe r Jon athan , and sister He len a occ upy center stage through the play and are depicted as slow, thickwitted , shrewd, but also likeab le peasants. Their plight as serfs under the control of a Hungarian count, Artus Revay, is treated with humor and irony. The Radosina Na"ive Theater company performed and still 46 Feldek, 96. Feldek, 93. 48 Feldek, 93 . 47 �76 SLOVAKIA performs the play with few props and simple Slovak folk costumes with so me ac tors wearing regular contemporary clothes . The tone and atmosphere, free and characterized by improvisation , suggests an amateur village production with simple, barel y literate actors - but in fact the theater' s actors are professionals who bring their ro les to li fe exceedingly well. 49 The writer of thi s article attended a performance of Jaaanosfffk in Slovakia in 1983, which was played with great g usto and hilarious improvi sation . That perform ance diverged somewhat from the published script of 1970, but thi s is to be expected , considering that improvisation is integra l to the pl ay, contributing to its "amateur" quality , and insurin g that there be room for some actor-audience interaction. The very first lines of Jaaanosfffk immediatel y set the tone for the ling ui stic and cultu ral manipulation to come: Instead of the co nventional opening of a Slovak fo lktale - "Kde bolo, tam bolo" (Once upon a time ... ; litera ll y: Where it was, there it was) - two narrators begin with "Kde bolelo, tam bolelo" (Where it hurt, there it hurt), a play on the traditional phrase and suggesting that much more would be turned on its head before the end of the performance.so Janosfk's Slovak mother and father are given spurious genealogies by the narrators - Pani Dagmar Janosfkov a, nee Trautenbergerova, and Jon ath an Jano sfk , whose real s urname, we are told , is Weissmann_s, To suggest th at the Slovak national hero is actually of German de sce nt is, of course, hi ghly ironical and am usin g. When Helena and Dagmar are visited by a local constable sent by the count, they are pleased to welcome him in, having locked father in the cellar. The constable tell s Dagmar that he is on the lookout for a rebel , specifically her hu sband , who is inciting or rou sing the serfs (" Poddanych buri .. . "), and she responds cynicall y that her husband 49 Stanis lav Stepka's Radosinske naivne div adlo produced a CD of Jaacinosfffk and a DVD of three pl ays, including Jaaanosffik. For availability, see : http://www. panorama. sk/index.asp?kam-/go/mapa.asp&lan g-s k&sv-2&mc- 12 I9 ~. 50 Stani slav Stepka, Jaaanosfffk: Sprava o hrdinovi alebo hra na hrdinu (Bratislava: Tatran , 1983) 19. All quotes are take n from the publi shed sc ript. Ac tors in the perfo rmance attended by the writer of this artic le fo llowed thi s sc ript closely, but not exactly. And this published script differs slightl y from the DVD version of the musical from 2004. 51 Jaaanosfffk, 23. �SLOVAKIA 77 "no longer arouses anything" ("Prosfm vas, on uz nic nevzburi. . ") and is willing to sign her name to that. 52 The constable summons Dagmar and Helena to the manor house, informing them that the Count Revay, a "candidate of the amorous sciences" (kandidat milostnych vied) - a satirical reference to scholarl y titles in communist Slovakia - wants them to come and "sew sacks" (obsfvat' vrecia), connoting here some kind of sex ual activity. In response, Helena blithely asks: "Which amorous lord ordered this, the young one or the old one?" When the constable says "the old one," Helena responds with complete confidence: "Mamicka, then that must mean the invitation 's for you. "53 Unlike in the conventional myth, the women here clearly do not feel threatened by the count's demand , and in fact they act as though it has happened repeatedly and welcome it eagerly. When the constable leaves, Helena and Dagmar di scuss how fine it is that the aristocracy, the lords, want only what is good for the serfs - surely a satirical reference to the contemporary situation with the communist government as the aristocracy and the serfs as the ordinary citizens. Helena means to say "They come here, advise us, and look around (pride, poradf, pohl'adf)," but, to the audience's surprise and amusement, in her simple-mindedness she says instead that "they come, advise us, and caress" (pride, poradi, pohladf)." 54 Dagmar then echoes, anachronistically for the eighteenth century, the sentiments of contemporary communist brigade workers perpetually urged to find ways to work harder, ways to over-fulfill the Plan: Let me pose this question to you, my daughter: are we really working on the estate like we should? Are we working a full eighteen hours? Couldn't we manage to work more? Sometimes we sing. Couldn't we work another eight or nine hours? We work only six days. And the seventh is the Sabbath. But couldn 't we work thirty-six days a month and then celebrate the Sabbath with whatever is left? And what about order at the workplace? Do we keep all our bundles in one place? So, see. We 55 need to think all thi s over sometime. 52 J aaanosifik, 22. Jaaanosffik, 22. 54 Jaaanosffik, 23. 55 Jti:i:inos([fk, 23. As an example of d ivergence from the written script of 1970, the 1983 viny l disc recordi ng of the musical , for instance, prov ides an al ternati ve statement in thi s section of the play. Dagmar asks: "Couldn 't we work six days a week and celebrate for seven?" This, again, is reflective of the improvisational nature of the script. 53 �78 SLOVAKIA These words, all too familiar to the audience daily subjected to pressure to achieve communist "excellence," provoked uproarious laughter from the audience. More bitter self-recognition for the Slovak audience in communist times - oftentimes struggling to procure even the basics, yet reassured by the government that they had the best possible living situation - resulted from Dagmar' s observation that they already had acquired everything they could possibly need: "We already have everything - a table, a chair, a bowl , a crucifix, and eventually even a house with doors. My God!" (A mame uz vsetko, aha - stol, stolicka, miska, krfzik , pomaly uz aj <lorn s dvermi. Boze!)56 Only after all this does the youthful Janosfk appear. Sister Helena, a family friend Samo, as well as Janosfk ' s girlfriend Anicka, and eventually his own mother all push him to become a brigand for the material benefits this will bring them, echoing a situation again all too familiar to the audience: that the only way to acquire goods , especially luxury goods, is by theft in one way or another. Janosfk acquiesces reluctantly, and only after complaining: Do I have to be a man? Do I have to be a hero? Do I have to be an example? You'll be at home lying in your feather quilts, and I have to offer up my kidneys [to the executioner's hook]? I don't want to be a hero, I want to be an ordinary man. . . I don't want to enter into reading books, I want to live out my life beautifully . . . This literature will live off me for 300 years , but I won ' t make it to thirty . . . I don ' t want to 57 enter history with a bullet between my shoulders. Janosfk, however, appears in the final scene with Uhorcfk, grudgingly about to begin his career, while Uhorcfk berates him for tossing aside his weapon and for showing no interest in banditry . Uhorcfk then initiates the highway robbery of two aristocratic travelers, a mother and daughter, with the traditional demand found in folktale s: "Your money or your life. . . " (Bohu dusu a nam dukaty. Literally: Hand over your soul to God and your money to us.) , but add s "and your citizenship documents" (a obcianske preukazy), much like the police could demand of anyone on the street in communist Slovakia. 58 The women, instead of fearing or hating Janosik, are enamored with hi s dashing appearance and charm - "Mama, so these are those famous brigands! My God, what beau56 Jaaanosfffk, 23. Jaaanosfffk, 33. 58 Jaaanosfffk, 34. 57 �SLOVAKIA 79 tiful folk garb they have" (Mamicka, tak toto su tf zbojnfci? Boze, ake krasne kroje maju.) - and he and Uhorcfk treat the robbery like a customs check. This certainly resonated with Slovaks, as well as foreigners, who passed repeatedly through Czechoslovak customs in communist times and often felt robbed and violated. 59 During the robbery, however, Janosik begins to wax poetic about the bandit life, and Uhorcik again reprimands him for getting distracted, but in a way which again sounds ironical in reference to brigandage and echoes a typical warning to the communist worker: "Duri, you keep forgetting your obligation" (Duri, zabudas na povinnost:)60 This Janosik is not Melichercfk's noble social brigand, a fighter against feudal lords, protector of the poor and oppressed. Stepka 's musical, as well as Bryll's and Feldek's, presented the Slovak public in the 1970s and 1980s not with a communist superhero, but with an ordinary guy, much of whose life and environment resonated with those of the audience. Janosik's experiences and the struggles of his time depicted in the musicals were a reflection of their own life. The outlines of the conventional myth were brought into question and turned upside down , and social and political issues that could not be criticized openly were spoofed. Audiences who experienced the plays together could leave the theater, having, in a sense, expressed and shared publicly their plight under the communist regime. Through irony and laughter, they could feel stronger in their resolve to resist. By employing the Janosik figure and myth, wrenching it free from the regime's ideology, the dramatists held up a mirror to the audience so that they could see themselves more clearly and could come to an understanding about how they might better deal with their social and political reality. Through humor and satire and breaking with the Soviet - and communist-approved conventional interpretation, the dramatists allowed Janosik once again to reach out to his people, to inspire in them the courage to resist the new authorities. Because Melichercik had so successfully portrayed Janosik as an acceptable proto-communist hero, the brigand's image in these musicals passed under the censors' radar screens. Once again, in a way not anticipated by Melichercik, Janosik was there to contribute to the 59 60 Jaaanosfffk, 34. Jaaanosfffk, 35. �80 SLOVAKIA social and political resistance, to help undermine the system. Once again, in a way not anticipated by Melichercik, Janosik was a symbol of freedom - this time for a new generation in a new time and against a new oppressor. Feldek suggested just exactly that when in an interview in 1979, he said of his work: "There is no such thing as a historical play . We write and play alway s for the contemporary audience and for the present. The hi storical subject in a good 'historical' play is only a pretext - almost like the subject of animals in a fable. The viewer should leave my play with the sense that this was about us. "61 And by the end of the next decade, 1989, the communist system finally collapsed from within and the barbed wire was torn down - perhaps with just a little help from Janosik. 61 Feldek, 126. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2007, Vol. 39 Description An account of the resource Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA ,, 63 V,, JANOSIK AS A SYMBOL OFFREDOMIN COMMUNIST SLOVAK.IA Patricia A. Krafcik The new millennium has witnessed a continued fascination in Central Europe with the figure of Janosfk, the well-known eighteenth-century Slovak brigand hero. Among the works relating to Janosfk that have appeared thus far, Polish scholar Joanna Goszczynska 's study, Mit Janosika w folklorze i literaturze Slowackiej XIX wieku (The Janosfk Myth in Slovak Folklore and Literature of the Nineteenth Century), examines the emergence of Janosfk from Slovak popular folklore and other sources, as well as the evolution of his figure in nineteenth-century Slovak literature. 1 Geroi iii zboinik? Obraz razboinika v fol 'klore Karpatskogo regiona (Heroes or Bandits? Outlaw Traditions in the Carpathian Region) , edited by Slovak ethnographer Viera Gasparfkova and Russian folklorist Boris N. Putilov, offers a comparative study of Carpathian bandit traditions, including that of Janosfk. 2 In a more popular vein, Zuzana Krizkova 's and Margareta Horvathova's popu lar collection of Janosfk folktales, Jura) Janosik: Rozpnivanie o zbojnfckom kapitanovi (Juraj Janosik : Tales of the Brigand Captain) , intersperses several texts with summaries of historical information from the mid-seventeeth century to just after Janosfk' s execution in Liptovsky Svaty Mikulas in 1713, and is replete with dozens of miniature historical and art prints relating to Slovak hi story prior to and during Janosfk's time.3 In 2005-2006, the Slovak National Gallery and the Slovak National Museum co-sponsored an ex hibition entitled "S lovensky mytu s" 1 Joanna Goszczynska, Mit Janosika w folklorze i literaturze Sfowackiej XIX wieku (Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski , Lnsty tut Filologii Stowianskiej , 200 I). 2 Viera Gasparfkova and Boris N. Putilov, eds. , Geroi iii zboinik ? Obraz razboinika v fol'klore Kmpatskogo regiona (B udapest: European Folklore Insti tute, 2002). This work is published in Russian with a substantial summary in English. 3 Zuzana Kri zkova and Margareta Horvathova, Juraj Janosik: Rozprtivanie o zbojnickom kapittinovi (Bratislava: Perfekt, 2004). 64 SLOVAKIA (Slovak Myth), which included a prominent exhibit devoted to Janosfk: "Mytu s Juraj Janosfk , alebo Janosfko mani a v slove nskom vytvarnom umenf" (The Myth of Juraj Janosfk or Janosfk Mania in Slovak Creati ve Art). 4 As part of this "Janosfk mania" in Slovaki a, two mu sical plays, Poli sh pl ay wright Ernes t Bryll ' s and co mposer Katarzy na Gartnerova's Na skle malbvane: Spevohra v 3 castiach (Painted on Glass: A Musical Play in Three Parts, 1970)5 and Stani slav Stepka's Jaaanosfffk : Sprava o hrdinovi alebo hra na hrdinu (Jaaanosfffk : News about the hero or a play on the hero , 1970)6 have been rev itali zed and restaged. When they first appeared in co mmunist Czechoslovakia of the 1970s-80s, these mu sica l pl ays were wildl y popular. Along with 4 Slovak Nati onal Ga llery at www s ng sk (accessed August 5, 2006). The ex hib ition's accompanying catalog contains an arti cle devoted to Janosik: Hana Hl6skova, "Narodny hrdina Ju raj Janosfk," My ty Nase Slovenske, eds. Edu ard Krekovic, Elena Mannova, and Eva Krekov icova, (Bratislava: Academic Electro nic Press, 2005), 94103 . 5 M albvane na skle premiered in Warsaw in 1970; in Czechoslovaki a in 1972 at the Statni divadl o in Brno under the title Z bojn fci a iandafi ; and in 1974 in Bratislava at the Slovak Natio nal T heater. Perfo rm ances resum ed again fro m October 2005 in Bratislava' s Nova scena theater in a new translation from the Polish by Slovak playwright J.:ubomfr Feldek, with singers and dancers from SCUK, Sl ove nsky l'udovy umelecky ko lektfv (S lovak Folk Artisti c Ensemble). See: http ://mu zikaly .szm.sk/nsm html (accessed August 4, 2006), and more on SCU K's ro le can be found in "I.:udovy umelec ky kolektfv koprodukcny partner di ela" at: http: //www nova-sce ne.sk/ index/php?page-page& itemid-15 (accessed August 6, 2006). For a brief descri ption of the revitalized musical' s fir st-night perform ance on September 22, 2005 at Brati slava's Nova scena theater, see "Prem iera Na skle ma lbvane mala us pech," at : http://koktail pravda sk/sk kfilm.asp?r=sk kfi lm&c-A050923 114927 sk kfi lm p 1Q (accessed Aug ust 6, 2006). The rev iew mentio ns that the spectac ul ar performance was attended by me mbers of the Nati onal Co unc il of the Slovak Repu blic, including its speaker Pavol Hrusovsky. The play is avai lab le on DVD; see: http://www panorama.sk/i ndex.asp?kam-/go/mapa.asp&lang-en&sv-2&mc- I430 &m id=l. 6 Jaaanosfffk premiered in 1970 in Rados ina' s Klu b ml adyc h (fou nded 1963) in th e hometow n of the Radosina Na'ive Theater (RND) which moved its operations that year to Brati slava. http: //www.rnd.sk/?i-program&id- J022 . The play is now run as "Jaaanosfffk (po tridsiatich rokoch)" (Janosik [after thirty years)), thi s rev ised title given to it during an earlier revival in 2000 in Kezmarok. The musical has continued to play in theaters through this past year: see, fo r instance, about a perform ance of the play in Rufo mberok in 2006 at : http ://www.ruzomberok.sk/index novinky.php?novinka-15 3. SLOVAKIA 65 a third production - I.:ubomfr Feldek's Janosik podl'a Vivaldiho (Jano sfk According to Vivaldi , 1979)7 - they employed in an innovative way folksong, folk dance, and classical mu sic, as well as contemporary rock mu sic elements, and were rife with raucous humor, language play, and scarcely veiled social and political criticism. In them the figure of Janosfk, so beloved in Slovak folklore and literature and so exploited by the communist regime for its own purposes, was demythologized and parodied. By daring to manipulate a fi gure and a myth solidified and sanctified by the regime, the mu sicals in fact functioned as a form of resistance to the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and to its many "myths" and false promises. Yet even in a demythologized form, the subversive nature of the bri gand hero as a sy mbol of freedom from oppression and as a challenge to the social order still served as a liberating force .8 The evolution of the Janosik fi gure over the past four centuries is complex, as Martin Votruba demon strates in hi s recent article, "Hang Him High: The Elevation of Janosfk to an Ethnic Icon . "9 Inspired in part by the fate of the hi storical eighteenth-century Juraj Janosik, the folklore and literary fi gure was shaped over the years by many sources: Slovak mythology, pre-eighteenth-century Slovak brigand songs and tales, medieval anecdotes about bandits, eighteenthcentury Slovak "market songs," and the nineteenth-century Romantic literary movement in Europe. As an expression of their zealous patriotism during the mid-nineteenth century's national awakening in Central Europe, the younger generation of Slovak poets surrounding Cudovft Stur adopted and furth er shaped the image of Janosik and hi s "mountain lads" as the nation al sy mbol of the Slovak people 's 7 The play premiered I 979 at Statne divadlo in Kos ice under th e direction of Vaclav Martinec, music by Jaroslav Fi lip. The script was published along with other Feldek plays in the fo llowing vo lume: I.:ubomfr Feldek, Smutne komedie (Brati slava : Slovensky spi sovatel', 1982) 79- 11 9. 8 Eri c Hobsbawm , Bandits (London : Weidenfeld & Nico lson, 2000). Hobsbawm ' s landmark study is devoted to defi ning the archetypal figure of the bri gand hero as a perpetually liberating force. He refers to Janosik as one of the "noble robber" types (47). 9 Martin Yotruba, "Hang Him H igh: The Elevation of Janosik to an Ethnic Icon, " Slavic Review 65: I (2006): 24-44. For more on the historical Janosik, see Patricia A. Krafc ik , "Janosfk: Unrave ling the M an from the Legend, " Slovakia XXX III : 606 I ( 1987- I 988) : 7-22. A lso see Jozef K oc is, Neznamy Janosfk (Marti n: Osveta, I 986) for a more detai led study of Janosik's historical context. 66 SLOVAKIA struggle for liberation from the domination of Austrian and Hungarian rule. Beautiful in their language and hi ghl y emotive in their imagery, poems by Stefan Marko Daxner (1822-92), Samo Chalupka (1812-83), and Jan Botto (1829-81) are still today memorized, recited , and loved by Slovaks. Early twentieth-century Slovak prose writers ' attempts at further romanticizing hi s image by playing up the motifs of Janosfk's gi rlfriend and Janosfk as a seminary student did not tarni sh the Stur poets' image of Janosfk as a noble outlaw, a representati ve of freedom and defender of the oppressed. In the mid-twentieth century, communist Czec hoslovakia embraced the Janosfk myth co ntoured large ly by the Stur poets. Bas ing their version on selected folklore and the Sturists' vision of the hero, communist propagandists attempted to demonstrate that Janosi'.k, honored as the Slovak national sy mbol , had in fact been a proto-revolutionary who advocated preci sely what the communist government advocated: both the destruction of the bourgeo isie and aristocracy and the redi stribution of wealth in the spirit of socialism. After all , in both the folklore and nineteenth -ce ntury literature, Janosfk, the "mountain eagle," was depicted , like Robin Hood , confronting and humiliating noblemen and rich merchants and aiding and rewarding his supporters. Genuine hi storical court documents from his trial also clearly showed that Janosfk had never killed anyone, and had actually given gifts of jewelry to the young women of Terchova. 1 Furthermore, Janosfk's name and hi s image as a defender of the Slovak people had just recently been invoked among Slovak partisans in the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. 11 Finally, Soviet scholars did not shy away from the subj ect of social bandits in these decades, thu s affording it a further official stamp of approva l. Di stingui shed Russian folklori st Petr Grigor' evich Bogatyrev (1893- 1971 ) wrote about brigands before the 1950s and publi shed two excellent books about ° 10 see Andrej M elichercfk, Janosikovska tradfcia na Slovensku (Brati slava : SA YU. 1952) 248-59, for texts of the court documents revea ling inform ation about Janosik's activities. 11 M eli chercfk, Juraj Janosfk: Hrdina Protifeudalneho odboja slovenskeho J'udu, 2nd ed. (Martin: Osveta, 1963) 16 1- 164. See also "Janosfk-partizanska brigada" and "Janosfk- ilegalny casopis protifasisti ckeho frontu," Encyklopedia Slovenska 11 (Bratislava, 1978): 478-479. SLOVAKIA 67 Slovak outlaws in 1963 and 1976. 12 Even earlier, nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries and Lenin himself had perceived in the Cossac k-bri gands, such as Sten ' ka Razin and Emeliian Pugachev, the people 's inherent revo lutionary spirit. 13 Janosik, in short, was thought to be a safe subject in communist Czechoslovakia, as well as advantageou s to the regime 's ideology, and thu s could be researched and celebrated by a host of writers, poets, artists, dramatists, composers, and scholars during the l 950s- l 980s . Through the ir work, he was elevated to communist sainthood. In Slovakia, the "father of Janosik studies," ethnographer Andrej Melichercfk (1917-1966) , was unquestionabl y the most ardent of them all. Born in the year of the Ru ssian revolution s, Melichercfk was educated at the Philosophical Faculty of Comenius University in Brati slava and was mentored in hi s chosen field of ethnography by Bogatyrev himself. 14 He served as an assistant professo r in ethnography at the university , was a "docent" from 1947, and lectured there to the end of hi s life. He also worked at the Matica slovenska, the key institution for the preservation of Slovak culture, from 1945, and served as its secretary from 1948. At the same time, as a tru sted sudruh (comrade), Melichercfk was asked to organize the Ethnographic Division (N arodnopisny ustav) in the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts and became president of that division in 1950. It was his responsibility in the new communist Slovakia to organize a unified body from diverse individuals, to critique the so-called bourgeois school s of folklore (that is, all folklore studies up to the communist ascend anc y in Czecho slovakia), and to align the work of hi s Academy sc holars with the "progress ive" Soviet ethnographic 12 P. G. Bogatyrev, S/ova tskie epicheskie rasskazy i /iro-epicheskie pesni ("zbojnickij cikl ") (Moskva: AN SSSR , 1963) and Slovatskie narodnye razbojnich 'i pesni i ballady (Moskva: Khudozhestvenna ia literatura, 1976). Bogatyrev helped pave the way for the stud y of the Carpathian brigand phenomenon in such articles as the fo llow ing about the "oprishki " or brigands and their legends in Western Ukraine: P. G. Bogatyrev , "Fo llklornye skazanija ob oprishkakh Zapadnoi Ukra iny," Sove tskaia etnografiia: Sbornik statei V ( 1941 ): 59-80. 13 Patricia A. Krafc ik, "Sten 'ka Ra zin in Ru ss ian Hi storical Fo lksongs : A Robin Hood of the Volga" (PhD diss., Columbia Uni versity, l 980), 3-6. 14 Jan Mjartan, "Za Prof. Dr. And rejom Melichercfkom , l 9I7-I966," Slovensky mirodopis XIV : 4 (1966): 501-505 . Subsequent biographical information is taken from thi s brief artic le. 68 SLOVAKIA school. The Soviet Union, after all , provided a model to be em ulated by the satellite countries in all fields. 15 Melichercfk energetically threw himself into thi s task, publishing a compilation of transl ations into Slovak of selected ethnographic studies from Soviet folklorists which were to serve as a methodolog ical aid for Slovak communist scholars, followed by the publication of a volume of exemplary Soviet-type studies by Slovak folklorists the mselves. Melichercik's personal history helps us understand his determination to do the right thing, to make certain that Slovak fo lkl ore sc holarship approached the folk tradition "correctly," and that it serve not just to inform but also to educate, to shape Slovak citi zens in a proper understanding of their past and "for the building of socialism" in Slovakia. 16 Indeed , thi s is what, according to Soviet culture tsar Andrei Zhdanov ( 18961948), Socialist Realist literature, art, and schol arship were supposed 17 to do. Melichercfk began publishin g hi s research on Janosfk in the 1950s. Until hi s untimely death in I 966 at age forty-nine as a result of so me fatal illness, perhaps contracted during a fi e ld trip with students near Rufomberok, he produced books and articles on the subject of the Slovak brigand hero. 18 He publi shed hi s defi nitive work on Janosfk in 1952, which was, in fact, the first major scholarl y study of the tradition in general , entitled Janos1ko vska tradfcia na 19 Slovensku (The Janosfk Tradition in Slovakia). Here, in great detail , Meli chercfk covered the historical backgro und of soc ial brigandage in Slovakia, the hi storical Juraj Janosfk on whom the image of the ideal brigand was based, and the Janosfk tradition in folklore and in Slovak formal literature. He also included several pages of folksong and folktale texts, as well as documents connected with Janosfk's trial and exec ution in I 7 I 3, and some literary texts. In 1956 Me li chercfk publi shed another major study of the Janosik tradition wh ich appeared in both Slovak and Czech editi ons. It was entitled Juraj Janosik: Hrdina protifeudalneho odboja slovenske- 15 Mjartan, 501-502. Mjartan, 502. 17 Gleb Struve, Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin 1917-1953 (Norman: Un iversity of Oklahoma Press, 197 1) 26 1-262. 18 Martjan, 503. 19 Melichercik, Janosfkovska tradfcia. 16 SLOVAKIA 69 ho J'udu (Juraj Janosfk: Hero of the Anti-Feudal Struggle of the Slovak People) .20 This time, while repeating some material from his first study, he placed even greater emphasis on the socio-economic conditions that gave ri se to the brigand phenomenon in Slovakia and in the greater Carpathian region. In hi s chapter on the comparative study of the bandit tradition in the Carpathian context, he was a pioneer in widening the scope of the study of that tradition in Slovak scholarship.21 Indeed, from the 1970s to the present, the most fruitful work on the brigand theme has been the comparative study of the bandit tradition within the Carpathian area, supported by the International Commission for the Study of Popular Culture in the Carpathian and Balkan Region , founded in 1976.22 Melichercfk 's study, Juraj Janosfk: Hrdina , was published in a second revised and enlarged edition in 1963 for the 250 th anniversary of Janosfk 's execution.23 Although after this he wrote a few articles and some short pieces about Janosik and other bandits, as well as a substantial textbook on Slovak folklore in general , this second edition of Juraj 24 Janosfk: hrdina was hi s last major statement about his beloved idol. In providing what became the official and definitive description of Janosfk in communist Slovakia, Melichercfk wrote with an almost religious fervor: Janosfk's struggle ended tragically, but the idea of struggle against exp loiters for the truth and for justice and a more beautiful life for the simple working people shone in the consciousness of our people like a bright star in the evening sky. Decades went by, centuries passed, and that struggle - even though its conditions changed - continued. In the memory of the people the figure of Juraj Janosfk revived afresh, and a 20 Juraj Janosik: Hrdina protifeuda/neho odboja s/ovenskeho J'udu (Praha : Nase vojsko, 1956). 21 Melichercfk pursued comparative study a lso in two separate articles: "K otazke vzn iku zbojnfctva v Karpatoc h," Slovensky narodopi s IV: 2 ( I 956) I 63-194 and "Slovensko-Ukrajinske vztahy v zbojnfckom folkl6re ," Slovanske studie I (Bratislava, 1957) 539-548. 22 Milan Lescak, CSc. , ed., lnteretnicke vztahy vo folk/6re karpatskej oblasti (Bratislava: Veda, 1980). Also see note 2 for Gasparfkova and Putilov , eds. , Geroi iii zboinik? Gasparfkova herself has contributed in a major way to brigand study with books and articles over the past several decades, including: Zbojn[k Michal Vdovec v hist6rii a folk/6re gemerskeho l'udu (Bratislava: SA V, 1964 ); Povesti o zbojnikoch zo slovenskych a pol's ky ch Tatier (Bratislava: Veda, 1979); and Janosik: Obraz zbojnika v narodnej kulture (Bratislava: Tatran, 1988). 23 Melichercfk, Juraj Janos{k: Hrdina, 2nd ed. 24 Melichercfk, Slovensky fo lk/6r: Chrestomatia (Bratislava : SA V, 1959). 70 SLOVAKIA beautiful poe m abo ut freedom linked to hi s life took shape and was 25 ex pressed in the Janosfk tradition for over two centuries. Melichercfk offered a biography of the hi storical Juraj Janosfk drawn from ex tant court documents connected to his trial in Liptovsky Mikul as, and viewed Janosfk in folklore and literature as a composite hero whose figure was influenced by many sources. As a communist sc holar, Melichercik emphasized Janosfk 's image as a product of hi storical conditions, that is, an image born of the struggle of the masses of serfs and peasants against their feudal lords. He also recognized the role of the human creative imagination in the contouring of thi s image, shaped by the people as "one of the most beautiful and humani stic types of hero ," reflecting the experience 26 and yearning of the masses for freedom from feudal exploitation. Like mantras, such statements are repeated over and over throughout all of Melichercfk 's writings about Janosfk . Melichercfk 's adoration of Janosik as a proto-revolutionary hero helps explain hi s high praise for the young Stur poets. Their work, he stressed, preserved the simple and pure lines of the folk hero who engaged in an elemental struggle for hi s people and who in a sense died a martyr's terribl e death - executed by being hung on a meat 27 hook piercing the left side of his rib cage. Melichercfk's unwavering devotion to this perception of Janosik also accounts for hi s extraordinarily harsh criticism of prose writers and dramatists from the end of the nineteenth and first few decades of the twentieth century . These writers, he claimed, intentionally di storted and falsified the Janosik tradition by playing down or eliminating the revolutionary content of the tradition and clothing the brigand in "adventure, sentimentality, megalomania, [and] day-dreaming. "28 He had in mind writers such as Pa vol Beblavy in Janosik: Po vest' o hrdinovi a dobrodincovi J'udu (Janosik: Tale of the People' s Hero and Benefactor), 25 Melichercfk , Jura} Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 7. M elichercfk, Jura} Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 158. 27 Yotruba describes how the bri gand fi gure from Slovak fo lklore was adapted by the Stur poets from fo lklore and other sources and further recontoured to fit their purposes, adapting some attributes of the Romantic bri gand hero well-known throu ghout Europe and eliminating a motif found in some previous folklore and poetry which harshly judged the bandits' deeds. The Stur poets, that is, pl ayed a significant role in manipul atin g the figure, rather th an simply "preserving" some sacred original image from the folklore. See Yotruba, 42-43. 28 Melichercfk , Jura} Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 143. 26 SLOVAKIA 71 which first appeared in installments in Slovenske pohl'ady (IX, 1889); Dobry Slovak in Janosfk, junak slobody (Janosfk, Hero of Freedom) (l 893); Gu stav Marsall-Petrovsky in his two-volume novel Janos[k (1894); and Emo Bohun in his two novel s, Janos1kov poklad (Ja no sfk 's Treasure Hoard ) (1926) and Dedics tvo Janostkovho pokladu (The Legacy of Jano sfk's Treasure Hoard) . About these, 29 Melichercfk had only the most negative observations. Melichercfk adopted the bitter tone of a real zealot when he focused on Slovak drama , in much of which he saw further destruction of what he considered the authentic folk tradition . He lashed out at Viliam Pauliny-T6th, for example, as the first to recontour Janosik in hi s play Janosik (1862) as a Roman Catholic seminary student, the so n of wealthy peasants, and an educated "gentleman bri ga nd ," 30 thereby di storting the "authentic " brigand figure. Evoking the language of di sease, he insisted that these bourgeoi s writers tried to "infect" the people 's consciousness "with traditions that are entirely harmful and hostile" because they wanted to divert the attention of the working masses away from their most important interests, that is, away from the class strugg le, and to "prevent them from correctly recognizing and assessi ng their own capabilities for resistance and 31 their successes in the past. " He added further: It is eno ugh o nl y to reca ll what efforts the Slovak bourgeoisie expended in order to infect our people with the idea th at the ir basic characteristics were humility, co mpli ance, resignation to the will of God , that they were a so{!, patient, God-fearing people, humbl y obli gated to the lords, and so on. - Melichercfk injected a positive note, however, pointing out a few works which he considered reflected the genuine folk hero who "goes into brigandage with stron g conviction to puni sh injustice perpetrated by the lords on the poor Slovak people, "33 as in Jiff Mahen 's play Janos[k. Tragedie o peti dejstv[ch (Janosfk - A Tragedy in Five Acts.) 34 He was pleased that these elements in Mahen 's play served as a basis for so me other dramatic and mu sical re-wor- 29 Melichercfk. Jura) Janosfk: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 142-147. Melichercfk. Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed., 150. 31 Melichercfk , Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 157. 32 Melichercfk . Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 157. 33 Melichercfk. Jura) Janosik: Hrdina, 2nd ed. , 15 I. 34 Jirf Mahen, Janosfk. Tragedie o peti dejstvfch (Prah a, 1910). 30 72 SLOVAKIA 35 kings of the Janosfk story. Jan Cikker's 1953 opera Jura Janosik, according to Melichercfk, captured so accurately the "entire magnitude of the concept the Janosfk rebellion and its revolutionary message" that in hi s estimation it qualified as a folk opera - that is, an authentic expression of the masses - in terms of its theme and 36 music. Melichercfk ended hi s di sc uss ion of Janosfk in literature and the arts with the hope that arti sts would produce an abundance of Janosfk images so that these "will decorate buildings, parks, and squares of our nation and Janosfk wi ll live everywhere as a sy mbol of struggle and freedom , as a great message from the past for us and 37 for future generations. " He also offered a challenge to Slovak dramati sts that they take up the task of writing a "genuine Slovak folk play" about Janosfk. 38 Although thi s last task would indeed be taken up and fulfilled by dramatists, it would not be carried out in the way Melichercfk had hoped. In the cynical years after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, dram atists responded to Melichercfk 's call and wrote musical plays about Janosfk. Stepka's Jaaanosfffk: News About the Hero or a Play on the Hero, Bryll 's and Gartnerova's Painted on Glass, and Feldek's Janosik According to Vivaldi were produced and performed for co untl ess Slovak audiences. These plays, however, manipul ated the conventi onal image defined by Melichercfk and offered audiences radically new ways of considering not only the figure of Janosfk and the brigand tradition, but their own social, political, and existential reality. As for the depiction of Janosfk him self, it was as if tired of occ upying the glorious, but increas ingly cramped role of the almost superhum an hero officially sanctioned by the communist governme nt, he broke free from th at role 's confines and assumed another g ui se - as an ordinary man with ordinary weaknesses, coming from a well-meaning, but simple-minded family, and, at best, a reluctant bandit. The debunking and parodying of the conventional and officially approved myth of Janosfk in the musicals occurred in the context of a broad postmodern movement apparent throughout Central Europe 35 Jan Cikker, Juro Janosik: Opera v 6 obrazoch (Libretto: Stefan Hoza), l 953 . Melichercfk, Jura) Janosik: hrdina, 2nd ed ., 153. 37 Melichercfk , Jura) Janosik: hrdina, 2nd ed. , 154. 38 Melichercfk, Jura) Janosfk: hrdina, 2nd ed. , 152. 36 SLOVAKIA 73 which had begun at the end of the 1950s. Slovak literary scholar Peter Petro refers to the period of the I 960s as a "turbulent decade," a period of experimentation , which gradua lly undercut the official Socialist Realism and pushed the limits of the permissible in literature. 39 The impul se to parody and debunk carried over into the 1970s and 1980s. It was strengthened by pressures of the "normalization," which took place directly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and was connected to the reemergence of surrealism influenced by the surrealist movement during World War 11. 40 Central to thi s movement was new activity in the theater and in dramatic productions. Playwrights, utilizing the language of surrealism and the grotesque, sought to expose the absurdity of the political system by undermining its values and utopian premises which had claimed that "it is possible to control everything, even the dreams and hopes of the citizens. "41 Productions were characterized by fragmentation of the main motifs into parts and the insertion of poetry, mu sic , and dance. Humor, irony, skepticism , interaction with the spectators, direct appeals to the audience's imagination, word games, verbal improvisation-and all of this intended to unmask falsehoods, to shatter ideological stereotypes--characterized plays of this pe42 riod. It was in this context that Bryll, Feldek, and Stepka conceived their musicals and chose the officially sanctioned and exploited image of the Slovak national hero in their subversive work. Bryll's Painted on Glass was translated from the 1970 original Polish libretto and performed in Slovakia from the mid-l 970s. 43 Its title refers to the widespread folk art of painting colorful images on glass, popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and well 39 Peter Petro, A History of Sl ovak Literature (Montreal & Kingston, London , Buffalo: McGill-Queens University Press), 143-44. 40 Petro, 143. 41 Halina Janaszek-lvanicov, "Post-Modernism in the West Slavonic Literature in the Context of Euro-Atlantic Changes of the Postmodern Paradigms," Part Ill : "Five tides of postmodernism in Polish, Czech, and Slovak Literature," at: http: //src- h. sla v. hokuda i.ac. jp/pub Iictn/N o.64/ janaszek/ janaszek. htm I. 42 Janaszek-I van icov. 43 111 Slovakia the play premiered at the Slovak National Theater Oct. 19, 1974, where it ran for three decades. It was pulled from the stage briefly in 1983 when Ernest Bryll was forced to leave Poland for crit icizi ng the political situatio n. Bratislava's Novii scena theater has staged the play in an updated form since 2005. http://mu zikal y. szm.sk/nsm.html 74 SLOVAKIA known for preserving images of Janosik and hi s brigands and various 44 moments related to the conventional myth. Reproducing these images in dramatic action with song and dance, Painted on Glass broke with Melichercik 's communist definition of the myth by disclosing both Janosik's very ordinary human yearnings and failings. Janosfk's love for Anicka is unfulfilled, the gendarmes are not the hero 's eternal class enemies, but also human beings; and Death personified awaits the hero, as it does all of us. Light humor, rousing folk dance, memorable songs, and poking holes in the conventional myth all blended in Painted on Glass, and the figure of Janosfk was endeared to the audience which identified with the demythologized hero. The music of Bryll' s play, composed by Katarzyna Gartnerova, was a delightful hybrid of rhythmic rock and folk, and gave new voice to the expression of the Janosik tradition in the 1970s and 1980s. Feldek chose the title for hi s play, Janosik According to Vivaldi, because he wanted to indicate that in the eighteenth century Slovaks li ved "not only in Yratna dolina (ie., in the isolated depth s of Slovakia) but also in Europe. "45 Action in the play alternates between Slovakia and the Viennese court of Charles YI (d. 1740), where the emperor's daughter, the young Maria Theresa (1717- 1780), is heard in the background playing the mu sic of Antonio Vivaldi (16801743), then popular throughout Europe. Feldek worked from actu al hi storical documents linked to Janosfk's trial , but wove an amusing and fantastical version of the myth . Here, Uhorcfk is portrayed as the real bandit hero, and he and hi s wife Katarfnka manipulate Janosik into becoming the brigand captain. In quick order, however, Janosfk tires of stealing, as he tell s Katarfnka in very contemporary sounding terms: "We rob from morning to night and then again from night to morning and I'm as tired as a dog. And I swear that people would do better if they didn 't carry all thi s silly gold with them" (Zbfjame od rana do vecera a potom este aj od vecera do rana, unaveny so m ako pes. Prisaham bohu, casto si hovorfm , ze by tf 44 See introductory texts and reproductions of glass-painted images of Janosfk and brigands in IIena Pi sutova, Painted Dreams: Slovak Folk Painting on Glass in the 2dh Century (Bratislava: Tatran, 1983), and Katarfna Ciema, Janosik v Slovenskom vytvamom umenf (Bratislava: Slovenska narodna galeria, 1988). This last is the catalog to an exhibition of the same name, held in March - May 1988. 45 Feldek, 125. SLOVAKIA 75 l'udi a urobili Iepsie, keby so sebou nenosili tolko toho poondiateho zlata.)46 In the end Katarfnka angri ly insi sts that the people should celebrate Uhorcfk ' s memory, not Janosik's. At the same time, in the absence of a male heir to the throne, Charles VI decides that Uhorcik is his illegitimate son and should be the next emperor. Feldek plays with the myth , the hi story, and language, as, fo r instance, in Charles Vi 's interview with the w idow of one of hi s Au stri an genera ls, Madame Schardonova, whose existence is attested in the hi storical doc uments since she actuall y was robbed by Janosfk in Slovakia. Her stilted Slovak, prono unced with a German acce nt, is hil ario us, because a ll of her mi stake s ac tu a ll y convey other ridiculous meanings. Instead of saying "I am a widow " (som vdova), she says "I 47 am water" (som voda) ; instead of complimenting Charles for his nobility (s l'achetn y), she compliments him for being "tendinous" (... 48 aky ste sl'achovity). Painted on Glass offers great humor and new twists on the convention al elements of the communist interpretation of Janosfk so well defi ned by Melichercik. Perhaps most radical in its depiction of Janosfk and the brigand myth is Stepka 's Jaaanosfffk, pl ayed by his own troupe, the Rados inske naivne divadlo (Radosi na Nai·ve Theater). Its unu sual title was inspired by Slovak actor and director Pal'o Bielik 's famo us two-part film , Janosik ( 1963), in which Janosik's name is called out in the mountains and echoes lo udl y with a prolonged stress on the vowels. Whil e Melichercfk had approached the Janosik tradition with the utmo st gravity, Stepka kept hi s co mmuni st-era audience laughing throughout the entire musical. His language is rich with puns and humorously distorted references from fo lkl ore, literature, and especiall y from dail y life in com munist Slovakia. Ribald sex ual innuendoes are woven into the entire script. Janosik appears onl y in the last third of the play , during which the punning continues. Hi s family members - mothe r Dag mar, fathe r Jon athan , and sister He len a occ upy center stage through the play and are depicted as slow, thickwitted , shrewd, but also likeab le peasants. Their plight as serfs under the control of a Hungarian count, Artus Revay, is treated with humor and irony. The Radosina Na"ive Theater company performed and still 46 Feldek, 96. Feldek, 93. 48 Feldek, 93 . 47 76 SLOVAKIA performs the play with few props and simple Slovak folk costumes with so me ac tors wearing regular contemporary clothes . The tone and atmosphere, free and characterized by improvisation , suggests an amateur village production with simple, barel y literate actors - but in fact the theater' s actors are professionals who bring their ro les to li fe exceedingly well. 49 The writer of thi s article attended a performance of Jaaanosfffk in Slovakia in 1983, which was played with great g usto and hilarious improvi sation . That perform ance diverged somewhat from the published script of 1970, but thi s is to be expected , considering that improvisation is integra l to the pl ay, contributing to its "amateur" quality , and insurin g that there be room for some actor-audience interaction. The very first lines of Jaaanosfffk immediatel y set the tone for the ling ui stic and cultu ral manipulation to come: Instead of the co nventional opening of a Slovak fo lktale - "Kde bolo, tam bolo" (Once upon a time ... ; litera ll y: Where it was, there it was) - two narrators begin with "Kde bolelo, tam bolelo" (Where it hurt, there it hurt), a play on the traditional phrase and suggesting that much more would be turned on its head before the end of the performance.so Janosfk's Slovak mother and father are given spurious genealogies by the narrators - Pani Dagmar Janosfkov a, nee Trautenbergerova, and Jon ath an Jano sfk , whose real s urname, we are told , is Weissmann_s, To suggest th at the Slovak national hero is actually of German de sce nt is, of course, hi ghly ironical and am usin g. When Helena and Dagmar are visited by a local constable sent by the count, they are pleased to welcome him in, having locked father in the cellar. The constable tell s Dagmar that he is on the lookout for a rebel , specifically her hu sband , who is inciting or rou sing the serfs (" Poddanych buri .. . "), and she responds cynicall y that her husband 49 Stanis lav Stepka's Radosinske naivne div adlo produced a CD of Jaacinosfffk and a DVD of three pl ays, including Jaaanosffik. For availability, see : http://www. panorama. sk/index.asp?kam-/go/mapa.asp&lan g-s k&sv-2&mc- 12 I9 ~. 50 Stani slav Stepka, Jaaanosfffk: Sprava o hrdinovi alebo hra na hrdinu (Bratislava: Tatran , 1983) 19. All quotes are take n from the publi shed sc ript. Ac tors in the perfo rmance attended by the writer of this artic le fo llowed thi s sc ript closely, but not exactly. And this published script differs slightl y from the DVD version of the musical from 2004. 51 Jaaanosfffk, 23. SLOVAKIA 77 "no longer arouses anything" ("Prosfm vas, on uz nic nevzburi. . ") and is willing to sign her name to that. 52 The constable summons Dagmar and Helena to the manor house, informing them that the Count Revay, a "candidate of the amorous sciences" (kandidat milostnych vied) - a satirical reference to scholarl y titles in communist Slovakia - wants them to come and "sew sacks" (obsfvat' vrecia), connoting here some kind of sex ual activity. In response, Helena blithely asks: "Which amorous lord ordered this, the young one or the old one?" When the constable says "the old one," Helena responds with complete confidence: "Mamicka, then that must mean the invitation 's for you. "53 Unlike in the conventional myth, the women here clearly do not feel threatened by the count's demand , and in fact they act as though it has happened repeatedly and welcome it eagerly. When the constable leaves, Helena and Dagmar di scuss how fine it is that the aristocracy, the lords, want only what is good for the serfs - surely a satirical reference to the contemporary situation with the communist government as the aristocracy and the serfs as the ordinary citizens. Helena means to say "They come here, advise us, and look around (pride, poradf, pohl'adf)," but, to the audience's surprise and amusement, in her simple-mindedness she says instead that "they come, advise us, and caress" (pride, poradi, pohladf)." 54 Dagmar then echoes, anachronistically for the eighteenth century, the sentiments of contemporary communist brigade workers perpetually urged to find ways to work harder, ways to over-fulfill the Plan: Let me pose this question to you, my daughter: are we really working on the estate like we should? Are we working a full eighteen hours? Couldn't we manage to work more? Sometimes we sing. Couldn't we work another eight or nine hours? We work only six days. And the seventh is the Sabbath. But couldn 't we work thirty-six days a month and then celebrate the Sabbath with whatever is left? And what about order at the workplace? Do we keep all our bundles in one place? So, see. We 55 need to think all thi s over sometime. 52 J aaanosifik, 22. Jaaanosffik, 22. 54 Jaaanosffik, 23. 55 Jti:i:inos([fk, 23. As an example of d ivergence from the written script of 1970, the 1983 viny l disc recordi ng of the musical , for instance, prov ides an al ternati ve statement in thi s section of the play. Dagmar asks: "Couldn 't we work six days a week and celebrate for seven?" This, again, is reflective of the improvisational nature of the script. 53 78 SLOVAKIA These words, all too familiar to the audience daily subjected to pressure to achieve communist "excellence," provoked uproarious laughter from the audience. More bitter self-recognition for the Slovak audience in communist times - oftentimes struggling to procure even the basics, yet reassured by the government that they had the best possible living situation - resulted from Dagmar' s observation that they already had acquired everything they could possibly need: "We already have everything - a table, a chair, a bowl , a crucifix, and eventually even a house with doors. My God!" (A mame uz vsetko, aha - stol, stolicka, miska, krfzik , pomaly uz aj <lorn s dvermi. Boze!)56 Only after all this does the youthful Janosfk appear. Sister Helena, a family friend Samo, as well as Janosfk ' s girlfriend Anicka, and eventually his own mother all push him to become a brigand for the material benefits this will bring them, echoing a situation again all too familiar to the audience: that the only way to acquire goods , especially luxury goods, is by theft in one way or another. Janosfk acquiesces reluctantly, and only after complaining: Do I have to be a man? Do I have to be a hero? Do I have to be an example? You'll be at home lying in your feather quilts, and I have to offer up my kidneys [to the executioner's hook]? I don't want to be a hero, I want to be an ordinary man. . . I don't want to enter into reading books, I want to live out my life beautifully . . . This literature will live off me for 300 years , but I won ' t make it to thirty . . . I don ' t want to 57 enter history with a bullet between my shoulders. Janosfk, however, appears in the final scene with Uhorcfk, grudgingly about to begin his career, while Uhorcfk berates him for tossing aside his weapon and for showing no interest in banditry . Uhorcfk then initiates the highway robbery of two aristocratic travelers, a mother and daughter, with the traditional demand found in folktale s: "Your money or your life. . . " (Bohu dusu a nam dukaty. Literally: Hand over your soul to God and your money to us.) , but add s "and your citizenship documents" (a obcianske preukazy), much like the police could demand of anyone on the street in communist Slovakia. 58 The women, instead of fearing or hating Janosik, are enamored with hi s dashing appearance and charm - "Mama, so these are those famous brigands! My God, what beau56 Jaaanosfffk, 23. Jaaanosfffk, 33. 58 Jaaanosfffk, 34. 57 SLOVAKIA 79 tiful folk garb they have" (Mamicka, tak toto su tf zbojnfci? Boze, ake krasne kroje maju.) - and he and Uhorcfk treat the robbery like a customs check. This certainly resonated with Slovaks, as well as foreigners, who passed repeatedly through Czechoslovak customs in communist times and often felt robbed and violated. 59 During the robbery, however, Janosik begins to wax poetic about the bandit life, and Uhorcik again reprimands him for getting distracted, but in a way which again sounds ironical in reference to brigandage and echoes a typical warning to the communist worker: "Duri, you keep forgetting your obligation" (Duri, zabudas na povinnost:)60 This Janosik is not Melichercfk's noble social brigand, a fighter against feudal lords, protector of the poor and oppressed. Stepka 's musical, as well as Bryll's and Feldek's, presented the Slovak public in the 1970s and 1980s not with a communist superhero, but with an ordinary guy, much of whose life and environment resonated with those of the audience. Janosik's experiences and the struggles of his time depicted in the musicals were a reflection of their own life. The outlines of the conventional myth were brought into question and turned upside down , and social and political issues that could not be criticized openly were spoofed. Audiences who experienced the plays together could leave the theater, having, in a sense, expressed and shared publicly their plight under the communist regime. Through irony and laughter, they could feel stronger in their resolve to resist. By employing the Janosik figure and myth, wrenching it free from the regime's ideology, the dramatists held up a mirror to the audience so that they could see themselves more clearly and could come to an understanding about how they might better deal with their social and political reality. Through humor and satire and breaking with the Soviet - and communist-approved conventional interpretation, the dramatists allowed Janosik once again to reach out to his people, to inspire in them the courage to resist the new authorities. Because Melichercik had so successfully portrayed Janosik as an acceptable proto-communist hero, the brigand's image in these musicals passed under the censors' radar screens. Once again, in a way not anticipated by Melichercik, Janosik was there to contribute to the 59 60 Jaaanosfffk, 34. Jaaanosfffk, 35. 80 SLOVAKIA social and political resistance, to help undermine the system. Once again, in a way not anticipated by Melichercik, Janosik was a symbol of freedom - this time for a new generation in a new time and against a new oppressor. Feldek suggested just exactly that when in an interview in 1979, he said of his work: "There is no such thing as a historical play . We write and play alway s for the contemporary audience and for the present. The hi storical subject in a good 'historical' play is only a pretext - almost like the subject of animals in a fable. The viewer should leave my play with the sense that this was about us. "61 And by the end of the next decade, 1989, the communist system finally collapsed from within and the barbed wire was torn down - perhaps with just a little help from Janosik. 61 Feldek, 126.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Jánošík as a Symbol of Freedom in Communist Slovakia Description An account of the resource Patricia A. Krafcik Slovakia, Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007 pp. 63-80 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Krafcik, Patricia Ann, 1949- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/e483d453a2b5c628bd44e309c2e5d189.pdf 1247a703bb9bba36d0cc0c5f129e0491 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 81 A HIGHWAYMAN'S LIFE: EXTANT DOCUMENTS v~ ABOUT JANOSIK ~ Martin Votruba "Our salvation can come only from Janosik," lamented a Czech blogger over the budget proposals in Prague. 1 In Poland, a group of developers has been working on recalcitrant software intended to undermine the program called Platnik ("Payer"), which is mandatory for employers to handle social security payments and works only with Microsoft Windows. The leader of the developers named their open-source software Janosik.2 Both of these people invoked the name of a brigand who robbed three hundred years ago in the northern and central predominantly Slovak counties in the Habsburg monarchy, was caught, tried and hanged. About a century after Janosfk's execution, his image began to emerge as the local embodiment of the pervasive myth of a hero who takes from the rich and gives to the poor. The folk stories, Romantic poems, and the more recent films ascribe 3 to him other quite universally idolized trappings, the ones that, for example, helped to generate Hollywood 's legendary rebel stars - he was good looking, single, made a stash of money, lived wild, and died young. 4 All of this is contained in Janosfk's modern Slovak, Czech, and Polish mythology. Practically none of that, however, finds any support in the existing evidence about the actual brigand 's life. 1 Hana Fonminkova, I Oct. 2003 , http: //www neraweb cz/index. php?stype-all&id=632. 2 Danuta Frey, "Janosik chce rozgryzc program Ptatnik." Rzeczpospolita, 6-7 Dec. 2004. 3 Dozens of books, thousands of stories, and popular and academic articles, at least nine plays, six films, one TV series, several classical compositions, and one opera th have been dedicated to Janosfk since the 19 century. His legend was discussed in this journal by Patricia A. Krafcik, "Janosik: Unraveling the Man from the Legend." Slovakia 33, no. 60-6 1 (1987-1988): 7-22. 4 Martin Votruba, " Hang Him High: The Elevation of Janosfk to an Ethnic Icon ." Slavic Review, vol. 56, no. I, Spring 2006, pp. 24-44. �82 SLOVAKIA Name variations There was a historical figure whose name was close or identical to Juraj Janosfk,5 who was sentenced for highway robbery and executed at the age of 25 in 1713. The limited sources about his actual life are the proceedings from his trial and an earlier interrogation, the proceedings from the trial with hi s friend and accomplice Tomas Uhorcfk, whom Janosik replaced as the leader of his band, and several brief records maintained by landlords. The trial proceedings were edited and published by several authors before most of them appeared together for the first time as an appendix to a book on Janosik in 1952. 6 The proceedings from his trial gave three versions of his last name: Janosik, Janosiak and Janosak. There are variations in the records of Uhorcfk ' s name, too. For instance, Janosik referred to him as Uhnk during his trial. Each spelling of Janosfk's name indicates a slightly different pronunciation, but that was not unusual at that time. Historically , people had only one - given - name, and what we know as the last name developed gradually, along with bureaucratic record-keeping, from attributes used to distinguish persons with the same given name, or from various nicknames. The bureaucratic effort to standardize people 's last (and first) names started in Catholic Europe with the Vatican-sponsored Council of Trent (1545-1563). Although the practice of maintaining the same last name within a family became quite common in the Habsburg 7 monarchy, where the Slovaks lived, by the I 600s, it was not formalized until the Imperial and Royal 8 Edict on Family Names was issued in 1787 - perhaps 5 [YOUray YAHnosheek] Ju raj is the Slovak version of George, the nicknames are Jura, Jurko, Dura. 6 Andrej Melichercfk, Janosikovska tradfcia na Slovensku Bratislava: Nakladatel'stvo Slovenskej akademie vied a umenf, 1952, pp. 165-176. 7 Often spelled Hapsburg in English history books. 8 "Imperi al and Royal" were standard attributes of a host of ' federal' institutions in the Habsburg monarchy. They indicated that the ruling monarch was the hereditary king of several kingdoms-provinces th at compri sed the Habsburgs' personal possessions, including the Kingdom of Hungary , and at the same time the emperor of a looser association of German states. The terms Habsburg monarchy and Austrian Empire usually refer only to the Habsburgs' personal possessions whose core were the Kingdom of Hungary (today: Slovakia, Hungary , Croatia), Kingdom of Bohemia, Margravi ate of Moravia (together today : the Czec h Republic) , Austria, and �SLOVAKIA 83 the first law on names in Europe. The three pronunciations of Janosfk 's last name during his trial are not indicative of any confusion about the captive' s identity. Birth date and place According to the trial proceedings, Juraj Janosfk came from the north-west Slovak village of Terchova. 9 Birth and death records were rare, or non-existent in the more distant past, but the maintenance of baptismal and burial records by parishes was among the guidelines set forth by the Council of Trent and became widely practiced by both the Slovak Catholic and Lutheran Churches. A governmentsponsored law on recording births and deaths was not adopted in the Habsburg monarchy until 1828. Baptismal records from the Varin parish that comprised Terchova contain the names of five babies christened in 1687-1688 that could have grown up to be the Juraj Janosfk sentenced in 1713. '0 Without discussing their choice, authors mostly give one of the dates as his true entry - commonly 25 February 1688, father Martin and mother Anna Czisznek or Czisznik, occasionally 16 May 1688, father Michal and mother Barbara Cingel. Only one, not particularly reliable, source makes an argument why the entry of 25 February is to be seen as more likely than the others: when Juraj's father bought his son out of military service in 1710, the father's name was apparently recorded as Martin Janosik. 11 However, if Juraj Janosfk, the brigand executed in March 1713, were baptized on 25 February, other entries in the baptismal records would show him as having a younger brother Jan. That would appear to be at odds with the record of a trial with Jan Janosik in December 1713 during which Jan was identified as an older brother of the executed brigand Juraj . The issue is complicated because the existing baptismal records are not sufficiently consistent and complete, because the name Jan, introduced to Europe through which also incorporated parts of their modern neighboring countries - Italy, Poland, Romania and others. 9 [TERkhova] 10 Rudo Brian, "Na tropie Janosika i polskich zb6jnik6w." Pam(:tnik Slowianski, vo l. 18, 1968, pp. I 67-186; and Rudo Brian, " Pat' Janosikov - ktory je ten pravy?" Nede/ha pravda, 3 Feb. 1978, p. 18. 11 The llles hazy archives, Strecno estate, Vol. 19, No. 15 as referenced in Jozef Kocis, Neznamy Janos1k, Bratislava: Yydavatel'stvo Osveta, l 986, p. 47 . �84 SLOVAKIA the New Testament, has historicall y been the most co mmon given name in Slovak (like its Anglicized version John in English), and the family name Janosfk 12 was, and still is, common in Terchova and vicinity (67 listings in the telephone directory) . It al so occurs elsewhere in Slovakia, and spread even to the United States where its frequency ranks as the 35,524 th most common name. 13 There is some inconsistency in the reading of the last name of Janosik 's mother among those who opt for 25 February as the date of his baptism. Many modem authors transcribe the recorded old spelling of Anna 's last name (Czisznek or Czisznik), without further explanation, as Cesnek, a few others as Cfsnik. Cesnek is a probable reading because such last names are still common in the area (29 telephone directory listings), while Cfsnik or other plausible modernized versions of the old spelling are absent there. Nothing is known about Janosfk 's life until he was between 15 and 21 years old - the time of the Francis Rak6czi uprising, which Janosik joined at an unknown age and for an unknown period of time according to the trial proceedings. Folk tales, as well as the first two film s about him, 14 depict him as a former seminary student who turned to brigandage after his parents were abused by the landlord. The earliest written reference to the legend of Janosfk 's schooling comes from 1809. 15 It says that he was popularly believed to have been a student of the humanities, not of theology. However, no preserved document and nothing in the trial proceedings suggests an educated Janosik. 12 It originated as a Slovak variation on Janos - the Hungarian version of the Biblical name John in English, Jan in Slovak. Janos was occas ionall y used as a ni ckname fo r persons named Jan by the Slovaks , too, and sometimes appeared instead of the th Slovak Jan in the Kingdom' s records. But durin g the 17 century, Janosik and its variations had become established Slovak fa mily names . 13 U.S. Census Burea u, Population Divi sio n, Population Anal ys is and Evaluati on Staff as quoted by Rhett A. Butler in "Most Common Names and Surnames in the U.S." at mongabay com. 14 Jan osfk directed by Jaros lav Jerry Siake l', Tatra Film, Chi cago, 192 1; Janostk directed by Martin Frie, A- B Studio, Praha [Prague] , I935. 15 Bohuslav Tablic, a 3-page unnumbered foo tnote to "Janossjk Liptowsky Laupeznjk ," in S/owensstj W ersso wcy. Collecta revirescunt. S wazek druhf. We Wacove [Yac]: v Antonjna Gotljba pry wil. Knehtlac itele, 1809, pp. 120-1 23 . �SLOVAKIA 85 The Kingdom's situation The trial proceedings begin to reveal glimpses of Janosfk 's life with him taking part in the Franci s Rak6czi 16 uprising of 1703-1711. It was a massive religious and separatist movement in the Kingdom of Hungary aga inst the Habsburg dynasty, which ruled it from Vienna (A ustria). The Slovaks were the majority inhabitants of the north-western , mostl y mountainous counties of the multi-ethnic 17 Kingdom. The Kingdom , established around the year 1000, was defeated and lost its sovereignty in the 1500s, and was incorporated as a province in the expanding Habsburg monarchy. The Kingdom was 90% Protestant (Lutheran in the Slovak areas) in the early 1600s, but by the mid- l 600s, the Vatican-allied Habsburgs began forcibly to reCatholicize it, and also increased their efforts to further reduce the Kingdom 's remaining limited self-government. The uprising led by nobleman Franci s Rak6czi II was the last of a series of substantial , but economically destructive armed attempts in the Kingdom to reverse that course. 18 He was Catholic, but in favor of the Kingdom 's independence and religious freedom. Janosik the insurgent It is not known when and under what circumstances Janosik joined Rak6czi 's rebel troops. It is not known , either, how he became a soldier in the Habsburg army later. The Rak6czi rebels suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Trencfn 19 (about 60 miles south-west 16 [RAHkotsee], Francis Rak:6czi II, Prince of Transylvani a, born on 27 March I 676. After his fin al defeat, he and some of his supporters initially defected to Poland. He eventu all y died in exi le in Turkey on 8 April 1735. 17 The country's language of admi nistration and education from high school up was Latin , which was no one ' s mother ton gue. The languages of individual ethnic groups, most of whom li ved in their majority areas, were used in everyday life, local businesses, emerging literatures, etc. The ethni c gro ups of the Kingdom of Hungary inc luded the Slovaks, Magyars ([MAHdars] often called Hungarians), Croats, Romani ans, Germans, Ru syns, Roma (Gypsies), and others. The Slovaks were in the majority in about 15 counties in the Kingdom ' s mountainous north-west (today's Slovakia) customari ly called the "Upper Co untry" in the Kingdo m, which is usuall y rendered as Upper Hungary in English. 1 8The major anti-Habsburg insurgenc ies that affected the Slovak counti es extensive ly were (the year of inception and leader): 1604 Stephen Bocskay, 16 19 Gabriel Bethlen, 1644 George Rak:6czi, 1678 Emerich Thokoly, 1703 Francis Rak:6czi II . 19 [TRENtsheen); in West Slovakia on the Yah River �86 SLOVAKIA of Terc hova) the actual fightin g took pl ace at Hamre, a haml et and originall y a forge site two miles south of Trencfn) on 3 August 1708. The Habsburgs had taken full control of the Kingdom by the time of Janosfk's tri al. It therefore needs to be taken with a grai n of salt that hi s defen se lawyer Baltazar Palugyay portrayed Janosik as the Emperor's loyal subj ect at hi s tri al, and insisted that Janosik had eage rl y and willingly enlisted in the Habsburg army during the upri sing. Authors mostly speculate that Janosfk first left the Rak6czi rebe ls, returned to Terchova, and was subsequentl y drafted by the Imperial and Royal Army. Another possibility put forward is that he was captured during the Battle of Trencfn and turned into a soldier, 20 which was what happe ned to hundreds of insurge nts on th at occasion. No records document either ass umption. Janosik the loyalist and a brigand's assistant Once in the Imperial and Royal Army, Janosik was stationed at Bytca Castle, 25 miles from his home. He was made a prison guard . During hi s trial, Janosik admitted providing unspecified services to Tomas Uhorcfk,2 1 a brigand leader he ld in the castle's dungeons. Uhorcik managed to escape in the fa ll of 1710 while Janosik still served at Bytca. Janosik 's father bought Ju raj out of military service a month later. This seq uence of events that emanates from the trial proceedings gave ri se to later spec ul ation s that Janosik may have actu ally he lped Uhorcfk to escape. Family background The statement from Janosik's trial that hi s father had bought him out of military service, for which he had to have enough spare money, appears to contrad ict the co mmon, but undoc umented , assertions that Janosik came fro m a particul arl y poor farmer's famil y. The existing records from the landlord of Terchova ' s estate around 1700 do not li st the Janosfk famil y among those obligated to work for a day or two each week in the landlord ' s field s22 - a common duty of fe ud al subj ects. It could mean that members of the Janosik fa mil y °Koc is, Neznamy ... 2 21 [TOmahsh OOhortsheek], from the village of Predmi er near Turzovka. Andrej Melichercfk, Janosikovska tradfcia na Slovensku. Brati slava: Nakladatel'stvo SAY , 1952. 22 �SLOVAKIA 87 were still obligated to work, but were among the poorest, almost landless families and therefore not entered in the records of households with farms; or it could be due to a contract between some of the original settlers of the village and a past landlord. Numerous Slovak villages originated as contractual settlements of a landlord's unimproved property in earlier centuries. Finally, Janosfk 's family could have been prosperous enough to be able to pay the landlord instead of providing labor services. Besides these historical reasons, the absence of an entry for the Janosfks in the landlord 's records could also be due to deficient record-keeping, or to lost documents. If the Janosfks could be shown to have been a particularly poor family, it would increase the likelihood that the money they used to buy Juraj out was not theirs, and that the Janosfks may have received it for that purpose from Uhorcfk who was grateful for Juraj's unspecified services in the dungeons (possibly including his escape). By the fall of 1710, Uhorcfk had had about eight robbing seasons behind him , which would have allowed him to accumulate some disposable cash. Highwaymen Other court records show the inhabitants of Terchova to have been fervent supporters of brigands. 23 That ties in with Uhorcfk's testimony, according to which Janosik sometimes stayed with the teacher at Terchova, and the local tavern-keeper would bring him food. Juraj Janosfk's brother Jan was hanged for highway robbery ten months after Juraj. 24 Highway robbery was common in Europe until the advent of modern times, which brought about increased policing, personal record-tracing, education, perhaps honesty, and new, less arduous forms of crime. The first mention of brigands in the Slovak region comes from the Legend of Saints Zoerardus and Benedict recorded in 1064. Two ancient north-south trade routes from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean passed through eastern Slovakia. The merchants' caravans were among the earliest lucrative targets for highway robbery. Legal records of highway robberies and 23 Stefan Kazimfr, "O novych dokumentoch k janosikovskej legende." Cudove cftanie Vol. 3, No. 6, 1957. 24 Stanistaw Sroka, Janosik: Pra wdziwa historia karpackiego zb6jnika. Krakow [Cracow]: Wydawnictwo Homini, 2004, p. 41; Kocis, Neznamy .. . p. 86. �88 SLOVAKIA trials with brigands begin to accumulate in the late 15 th century and do not start to dwindle until the mid-19 th century. One of the first known brigand bands in the Slovak counties, led by Fedor Hlavaty, operated in the north-east (Saris County). Its 50 members included Slovaks, Poles, and Rusyns.25 In 1493, Hlavaty sent a ransom letter to the town of Bardejov threatening to burn it down unless the Town Council paid a hefty compensation for the execution of four of Hlavaty's highwaymen. Incentives to rob in the 1600s The religious-cum-separatist wars of the 1i" century caused a great deal of destruction in the Kingdom already harmed by decades of attacks by the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire from the south. 26 Highway robbery must have appeared to be a way out to some of those impoverished by the developments. The brigands' ranks were also increased by displaced soldiers made redundant by both the insurgent and the Habsburg armies after the resolution of each rebellion. With the reduced, or periodicall y absent authority of the monarch, some noblemen, too, turned their hill-top castles to brigands' nests, armed large bands and in addition to highway robbery, raided villages, as well as their peers' residences. The Kingdom therefore saw a jump in highway robberies in the 17 th century.2 7 25 The Rusyns, also called Ruthenians, are an East Slav ic ethni c group (as opposed to the West Slavic Slovaks and Poles) who li ve as a recogni zed minority in the north-eastern parts of Slovakia, as well as in so uth-eastern Poland - often called L emkos there. Their acti vists call for a recognition of their much more substantial numbers in south- western Ukraine where the authorities insist they are Ukrainians. 26 The Slovak counties never fell to the Turks, but es peciall y the southern ones were continuall y harassed and attacked. The fac t that the mostl y Magyar/Hungarian counties (today's Hungary) fell under the Ottoman rule and became their prov ince of Ma1,aristan fo r about l 50 years added to the disruption of the economy of the Slovak counties and brought in some ethni c Hungari ans, especiall y noblemen, who ran away north fro m the encroaching Turks. 27 Although just a pass ing reference has been preserved about him , the name of briga nd leader Adamcik survived from the 1630s in fo lklore, and was later added to the list of Janosik 's band members in fo lk tales. The name Ilcfk - another of Janosik's comrades in fo lk stories - has a similar, albeit somewhat later origin. �SLOVAKIA 89 Highwaymen's seasons In the Kingdom , and in Central Europe in general, the brigands' season was limited by the climate. Late summer and early fall was the time when seasonal sheepfolds in mountain pastures were abandoned and the flocks were dri ven back to villages. These shepherds played an important role in hi ghwaymen 's support networks. Cold winters made clandestine surviva l in the Slovak mountai ns almost impossible. Moreover, Europe was at the height of its Little Ice Age (l 560-1850). The deciduous forests at the lower elevations lose leaves and provide less cover, and while the higher elevations have spruce and fir trees that do not lose their needles, they are also colder and therefore even less suitable for winter subsistence 28 . Snow tracks made the brigands easily traceable. But brigands needed villagers ' support year-round. In the winter, they needed farmers to accept them as hired hands, and even their help to cover up their identities and summer acti vity. In the summer, the brigands needed to obtain food , sell their loot, and learn about the police searches for them, not to mention their less operative desires to show off, party, booze and flirt. Some of the villagers in turn , made welcome profit on the services and goods rendered to the brigands, since they were paid for their silence as well. Moreover, the vi llagers were paid by people with periodic windfalls who are generall y inclined to overspending. According to the court records, the Janosiks were among Terchova 's notorious rowdy , thieving fa milies. Jano~fk' s participation During his trial , Janosik confessed that he joined Tomas Uhorcfk ' s band of brigands " around Michaelmas" 29 in 1711. Brigand bands in the Western Carpathians would traditionall y di sperse on or not long after Michaelmas and agree to reassemble on St. Adalbert's Feast-George mas (23-24 April). Numero us saints' days were associated with a variety of far m works and festivities , and were used to identify periods of the year in the same manner that months and parts of months are used today (" late September"). Michae lmas was a typical day of post-harvest fa irs. Janosik claimed that he had 28 Some mountains aro und Terchova reach over 5,000 ft, some mountain ridges around Liptov County rise to 7,000 ft. 29 September 29, St. Michael' s Day. �90 SLOVAKIA joined the brigands at Uhorcik's insistence. It was customary that a new member would swear allegiance to the band leader°. The group he joined may have had about two to three dozen members, but that was always in a state of flux with highwaymen. Some were disabled or killed during robberies and chases, so me were caught, some dropped out, temporarily , or for good, and aspiring highwaymen joined. Janosfk's confession that Uhorcik handed the leadership of the band to him soon afterwards indicates that it was hardly as simple as Uhorcik looking up Janosik almost a year after the latter provided him with some incidental assistance in prison. Uhorcik had to have great tru st in Janosik in order to persuade his band of thugs that a rel ati ve newcomer should take over after him . That, in turn , suggests that Janosik's assistance at Bytca Castle may have extended to Uhorcik ' s escape, that they maintained contacts afterwards, that Uhorcfk 's band had already seen Janosik in action, and it opens to speculation the source of the money that his father used to buy Juraj out of military service. It is also poss ible that the members of Uhorcik's band already knew Janosik because he became involved with them earlier. The highwaymen's logistics Limited circumstantial evidence contradicts Janosfk's testimony that he did not meet with Uhorcik until a year after Uhorcik's escape and that he simply talked Janosik into joining his band on that single occasion. A court record hints that there could have been rather a pressing incentive for Janosik to turn from initially a brigands' assistant and perhaps a subsequent incidental brigand into a regular member of Uhorcik's band. On 30 September 1711 , a day after Michaelmas, the confessed time of Janosik's pledge to Uhorcfk, three of the Janosfks of Terchova were brought to court and charged with assault 30 In contrast with their life of crime, the pledge could appear quite pious - an indication that they perceived Christianity as part of a flexible set of beliefs in the supernatural rather than the strict doctrine with a specific moral code preached by the Church. A documented pledge in the band of Jakub Surovec from the 1730s said: " I swear to God eternal, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary and all the divine saints that I shall neither betray, nor cheat, nor yet abandon my companions in fortu ne, or misfortune. Thus help me God the Lord." �SLOVAKIA 91 and robbery .31 If they were Juraj Janosik' s family, and moreover, if he was among the suspects (and guilty), he might have preferred to remove himself from the village rather than face the charges and possibly be forced to reveal more of his recent past. The Habsburgs did not ban torture as an investi gati ve method until 1776. J ano~ik' s season Soon after 23-year old Janosik became the band 's leader, Uhorcfk , after nine seasons as a highwayman, retired to Klenovec in south-central Slovakia under the adopted name Martin Mravec. He married and became the village's hired shepherd and occasional musician (he also managed briefly to serve as the village's policeman). Janosfk's band robbed mainly in the north-central Slovak counties of Orava, Liptov, and Spis, sometimes to the south of them, and occasionally - still in the Habsburg monarchy - across the Kingdom 's north -western border in parts of Silesia and the Margrav iate of Moravia (both now in the Czech Republic). All of the three Slovak counties border Poland in the north , and Janosik identified several members of his band as coming from Poland, but no document has surfaced to confirm legends about his raids into the Kingdom of Poland. Simple economics may have played a role: while Moravia and Silesia were relatively wealthy, the Polish Podhale region north of Slovakia was poorer than the Slovak counties and with fewer noblemen 's residences, and therefore less attractive, especially since the border follows a rel atively high mountain ridge in Liptov and in parts of Spis and Orava, which was a substanti al obstacle to bringing back any loot except money. On the other hand, the Podhale folklore occasionally depicted the Slovak counties as desirable targets of Polish brigands. The expected higher return may have made the climb somewhat more worthwhile. However, Janosik was questioned specifically during hi s tri al whether he had also robbed in Poland : an indication that the border was crossed by hi ghwaymen from both sides, but also of the authorities' concern about possible contacts with leaders of the Rak6cz i upri sing who defected to Pol and after their final defeat in 1711. 31 Rudo Brtan "Na tropie Janosika i polskich zb6jnik6w." Pami~tnik Slowiariski 18, pp. 167-186. �92 SLOVAKIA Janosik:' s victims and spoils While the list was certainly not complete, Janosik's trial revealed rather meager, and some bizarre spoils from hi s only full-time robbing season from the spring to the fall of 1712: several guns, including a "valuable" one, unimpressive amounts of cash, some jewelry, as well as two ladies' wigs and elegant ladies' clothing impossible to be worn by villagers and therefore awkward to sell or donate in those days. However, Uhorcfk said Janosfk's highway robberies yielded more. Among other things, he apparently accumulated almost two bushels of coins, enough cloth to dress 300 men, and maintained a stash of weapons in another hiding place. Although cloth may appear to be an unlikely booty, it was among the brigands' prized possessions. It was needed to repair their clothing, which was more prone to wear and tear, yet less readily replaceable in case of damage than the clothes of law-abiding subjects. 32 Rolls of cloth, not ready-made clothes, were loaded in merchants' wagons that were attacked by brigands. Cloth was also among the more durable goods in their loot, but not as easy to exchange as money, jewelry, or guns, so the brigands were likely to have a surplus of cloth in their hiding places. 33 Uhorcfk also spoke of Janosfk's attacks on small detachments of the Imperial and Royal Army which yielded weapons, ammunition, and on one occasion a carriage. Janosfk admitted robbing men and women, commoners as well as three noblemen , a clergyman, another clergyman's wife, a blacksmith (he did not respond to this charge), a goldsmith, a butcher, a cloth trader, and wine traders. He robbed them on the road, in their homes, in the woods, even on the Vah River (see below), emphasized the prosecutor. Of all the regional authorities, Liptov County was probably the most bitter about Janosfk's actions because of his assault on Imperial and Royal Officer Rudolf Schardon's wife and her retinue. Slovak and Polish sources commonly say she was Officer Schardon 's widow. One author contradicts thi s without giving his 32 John S. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, Brigandage and Irredentism in Mo- dem Greece /821-1912. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. 33 Jozef Kocis, Neznamy ... creates a weighty narrative about Janosfk's apparent revolutionary intentions from a historical report that guns and substantial amounts of cloth were discovered in some of his hiding places. �SLOVAKIA 93 reasons. 34 The trial proceedings refer to her as Schardonka (the ending -ka indicates that she was a woman) and as vojenskeho oficfra pani, which means "a military officer's lady [wife]" without any indication of her being a widow. Because her husband was employed by the Crown and the robbery took place while she was passing through Liptov, the law obligated the County to pay the Lady the damages, which must have been higher than usual due to her rank. Throughout his trial, Janosik maintained that he had not killed anyone, but the court still considered him a guilty party when a priest from Domaniza was "shot through" by two brigands from his band during a robbery. The priest, 58-year old Juraj Yrtik (also spelled Yertik), died a month later. Janosik was also accused of sacrilege target-shooting at a host (the Eucharistic bread) attached to a treetrunk. He neither denied, nor confirmed this charge. While it is not clear why so many authors call Lady Schardon a widow rather than a wife, some of the counterfactual information in modern writing about Janosik ' s robberies and victims stems from cross-linguistic confusion by Polish authors reading Slovak sources, which is then repeated by others. Thus, for example, one author has Janosik rob a magnate on his way to Turkey (do Turcji in Polish), while the person, John Radvanszky, County Lieutenant of Zvolen, was actually on his way to Turiec County (do Turca in Slovak) in north-central Slovakia. 35 Another author says that Janosik robbed a pastor' s wife as she was fetching water (po wodf! in Polish) from the Yah River. 36 It is not only unlikely for geographic and historical reasons because her village was not on the V ah and people used wells as their source of water, not the river. It is mistaken factually because the trial proceedings say that she was robbed about a half-day's journey from her home, while traveling down the Vah (po vode in Slovak) on a raft - a common means of transport provided comercially at that time. Such confusion about language and geography happens with some regularity and can affect the authors' arguments. For instance, Stanislaw Sroka believes that the village of Klenovec where Janosik was captured was in Liptov County , a mere geogra34 Jozef Kocis, Neznamy .. . Jace k Kotbu szewski , "Janosik ni eznany?" Literatura Judowa, vol. 3 1, no. 4-6, Jul y- December 1987, pp. 108-11 2, - p. 110. 36 Sroka, Janosik ... p. 50. 35 �SLOVAKIA 94 phic error, but the error then becomes Sroka's explanation of why Janosik was tried by Liptov County. Klenovec, however, was in Malohont County. The real reason for the location of Janosik's trial was that he was captured in Klenovec by the Liptov police (see below). Cross-linguistic confusion can lead to much farther-reaching fallacious conclusions. Jacek Kolbuszewski, the author who believes that Janosik robbed John Radvanszky on his way to Turkey, then 37 assumes that he was going to the funeral of Stephen Petrycy [sic], a former general in the Kuruc army, according to Kolbuszewski, who took refuge in Turkey in order to avoid persec ution by the Habsburgs. Kolbuszewski subsequently presents his conjecture as evidence to disprove a point made by another author, Jozef Koci s, 38 and accuses him of "keeping silent" about that apparent fact. Yet, Radvanszky was robbed in 1712 while traveling from Zvolen County to Turiec County in order to attend the funeral of Stephen Petr6czy de Petr6cz et Kaszavar (villages near Trencfn : the name could be Stefan Petrovicky of Petrovice and Koseca in modern Slovak spelling), sonin-law of the late Turiec County Chief Emerich Revay - not to Turkey to a conjectured funeral of Baron Stephen Petr6czy, born around 1620, a commander in the Kuruc insurgencies in the l 670- l 680s who sought refuge in Turkey after their failure . Baron Petr6czy would have to have been in his 90s had he died, as Kotbuszewski concludes, in 1712 when Radvanszky was robbed by Janosfk (the date of his death is actually unknown). Janosik, s capture Janosik was first caught, along with Uhorcfk, about a year after he joined Uhorcik's former band and became its leader. They were detained by Malohont County authorities in Klenovec in south37 Kotbuszewski , "Janosik ... " p. 110. Kocis, Neznamy ... Kotbuszewski's goal was to disprove Kocis's claims about Janosfk's sym pathies for the anti-Habsburg rebels by showing that Janosfk actually robbed a nobleman presumably supportive of the rebellion since he went to a former rebel ' s and political defector' s funeral. If Polish scholars had not misread the Slovak sources, which was the starting point for Kotbuszewski's disoriented conclusions about the historical figures, Kotbuszewski could have made the same argument without any reference to Petr6czy, because Janosfk ' s victim John Radvanszky, Zvolen County Lieutenant and minor poet born in 1666, was himself a former influential supporter of the Kuruc rebellion, Thokoly, as well as Francis Rak6czi. 38 �SLOVAKIA 95 central Slovakia, where Uhorcik had settled as Martin Mravec, on 26 October 1712 - around the end of the robbing season. Janosik probably came to spend the winter with his comrade under an assumed identity . They were put in jail in the Mansion of Hrachov but were released after they "proved" their innocence. Janosik's subsequent trial revealed that the proof rested mainly in fox furs and cheese passed on to the detaining authorities. Moreover, the County Lieutenant of Malohont 39 who testified on their behalf had earlier received a prized rifle from Uhorcik. The historical, decorated weapon came from Janosik's loot when his band ambushed Baron Paul Revay. Janosik was arrested again while still in Klenovec before he had a chance to start his next robbing season, and so was "Mravec" for giving him shelter for the winter. Although in another county, this time he was traced and captured by the Liptov police put on special alert after the robbery of Lady Schardon. They were transferred to Svaty Mikulas, 40 the seat of Liptov County, where Uhorcik 's identity was eventually discovered. JaI1osik's sentence Janosik's trial took place on 16-17 March 1713. The Kingdom ' s main statutes were contained in the Tripartitum of 1514,41 and two subsequent royal decrees. Chapter I, Titulus XV, Paragraph I of the Tripartitum mandated that highwaymen be hanged, broken upon the wheel, impaled, or beheaded, as a warning to others. When the Habsburgs added the Kingdom to their lands, they tried to limit various laws contained in the Tripartitum, especially those that gave more privileges to its nobles and greater self-government to its counties and some municipalities than were granted in other Habsburg lands, but they reinforced some other laws including those against brigandage. Emperor Ferdinand II iss ued a decree in 1625 "On pillaging vagabonds and highwaymen and on ways of handling them," whose 39 Pal Lan yi/Pavol Lani (1670-1733) was a prominent supporter of the Rak6czi insurgency. 40 Now called Liptovsky Mikulas. 41 Tripartitum opus iuris consuetudinarii incly ti regni Hungariae partiumque annexarum , by Stephen Werboczy (1460-1541), presented to the Diet in 1514 and published by the author in Vienna in 1517. Although not a fo rmall y adopted document, it was used as the authoritati ve compend ium of the Kingdom's customary law. �96 SLOVAKIA Article XIII mandated that hi ghwaymen and similar criminals be tortured if their testimonies were not comprehensive and convincing. The decision to apply torture was regulated in the Kingdom by a widely used book of comments on the Tripartitum from 1619,42 whose Article 8, Section 6 required that the defendant be rel eased without torture if the preliminary proceedings did not raise sufficient suspicions about the truthfulness of his denial of guilt. Emperor Ferdinand Ill 's decree from 1655 contained Article XXVI , which prohibited any leniency or pardon in such trials. Additionally , Emperor Leopold I decreed in Article XVII in 1659 that those providing shelter to brigands be executed as well. Janosik's assigned defense lawyer Palugyay described him as a former victim of Francis Rak6czi 's insurgents and played up his loyalty to the Crown demonstrated by his apparent eagerness to join the Imperial and Royal Army. Palugyay also stressed that although submitted to both the light and severe levels of torture, Janosik denied having been guilty of the murder of the Reverend Yrtik. Under the Kingdom 's legislation it meant that the defendant (called the "accused" then) was to be seen as innocent of the crime. Although people submitted to torture did not normally survive for more than three days - if for no additional injuries, then due to the internal hemorrhage and other damage to the joints pulled out of their sockets during stretching - the county was obligated to pay an annual allowance to the family of the accused who failed to admit guilt under torture. Janosfk's defense lawyer called for his release because, according to Palugay, he certainly regretted his actions and would mend his ways. Yet, Janosik did admit to highway robbery, and the court still considered him an accomplice in the priest' s murder. He was sentenced to death. As usual in those days , it was a public execution. In Janosfk' s case, a hook was threaded through his left side, and he was left dangling on the gallows to die - a fairly common execution then especially for brigand leaders, although this was the only instance of its implementation by Liptov County between 1700 and 1715.43 42 Directio methodica processus judiciarii; Juris consuetudinarii lnclyti Regni Hun gariae .. . , by Johannes Kitonich de Koztanicza [Ivan Kitonic/Janos Kaszony i of Kostajnica] , Tymavia: [Tmava] : Anno Domini MDCXIX. 43 Stanistaw Dzieciolowski in an interview with Zdena Sisova "Odpocfva Janosfk na dne Liptovskej Mary?" Slovenske dotyky Maj 2002, p. 7. �SLOVAKIA 97 Uhorcik's identity was not discovered until after the first day of his trial during which he was still taken to be a Martin Mravec. He was sentenced more than a month after Janosik, on 21 April 1713 . He was broken upon the wheel, another common form of execution. As an act of benevolence, perhaps obtained by the County Lieutenant of Malohont who testified on Janosik ' s and Uhorcik's behalf at their trials, the court ordered that his neck be broken first. The burial place of either of the brigands is unknown. Corpses were often left hanging or otherwise exposed as a warning for a period of time after the criminals' execution and then di sposed of unceremoniously. Conclusion The trial proceedings, effectively the only extant source of information about Janosik, offer a meager picture of his life because he disclosed very little before or under torture. Most questions posed by the interrogators remained unanswered. All that transpires from the proceedings besides some of his robberies is that he was loyal to his fellow-criminals, that he remained so under severe torture, and that he proved to be a cunning liar before severe torture more-or-less silenced him. When he gave answers, they were often misleading or quite untrue, crafted to protect his accomplices. For example, while Uhorcik, still known to the authorities only as Martin Mravec, was awaiting his trial in the same building, Janosik was telling the interrogators that Uhorcik had been killed by another brigand several years earlier. Most of the accomplices Janosik divulged were already dead or believed to be dead. He claimed not to know the whereabouts of the others whose names came up during the interrogation. He did not di sclose the names of those who gave him shelter. Uhorcfk's testimony a month later revealed that Janosik had withheld the names of at least a half of his fellow brigands. Even without the strict Imperial and Royal decrees on brigandage, several factors would have probably contributed to Janosik's harsh punishment by Liptov County anyway: the damages that the county had to pay to Lady Schardon; the blame it probably received from the monarc hy's central authorities and the county 's subsequent increased efforts to eradicate hi ghway robbery; Janosik's origin in Terchova known for its support to highwaymen ; Janosik 's participation in the Francis Rak6czi uprising against the Habsburgs, which �98 SLOVAKIA the judge reiterated before reading his sentence; and finally , susp icions of anti-Catholic and heretic sentiments reflected in hi s insurgent past and in the alleged target-shooting at hosts augmented by his presence at the killing of a priest. In a broader context, the existence of the enormous gap between what is documented about Juraj Janosfk and his modern myth is unremarkable. Discrepancies, elevations or degradations, are common, universal features of historical mythology. Equally pervasive are folk legends about characters from the feudal past who "took from the rich and gave to the poor" and defended the commoners from the injustices of the masters. Such tales dot the Eurasian continent from English Robin Hood at its north-western periphery all the way to Korean Hong Kildong and Japanese Oyake Akahachi at its south-eastern edge. What makes Janosfk 's myth in Slovakia special (which applies only partly in the Czech Republic and decidedly less so in Poland) is the manner in which it was first embraced and molded by the intellectuals around the middle of the 19 th century44 and then by academia from around the middle of the 20 th century, and the degree to which his intellectualized and academic myth incorporated the notion that it is not talking merely about folk mythology (whose modern shape has actually been largely formed by Janosfk' s myth created in high culture), but that it is also talking about a real hi storical character. 44 Yotruba, " Hang Him Hi gh .. ." � SLOVAKIA 81 A HIGHWAYMAN'S LIFE: EXTANT DOCUMENTS v~ ABOUT JANOSIK ~ Martin Votruba "Our salvation can come only from Janosik," lamented a Czech blogger over the budget proposals in Prague. 1 In Poland, a group of developers has been working on recalcitrant software intended to undermine the program called Platnik ("Payer"), which is mandatory for employers to handle social security payments and works only with Microsoft Windows. The leader of the developers named their open-source software Janosik.2 Both of these people invoked the name of a brigand who robbed three hundred years ago in the northern and central predominantly Slovak counties in the Habsburg monarchy, was caught, tried and hanged. About a century after Janosfk's execution, his image began to emerge as the local embodiment of the pervasive myth of a hero who takes from the rich and gives to the poor. The folk stories, Romantic poems, and the more recent films ascribe 3 to him other quite universally idolized trappings, the ones that, for example, helped to generate Hollywood 's legendary rebel stars - he was good looking, single, made a stash of money, lived wild, and died young. 4 All of this is contained in Janosfk's modern Slovak, Czech, and Polish mythology. Practically none of that, however, finds any support in the existing evidence about the actual brigand 's life. 1 Hana Fonminkova, I Oct. 2003 , http: //www neraweb cz/index. php?stype-all&id=632. 2 Danuta Frey, "Janosik chce rozgryzc program Ptatnik." Rzeczpospolita, 6-7 Dec. 2004. 3 Dozens of books, thousands of stories, and popular and academic articles, at least nine plays, six films, one TV series, several classical compositions, and one opera th have been dedicated to Janosfk since the 19 century. His legend was discussed in this journal by Patricia A. Krafcik, "Janosik: Unraveling the Man from the Legend." Slovakia 33, no. 60-6 1 (1987-1988): 7-22. 4 Martin Votruba, " Hang Him High: The Elevation of Janosfk to an Ethnic Icon ." Slavic Review, vol. 56, no. I, Spring 2006, pp. 24-44. �82 SLOVAKIA Name variations There was a historical figure whose name was close or identical to Juraj Janosfk,5 who was sentenced for highway robbery and executed at the age of 25 in 1713. The limited sources about his actual life are the proceedings from his trial and an earlier interrogation, the proceedings from the trial with hi s friend and accomplice Tomas Uhorcfk, whom Janosik replaced as the leader of his band, and several brief records maintained by landlords. The trial proceedings were edited and published by several authors before most of them appeared together for the first time as an appendix to a book on Janosik in 1952. 6 The proceedings from his trial gave three versions of his last name: Janosik, Janosiak and Janosak. There are variations in the records of Uhorcfk ' s name, too. For instance, Janosik referred to him as Uhnk during his trial. Each spelling of Janosfk's name indicates a slightly different pronunciation, but that was not unusual at that time. Historically , people had only one - given - name, and what we know as the last name developed gradually, along with bureaucratic record-keeping, from attributes used to distinguish persons with the same given name, or from various nicknames. The bureaucratic effort to standardize people 's last (and first) names started in Catholic Europe with the Vatican-sponsored Council of Trent (1545-1563). Although the practice of maintaining the same last name within a family became quite common in the Habsburg 7 monarchy, where the Slovaks lived, by the I 600s, it was not formalized until the Imperial and Royal 8 Edict on Family Names was issued in 1787 - perhaps 5 [YOUray YAHnosheek] Ju raj is the Slovak version of George, the nicknames are Jura, Jurko, Dura. 6 Andrej Melichercfk, Janosikovska tradfcia na Slovensku Bratislava: Nakladatel'stvo Slovenskej akademie vied a umenf, 1952, pp. 165-176. 7 Often spelled Hapsburg in English history books. 8 "Imperi al and Royal" were standard attributes of a host of ' federal' institutions in the Habsburg monarchy. They indicated that the ruling monarch was the hereditary king of several kingdoms-provinces th at compri sed the Habsburgs' personal possessions, including the Kingdom of Hungary , and at the same time the emperor of a looser association of German states. The terms Habsburg monarchy and Austrian Empire usually refer only to the Habsburgs' personal possessions whose core were the Kingdom of Hungary (today: Slovakia, Hungary , Croatia), Kingdom of Bohemia, Margravi ate of Moravia (together today : the Czec h Republic) , Austria, and �SLOVAKIA 83 the first law on names in Europe. The three pronunciations of Janosfk 's last name during his trial are not indicative of any confusion about the captive' s identity. Birth date and place According to the trial proceedings, Juraj Janosfk came from the north-west Slovak village of Terchova. 9 Birth and death records were rare, or non-existent in the more distant past, but the maintenance of baptismal and burial records by parishes was among the guidelines set forth by the Council of Trent and became widely practiced by both the Slovak Catholic and Lutheran Churches. A governmentsponsored law on recording births and deaths was not adopted in the Habsburg monarchy until 1828. Baptismal records from the Varin parish that comprised Terchova contain the names of five babies christened in 1687-1688 that could have grown up to be the Juraj Janosfk sentenced in 1713. '0 Without discussing their choice, authors mostly give one of the dates as his true entry - commonly 25 February 1688, father Martin and mother Anna Czisznek or Czisznik, occasionally 16 May 1688, father Michal and mother Barbara Cingel. Only one, not particularly reliable, source makes an argument why the entry of 25 February is to be seen as more likely than the others: when Juraj's father bought his son out of military service in 1710, the father's name was apparently recorded as Martin Janosik. 11 However, if Juraj Janosfk, the brigand executed in March 1713, were baptized on 25 February, other entries in the baptismal records would show him as having a younger brother Jan. That would appear to be at odds with the record of a trial with Jan Janosik in December 1713 during which Jan was identified as an older brother of the executed brigand Juraj . The issue is complicated because the existing baptismal records are not sufficiently consistent and complete, because the name Jan, introduced to Europe through which also incorporated parts of their modern neighboring countries - Italy, Poland, Romania and others. 9 [TERkhova] 10 Rudo Brian, "Na tropie Janosika i polskich zb6jnik6w." Pam(:tnik Slowianski, vo l. 18, 1968, pp. I 67-186; and Rudo Brian, " Pat' Janosikov - ktory je ten pravy?" Nede/ha pravda, 3 Feb. 1978, p. 18. 11 The llles hazy archives, Strecno estate, Vol. 19, No. 15 as referenced in Jozef Kocis, Neznamy Janos1k, Bratislava: Yydavatel'stvo Osveta, l 986, p. 47 . �84 SLOVAKIA the New Testament, has historicall y been the most co mmon given name in Slovak (like its Anglicized version John in English), and the family name Janosfk 12 was, and still is, common in Terchova and vicinity (67 listings in the telephone directory) . It al so occurs elsewhere in Slovakia, and spread even to the United States where its frequency ranks as the 35,524 th most common name. 13 There is some inconsistency in the reading of the last name of Janosik 's mother among those who opt for 25 February as the date of his baptism. Many modem authors transcribe the recorded old spelling of Anna 's last name (Czisznek or Czisznik), without further explanation, as Cesnek, a few others as Cfsnik. Cesnek is a probable reading because such last names are still common in the area (29 telephone directory listings), while Cfsnik or other plausible modernized versions of the old spelling are absent there. Nothing is known about Janosfk 's life until he was between 15 and 21 years old - the time of the Francis Rak6czi uprising, which Janosik joined at an unknown age and for an unknown period of time according to the trial proceedings. Folk tales, as well as the first two film s about him, 14 depict him as a former seminary student who turned to brigandage after his parents were abused by the landlord. The earliest written reference to the legend of Janosfk 's schooling comes from 1809. 15 It says that he was popularly believed to have been a student of the humanities, not of theology. However, no preserved document and nothing in the trial proceedings suggests an educated Janosik. 12 It originated as a Slovak variation on Janos - the Hungarian version of the Biblical name John in English, Jan in Slovak. Janos was occas ionall y used as a ni ckname fo r persons named Jan by the Slovaks , too, and sometimes appeared instead of the th Slovak Jan in the Kingdom' s records. But durin g the 17 century, Janosik and its variations had become established Slovak fa mily names . 13 U.S. Census Burea u, Population Divi sio n, Population Anal ys is and Evaluati on Staff as quoted by Rhett A. Butler in "Most Common Names and Surnames in the U.S." at mongabay com. 14 Jan osfk directed by Jaros lav Jerry Siake l', Tatra Film, Chi cago, 192 1; Janostk directed by Martin Frie, A- B Studio, Praha [Prague] , I935. 15 Bohuslav Tablic, a 3-page unnumbered foo tnote to "Janossjk Liptowsky Laupeznjk ," in S/owensstj W ersso wcy. Collecta revirescunt. S wazek druhf. We Wacove [Yac]: v Antonjna Gotljba pry wil. Knehtlac itele, 1809, pp. 120-1 23 . �SLOVAKIA 85 The Kingdom's situation The trial proceedings begin to reveal glimpses of Janosfk 's life with him taking part in the Franci s Rak6czi 16 uprising of 1703-1711. It was a massive religious and separatist movement in the Kingdom of Hungary aga inst the Habsburg dynasty, which ruled it from Vienna (A ustria). The Slovaks were the majority inhabitants of the north-western , mostl y mountainous counties of the multi-ethnic 17 Kingdom. The Kingdom , established around the year 1000, was defeated and lost its sovereignty in the 1500s, and was incorporated as a province in the expanding Habsburg monarchy. The Kingdom was 90% Protestant (Lutheran in the Slovak areas) in the early 1600s, but by the mid- l 600s, the Vatican-allied Habsburgs began forcibly to reCatholicize it, and also increased their efforts to further reduce the Kingdom 's remaining limited self-government. The uprising led by nobleman Franci s Rak6czi II was the last of a series of substantial , but economically destructive armed attempts in the Kingdom to reverse that course. 18 He was Catholic, but in favor of the Kingdom 's independence and religious freedom. Janosik the insurgent It is not known when and under what circumstances Janosik joined Rak6czi 's rebel troops. It is not known , either, how he became a soldier in the Habsburg army later. The Rak6czi rebels suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Trencfn 19 (about 60 miles south-west 16 [RAHkotsee], Francis Rak:6czi II, Prince of Transylvani a, born on 27 March I 676. After his fin al defeat, he and some of his supporters initially defected to Poland. He eventu all y died in exi le in Turkey on 8 April 1735. 17 The country's language of admi nistration and education from high school up was Latin , which was no one ' s mother ton gue. The languages of individual ethnic groups, most of whom li ved in their majority areas, were used in everyday life, local businesses, emerging literatures, etc. The ethni c gro ups of the Kingdom of Hungary inc luded the Slovaks, Magyars ([MAHdars] often called Hungarians), Croats, Romani ans, Germans, Ru syns, Roma (Gypsies), and others. The Slovaks were in the majority in about 15 counties in the Kingdom ' s mountainous north-west (today's Slovakia) customari ly called the "Upper Co untry" in the Kingdo m, which is usuall y rendered as Upper Hungary in English. 1 8The major anti-Habsburg insurgenc ies that affected the Slovak counti es extensive ly were (the year of inception and leader): 1604 Stephen Bocskay, 16 19 Gabriel Bethlen, 1644 George Rak:6czi, 1678 Emerich Thokoly, 1703 Francis Rak:6czi II . 19 [TRENtsheen); in West Slovakia on the Yah River �86 SLOVAKIA of Terc hova) the actual fightin g took pl ace at Hamre, a haml et and originall y a forge site two miles south of Trencfn) on 3 August 1708. The Habsburgs had taken full control of the Kingdom by the time of Janosfk's tri al. It therefore needs to be taken with a grai n of salt that hi s defen se lawyer Baltazar Palugyay portrayed Janosik as the Emperor's loyal subj ect at hi s tri al, and insisted that Janosik had eage rl y and willingly enlisted in the Habsburg army during the upri sing. Authors mostly speculate that Janosfk first left the Rak6czi rebe ls, returned to Terchova, and was subsequentl y drafted by the Imperial and Royal Army. Another possibility put forward is that he was captured during the Battle of Trencfn and turned into a soldier, 20 which was what happe ned to hundreds of insurge nts on th at occasion. No records document either ass umption. Janosik the loyalist and a brigand's assistant Once in the Imperial and Royal Army, Janosik was stationed at Bytca Castle, 25 miles from his home. He was made a prison guard . During hi s trial, Janosik admitted providing unspecified services to Tomas Uhorcfk,2 1 a brigand leader he ld in the castle's dungeons. Uhorcik managed to escape in the fa ll of 1710 while Janosik still served at Bytca. Janosik 's father bought Ju raj out of military service a month later. This seq uence of events that emanates from the trial proceedings gave ri se to later spec ul ation s that Janosik may have actu ally he lped Uhorcfk to escape. Family background The statement from Janosik's trial that hi s father had bought him out of military service, for which he had to have enough spare money, appears to contrad ict the co mmon, but undoc umented , assertions that Janosik came fro m a particul arl y poor farmer's famil y. The existing records from the landlord of Terchova ' s estate around 1700 do not li st the Janosfk famil y among those obligated to work for a day or two each week in the landlord ' s field s22 - a common duty of fe ud al subj ects. It could mean that members of the Janosik fa mil y °Koc is, Neznamy ... 2 21 [TOmahsh OOhortsheek], from the village of Predmi er near Turzovka. Andrej Melichercfk, Janosikovska tradfcia na Slovensku. Brati slava: Nakladatel'stvo SAY , 1952. 22 �SLOVAKIA 87 were still obligated to work, but were among the poorest, almost landless families and therefore not entered in the records of households with farms; or it could be due to a contract between some of the original settlers of the village and a past landlord. Numerous Slovak villages originated as contractual settlements of a landlord's unimproved property in earlier centuries. Finally, Janosfk 's family could have been prosperous enough to be able to pay the landlord instead of providing labor services. Besides these historical reasons, the absence of an entry for the Janosfks in the landlord 's records could also be due to deficient record-keeping, or to lost documents. If the Janosfks could be shown to have been a particularly poor family, it would increase the likelihood that the money they used to buy Juraj out was not theirs, and that the Janosfks may have received it for that purpose from Uhorcfk who was grateful for Juraj's unspecified services in the dungeons (possibly including his escape). By the fall of 1710, Uhorcfk had had about eight robbing seasons behind him , which would have allowed him to accumulate some disposable cash. Highwaymen Other court records show the inhabitants of Terchova to have been fervent supporters of brigands. 23 That ties in with Uhorcfk's testimony, according to which Janosik sometimes stayed with the teacher at Terchova, and the local tavern-keeper would bring him food. Juraj Janosfk's brother Jan was hanged for highway robbery ten months after Juraj. 24 Highway robbery was common in Europe until the advent of modern times, which brought about increased policing, personal record-tracing, education, perhaps honesty, and new, less arduous forms of crime. The first mention of brigands in the Slovak region comes from the Legend of Saints Zoerardus and Benedict recorded in 1064. Two ancient north-south trade routes from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean passed through eastern Slovakia. The merchants' caravans were among the earliest lucrative targets for highway robbery. Legal records of highway robberies and 23 Stefan Kazimfr, "O novych dokumentoch k janosikovskej legende." Cudove cftanie Vol. 3, No. 6, 1957. 24 Stanistaw Sroka, Janosik: Pra wdziwa historia karpackiego zb6jnika. Krakow [Cracow]: Wydawnictwo Homini, 2004, p. 41; Kocis, Neznamy .. . p. 86. �88 SLOVAKIA trials with brigands begin to accumulate in the late 15 th century and do not start to dwindle until the mid-19 th century. One of the first known brigand bands in the Slovak counties, led by Fedor Hlavaty, operated in the north-east (Saris County). Its 50 members included Slovaks, Poles, and Rusyns.25 In 1493, Hlavaty sent a ransom letter to the town of Bardejov threatening to burn it down unless the Town Council paid a hefty compensation for the execution of four of Hlavaty's highwaymen. Incentives to rob in the 1600s The religious-cum-separatist wars of the 1i" century caused a great deal of destruction in the Kingdom already harmed by decades of attacks by the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire from the south. 26 Highway robbery must have appeared to be a way out to some of those impoverished by the developments. The brigands' ranks were also increased by displaced soldiers made redundant by both the insurgent and the Habsburg armies after the resolution of each rebellion. With the reduced, or periodicall y absent authority of the monarch, some noblemen, too, turned their hill-top castles to brigands' nests, armed large bands and in addition to highway robbery, raided villages, as well as their peers' residences. The Kingdom therefore saw a jump in highway robberies in the 17 th century.2 7 25 The Rusyns, also called Ruthenians, are an East Slav ic ethni c group (as opposed to the West Slavic Slovaks and Poles) who li ve as a recogni zed minority in the north-eastern parts of Slovakia, as well as in so uth-eastern Poland - often called L emkos there. Their acti vists call for a recognition of their much more substantial numbers in south- western Ukraine where the authorities insist they are Ukrainians. 26 The Slovak counties never fell to the Turks, but es peciall y the southern ones were continuall y harassed and attacked. The fac t that the mostl y Magyar/Hungarian counties (today's Hungary) fell under the Ottoman rule and became their prov ince of Ma1,aristan fo r about l 50 years added to the disruption of the economy of the Slovak counties and brought in some ethni c Hungari ans, especiall y noblemen, who ran away north fro m the encroaching Turks. 27 Although just a pass ing reference has been preserved about him , the name of briga nd leader Adamcik survived from the 1630s in fo lklore, and was later added to the list of Janosik 's band members in fo lk tales. The name Ilcfk - another of Janosik's comrades in fo lk stories - has a similar, albeit somewhat later origin. �SLOVAKIA 89 Highwaymen's seasons In the Kingdom , and in Central Europe in general, the brigands' season was limited by the climate. Late summer and early fall was the time when seasonal sheepfolds in mountain pastures were abandoned and the flocks were dri ven back to villages. These shepherds played an important role in hi ghwaymen 's support networks. Cold winters made clandestine surviva l in the Slovak mountai ns almost impossible. Moreover, Europe was at the height of its Little Ice Age (l 560-1850). The deciduous forests at the lower elevations lose leaves and provide less cover, and while the higher elevations have spruce and fir trees that do not lose their needles, they are also colder and therefore even less suitable for winter subsistence 28 . Snow tracks made the brigands easily traceable. But brigands needed villagers ' support year-round. In the winter, they needed farmers to accept them as hired hands, and even their help to cover up their identities and summer acti vity. In the summer, the brigands needed to obtain food , sell their loot, and learn about the police searches for them, not to mention their less operative desires to show off, party, booze and flirt. Some of the villagers in turn , made welcome profit on the services and goods rendered to the brigands, since they were paid for their silence as well. Moreover, the vi llagers were paid by people with periodic windfalls who are generall y inclined to overspending. According to the court records, the Janosiks were among Terchova 's notorious rowdy , thieving fa milies. Jano~fk' s participation During his trial , Janosik confessed that he joined Tomas Uhorcfk ' s band of brigands " around Michaelmas" 29 in 1711. Brigand bands in the Western Carpathians would traditionall y di sperse on or not long after Michaelmas and agree to reassemble on St. Adalbert's Feast-George mas (23-24 April). Numero us saints' days were associated with a variety of far m works and festivities , and were used to identify periods of the year in the same manner that months and parts of months are used today (" late September"). Michae lmas was a typical day of post-harvest fa irs. Janosik claimed that he had 28 Some mountains aro und Terchova reach over 5,000 ft, some mountain ridges around Liptov County rise to 7,000 ft. 29 September 29, St. Michael' s Day. �90 SLOVAKIA joined the brigands at Uhorcik's insistence. It was customary that a new member would swear allegiance to the band leader°. The group he joined may have had about two to three dozen members, but that was always in a state of flux with highwaymen. Some were disabled or killed during robberies and chases, so me were caught, some dropped out, temporarily , or for good, and aspiring highwaymen joined. Janosfk's confession that Uhorcik handed the leadership of the band to him soon afterwards indicates that it was hardly as simple as Uhorcik looking up Janosik almost a year after the latter provided him with some incidental assistance in prison. Uhorcik had to have great tru st in Janosik in order to persuade his band of thugs that a rel ati ve newcomer should take over after him . That, in turn , suggests that Janosik's assistance at Bytca Castle may have extended to Uhorcik ' s escape, that they maintained contacts afterwards, that Uhorcfk 's band had already seen Janosik in action, and it opens to speculation the source of the money that his father used to buy Juraj out of military service. It is also poss ible that the members of Uhorcik's band already knew Janosik because he became involved with them earlier. The highwaymen's logistics Limited circumstantial evidence contradicts Janosfk's testimony that he did not meet with Uhorcik until a year after Uhorcik's escape and that he simply talked Janosik into joining his band on that single occasion. A court record hints that there could have been rather a pressing incentive for Janosik to turn from initially a brigands' assistant and perhaps a subsequent incidental brigand into a regular member of Uhorcik's band. On 30 September 1711 , a day after Michaelmas, the confessed time of Janosik's pledge to Uhorcfk, three of the Janosfks of Terchova were brought to court and charged with assault 30 In contrast with their life of crime, the pledge could appear quite pious - an indication that they perceived Christianity as part of a flexible set of beliefs in the supernatural rather than the strict doctrine with a specific moral code preached by the Church. A documented pledge in the band of Jakub Surovec from the 1730s said: " I swear to God eternal, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary and all the divine saints that I shall neither betray, nor cheat, nor yet abandon my companions in fortu ne, or misfortune. Thus help me God the Lord." �SLOVAKIA 91 and robbery .31 If they were Juraj Janosik' s family, and moreover, if he was among the suspects (and guilty), he might have preferred to remove himself from the village rather than face the charges and possibly be forced to reveal more of his recent past. The Habsburgs did not ban torture as an investi gati ve method until 1776. J ano~ik' s season Soon after 23-year old Janosik became the band 's leader, Uhorcfk , after nine seasons as a highwayman, retired to Klenovec in south-central Slovakia under the adopted name Martin Mravec. He married and became the village's hired shepherd and occasional musician (he also managed briefly to serve as the village's policeman). Janosfk's band robbed mainly in the north-central Slovak counties of Orava, Liptov, and Spis, sometimes to the south of them, and occasionally - still in the Habsburg monarchy - across the Kingdom 's north -western border in parts of Silesia and the Margrav iate of Moravia (both now in the Czech Republic). All of the three Slovak counties border Poland in the north , and Janosik identified several members of his band as coming from Poland, but no document has surfaced to confirm legends about his raids into the Kingdom of Poland. Simple economics may have played a role: while Moravia and Silesia were relatively wealthy, the Polish Podhale region north of Slovakia was poorer than the Slovak counties and with fewer noblemen 's residences, and therefore less attractive, especially since the border follows a rel atively high mountain ridge in Liptov and in parts of Spis and Orava, which was a substanti al obstacle to bringing back any loot except money. On the other hand, the Podhale folklore occasionally depicted the Slovak counties as desirable targets of Polish brigands. The expected higher return may have made the climb somewhat more worthwhile. However, Janosik was questioned specifically during hi s tri al whether he had also robbed in Poland : an indication that the border was crossed by hi ghwaymen from both sides, but also of the authorities' concern about possible contacts with leaders of the Rak6cz i upri sing who defected to Pol and after their final defeat in 1711. 31 Rudo Brtan "Na tropie Janosika i polskich zb6jnik6w." Pami~tnik Slowiariski 18, pp. 167-186. �92 SLOVAKIA Janosik:' s victims and spoils While the list was certainly not complete, Janosik's trial revealed rather meager, and some bizarre spoils from hi s only full-time robbing season from the spring to the fall of 1712: several guns, including a "valuable" one, unimpressive amounts of cash, some jewelry, as well as two ladies' wigs and elegant ladies' clothing impossible to be worn by villagers and therefore awkward to sell or donate in those days. However, Uhorcfk said Janosfk's highway robberies yielded more. Among other things, he apparently accumulated almost two bushels of coins, enough cloth to dress 300 men, and maintained a stash of weapons in another hiding place. Although cloth may appear to be an unlikely booty, it was among the brigands' prized possessions. It was needed to repair their clothing, which was more prone to wear and tear, yet less readily replaceable in case of damage than the clothes of law-abiding subjects. 32 Rolls of cloth, not ready-made clothes, were loaded in merchants' wagons that were attacked by brigands. Cloth was also among the more durable goods in their loot, but not as easy to exchange as money, jewelry, or guns, so the brigands were likely to have a surplus of cloth in their hiding places. 33 Uhorcfk also spoke of Janosfk's attacks on small detachments of the Imperial and Royal Army which yielded weapons, ammunition, and on one occasion a carriage. Janosfk admitted robbing men and women, commoners as well as three noblemen , a clergyman, another clergyman's wife, a blacksmith (he did not respond to this charge), a goldsmith, a butcher, a cloth trader, and wine traders. He robbed them on the road, in their homes, in the woods, even on the Vah River (see below), emphasized the prosecutor. Of all the regional authorities, Liptov County was probably the most bitter about Janosfk's actions because of his assault on Imperial and Royal Officer Rudolf Schardon's wife and her retinue. Slovak and Polish sources commonly say she was Officer Schardon 's widow. One author contradicts thi s without giving his 32 John S. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, Brigandage and Irredentism in Mo- dem Greece /821-1912. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. 33 Jozef Kocis, Neznamy ... creates a weighty narrative about Janosfk's apparent revolutionary intentions from a historical report that guns and substantial amounts of cloth were discovered in some of his hiding places. �SLOVAKIA 93 reasons. 34 The trial proceedings refer to her as Schardonka (the ending -ka indicates that she was a woman) and as vojenskeho oficfra pani, which means "a military officer's lady [wife]" without any indication of her being a widow. Because her husband was employed by the Crown and the robbery took place while she was passing through Liptov, the law obligated the County to pay the Lady the damages, which must have been higher than usual due to her rank. Throughout his trial, Janosik maintained that he had not killed anyone, but the court still considered him a guilty party when a priest from Domaniza was "shot through" by two brigands from his band during a robbery. The priest, 58-year old Juraj Yrtik (also spelled Yertik), died a month later. Janosik was also accused of sacrilege target-shooting at a host (the Eucharistic bread) attached to a treetrunk. He neither denied, nor confirmed this charge. While it is not clear why so many authors call Lady Schardon a widow rather than a wife, some of the counterfactual information in modern writing about Janosik ' s robberies and victims stems from cross-linguistic confusion by Polish authors reading Slovak sources, which is then repeated by others. Thus, for example, one author has Janosik rob a magnate on his way to Turkey (do Turcji in Polish), while the person, John Radvanszky, County Lieutenant of Zvolen, was actually on his way to Turiec County (do Turca in Slovak) in north-central Slovakia. 35 Another author says that Janosik robbed a pastor' s wife as she was fetching water (po wodf! in Polish) from the Yah River. 36 It is not only unlikely for geographic and historical reasons because her village was not on the V ah and people used wells as their source of water, not the river. It is mistaken factually because the trial proceedings say that she was robbed about a half-day's journey from her home, while traveling down the Vah (po vode in Slovak) on a raft - a common means of transport provided comercially at that time. Such confusion about language and geography happens with some regularity and can affect the authors' arguments. For instance, Stanislaw Sroka believes that the village of Klenovec where Janosik was captured was in Liptov County , a mere geogra34 Jozef Kocis, Neznamy .. . Jace k Kotbu szewski , "Janosik ni eznany?" Literatura Judowa, vol. 3 1, no. 4-6, Jul y- December 1987, pp. 108-11 2, - p. 110. 36 Sroka, Janosik ... p. 50. 35 �SLOVAKIA 94 phic error, but the error then becomes Sroka's explanation of why Janosik was tried by Liptov County. Klenovec, however, was in Malohont County. The real reason for the location of Janosik's trial was that he was captured in Klenovec by the Liptov police (see below). Cross-linguistic confusion can lead to much farther-reaching fallacious conclusions. Jacek Kolbuszewski, the author who believes that Janosik robbed John Radvanszky on his way to Turkey, then 37 assumes that he was going to the funeral of Stephen Petrycy [sic], a former general in the Kuruc army, according to Kolbuszewski, who took refuge in Turkey in order to avoid persec ution by the Habsburgs. Kolbuszewski subsequently presents his conjecture as evidence to disprove a point made by another author, Jozef Koci s, 38 and accuses him of "keeping silent" about that apparent fact. Yet, Radvanszky was robbed in 1712 while traveling from Zvolen County to Turiec County in order to attend the funeral of Stephen Petr6czy de Petr6cz et Kaszavar (villages near Trencfn : the name could be Stefan Petrovicky of Petrovice and Koseca in modern Slovak spelling), sonin-law of the late Turiec County Chief Emerich Revay - not to Turkey to a conjectured funeral of Baron Stephen Petr6czy, born around 1620, a commander in the Kuruc insurgencies in the l 670- l 680s who sought refuge in Turkey after their failure . Baron Petr6czy would have to have been in his 90s had he died, as Kotbuszewski concludes, in 1712 when Radvanszky was robbed by Janosfk (the date of his death is actually unknown). Janosik, s capture Janosik was first caught, along with Uhorcfk, about a year after he joined Uhorcik's former band and became its leader. They were detained by Malohont County authorities in Klenovec in south37 Kotbuszewski , "Janosik ... " p. 110. Kocis, Neznamy ... Kotbuszewski's goal was to disprove Kocis's claims about Janosfk's sym pathies for the anti-Habsburg rebels by showing that Janosfk actually robbed a nobleman presumably supportive of the rebellion since he went to a former rebel ' s and political defector' s funeral. If Polish scholars had not misread the Slovak sources, which was the starting point for Kotbuszewski's disoriented conclusions about the historical figures, Kotbuszewski could have made the same argument without any reference to Petr6czy, because Janosfk ' s victim John Radvanszky, Zvolen County Lieutenant and minor poet born in 1666, was himself a former influential supporter of the Kuruc rebellion, Thokoly, as well as Francis Rak6czi. 38 �SLOVAKIA 95 central Slovakia, where Uhorcik had settled as Martin Mravec, on 26 October 1712 - around the end of the robbing season. Janosik probably came to spend the winter with his comrade under an assumed identity . They were put in jail in the Mansion of Hrachov but were released after they "proved" their innocence. Janosik's subsequent trial revealed that the proof rested mainly in fox furs and cheese passed on to the detaining authorities. Moreover, the County Lieutenant of Malohont 39 who testified on their behalf had earlier received a prized rifle from Uhorcik. The historical, decorated weapon came from Janosik's loot when his band ambushed Baron Paul Revay. Janosik was arrested again while still in Klenovec before he had a chance to start his next robbing season, and so was "Mravec" for giving him shelter for the winter. Although in another county, this time he was traced and captured by the Liptov police put on special alert after the robbery of Lady Schardon. They were transferred to Svaty Mikulas, 40 the seat of Liptov County, where Uhorcik 's identity was eventually discovered. JaI1osik's sentence Janosik's trial took place on 16-17 March 1713. The Kingdom ' s main statutes were contained in the Tripartitum of 1514,41 and two subsequent royal decrees. Chapter I, Titulus XV, Paragraph I of the Tripartitum mandated that highwaymen be hanged, broken upon the wheel, impaled, or beheaded, as a warning to others. When the Habsburgs added the Kingdom to their lands, they tried to limit various laws contained in the Tripartitum, especially those that gave more privileges to its nobles and greater self-government to its counties and some municipalities than were granted in other Habsburg lands, but they reinforced some other laws including those against brigandage. Emperor Ferdinand II iss ued a decree in 1625 "On pillaging vagabonds and highwaymen and on ways of handling them," whose 39 Pal Lan yi/Pavol Lani (1670-1733) was a prominent supporter of the Rak6czi insurgency. 40 Now called Liptovsky Mikulas. 41 Tripartitum opus iuris consuetudinarii incly ti regni Hungariae partiumque annexarum , by Stephen Werboczy (1460-1541), presented to the Diet in 1514 and published by the author in Vienna in 1517. Although not a fo rmall y adopted document, it was used as the authoritati ve compend ium of the Kingdom's customary law. �96 SLOVAKIA Article XIII mandated that hi ghwaymen and similar criminals be tortured if their testimonies were not comprehensive and convincing. The decision to apply torture was regulated in the Kingdom by a widely used book of comments on the Tripartitum from 1619,42 whose Article 8, Section 6 required that the defendant be rel eased without torture if the preliminary proceedings did not raise sufficient suspicions about the truthfulness of his denial of guilt. Emperor Ferdinand Ill 's decree from 1655 contained Article XXVI , which prohibited any leniency or pardon in such trials. Additionally , Emperor Leopold I decreed in Article XVII in 1659 that those providing shelter to brigands be executed as well. Janosik's assigned defense lawyer Palugyay described him as a former victim of Francis Rak6czi 's insurgents and played up his loyalty to the Crown demonstrated by his apparent eagerness to join the Imperial and Royal Army. Palugyay also stressed that although submitted to both the light and severe levels of torture, Janosik denied having been guilty of the murder of the Reverend Yrtik. Under the Kingdom 's legislation it meant that the defendant (called the "accused" then) was to be seen as innocent of the crime. Although people submitted to torture did not normally survive for more than three days - if for no additional injuries, then due to the internal hemorrhage and other damage to the joints pulled out of their sockets during stretching - the county was obligated to pay an annual allowance to the family of the accused who failed to admit guilt under torture. Janosfk's defense lawyer called for his release because, according to Palugay, he certainly regretted his actions and would mend his ways. Yet, Janosik did admit to highway robbery, and the court still considered him an accomplice in the priest' s murder. He was sentenced to death. As usual in those days , it was a public execution. In Janosfk' s case, a hook was threaded through his left side, and he was left dangling on the gallows to die - a fairly common execution then especially for brigand leaders, although this was the only instance of its implementation by Liptov County between 1700 and 1715.43 42 Directio methodica processus judiciarii; Juris consuetudinarii lnclyti Regni Hun gariae .. . , by Johannes Kitonich de Koztanicza [Ivan Kitonic/Janos Kaszony i of Kostajnica] , Tymavia: [Tmava] : Anno Domini MDCXIX. 43 Stanistaw Dzieciolowski in an interview with Zdena Sisova "Odpocfva Janosfk na dne Liptovskej Mary?" Slovenske dotyky Maj 2002, p. 7. �SLOVAKIA 97 Uhorcik's identity was not discovered until after the first day of his trial during which he was still taken to be a Martin Mravec. He was sentenced more than a month after Janosik, on 21 April 1713 . He was broken upon the wheel, another common form of execution. As an act of benevolence, perhaps obtained by the County Lieutenant of Malohont who testified on Janosik ' s and Uhorcik's behalf at their trials, the court ordered that his neck be broken first. The burial place of either of the brigands is unknown. Corpses were often left hanging or otherwise exposed as a warning for a period of time after the criminals' execution and then di sposed of unceremoniously. Conclusion The trial proceedings, effectively the only extant source of information about Janosik, offer a meager picture of his life because he disclosed very little before or under torture. Most questions posed by the interrogators remained unanswered. All that transpires from the proceedings besides some of his robberies is that he was loyal to his fellow-criminals, that he remained so under severe torture, and that he proved to be a cunning liar before severe torture more-or-less silenced him. When he gave answers, they were often misleading or quite untrue, crafted to protect his accomplices. For example, while Uhorcik, still known to the authorities only as Martin Mravec, was awaiting his trial in the same building, Janosik was telling the interrogators that Uhorcik had been killed by another brigand several years earlier. Most of the accomplices Janosik divulged were already dead or believed to be dead. He claimed not to know the whereabouts of the others whose names came up during the interrogation. He did not di sclose the names of those who gave him shelter. Uhorcfk's testimony a month later revealed that Janosik had withheld the names of at least a half of his fellow brigands. Even without the strict Imperial and Royal decrees on brigandage, several factors would have probably contributed to Janosik's harsh punishment by Liptov County anyway: the damages that the county had to pay to Lady Schardon; the blame it probably received from the monarc hy's central authorities and the county 's subsequent increased efforts to eradicate hi ghway robbery; Janosik's origin in Terchova known for its support to highwaymen ; Janosik 's participation in the Francis Rak6czi uprising against the Habsburgs, which �98 SLOVAKIA the judge reiterated before reading his sentence; and finally , susp icions of anti-Catholic and heretic sentiments reflected in hi s insurgent past and in the alleged target-shooting at hosts augmented by his presence at the killing of a priest. In a broader context, the existence of the enormous gap between what is documented about Juraj Janosfk and his modern myth is unremarkable. Discrepancies, elevations or degradations, are common, universal features of historical mythology. Equally pervasive are folk legends about characters from the feudal past who "took from the rich and gave to the poor" and defended the commoners from the injustices of the masters. Such tales dot the Eurasian continent from English Robin Hood at its north-western periphery all the way to Korean Hong Kildong and Japanese Oyake Akahachi at its south-eastern edge. What makes Janosfk 's myth in Slovakia special (which applies only partly in the Czech Republic and decidedly less so in Poland) is the manner in which it was first embraced and molded by the intellectuals around the middle of the 19 th century44 and then by academia from around the middle of the 20 th century, and the degree to which his intellectualized and academic myth incorporated the notion that it is not talking merely about folk mythology (whose modern shape has actually been largely formed by Janosfk' s myth created in high culture), but that it is also talking about a real hi storical character. 44 Yotruba, " Hang Him Hi gh .. ." � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2007, Vol. 39 Description An account of the resource Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 81 A HIGHWAYMAN'S LIFE: EXTANT DOCUMENTS v~ ABOUT JANOSIK ~ Martin Votruba "Our salvation can come only from Janosik," lamented a Czech blogger over the budget proposals in Prague. 1 In Poland, a group of developers has been working on recalcitrant software intended to undermine the program called Platnik ("Payer"), which is mandatory for employers to handle social security payments and works only with Microsoft Windows. The leader of the developers named their open-source software Janosik.2 Both of these people invoked the name of a brigand who robbed three hundred years ago in the northern and central predominantly Slovak counties in the Habsburg monarchy, was caught, tried and hanged. About a century after Janosfk's execution, his image began to emerge as the local embodiment of the pervasive myth of a hero who takes from the rich and gives to the poor. The folk stories, Romantic poems, and the more recent films ascribe 3 to him other quite universally idolized trappings, the ones that, for example, helped to generate Hollywood 's legendary rebel stars - he was good looking, single, made a stash of money, lived wild, and died young. 4 All of this is contained in Janosfk's modern Slovak, Czech, and Polish mythology. Practically none of that, however, finds any support in the existing evidence about the actual brigand 's life. 1 Hana Fonminkova, I Oct. 2003 , http: //www neraweb cz/index. php?stype-all&id=632. 2 Danuta Frey, "Janosik chce rozgryzc program Ptatnik." Rzeczpospolita, 6-7 Dec. 2004. 3 Dozens of books, thousands of stories, and popular and academic articles, at least nine plays, six films, one TV series, several classical compositions, and one opera th have been dedicated to Janosfk since the 19 century. His legend was discussed in this journal by Patricia A. Krafcik, "Janosik: Unraveling the Man from the Legend." Slovakia 33, no. 60-6 1 (1987-1988): 7-22. 4 Martin Votruba, " Hang Him High: The Elevation of Janosfk to an Ethnic Icon ." Slavic Review, vol. 56, no. I, Spring 2006, pp. 24-44. 82 SLOVAKIA Name variations There was a historical figure whose name was close or identical to Juraj Janosfk,5 who was sentenced for highway robbery and executed at the age of 25 in 1713. The limited sources about his actual life are the proceedings from his trial and an earlier interrogation, the proceedings from the trial with hi s friend and accomplice Tomas Uhorcfk, whom Janosik replaced as the leader of his band, and several brief records maintained by landlords. The trial proceedings were edited and published by several authors before most of them appeared together for the first time as an appendix to a book on Janosik in 1952. 6 The proceedings from his trial gave three versions of his last name: Janosik, Janosiak and Janosak. There are variations in the records of Uhorcfk ' s name, too. For instance, Janosik referred to him as Uhnk during his trial. Each spelling of Janosfk's name indicates a slightly different pronunciation, but that was not unusual at that time. Historically , people had only one - given - name, and what we know as the last name developed gradually, along with bureaucratic record-keeping, from attributes used to distinguish persons with the same given name, or from various nicknames. The bureaucratic effort to standardize people 's last (and first) names started in Catholic Europe with the Vatican-sponsored Council of Trent (1545-1563). Although the practice of maintaining the same last name within a family became quite common in the Habsburg 7 monarchy, where the Slovaks lived, by the I 600s, it was not formalized until the Imperial and Royal 8 Edict on Family Names was issued in 1787 - perhaps 5 [YOUray YAHnosheek] Ju raj is the Slovak version of George, the nicknames are Jura, Jurko, Dura. 6 Andrej Melichercfk, Janosikovska tradfcia na Slovensku Bratislava: Nakladatel'stvo Slovenskej akademie vied a umenf, 1952, pp. 165-176. 7 Often spelled Hapsburg in English history books. 8 "Imperi al and Royal" were standard attributes of a host of ' federal' institutions in the Habsburg monarchy. They indicated that the ruling monarch was the hereditary king of several kingdoms-provinces th at compri sed the Habsburgs' personal possessions, including the Kingdom of Hungary , and at the same time the emperor of a looser association of German states. The terms Habsburg monarchy and Austrian Empire usually refer only to the Habsburgs' personal possessions whose core were the Kingdom of Hungary (today: Slovakia, Hungary , Croatia), Kingdom of Bohemia, Margravi ate of Moravia (together today : the Czec h Republic) , Austria, and SLOVAKIA 83 the first law on names in Europe. The three pronunciations of Janosfk 's last name during his trial are not indicative of any confusion about the captive' s identity. Birth date and place According to the trial proceedings, Juraj Janosfk came from the north-west Slovak village of Terchova. 9 Birth and death records were rare, or non-existent in the more distant past, but the maintenance of baptismal and burial records by parishes was among the guidelines set forth by the Council of Trent and became widely practiced by both the Slovak Catholic and Lutheran Churches. A governmentsponsored law on recording births and deaths was not adopted in the Habsburg monarchy until 1828. Baptismal records from the Varin parish that comprised Terchova contain the names of five babies christened in 1687-1688 that could have grown up to be the Juraj Janosfk sentenced in 1713. '0 Without discussing their choice, authors mostly give one of the dates as his true entry - commonly 25 February 1688, father Martin and mother Anna Czisznek or Czisznik, occasionally 16 May 1688, father Michal and mother Barbara Cingel. Only one, not particularly reliable, source makes an argument why the entry of 25 February is to be seen as more likely than the others: when Juraj's father bought his son out of military service in 1710, the father's name was apparently recorded as Martin Janosik. 11 However, if Juraj Janosfk, the brigand executed in March 1713, were baptized on 25 February, other entries in the baptismal records would show him as having a younger brother Jan. That would appear to be at odds with the record of a trial with Jan Janosik in December 1713 during which Jan was identified as an older brother of the executed brigand Juraj . The issue is complicated because the existing baptismal records are not sufficiently consistent and complete, because the name Jan, introduced to Europe through which also incorporated parts of their modern neighboring countries - Italy, Poland, Romania and others. 9 [TERkhova] 10 Rudo Brian, "Na tropie Janosika i polskich zb6jnik6w." Pam(:tnik Slowianski, vo l. 18, 1968, pp. I 67-186; and Rudo Brian, " Pat' Janosikov - ktory je ten pravy?" Nede/ha pravda, 3 Feb. 1978, p. 18. 11 The llles hazy archives, Strecno estate, Vol. 19, No. 15 as referenced in Jozef Kocis, Neznamy Janos1k, Bratislava: Yydavatel'stvo Osveta, l 986, p. 47 . 84 SLOVAKIA the New Testament, has historicall y been the most co mmon given name in Slovak (like its Anglicized version John in English), and the family name Janosfk 12 was, and still is, common in Terchova and vicinity (67 listings in the telephone directory) . It al so occurs elsewhere in Slovakia, and spread even to the United States where its frequency ranks as the 35,524 th most common name. 13 There is some inconsistency in the reading of the last name of Janosik 's mother among those who opt for 25 February as the date of his baptism. Many modem authors transcribe the recorded old spelling of Anna 's last name (Czisznek or Czisznik), without further explanation, as Cesnek, a few others as Cfsnik. Cesnek is a probable reading because such last names are still common in the area (29 telephone directory listings), while Cfsnik or other plausible modernized versions of the old spelling are absent there. Nothing is known about Janosfk 's life until he was between 15 and 21 years old - the time of the Francis Rak6czi uprising, which Janosik joined at an unknown age and for an unknown period of time according to the trial proceedings. Folk tales, as well as the first two film s about him, 14 depict him as a former seminary student who turned to brigandage after his parents were abused by the landlord. The earliest written reference to the legend of Janosfk 's schooling comes from 1809. 15 It says that he was popularly believed to have been a student of the humanities, not of theology. However, no preserved document and nothing in the trial proceedings suggests an educated Janosik. 12 It originated as a Slovak variation on Janos - the Hungarian version of the Biblical name John in English, Jan in Slovak. Janos was occas ionall y used as a ni ckname fo r persons named Jan by the Slovaks , too, and sometimes appeared instead of the th Slovak Jan in the Kingdom' s records. But durin g the 17 century, Janosik and its variations had become established Slovak fa mily names . 13 U.S. Census Burea u, Population Divi sio n, Population Anal ys is and Evaluati on Staff as quoted by Rhett A. Butler in "Most Common Names and Surnames in the U.S." at mongabay com. 14 Jan osfk directed by Jaros lav Jerry Siake l', Tatra Film, Chi cago, 192 1; Janostk directed by Martin Frie, A- B Studio, Praha [Prague] , I935. 15 Bohuslav Tablic, a 3-page unnumbered foo tnote to "Janossjk Liptowsky Laupeznjk ," in S/owensstj W ersso wcy. Collecta revirescunt. S wazek druhf. We Wacove [Yac]: v Antonjna Gotljba pry wil. Knehtlac itele, 1809, pp. 120-1 23 . SLOVAKIA 85 The Kingdom's situation The trial proceedings begin to reveal glimpses of Janosfk 's life with him taking part in the Franci s Rak6czi 16 uprising of 1703-1711. It was a massive religious and separatist movement in the Kingdom of Hungary aga inst the Habsburg dynasty, which ruled it from Vienna (A ustria). The Slovaks were the majority inhabitants of the north-western , mostl y mountainous counties of the multi-ethnic 17 Kingdom. The Kingdom , established around the year 1000, was defeated and lost its sovereignty in the 1500s, and was incorporated as a province in the expanding Habsburg monarchy. The Kingdom was 90% Protestant (Lutheran in the Slovak areas) in the early 1600s, but by the mid- l 600s, the Vatican-allied Habsburgs began forcibly to reCatholicize it, and also increased their efforts to further reduce the Kingdom 's remaining limited self-government. The uprising led by nobleman Franci s Rak6czi II was the last of a series of substantial , but economically destructive armed attempts in the Kingdom to reverse that course. 18 He was Catholic, but in favor of the Kingdom 's independence and religious freedom. Janosik the insurgent It is not known when and under what circumstances Janosik joined Rak6czi 's rebel troops. It is not known , either, how he became a soldier in the Habsburg army later. The Rak6czi rebels suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Trencfn 19 (about 60 miles south-west 16 [RAHkotsee], Francis Rak:6czi II, Prince of Transylvani a, born on 27 March I 676. After his fin al defeat, he and some of his supporters initially defected to Poland. He eventu all y died in exi le in Turkey on 8 April 1735. 17 The country's language of admi nistration and education from high school up was Latin , which was no one ' s mother ton gue. The languages of individual ethnic groups, most of whom li ved in their majority areas, were used in everyday life, local businesses, emerging literatures, etc. The ethni c gro ups of the Kingdom of Hungary inc luded the Slovaks, Magyars ([MAHdars] often called Hungarians), Croats, Romani ans, Germans, Ru syns, Roma (Gypsies), and others. The Slovaks were in the majority in about 15 counties in the Kingdom ' s mountainous north-west (today's Slovakia) customari ly called the "Upper Co untry" in the Kingdo m, which is usuall y rendered as Upper Hungary in English. 1 8The major anti-Habsburg insurgenc ies that affected the Slovak counti es extensive ly were (the year of inception and leader): 1604 Stephen Bocskay, 16 19 Gabriel Bethlen, 1644 George Rak:6czi, 1678 Emerich Thokoly, 1703 Francis Rak:6czi II . 19 [TRENtsheen); in West Slovakia on the Yah River 86 SLOVAKIA of Terc hova) the actual fightin g took pl ace at Hamre, a haml et and originall y a forge site two miles south of Trencfn) on 3 August 1708. The Habsburgs had taken full control of the Kingdom by the time of Janosfk's tri al. It therefore needs to be taken with a grai n of salt that hi s defen se lawyer Baltazar Palugyay portrayed Janosik as the Emperor's loyal subj ect at hi s tri al, and insisted that Janosik had eage rl y and willingly enlisted in the Habsburg army during the upri sing. Authors mostly speculate that Janosfk first left the Rak6czi rebe ls, returned to Terchova, and was subsequentl y drafted by the Imperial and Royal Army. Another possibility put forward is that he was captured during the Battle of Trencfn and turned into a soldier, 20 which was what happe ned to hundreds of insurge nts on th at occasion. No records document either ass umption. Janosik the loyalist and a brigand's assistant Once in the Imperial and Royal Army, Janosik was stationed at Bytca Castle, 25 miles from his home. He was made a prison guard . During hi s trial, Janosik admitted providing unspecified services to Tomas Uhorcfk,2 1 a brigand leader he ld in the castle's dungeons. Uhorcik managed to escape in the fa ll of 1710 while Janosik still served at Bytca. Janosik 's father bought Ju raj out of military service a month later. This seq uence of events that emanates from the trial proceedings gave ri se to later spec ul ation s that Janosik may have actu ally he lped Uhorcfk to escape. Family background The statement from Janosik's trial that hi s father had bought him out of military service, for which he had to have enough spare money, appears to contrad ict the co mmon, but undoc umented , assertions that Janosik came fro m a particul arl y poor farmer's famil y. The existing records from the landlord of Terchova ' s estate around 1700 do not li st the Janosfk famil y among those obligated to work for a day or two each week in the landlord ' s field s22 - a common duty of fe ud al subj ects. It could mean that members of the Janosik fa mil y °Koc is, Neznamy ... 2 21 [TOmahsh OOhortsheek], from the village of Predmi er near Turzovka. Andrej Melichercfk, Janosikovska tradfcia na Slovensku. Brati slava: Nakladatel'stvo SAY , 1952. 22 SLOVAKIA 87 were still obligated to work, but were among the poorest, almost landless families and therefore not entered in the records of households with farms; or it could be due to a contract between some of the original settlers of the village and a past landlord. Numerous Slovak villages originated as contractual settlements of a landlord's unimproved property in earlier centuries. Finally, Janosfk 's family could have been prosperous enough to be able to pay the landlord instead of providing labor services. Besides these historical reasons, the absence of an entry for the Janosfks in the landlord 's records could also be due to deficient record-keeping, or to lost documents. If the Janosfks could be shown to have been a particularly poor family, it would increase the likelihood that the money they used to buy Juraj out was not theirs, and that the Janosfks may have received it for that purpose from Uhorcfk who was grateful for Juraj's unspecified services in the dungeons (possibly including his escape). By the fall of 1710, Uhorcfk had had about eight robbing seasons behind him , which would have allowed him to accumulate some disposable cash. Highwaymen Other court records show the inhabitants of Terchova to have been fervent supporters of brigands. 23 That ties in with Uhorcfk's testimony, according to which Janosik sometimes stayed with the teacher at Terchova, and the local tavern-keeper would bring him food. Juraj Janosfk's brother Jan was hanged for highway robbery ten months after Juraj. 24 Highway robbery was common in Europe until the advent of modern times, which brought about increased policing, personal record-tracing, education, perhaps honesty, and new, less arduous forms of crime. The first mention of brigands in the Slovak region comes from the Legend of Saints Zoerardus and Benedict recorded in 1064. Two ancient north-south trade routes from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean passed through eastern Slovakia. The merchants' caravans were among the earliest lucrative targets for highway robbery. Legal records of highway robberies and 23 Stefan Kazimfr, "O novych dokumentoch k janosikovskej legende." Cudove cftanie Vol. 3, No. 6, 1957. 24 Stanistaw Sroka, Janosik: Pra wdziwa historia karpackiego zb6jnika. Krakow [Cracow]: Wydawnictwo Homini, 2004, p. 41; Kocis, Neznamy .. . p. 86. 88 SLOVAKIA trials with brigands begin to accumulate in the late 15 th century and do not start to dwindle until the mid-19 th century. One of the first known brigand bands in the Slovak counties, led by Fedor Hlavaty, operated in the north-east (Saris County). Its 50 members included Slovaks, Poles, and Rusyns.25 In 1493, Hlavaty sent a ransom letter to the town of Bardejov threatening to burn it down unless the Town Council paid a hefty compensation for the execution of four of Hlavaty's highwaymen. Incentives to rob in the 1600s The religious-cum-separatist wars of the 1i" century caused a great deal of destruction in the Kingdom already harmed by decades of attacks by the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire from the south. 26 Highway robbery must have appeared to be a way out to some of those impoverished by the developments. The brigands' ranks were also increased by displaced soldiers made redundant by both the insurgent and the Habsburg armies after the resolution of each rebellion. With the reduced, or periodicall y absent authority of the monarch, some noblemen, too, turned their hill-top castles to brigands' nests, armed large bands and in addition to highway robbery, raided villages, as well as their peers' residences. The Kingdom therefore saw a jump in highway robberies in the 17 th century.2 7 25 The Rusyns, also called Ruthenians, are an East Slav ic ethni c group (as opposed to the West Slavic Slovaks and Poles) who li ve as a recogni zed minority in the north-eastern parts of Slovakia, as well as in so uth-eastern Poland - often called L emkos there. Their acti vists call for a recognition of their much more substantial numbers in south- western Ukraine where the authorities insist they are Ukrainians. 26 The Slovak counties never fell to the Turks, but es peciall y the southern ones were continuall y harassed and attacked. The fac t that the mostl y Magyar/Hungarian counties (today's Hungary) fell under the Ottoman rule and became their prov ince of Ma1,aristan fo r about l 50 years added to the disruption of the economy of the Slovak counties and brought in some ethni c Hungari ans, especiall y noblemen, who ran away north fro m the encroaching Turks. 27 Although just a pass ing reference has been preserved about him , the name of briga nd leader Adamcik survived from the 1630s in fo lklore, and was later added to the list of Janosik 's band members in fo lk tales. The name Ilcfk - another of Janosik's comrades in fo lk stories - has a similar, albeit somewhat later origin. SLOVAKIA 89 Highwaymen's seasons In the Kingdom , and in Central Europe in general, the brigands' season was limited by the climate. Late summer and early fall was the time when seasonal sheepfolds in mountain pastures were abandoned and the flocks were dri ven back to villages. These shepherds played an important role in hi ghwaymen 's support networks. Cold winters made clandestine surviva l in the Slovak mountai ns almost impossible. Moreover, Europe was at the height of its Little Ice Age (l 560-1850). The deciduous forests at the lower elevations lose leaves and provide less cover, and while the higher elevations have spruce and fir trees that do not lose their needles, they are also colder and therefore even less suitable for winter subsistence 28 . Snow tracks made the brigands easily traceable. But brigands needed villagers ' support year-round. In the winter, they needed farmers to accept them as hired hands, and even their help to cover up their identities and summer acti vity. In the summer, the brigands needed to obtain food , sell their loot, and learn about the police searches for them, not to mention their less operative desires to show off, party, booze and flirt. Some of the villagers in turn , made welcome profit on the services and goods rendered to the brigands, since they were paid for their silence as well. Moreover, the vi llagers were paid by people with periodic windfalls who are generall y inclined to overspending. According to the court records, the Janosiks were among Terchova 's notorious rowdy , thieving fa milies. Jano~fk' s participation During his trial , Janosik confessed that he joined Tomas Uhorcfk ' s band of brigands " around Michaelmas" 29 in 1711. Brigand bands in the Western Carpathians would traditionall y di sperse on or not long after Michaelmas and agree to reassemble on St. Adalbert's Feast-George mas (23-24 April). Numero us saints' days were associated with a variety of far m works and festivities , and were used to identify periods of the year in the same manner that months and parts of months are used today (" late September"). Michae lmas was a typical day of post-harvest fa irs. Janosik claimed that he had 28 Some mountains aro und Terchova reach over 5,000 ft, some mountain ridges around Liptov County rise to 7,000 ft. 29 September 29, St. Michael' s Day. 90 SLOVAKIA joined the brigands at Uhorcik's insistence. It was customary that a new member would swear allegiance to the band leader°. The group he joined may have had about two to three dozen members, but that was always in a state of flux with highwaymen. Some were disabled or killed during robberies and chases, so me were caught, some dropped out, temporarily , or for good, and aspiring highwaymen joined. Janosfk's confession that Uhorcik handed the leadership of the band to him soon afterwards indicates that it was hardly as simple as Uhorcik looking up Janosik almost a year after the latter provided him with some incidental assistance in prison. Uhorcik had to have great tru st in Janosik in order to persuade his band of thugs that a rel ati ve newcomer should take over after him . That, in turn , suggests that Janosik's assistance at Bytca Castle may have extended to Uhorcik ' s escape, that they maintained contacts afterwards, that Uhorcfk 's band had already seen Janosik in action, and it opens to speculation the source of the money that his father used to buy Juraj out of military service. It is also poss ible that the members of Uhorcik's band already knew Janosik because he became involved with them earlier. The highwaymen's logistics Limited circumstantial evidence contradicts Janosfk's testimony that he did not meet with Uhorcik until a year after Uhorcik's escape and that he simply talked Janosik into joining his band on that single occasion. A court record hints that there could have been rather a pressing incentive for Janosik to turn from initially a brigands' assistant and perhaps a subsequent incidental brigand into a regular member of Uhorcik's band. On 30 September 1711 , a day after Michaelmas, the confessed time of Janosik's pledge to Uhorcfk, three of the Janosfks of Terchova were brought to court and charged with assault 30 In contrast with their life of crime, the pledge could appear quite pious - an indication that they perceived Christianity as part of a flexible set of beliefs in the supernatural rather than the strict doctrine with a specific moral code preached by the Church. A documented pledge in the band of Jakub Surovec from the 1730s said: " I swear to God eternal, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary and all the divine saints that I shall neither betray, nor cheat, nor yet abandon my companions in fortu ne, or misfortune. Thus help me God the Lord." SLOVAKIA 91 and robbery .31 If they were Juraj Janosik' s family, and moreover, if he was among the suspects (and guilty), he might have preferred to remove himself from the village rather than face the charges and possibly be forced to reveal more of his recent past. The Habsburgs did not ban torture as an investi gati ve method until 1776. J ano~ik' s season Soon after 23-year old Janosik became the band 's leader, Uhorcfk , after nine seasons as a highwayman, retired to Klenovec in south-central Slovakia under the adopted name Martin Mravec. He married and became the village's hired shepherd and occasional musician (he also managed briefly to serve as the village's policeman). Janosfk's band robbed mainly in the north-central Slovak counties of Orava, Liptov, and Spis, sometimes to the south of them, and occasionally - still in the Habsburg monarchy - across the Kingdom 's north -western border in parts of Silesia and the Margrav iate of Moravia (both now in the Czech Republic). All of the three Slovak counties border Poland in the north , and Janosik identified several members of his band as coming from Poland, but no document has surfaced to confirm legends about his raids into the Kingdom of Poland. Simple economics may have played a role: while Moravia and Silesia were relatively wealthy, the Polish Podhale region north of Slovakia was poorer than the Slovak counties and with fewer noblemen 's residences, and therefore less attractive, especially since the border follows a rel atively high mountain ridge in Liptov and in parts of Spis and Orava, which was a substanti al obstacle to bringing back any loot except money. On the other hand, the Podhale folklore occasionally depicted the Slovak counties as desirable targets of Polish brigands. The expected higher return may have made the climb somewhat more worthwhile. However, Janosik was questioned specifically during hi s tri al whether he had also robbed in Poland : an indication that the border was crossed by hi ghwaymen from both sides, but also of the authorities' concern about possible contacts with leaders of the Rak6cz i upri sing who defected to Pol and after their final defeat in 1711. 31 Rudo Brtan "Na tropie Janosika i polskich zb6jnik6w." Pami~tnik Slowiariski 18, pp. 167-186. 92 SLOVAKIA Janosik:' s victims and spoils While the list was certainly not complete, Janosik's trial revealed rather meager, and some bizarre spoils from hi s only full-time robbing season from the spring to the fall of 1712: several guns, including a "valuable" one, unimpressive amounts of cash, some jewelry, as well as two ladies' wigs and elegant ladies' clothing impossible to be worn by villagers and therefore awkward to sell or donate in those days. However, Uhorcfk said Janosfk's highway robberies yielded more. Among other things, he apparently accumulated almost two bushels of coins, enough cloth to dress 300 men, and maintained a stash of weapons in another hiding place. Although cloth may appear to be an unlikely booty, it was among the brigands' prized possessions. It was needed to repair their clothing, which was more prone to wear and tear, yet less readily replaceable in case of damage than the clothes of law-abiding subjects. 32 Rolls of cloth, not ready-made clothes, were loaded in merchants' wagons that were attacked by brigands. Cloth was also among the more durable goods in their loot, but not as easy to exchange as money, jewelry, or guns, so the brigands were likely to have a surplus of cloth in their hiding places. 33 Uhorcfk also spoke of Janosfk's attacks on small detachments of the Imperial and Royal Army which yielded weapons, ammunition, and on one occasion a carriage. Janosfk admitted robbing men and women, commoners as well as three noblemen , a clergyman, another clergyman's wife, a blacksmith (he did not respond to this charge), a goldsmith, a butcher, a cloth trader, and wine traders. He robbed them on the road, in their homes, in the woods, even on the Vah River (see below), emphasized the prosecutor. Of all the regional authorities, Liptov County was probably the most bitter about Janosfk's actions because of his assault on Imperial and Royal Officer Rudolf Schardon's wife and her retinue. Slovak and Polish sources commonly say she was Officer Schardon 's widow. One author contradicts thi s without giving his 32 John S. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, Brigandage and Irredentism in Mo- dem Greece /821-1912. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. 33 Jozef Kocis, Neznamy ... creates a weighty narrative about Janosfk's apparent revolutionary intentions from a historical report that guns and substantial amounts of cloth were discovered in some of his hiding places. SLOVAKIA 93 reasons. 34 The trial proceedings refer to her as Schardonka (the ending -ka indicates that she was a woman) and as vojenskeho oficfra pani, which means "a military officer's lady [wife]" without any indication of her being a widow. Because her husband was employed by the Crown and the robbery took place while she was passing through Liptov, the law obligated the County to pay the Lady the damages, which must have been higher than usual due to her rank. Throughout his trial, Janosik maintained that he had not killed anyone, but the court still considered him a guilty party when a priest from Domaniza was "shot through" by two brigands from his band during a robbery. The priest, 58-year old Juraj Yrtik (also spelled Yertik), died a month later. Janosik was also accused of sacrilege target-shooting at a host (the Eucharistic bread) attached to a treetrunk. He neither denied, nor confirmed this charge. While it is not clear why so many authors call Lady Schardon a widow rather than a wife, some of the counterfactual information in modern writing about Janosik ' s robberies and victims stems from cross-linguistic confusion by Polish authors reading Slovak sources, which is then repeated by others. Thus, for example, one author has Janosik rob a magnate on his way to Turkey (do Turcji in Polish), while the person, John Radvanszky, County Lieutenant of Zvolen, was actually on his way to Turiec County (do Turca in Slovak) in north-central Slovakia. 35 Another author says that Janosik robbed a pastor' s wife as she was fetching water (po wodf! in Polish) from the Yah River. 36 It is not only unlikely for geographic and historical reasons because her village was not on the V ah and people used wells as their source of water, not the river. It is mistaken factually because the trial proceedings say that she was robbed about a half-day's journey from her home, while traveling down the Vah (po vode in Slovak) on a raft - a common means of transport provided comercially at that time. Such confusion about language and geography happens with some regularity and can affect the authors' arguments. For instance, Stanislaw Sroka believes that the village of Klenovec where Janosik was captured was in Liptov County , a mere geogra34 Jozef Kocis, Neznamy .. . Jace k Kotbu szewski , "Janosik ni eznany?" Literatura Judowa, vol. 3 1, no. 4-6, Jul y- December 1987, pp. 108-11 2, - p. 110. 36 Sroka, Janosik ... p. 50. 35 SLOVAKIA 94 phic error, but the error then becomes Sroka's explanation of why Janosik was tried by Liptov County. Klenovec, however, was in Malohont County. The real reason for the location of Janosik's trial was that he was captured in Klenovec by the Liptov police (see below). Cross-linguistic confusion can lead to much farther-reaching fallacious conclusions. Jacek Kolbuszewski, the author who believes that Janosik robbed John Radvanszky on his way to Turkey, then 37 assumes that he was going to the funeral of Stephen Petrycy [sic], a former general in the Kuruc army, according to Kolbuszewski, who took refuge in Turkey in order to avoid persec ution by the Habsburgs. Kolbuszewski subsequently presents his conjecture as evidence to disprove a point made by another author, Jozef Koci s, 38 and accuses him of "keeping silent" about that apparent fact. Yet, Radvanszky was robbed in 1712 while traveling from Zvolen County to Turiec County in order to attend the funeral of Stephen Petr6czy de Petr6cz et Kaszavar (villages near Trencfn : the name could be Stefan Petrovicky of Petrovice and Koseca in modern Slovak spelling), sonin-law of the late Turiec County Chief Emerich Revay - not to Turkey to a conjectured funeral of Baron Stephen Petr6czy, born around 1620, a commander in the Kuruc insurgencies in the l 670- l 680s who sought refuge in Turkey after their failure . Baron Petr6czy would have to have been in his 90s had he died, as Kotbuszewski concludes, in 1712 when Radvanszky was robbed by Janosfk (the date of his death is actually unknown). Janosik, s capture Janosik was first caught, along with Uhorcfk, about a year after he joined Uhorcik's former band and became its leader. They were detained by Malohont County authorities in Klenovec in south37 Kotbuszewski , "Janosik ... " p. 110. Kocis, Neznamy ... Kotbuszewski's goal was to disprove Kocis's claims about Janosfk's sym pathies for the anti-Habsburg rebels by showing that Janosfk actually robbed a nobleman presumably supportive of the rebellion since he went to a former rebel ' s and political defector' s funeral. If Polish scholars had not misread the Slovak sources, which was the starting point for Kotbuszewski's disoriented conclusions about the historical figures, Kotbuszewski could have made the same argument without any reference to Petr6czy, because Janosfk ' s victim John Radvanszky, Zvolen County Lieutenant and minor poet born in 1666, was himself a former influential supporter of the Kuruc rebellion, Thokoly, as well as Francis Rak6czi. 38 SLOVAKIA 95 central Slovakia, where Uhorcik had settled as Martin Mravec, on 26 October 1712 - around the end of the robbing season. Janosik probably came to spend the winter with his comrade under an assumed identity . They were put in jail in the Mansion of Hrachov but were released after they "proved" their innocence. Janosik's subsequent trial revealed that the proof rested mainly in fox furs and cheese passed on to the detaining authorities. Moreover, the County Lieutenant of Malohont 39 who testified on their behalf had earlier received a prized rifle from Uhorcik. The historical, decorated weapon came from Janosik's loot when his band ambushed Baron Paul Revay. Janosik was arrested again while still in Klenovec before he had a chance to start his next robbing season, and so was "Mravec" for giving him shelter for the winter. Although in another county, this time he was traced and captured by the Liptov police put on special alert after the robbery of Lady Schardon. They were transferred to Svaty Mikulas, 40 the seat of Liptov County, where Uhorcik 's identity was eventually discovered. JaI1osik's sentence Janosik's trial took place on 16-17 March 1713. The Kingdom ' s main statutes were contained in the Tripartitum of 1514,41 and two subsequent royal decrees. Chapter I, Titulus XV, Paragraph I of the Tripartitum mandated that highwaymen be hanged, broken upon the wheel, impaled, or beheaded, as a warning to others. When the Habsburgs added the Kingdom to their lands, they tried to limit various laws contained in the Tripartitum, especially those that gave more privileges to its nobles and greater self-government to its counties and some municipalities than were granted in other Habsburg lands, but they reinforced some other laws including those against brigandage. Emperor Ferdinand II iss ued a decree in 1625 "On pillaging vagabonds and highwaymen and on ways of handling them," whose 39 Pal Lan yi/Pavol Lani (1670-1733) was a prominent supporter of the Rak6czi insurgency. 40 Now called Liptovsky Mikulas. 41 Tripartitum opus iuris consuetudinarii incly ti regni Hungariae partiumque annexarum , by Stephen Werboczy (1460-1541), presented to the Diet in 1514 and published by the author in Vienna in 1517. Although not a fo rmall y adopted document, it was used as the authoritati ve compend ium of the Kingdom's customary law. 96 SLOVAKIA Article XIII mandated that hi ghwaymen and similar criminals be tortured if their testimonies were not comprehensive and convincing. The decision to apply torture was regulated in the Kingdom by a widely used book of comments on the Tripartitum from 1619,42 whose Article 8, Section 6 required that the defendant be rel eased without torture if the preliminary proceedings did not raise sufficient suspicions about the truthfulness of his denial of guilt. Emperor Ferdinand Ill 's decree from 1655 contained Article XXVI , which prohibited any leniency or pardon in such trials. Additionally , Emperor Leopold I decreed in Article XVII in 1659 that those providing shelter to brigands be executed as well. Janosik's assigned defense lawyer Palugyay described him as a former victim of Francis Rak6czi 's insurgents and played up his loyalty to the Crown demonstrated by his apparent eagerness to join the Imperial and Royal Army. Palugyay also stressed that although submitted to both the light and severe levels of torture, Janosik denied having been guilty of the murder of the Reverend Yrtik. Under the Kingdom 's legislation it meant that the defendant (called the "accused" then) was to be seen as innocent of the crime. Although people submitted to torture did not normally survive for more than three days - if for no additional injuries, then due to the internal hemorrhage and other damage to the joints pulled out of their sockets during stretching - the county was obligated to pay an annual allowance to the family of the accused who failed to admit guilt under torture. Janosfk's defense lawyer called for his release because, according to Palugay, he certainly regretted his actions and would mend his ways. Yet, Janosik did admit to highway robbery, and the court still considered him an accomplice in the priest' s murder. He was sentenced to death. As usual in those days , it was a public execution. In Janosfk' s case, a hook was threaded through his left side, and he was left dangling on the gallows to die - a fairly common execution then especially for brigand leaders, although this was the only instance of its implementation by Liptov County between 1700 and 1715.43 42 Directio methodica processus judiciarii; Juris consuetudinarii lnclyti Regni Hun gariae .. . , by Johannes Kitonich de Koztanicza [Ivan Kitonic/Janos Kaszony i of Kostajnica] , Tymavia: [Tmava] : Anno Domini MDCXIX. 43 Stanistaw Dzieciolowski in an interview with Zdena Sisova "Odpocfva Janosfk na dne Liptovskej Mary?" Slovenske dotyky Maj 2002, p. 7. SLOVAKIA 97 Uhorcik's identity was not discovered until after the first day of his trial during which he was still taken to be a Martin Mravec. He was sentenced more than a month after Janosik, on 21 April 1713 . He was broken upon the wheel, another common form of execution. As an act of benevolence, perhaps obtained by the County Lieutenant of Malohont who testified on Janosik ' s and Uhorcik's behalf at their trials, the court ordered that his neck be broken first. The burial place of either of the brigands is unknown. Corpses were often left hanging or otherwise exposed as a warning for a period of time after the criminals' execution and then di sposed of unceremoniously. Conclusion The trial proceedings, effectively the only extant source of information about Janosik, offer a meager picture of his life because he disclosed very little before or under torture. Most questions posed by the interrogators remained unanswered. All that transpires from the proceedings besides some of his robberies is that he was loyal to his fellow-criminals, that he remained so under severe torture, and that he proved to be a cunning liar before severe torture more-or-less silenced him. When he gave answers, they were often misleading or quite untrue, crafted to protect his accomplices. For example, while Uhorcik, still known to the authorities only as Martin Mravec, was awaiting his trial in the same building, Janosik was telling the interrogators that Uhorcik had been killed by another brigand several years earlier. Most of the accomplices Janosik divulged were already dead or believed to be dead. He claimed not to know the whereabouts of the others whose names came up during the interrogation. He did not di sclose the names of those who gave him shelter. Uhorcfk's testimony a month later revealed that Janosik had withheld the names of at least a half of his fellow brigands. Even without the strict Imperial and Royal decrees on brigandage, several factors would have probably contributed to Janosik's harsh punishment by Liptov County anyway: the damages that the county had to pay to Lady Schardon; the blame it probably received from the monarc hy's central authorities and the county 's subsequent increased efforts to eradicate hi ghway robbery; Janosik's origin in Terchova known for its support to highwaymen ; Janosik 's participation in the Francis Rak6czi uprising against the Habsburgs, which 98 SLOVAKIA the judge reiterated before reading his sentence; and finally , susp icions of anti-Catholic and heretic sentiments reflected in hi s insurgent past and in the alleged target-shooting at hosts augmented by his presence at the killing of a priest. In a broader context, the existence of the enormous gap between what is documented about Juraj Janosfk and his modern myth is unremarkable. Discrepancies, elevations or degradations, are common, universal features of historical mythology. Equally pervasive are folk legends about characters from the feudal past who "took from the rich and gave to the poor" and defended the commoners from the injustices of the masters. Such tales dot the Eurasian continent from English Robin Hood at its north-western periphery all the way to Korean Hong Kildong and Japanese Oyake Akahachi at its south-eastern edge. What makes Janosfk 's myth in Slovakia special (which applies only partly in the Czech Republic and decidedly less so in Poland) is the manner in which it was first embraced and molded by the intellectuals around the middle of the 19 th century44 and then by academia from around the middle of the 20 th century, and the degree to which his intellectualized and academic myth incorporated the notion that it is not talking merely about folk mythology (whose modern shape has actually been largely formed by Janosfk' s myth created in high culture), but that it is also talking about a real hi storical character. 44 Yotruba, " Hang Him Hi gh .. ."  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Highwayman's Life: Extant Documents About Jánošík Description An account of the resource Martin Votruba Slovakia, Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007 pp. 81-98 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Votruba, Martin Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 name https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/77ae7728cbfaed1948b983254b1b7916.pdf 63d60bb63d722e7fef72b40f1cb8a349 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 99 THE 1985 PILGRIMAGE AT VELEHRAD: SLOVAK CATHOLICS AND THE CREATION OF A PUBLIC SPACE David Doellinger An analysis of the 1985 pilgrimage at Velehrad reveals many of the ways that the nature of pilgrimages (and thus Catholicism's role in Communist Czechoslovakia) had begun to change during the 1980s. At this event, Catholic activists and pilgrims surprised church leaders by voicing their opposition to state policy in front of Party officials, thereby transforming a religious tradition into a public space where Slovak Catholics could meet free from state interference to assert their religious and political beliefs. The 1985 Yelehrad pilgrimage offers an interesting window into the increas ingly contentious relationship between church and state in Czec hoslovakia. It illustrates the mobilizing influence of Pope John Paul II and reveals that restive Catholics, who had been practicing their faith secretly in the underground, helped empower some leaders in the Czechoslovakia's official hierarchy - particularly Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek of Prague - to be more critical of the state's religious policies. Man y scholars have recognized the ability of pilgrimages to serve as barometers of soc ial and political change. In their analysis of Christian pilgrimage traditi ons, anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner conclude: Pilgrimage should be regarded ... as an institution with a history. Each pilgrimage, of any length, is vulnerable to the history of its period and must come to terms with shifts of political geography. Pilgrimage is more responsive to social change and popular moods than liturgical ritual, fixed by rubric. 1 1 Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York : Columbia Un ivers ity Press, 1978), 23 1. �SLOVAKIA The character of Slovak pilgrimages had certainly reflected the changing social and political landscape in Slovakia after the Second World War. Pilgrimages had been an important part of Slovak reli gious life since the middle ages. Over thirty pilgrimage sites exist throughout Slovakia and Slovak pilgrim s also visited several religious sites in the Czech lands. Until 1949, when state permission to hold public gatherings such as pilgrimages became mandatory, local church officials had organized the annu al pilgrimages and services at these sites. Thereafter, there had been little acti vity at these sites on pilgrimage days, with the exception of the moments of political liberalization, such as in 1956 (following Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin) and 1968 (during the Prague Spring). 2 The 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage has received much attention by Western political analysts and scholars. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Keston News Service fo llowed this event closely and released extensive reports about thi s pilgrimage (and the pilgrimages that followed). 3 Although Velehrad is located in Moravi a, this pilgrimage was of particular importance to Slovak Catholi cs, who attended in relatively high numbers. Several schol ars writing in the latter half of the 1980s referred to thi s pilgrimage as evidence of a reli gious revival and the resilience of Catholicism in Slovakia. 4 Scholars writing after 1989 have referred to thi s pilgrimage and those that followed, not only in the context of a religious revival, but 2 Karel Kaplan notes that not onl y pilgrimages, but also attendance at reli gious services and the forma tion of new youth groups occurred during the upheaval s in Poland and Hungary in 1956. Karel Kaplan, " Church and State in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1956 - Part III ," Religion in Comm unist Lands, 14, no. 3 (fall 1986): 280. Milan J. Reban reports a sim ilar resurgence of pilgrimages during the Prague Spring in 1968 . Milan J. Reban, "The Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia," in Catholicism and Politics in Communist Societies, ed . Pedro Ramet (Durham and London: Duke Uni versity Press, I 990), 15 I. 3 The Keston News Service was based at Keston College, England and provided reports and analys is of the religious situation in East Europe. 4 See Janice Brou n, Conscience and Capti vity: Religion in Eastern Europe (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1988), 67- 101. Also see Pedro Ramet, Cross and Commissar (Bloom ington and Indianapo lis: Ind iana Universi ty Press, 1987), 78. �SLOVAKIA 101 also as an example of one of the few expressions of independent or non-state activity in Slovakia. 5 Pilgrimages and their increasing popularity throughout the 1980s became one of the most visible markers of a religious revival in Slovakia. This religious revival had begun almost a decade earlier and was closely related to the election of a Pole, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II in 1978. Pope John Paul II took a new aggressive and uncompromising stand when dealing with the Communist governments of Eastern Europe. Under Pope Paul Vi's (1963-1978) eastern policy (Ostpolitik), the Vatican had made preserving the church hierarchy in Czechoslovakia a primary goal, even at the expense of making important concessions to the Communist government. In 1973, Cardinal Casaroli, responsible for the Vatican's Ostpolitik, had negotiated the regime's approval of four new bishops, even though all four remained members of Pacem in Terris, a state sponsored organization that coordinated the work of priests in Czechoslovakia. Although this agreement brought the total number of bishops to five (out of thirteen dioceses), many Czech and Slovak Catholics criticized the Vatican's tolerance of Pacem in Terris. Breaking with his predecessor, Pope John Paul II refused to compromise with these governments, particularly with regards to spiritual matters. In 1982, he formally condemned Pacem in Terris. 6 As Archbishop of Krakow, Wojtyla had secretly ordained many Czech and Slovak priests in the 1970s. Silvester Krcmery, a leader of Slovakia's secret church and a friend of Wojtyla since 1973, described him as a protector of the Slovaks. Emphasizing the importance of their shared experiences under Communism, Krcmery pointed to a 5 Stokes refers to the 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage not only in terms of attendance, but also as evidence of Cardinal Tomasek's increasing willingness to act independently of the state. Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 152. See also Sabrina Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe (Durham and London : Duke University Press , 1991), 109 and Padraic Kenney , A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 36. 6 Alexander Tomsky, "Pacem in Terris," Religion in Communist Lands lO (1982): 278-279. For a discussion of bishop vacancies, see Sabrina P. Ramet, Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 125. �102 SLOVAKIA bond that undoubted ly other Catholics in Czechoslovakia shared by saying: "He has lived all thi s persec ution of Catholics." 7 While the election of a Polish pope in 1978 helps explain the increased popularity of Catholicism and religious traditions in Slovakia, the events at Yelehrad in 1985 indicate th at the nature of the pilgrimage experience was transformed by activists in the secret (underground) Catholic church. Such a church existed in the Czech lands and Slovakia from the late 1940s to 1989. It was organized by Catholics in response to the persec ution they faced by the Communist authorities. Members of the secret church met in private apartments for bible study , fellowship and even choir practice. Bishops and priests who had been clandestinely trained and ordained provided pastoral serv ices to these believers. By the 1980s, activists in the secret church published and distributed a wide variety of books and newsletters as samizdat. 8 The undergro und church used its samizdat network to publicize this and later pilgrimages by printing announcements of upcoming pilgrimages and it published accounts of each year's pilgrimages. A rich written record of the 1985 Velehrad pil gri mage can be found in thi s body of sa mizdat literature. 9 7 Silvester Krcmery , interview by author, 3 July I996 , Bratislava, Slovakia. For a brief description of Krcmery's first meeting with Wojtyta, see Frantisek Miklosko, Nebudete ich m6ct' roz vratit: z osudov katolickej cfrkvi na Slovensku v rokoch I 943-89 (Bratislava: Archa, 1990), 125. 8 David Doellinger, " Prayers, Pilgrims , and Petitions: The Secret Church and the Growth of Civ il Society in Slovakia," Nationalities Papers 30, no. 2 (June 2002): 215-240. 9 Samizdat (self-published) refers to newspapers, articles, essays, books , etc. that were printed with mimeograph machines or typed carbon copy, and often distributed illegall y, usuall y throu gh personal contacts and info rm al networks. Archi ves with the most extensive holdings on Slovak religious samizdat include: Listy z podzemia samizdat arch ive at the Christian Democratic Movement headq uarters, Bratislava, Slovakia ; Libri Prohibiti Samizdat Archive, Prag ue, Czech Republic; Czechoslovak Documentation Center, Dobrichovice (Prague), Czech Republic. Slovak samizda t can also be found in the Keston Institute's arc hi ve, Oxford , England and th e arc hives of Radi o Free Europe/Radio Liberty in th e Open Society Archives , Budapest, Hungary. For a comprehensive catalog of Slovak religious sam izdat, see Rudolf Lessak, Listy z podzemia: suboma dokumentacia krestanskej samizdatovej publicistiky na S/ovensku v rokoch I 945- I989 (Bratislava: US PO, 1998). �SLOVAKIA 103 The 1985 Velehrad Pilgrimage An increasing number of Catholics attended pilgrimages in Slovakia in the first half of the 1980s. Between 1982 and 1985, samizdat reports only carried information for the pilgrimages to Sastfn and Levoca, the two most popular Slovak pilgrimages. An estimated 15 ,000 people attended the pilgrimage at Sastfn in 1983 ; attendance jumped to 50,000 in 1984. 10 About 100,000 pilgrims attended the pilgrimages at Levoca in both 1982 and 1983. 11 The new role and importance of the pilgrimage tradition became firmly established at the 1985 pilgrimage at Yelehrad. An important pil grimage site in Moravia, Velehrad had already hosted an estim ated 40,000 pilgrims in 1984. The 1985 Yelehrad pilgrimage, however, commemorated the 1, 100th anni versary of the death of St. Methodius, who along with St. Cyril , had introduced eastern Christianity (and the Slavic liturgy) to the Great Moravian Empire in the ninth century. The work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius is particulai:.ly important to Slovak Catholics, who trace their political, cultural and religious history to thi s early empire and the arrival of these monks. 12 Several months prior to the pilgrimage, Czechoslovak Catholics and the Communist authorities began to contest the direction of the Yelehrad commemoration. At the center of the dispute was the question of whether Pope John Paul II would be permitted to attend the event. The Pope had made his first visit to Poland as early as 1979, and Czechoslovakia 's Catholics hoped this anniversary would bring a papal visit. An August 1984 letter to President Gustav Husak, signed simpl y the " Youth of CSSR," demanded that the Pope be 10 "Sastfnska put' I983 ," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'(sami zdat) 4 (1983): 2; "Sastfnsky prihovor otca Biskupa Gabrisa," Naboi enstvo a sucasnost'5 ( 1984): 8; " Sastfn '84," Vy ber (sami zdat) 4 ( 1984): 38. 11 "Annual Pilgrimage to Levoca," Keston News Service (KNS), no. 156 (August I6, I982): 3-4. Also, see Vy ber, 3 (1984 ): 7. 12 See lmrich Kruzliak, "The Heritage of Saints Cyril and Methodius in the Works of Slovak Writers and Artists," in SS. Cy ril and M ethodius Among the Slovaks: Observing the 1, JOd" Anniversary of Saint Methodius' Death, eds. lmrich Kru zliak and Frances L. Mi zenko (Middletown, PA : Slovak Catholic Federation, 1985), 134-143. The territori al extent of thi s empire is unclear, but it probably included large porti ons of present day Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. �104 SLOVAKIA permitted to attend the 1, l 00 th anniversary event. The authors indicated that they were Catholics from Banska Bystrica (in central Slovakia) and argued that there was popular support for a papal visit: We are in the jubilee year of St. Methodius. Thousands of young hearts put their signature on the request that the Holy Father John Paul II come to our country for thi s jubilee celebration. We join with Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, who personally invited the Holy Father to this celebration. Esteemed Mr. President, if these thousands of signatures are [too] few, we are willing to collect additional thousands from young people to agai n document for you the desire of the absolute majority of inhabitants of the CSSR, so that the Holy Father comes to our republic for this precious jubilee occasion. 13 In February 1984, Cardinal Tomasek had formally invited the Pope to Velehrad, and over 17,000 Catholic youth in Czechoslovakia 14 signed a statement demonstrating their support for thi s visit. Cardinal Tomasek also cited this petition action in a letter to the CSSR government requesting permission for the visit. 15 A samizdat author analyzing the importance of the Velehrad celebration for Slovaks and the meaning of the petition wrote: "It is a new first in the public life of our church." 16 The Slovak secret church helped publicize several of these appeals for the Pope' s attendance. Despite the authorities' refusal, public support for the Papal visit continued. On New Years Day 1985 , Cardinal Tomasek sent a letter to the Pope with an additional 500 signatures that had been collected over Christmas. The letter reaffirmed the desire of Czechoslovak Catholics for the Pope to come to Velehrad on September 14 for the Methodius commemoration. It also invited the Pope to visit Sastfn, a Slovak pilgrimage site, afterwards 17 The authorities continued to refuse permission for the visit. 18 13 Letter to President Husak from the Youth of CSS R, 29 August 1984, I, Keston st Institute Fi le (hereafter KJ): CZ ROM 7/4 1 Methodius Celebrations 1985. 14 "Pozvanie sv. Otca do Ceskoslovenska," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'3 ( 1984): 17. 15 Una Sane ta Catholica (samizdat) Tu rice ( 1984 ): 35. 16 • "Pozvanie sv. Otca do Ceskoslovenska," 17-1 8. 17 Naboienstvo a sucasnost'2 (1985): 19. 18 Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Do wn, 152. Though the authori ties prevented Pope John Paul II from attending the commemoration, his encyc lical Slavorum �SLOVAKIA 105 As the Velehrad pilgrimage approached, members of the secret church in both the Czech lands and Slovakia began making plans to alter the length and nature of the commemoration by organizing a special night program. Catholic activists wanted to invite youth to the site on Saturday, July 6, 1985, for a special program of song and prayer during the night preceding the official commemoration, which had been scheduled for Sunday, July 7. Night programs had already become a popular component of pilgrimages in Slovakia. Over 50,000 pilgrims attended the night program at the Levoca pilgrimage in 1983. 19 At Sastfn in 1984, a night program organized by Vladimir Jukl, one of the leaders of the Slovak secret church, had also preceded the regular pilgrimage celebration.20 The plan for a night program at Velehrad appears to have originated with both Moravian and Slovak sources. Catholic youth in Moravia invited their counterparts in Slovakia and Bohemia to the Saturday program that would include prayers for the unity of the church, the Pope, bishops and others in the Church. The Slovak reli gious samizdat Vy ber helped distribute this invitation by prominently publishing it on the back of the front cover of a spring 1985 issue.2' Frantisek Miklosko, another activist in the Slovak secret church , refers to the Moravian Catholics' pl an in a history of the post-war Catholi c Church in Slovakia that he published in 1991 . He credits Vladimir Jukl with the idea of introducing the night program at Velehrad. Miklosko personally presented Jukl 's plan for a night program to Cardinal Tomasek, who supported the idea. Though the local priest and bishop responsible for Velehrad refused to officially approve the night program or permit the youth to spend the night in Velehrad's basilica, the plan for the night program went ahead. 22 On Saturday afternoon , Ju ly 6, the Velehrad celebration made its informal start with the arri val of an estimated 5,000 young Apostoli - which praised the work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius - was published on the day of the event. Alexander Tomsky, "St Methodius Return s to Czechos lovakia," KNS, no. 235 (October 3, 1985): 18- 19. 19 " Vfce nez sto ti sfc poutn fku na Levocske hofe 3.7. 1983," ln fo rmace o cfrk vi (sami zdat) 9 (1983): 13. 20 "Sastfn ' 84," Vfber 4 ( 1984): 38. Miklosko writes that Ju kl developed the idea for the night program for Sastfn that year. Miklosko, Nebudete ich moct'rozvratit, 136. 21 Vfber4 (1985). 22 Miklosko, Nebudete ich m6ct'rozvratit;128- l 30. �106 SLOVAKIA Catholics. Accounts of their activities filled subseq uent samizdat periodicals and painted a vivid picture of their activities prior to the formal opening of the celebration at 10:00 AM on Sunday morning. As they arrived on Saturday, the young pilgrims sat in small groups in front of the basilica, some talking with friends and others singing songs, sometimes with the accompaniment of a guitar. Bishop Jan Korec , who had been secretly consecrated in 1951, visited with the young pilgrims in the afternoon and remained with them throughout the night. 23 After an evening mass inside the basilica, the pilgrims spent the night outside with one group in front of the basilica and the other in a nearby field. Each group stayed awake the entire night and observed a program of prayer, meditation and si nging. During the night, both groups chanted slogans such as "We want cloisters," "Long live Tomasek," and "Long live the Pope." One report indicated that the pilgrims also chanted "Let the Pope Come" for about twenty-five minutes. 24 One member of the Slovak secret church apparently spent Saturday afternoon and night with a tape recorder recording the songs, chants and conversations with the pilgrims. A Slovak samiz dat periodical published excerpts from this recording, capturing some of the different hopes and concerns of those in attendance, including the di sappointment of one young pilgrim that the state authorities viewed the pilgrimage and anniversary celebration as a "peace event." The pilgrim, speaking sometime late Saturday evening, described his mixed response to the weekend: I assumed that many believers would participate in this pilgrimage, but I am very surprised by the multitude of people who are already here today. I am very enthusiastic about it, because I expect rich spiritual fruits from this pilgrimage. I regret, of course - and I also think everyone else does - that we may not have the Holy Father here among us. But on the other hand, we are glad that he is represented here by Cardinal Casaro li [responsible for the Vatican's Ostpolitik]. 25 23 " Velehrad ' 85 ," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'3 ( 1985): 17. The largest Czech religious samizdat periodical republished this report. "Velehrad I985 , videny zo Slovenska," Jnformace o cirkvi IO (1985), 6-7. 24 "Boli sme na Velehrade," Rodinne spolocenstvo (samizdat) 5 ( 1985): 5-6. 25 "Velehrad ' 85 z magnetofonoveho zaznamu," Vyber9 (1985): 12. �SLOVAKIA 107 Early in the morning a fifty-year old priest, asked for his reaction to thi s " uncommon" event, replied: We spent this night at Velehrad together with Sai nts Cyril and Methodius. And it was very beautiful. There are groups of young believers here from all over Slovakia and also from the Czech lands, but a preponderance here are Slovaks. 26 Though located in Moravia, the night program at Velehrad was of particul ar interest to Slovak Catholics, and other observers also noted the large presence of Slovaks at Velehrad.27 . The enthusiasm of the young Catholics who had arri ved early to spend the night at Velehrad carried over to the official celebrations on Sunday. Despite the state's efforts to curtail attendance by canceling public transportation to Velehrad, pilgrims from all over Czechoslovakia arrived , many on foot, to join those who had spent the night singing, praying and chanting. 28 One samizdat periodical reported that at a 7:00 AM mass outside the Basilica, the pilgrims who had arrived only that morning were surprised that the young people, fo llowing the singing of the papal hymn, broke into chants of "Long li ve John Paul II! " and " Let us have the Hol y Father! " 29 The youth had been chanting these slogans throughout the night, and like a team coming out of a hi gh-school pep rally, they were ready for the celebration to begin. By 10:00 AM, when the official celebration began, an estimated 100,000-250,000 pilgrims had gathered outside the Basilica in the center of Velehrad. 30 A local Party official opened the celebration by welcoming everyone to what he called the St. Methodiu s " Peace Celebration ." In response to this designation, the 26 Ibid., 19. Another Slovak priest, Father Martinec, explai ned that he had he lped wi th the organization of the pilgrimage and the arriva l of Slovak Catholics at Yelehrad . Karel Martinec, interview by author, 4 Jul y 1996, Bratislava, Slovakia. 28 "Yelehrad 1985 ," Vzkffsenf(samizdat) 2 ( 1985): 15. 29 " Boli sme na Yelehrade," 5. 30 Religious samizdat peri odical s re ported this wide range estimate of pilgrims in attendance. See "Boli sme na Yelehrade," 8; "Yelehrad ' 85," 18; " Yelehrad 1985," Vzkifsenf2 ( 1985): 15; and " Yelehrad nas," Informace o cfrk vi 10 ( 1985): 6. Photographs of the pilgrims gathered around the Bas ilica at Yelehrad on Jul y 7 - taken from different angles - indicate that the pilgrims filled every inch of the square and support the magnitude of the size of the crowd as reported by religious samizdat. Kl: photo collection, photos# 1793 and # 1876. 27 �108 SLOVAKIA pilgrims responded negatively with whistles and shouts of "We want Holy Mass!" 3 1 Following the singi ng of the state anthem, the Minister of Culture, Dr. Milan Klu sak, spoke. Again, the pilgrims expressed their dissatisfaction with the official spin he gave to the importance of the anniversary. Several samizdat periodicals reported the following exchange between Klusak and the pilgrims: [Minister Klusak] grasped the situation and therefore improvised as he spoke. In order to stress that he did not consider the celebration to be a peace celebration, he said that he came to the pilgrimage to celebrate Methodius' memory. The crowd corrected him by chanting "Saint, Saint." When he said that Cyril and Methodius brought us a language and alphabet, the people supplemented it with "Faith , Faith!" The surpri sed minister then began a discussion with the people by saying "The Bi shop will speak about Faith to you. We have divided up the work." ... the young people replied to him: "Freedom, Religious Freedom." The minister argued back to the youth and everyone else: "If you did not have [religious freedom], you would not be here." 32 The pilgrims responded to the remainder of Klusak's speech with chants: "We Want the Holy Father!" "We Want Religious Freedom," and "We Want Bishops!" In contrast to the pilgrims' dissatisfaction with the state authorities' remarks, the pilgrims enthusiastically supported the words of the church officials. During the heckling of Minister Klu sak, the pilgrims had also chanted "Long Live Cardinal Tomasek! and "Casaroli!" 33 Cardinal Tomasek read a letter from the Pope that reportedly energized the pilgrims despite their disappointment that the Pope was not there to deliver his words personally . During the Mass, Cardinal Casaroli switched between Czech and Slovak while delivering his sermon.34 Accounts indicate that Cardinal Tomasek and Cardinal Casaroli clearly were surprised by the hi gh attendance and the enthusiasm of the pilgrims. After- 31 "Boli sme na Yelehrade," 7. fbid ., 7. A similar account of this exchange, written by a Slovak pilgrim , appeared in Czech samizdat. " Velehrad 1985 ," Vzkfisenf2 ( 1985): 16. See also Jan Korec, Od barbarskej noci na slobode (Bratislava: Luc, 1993), 342. 33 "Velehrad '85," Naboienstvo a sucasnost; 18. 34 "Boli sme na Velehrade," 7-8. 32 �SLOVAKIA 109 wards, Cardinal Tomasek reportedly told a group of young people, "This is not reality, this is a dream. " 35 The Significance of Velehrad The relatively large number of Catholic youth from Slovakia that chose to come earl y to this pilgrimage indicates both the strength of Catholicism in Slovakia and the failure of the state 's restricti ve policies against the church. Vaclav Benda, a Catholic Czech activist, afterwards commented on the significance of this pilgrimage: Yelehrad was an effective demonstration that the experiment of splitting the church was condemned to failure and ridiculous from the beginning. It must presently be clear from this pilgrimage ... that the prohibitions or radical restriction on the church drove several million active believers into the underground. 36 The 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage was critical turning point in a revival of the pilgrimage tradition in Slovakia. After Yelehrad, pilgrimage attendance and the number of sites hosting pilgrimages in Slovakia increased significantly. 37 Levoca, in eastern Slovakia, received the largest number of pilgrims with an estimated 150,000 in 1986,38 200,000-230,000 in 1987,39 and possibly as high as 280,000 300,000 in 1988.40 The number of pilgrims to Sastfn, a small village located north of Bratislava near the Moravian border, grew steadily from estimates of 40,000-50,000 in 1986,4 1 and 60,000 in 1987 ,42 to 35 " Yelehrad '85," Naboienstvo a sricasnost; 18. Vaclav Benda, "Ako d'alej po Yelehrade?" Naboienstvo a sricasnost'2 (I 986): 4. 37 Attendance at Slo vak pil grimages in 1989 was also high, but there is less information in samizdat about that year's pilgrimages than for earlier years. This is probably due to the fac t that reports of the summer pilgrimages usually appeared in late fa ll samizdat issues, by which time the Velvet Revolution had already begun. 38 "Levoca 1986," Voice of A merica (VOA) 12 July 1986. 39 "Record Numbers Attend Slovak Pilgrimages," Keston News Service, 280 (23 Jul y 87): 19; "Message from Jan Carnogursky to Keston College," KI: CZ ROM 7 /4 Pilgrimages; "Levoca put' 1987," Naboienstvo a sricasnost'4 ( 1987): 7. 40 " Mariansky rok na Slovensku," Katolfcky mesacnik (sami zdat) 4 (1 988): I ; Peter Marti n, "The Pilgrimage to Levoca," R FE/RL, 14 July 1988, 19. Another sami zdat periodical estimated the attendance in 1988 at " more than 200,000 ." See "Mys lienky z Levocskej pute," Naboienstvo a sricasnost'3 (I 988): 3. 41 " Putne slav nosti na Slovensku v r. 1986," Naboienstvo a sricasnost' I ( I 987): I 719. 36 �110 SLOVAKIA 60,000-70,000 in 1988. 43 The number of pilgrims to Gaboltov, estimated at 20,000-25,000 in 1985 ,44 increased more dramatically from estimates of 30,000-50,000 in 198645 to as high as l 00,000 in 1987 and 1988. 46 Large numbers of pilgrims also visited traditionally less popular pilgrimage sites in Slovakia during this period. Lutina, an important Greek Catholic pilgrimage site in eastern Slovakia, received 40,000 pilgrims in 198647 and 50,000 in 1987 .48 Topolcany received 25,000 pilgrims in 1988.49 Due to the nature of a pilgrimage, usually an outdoor event with people sitting or standing in a town square or in a nearby field, only estimates, probably made by members of the secret church present at the pilgrimage, are available. Jan Camogursky , a prominent activist in the Slovak secret church, reported that as he became aware of the political significance of the pilgrimages in 1987, he began making estimates of the number of pilgrims attending the events throughout Slovakia.50 Although not an exact count, these estimates are significant as a measure of the increase in the multitude of pilgrim s attending a particular pilgrimage, an increase that the authors of samizdat reports on pilgrimages were certainly observing. The increase in attendance after 1985 suggests that pilgrimages can be more than barometers of social change; the Velehrad pilgrimage promoted a change in the function of pilgrimages and their appeal to Catholics. The active force that promoted this transformation was the secret church. Members of this community helped transform the pilgrimage tradition into a space where Catholics could meet publicly and in large numbers to worship. Velehrad 's night program allowed young people active in the underground to meet 42 "Sastfn - September 1987," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'5 (1987): l 1. "Sastfn - '88," K ato/fcky mesacnik 5 ( 1988): I. 44 "Gaboltov ' 85 ," Naboi enstvo a sucasnost'3 (I 985): 20. 45 " Putne slavnosti na Slovensku v r 1986," 17- 19. 46 " Message from Jan Camogursky to Keston College"; "Put' v Gaboltove," VOA , 24 Jul y 1988. 47 "Pout' reckokatoliku v Lu tine 1986," lnformace o cfrkvi 10 (1986): I0. 48 "Message from Jan Camogursky." 49 "Pilgrimage at Topol'cany," Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB), 13 September 1988. 50 Jan Camogursky, interview by author, 16 Jul y 1996, Bratislava, Slovakia. Documents in the Keston Institute archive indicate that he sent reports of these estimates to Western news organizations. See for example, "Message from Jan Camogursky." 43 �SLOVAKIA 111 with other Catholics and express their faith publicly. Velehrad had demonstrated the secret church 's ability to mobilize its members to participate in a public event, and it continued to do so during the remainder of the decade. Slovak Catholic activists contributed to the popularity of pilgrimages and their night programs in the later half of the 1980s. The used the secret church 's samizdat network to inform its members about previous pilgrimages and to promote attendance at upcoming ones. From 1986 to 1989, the issues of Naboi enstvo a sucasnost; Rodinne spolocenstvo and later Katolfcky mesacnfk published extensive articles and reports about Slovak pilgrimages. This coverage included first hand reports of pilgrims' experiences, often including descriptions of their walk to the site and the activities of the night program. These samizdat periodicals also frequently published transcripts of prayers and sermons spoken during Mass at a pilgrimage, as well as historical information about different pilgrimage sites. 5 1 They also published schedules and information about upcoming pilgrimages in Slovakia. 52 As a result of this coverage, a written record of the experiences, worship service, activities, and even the chants at pilgrimages has been preserved. Catholics unable to attend a particular pilgrimage could learn about what had been said and done by reading these accounts. Since most samizdat reports on pilgrimages were usuall y publi shed several months after the pilgrimage, this coverage reminded Slovak Catholics of what had happened during the summer. Its reports and descriptions of previous pilgrimages promoted the events, and its schedule information certainly helped coordinate attendance at a pilgrimage. In addition to its samiz dat network, information about pilgrimages was shared through the communities of the secret church. Carnogursky reported that many of its communities "visited these pilgrimages collectively as groups." 53 The Slovak secret church also continued to promote the night program for pilgrimages after 1985, and attendance at night prog- 51 For the text of a prayer read by a local priest at the I 988 Sastfn pilgrimage, see "Modlitba na zaver marianskeho Rok u," Kato/icky mesacnfk 6 ( 1988): 5-7 . Another arti cle recounts the history of th e Sastfn pilgrim age site fro m 9 16 A.O. to 1987. "Sastfn," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'4 ( 1987): 8-10. 52 " Letna - putnicka - aktivita 1989," Kato/icky mesacmk 5 ( I 989): 6. 53 Camogursky, interview. �112 SLOVAKIA rams increased. A samizdat article describing the pilgrimage celebrations that had taken place throughout Slovakia in 1986 announced that in 1987 night programs were scheduled in Gaboltov and Uhorna in addition to Levoca and Sastin. 54 In 1988, an estimated 50,000 pilgrims attended the night program at Gaboltov,55 and 100,000 attended the night program during the Marian year pilgrimage in Levoca. 56 The following year, 5,000-10,000 people attended the night pro57 gram at the smaller pilgrimage site of Lutina. At the pilgrimage, the members of the secret church could do openly and publicly what they had done since their foundation: gather for prayer, meditation, and worship. Rather than finding safety in small numbers by meeting in private apartments, the pilgrimage tradition allowed the secret church members to practice their faith publicly, on a larger scale, and in fellowship with Catholics not active in the secret church. Jan Camogursky, reporting on the significance of pilgrimages in Slovakia, writes: [While] they last, pilgrimages solve a basic problem of our society - the problem of being outnumbered by the police ... The police are unable even to act against individuals on pilgrimages, because they are protected in the solidarity of numbers ... [This] feeling of safety gives the pilgrims another feeling - that of freedom . On a pilgrimage they can act according to their convictions and openly display their religious faith. 58 Although the secret church had traditionally distanced itself from the political opposition to avoid additional persecution by the state, the pilgrimage tradition facilitated a shift towards a new engagement in the public sphere. For members of the secret church, this issue of religious freedom could always be discussed among fellow members through its communities and samizdat press. Chants for religious freedom and in support of certain church officials had been voiced publicly to a significantly large gathering at Velehrad in 1985. The 54 "Putne slavnosti na Slovensku v r. 1986," 19. " Put' v Gaboltove," VOA, 24 July 1988. 56 "Mariansky rok na Slovensku," l. 57 "0 puti V Lutine," Rodinne spolocenstvo 5 (1989): 14. 58 Jan Carnogursky, "The Underground Church and Pilgrimages in Slovakia," The Salisbury Review (Ju ne 1989): 36. 55 �SLOVAKIA 113 pilgrimage tradition provided a public space and forum where political demands arti culated by the secret church could be discussed, debated, and shared with the broader public in relative safety. The contest between church and state exhibited at the 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage is one of the most striking feature s of this event. 59 The contest over the orientation of the commemoration could be said to have begun in 1984 as Cardinal Tomasek and Czechoslovak Catholics began demanding that Pope John Paul II be given permi ssion to attend. While the state argued that the commemoration should celebrate the cultural significance of St. Methodius, the church argued that the anniversary was a religious event. This conflict between church and state, so publicly exhibited at Velehrad in 1985, suggests that a term such as "church" fail s to capture the complexity of relations between church and state. Rather than a monolith, the "church" was represented by at least three distinct groups in this contest: the official church hierarchy , pilgrims active in the secret church, and pilgrims not active in the secret church. Of the three, it was the pilgrims (both within and without the secret church) listening to the Party officials' presentations who openly challenged the state's authority over the pilgrimage. Through their efforts, the pilgrimage became a public space where Catholics could challenge the status quo and the state 's right to define the meaning of St. Methodius and the l ,lO0 th anni versary . The pilgrimage created a forum where these three representations of the church ' s position could interact and influence one another. Even more interesting is the fact that the challenge to the status quo did not end in 1985 . Leaders of the Slovak underground church increasingly crossed into more politically-oriented public activities, most notably its collection of signatures to a 31-point petition for greater religious freedom in 1987 and 1988 and its organization of a public demonstration for religious freedom in Bratislava on March 25 , 1988 whi ch was violently 59 John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, in the introduction to an edited vo lume of research on pilgrimages, assert that the new agenda in pilgrimage stud ies recogni zes that pilgrimage " is above all an arena for competing re ligious and secular discourses, for both the offi cial co-optation and the non-official recovery of rel igious meanings, fo r conflict between orthodoxies, sects and confess ional groups, fo r dri ves towards consensus and communities, and for counter movements towards separateness and division." John Eade and Michae l J. Sallnow , eds. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 2. �114 SLOVAKIA broken up by the police. Altogether, 600,000 Czechs and Slovaks signed the petition and a reported 300,000-400,000 of the signatures were collected in Slovakia. Samizdat reports indicate that this petition was often read aloud at pilgrimages in Slovakia during night programs in the late 1980s.60 Divisions also existed within the official hierarchy of the Czechoslovak Catholic Church regarding the direction the 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage should take. Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, since the election of Pope John Paul II, had become increasingly willing to criticize the state's interference in church affairs. In a 1981 letter to the editors of Katolfcke noviny, the state-approved and supported news organ of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia, Cardinal Tomasek had criticized this periodical's focus on Pacem in Terris, disarmament and international relations, rather than Papal speeches and material that responded to the spiritual needs of the country ' s believers.61 In 1984, Cardinal Tomasek had not only formally invited Pope John Paul II to attend the Velehrad commemoration, but had also supported unofficial initiatives that demonstrated popular support for a papal visit. Cardinal Tomasek had also supported the secret church's plan to organize a night program at Velehrad, thus demonstrating that the lines between the secret church's activities and the official church sometimes became quite blurred. The unwillingness of the local bishop and priest responsible for Velehrad to approve the night program or permit the youth to spend the night in the basilica stands in stark contrast to Cardinal Tomasek's interest in it. All reports indicate that the police and other authorities in Slovakia were fairly ineffective in their efforts to clamp down on pilgrimages. Samizdat articles indicate that the pilgrims were quite aware of secret police agents dressed in civilian clothes and using cameras and video-recorders to document the event, but their presence apparently did little to deter their activities. As early as the 1984 pilgrimage to Levoca, police put several obstacles in the way of 60 For more about the 31-point petition and the March 25, 1988 demonstration, see David Doellinger, "From Prayers to Protests: The Impact of Religio us-Based Dissent on the Emergence of Civil Society in Slovakia and the GDR," (Ph.D. Dissertation: University of Pittsburgh, 2002), chapter 4. 61 This letter appeared in lnformace o cirkvi, no. 4 ( 198 1): 24-25. �SLOVAKIA 115 pilgrims, such as running road checks to back up traffic to the site, canceling train and bus service to Levoca, and even cutting down trees to block the road to the basilica. More subtle efforts focused on keeping young people away from Levoca by scheduling a concert by a Slovak pop star in a nearby town . Some schools scheduled special activities on the day of pilgrimages, and others even posted notices banning participation in the pilgrimage.62 Police efforts took a more violent turn in 1986, when militia used dogs to break up groups of pilgrims making their way to Gaboltov.63 Also in 1986, the police interrogated Jozef Halko, a priest who had been sec retly ordained, and Anton Selecky, a Catholic activist, for their activities earlier in the year at the Sastin and Levoca pilgrimages. Holk.o 's interrogation focused on the fact that he had heard confessions at Levoca and Selecky ' s interrogators were concerned that he had written accounts of the pilgrimages for publication in samizdat. 64 In addition to signaling the pilgrimage' s transformation into a public space for Catholics, Velehrad also reflected the increasingly political potential of religion itself in the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. The political significance of religion and religious activities in the Soviet bloc had become quite apparent during the Pope 's first visit to Poland in 1979. In Warsaw's Victory Square on June 2, John Paul II spoke freely about the historically close rel ationship between Christianity and the Polish nation. He also spoke about the failed Warsaw uprising in 1944 (when Soviet troops allowed the Polish Home Army to be defeated by the Nazis), Polish independence, and human dignity. 65 In his analysis of the rise of Solidarity in Poland, Jan Kubik notes that Pope John Paul II 's speech and visit brought an end to the " Party-state's monopoly over public di scourse in 62 " Levoca - the Slovak National Shrine," K NS 2 14 (6 December I 984) . For references to the presence of the secret police at Velehrad in 1985, see " Velehrad 85 - spomienka studentov," Naboi enstvo a sucasnost'3 ( 1986): 17 and " Boli sme na Velehrade," 5. 63 "Militia Set Dogs on Pilgrims (Czechoslovakia)," KNS 257 (2 1 August 1986). 64 "Slovak Cathol ics interrogated," KNS 264 (27 November 1986). 65 Pope John Paul II , "Pope John Paul IL Speaks in Victory Square, Warsaw," in ed., Gale Stokes, From Stalinism to Pluralism (New York and Oxford : Oxford Universi ty Press, 1996), 200-203. �116 SLOVAKIA Poland."66 Though Solidarity was not a religious movement, Kubik argues that its close association with the Catholic Church and the use of religious symbols strengthened its ability to mobilize the Polish population and to construct a sphere of activity separate from and in defiance to the state. Among its achievements was the construction of public spaces not reserved for the state, including the Gdansk Monument and the Poznan Monument. Both incorporated crosses into their design, and, as Kubik explains, both monuments had been unveiled in religious ceremonies that emphasized the participation of society, rather than society 's subservience to the state. 67 Jan Kubik's analysis of these public events in Poland that preceded the formation of Solidarity offers insight into the political significance of religion in East Central Europe. Just as religion and religious traditions offered an alternative to the state's monopoly of power in Poland, the pilgrimage at Velehrad demonstrated that religion and religious traditions could offer a similar alternative in Czechoslovakia. Pope John Paul II had emphasized the historical significance of Christianity in Poland during his visit in 1979 and the commemoration of St. Methodius at Velehrad had allowed Catholic pilgrims the unique opportunity to confront state officials regarding Czechoslovakia's historical relationship with Christianity. The pilgrims at Velehrad, by vocally opposing the state's emphasis on the cultural contribution of Methodius, expressed their defiance of and unwillingness to be subservient to the state's religious policies. In doing so, the pilgrims transformed the traditional religious pilgrimage into an event of political significance. 66 Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, I 994 ), 144. 67 For description and analysis of the Gdansk and the Poznan Monuments, see Kubik, The Power of Symbols, I 96-206, 2 14-216. � SLOVAKIA 99 THE 1985 PILGRIMAGE AT VELEHRAD: SLOVAK CATHOLICS AND THE CREATION OF A PUBLIC SPACE David Doellinger An analysis of the 1985 pilgrimage at Velehrad reveals many of the ways that the nature of pilgrimages (and thus Catholicism's role in Communist Czechoslovakia) had begun to change during the 1980s. At this event, Catholic activists and pilgrims surprised church leaders by voicing their opposition to state policy in front of Party officials, thereby transforming a religious tradition into a public space where Slovak Catholics could meet free from state interference to assert their religious and political beliefs. The 1985 Yelehrad pilgrimage offers an interesting window into the increas ingly contentious relationship between church and state in Czec hoslovakia. It illustrates the mobilizing influence of Pope John Paul II and reveals that restive Catholics, who had been practicing their faith secretly in the underground, helped empower some leaders in the Czechoslovakia's official hierarchy - particularly Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek of Prague - to be more critical of the state's religious policies. Man y scholars have recognized the ability of pilgrimages to serve as barometers of soc ial and political change. In their analysis of Christian pilgrimage traditi ons, anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner conclude: Pilgrimage should be regarded ... as an institution with a history. Each pilgrimage, of any length, is vulnerable to the history of its period and must come to terms with shifts of political geography. Pilgrimage is more responsive to social change and popular moods than liturgical ritual, fixed by rubric. 1 1 Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York : Columbia Un ivers ity Press, 1978), 23 1. �SLOVAKIA The character of Slovak pilgrimages had certainly reflected the changing social and political landscape in Slovakia after the Second World War. Pilgrimages had been an important part of Slovak reli gious life since the middle ages. Over thirty pilgrimage sites exist throughout Slovakia and Slovak pilgrim s also visited several religious sites in the Czech lands. Until 1949, when state permission to hold public gatherings such as pilgrimages became mandatory, local church officials had organized the annu al pilgrimages and services at these sites. Thereafter, there had been little acti vity at these sites on pilgrimage days, with the exception of the moments of political liberalization, such as in 1956 (following Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin) and 1968 (during the Prague Spring). 2 The 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage has received much attention by Western political analysts and scholars. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Keston News Service fo llowed this event closely and released extensive reports about thi s pilgrimage (and the pilgrimages that followed). 3 Although Velehrad is located in Moravi a, this pilgrimage was of particular importance to Slovak Catholi cs, who attended in relatively high numbers. Several schol ars writing in the latter half of the 1980s referred to thi s pilgrimage as evidence of a reli gious revival and the resilience of Catholicism in Slovakia. 4 Scholars writing after 1989 have referred to thi s pilgrimage and those that followed, not only in the context of a religious revival, but 2 Karel Kaplan notes that not onl y pilgrimages, but also attendance at reli gious services and the forma tion of new youth groups occurred during the upheaval s in Poland and Hungary in 1956. Karel Kaplan, " Church and State in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1956 - Part III ," Religion in Comm unist Lands, 14, no. 3 (fall 1986): 280. Milan J. Reban reports a sim ilar resurgence of pilgrimages during the Prague Spring in 1968 . Milan J. Reban, "The Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia," in Catholicism and Politics in Communist Societies, ed . Pedro Ramet (Durham and London: Duke Uni versity Press, I 990), 15 I. 3 The Keston News Service was based at Keston College, England and provided reports and analys is of the religious situation in East Europe. 4 See Janice Brou n, Conscience and Capti vity: Religion in Eastern Europe (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1988), 67- 101. Also see Pedro Ramet, Cross and Commissar (Bloom ington and Indianapo lis: Ind iana Universi ty Press, 1987), 78. �SLOVAKIA 101 also as an example of one of the few expressions of independent or non-state activity in Slovakia. 5 Pilgrimages and their increasing popularity throughout the 1980s became one of the most visible markers of a religious revival in Slovakia. This religious revival had begun almost a decade earlier and was closely related to the election of a Pole, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II in 1978. Pope John Paul II took a new aggressive and uncompromising stand when dealing with the Communist governments of Eastern Europe. Under Pope Paul Vi's (1963-1978) eastern policy (Ostpolitik), the Vatican had made preserving the church hierarchy in Czechoslovakia a primary goal, even at the expense of making important concessions to the Communist government. In 1973, Cardinal Casaroli, responsible for the Vatican's Ostpolitik, had negotiated the regime's approval of four new bishops, even though all four remained members of Pacem in Terris, a state sponsored organization that coordinated the work of priests in Czechoslovakia. Although this agreement brought the total number of bishops to five (out of thirteen dioceses), many Czech and Slovak Catholics criticized the Vatican's tolerance of Pacem in Terris. Breaking with his predecessor, Pope John Paul II refused to compromise with these governments, particularly with regards to spiritual matters. In 1982, he formally condemned Pacem in Terris. 6 As Archbishop of Krakow, Wojtyla had secretly ordained many Czech and Slovak priests in the 1970s. Silvester Krcmery, a leader of Slovakia's secret church and a friend of Wojtyla since 1973, described him as a protector of the Slovaks. Emphasizing the importance of their shared experiences under Communism, Krcmery pointed to a 5 Stokes refers to the 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage not only in terms of attendance, but also as evidence of Cardinal Tomasek's increasing willingness to act independently of the state. Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 152. See also Sabrina Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe (Durham and London : Duke University Press , 1991), 109 and Padraic Kenney , A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 36. 6 Alexander Tomsky, "Pacem in Terris," Religion in Communist Lands lO (1982): 278-279. For a discussion of bishop vacancies, see Sabrina P. Ramet, Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 125. �102 SLOVAKIA bond that undoubted ly other Catholics in Czechoslovakia shared by saying: "He has lived all thi s persec ution of Catholics." 7 While the election of a Polish pope in 1978 helps explain the increased popularity of Catholicism and religious traditions in Slovakia, the events at Yelehrad in 1985 indicate th at the nature of the pilgrimage experience was transformed by activists in the secret (underground) Catholic church. Such a church existed in the Czech lands and Slovakia from the late 1940s to 1989. It was organized by Catholics in response to the persec ution they faced by the Communist authorities. Members of the secret church met in private apartments for bible study , fellowship and even choir practice. Bishops and priests who had been clandestinely trained and ordained provided pastoral serv ices to these believers. By the 1980s, activists in the secret church published and distributed a wide variety of books and newsletters as samizdat. 8 The undergro und church used its samizdat network to publicize this and later pilgrimages by printing announcements of upcoming pilgrimages and it published accounts of each year's pilgrimages. A rich written record of the 1985 Velehrad pil gri mage can be found in thi s body of sa mizdat literature. 9 7 Silvester Krcmery , interview by author, 3 July I996 , Bratislava, Slovakia. For a brief description of Krcmery's first meeting with Wojtyta, see Frantisek Miklosko, Nebudete ich m6ct' roz vratit: z osudov katolickej cfrkvi na Slovensku v rokoch I 943-89 (Bratislava: Archa, 1990), 125. 8 David Doellinger, " Prayers, Pilgrims , and Petitions: The Secret Church and the Growth of Civ il Society in Slovakia," Nationalities Papers 30, no. 2 (June 2002): 215-240. 9 Samizdat (self-published) refers to newspapers, articles, essays, books , etc. that were printed with mimeograph machines or typed carbon copy, and often distributed illegall y, usuall y throu gh personal contacts and info rm al networks. Archi ves with the most extensive holdings on Slovak religious samizdat include: Listy z podzemia samizdat arch ive at the Christian Democratic Movement headq uarters, Bratislava, Slovakia ; Libri Prohibiti Samizdat Archive, Prag ue, Czech Republic; Czechoslovak Documentation Center, Dobrichovice (Prague), Czech Republic. Slovak samizda t can also be found in the Keston Institute's arc hi ve, Oxford , England and th e arc hives of Radi o Free Europe/Radio Liberty in th e Open Society Archives , Budapest, Hungary. For a comprehensive catalog of Slovak religious sam izdat, see Rudolf Lessak, Listy z podzemia: suboma dokumentacia krestanskej samizdatovej publicistiky na S/ovensku v rokoch I 945- I989 (Bratislava: US PO, 1998). �SLOVAKIA 103 The 1985 Velehrad Pilgrimage An increasing number of Catholics attended pilgrimages in Slovakia in the first half of the 1980s. Between 1982 and 1985, samizdat reports only carried information for the pilgrimages to Sastfn and Levoca, the two most popular Slovak pilgrimages. An estimated 15 ,000 people attended the pilgrimage at Sastfn in 1983 ; attendance jumped to 50,000 in 1984. 10 About 100,000 pilgrims attended the pilgrimages at Levoca in both 1982 and 1983. 11 The new role and importance of the pilgrimage tradition became firmly established at the 1985 pilgrimage at Yelehrad. An important pil grimage site in Moravia, Velehrad had already hosted an estim ated 40,000 pilgrims in 1984. The 1985 Yelehrad pilgrimage, however, commemorated the 1, 100th anni versary of the death of St. Methodius, who along with St. Cyril , had introduced eastern Christianity (and the Slavic liturgy) to the Great Moravian Empire in the ninth century. The work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius is particulai:.ly important to Slovak Catholics, who trace their political, cultural and religious history to thi s early empire and the arrival of these monks. 12 Several months prior to the pilgrimage, Czechoslovak Catholics and the Communist authorities began to contest the direction of the Yelehrad commemoration. At the center of the dispute was the question of whether Pope John Paul II would be permitted to attend the event. The Pope had made his first visit to Poland as early as 1979, and Czechoslovakia 's Catholics hoped this anniversary would bring a papal visit. An August 1984 letter to President Gustav Husak, signed simpl y the " Youth of CSSR," demanded that the Pope be 10 "Sastfnska put' I983 ," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'(sami zdat) 4 (1983): 2; "Sastfnsky prihovor otca Biskupa Gabrisa," Naboi enstvo a sucasnost'5 ( 1984): 8; " Sastfn '84," Vy ber (sami zdat) 4 ( 1984): 38. 11 "Annual Pilgrimage to Levoca," Keston News Service (KNS), no. 156 (August I6, I982): 3-4. Also, see Vy ber, 3 (1984 ): 7. 12 See lmrich Kruzliak, "The Heritage of Saints Cyril and Methodius in the Works of Slovak Writers and Artists," in SS. Cy ril and M ethodius Among the Slovaks: Observing the 1, JOd" Anniversary of Saint Methodius' Death, eds. lmrich Kru zliak and Frances L. Mi zenko (Middletown, PA : Slovak Catholic Federation, 1985), 134-143. The territori al extent of thi s empire is unclear, but it probably included large porti ons of present day Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. �104 SLOVAKIA permitted to attend the 1, l 00 th anniversary event. The authors indicated that they were Catholics from Banska Bystrica (in central Slovakia) and argued that there was popular support for a papal visit: We are in the jubilee year of St. Methodius. Thousands of young hearts put their signature on the request that the Holy Father John Paul II come to our country for thi s jubilee celebration. We join with Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, who personally invited the Holy Father to this celebration. Esteemed Mr. President, if these thousands of signatures are [too] few, we are willing to collect additional thousands from young people to agai n document for you the desire of the absolute majority of inhabitants of the CSSR, so that the Holy Father comes to our republic for this precious jubilee occasion. 13 In February 1984, Cardinal Tomasek had formally invited the Pope to Velehrad, and over 17,000 Catholic youth in Czechoslovakia 14 signed a statement demonstrating their support for thi s visit. Cardinal Tomasek also cited this petition action in a letter to the CSSR government requesting permission for the visit. 15 A samizdat author analyzing the importance of the Velehrad celebration for Slovaks and the meaning of the petition wrote: "It is a new first in the public life of our church." 16 The Slovak secret church helped publicize several of these appeals for the Pope' s attendance. Despite the authorities' refusal, public support for the Papal visit continued. On New Years Day 1985 , Cardinal Tomasek sent a letter to the Pope with an additional 500 signatures that had been collected over Christmas. The letter reaffirmed the desire of Czechoslovak Catholics for the Pope to come to Velehrad on September 14 for the Methodius commemoration. It also invited the Pope to visit Sastfn, a Slovak pilgrimage site, afterwards 17 The authorities continued to refuse permission for the visit. 18 13 Letter to President Husak from the Youth of CSS R, 29 August 1984, I, Keston st Institute Fi le (hereafter KJ): CZ ROM 7/4 1 Methodius Celebrations 1985. 14 "Pozvanie sv. Otca do Ceskoslovenska," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'3 ( 1984): 17. 15 Una Sane ta Catholica (samizdat) Tu rice ( 1984 ): 35. 16 • "Pozvanie sv. Otca do Ceskoslovenska," 17-1 8. 17 Naboienstvo a sucasnost'2 (1985): 19. 18 Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Do wn, 152. Though the authori ties prevented Pope John Paul II from attending the commemoration, his encyc lical Slavorum �SLOVAKIA 105 As the Velehrad pilgrimage approached, members of the secret church in both the Czech lands and Slovakia began making plans to alter the length and nature of the commemoration by organizing a special night program. Catholic activists wanted to invite youth to the site on Saturday, July 6, 1985, for a special program of song and prayer during the night preceding the official commemoration, which had been scheduled for Sunday, July 7. Night programs had already become a popular component of pilgrimages in Slovakia. Over 50,000 pilgrims attended the night program at the Levoca pilgrimage in 1983. 19 At Sastfn in 1984, a night program organized by Vladimir Jukl, one of the leaders of the Slovak secret church, had also preceded the regular pilgrimage celebration.20 The plan for a night program at Velehrad appears to have originated with both Moravian and Slovak sources. Catholic youth in Moravia invited their counterparts in Slovakia and Bohemia to the Saturday program that would include prayers for the unity of the church, the Pope, bishops and others in the Church. The Slovak reli gious samizdat Vy ber helped distribute this invitation by prominently publishing it on the back of the front cover of a spring 1985 issue.2' Frantisek Miklosko, another activist in the Slovak secret church , refers to the Moravian Catholics' pl an in a history of the post-war Catholi c Church in Slovakia that he published in 1991 . He credits Vladimir Jukl with the idea of introducing the night program at Velehrad. Miklosko personally presented Jukl 's plan for a night program to Cardinal Tomasek, who supported the idea. Though the local priest and bishop responsible for Velehrad refused to officially approve the night program or permit the youth to spend the night in Velehrad's basilica, the plan for the night program went ahead. 22 On Saturday afternoon , Ju ly 6, the Velehrad celebration made its informal start with the arri val of an estimated 5,000 young Apostoli - which praised the work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius - was published on the day of the event. Alexander Tomsky, "St Methodius Return s to Czechos lovakia," KNS, no. 235 (October 3, 1985): 18- 19. 19 " Vfce nez sto ti sfc poutn fku na Levocske hofe 3.7. 1983," ln fo rmace o cfrk vi (sami zdat) 9 (1983): 13. 20 "Sastfn ' 84," Vfber 4 ( 1984): 38. Miklosko writes that Ju kl developed the idea for the night program for Sastfn that year. Miklosko, Nebudete ich moct'rozvratit, 136. 21 Vfber4 (1985). 22 Miklosko, Nebudete ich m6ct'rozvratit;128- l 30. �106 SLOVAKIA Catholics. Accounts of their activities filled subseq uent samizdat periodicals and painted a vivid picture of their activities prior to the formal opening of the celebration at 10:00 AM on Sunday morning. As they arrived on Saturday, the young pilgrims sat in small groups in front of the basilica, some talking with friends and others singing songs, sometimes with the accompaniment of a guitar. Bishop Jan Korec , who had been secretly consecrated in 1951, visited with the young pilgrims in the afternoon and remained with them throughout the night. 23 After an evening mass inside the basilica, the pilgrims spent the night outside with one group in front of the basilica and the other in a nearby field. Each group stayed awake the entire night and observed a program of prayer, meditation and si nging. During the night, both groups chanted slogans such as "We want cloisters," "Long live Tomasek," and "Long live the Pope." One report indicated that the pilgrims also chanted "Let the Pope Come" for about twenty-five minutes. 24 One member of the Slovak secret church apparently spent Saturday afternoon and night with a tape recorder recording the songs, chants and conversations with the pilgrims. A Slovak samiz dat periodical published excerpts from this recording, capturing some of the different hopes and concerns of those in attendance, including the di sappointment of one young pilgrim that the state authorities viewed the pilgrimage and anniversary celebration as a "peace event." The pilgrim, speaking sometime late Saturday evening, described his mixed response to the weekend: I assumed that many believers would participate in this pilgrimage, but I am very surprised by the multitude of people who are already here today. I am very enthusiastic about it, because I expect rich spiritual fruits from this pilgrimage. I regret, of course - and I also think everyone else does - that we may not have the Holy Father here among us. But on the other hand, we are glad that he is represented here by Cardinal Casaro li [responsible for the Vatican's Ostpolitik]. 25 23 " Velehrad ' 85 ," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'3 ( 1985): 17. The largest Czech religious samizdat periodical republished this report. "Velehrad I985 , videny zo Slovenska," Jnformace o cirkvi IO (1985), 6-7. 24 "Boli sme na Velehrade," Rodinne spolocenstvo (samizdat) 5 ( 1985): 5-6. 25 "Velehrad ' 85 z magnetofonoveho zaznamu," Vyber9 (1985): 12. �SLOVAKIA 107 Early in the morning a fifty-year old priest, asked for his reaction to thi s " uncommon" event, replied: We spent this night at Velehrad together with Sai nts Cyril and Methodius. And it was very beautiful. There are groups of young believers here from all over Slovakia and also from the Czech lands, but a preponderance here are Slovaks. 26 Though located in Moravia, the night program at Velehrad was of particul ar interest to Slovak Catholics, and other observers also noted the large presence of Slovaks at Velehrad.27 . The enthusiasm of the young Catholics who had arri ved early to spend the night at Velehrad carried over to the official celebrations on Sunday. Despite the state's efforts to curtail attendance by canceling public transportation to Velehrad, pilgrims from all over Czechoslovakia arrived , many on foot, to join those who had spent the night singing, praying and chanting. 28 One samizdat periodical reported that at a 7:00 AM mass outside the Basilica, the pilgrims who had arrived only that morning were surprised that the young people, fo llowing the singing of the papal hymn, broke into chants of "Long li ve John Paul II! " and " Let us have the Hol y Father! " 29 The youth had been chanting these slogans throughout the night, and like a team coming out of a hi gh-school pep rally, they were ready for the celebration to begin. By 10:00 AM, when the official celebration began, an estimated 100,000-250,000 pilgrims had gathered outside the Basilica in the center of Velehrad. 30 A local Party official opened the celebration by welcoming everyone to what he called the St. Methodiu s " Peace Celebration ." In response to this designation, the 26 Ibid., 19. Another Slovak priest, Father Martinec, explai ned that he had he lped wi th the organization of the pilgrimage and the arriva l of Slovak Catholics at Yelehrad . Karel Martinec, interview by author, 4 Jul y 1996, Bratislava, Slovakia. 28 "Yelehrad 1985 ," Vzkffsenf(samizdat) 2 ( 1985): 15. 29 " Boli sme na Yelehrade," 5. 30 Religious samizdat peri odical s re ported this wide range estimate of pilgrims in attendance. See "Boli sme na Yelehrade," 8; "Yelehrad ' 85," 18; " Yelehrad 1985," Vzkifsenf2 ( 1985): 15; and " Yelehrad nas," Informace o cfrk vi 10 ( 1985): 6. Photographs of the pilgrims gathered around the Bas ilica at Yelehrad on Jul y 7 - taken from different angles - indicate that the pilgrims filled every inch of the square and support the magnitude of the size of the crowd as reported by religious samizdat. Kl: photo collection, photos# 1793 and # 1876. 27 �108 SLOVAKIA pilgrims responded negatively with whistles and shouts of "We want Holy Mass!" 3 1 Following the singi ng of the state anthem, the Minister of Culture, Dr. Milan Klu sak, spoke. Again, the pilgrims expressed their dissatisfaction with the official spin he gave to the importance of the anniversary. Several samizdat periodicals reported the following exchange between Klusak and the pilgrims: [Minister Klusak] grasped the situation and therefore improvised as he spoke. In order to stress that he did not consider the celebration to be a peace celebration, he said that he came to the pilgrimage to celebrate Methodius' memory. The crowd corrected him by chanting "Saint, Saint." When he said that Cyril and Methodius brought us a language and alphabet, the people supplemented it with "Faith , Faith!" The surpri sed minister then began a discussion with the people by saying "The Bi shop will speak about Faith to you. We have divided up the work." ... the young people replied to him: "Freedom, Religious Freedom." The minister argued back to the youth and everyone else: "If you did not have [religious freedom], you would not be here." 32 The pilgrims responded to the remainder of Klusak's speech with chants: "We Want the Holy Father!" "We Want Religious Freedom," and "We Want Bishops!" In contrast to the pilgrims' dissatisfaction with the state authorities' remarks, the pilgrims enthusiastically supported the words of the church officials. During the heckling of Minister Klu sak, the pilgrims had also chanted "Long Live Cardinal Tomasek! and "Casaroli!" 33 Cardinal Tomasek read a letter from the Pope that reportedly energized the pilgrims despite their disappointment that the Pope was not there to deliver his words personally . During the Mass, Cardinal Casaroli switched between Czech and Slovak while delivering his sermon.34 Accounts indicate that Cardinal Tomasek and Cardinal Casaroli clearly were surprised by the hi gh attendance and the enthusiasm of the pilgrims. After- 31 "Boli sme na Yelehrade," 7. fbid ., 7. A similar account of this exchange, written by a Slovak pilgrim , appeared in Czech samizdat. " Velehrad 1985 ," Vzkfisenf2 ( 1985): 16. See also Jan Korec, Od barbarskej noci na slobode (Bratislava: Luc, 1993), 342. 33 "Velehrad '85," Naboienstvo a sucasnost; 18. 34 "Boli sme na Velehrade," 7-8. 32 �SLOVAKIA 109 wards, Cardinal Tomasek reportedly told a group of young people, "This is not reality, this is a dream. " 35 The Significance of Velehrad The relatively large number of Catholic youth from Slovakia that chose to come earl y to this pilgrimage indicates both the strength of Catholicism in Slovakia and the failure of the state 's restricti ve policies against the church. Vaclav Benda, a Catholic Czech activist, afterwards commented on the significance of this pilgrimage: Yelehrad was an effective demonstration that the experiment of splitting the church was condemned to failure and ridiculous from the beginning. It must presently be clear from this pilgrimage ... that the prohibitions or radical restriction on the church drove several million active believers into the underground. 36 The 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage was critical turning point in a revival of the pilgrimage tradition in Slovakia. After Yelehrad, pilgrimage attendance and the number of sites hosting pilgrimages in Slovakia increased significantly. 37 Levoca, in eastern Slovakia, received the largest number of pilgrims with an estimated 150,000 in 1986,38 200,000-230,000 in 1987,39 and possibly as high as 280,000 300,000 in 1988.40 The number of pilgrims to Sastfn, a small village located north of Bratislava near the Moravian border, grew steadily from estimates of 40,000-50,000 in 1986,4 1 and 60,000 in 1987 ,42 to 35 " Yelehrad '85," Naboienstvo a sricasnost; 18. Vaclav Benda, "Ako d'alej po Yelehrade?" Naboienstvo a sricasnost'2 (I 986): 4. 37 Attendance at Slo vak pil grimages in 1989 was also high, but there is less information in samizdat about that year's pilgrimages than for earlier years. This is probably due to the fac t that reports of the summer pilgrimages usually appeared in late fa ll samizdat issues, by which time the Velvet Revolution had already begun. 38 "Levoca 1986," Voice of A merica (VOA) 12 July 1986. 39 "Record Numbers Attend Slovak Pilgrimages," Keston News Service, 280 (23 Jul y 87): 19; "Message from Jan Carnogursky to Keston College," KI: CZ ROM 7 /4 Pilgrimages; "Levoca put' 1987," Naboienstvo a sricasnost'4 ( 1987): 7. 40 " Mariansky rok na Slovensku," Katolfcky mesacnik (sami zdat) 4 (1 988): I ; Peter Marti n, "The Pilgrimage to Levoca," R FE/RL, 14 July 1988, 19. Another sami zdat periodical estimated the attendance in 1988 at " more than 200,000 ." See "Mys lienky z Levocskej pute," Naboienstvo a sricasnost'3 (I 988): 3. 41 " Putne slav nosti na Slovensku v r. 1986," Naboienstvo a sricasnost' I ( I 987): I 719. 36 �110 SLOVAKIA 60,000-70,000 in 1988. 43 The number of pilgrims to Gaboltov, estimated at 20,000-25,000 in 1985 ,44 increased more dramatically from estimates of 30,000-50,000 in 198645 to as high as l 00,000 in 1987 and 1988. 46 Large numbers of pilgrims also visited traditionally less popular pilgrimage sites in Slovakia during this period. Lutina, an important Greek Catholic pilgrimage site in eastern Slovakia, received 40,000 pilgrims in 198647 and 50,000 in 1987 .48 Topolcany received 25,000 pilgrims in 1988.49 Due to the nature of a pilgrimage, usually an outdoor event with people sitting or standing in a town square or in a nearby field, only estimates, probably made by members of the secret church present at the pilgrimage, are available. Jan Camogursky , a prominent activist in the Slovak secret church, reported that as he became aware of the political significance of the pilgrimages in 1987, he began making estimates of the number of pilgrims attending the events throughout Slovakia.50 Although not an exact count, these estimates are significant as a measure of the increase in the multitude of pilgrim s attending a particular pilgrimage, an increase that the authors of samizdat reports on pilgrimages were certainly observing. The increase in attendance after 1985 suggests that pilgrimages can be more than barometers of social change; the Velehrad pilgrimage promoted a change in the function of pilgrimages and their appeal to Catholics. The active force that promoted this transformation was the secret church. Members of this community helped transform the pilgrimage tradition into a space where Catholics could meet publicly and in large numbers to worship. Velehrad 's night program allowed young people active in the underground to meet 42 "Sastfn - September 1987," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'5 (1987): l 1. "Sastfn - '88," K ato/fcky mesacnik 5 ( 1988): I. 44 "Gaboltov ' 85 ," Naboi enstvo a sucasnost'3 (I 985): 20. 45 " Putne slavnosti na Slovensku v r 1986," 17- 19. 46 " Message from Jan Camogursky to Keston College"; "Put' v Gaboltove," VOA , 24 Jul y 1988. 47 "Pout' reckokatoliku v Lu tine 1986," lnformace o cfrkvi 10 (1986): I0. 48 "Message from Jan Camogursky." 49 "Pilgrimage at Topol'cany," Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB), 13 September 1988. 50 Jan Camogursky, interview by author, 16 Jul y 1996, Bratislava, Slovakia. Documents in the Keston Institute archive indicate that he sent reports of these estimates to Western news organizations. See for example, "Message from Jan Camogursky." 43 �SLOVAKIA 111 with other Catholics and express their faith publicly. Velehrad had demonstrated the secret church 's ability to mobilize its members to participate in a public event, and it continued to do so during the remainder of the decade. Slovak Catholic activists contributed to the popularity of pilgrimages and their night programs in the later half of the 1980s. The used the secret church 's samizdat network to inform its members about previous pilgrimages and to promote attendance at upcoming ones. From 1986 to 1989, the issues of Naboi enstvo a sucasnost; Rodinne spolocenstvo and later Katolfcky mesacnfk published extensive articles and reports about Slovak pilgrimages. This coverage included first hand reports of pilgrims' experiences, often including descriptions of their walk to the site and the activities of the night program. These samizdat periodicals also frequently published transcripts of prayers and sermons spoken during Mass at a pilgrimage, as well as historical information about different pilgrimage sites. 5 1 They also published schedules and information about upcoming pilgrimages in Slovakia. 52 As a result of this coverage, a written record of the experiences, worship service, activities, and even the chants at pilgrimages has been preserved. Catholics unable to attend a particular pilgrimage could learn about what had been said and done by reading these accounts. Since most samizdat reports on pilgrimages were usuall y publi shed several months after the pilgrimage, this coverage reminded Slovak Catholics of what had happened during the summer. Its reports and descriptions of previous pilgrimages promoted the events, and its schedule information certainly helped coordinate attendance at a pilgrimage. In addition to its samiz dat network, information about pilgrimages was shared through the communities of the secret church. Carnogursky reported that many of its communities "visited these pilgrimages collectively as groups." 53 The Slovak secret church also continued to promote the night program for pilgrimages after 1985, and attendance at night prog- 51 For the text of a prayer read by a local priest at the I 988 Sastfn pilgrimage, see "Modlitba na zaver marianskeho Rok u," Kato/icky mesacnfk 6 ( 1988): 5-7 . Another arti cle recounts the history of th e Sastfn pilgrim age site fro m 9 16 A.O. to 1987. "Sastfn," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'4 ( 1987): 8-10. 52 " Letna - putnicka - aktivita 1989," Kato/icky mesacmk 5 ( I 989): 6. 53 Camogursky, interview. �112 SLOVAKIA rams increased. A samizdat article describing the pilgrimage celebrations that had taken place throughout Slovakia in 1986 announced that in 1987 night programs were scheduled in Gaboltov and Uhorna in addition to Levoca and Sastin. 54 In 1988, an estimated 50,000 pilgrims attended the night program at Gaboltov,55 and 100,000 attended the night program during the Marian year pilgrimage in Levoca. 56 The following year, 5,000-10,000 people attended the night pro57 gram at the smaller pilgrimage site of Lutina. At the pilgrimage, the members of the secret church could do openly and publicly what they had done since their foundation: gather for prayer, meditation, and worship. Rather than finding safety in small numbers by meeting in private apartments, the pilgrimage tradition allowed the secret church members to practice their faith publicly, on a larger scale, and in fellowship with Catholics not active in the secret church. Jan Camogursky, reporting on the significance of pilgrimages in Slovakia, writes: [While] they last, pilgrimages solve a basic problem of our society - the problem of being outnumbered by the police ... The police are unable even to act against individuals on pilgrimages, because they are protected in the solidarity of numbers ... [This] feeling of safety gives the pilgrims another feeling - that of freedom . On a pilgrimage they can act according to their convictions and openly display their religious faith. 58 Although the secret church had traditionally distanced itself from the political opposition to avoid additional persecution by the state, the pilgrimage tradition facilitated a shift towards a new engagement in the public sphere. For members of the secret church, this issue of religious freedom could always be discussed among fellow members through its communities and samizdat press. Chants for religious freedom and in support of certain church officials had been voiced publicly to a significantly large gathering at Velehrad in 1985. The 54 "Putne slavnosti na Slovensku v r. 1986," 19. " Put' v Gaboltove," VOA, 24 July 1988. 56 "Mariansky rok na Slovensku," l. 57 "0 puti V Lutine," Rodinne spolocenstvo 5 (1989): 14. 58 Jan Carnogursky, "The Underground Church and Pilgrimages in Slovakia," The Salisbury Review (Ju ne 1989): 36. 55 �SLOVAKIA 113 pilgrimage tradition provided a public space and forum where political demands arti culated by the secret church could be discussed, debated, and shared with the broader public in relative safety. The contest between church and state exhibited at the 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage is one of the most striking feature s of this event. 59 The contest over the orientation of the commemoration could be said to have begun in 1984 as Cardinal Tomasek and Czechoslovak Catholics began demanding that Pope John Paul II be given permi ssion to attend. While the state argued that the commemoration should celebrate the cultural significance of St. Methodius, the church argued that the anniversary was a religious event. This conflict between church and state, so publicly exhibited at Velehrad in 1985, suggests that a term such as "church" fail s to capture the complexity of relations between church and state. Rather than a monolith, the "church" was represented by at least three distinct groups in this contest: the official church hierarchy , pilgrims active in the secret church, and pilgrims not active in the secret church. Of the three, it was the pilgrims (both within and without the secret church) listening to the Party officials' presentations who openly challenged the state's authority over the pilgrimage. Through their efforts, the pilgrimage became a public space where Catholics could challenge the status quo and the state 's right to define the meaning of St. Methodius and the l ,lO0 th anni versary . The pilgrimage created a forum where these three representations of the church ' s position could interact and influence one another. Even more interesting is the fact that the challenge to the status quo did not end in 1985 . Leaders of the Slovak underground church increasingly crossed into more politically-oriented public activities, most notably its collection of signatures to a 31-point petition for greater religious freedom in 1987 and 1988 and its organization of a public demonstration for religious freedom in Bratislava on March 25 , 1988 whi ch was violently 59 John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, in the introduction to an edited vo lume of research on pilgrimages, assert that the new agenda in pilgrimage stud ies recogni zes that pilgrimage " is above all an arena for competing re ligious and secular discourses, for both the offi cial co-optation and the non-official recovery of rel igious meanings, fo r conflict between orthodoxies, sects and confess ional groups, fo r dri ves towards consensus and communities, and for counter movements towards separateness and division." John Eade and Michae l J. Sallnow , eds. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 2. �114 SLOVAKIA broken up by the police. Altogether, 600,000 Czechs and Slovaks signed the petition and a reported 300,000-400,000 of the signatures were collected in Slovakia. Samizdat reports indicate that this petition was often read aloud at pilgrimages in Slovakia during night programs in the late 1980s.60 Divisions also existed within the official hierarchy of the Czechoslovak Catholic Church regarding the direction the 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage should take. Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, since the election of Pope John Paul II, had become increasingly willing to criticize the state's interference in church affairs. In a 1981 letter to the editors of Katolfcke noviny, the state-approved and supported news organ of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia, Cardinal Tomasek had criticized this periodical's focus on Pacem in Terris, disarmament and international relations, rather than Papal speeches and material that responded to the spiritual needs of the country ' s believers.61 In 1984, Cardinal Tomasek had not only formally invited Pope John Paul II to attend the Velehrad commemoration, but had also supported unofficial initiatives that demonstrated popular support for a papal visit. Cardinal Tomasek had also supported the secret church's plan to organize a night program at Velehrad, thus demonstrating that the lines between the secret church's activities and the official church sometimes became quite blurred. The unwillingness of the local bishop and priest responsible for Velehrad to approve the night program or permit the youth to spend the night in the basilica stands in stark contrast to Cardinal Tomasek's interest in it. All reports indicate that the police and other authorities in Slovakia were fairly ineffective in their efforts to clamp down on pilgrimages. Samizdat articles indicate that the pilgrims were quite aware of secret police agents dressed in civilian clothes and using cameras and video-recorders to document the event, but their presence apparently did little to deter their activities. As early as the 1984 pilgrimage to Levoca, police put several obstacles in the way of 60 For more about the 31-point petition and the March 25, 1988 demonstration, see David Doellinger, "From Prayers to Protests: The Impact of Religio us-Based Dissent on the Emergence of Civil Society in Slovakia and the GDR," (Ph.D. Dissertation: University of Pittsburgh, 2002), chapter 4. 61 This letter appeared in lnformace o cirkvi, no. 4 ( 198 1): 24-25. �SLOVAKIA 115 pilgrims, such as running road checks to back up traffic to the site, canceling train and bus service to Levoca, and even cutting down trees to block the road to the basilica. More subtle efforts focused on keeping young people away from Levoca by scheduling a concert by a Slovak pop star in a nearby town . Some schools scheduled special activities on the day of pilgrimages, and others even posted notices banning participation in the pilgrimage.62 Police efforts took a more violent turn in 1986, when militia used dogs to break up groups of pilgrims making their way to Gaboltov.63 Also in 1986, the police interrogated Jozef Halko, a priest who had been sec retly ordained, and Anton Selecky, a Catholic activist, for their activities earlier in the year at the Sastin and Levoca pilgrimages. Holk.o 's interrogation focused on the fact that he had heard confessions at Levoca and Selecky ' s interrogators were concerned that he had written accounts of the pilgrimages for publication in samizdat. 64 In addition to signaling the pilgrimage' s transformation into a public space for Catholics, Velehrad also reflected the increasingly political potential of religion itself in the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. The political significance of religion and religious activities in the Soviet bloc had become quite apparent during the Pope 's first visit to Poland in 1979. In Warsaw's Victory Square on June 2, John Paul II spoke freely about the historically close rel ationship between Christianity and the Polish nation. He also spoke about the failed Warsaw uprising in 1944 (when Soviet troops allowed the Polish Home Army to be defeated by the Nazis), Polish independence, and human dignity. 65 In his analysis of the rise of Solidarity in Poland, Jan Kubik notes that Pope John Paul II 's speech and visit brought an end to the " Party-state's monopoly over public di scourse in 62 " Levoca - the Slovak National Shrine," K NS 2 14 (6 December I 984) . For references to the presence of the secret police at Velehrad in 1985, see " Velehrad 85 - spomienka studentov," Naboi enstvo a sucasnost'3 ( 1986): 17 and " Boli sme na Velehrade," 5. 63 "Militia Set Dogs on Pilgrims (Czechoslovakia)," KNS 257 (2 1 August 1986). 64 "Slovak Cathol ics interrogated," KNS 264 (27 November 1986). 65 Pope John Paul II , "Pope John Paul IL Speaks in Victory Square, Warsaw," in ed., Gale Stokes, From Stalinism to Pluralism (New York and Oxford : Oxford Universi ty Press, 1996), 200-203. �116 SLOVAKIA Poland."66 Though Solidarity was not a religious movement, Kubik argues that its close association with the Catholic Church and the use of religious symbols strengthened its ability to mobilize the Polish population and to construct a sphere of activity separate from and in defiance to the state. Among its achievements was the construction of public spaces not reserved for the state, including the Gdansk Monument and the Poznan Monument. Both incorporated crosses into their design, and, as Kubik explains, both monuments had been unveiled in religious ceremonies that emphasized the participation of society, rather than society 's subservience to the state. 67 Jan Kubik's analysis of these public events in Poland that preceded the formation of Solidarity offers insight into the political significance of religion in East Central Europe. Just as religion and religious traditions offered an alternative to the state's monopoly of power in Poland, the pilgrimage at Velehrad demonstrated that religion and religious traditions could offer a similar alternative in Czechoslovakia. Pope John Paul II had emphasized the historical significance of Christianity in Poland during his visit in 1979 and the commemoration of St. Methodius at Velehrad had allowed Catholic pilgrims the unique opportunity to confront state officials regarding Czechoslovakia's historical relationship with Christianity. The pilgrims at Velehrad, by vocally opposing the state's emphasis on the cultural contribution of Methodius, expressed their defiance of and unwillingness to be subservient to the state's religious policies. In doing so, the pilgrims transformed the traditional religious pilgrimage into an event of political significance. 66 Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, I 994 ), 144. 67 For description and analysis of the Gdansk and the Poznan Monuments, see Kubik, The Power of Symbols, I 96-206, 2 14-216. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2007, Vol. 39 Description An account of the resource Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 99 THE 1985 PILGRIMAGE AT VELEHRAD: SLOVAK CATHOLICS AND THE CREATION OF A PUBLIC SPACE David Doellinger An analysis of the 1985 pilgrimage at Velehrad reveals many of the ways that the nature of pilgrimages (and thus Catholicism's role in Communist Czechoslovakia) had begun to change during the 1980s. At this event, Catholic activists and pilgrims surprised church leaders by voicing their opposition to state policy in front of Party officials, thereby transforming a religious tradition into a public space where Slovak Catholics could meet free from state interference to assert their religious and political beliefs. The 1985 Yelehrad pilgrimage offers an interesting window into the increas ingly contentious relationship between church and state in Czec hoslovakia. It illustrates the mobilizing influence of Pope John Paul II and reveals that restive Catholics, who had been practicing their faith secretly in the underground, helped empower some leaders in the Czechoslovakia's official hierarchy - particularly Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek of Prague - to be more critical of the state's religious policies. Man y scholars have recognized the ability of pilgrimages to serve as barometers of soc ial and political change. In their analysis of Christian pilgrimage traditi ons, anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner conclude: Pilgrimage should be regarded ... as an institution with a history. Each pilgrimage, of any length, is vulnerable to the history of its period and must come to terms with shifts of political geography. Pilgrimage is more responsive to social change and popular moods than liturgical ritual, fixed by rubric. 1 1 Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York : Columbia Un ivers ity Press, 1978), 23 1. SLOVAKIA The character of Slovak pilgrimages had certainly reflected the changing social and political landscape in Slovakia after the Second World War. Pilgrimages had been an important part of Slovak reli gious life since the middle ages. Over thirty pilgrimage sites exist throughout Slovakia and Slovak pilgrim s also visited several religious sites in the Czech lands. Until 1949, when state permission to hold public gatherings such as pilgrimages became mandatory, local church officials had organized the annu al pilgrimages and services at these sites. Thereafter, there had been little acti vity at these sites on pilgrimage days, with the exception of the moments of political liberalization, such as in 1956 (following Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin) and 1968 (during the Prague Spring). 2 The 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage has received much attention by Western political analysts and scholars. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Keston News Service fo llowed this event closely and released extensive reports about thi s pilgrimage (and the pilgrimages that followed). 3 Although Velehrad is located in Moravi a, this pilgrimage was of particular importance to Slovak Catholi cs, who attended in relatively high numbers. Several schol ars writing in the latter half of the 1980s referred to thi s pilgrimage as evidence of a reli gious revival and the resilience of Catholicism in Slovakia. 4 Scholars writing after 1989 have referred to thi s pilgrimage and those that followed, not only in the context of a religious revival, but 2 Karel Kaplan notes that not onl y pilgrimages, but also attendance at reli gious services and the forma tion of new youth groups occurred during the upheaval s in Poland and Hungary in 1956. Karel Kaplan, " Church and State in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1956 - Part III ," Religion in Comm unist Lands, 14, no. 3 (fall 1986): 280. Milan J. Reban reports a sim ilar resurgence of pilgrimages during the Prague Spring in 1968 . Milan J. Reban, "The Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia," in Catholicism and Politics in Communist Societies, ed . Pedro Ramet (Durham and London: Duke Uni versity Press, I 990), 15 I. 3 The Keston News Service was based at Keston College, England and provided reports and analys is of the religious situation in East Europe. 4 See Janice Brou n, Conscience and Capti vity: Religion in Eastern Europe (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1988), 67- 101. Also see Pedro Ramet, Cross and Commissar (Bloom ington and Indianapo lis: Ind iana Universi ty Press, 1987), 78. SLOVAKIA 101 also as an example of one of the few expressions of independent or non-state activity in Slovakia. 5 Pilgrimages and their increasing popularity throughout the 1980s became one of the most visible markers of a religious revival in Slovakia. This religious revival had begun almost a decade earlier and was closely related to the election of a Pole, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II in 1978. Pope John Paul II took a new aggressive and uncompromising stand when dealing with the Communist governments of Eastern Europe. Under Pope Paul Vi's (1963-1978) eastern policy (Ostpolitik), the Vatican had made preserving the church hierarchy in Czechoslovakia a primary goal, even at the expense of making important concessions to the Communist government. In 1973, Cardinal Casaroli, responsible for the Vatican's Ostpolitik, had negotiated the regime's approval of four new bishops, even though all four remained members of Pacem in Terris, a state sponsored organization that coordinated the work of priests in Czechoslovakia. Although this agreement brought the total number of bishops to five (out of thirteen dioceses), many Czech and Slovak Catholics criticized the Vatican's tolerance of Pacem in Terris. Breaking with his predecessor, Pope John Paul II refused to compromise with these governments, particularly with regards to spiritual matters. In 1982, he formally condemned Pacem in Terris. 6 As Archbishop of Krakow, Wojtyla had secretly ordained many Czech and Slovak priests in the 1970s. Silvester Krcmery, a leader of Slovakia's secret church and a friend of Wojtyla since 1973, described him as a protector of the Slovaks. Emphasizing the importance of their shared experiences under Communism, Krcmery pointed to a 5 Stokes refers to the 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage not only in terms of attendance, but also as evidence of Cardinal Tomasek's increasing willingness to act independently of the state. Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 152. See also Sabrina Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe (Durham and London : Duke University Press , 1991), 109 and Padraic Kenney , A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 36. 6 Alexander Tomsky, "Pacem in Terris," Religion in Communist Lands lO (1982): 278-279. For a discussion of bishop vacancies, see Sabrina P. Ramet, Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 125. 102 SLOVAKIA bond that undoubted ly other Catholics in Czechoslovakia shared by saying: "He has lived all thi s persec ution of Catholics." 7 While the election of a Polish pope in 1978 helps explain the increased popularity of Catholicism and religious traditions in Slovakia, the events at Yelehrad in 1985 indicate th at the nature of the pilgrimage experience was transformed by activists in the secret (underground) Catholic church. Such a church existed in the Czech lands and Slovakia from the late 1940s to 1989. It was organized by Catholics in response to the persec ution they faced by the Communist authorities. Members of the secret church met in private apartments for bible study , fellowship and even choir practice. Bishops and priests who had been clandestinely trained and ordained provided pastoral serv ices to these believers. By the 1980s, activists in the secret church published and distributed a wide variety of books and newsletters as samizdat. 8 The undergro und church used its samizdat network to publicize this and later pilgrimages by printing announcements of upcoming pilgrimages and it published accounts of each year's pilgrimages. A rich written record of the 1985 Velehrad pil gri mage can be found in thi s body of sa mizdat literature. 9 7 Silvester Krcmery , interview by author, 3 July I996 , Bratislava, Slovakia. For a brief description of Krcmery's first meeting with Wojtyta, see Frantisek Miklosko, Nebudete ich m6ct' roz vratit: z osudov katolickej cfrkvi na Slovensku v rokoch I 943-89 (Bratislava: Archa, 1990), 125. 8 David Doellinger, " Prayers, Pilgrims , and Petitions: The Secret Church and the Growth of Civ il Society in Slovakia," Nationalities Papers 30, no. 2 (June 2002): 215-240. 9 Samizdat (self-published) refers to newspapers, articles, essays, books , etc. that were printed with mimeograph machines or typed carbon copy, and often distributed illegall y, usuall y throu gh personal contacts and info rm al networks. Archi ves with the most extensive holdings on Slovak religious samizdat include: Listy z podzemia samizdat arch ive at the Christian Democratic Movement headq uarters, Bratislava, Slovakia ; Libri Prohibiti Samizdat Archive, Prag ue, Czech Republic; Czechoslovak Documentation Center, Dobrichovice (Prague), Czech Republic. Slovak samizda t can also be found in the Keston Institute's arc hi ve, Oxford , England and th e arc hives of Radi o Free Europe/Radio Liberty in th e Open Society Archives , Budapest, Hungary. For a comprehensive catalog of Slovak religious sam izdat, see Rudolf Lessak, Listy z podzemia: suboma dokumentacia krestanskej samizdatovej publicistiky na S/ovensku v rokoch I 945- I989 (Bratislava: US PO, 1998). SLOVAKIA 103 The 1985 Velehrad Pilgrimage An increasing number of Catholics attended pilgrimages in Slovakia in the first half of the 1980s. Between 1982 and 1985, samizdat reports only carried information for the pilgrimages to Sastfn and Levoca, the two most popular Slovak pilgrimages. An estimated 15 ,000 people attended the pilgrimage at Sastfn in 1983 ; attendance jumped to 50,000 in 1984. 10 About 100,000 pilgrims attended the pilgrimages at Levoca in both 1982 and 1983. 11 The new role and importance of the pilgrimage tradition became firmly established at the 1985 pilgrimage at Yelehrad. An important pil grimage site in Moravia, Velehrad had already hosted an estim ated 40,000 pilgrims in 1984. The 1985 Yelehrad pilgrimage, however, commemorated the 1, 100th anni versary of the death of St. Methodius, who along with St. Cyril , had introduced eastern Christianity (and the Slavic liturgy) to the Great Moravian Empire in the ninth century. The work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius is particulai:.ly important to Slovak Catholics, who trace their political, cultural and religious history to thi s early empire and the arrival of these monks. 12 Several months prior to the pilgrimage, Czechoslovak Catholics and the Communist authorities began to contest the direction of the Yelehrad commemoration. At the center of the dispute was the question of whether Pope John Paul II would be permitted to attend the event. The Pope had made his first visit to Poland as early as 1979, and Czechoslovakia 's Catholics hoped this anniversary would bring a papal visit. An August 1984 letter to President Gustav Husak, signed simpl y the " Youth of CSSR," demanded that the Pope be 10 "Sastfnska put' I983 ," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'(sami zdat) 4 (1983): 2; "Sastfnsky prihovor otca Biskupa Gabrisa," Naboi enstvo a sucasnost'5 ( 1984): 8; " Sastfn '84," Vy ber (sami zdat) 4 ( 1984): 38. 11 "Annual Pilgrimage to Levoca," Keston News Service (KNS), no. 156 (August I6, I982): 3-4. Also, see Vy ber, 3 (1984 ): 7. 12 See lmrich Kruzliak, "The Heritage of Saints Cyril and Methodius in the Works of Slovak Writers and Artists," in SS. Cy ril and M ethodius Among the Slovaks: Observing the 1, JOd" Anniversary of Saint Methodius' Death, eds. lmrich Kru zliak and Frances L. Mi zenko (Middletown, PA : Slovak Catholic Federation, 1985), 134-143. The territori al extent of thi s empire is unclear, but it probably included large porti ons of present day Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. 104 SLOVAKIA permitted to attend the 1, l 00 th anniversary event. The authors indicated that they were Catholics from Banska Bystrica (in central Slovakia) and argued that there was popular support for a papal visit: We are in the jubilee year of St. Methodius. Thousands of young hearts put their signature on the request that the Holy Father John Paul II come to our country for thi s jubilee celebration. We join with Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, who personally invited the Holy Father to this celebration. Esteemed Mr. President, if these thousands of signatures are [too] few, we are willing to collect additional thousands from young people to agai n document for you the desire of the absolute majority of inhabitants of the CSSR, so that the Holy Father comes to our republic for this precious jubilee occasion. 13 In February 1984, Cardinal Tomasek had formally invited the Pope to Velehrad, and over 17,000 Catholic youth in Czechoslovakia 14 signed a statement demonstrating their support for thi s visit. Cardinal Tomasek also cited this petition action in a letter to the CSSR government requesting permission for the visit. 15 A samizdat author analyzing the importance of the Velehrad celebration for Slovaks and the meaning of the petition wrote: "It is a new first in the public life of our church." 16 The Slovak secret church helped publicize several of these appeals for the Pope' s attendance. Despite the authorities' refusal, public support for the Papal visit continued. On New Years Day 1985 , Cardinal Tomasek sent a letter to the Pope with an additional 500 signatures that had been collected over Christmas. The letter reaffirmed the desire of Czechoslovak Catholics for the Pope to come to Velehrad on September 14 for the Methodius commemoration. It also invited the Pope to visit Sastfn, a Slovak pilgrimage site, afterwards 17 The authorities continued to refuse permission for the visit. 18 13 Letter to President Husak from the Youth of CSS R, 29 August 1984, I, Keston st Institute Fi le (hereafter KJ): CZ ROM 7/4 1 Methodius Celebrations 1985. 14 "Pozvanie sv. Otca do Ceskoslovenska," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'3 ( 1984): 17. 15 Una Sane ta Catholica (samizdat) Tu rice ( 1984 ): 35. 16 • "Pozvanie sv. Otca do Ceskoslovenska," 17-1 8. 17 Naboienstvo a sucasnost'2 (1985): 19. 18 Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Do wn, 152. Though the authori ties prevented Pope John Paul II from attending the commemoration, his encyc lical Slavorum SLOVAKIA 105 As the Velehrad pilgrimage approached, members of the secret church in both the Czech lands and Slovakia began making plans to alter the length and nature of the commemoration by organizing a special night program. Catholic activists wanted to invite youth to the site on Saturday, July 6, 1985, for a special program of song and prayer during the night preceding the official commemoration, which had been scheduled for Sunday, July 7. Night programs had already become a popular component of pilgrimages in Slovakia. Over 50,000 pilgrims attended the night program at the Levoca pilgrimage in 1983. 19 At Sastfn in 1984, a night program organized by Vladimir Jukl, one of the leaders of the Slovak secret church, had also preceded the regular pilgrimage celebration.20 The plan for a night program at Velehrad appears to have originated with both Moravian and Slovak sources. Catholic youth in Moravia invited their counterparts in Slovakia and Bohemia to the Saturday program that would include prayers for the unity of the church, the Pope, bishops and others in the Church. The Slovak reli gious samizdat Vy ber helped distribute this invitation by prominently publishing it on the back of the front cover of a spring 1985 issue.2' Frantisek Miklosko, another activist in the Slovak secret church , refers to the Moravian Catholics' pl an in a history of the post-war Catholi c Church in Slovakia that he published in 1991 . He credits Vladimir Jukl with the idea of introducing the night program at Velehrad. Miklosko personally presented Jukl 's plan for a night program to Cardinal Tomasek, who supported the idea. Though the local priest and bishop responsible for Velehrad refused to officially approve the night program or permit the youth to spend the night in Velehrad's basilica, the plan for the night program went ahead. 22 On Saturday afternoon , Ju ly 6, the Velehrad celebration made its informal start with the arri val of an estimated 5,000 young Apostoli - which praised the work of Sts. Cyril and Methodius - was published on the day of the event. Alexander Tomsky, "St Methodius Return s to Czechos lovakia," KNS, no. 235 (October 3, 1985): 18- 19. 19 " Vfce nez sto ti sfc poutn fku na Levocske hofe 3.7. 1983," ln fo rmace o cfrk vi (sami zdat) 9 (1983): 13. 20 "Sastfn ' 84," Vfber 4 ( 1984): 38. Miklosko writes that Ju kl developed the idea for the night program for Sastfn that year. Miklosko, Nebudete ich moct'rozvratit, 136. 21 Vfber4 (1985). 22 Miklosko, Nebudete ich m6ct'rozvratit;128- l 30. 106 SLOVAKIA Catholics. Accounts of their activities filled subseq uent samizdat periodicals and painted a vivid picture of their activities prior to the formal opening of the celebration at 10:00 AM on Sunday morning. As they arrived on Saturday, the young pilgrims sat in small groups in front of the basilica, some talking with friends and others singing songs, sometimes with the accompaniment of a guitar. Bishop Jan Korec , who had been secretly consecrated in 1951, visited with the young pilgrims in the afternoon and remained with them throughout the night. 23 After an evening mass inside the basilica, the pilgrims spent the night outside with one group in front of the basilica and the other in a nearby field. Each group stayed awake the entire night and observed a program of prayer, meditation and si nging. During the night, both groups chanted slogans such as "We want cloisters," "Long live Tomasek," and "Long live the Pope." One report indicated that the pilgrims also chanted "Let the Pope Come" for about twenty-five minutes. 24 One member of the Slovak secret church apparently spent Saturday afternoon and night with a tape recorder recording the songs, chants and conversations with the pilgrims. A Slovak samiz dat periodical published excerpts from this recording, capturing some of the different hopes and concerns of those in attendance, including the di sappointment of one young pilgrim that the state authorities viewed the pilgrimage and anniversary celebration as a "peace event." The pilgrim, speaking sometime late Saturday evening, described his mixed response to the weekend: I assumed that many believers would participate in this pilgrimage, but I am very surprised by the multitude of people who are already here today. I am very enthusiastic about it, because I expect rich spiritual fruits from this pilgrimage. I regret, of course - and I also think everyone else does - that we may not have the Holy Father here among us. But on the other hand, we are glad that he is represented here by Cardinal Casaro li [responsible for the Vatican's Ostpolitik]. 25 23 " Velehrad ' 85 ," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'3 ( 1985): 17. The largest Czech religious samizdat periodical republished this report. "Velehrad I985 , videny zo Slovenska," Jnformace o cirkvi IO (1985), 6-7. 24 "Boli sme na Velehrade," Rodinne spolocenstvo (samizdat) 5 ( 1985): 5-6. 25 "Velehrad ' 85 z magnetofonoveho zaznamu," Vyber9 (1985): 12. SLOVAKIA 107 Early in the morning a fifty-year old priest, asked for his reaction to thi s " uncommon" event, replied: We spent this night at Velehrad together with Sai nts Cyril and Methodius. And it was very beautiful. There are groups of young believers here from all over Slovakia and also from the Czech lands, but a preponderance here are Slovaks. 26 Though located in Moravia, the night program at Velehrad was of particul ar interest to Slovak Catholics, and other observers also noted the large presence of Slovaks at Velehrad.27 . The enthusiasm of the young Catholics who had arri ved early to spend the night at Velehrad carried over to the official celebrations on Sunday. Despite the state's efforts to curtail attendance by canceling public transportation to Velehrad, pilgrims from all over Czechoslovakia arrived , many on foot, to join those who had spent the night singing, praying and chanting. 28 One samizdat periodical reported that at a 7:00 AM mass outside the Basilica, the pilgrims who had arrived only that morning were surprised that the young people, fo llowing the singing of the papal hymn, broke into chants of "Long li ve John Paul II! " and " Let us have the Hol y Father! " 29 The youth had been chanting these slogans throughout the night, and like a team coming out of a hi gh-school pep rally, they were ready for the celebration to begin. By 10:00 AM, when the official celebration began, an estimated 100,000-250,000 pilgrims had gathered outside the Basilica in the center of Velehrad. 30 A local Party official opened the celebration by welcoming everyone to what he called the St. Methodiu s " Peace Celebration ." In response to this designation, the 26 Ibid., 19. Another Slovak priest, Father Martinec, explai ned that he had he lped wi th the organization of the pilgrimage and the arriva l of Slovak Catholics at Yelehrad . Karel Martinec, interview by author, 4 Jul y 1996, Bratislava, Slovakia. 28 "Yelehrad 1985 ," Vzkffsenf(samizdat) 2 ( 1985): 15. 29 " Boli sme na Yelehrade," 5. 30 Religious samizdat peri odical s re ported this wide range estimate of pilgrims in attendance. See "Boli sme na Yelehrade," 8; "Yelehrad ' 85," 18; " Yelehrad 1985," Vzkifsenf2 ( 1985): 15; and " Yelehrad nas," Informace o cfrk vi 10 ( 1985): 6. Photographs of the pilgrims gathered around the Bas ilica at Yelehrad on Jul y 7 - taken from different angles - indicate that the pilgrims filled every inch of the square and support the magnitude of the size of the crowd as reported by religious samizdat. Kl: photo collection, photos# 1793 and # 1876. 27 108 SLOVAKIA pilgrims responded negatively with whistles and shouts of "We want Holy Mass!" 3 1 Following the singi ng of the state anthem, the Minister of Culture, Dr. Milan Klu sak, spoke. Again, the pilgrims expressed their dissatisfaction with the official spin he gave to the importance of the anniversary. Several samizdat periodicals reported the following exchange between Klusak and the pilgrims: [Minister Klusak] grasped the situation and therefore improvised as he spoke. In order to stress that he did not consider the celebration to be a peace celebration, he said that he came to the pilgrimage to celebrate Methodius' memory. The crowd corrected him by chanting "Saint, Saint." When he said that Cyril and Methodius brought us a language and alphabet, the people supplemented it with "Faith , Faith!" The surpri sed minister then began a discussion with the people by saying "The Bi shop will speak about Faith to you. We have divided up the work." ... the young people replied to him: "Freedom, Religious Freedom." The minister argued back to the youth and everyone else: "If you did not have [religious freedom], you would not be here." 32 The pilgrims responded to the remainder of Klusak's speech with chants: "We Want the Holy Father!" "We Want Religious Freedom," and "We Want Bishops!" In contrast to the pilgrims' dissatisfaction with the state authorities' remarks, the pilgrims enthusiastically supported the words of the church officials. During the heckling of Minister Klu sak, the pilgrims had also chanted "Long Live Cardinal Tomasek! and "Casaroli!" 33 Cardinal Tomasek read a letter from the Pope that reportedly energized the pilgrims despite their disappointment that the Pope was not there to deliver his words personally . During the Mass, Cardinal Casaroli switched between Czech and Slovak while delivering his sermon.34 Accounts indicate that Cardinal Tomasek and Cardinal Casaroli clearly were surprised by the hi gh attendance and the enthusiasm of the pilgrims. After- 31 "Boli sme na Yelehrade," 7. fbid ., 7. A similar account of this exchange, written by a Slovak pilgrim , appeared in Czech samizdat. " Velehrad 1985 ," Vzkfisenf2 ( 1985): 16. See also Jan Korec, Od barbarskej noci na slobode (Bratislava: Luc, 1993), 342. 33 "Velehrad '85," Naboienstvo a sucasnost; 18. 34 "Boli sme na Velehrade," 7-8. 32 SLOVAKIA 109 wards, Cardinal Tomasek reportedly told a group of young people, "This is not reality, this is a dream. " 35 The Significance of Velehrad The relatively large number of Catholic youth from Slovakia that chose to come earl y to this pilgrimage indicates both the strength of Catholicism in Slovakia and the failure of the state 's restricti ve policies against the church. Vaclav Benda, a Catholic Czech activist, afterwards commented on the significance of this pilgrimage: Yelehrad was an effective demonstration that the experiment of splitting the church was condemned to failure and ridiculous from the beginning. It must presently be clear from this pilgrimage ... that the prohibitions or radical restriction on the church drove several million active believers into the underground. 36 The 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage was critical turning point in a revival of the pilgrimage tradition in Slovakia. After Yelehrad, pilgrimage attendance and the number of sites hosting pilgrimages in Slovakia increased significantly. 37 Levoca, in eastern Slovakia, received the largest number of pilgrims with an estimated 150,000 in 1986,38 200,000-230,000 in 1987,39 and possibly as high as 280,000 300,000 in 1988.40 The number of pilgrims to Sastfn, a small village located north of Bratislava near the Moravian border, grew steadily from estimates of 40,000-50,000 in 1986,4 1 and 60,000 in 1987 ,42 to 35 " Yelehrad '85," Naboienstvo a sricasnost; 18. Vaclav Benda, "Ako d'alej po Yelehrade?" Naboienstvo a sricasnost'2 (I 986): 4. 37 Attendance at Slo vak pil grimages in 1989 was also high, but there is less information in samizdat about that year's pilgrimages than for earlier years. This is probably due to the fac t that reports of the summer pilgrimages usually appeared in late fa ll samizdat issues, by which time the Velvet Revolution had already begun. 38 "Levoca 1986," Voice of A merica (VOA) 12 July 1986. 39 "Record Numbers Attend Slovak Pilgrimages," Keston News Service, 280 (23 Jul y 87): 19; "Message from Jan Carnogursky to Keston College," KI: CZ ROM 7 /4 Pilgrimages; "Levoca put' 1987," Naboienstvo a sricasnost'4 ( 1987): 7. 40 " Mariansky rok na Slovensku," Katolfcky mesacnik (sami zdat) 4 (1 988): I ; Peter Marti n, "The Pilgrimage to Levoca," R FE/RL, 14 July 1988, 19. Another sami zdat periodical estimated the attendance in 1988 at " more than 200,000 ." See "Mys lienky z Levocskej pute," Naboienstvo a sricasnost'3 (I 988): 3. 41 " Putne slav nosti na Slovensku v r. 1986," Naboienstvo a sricasnost' I ( I 987): I 719. 36 110 SLOVAKIA 60,000-70,000 in 1988. 43 The number of pilgrims to Gaboltov, estimated at 20,000-25,000 in 1985 ,44 increased more dramatically from estimates of 30,000-50,000 in 198645 to as high as l 00,000 in 1987 and 1988. 46 Large numbers of pilgrims also visited traditionally less popular pilgrimage sites in Slovakia during this period. Lutina, an important Greek Catholic pilgrimage site in eastern Slovakia, received 40,000 pilgrims in 198647 and 50,000 in 1987 .48 Topolcany received 25,000 pilgrims in 1988.49 Due to the nature of a pilgrimage, usually an outdoor event with people sitting or standing in a town square or in a nearby field, only estimates, probably made by members of the secret church present at the pilgrimage, are available. Jan Camogursky , a prominent activist in the Slovak secret church, reported that as he became aware of the political significance of the pilgrimages in 1987, he began making estimates of the number of pilgrims attending the events throughout Slovakia.50 Although not an exact count, these estimates are significant as a measure of the increase in the multitude of pilgrim s attending a particular pilgrimage, an increase that the authors of samizdat reports on pilgrimages were certainly observing. The increase in attendance after 1985 suggests that pilgrimages can be more than barometers of social change; the Velehrad pilgrimage promoted a change in the function of pilgrimages and their appeal to Catholics. The active force that promoted this transformation was the secret church. Members of this community helped transform the pilgrimage tradition into a space where Catholics could meet publicly and in large numbers to worship. Velehrad 's night program allowed young people active in the underground to meet 42 "Sastfn - September 1987," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'5 (1987): l 1. "Sastfn - '88," K ato/fcky mesacnik 5 ( 1988): I. 44 "Gaboltov ' 85 ," Naboi enstvo a sucasnost'3 (I 985): 20. 45 " Putne slavnosti na Slovensku v r 1986," 17- 19. 46 " Message from Jan Camogursky to Keston College"; "Put' v Gaboltove," VOA , 24 Jul y 1988. 47 "Pout' reckokatoliku v Lu tine 1986," lnformace o cfrkvi 10 (1986): I0. 48 "Message from Jan Camogursky." 49 "Pilgrimage at Topol'cany," Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB), 13 September 1988. 50 Jan Camogursky, interview by author, 16 Jul y 1996, Bratislava, Slovakia. Documents in the Keston Institute archive indicate that he sent reports of these estimates to Western news organizations. See for example, "Message from Jan Camogursky." 43 SLOVAKIA 111 with other Catholics and express their faith publicly. Velehrad had demonstrated the secret church 's ability to mobilize its members to participate in a public event, and it continued to do so during the remainder of the decade. Slovak Catholic activists contributed to the popularity of pilgrimages and their night programs in the later half of the 1980s. The used the secret church 's samizdat network to inform its members about previous pilgrimages and to promote attendance at upcoming ones. From 1986 to 1989, the issues of Naboi enstvo a sucasnost; Rodinne spolocenstvo and later Katolfcky mesacnfk published extensive articles and reports about Slovak pilgrimages. This coverage included first hand reports of pilgrims' experiences, often including descriptions of their walk to the site and the activities of the night program. These samizdat periodicals also frequently published transcripts of prayers and sermons spoken during Mass at a pilgrimage, as well as historical information about different pilgrimage sites. 5 1 They also published schedules and information about upcoming pilgrimages in Slovakia. 52 As a result of this coverage, a written record of the experiences, worship service, activities, and even the chants at pilgrimages has been preserved. Catholics unable to attend a particular pilgrimage could learn about what had been said and done by reading these accounts. Since most samizdat reports on pilgrimages were usuall y publi shed several months after the pilgrimage, this coverage reminded Slovak Catholics of what had happened during the summer. Its reports and descriptions of previous pilgrimages promoted the events, and its schedule information certainly helped coordinate attendance at a pilgrimage. In addition to its samiz dat network, information about pilgrimages was shared through the communities of the secret church. Carnogursky reported that many of its communities "visited these pilgrimages collectively as groups." 53 The Slovak secret church also continued to promote the night program for pilgrimages after 1985, and attendance at night prog- 51 For the text of a prayer read by a local priest at the I 988 Sastfn pilgrimage, see "Modlitba na zaver marianskeho Rok u," Kato/icky mesacnfk 6 ( 1988): 5-7 . Another arti cle recounts the history of th e Sastfn pilgrim age site fro m 9 16 A.O. to 1987. "Sastfn," Naboienstvo a sucasnost'4 ( 1987): 8-10. 52 " Letna - putnicka - aktivita 1989," Kato/icky mesacmk 5 ( I 989): 6. 53 Camogursky, interview. 112 SLOVAKIA rams increased. A samizdat article describing the pilgrimage celebrations that had taken place throughout Slovakia in 1986 announced that in 1987 night programs were scheduled in Gaboltov and Uhorna in addition to Levoca and Sastin. 54 In 1988, an estimated 50,000 pilgrims attended the night program at Gaboltov,55 and 100,000 attended the night program during the Marian year pilgrimage in Levoca. 56 The following year, 5,000-10,000 people attended the night pro57 gram at the smaller pilgrimage site of Lutina. At the pilgrimage, the members of the secret church could do openly and publicly what they had done since their foundation: gather for prayer, meditation, and worship. Rather than finding safety in small numbers by meeting in private apartments, the pilgrimage tradition allowed the secret church members to practice their faith publicly, on a larger scale, and in fellowship with Catholics not active in the secret church. Jan Camogursky, reporting on the significance of pilgrimages in Slovakia, writes: [While] they last, pilgrimages solve a basic problem of our society - the problem of being outnumbered by the police ... The police are unable even to act against individuals on pilgrimages, because they are protected in the solidarity of numbers ... [This] feeling of safety gives the pilgrims another feeling - that of freedom . On a pilgrimage they can act according to their convictions and openly display their religious faith. 58 Although the secret church had traditionally distanced itself from the political opposition to avoid additional persecution by the state, the pilgrimage tradition facilitated a shift towards a new engagement in the public sphere. For members of the secret church, this issue of religious freedom could always be discussed among fellow members through its communities and samizdat press. Chants for religious freedom and in support of certain church officials had been voiced publicly to a significantly large gathering at Velehrad in 1985. The 54 "Putne slavnosti na Slovensku v r. 1986," 19. " Put' v Gaboltove," VOA, 24 July 1988. 56 "Mariansky rok na Slovensku," l. 57 "0 puti V Lutine," Rodinne spolocenstvo 5 (1989): 14. 58 Jan Carnogursky, "The Underground Church and Pilgrimages in Slovakia," The Salisbury Review (Ju ne 1989): 36. 55 SLOVAKIA 113 pilgrimage tradition provided a public space and forum where political demands arti culated by the secret church could be discussed, debated, and shared with the broader public in relative safety. The contest between church and state exhibited at the 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage is one of the most striking feature s of this event. 59 The contest over the orientation of the commemoration could be said to have begun in 1984 as Cardinal Tomasek and Czechoslovak Catholics began demanding that Pope John Paul II be given permi ssion to attend. While the state argued that the commemoration should celebrate the cultural significance of St. Methodius, the church argued that the anniversary was a religious event. This conflict between church and state, so publicly exhibited at Velehrad in 1985, suggests that a term such as "church" fail s to capture the complexity of relations between church and state. Rather than a monolith, the "church" was represented by at least three distinct groups in this contest: the official church hierarchy , pilgrims active in the secret church, and pilgrims not active in the secret church. Of the three, it was the pilgrims (both within and without the secret church) listening to the Party officials' presentations who openly challenged the state's authority over the pilgrimage. Through their efforts, the pilgrimage became a public space where Catholics could challenge the status quo and the state 's right to define the meaning of St. Methodius and the l ,lO0 th anni versary . The pilgrimage created a forum where these three representations of the church ' s position could interact and influence one another. Even more interesting is the fact that the challenge to the status quo did not end in 1985 . Leaders of the Slovak underground church increasingly crossed into more politically-oriented public activities, most notably its collection of signatures to a 31-point petition for greater religious freedom in 1987 and 1988 and its organization of a public demonstration for religious freedom in Bratislava on March 25 , 1988 whi ch was violently 59 John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, in the introduction to an edited vo lume of research on pilgrimages, assert that the new agenda in pilgrimage stud ies recogni zes that pilgrimage " is above all an arena for competing re ligious and secular discourses, for both the offi cial co-optation and the non-official recovery of rel igious meanings, fo r conflict between orthodoxies, sects and confess ional groups, fo r dri ves towards consensus and communities, and for counter movements towards separateness and division." John Eade and Michae l J. Sallnow , eds. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 2. 114 SLOVAKIA broken up by the police. Altogether, 600,000 Czechs and Slovaks signed the petition and a reported 300,000-400,000 of the signatures were collected in Slovakia. Samizdat reports indicate that this petition was often read aloud at pilgrimages in Slovakia during night programs in the late 1980s.60 Divisions also existed within the official hierarchy of the Czechoslovak Catholic Church regarding the direction the 1985 Velehrad pilgrimage should take. Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, since the election of Pope John Paul II, had become increasingly willing to criticize the state's interference in church affairs. In a 1981 letter to the editors of Katolfcke noviny, the state-approved and supported news organ of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia, Cardinal Tomasek had criticized this periodical's focus on Pacem in Terris, disarmament and international relations, rather than Papal speeches and material that responded to the spiritual needs of the country ' s believers.61 In 1984, Cardinal Tomasek had not only formally invited Pope John Paul II to attend the Velehrad commemoration, but had also supported unofficial initiatives that demonstrated popular support for a papal visit. Cardinal Tomasek had also supported the secret church's plan to organize a night program at Velehrad, thus demonstrating that the lines between the secret church's activities and the official church sometimes became quite blurred. The unwillingness of the local bishop and priest responsible for Velehrad to approve the night program or permit the youth to spend the night in the basilica stands in stark contrast to Cardinal Tomasek's interest in it. All reports indicate that the police and other authorities in Slovakia were fairly ineffective in their efforts to clamp down on pilgrimages. Samizdat articles indicate that the pilgrims were quite aware of secret police agents dressed in civilian clothes and using cameras and video-recorders to document the event, but their presence apparently did little to deter their activities. As early as the 1984 pilgrimage to Levoca, police put several obstacles in the way of 60 For more about the 31-point petition and the March 25, 1988 demonstration, see David Doellinger, "From Prayers to Protests: The Impact of Religio us-Based Dissent on the Emergence of Civil Society in Slovakia and the GDR," (Ph.D. Dissertation: University of Pittsburgh, 2002), chapter 4. 61 This letter appeared in lnformace o cirkvi, no. 4 ( 198 1): 24-25. SLOVAKIA 115 pilgrims, such as running road checks to back up traffic to the site, canceling train and bus service to Levoca, and even cutting down trees to block the road to the basilica. More subtle efforts focused on keeping young people away from Levoca by scheduling a concert by a Slovak pop star in a nearby town . Some schools scheduled special activities on the day of pilgrimages, and others even posted notices banning participation in the pilgrimage.62 Police efforts took a more violent turn in 1986, when militia used dogs to break up groups of pilgrims making their way to Gaboltov.63 Also in 1986, the police interrogated Jozef Halko, a priest who had been sec retly ordained, and Anton Selecky, a Catholic activist, for their activities earlier in the year at the Sastin and Levoca pilgrimages. Holk.o 's interrogation focused on the fact that he had heard confessions at Levoca and Selecky ' s interrogators were concerned that he had written accounts of the pilgrimages for publication in samizdat. 64 In addition to signaling the pilgrimage' s transformation into a public space for Catholics, Velehrad also reflected the increasingly political potential of religion itself in the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. The political significance of religion and religious activities in the Soviet bloc had become quite apparent during the Pope 's first visit to Poland in 1979. In Warsaw's Victory Square on June 2, John Paul II spoke freely about the historically close rel ationship between Christianity and the Polish nation. He also spoke about the failed Warsaw uprising in 1944 (when Soviet troops allowed the Polish Home Army to be defeated by the Nazis), Polish independence, and human dignity. 65 In his analysis of the rise of Solidarity in Poland, Jan Kubik notes that Pope John Paul II 's speech and visit brought an end to the " Party-state's monopoly over public di scourse in 62 " Levoca - the Slovak National Shrine," K NS 2 14 (6 December I 984) . For references to the presence of the secret police at Velehrad in 1985, see " Velehrad 85 - spomienka studentov," Naboi enstvo a sucasnost'3 ( 1986): 17 and " Boli sme na Velehrade," 5. 63 "Militia Set Dogs on Pilgrims (Czechoslovakia)," KNS 257 (2 1 August 1986). 64 "Slovak Cathol ics interrogated," KNS 264 (27 November 1986). 65 Pope John Paul II , "Pope John Paul IL Speaks in Victory Square, Warsaw," in ed., Gale Stokes, From Stalinism to Pluralism (New York and Oxford : Oxford Universi ty Press, 1996), 200-203. 116 SLOVAKIA Poland."66 Though Solidarity was not a religious movement, Kubik argues that its close association with the Catholic Church and the use of religious symbols strengthened its ability to mobilize the Polish population and to construct a sphere of activity separate from and in defiance to the state. Among its achievements was the construction of public spaces not reserved for the state, including the Gdansk Monument and the Poznan Monument. Both incorporated crosses into their design, and, as Kubik explains, both monuments had been unveiled in religious ceremonies that emphasized the participation of society, rather than society 's subservience to the state. 67 Jan Kubik's analysis of these public events in Poland that preceded the formation of Solidarity offers insight into the political significance of religion in East Central Europe. Just as religion and religious traditions offered an alternative to the state's monopoly of power in Poland, the pilgrimage at Velehrad demonstrated that religion and religious traditions could offer a similar alternative in Czechoslovakia. Pope John Paul II had emphasized the historical significance of Christianity in Poland during his visit in 1979 and the commemoration of St. Methodius at Velehrad had allowed Catholic pilgrims the unique opportunity to confront state officials regarding Czechoslovakia's historical relationship with Christianity. The pilgrims at Velehrad, by vocally opposing the state's emphasis on the cultural contribution of Methodius, expressed their defiance of and unwillingness to be subservient to the state's religious policies. In doing so, the pilgrims transformed the traditional religious pilgrimage into an event of political significance. 66 Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, I 994 ), 144. 67 For description and analysis of the Gdansk and the Poznan Monuments, see Kubik, The Power of Symbols, I 96-206, 2 14-216.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The 1985 Pilgrimage at Velehrad: Slovak Catholics and the Creation of a Public Space Description An account of the resource David Doellinger Slovakia, Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007 pp. 99-116 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Doellinger, David Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/e042cae3d975eba92d39991df47aace0.pdf 0f326f309d067af6ab96aeb8a67372ed PDF Text Text REVIEW ESSAYS ��SLOVAKIA 119 SUBCARPATHIAN RUS' AND THE NEW SLOVAK HISTORIOGRAPHY: Peter Mosny. Podkarpatska Rus ': nerealizovana auton6mia. Bratislava: Slovak Academic Press, 2001 , 2 I 6 pp. Index. Paper. Peter Svorc. Krajinska hranica medzi Sloven skom a Podkarpatskou Rusou, 1919-1939. Presov: Vydavatel'stvo Universum , 2003, 424 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index . cloth. PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI University of Toronto As we move further and further into the twenty-first century, the former Czechoslovakia is rapidly being transformed into little more than a hi stori c memory. The first phase of memory loss about the concept of Czechoslovakia began just after World War II, when the country was reco nstituted but without its far eastern reg ion, Subcarpathian Ru s', which was formally annexed to the Soviet Union. After 1945 the concept of Czechoslovakia became one in which for all intents and purposes Subcarpathian Ru s' did not exist. Now that we are in the second stage of memory loss, which could be said to have begun with the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993, it is not difficult to foresee a time when the inhabitants of the Czech Republic and Slovakia will at best have only some vague recollection that their two countries once formed a single sociopolitical entity. The second stage of memory loss will be like the first, which occurred between 1945 and 1993 , when the public-at-large and sc hol ars (who should have known better) forgot that the country was founded as a state of three, not two , Slavic peoples-Czec hs, Slovaks, and CarpathoRusyns. It is interesting to note that even during the first Czechoslovak Republic (19 I 9-1938) , let alone post-World War II Socialist Czechoslovakia (1948-1989) , Slovak sc hol arl y interest in the region of Subcarpathian Ru s' and its majority population , Carpatho-Rusyns , was virtually non-ex istent. For example, during the First Republic there was a whole host of Czech scholars (Vac lav Chaloupecky, Frantisek Gabriel , Antonfn Hartl , Jiri Kral, Frantisek Tichy, among �120 SLOVAKIA others), not to mention belletrists (Karel Capek, Ivan Olbracht, Jaromfr Tomecek, Vladislav Vancura), who studied Subcarpathian Rus' or who were inspired by its landscape and people. One would be hard-pressed to find a few Slovaks who during that period evinced any interest in their Slavic brethren to the east. One could speculate about the reasons for thi s lack of interest: at the time Slovak intellectual s had enough of a challenge to demonstrate that they themselves represented a culture and people distinct from the Czechs. Moreover, in contrast to the largely urbanized Czechs, interwar Slovak intellectuals-removed from the village at best by one generation-did not have to seek, nor were they particularly interested in , an undeveloped rural area like Subcarpathian Rus' , no matter how exotic its peop le and landscape may have seemed. During the post-World War II Communist decades, neither Czechs nor Slovaks (in the unlikely case that they wanted) were able to publish about their country 's former eastern province, since Subcarpathian Rus ', or the Transcarpathian oblast' of Ukraine, was by then part of the Soviet workers' state, whose scholarly and literary circles were allowed to remember only that once their homeland had been "occupied" by "bourgeois Czechoslovakia." In short, Subcarpathian Ru s' as a subject was a taboo for Czechs and Slovaks, who in popular parlance referred to everything east of the Slovak border, including the Transcarpathian oblast' of Ukraine, as Rusko-Russia. As for the handful of Slovak scholars who during the Communist era were allowed to publish on Rusyn topics (the historian I.:udovft Haraksim, the ethnographer Jan Podolak), they were forced to focus solely on the "Ukrainian minority" (i. e., Rusyns) living in northeastern Slovakia. The political and intellectual environment has certainly changed in Slovakia since the collapse of Communist rule in l 989 and the establishment of independent Slovakia three years later. The old Soviet taboo has been lifted, and Rusyns, not only in eastern Slovakia, but also in Subcarpathian Rus ', have finally become legitimate topics of scholarly inquiry. Among the new generation of Slovak scholars who have turned their attention to Carpatho-Rusyns are the sociologist Marian Gajdos, the historian Stanislav Konecny, the political scientist Alexander Duleba, and the authors of the two books under review, Peter Mosny and Peter Svorc. �SLOVAKIA 121 Both authors examine different but related aspects of Subcarpathia' s relationship to Czechoslovakia during the period 1919 to 1945. In contrast to the Czech lands and Slovakia, Subcarpathian Rus' had joined Czechoslovakia in 1919 under the specific condition that it would granted "the widest degree of autonomy compatible with the Czechoslovak state." The proviso on autonomy was spelled out in two of the treaties (St. Germain and Trianon) signed within the framework of the Paris Peace Conference ( 1919 and 1920) and it was incorporated into the Czechoslovak Con stitution adopted in February of 1920. Mosny 's monograph focuses on three themes: the reluctance of Czechoslovakia's authorities to implement autonomy in Subcarpathian Rus' during the years of the First Republic; the form of autonomy that finally came into being in post-Munich Czechoslovakia (October 1938-March I 939); and the promises that were again made to Rusyns during World War II, when it was expected that Czechoslovakia was to be recreated according to its pre-Munich boundaries as "a state comprised of three Slavic peoples: Czechs, Slovaks, and Carpatho-Rusyns/Ukrainians" (p. 162). Mosny provides an incredible amount of documented detail for those who wish to know of Czechoslovak policy toward Subcarpathian Rus ' from the standpoint of the regime in Prague. His legalistic and often tediously dry account says virtually nothing, however, about the activity of Rusyn civic and political leaders to attain the autonomy their province was promised at the close of World War I. Mosny 's onesided approach to the problem may be explained by the fact that he used only Czech- and Slovak-language sources, a serious shortcoming for anyone interested in studying a region in which knowledge of Ukrainian, Russian, and Hungarian is essential. Far more ambitious and intellectually satisfying is the monograph by Peter Svorc. His ostensible focus is the question of the regional border between Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus' during the First Czechoslovak Republic. In fact, the book provides a wide-ranging discussion of Slovak national activists toward Rusy ns beginning already in the nineteenth century, as well as the key political issues faced by Subcarpathia' s leaders from the end of World War I to the end of World War II. Svorc is not only a specialist and widelypublished historian of eastern Slovakia in the twentieth century, but �122 SLOVAKIA he has also published several studies on specific aspects of Ru syn history, as well as the first survey of Subcarpathian Rus' in the first half of the twentieth century to appear in Slovak: Zakliata krajina: Podkarpatska Rus, 1918-1946 (Presov, 1996). The book by Svorc under review here reflects his close familiarity with the secondary literature in a wide variety of languages. Svorc has made use of materials from archives in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, and Slovakia, but not in Hungary or Ukraine. Particularly valuable are several historic photographs and maps that accompany the heavily-footnoted text, although considering the author's approach to the subject, it is surprising not to find a map that compares the various proposals put forth by Slovak and non-Slovak scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding the traditional ethnolinguistic boundary between Slovaks and Rusyns. Svorc's monograph comprises 24 chapters. Several of them provide a detailed description of the views put forth by Slovak, Czech, and Ru syn authors-Pavo! Jozef Safarik, Josef Skultety, Stefan Misik, Lubor Niederle, Samuel Czambel, Jan Husek, and Nikolaj Beskid-who in their writings tried to define the ethnolinguistic border between Slovaks and Rusyns. Svorc also deals at length with Slovak and Rusyn immigrants in the United States and their impact on homeland politics, with the Rusyn question at the Paris Peace Conference and League of Nations, with Czechoslovak administrative policy in Subcarpathian Rus ' and the efforts of Rusyn activists to attain autonomy, and with the controversy in eastern Slovakia among Slovaks and Rusyns regarding the possible unification of all or part of that region with Subcarpathian Rus '. The latter topic is only one of many in which Svorc provides new or previously littleknown information. For example, a bilateral Slovak-Rusyn governmental commission met as early as September 1919 to propose a Slovak-Subcarpathian boundary. The Slovak negotiators, who included Igor Hrusovsky, Jozef Skultety, Karel Chotek, and Yiktor Dvorsky proposed that the following "Rusyn-inhabited" areas should be united with Subcarpathian Rus ' : northeastern Saris county (including the town of Svidnfk and surrounding villages), northeastern Zemplfn county (beyond the line connecting Hanusovce and Snina), and parts of Uh county west of the Uh River (below the Vihorlat �123 SLOVAKIA ridge). The Rusyn delegation , however, refused to compromise on its demand that all of Uh and Zemplfn counties, most of Saris county, and northern Spis county around Stani r.ubovna should be included within Subcarpathian Rus '. As a result of the impasse, Subcarpathian Rus' was in the end reduced to territory east of the Uh River and eventually (after 1928) along a parallel line just west of the river that was to become an international border that remains in place to this day. Slovak-Rusyn political (as opposed to cultural) relations could be said to have begun in 1918, when the land s within the Danubian Bas in were being reconfi gured to accord with the new post-World War I international order. Since that time Slovak scholars have been very slow in coming to grips with the Rusy n lands just to the east. When Czechoslovakia existed, whether in the form of the First Republic or the post-World War II socialist state, Slovak researchers showed little or no interest in their neighbors to the east. It is only from the last decade of the twentieth century that one can finally speak of a Slovak historiography about Rusyn s and Subcarpathian Rus ' . This new tradition has certainly gotten off to a good start with serious and impartial writings by sc holars like Peter Mosny and, in particular, Peter Svare. Eighty Years of English Studies at the Faculty of Arts, ed. by Alojz Kenfz. PHILOLOGICA LX , Zbornfk Filozofickej fakulty Univerzity Komenskeho Bratislava: FFUK, 2004; 406 pages. JA.N SIMKO Washington, DC A SHORT HISTORY In 1924 English studies began at the Comenius University in Bratislava. The first professor, Otakar Yocadlo, however, resigned in February 1939 during the turbulent political developments rocking Czecho-Slovakia . The continuation of English studies was, nevertheless, secured thanks to the appointment of both one lecturer taking over the instruction of the older periods of English language and literature and the other one to teach the modern period. �124 SLOVAKIA Following the communist seizure of political power in February 1948, hotheads began urging the total elimination of English from FFUK, and, in the early I 950 ' s, no new students were admitted for three consecutive years. Fortunately, the argument prevailed that the only Slovak University in existence needed to have its own Department of English . For several years thereafter, on ly three new students were enrolled per year. In the 1960s this number was raised to 20, and later even more. So much so that, when it was later renamed the Department of English and American Studies, it was in a good position to commemorate its eighty years of existence with the publication of this festive, anniversary volume of Ang listic contributions. The total of forty-nine articles includes nine by foreign contributors and forty by domestic authors. All "guest" contributors are current or retired professors of English and are leading world experts in their respective fields of specialization. Their inclusion in this volume is justified by their positive personal relations with Slovakia and the Slovaks as attested by these facts : not only have they been for many years colleagues and friends of this reviewer but, three of them: S. Berkner, S. Noguchi, R. Quirk, and Y. Nakao's son, have paid individual visits to Slovakia, while K. Fukuda has extended his effective help to the FFUK's new Department of Japanese Studies! LANGUAGE STUDIES (1) Sergey Berkner of Voronezh University in Russia spent eight months in 1994 at Ohio State University on a Fu lbright grant. His topical contribution: "Language as an Instrument of Politics: the Role of Cliches and Ideological Lexicon," characterizes the use of language of propaganda as a strong instrument of persuasion, as illustrated by examples from Ru ssian , English , and German. (2) Shunichi Noguchi (b.1933), since 1996 an Emeritus from Osaka University of Education, sent in: "How Can We Not Mismetre Chaucer's Troilus?" He argues that Chaucer had very few specialized terms at his disposal referring to poetry. In classifying the variety of verse patterns used in Troilus, Noguchi has adopted my methods applied to the study of the word-order patterns in 15th century English, namely: "simplification and abstraction" as implemented in my 1957 book. Many typographical errors mar �SLOVAKIA 125 this valuable article. S. Noguchi is one of the world's foremost Malory scholars. The discussion of his article here has been found preferable with regard to the following: (3) Yuji Nakao (b.1935), since March 2007 an Emeritus from both Nagoya and Chubu Universities. He had spent 1967-68 at Brown University in Providence, R.I. , while I was at the same time a Folger Shakespeare Library scholar in Washington, D.C., with neither of us knowing "aught" of the other! His contribution: "On Negative Disjunctive Connectives" in Malory and Caxton of the 15th century, deals with the same material as did I in my 1957 book. While, however, I had been studying the "larger picture," that is, the word-order, he studied the small connectives: nother, neuther, neyther, nor. In the 15th century, they were interchangeable. While of an inconspicuous personal appearance, Y. Nakao is a giant in Arthurian studies. (4) Kazuo Fukuda (b. 1947), of Niigata University, sent in an article: "Theme-Rheme Articulation: A View Based on a Comparison of English and Japanese." He examines the various definitions of these terms well-known to Slovak linguists. He emphasizes the need of a functional , rather than a formalistic view of language. He has extended his generous help to the new Slovak Japanists at FFUK. LITERARY STUDIES (1) Paul Miller (b. 1926), is an Emeritus of Wittenberg University of Springfield, Ohio, where he had taught from 1961 to 1991. In his article: "In Theodore Roosevelt's Footsteps: Midwestern Writers Hunt Lion in East Africa," he offers a fascinating insight into the positive evolution of the African safari wild animal hunter and killer into a wild animal photographer. (2) David George, of Urbana University in Ohio, has, since 1986, been working on a monumental New Yariorum edition of Shakespeare's Roman tragedy CORIOLANUS (1608), to be ready at the end of 2007. In his contribution: "Coriolanus: Narrative and Mythic Sources, " he aims at establishing that, rather than having read Livy in Latin, Shakespeare consulted Livy and Plutarch in English translation. In his meticulous, "clinical" dissection, the author demonstrates that Shakespeare not only followed Plutarch �126 SLOVAKIA but also improved upon his sources, thus exemplifying the Bard's amazing mastery of Roman and Greek history and mythology. (3) Robert Fleissner retired, after 38 years of service (1967-2006), from the Central State University of Springfield, Ohio. He is an unusually prolific author, with fourteen books and 585 published articles (by 2006). Nor does he shun controversy with startling statements, such as, the ones of, respectively, 2000 and 2006 (in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America), suggesting that Shakespeare could have studied, or spent some time, at Oxford! In his article: "Richard II in His Own Way: An Intertextual Study," he debates the question "whether the play is more of a historical play or a tragedy." He inclines to the opinion that it is "a history play with a tragic hero manque" (that is: might have been but is not). (4) The eminent Shakespearean Soji Iwasaki (b.1929) has been, among others, also a professor at Nagoya University. It is surprising that his mentor and supervisor at Cambridge (1964-66), the late eminent Shakespearean, Muriel C. Bradbrook, was, by family connections, related to Professor 0. Vocadlo, through 1939 at FFUK! Also surprisingly but significantly, the two of us have found common ground in each of us having devoted some related unconventional insights into Shakespeare's masterful comedy As You Like It (c . 1599) : he, in his contribution : "Transvestism and Social Reformation in A YLI;" and, as to me, in " W. Shakespeare's A YLI and Slovakia" (Almanac of the National Slovak Society, Pittsburgh 1999). The latter article compares the situation in the former Czecho-Slovakia, both after WW II in May 1945 and to the demise of Communism on November 17, 1989, to the situation following the usurper Duke Frederick's abdication in A YLI. (5) Jan Simko was, from 1945 to 1967 at FFUK, then in the U.S .A. In his contribution: "A Possible Parallel to 'Shall I Die?' A Poem Attributed to Shakespeare?" he compares this poem to English poetry of the 1590s, finding it highly unlikely for it to be by Shakespeare. �SLOVAKIA 127 These contributions by mainly foreign, outstanding Anglicists , have added both luster and prestige to thi s commemorative volume published by Slovak Anglicists. Contributions by Domestic, that is, Slovak Anglicists LANGUAGE STUDIES Seventeen articles deal with the following areas: syntax; wordformation; semantics; style and stylistics; language and culture; language teaching (this is to be grouped with methodology below) ; translation (also to be grouped with translation below). Missing are articles on historical linguistics, varieties of English, etc, Seven (c.42%) of these articles quote A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (London: Longman, 1985), a seminal , monumental work created by Lord Quirk (and collaborators) of the University College, London. Although, for health reasons, he was unable to send in a contribution, his keen interest in the progress of Slovak studies of English and his April 1966 lecture at FFUK deserve special recognition. LITERARY STUDIES Out of eight contributions, English literature is di sc ussed in three; one each disc usses Canadian literature, women's iss ues, theory (realism: modified, and magic; tragedy). No article is devoted to Shakespeare or to American literature. TEACHING METHODOLOGY Nine articles di scuss various topics: the use of storytelling and drama; novels; on-line tutoring; innovative approaches; learning strategies; foreign-language teaching training. Eva Tandlichova (author of the introductory article) advocates, in her contribution: "More Autonomy ... The Need for Real LearnerCentred Teaching and Leaming." BRITISH STUDIES (2 contributions) �128 SLOVAKIA TRANSLATIONS (4 contributions) The emphasis is on quality philological preparation and a good memory. Jan Vilikovsky (former Czecho-Slovak and after 1993 Slovak Republic's first Ambassador to London) di sc usses, in his fundamental contribution: "Orwell, Politics and Translation - Notes of a Translator." He emphasizes the need to evaluate Orwell's texts with a view to the political situation in which they were written. CONCLUSION Even if considering the empty spaces in its overall coverage of the wide field of Anglistics, PHILOLOGICA LX of 2004 cannot but be evaluated as an obvious quantitative and qualitative advance of Slovak studies of English. � REVIEW ESSAYS ��SLOVAKIA 119 SUBCARPATHIAN RUS' AND THE NEW SLOVAK HISTORIOGRAPHY: Peter Mosny. Podkarpatska Rus ': nerealizovana auton6mia. Bratislava: Slovak Academic Press, 2001 , 2 I 6 pp. Index. Paper. Peter Svorc. Krajinska hranica medzi Sloven skom a Podkarpatskou Rusou, 1919-1939. Presov: Vydavatel'stvo Universum , 2003, 424 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index . cloth. PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI University of Toronto As we move further and further into the twenty-first century, the former Czechoslovakia is rapidly being transformed into little more than a hi stori c memory. The first phase of memory loss about the concept of Czechoslovakia began just after World War II, when the country was reco nstituted but without its far eastern reg ion, Subcarpathian Ru s', which was formally annexed to the Soviet Union. After 1945 the concept of Czechoslovakia became one in which for all intents and purposes Subcarpathian Ru s' did not exist. Now that we are in the second stage of memory loss, which could be said to have begun with the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993, it is not difficult to foresee a time when the inhabitants of the Czech Republic and Slovakia will at best have only some vague recollection that their two countries once formed a single sociopolitical entity. The second stage of memory loss will be like the first, which occurred between 1945 and 1993 , when the public-at-large and sc hol ars (who should have known better) forgot that the country was founded as a state of three, not two , Slavic peoples-Czec hs, Slovaks, and CarpathoRusyns. It is interesting to note that even during the first Czechoslovak Republic (19 I 9-1938) , let alone post-World War II Socialist Czechoslovakia (1948-1989) , Slovak sc hol arl y interest in the region of Subcarpathian Ru s' and its majority population , Carpatho-Rusyns , was virtually non-ex istent. For example, during the First Republic there was a whole host of Czech scholars (Vac lav Chaloupecky, Frantisek Gabriel , Antonfn Hartl , Jiri Kral, Frantisek Tichy, among �120 SLOVAKIA others), not to mention belletrists (Karel Capek, Ivan Olbracht, Jaromfr Tomecek, Vladislav Vancura), who studied Subcarpathian Rus' or who were inspired by its landscape and people. One would be hard-pressed to find a few Slovaks who during that period evinced any interest in their Slavic brethren to the east. One could speculate about the reasons for thi s lack of interest: at the time Slovak intellectual s had enough of a challenge to demonstrate that they themselves represented a culture and people distinct from the Czechs. Moreover, in contrast to the largely urbanized Czechs, interwar Slovak intellectuals-removed from the village at best by one generation-did not have to seek, nor were they particularly interested in , an undeveloped rural area like Subcarpathian Rus' , no matter how exotic its peop le and landscape may have seemed. During the post-World War II Communist decades, neither Czechs nor Slovaks (in the unlikely case that they wanted) were able to publish about their country 's former eastern province, since Subcarpathian Rus ', or the Transcarpathian oblast' of Ukraine, was by then part of the Soviet workers' state, whose scholarly and literary circles were allowed to remember only that once their homeland had been "occupied" by "bourgeois Czechoslovakia." In short, Subcarpathian Ru s' as a subject was a taboo for Czechs and Slovaks, who in popular parlance referred to everything east of the Slovak border, including the Transcarpathian oblast' of Ukraine, as Rusko-Russia. As for the handful of Slovak scholars who during the Communist era were allowed to publish on Rusyn topics (the historian I.:udovft Haraksim, the ethnographer Jan Podolak), they were forced to focus solely on the "Ukrainian minority" (i. e., Rusyns) living in northeastern Slovakia. The political and intellectual environment has certainly changed in Slovakia since the collapse of Communist rule in l 989 and the establishment of independent Slovakia three years later. The old Soviet taboo has been lifted, and Rusyns, not only in eastern Slovakia, but also in Subcarpathian Rus ', have finally become legitimate topics of scholarly inquiry. Among the new generation of Slovak scholars who have turned their attention to Carpatho-Rusyns are the sociologist Marian Gajdos, the historian Stanislav Konecny, the political scientist Alexander Duleba, and the authors of the two books under review, Peter Mosny and Peter Svorc. �SLOVAKIA 121 Both authors examine different but related aspects of Subcarpathia' s relationship to Czechoslovakia during the period 1919 to 1945. In contrast to the Czech lands and Slovakia, Subcarpathian Rus' had joined Czechoslovakia in 1919 under the specific condition that it would granted "the widest degree of autonomy compatible with the Czechoslovak state." The proviso on autonomy was spelled out in two of the treaties (St. Germain and Trianon) signed within the framework of the Paris Peace Conference ( 1919 and 1920) and it was incorporated into the Czechoslovak Con stitution adopted in February of 1920. Mosny 's monograph focuses on three themes: the reluctance of Czechoslovakia's authorities to implement autonomy in Subcarpathian Rus' during the years of the First Republic; the form of autonomy that finally came into being in post-Munich Czechoslovakia (October 1938-March I 939); and the promises that were again made to Rusyns during World War II, when it was expected that Czechoslovakia was to be recreated according to its pre-Munich boundaries as "a state comprised of three Slavic peoples: Czechs, Slovaks, and Carpatho-Rusyns/Ukrainians" (p. 162). Mosny provides an incredible amount of documented detail for those who wish to know of Czechoslovak policy toward Subcarpathian Rus ' from the standpoint of the regime in Prague. His legalistic and often tediously dry account says virtually nothing, however, about the activity of Rusyn civic and political leaders to attain the autonomy their province was promised at the close of World War I. Mosny 's onesided approach to the problem may be explained by the fact that he used only Czech- and Slovak-language sources, a serious shortcoming for anyone interested in studying a region in which knowledge of Ukrainian, Russian, and Hungarian is essential. Far more ambitious and intellectually satisfying is the monograph by Peter Svorc. His ostensible focus is the question of the regional border between Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus' during the First Czechoslovak Republic. In fact, the book provides a wide-ranging discussion of Slovak national activists toward Rusy ns beginning already in the nineteenth century, as well as the key political issues faced by Subcarpathia' s leaders from the end of World War I to the end of World War II. Svorc is not only a specialist and widelypublished historian of eastern Slovakia in the twentieth century, but �122 SLOVAKIA he has also published several studies on specific aspects of Ru syn history, as well as the first survey of Subcarpathian Rus' in the first half of the twentieth century to appear in Slovak: Zakliata krajina: Podkarpatska Rus, 1918-1946 (Presov, 1996). The book by Svorc under review here reflects his close familiarity with the secondary literature in a wide variety of languages. Svorc has made use of materials from archives in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, and Slovakia, but not in Hungary or Ukraine. Particularly valuable are several historic photographs and maps that accompany the heavily-footnoted text, although considering the author's approach to the subject, it is surprising not to find a map that compares the various proposals put forth by Slovak and non-Slovak scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding the traditional ethnolinguistic boundary between Slovaks and Rusyns. Svorc's monograph comprises 24 chapters. Several of them provide a detailed description of the views put forth by Slovak, Czech, and Ru syn authors-Pavo! Jozef Safarik, Josef Skultety, Stefan Misik, Lubor Niederle, Samuel Czambel, Jan Husek, and Nikolaj Beskid-who in their writings tried to define the ethnolinguistic border between Slovaks and Rusyns. Svorc also deals at length with Slovak and Rusyn immigrants in the United States and their impact on homeland politics, with the Rusyn question at the Paris Peace Conference and League of Nations, with Czechoslovak administrative policy in Subcarpathian Rus ' and the efforts of Rusyn activists to attain autonomy, and with the controversy in eastern Slovakia among Slovaks and Rusyns regarding the possible unification of all or part of that region with Subcarpathian Rus '. The latter topic is only one of many in which Svorc provides new or previously littleknown information. For example, a bilateral Slovak-Rusyn governmental commission met as early as September 1919 to propose a Slovak-Subcarpathian boundary. The Slovak negotiators, who included Igor Hrusovsky, Jozef Skultety, Karel Chotek, and Yiktor Dvorsky proposed that the following "Rusyn-inhabited" areas should be united with Subcarpathian Rus ' : northeastern Saris county (including the town of Svidnfk and surrounding villages), northeastern Zemplfn county (beyond the line connecting Hanusovce and Snina), and parts of Uh county west of the Uh River (below the Vihorlat �123 SLOVAKIA ridge). The Rusyn delegation , however, refused to compromise on its demand that all of Uh and Zemplfn counties, most of Saris county, and northern Spis county around Stani r.ubovna should be included within Subcarpathian Rus '. As a result of the impasse, Subcarpathian Rus' was in the end reduced to territory east of the Uh River and eventually (after 1928) along a parallel line just west of the river that was to become an international border that remains in place to this day. Slovak-Rusyn political (as opposed to cultural) relations could be said to have begun in 1918, when the land s within the Danubian Bas in were being reconfi gured to accord with the new post-World War I international order. Since that time Slovak scholars have been very slow in coming to grips with the Rusy n lands just to the east. When Czechoslovakia existed, whether in the form of the First Republic or the post-World War II socialist state, Slovak researchers showed little or no interest in their neighbors to the east. It is only from the last decade of the twentieth century that one can finally speak of a Slovak historiography about Rusyn s and Subcarpathian Rus ' . This new tradition has certainly gotten off to a good start with serious and impartial writings by sc holars like Peter Mosny and, in particular, Peter Svare. Eighty Years of English Studies at the Faculty of Arts, ed. by Alojz Kenfz. PHILOLOGICA LX , Zbornfk Filozofickej fakulty Univerzity Komenskeho Bratislava: FFUK, 2004; 406 pages. JA.N SIMKO Washington, DC A SHORT HISTORY In 1924 English studies began at the Comenius University in Bratislava. The first professor, Otakar Yocadlo, however, resigned in February 1939 during the turbulent political developments rocking Czecho-Slovakia . The continuation of English studies was, nevertheless, secured thanks to the appointment of both one lecturer taking over the instruction of the older periods of English language and literature and the other one to teach the modern period. �124 SLOVAKIA Following the communist seizure of political power in February 1948, hotheads began urging the total elimination of English from FFUK, and, in the early I 950 ' s, no new students were admitted for three consecutive years. Fortunately, the argument prevailed that the only Slovak University in existence needed to have its own Department of English . For several years thereafter, on ly three new students were enrolled per year. In the 1960s this number was raised to 20, and later even more. So much so that, when it was later renamed the Department of English and American Studies, it was in a good position to commemorate its eighty years of existence with the publication of this festive, anniversary volume of Ang listic contributions. The total of forty-nine articles includes nine by foreign contributors and forty by domestic authors. All "guest" contributors are current or retired professors of English and are leading world experts in their respective fields of specialization. Their inclusion in this volume is justified by their positive personal relations with Slovakia and the Slovaks as attested by these facts : not only have they been for many years colleagues and friends of this reviewer but, three of them: S. Berkner, S. Noguchi, R. Quirk, and Y. Nakao's son, have paid individual visits to Slovakia, while K. Fukuda has extended his effective help to the FFUK's new Department of Japanese Studies! LANGUAGE STUDIES (1) Sergey Berkner of Voronezh University in Russia spent eight months in 1994 at Ohio State University on a Fu lbright grant. His topical contribution: "Language as an Instrument of Politics: the Role of Cliches and Ideological Lexicon," characterizes the use of language of propaganda as a strong instrument of persuasion, as illustrated by examples from Ru ssian , English , and German. (2) Shunichi Noguchi (b.1933), since 1996 an Emeritus from Osaka University of Education, sent in: "How Can We Not Mismetre Chaucer's Troilus?" He argues that Chaucer had very few specialized terms at his disposal referring to poetry. In classifying the variety of verse patterns used in Troilus, Noguchi has adopted my methods applied to the study of the word-order patterns in 15th century English, namely: "simplification and abstraction" as implemented in my 1957 book. Many typographical errors mar �SLOVAKIA 125 this valuable article. S. Noguchi is one of the world's foremost Malory scholars. The discussion of his article here has been found preferable with regard to the following: (3) Yuji Nakao (b.1935), since March 2007 an Emeritus from both Nagoya and Chubu Universities. He had spent 1967-68 at Brown University in Providence, R.I. , while I was at the same time a Folger Shakespeare Library scholar in Washington, D.C., with neither of us knowing "aught" of the other! His contribution: "On Negative Disjunctive Connectives" in Malory and Caxton of the 15th century, deals with the same material as did I in my 1957 book. While, however, I had been studying the "larger picture," that is, the word-order, he studied the small connectives: nother, neuther, neyther, nor. In the 15th century, they were interchangeable. While of an inconspicuous personal appearance, Y. Nakao is a giant in Arthurian studies. (4) Kazuo Fukuda (b. 1947), of Niigata University, sent in an article: "Theme-Rheme Articulation: A View Based on a Comparison of English and Japanese." He examines the various definitions of these terms well-known to Slovak linguists. He emphasizes the need of a functional , rather than a formalistic view of language. He has extended his generous help to the new Slovak Japanists at FFUK. LITERARY STUDIES (1) Paul Miller (b. 1926), is an Emeritus of Wittenberg University of Springfield, Ohio, where he had taught from 1961 to 1991. In his article: "In Theodore Roosevelt's Footsteps: Midwestern Writers Hunt Lion in East Africa," he offers a fascinating insight into the positive evolution of the African safari wild animal hunter and killer into a wild animal photographer. (2) David George, of Urbana University in Ohio, has, since 1986, been working on a monumental New Yariorum edition of Shakespeare's Roman tragedy CORIOLANUS (1608), to be ready at the end of 2007. In his contribution: "Coriolanus: Narrative and Mythic Sources, " he aims at establishing that, rather than having read Livy in Latin, Shakespeare consulted Livy and Plutarch in English translation. In his meticulous, "clinical" dissection, the author demonstrates that Shakespeare not only followed Plutarch �126 SLOVAKIA but also improved upon his sources, thus exemplifying the Bard's amazing mastery of Roman and Greek history and mythology. (3) Robert Fleissner retired, after 38 years of service (1967-2006), from the Central State University of Springfield, Ohio. He is an unusually prolific author, with fourteen books and 585 published articles (by 2006). Nor does he shun controversy with startling statements, such as, the ones of, respectively, 2000 and 2006 (in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America), suggesting that Shakespeare could have studied, or spent some time, at Oxford! In his article: "Richard II in His Own Way: An Intertextual Study," he debates the question "whether the play is more of a historical play or a tragedy." He inclines to the opinion that it is "a history play with a tragic hero manque" (that is: might have been but is not). (4) The eminent Shakespearean Soji Iwasaki (b.1929) has been, among others, also a professor at Nagoya University. It is surprising that his mentor and supervisor at Cambridge (1964-66), the late eminent Shakespearean, Muriel C. Bradbrook, was, by family connections, related to Professor 0. Vocadlo, through 1939 at FFUK! Also surprisingly but significantly, the two of us have found common ground in each of us having devoted some related unconventional insights into Shakespeare's masterful comedy As You Like It (c . 1599) : he, in his contribution : "Transvestism and Social Reformation in A YLI;" and, as to me, in " W. Shakespeare's A YLI and Slovakia" (Almanac of the National Slovak Society, Pittsburgh 1999). The latter article compares the situation in the former Czecho-Slovakia, both after WW II in May 1945 and to the demise of Communism on November 17, 1989, to the situation following the usurper Duke Frederick's abdication in A YLI. (5) Jan Simko was, from 1945 to 1967 at FFUK, then in the U.S .A. In his contribution: "A Possible Parallel to 'Shall I Die?' A Poem Attributed to Shakespeare?" he compares this poem to English poetry of the 1590s, finding it highly unlikely for it to be by Shakespeare. �SLOVAKIA 127 These contributions by mainly foreign, outstanding Anglicists , have added both luster and prestige to thi s commemorative volume published by Slovak Anglicists. Contributions by Domestic, that is, Slovak Anglicists LANGUAGE STUDIES Seventeen articles deal with the following areas: syntax; wordformation; semantics; style and stylistics; language and culture; language teaching (this is to be grouped with methodology below) ; translation (also to be grouped with translation below). Missing are articles on historical linguistics, varieties of English, etc, Seven (c.42%) of these articles quote A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (London: Longman, 1985), a seminal , monumental work created by Lord Quirk (and collaborators) of the University College, London. Although, for health reasons, he was unable to send in a contribution, his keen interest in the progress of Slovak studies of English and his April 1966 lecture at FFUK deserve special recognition. LITERARY STUDIES Out of eight contributions, English literature is di sc ussed in three; one each disc usses Canadian literature, women's iss ues, theory (realism: modified, and magic; tragedy). No article is devoted to Shakespeare or to American literature. TEACHING METHODOLOGY Nine articles di scuss various topics: the use of storytelling and drama; novels; on-line tutoring; innovative approaches; learning strategies; foreign-language teaching training. Eva Tandlichova (author of the introductory article) advocates, in her contribution: "More Autonomy ... The Need for Real LearnerCentred Teaching and Leaming." BRITISH STUDIES (2 contributions) �128 SLOVAKIA TRANSLATIONS (4 contributions) The emphasis is on quality philological preparation and a good memory. Jan Vilikovsky (former Czecho-Slovak and after 1993 Slovak Republic's first Ambassador to London) di sc usses, in his fundamental contribution: "Orwell, Politics and Translation - Notes of a Translator." He emphasizes the need to evaluate Orwell's texts with a view to the political situation in which they were written. CONCLUSION Even if considering the empty spaces in its overall coverage of the wide field of Anglistics, PHILOLOGICA LX of 2004 cannot but be evaluated as an obvious quantitative and qualitative advance of Slovak studies of English. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2007, Vol. 39 Description An account of the resource Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document REVIEW ESSAYS SLOVAKIA 119 SUBCARPATHIAN RUS' AND THE NEW SLOVAK HISTORIOGRAPHY: Peter Mosny. Podkarpatska Rus ': nerealizovana auton6mia. Bratislava: Slovak Academic Press, 2001 , 2 I 6 pp. Index. Paper. Peter Svorc. Krajinska hranica medzi Sloven skom a Podkarpatskou Rusou, 1919-1939. Presov: Vydavatel'stvo Universum , 2003, 424 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index . cloth. PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI University of Toronto As we move further and further into the twenty-first century, the former Czechoslovakia is rapidly being transformed into little more than a hi stori c memory. The first phase of memory loss about the concept of Czechoslovakia began just after World War II, when the country was reco nstituted but without its far eastern reg ion, Subcarpathian Ru s', which was formally annexed to the Soviet Union. After 1945 the concept of Czechoslovakia became one in which for all intents and purposes Subcarpathian Ru s' did not exist. Now that we are in the second stage of memory loss, which could be said to have begun with the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993, it is not difficult to foresee a time when the inhabitants of the Czech Republic and Slovakia will at best have only some vague recollection that their two countries once formed a single sociopolitical entity. The second stage of memory loss will be like the first, which occurred between 1945 and 1993 , when the public-at-large and sc hol ars (who should have known better) forgot that the country was founded as a state of three, not two , Slavic peoples-Czec hs, Slovaks, and CarpathoRusyns. It is interesting to note that even during the first Czechoslovak Republic (19 I 9-1938) , let alone post-World War II Socialist Czechoslovakia (1948-1989) , Slovak sc hol arl y interest in the region of Subcarpathian Ru s' and its majority population , Carpatho-Rusyns , was virtually non-ex istent. For example, during the First Republic there was a whole host of Czech scholars (Vac lav Chaloupecky, Frantisek Gabriel , Antonfn Hartl , Jiri Kral, Frantisek Tichy, among 120 SLOVAKIA others), not to mention belletrists (Karel Capek, Ivan Olbracht, Jaromfr Tomecek, Vladislav Vancura), who studied Subcarpathian Rus' or who were inspired by its landscape and people. One would be hard-pressed to find a few Slovaks who during that period evinced any interest in their Slavic brethren to the east. One could speculate about the reasons for thi s lack of interest: at the time Slovak intellectual s had enough of a challenge to demonstrate that they themselves represented a culture and people distinct from the Czechs. Moreover, in contrast to the largely urbanized Czechs, interwar Slovak intellectuals-removed from the village at best by one generation-did not have to seek, nor were they particularly interested in , an undeveloped rural area like Subcarpathian Rus' , no matter how exotic its peop le and landscape may have seemed. During the post-World War II Communist decades, neither Czechs nor Slovaks (in the unlikely case that they wanted) were able to publish about their country 's former eastern province, since Subcarpathian Rus ', or the Transcarpathian oblast' of Ukraine, was by then part of the Soviet workers' state, whose scholarly and literary circles were allowed to remember only that once their homeland had been "occupied" by "bourgeois Czechoslovakia." In short, Subcarpathian Ru s' as a subject was a taboo for Czechs and Slovaks, who in popular parlance referred to everything east of the Slovak border, including the Transcarpathian oblast' of Ukraine, as Rusko-Russia. As for the handful of Slovak scholars who during the Communist era were allowed to publish on Rusyn topics (the historian I.:udovft Haraksim, the ethnographer Jan Podolak), they were forced to focus solely on the "Ukrainian minority" (i. e., Rusyns) living in northeastern Slovakia. The political and intellectual environment has certainly changed in Slovakia since the collapse of Communist rule in l 989 and the establishment of independent Slovakia three years later. The old Soviet taboo has been lifted, and Rusyns, not only in eastern Slovakia, but also in Subcarpathian Rus ', have finally become legitimate topics of scholarly inquiry. Among the new generation of Slovak scholars who have turned their attention to Carpatho-Rusyns are the sociologist Marian Gajdos, the historian Stanislav Konecny, the political scientist Alexander Duleba, and the authors of the two books under review, Peter Mosny and Peter Svorc. SLOVAKIA 121 Both authors examine different but related aspects of Subcarpathia' s relationship to Czechoslovakia during the period 1919 to 1945. In contrast to the Czech lands and Slovakia, Subcarpathian Rus' had joined Czechoslovakia in 1919 under the specific condition that it would granted "the widest degree of autonomy compatible with the Czechoslovak state." The proviso on autonomy was spelled out in two of the treaties (St. Germain and Trianon) signed within the framework of the Paris Peace Conference ( 1919 and 1920) and it was incorporated into the Czechoslovak Con stitution adopted in February of 1920. Mosny 's monograph focuses on three themes: the reluctance of Czechoslovakia's authorities to implement autonomy in Subcarpathian Rus' during the years of the First Republic; the form of autonomy that finally came into being in post-Munich Czechoslovakia (October 1938-March I 939); and the promises that were again made to Rusyns during World War II, when it was expected that Czechoslovakia was to be recreated according to its pre-Munich boundaries as "a state comprised of three Slavic peoples: Czechs, Slovaks, and Carpatho-Rusyns/Ukrainians" (p. 162). Mosny provides an incredible amount of documented detail for those who wish to know of Czechoslovak policy toward Subcarpathian Rus ' from the standpoint of the regime in Prague. His legalistic and often tediously dry account says virtually nothing, however, about the activity of Rusyn civic and political leaders to attain the autonomy their province was promised at the close of World War I. Mosny 's onesided approach to the problem may be explained by the fact that he used only Czech- and Slovak-language sources, a serious shortcoming for anyone interested in studying a region in which knowledge of Ukrainian, Russian, and Hungarian is essential. Far more ambitious and intellectually satisfying is the monograph by Peter Svorc. His ostensible focus is the question of the regional border between Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus' during the First Czechoslovak Republic. In fact, the book provides a wide-ranging discussion of Slovak national activists toward Rusy ns beginning already in the nineteenth century, as well as the key political issues faced by Subcarpathia' s leaders from the end of World War I to the end of World War II. Svorc is not only a specialist and widelypublished historian of eastern Slovakia in the twentieth century, but 122 SLOVAKIA he has also published several studies on specific aspects of Ru syn history, as well as the first survey of Subcarpathian Rus' in the first half of the twentieth century to appear in Slovak: Zakliata krajina: Podkarpatska Rus, 1918-1946 (Presov, 1996). The book by Svorc under review here reflects his close familiarity with the secondary literature in a wide variety of languages. Svorc has made use of materials from archives in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, and Slovakia, but not in Hungary or Ukraine. Particularly valuable are several historic photographs and maps that accompany the heavily-footnoted text, although considering the author's approach to the subject, it is surprising not to find a map that compares the various proposals put forth by Slovak and non-Slovak scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding the traditional ethnolinguistic boundary between Slovaks and Rusyns. Svorc's monograph comprises 24 chapters. Several of them provide a detailed description of the views put forth by Slovak, Czech, and Ru syn authors-Pavo! Jozef Safarik, Josef Skultety, Stefan Misik, Lubor Niederle, Samuel Czambel, Jan Husek, and Nikolaj Beskid-who in their writings tried to define the ethnolinguistic border between Slovaks and Rusyns. Svorc also deals at length with Slovak and Rusyn immigrants in the United States and their impact on homeland politics, with the Rusyn question at the Paris Peace Conference and League of Nations, with Czechoslovak administrative policy in Subcarpathian Rus ' and the efforts of Rusyn activists to attain autonomy, and with the controversy in eastern Slovakia among Slovaks and Rusyns regarding the possible unification of all or part of that region with Subcarpathian Rus '. The latter topic is only one of many in which Svorc provides new or previously littleknown information. For example, a bilateral Slovak-Rusyn governmental commission met as early as September 1919 to propose a Slovak-Subcarpathian boundary. The Slovak negotiators, who included Igor Hrusovsky, Jozef Skultety, Karel Chotek, and Yiktor Dvorsky proposed that the following "Rusyn-inhabited" areas should be united with Subcarpathian Rus ' : northeastern Saris county (including the town of Svidnfk and surrounding villages), northeastern Zemplfn county (beyond the line connecting Hanusovce and Snina), and parts of Uh county west of the Uh River (below the Vihorlat 123 SLOVAKIA ridge). The Rusyn delegation , however, refused to compromise on its demand that all of Uh and Zemplfn counties, most of Saris county, and northern Spis county around Stani r.ubovna should be included within Subcarpathian Rus '. As a result of the impasse, Subcarpathian Rus' was in the end reduced to territory east of the Uh River and eventually (after 1928) along a parallel line just west of the river that was to become an international border that remains in place to this day. Slovak-Rusyn political (as opposed to cultural) relations could be said to have begun in 1918, when the land s within the Danubian Bas in were being reconfi gured to accord with the new post-World War I international order. Since that time Slovak scholars have been very slow in coming to grips with the Rusy n lands just to the east. When Czechoslovakia existed, whether in the form of the First Republic or the post-World War II socialist state, Slovak researchers showed little or no interest in their neighbors to the east. It is only from the last decade of the twentieth century that one can finally speak of a Slovak historiography about Rusyn s and Subcarpathian Rus ' . This new tradition has certainly gotten off to a good start with serious and impartial writings by sc holars like Peter Mosny and, in particular, Peter Svare. Eighty Years of English Studies at the Faculty of Arts, ed. by Alojz Kenfz. PHILOLOGICA LX , Zbornfk Filozofickej fakulty Univerzity Komenskeho Bratislava: FFUK, 2004; 406 pages. JA.N SIMKO Washington, DC A SHORT HISTORY In 1924 English studies began at the Comenius University in Bratislava. The first professor, Otakar Yocadlo, however, resigned in February 1939 during the turbulent political developments rocking Czecho-Slovakia . The continuation of English studies was, nevertheless, secured thanks to the appointment of both one lecturer taking over the instruction of the older periods of English language and literature and the other one to teach the modern period. 124 SLOVAKIA Following the communist seizure of political power in February 1948, hotheads began urging the total elimination of English from FFUK, and, in the early I 950 ' s, no new students were admitted for three consecutive years. Fortunately, the argument prevailed that the only Slovak University in existence needed to have its own Department of English . For several years thereafter, on ly three new students were enrolled per year. In the 1960s this number was raised to 20, and later even more. So much so that, when it was later renamed the Department of English and American Studies, it was in a good position to commemorate its eighty years of existence with the publication of this festive, anniversary volume of Ang listic contributions. The total of forty-nine articles includes nine by foreign contributors and forty by domestic authors. All "guest" contributors are current or retired professors of English and are leading world experts in their respective fields of specialization. Their inclusion in this volume is justified by their positive personal relations with Slovakia and the Slovaks as attested by these facts : not only have they been for many years colleagues and friends of this reviewer but, three of them: S. Berkner, S. Noguchi, R. Quirk, and Y. Nakao's son, have paid individual visits to Slovakia, while K. Fukuda has extended his effective help to the FFUK's new Department of Japanese Studies! LANGUAGE STUDIES (1) Sergey Berkner of Voronezh University in Russia spent eight months in 1994 at Ohio State University on a Fu lbright grant. His topical contribution: "Language as an Instrument of Politics: the Role of Cliches and Ideological Lexicon," characterizes the use of language of propaganda as a strong instrument of persuasion, as illustrated by examples from Ru ssian , English , and German. (2) Shunichi Noguchi (b.1933), since 1996 an Emeritus from Osaka University of Education, sent in: "How Can We Not Mismetre Chaucer's Troilus?" He argues that Chaucer had very few specialized terms at his disposal referring to poetry. In classifying the variety of verse patterns used in Troilus, Noguchi has adopted my methods applied to the study of the word-order patterns in 15th century English, namely: "simplification and abstraction" as implemented in my 1957 book. Many typographical errors mar SLOVAKIA 125 this valuable article. S. Noguchi is one of the world's foremost Malory scholars. The discussion of his article here has been found preferable with regard to the following: (3) Yuji Nakao (b.1935), since March 2007 an Emeritus from both Nagoya and Chubu Universities. He had spent 1967-68 at Brown University in Providence, R.I. , while I was at the same time a Folger Shakespeare Library scholar in Washington, D.C., with neither of us knowing "aught" of the other! His contribution: "On Negative Disjunctive Connectives" in Malory and Caxton of the 15th century, deals with the same material as did I in my 1957 book. While, however, I had been studying the "larger picture," that is, the word-order, he studied the small connectives: nother, neuther, neyther, nor. In the 15th century, they were interchangeable. While of an inconspicuous personal appearance, Y. Nakao is a giant in Arthurian studies. (4) Kazuo Fukuda (b. 1947), of Niigata University, sent in an article: "Theme-Rheme Articulation: A View Based on a Comparison of English and Japanese." He examines the various definitions of these terms well-known to Slovak linguists. He emphasizes the need of a functional , rather than a formalistic view of language. He has extended his generous help to the new Slovak Japanists at FFUK. LITERARY STUDIES (1) Paul Miller (b. 1926), is an Emeritus of Wittenberg University of Springfield, Ohio, where he had taught from 1961 to 1991. In his article: "In Theodore Roosevelt's Footsteps: Midwestern Writers Hunt Lion in East Africa," he offers a fascinating insight into the positive evolution of the African safari wild animal hunter and killer into a wild animal photographer. (2) David George, of Urbana University in Ohio, has, since 1986, been working on a monumental New Yariorum edition of Shakespeare's Roman tragedy CORIOLANUS (1608), to be ready at the end of 2007. In his contribution: "Coriolanus: Narrative and Mythic Sources, " he aims at establishing that, rather than having read Livy in Latin, Shakespeare consulted Livy and Plutarch in English translation. In his meticulous, "clinical" dissection, the author demonstrates that Shakespeare not only followed Plutarch 126 SLOVAKIA but also improved upon his sources, thus exemplifying the Bard's amazing mastery of Roman and Greek history and mythology. (3) Robert Fleissner retired, after 38 years of service (1967-2006), from the Central State University of Springfield, Ohio. He is an unusually prolific author, with fourteen books and 585 published articles (by 2006). Nor does he shun controversy with startling statements, such as, the ones of, respectively, 2000 and 2006 (in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America), suggesting that Shakespeare could have studied, or spent some time, at Oxford! In his article: "Richard II in His Own Way: An Intertextual Study," he debates the question "whether the play is more of a historical play or a tragedy." He inclines to the opinion that it is "a history play with a tragic hero manque" (that is: might have been but is not). (4) The eminent Shakespearean Soji Iwasaki (b.1929) has been, among others, also a professor at Nagoya University. It is surprising that his mentor and supervisor at Cambridge (1964-66), the late eminent Shakespearean, Muriel C. Bradbrook, was, by family connections, related to Professor 0. Vocadlo, through 1939 at FFUK! Also surprisingly but significantly, the two of us have found common ground in each of us having devoted some related unconventional insights into Shakespeare's masterful comedy As You Like It (c . 1599) : he, in his contribution : "Transvestism and Social Reformation in A YLI;" and, as to me, in " W. Shakespeare's A YLI and Slovakia" (Almanac of the National Slovak Society, Pittsburgh 1999). The latter article compares the situation in the former Czecho-Slovakia, both after WW II in May 1945 and to the demise of Communism on November 17, 1989, to the situation following the usurper Duke Frederick's abdication in A YLI. (5) Jan Simko was, from 1945 to 1967 at FFUK, then in the U.S .A. In his contribution: "A Possible Parallel to 'Shall I Die?' A Poem Attributed to Shakespeare?" he compares this poem to English poetry of the 1590s, finding it highly unlikely for it to be by Shakespeare. SLOVAKIA 127 These contributions by mainly foreign, outstanding Anglicists , have added both luster and prestige to thi s commemorative volume published by Slovak Anglicists. Contributions by Domestic, that is, Slovak Anglicists LANGUAGE STUDIES Seventeen articles deal with the following areas: syntax; wordformation; semantics; style and stylistics; language and culture; language teaching (this is to be grouped with methodology below) ; translation (also to be grouped with translation below). Missing are articles on historical linguistics, varieties of English, etc, Seven (c.42%) of these articles quote A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (London: Longman, 1985), a seminal , monumental work created by Lord Quirk (and collaborators) of the University College, London. Although, for health reasons, he was unable to send in a contribution, his keen interest in the progress of Slovak studies of English and his April 1966 lecture at FFUK deserve special recognition. LITERARY STUDIES Out of eight contributions, English literature is di sc ussed in three; one each disc usses Canadian literature, women's iss ues, theory (realism: modified, and magic; tragedy). No article is devoted to Shakespeare or to American literature. TEACHING METHODOLOGY Nine articles di scuss various topics: the use of storytelling and drama; novels; on-line tutoring; innovative approaches; learning strategies; foreign-language teaching training. Eva Tandlichova (author of the introductory article) advocates, in her contribution: "More Autonomy ... The Need for Real LearnerCentred Teaching and Leaming." BRITISH STUDIES (2 contributions) 128 SLOVAKIA TRANSLATIONS (4 contributions) The emphasis is on quality philological preparation and a good memory. Jan Vilikovsky (former Czecho-Slovak and after 1993 Slovak Republic's first Ambassador to London) di sc usses, in his fundamental contribution: "Orwell, Politics and Translation - Notes of a Translator." He emphasizes the need to evaluate Orwell's texts with a view to the political situation in which they were written. CONCLUSION Even if considering the empty spaces in its overall coverage of the wide field of Anglistics, PHILOLOGICA LX of 2004 cannot but be evaluated as an obvious quantitative and qualitative advance of Slovak studies of English.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Review Essays, Slovakia, Vol. 39 (No. 72-73) Description An account of the resource includes:<br /><ul><li>Subcarpathian Rus' and the New Slovak Historiography: Peter Mosný, Podkarpatská Rus', and Peter Švorc, Krajinská hranica medzi Slovenskom a Podkarpatskou Rusou, 1919-1939 (Paul Robert Magocsi), p. 119</li> <li>Zborník Filozofickej fakulty Univerzity Komenského, Philologica LX (Ján Šimko), p. 123</li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Magocsi, Paul Robert, 1945- Šimko, Ján, 1920-2011 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 SNK https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/46fdc3e0c813f2a93adbad435b51483e.pdf 9061638c10f0fc8565df947913f2662b PDF Text Text REVIEWS ��SLOVAKIA 131 Jan Steinhtibe l, Nitrianske knieiatstvo: Pociatky stredovekeho Slovenska. Rozpravanie o dejinach nasho tizemia a okolitych krajfn od st!lho vania narodov do zaciatku 12. storocia. Brati slava: Veda, 2004. 575pp., bibliography, index of names, index of places, maps, photos, illustration s. M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa This massive sy nthesis is the culmination of fifteen years of research and publication on the ancestors of the Slovaks in Central Europe. Jan Steinhi.ibel, who works for the Historical Institute of the Sloak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, is a worthy successor to the late Peter Ratkos, the age ing Richard Marsina, and the recentl yretired Matus Kucera , all ex perts on the ancient hi story of the Slovaks. According to Ste inhtibel , the Principality of Nitra was the earliest state of the ancestors of the Slovaks. It started to form in the 6th century, and was independent from 805 to 833. After it was conquered by the nearby Moravians, it remained an important Principality until the demi se of the Great Morav ian Empire in 906. Once the Magyar Arpad dynasty establi shed itself in Central Europe in the 10th century, Nitra, which was inhabited large ly by Slavs, remained a key Principality in the emerging Hungarian Kin gdom until the beginning of the I 2th century. Prince l mri ch, ruler of Nitra and son of King (Sa int) Stephen, was even dubbed " Henricus nobilis dux Sc lavoni e" by a Polish chronicler in I029. And, as long as the Principality existed, its people were called "Nytrenses Sclavi" by Hungarian chroniclers. For three ce nturi es Nitra served as the steppingstone for the future rulers of, first Great Moravia, and later the Kingdom of Hungary. Indeed, the rul ers of Nitra were sovereign over nine counties (large ly coterminous with present-day Slovakia, with the exception of the eastern counties), commanded armies of 3,000 soldiers and often struck their own coins. Eventuall y, however, the early Kings of Hungary, who had traditionally shared their rule wi th their brothers as Princes of Nitra, came to regard this principality as a source of rebellion against them selves or their designated successsors (their leg itimate sons). As a result, in 1108 King Koloman depo- �132 SLOVAKIA sed and blinded his brother Almos, along with the latter's son, and two years later abolished the Principality, along wi th its southern border. Thereafter, medieval chroniclers referred to the local inhabitants si mply as " Sclavi ," but by the 15th century they had become "Slowak." Of course the 18th century Czech linguist Josef Dobrovsky , who claimed that the term "Slovak" or "Slovensko" were recent inventions, did not know any of this. After 336 pages of text, lavishly illustrated with relevant quotations from medieval chroniclers, Steinhiibel concluded that one can trace the beginnings of Slovak history to the Principality of Nitra. Indeed, he continued, one has to look to thi s Principality to find the national, territorial and historical roots of Slovakia. This book is a testament to the deep eruditon of the author. As the 1900 footnotes covering pages 337-495 testify, SteinhUbel mined virtually all (largely Latin) medieval sources written by German, Magyar, Polish, Czech, Ru ssian and Byzantine chroniclers that pertain to Central Europe. He also read the relevant books and articles in the vernacular languages of contemporary scholars of Central Europe and he judiciously illustrated his book with copies of medieval manuscripts , drawings and photos of artifacts. This monograph was a pleasure to read and I will eagerly mine it for relevant quotations for my course on the early history of the Slovaks. Dusan Kovac et. al. Na zaciatku storocia, 1901 -1914. Bratislava: Veda, 2004. 292 pp. , ill., index . GREGORY C. FERENCE Salisbury University This is the first of a scheduled seven volume series entitled Slovensko v 20. storoci (Slovakia in the 2(Jh Century) sponsored by the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, under the chief editorship of Dusan Kovac, a leading Slovak historian. Kovac, one of five historians who wrote chapters in this volume penned the introduction and the first "Raku sko-Uhorsko a slo venska otazka v narodnych vztahoch" (A ustria-Hungary and the Slovak Question in International Affairs) and sixth "Pred prvou svetovou vojnou" (Be- �SLOVAKIA 133 fore the First World War) chapters. Other eminent Slovak historians included in this volume are alphabetically: Roman Holec, Chapter 3 "Hospodarstvo" (Economics), Elena Jakesova, chapter 2 "Spolocnost" (Society), Elena Mannova, Chapter 7 "Ideove smery. Kulturny a spolocensky zivot" (Ideological Movements. Cultural and Social Life), and Milan Podrimavsky, Chapters 4 "Krfza liberalneho rezimu 1901-1904" (Crisis of the Liberal Regime 1901-1904) and 5 "Vyvrcholenie politickej krfzy. Koalicna vlada 1905-1910" (Culmination of the Political Crisis. The Coalition Government 1905-1910). Although only these five authors receive credit for the entries, Kovac notes that they relied on the research of another ten historians. This is the most comprehensive general history of Slovakia produced thus far. As Kovac states in his introduction, the Slovak public, and indeed the world, has not until this time possessed a true synthesized historical work written by experts. Previous attempts developed under the totalitarian regime failed to fulfill this goal because they presented distorted interpretations. Kovac hopes this and subsequent works of the series will return to the tradition of noted historian Cubomfr Liptak when he wrote his Slovensko v 20. storoci in 1968 This volume contains traditional aspects of any society, but also gives coverage to areas rarely found in general historical works such as architecture, the beaux arts, mass communication, education, the family , business, and economics . It is not intended to be an all encompassing in-depth study, but rather explores the topics with sufficient coverage without becoming too bogged down in detail. It is meant to be a starting point for further research and study , and it accomplishes this feat quite well. The fourteen years prior to the outbreak of war were a very dynamic and dramatic period, so much so that Slovakia, in the spring of 1914, was quite a different place than in1901 , especially in its urban areas. Despite the Slovaks politically and culturally waging an uphill battle against intensive Magyarization aimed at their assimilation, they fared much better than they had in 1901. The book contains information about the Slovak diaspora, including Budapest, Vienna, the United States, and the Yojvodina/Banat region. The authors explained that a general history of Slovakia and Slovaks before the First World War needs to explore territories other than that of �134 SLOVAKIA Slovakia or Upper Hungary. Indeed, during this time, the true urban center of the Slovaks was Budapest. The work also covers, in much less detail, the other inhabitants of the region including Jews, Germans, Rusyns, and Gypsies (Romany) and provides ample evidence of the ethnic plurali sm of Upper Hungary . At times, too much emphasis appears to be placed on trends and developments throughout Hungary, but, naturall y, it proves impossible to divorce Slovakia from the rest of the Lands of St. Stephen. Each chapter is broken down into numerous short subsections of several pages thereby enabling the reader to easily digest and comprehend them without becoming lost in lengthy discu ssions. Seven charts placed throughout the work and numerous photographs in five section s better illustrate and clarify the points made in the text. The bibliography is intended to be used for further study of the various issues addressed in this work. It contains older essential, fundamental works alongside newly published research. As is often the case for books published in Slovakia, this work contains an index of names, but not subjects, rendering it of marginal value. Overall, this is a fine volume that will become an accepted, starting point for anyone wishing to delve into virtually all aspects of Slovak history at the turn of the last century. Its thoughtful, well constructed chapters present information that piques the interest of the reader. If the quality of this work is upheld in the sc heduled six additional volumes, this series will prove to be a definiti ve collection. Hopefully, an English translation will follow. Ivan A. Petran sky, Stat a katolfcka cirkev na Slovensku 19451946. Nitra: Garmond, 2001, 318pp, summary in English, bibliography, index. JAMES RAMON FELAK University of Washington Ivan Petransky ' s Stat a katolfcka cirkev na Slovensku 1945-1946 covers a brief but crucial period in church-state relations in the history of Slovakia. This was a time of transition between the wartime �SLOVAKIA 135 regime, when the Catholic Church had a rel atively pri vi leged place due to its more or less positive relations with the Tiso regime, and the Communist era, when the state brought immense press ure and control on the Church. This period has been largely ignored in the past, though increasingly it is becoming a topic of research across East Central Europe. Petransky used a number of archival sources. At the Slovak National Archive, he employed the collections of the Slovak National Council, the Commission of Education, the Commission of the Interior, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia. In addition, he made significant use of diocesan archives, in partic ular those of Kosice, Banska Bystrica, and Nitra. These latter sources enabled him to present and discuss conversations that occurred within the church leadership, and he revealed some of the differences of opinion among Slovak bishops over how best to defend Catholic interests and respond to state press ures. They also provided insight into the nature of decision-making and consensus-building within the hierarchy . Among the other sources employed by Petransky are documents from the post- 1948 trial s of Catholic bishops and political leaders, documents of the Foreign Ministry pertaining to relations with the Vatican, memoirs, and articles from the press. After a brief overview of relations between church and state in Czechoslovakia and Slovakia from 191 8 to 1945, Petransky presented a narrative of developments in church-state relations during the period from the liberation of Slovakia from Nazi occupation in the spring of 1945 to the parliamentary elections of May 1946. During this period the Communists tried both to weaken the Catholic Church and its social influence, and to attract Catholics to the Communi st camp, or at least keep them away from the rival Democratic Party. Petransky's narrati ve is followed by the longest section of the book, an examination of a variety conflicts between church and state. These include the state 's attempt at a near-complete takeover of education , the outlawing of a number of Catholic organizations, restriction s on the Catholic press, state claims to the Church' s agricultural property, and the persec ution of bishops, priests, and members of reli gious orders. Petransky also examined the question of Church ties with Slovakia 's illegal underground opposition, and the Church's policies toward s the national minorities, in particular the Magyars. �136 SLOVAKIA Finally, he gave his book an international dimension by looking at the situation of the Catholic Church in Slovakia from the perspectives of the Slovak emigre press and the Vatican. This book has several strengths. It keeps its focus on the issues of church-state relations, while providing sufficient context for understanding how those issues fit into the larger context of post-war Slovakia. Though the author's sympathies are clearly with the Catholics, the work remained fair to all sides. This is not simply a litany of crimes and abuses aga inst the Catholic Church, though there were enough of those. Rather, it is a serious and largely successful attempt to present and ana lyze the complex and dynamic relationship between Church , state, Catholics, and Democrats during a cruc ial period of Slovakia 's modern history. One definitely takes away from this book a deeper understanding of the period and the forces at play in it. It is to be hoped that Mr. Petransky, or someone of his caliber, writes a sequel up to the Communist takeover of February 1948. Anton Hyki sch, Ako chutf politika, Spomienky a zaznamy z rokov 1990-1992. Yydavatel'stvo Pozsony/Pressburg/Bratislava, 2004. 349pp. Index of names. MARCEL JESENSKY University of Ottawa The years I 990-1992 represent one of the most fascinating periods in the modern-day history of Slovakia. During the last months of 1989 the seemingly permanent political , social and eco nomi c order in Czechoslovakia disintegrated and set into motion a process of dramatic reforms that changed the lives of the majority of Slovaks and Czechs. Anton Hykisch, an acclaimed Slovak writer, Christian Democratic politician and member of parliament, and a former diplomat, presents his personal narrative of those dynamic days. He offers an analys is of Slovak society based on his personal diaries and consultations of other primary so urces. Like many of his contemporaries, Hykisch could not resist the challenges of active participation in Slovak society's revitalization and transformation. His long-cherished �SLOVAKIA 137 idea of the creation of a Christian political movement in Slovakia materialized in 1990, although not entirely according to his wishes. Should it be a movement or a political party? There was no time for such "details." Everything happened so quickly before the first free elections (since 1946) in 1990. Anton Hykisch became a member of the Slovak Parliament (SNR) for the Christian Democratic Movement (KOH), as well as a member of its Executive Council (Predsednfctvo ). In l 990-1992 Slovakia experienced its own revolution, one pertaining to its identity. What should be Slovakia's place in post-communist Czechoslovakia, Czecho-Slovakia or the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic? How could one re-formulate the relations between Slovaks and Czechs? The " revolutionaries" from the ruling VPN (Verejnost' proti nasiliu), the strongest political force in the aftermath of the " Velvet Revolution" of 1989, wished to transform Slovakia into a non-national civic society. The crowds in Brati slava that brought the "velvet revolutionaries" to power in November 1989, merely one year later denounced many of them as traitors to the Slovak national cause. What went wrong? The author believes that Slovakia experienced twin revo lutions, the "velvet" anti-communist one, as well as a national one. This was contrary to the plans and expectations of president Vaclav Havel's followers in Prague. Slovakia " wanted and had to abandon its twin yoke. ls it so difficult to understand?" (p.51) Hykisc h believes that Slovakia became a victim of the post-November 1989 myth originating in Prague. Havel and hi s colleagues dreamed of proving to the world that " their" Czechoslovakia could defy the national selfdetermination trends prevailing in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. In other words, Slovaks and Czechs should demonstrate their allegedly more advanced moral and civic feelings by defying the laws and trends of national movements, the wave of creation of new national states in Europe (p.52). Slovaks and Czechs allegedly wanted to only be citizens of the world, and Czechoslovakia was merely a way-station to the " blessed civic society of the world" (p.53). To put it more bluntly, Czechoslovakia should not di sintegrate. According to Hykisch, thi s, quixotic task, dream or vision, was politically unrealistic and practically impossible. Throughout the book the reader detects the author's disappoint- �138 SLOVAKIA ment over missed opportunities. Hykisc h believes that the Christian Democrats (KOH) mishandled the question of Slovakia ' s sovereignty. "Had we (i.e. the Christian Democrats), hal f a year before the general elections of June 1992, submitted to ourselves, to our Czech partners and to the world, a serious, economically-sound plan of gradual self-determination or a plan of suitable union of Slovak and Czech states, it would not have to be done after the 1992 elections by somebody else" (p.241). The question of Slovakia's sovereignty played a decisive role in the author 's decision to eventually break with the Christian Democrats and to join a new political party , the Slovak Christian Democratic Movement, led by Jan Klepac. Thi s book offers an interesting, personal , interpretation of the 1990-1992 events in Slovakia and Czechoslovakia. Anton Hykisch 's attractive literary style, as well as his informed and insightful perspecti ve, will not di sappoint those who desire to submerge themselves into the complexities of Slovakia's modern history and the deteriorating Slovak-Czech relationship of the early l 990 's. Jan Rychlfk, Rozpad Ceskoslovenska. Cesko-slovenske vztahy 1989-1992. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press, 2002, 457 pp., notes, summaries in English and German, bibliography , documents, index . JURAJ HOCMAN University of Ottawa Both the " Velvet Revolution" and the "Velvet Divorce" of Czechoslovakia have fascinated many scholars and much has been written about them. After a decade had passed, Jan Rychlik published his interpretation of the breakup of Czechoslovakia. The author is a trained and experienced Czech historian who witnessed the collapse of the communist regime and the emergence of new political elites in Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1980s. He started with the so-called era of "normalization", while analyzing the reasons for the collapse of the ancien regime. He then describes the appearance of the new, inexperienced , Czech and Slovak national political elites. In his introduction Rychlfk stresses the fact that wes- �SLOVAKIA 139 tern scholars, such as Eric Stein in his Czecho/Slovakia: Ethnic Conflict, Constitutional Fissure, Negotiated Breakup (1997), looked at the recent events in this country from a legal perspective that lacked empathy for the overlapping, but also diverging histories of the country's constituent parts. By contrast, as Rychlfk rightly points out, it was the residua of the past, not the constitutional issues emerging in 1990-1992, that sealed the fa te of Czechoslovakia (pp.1011 ). For a good history book, however, empathy is not enough. Ryc hlfk added access to primary documents that had not been released or commented on before to hi s personal proximity to the events, which proceeded from a federation to the creation of two separate states. He strengthened his work with narrati ves stemming from interv iews wi th several prominent former di ssidents and moderate politicians such as Petr Pithart and Jan Carnogursky, for they pl ayed a deci sive role in the negotiations between the Czech and Slovak governments in the period 1990-1992. At the same time, Rychlfk demonstrates his familiarity with the sc holarly literature published in the West. While the general picture of what took place in post-communist Czechoslovakia is well-known, Rychlfk adds many detai ls to the story. First, radicals and nationalists appeared on both sides. During the constitutional crisis the names of the radical Slovak politicians were frequently reported in the media. Nevertheless, as the author shows, Jan Slota, Jan Klep ac and Stanislav Panis had their counterparts across the Morava River who voiced Czech national interests. They were Jan Kalvoda, Dagmar Buresova, Jan Bratinka, and Miroslav Macek, to name but a few. Strangely enough, Rudolf Sladek, the leader of the Republican Party , who favored , quite paradoxi cally, a common state, does not appear in the book at all. Secondly, Rychlfk poi nts out that already on November 16, 1989, university students in Slovakia had demonstrated against the regime in Bratislava, without any coordination with their Czech counterparts in Prague. This clearly showed Slovak initiati ve and courage. Thirdly, the Charta dissenters were not the only ones in Communist Czechoslovakia, though they appeared in the West as the most prominent ones. Since the mid- I 980s, there had already ex isted two �140 SLOVAKIA main groups of dissenters in Slovakia: the environmentalists, and for the communist regime the far more dangerous Catholic dissenters. Furthermore, Rychlfk cites Slovak emigre historians as well. However, he differentiates between the ' hard core' sympathizers of the J'udaks (the term describing the members of the Slovak People's Party prior to and during WWII) and of the Slovak Republic (19391945), and acceptable ' moderates '. While cliches and stereotypes regarding the past have existed on both sides, Rychlfk shows courage vis a vis his fellow citizens as this most recent perspective may still be something totally new for general Czech audiences. While the author made a sincere effort to be sy mpathetic to Slovak political objectives, there are some instances where important details are missing. For example, in the dispute over the Gabcikovo dam on the Danube between Czechoslovakia and Hungary , the author seems to have limited himself to telling only a part of the story. He sees the Gabcfkovo dispute as exclusively a Slovak problem in which the Czechs were not interested, especially in the last couple of months before the negotiated breakup (pp.308-3 I I). This is only partly true as Josef Vavrousek, the last Czechoslovak federal minister of the environment, seemed particularly keen to be engaged in the negotiations, even to lead them, when Slovak politicians already took the initiative from the federal government. Likewise, the author rightly argues that the forced expatriation of the Magyars, who had collaborated with the fascists in the Slovak (Czechoslovak) territories in 1945, which had stemmed from the Benes Decrees, had negatively affected the current Slovak - Magyar relationship. On the other hand, the author states that such a problem did not arise in the Czech lands with regard to the expulsion of the German minority (p.255). This statement, if meant as a sharp antipode to the Slovak-Magyar relationship, would deserve far more historic and contextual background. Rychlik' s book is a very solid overview of what happened in the ' heart of Europe' after the fall of communism. Due to its complex and balanced perspective, it could serve as a valuable textbook for graduate students and a good primary source for scholars dealing with the last chapter in the history of Czechoslovakia. � REVIEWS ��SLOVAKIA 131 Jan Steinhtibe l, Nitrianske knieiatstvo: Pociatky stredovekeho Slovenska. Rozpravanie o dejinach nasho tizemia a okolitych krajfn od st!lho vania narodov do zaciatku 12. storocia. Brati slava: Veda, 2004. 575pp., bibliography, index of names, index of places, maps, photos, illustration s. M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa This massive sy nthesis is the culmination of fifteen years of research and publication on the ancestors of the Slovaks in Central Europe. Jan Steinhi.ibel, who works for the Historical Institute of the Sloak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, is a worthy successor to the late Peter Ratkos, the age ing Richard Marsina, and the recentl yretired Matus Kucera , all ex perts on the ancient hi story of the Slovaks. According to Ste inhtibel , the Principality of Nitra was the earliest state of the ancestors of the Slovaks. It started to form in the 6th century, and was independent from 805 to 833. After it was conquered by the nearby Moravians, it remained an important Principality until the demi se of the Great Morav ian Empire in 906. Once the Magyar Arpad dynasty establi shed itself in Central Europe in the 10th century, Nitra, which was inhabited large ly by Slavs, remained a key Principality in the emerging Hungarian Kin gdom until the beginning of the I 2th century. Prince l mri ch, ruler of Nitra and son of King (Sa int) Stephen, was even dubbed " Henricus nobilis dux Sc lavoni e" by a Polish chronicler in I029. And, as long as the Principality existed, its people were called "Nytrenses Sclavi" by Hungarian chroniclers. For three ce nturi es Nitra served as the steppingstone for the future rulers of, first Great Moravia, and later the Kingdom of Hungary. Indeed, the rul ers of Nitra were sovereign over nine counties (large ly coterminous with present-day Slovakia, with the exception of the eastern counties), commanded armies of 3,000 soldiers and often struck their own coins. Eventuall y, however, the early Kings of Hungary, who had traditionally shared their rule wi th their brothers as Princes of Nitra, came to regard this principality as a source of rebellion against them selves or their designated successsors (their leg itimate sons). As a result, in 1108 King Koloman depo- �132 SLOVAKIA sed and blinded his brother Almos, along with the latter's son, and two years later abolished the Principality, along wi th its southern border. Thereafter, medieval chroniclers referred to the local inhabitants si mply as " Sclavi ," but by the 15th century they had become "Slowak." Of course the 18th century Czech linguist Josef Dobrovsky , who claimed that the term "Slovak" or "Slovensko" were recent inventions, did not know any of this. After 336 pages of text, lavishly illustrated with relevant quotations from medieval chroniclers, Steinhiibel concluded that one can trace the beginnings of Slovak history to the Principality of Nitra. Indeed, he continued, one has to look to thi s Principality to find the national, territorial and historical roots of Slovakia. This book is a testament to the deep eruditon of the author. As the 1900 footnotes covering pages 337-495 testify, SteinhUbel mined virtually all (largely Latin) medieval sources written by German, Magyar, Polish, Czech, Ru ssian and Byzantine chroniclers that pertain to Central Europe. He also read the relevant books and articles in the vernacular languages of contemporary scholars of Central Europe and he judiciously illustrated his book with copies of medieval manuscripts , drawings and photos of artifacts. This monograph was a pleasure to read and I will eagerly mine it for relevant quotations for my course on the early history of the Slovaks. Dusan Kovac et. al. Na zaciatku storocia, 1901 -1914. Bratislava: Veda, 2004. 292 pp. , ill., index . GREGORY C. FERENCE Salisbury University This is the first of a scheduled seven volume series entitled Slovensko v 20. storoci (Slovakia in the 2(Jh Century) sponsored by the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, under the chief editorship of Dusan Kovac, a leading Slovak historian. Kovac, one of five historians who wrote chapters in this volume penned the introduction and the first "Raku sko-Uhorsko a slo venska otazka v narodnych vztahoch" (A ustria-Hungary and the Slovak Question in International Affairs) and sixth "Pred prvou svetovou vojnou" (Be- �SLOVAKIA 133 fore the First World War) chapters. Other eminent Slovak historians included in this volume are alphabetically: Roman Holec, Chapter 3 "Hospodarstvo" (Economics), Elena Jakesova, chapter 2 "Spolocnost" (Society), Elena Mannova, Chapter 7 "Ideove smery. Kulturny a spolocensky zivot" (Ideological Movements. Cultural and Social Life), and Milan Podrimavsky, Chapters 4 "Krfza liberalneho rezimu 1901-1904" (Crisis of the Liberal Regime 1901-1904) and 5 "Vyvrcholenie politickej krfzy. Koalicna vlada 1905-1910" (Culmination of the Political Crisis. The Coalition Government 1905-1910). Although only these five authors receive credit for the entries, Kovac notes that they relied on the research of another ten historians. This is the most comprehensive general history of Slovakia produced thus far. As Kovac states in his introduction, the Slovak public, and indeed the world, has not until this time possessed a true synthesized historical work written by experts. Previous attempts developed under the totalitarian regime failed to fulfill this goal because they presented distorted interpretations. Kovac hopes this and subsequent works of the series will return to the tradition of noted historian Cubomfr Liptak when he wrote his Slovensko v 20. storoci in 1968 This volume contains traditional aspects of any society, but also gives coverage to areas rarely found in general historical works such as architecture, the beaux arts, mass communication, education, the family , business, and economics . It is not intended to be an all encompassing in-depth study, but rather explores the topics with sufficient coverage without becoming too bogged down in detail. It is meant to be a starting point for further research and study , and it accomplishes this feat quite well. The fourteen years prior to the outbreak of war were a very dynamic and dramatic period, so much so that Slovakia, in the spring of 1914, was quite a different place than in1901 , especially in its urban areas. Despite the Slovaks politically and culturally waging an uphill battle against intensive Magyarization aimed at their assimilation, they fared much better than they had in 1901. The book contains information about the Slovak diaspora, including Budapest, Vienna, the United States, and the Yojvodina/Banat region. The authors explained that a general history of Slovakia and Slovaks before the First World War needs to explore territories other than that of �134 SLOVAKIA Slovakia or Upper Hungary. Indeed, during this time, the true urban center of the Slovaks was Budapest. The work also covers, in much less detail, the other inhabitants of the region including Jews, Germans, Rusyns, and Gypsies (Romany) and provides ample evidence of the ethnic plurali sm of Upper Hungary . At times, too much emphasis appears to be placed on trends and developments throughout Hungary, but, naturall y, it proves impossible to divorce Slovakia from the rest of the Lands of St. Stephen. Each chapter is broken down into numerous short subsections of several pages thereby enabling the reader to easily digest and comprehend them without becoming lost in lengthy discu ssions. Seven charts placed throughout the work and numerous photographs in five section s better illustrate and clarify the points made in the text. The bibliography is intended to be used for further study of the various issues addressed in this work. It contains older essential, fundamental works alongside newly published research. As is often the case for books published in Slovakia, this work contains an index of names, but not subjects, rendering it of marginal value. Overall, this is a fine volume that will become an accepted, starting point for anyone wishing to delve into virtually all aspects of Slovak history at the turn of the last century. Its thoughtful, well constructed chapters present information that piques the interest of the reader. If the quality of this work is upheld in the sc heduled six additional volumes, this series will prove to be a definiti ve collection. Hopefully, an English translation will follow. Ivan A. Petran sky, Stat a katolfcka cirkev na Slovensku 19451946. Nitra: Garmond, 2001, 318pp, summary in English, bibliography, index. JAMES RAMON FELAK University of Washington Ivan Petransky ' s Stat a katolfcka cirkev na Slovensku 1945-1946 covers a brief but crucial period in church-state relations in the history of Slovakia. This was a time of transition between the wartime �SLOVAKIA 135 regime, when the Catholic Church had a rel atively pri vi leged place due to its more or less positive relations with the Tiso regime, and the Communist era, when the state brought immense press ure and control on the Church. This period has been largely ignored in the past, though increasingly it is becoming a topic of research across East Central Europe. Petransky used a number of archival sources. At the Slovak National Archive, he employed the collections of the Slovak National Council, the Commission of Education, the Commission of the Interior, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia. In addition, he made significant use of diocesan archives, in partic ular those of Kosice, Banska Bystrica, and Nitra. These latter sources enabled him to present and discuss conversations that occurred within the church leadership, and he revealed some of the differences of opinion among Slovak bishops over how best to defend Catholic interests and respond to state press ures. They also provided insight into the nature of decision-making and consensus-building within the hierarchy . Among the other sources employed by Petransky are documents from the post- 1948 trial s of Catholic bishops and political leaders, documents of the Foreign Ministry pertaining to relations with the Vatican, memoirs, and articles from the press. After a brief overview of relations between church and state in Czechoslovakia and Slovakia from 191 8 to 1945, Petransky presented a narrative of developments in church-state relations during the period from the liberation of Slovakia from Nazi occupation in the spring of 1945 to the parliamentary elections of May 1946. During this period the Communists tried both to weaken the Catholic Church and its social influence, and to attract Catholics to the Communi st camp, or at least keep them away from the rival Democratic Party. Petransky's narrati ve is followed by the longest section of the book, an examination of a variety conflicts between church and state. These include the state 's attempt at a near-complete takeover of education , the outlawing of a number of Catholic organizations, restriction s on the Catholic press, state claims to the Church' s agricultural property, and the persec ution of bishops, priests, and members of reli gious orders. Petransky also examined the question of Church ties with Slovakia 's illegal underground opposition, and the Church's policies toward s the national minorities, in particular the Magyars. �136 SLOVAKIA Finally, he gave his book an international dimension by looking at the situation of the Catholic Church in Slovakia from the perspectives of the Slovak emigre press and the Vatican. This book has several strengths. It keeps its focus on the issues of church-state relations, while providing sufficient context for understanding how those issues fit into the larger context of post-war Slovakia. Though the author's sympathies are clearly with the Catholics, the work remained fair to all sides. This is not simply a litany of crimes and abuses aga inst the Catholic Church, though there were enough of those. Rather, it is a serious and largely successful attempt to present and ana lyze the complex and dynamic relationship between Church , state, Catholics, and Democrats during a cruc ial period of Slovakia 's modern history. One definitely takes away from this book a deeper understanding of the period and the forces at play in it. It is to be hoped that Mr. Petransky, or someone of his caliber, writes a sequel up to the Communist takeover of February 1948. Anton Hyki sch, Ako chutf politika, Spomienky a zaznamy z rokov 1990-1992. Yydavatel'stvo Pozsony/Pressburg/Bratislava, 2004. 349pp. Index of names. MARCEL JESENSKY University of Ottawa The years I 990-1992 represent one of the most fascinating periods in the modern-day history of Slovakia. During the last months of 1989 the seemingly permanent political , social and eco nomi c order in Czechoslovakia disintegrated and set into motion a process of dramatic reforms that changed the lives of the majority of Slovaks and Czechs. Anton Hykisch, an acclaimed Slovak writer, Christian Democratic politician and member of parliament, and a former diplomat, presents his personal narrative of those dynamic days. He offers an analys is of Slovak society based on his personal diaries and consultations of other primary so urces. Like many of his contemporaries, Hykisch could not resist the challenges of active participation in Slovak society's revitalization and transformation. His long-cherished �SLOVAKIA 137 idea of the creation of a Christian political movement in Slovakia materialized in 1990, although not entirely according to his wishes. Should it be a movement or a political party? There was no time for such "details." Everything happened so quickly before the first free elections (since 1946) in 1990. Anton Hykisch became a member of the Slovak Parliament (SNR) for the Christian Democratic Movement (KOH), as well as a member of its Executive Council (Predsednfctvo ). In l 990-1992 Slovakia experienced its own revolution, one pertaining to its identity. What should be Slovakia's place in post-communist Czechoslovakia, Czecho-Slovakia or the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic? How could one re-formulate the relations between Slovaks and Czechs? The " revolutionaries" from the ruling VPN (Verejnost' proti nasiliu), the strongest political force in the aftermath of the " Velvet Revolution" of 1989, wished to transform Slovakia into a non-national civic society. The crowds in Brati slava that brought the "velvet revolutionaries" to power in November 1989, merely one year later denounced many of them as traitors to the Slovak national cause. What went wrong? The author believes that Slovakia experienced twin revo lutions, the "velvet" anti-communist one, as well as a national one. This was contrary to the plans and expectations of president Vaclav Havel's followers in Prague. Slovakia " wanted and had to abandon its twin yoke. ls it so difficult to understand?" (p.51) Hykisc h believes that Slovakia became a victim of the post-November 1989 myth originating in Prague. Havel and hi s colleagues dreamed of proving to the world that " their" Czechoslovakia could defy the national selfdetermination trends prevailing in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. In other words, Slovaks and Czechs should demonstrate their allegedly more advanced moral and civic feelings by defying the laws and trends of national movements, the wave of creation of new national states in Europe (p.52). Slovaks and Czechs allegedly wanted to only be citizens of the world, and Czechoslovakia was merely a way-station to the " blessed civic society of the world" (p.53). To put it more bluntly, Czechoslovakia should not di sintegrate. According to Hykisch, thi s, quixotic task, dream or vision, was politically unrealistic and practically impossible. Throughout the book the reader detects the author's disappoint- �138 SLOVAKIA ment over missed opportunities. Hykisc h believes that the Christian Democrats (KOH) mishandled the question of Slovakia ' s sovereignty. "Had we (i.e. the Christian Democrats), hal f a year before the general elections of June 1992, submitted to ourselves, to our Czech partners and to the world, a serious, economically-sound plan of gradual self-determination or a plan of suitable union of Slovak and Czech states, it would not have to be done after the 1992 elections by somebody else" (p.241). The question of Slovakia's sovereignty played a decisive role in the author 's decision to eventually break with the Christian Democrats and to join a new political party , the Slovak Christian Democratic Movement, led by Jan Klepac. Thi s book offers an interesting, personal , interpretation of the 1990-1992 events in Slovakia and Czechoslovakia. Anton Hykisch 's attractive literary style, as well as his informed and insightful perspecti ve, will not di sappoint those who desire to submerge themselves into the complexities of Slovakia's modern history and the deteriorating Slovak-Czech relationship of the early l 990 's. Jan Rychlfk, Rozpad Ceskoslovenska. Cesko-slovenske vztahy 1989-1992. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press, 2002, 457 pp., notes, summaries in English and German, bibliography , documents, index . JURAJ HOCMAN University of Ottawa Both the " Velvet Revolution" and the "Velvet Divorce" of Czechoslovakia have fascinated many scholars and much has been written about them. After a decade had passed, Jan Rychlik published his interpretation of the breakup of Czechoslovakia. The author is a trained and experienced Czech historian who witnessed the collapse of the communist regime and the emergence of new political elites in Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1980s. He started with the so-called era of "normalization", while analyzing the reasons for the collapse of the ancien regime. He then describes the appearance of the new, inexperienced , Czech and Slovak national political elites. In his introduction Rychlfk stresses the fact that wes- �SLOVAKIA 139 tern scholars, such as Eric Stein in his Czecho/Slovakia: Ethnic Conflict, Constitutional Fissure, Negotiated Breakup (1997), looked at the recent events in this country from a legal perspective that lacked empathy for the overlapping, but also diverging histories of the country's constituent parts. By contrast, as Rychlfk rightly points out, it was the residua of the past, not the constitutional issues emerging in 1990-1992, that sealed the fa te of Czechoslovakia (pp.1011 ). For a good history book, however, empathy is not enough. Ryc hlfk added access to primary documents that had not been released or commented on before to hi s personal proximity to the events, which proceeded from a federation to the creation of two separate states. He strengthened his work with narrati ves stemming from interv iews wi th several prominent former di ssidents and moderate politicians such as Petr Pithart and Jan Carnogursky, for they pl ayed a deci sive role in the negotiations between the Czech and Slovak governments in the period 1990-1992. At the same time, Rychlfk demonstrates his familiarity with the sc holarly literature published in the West. While the general picture of what took place in post-communist Czechoslovakia is well-known, Rychlfk adds many detai ls to the story. First, radicals and nationalists appeared on both sides. During the constitutional crisis the names of the radical Slovak politicians were frequently reported in the media. Nevertheless, as the author shows, Jan Slota, Jan Klep ac and Stanislav Panis had their counterparts across the Morava River who voiced Czech national interests. They were Jan Kalvoda, Dagmar Buresova, Jan Bratinka, and Miroslav Macek, to name but a few. Strangely enough, Rudolf Sladek, the leader of the Republican Party , who favored , quite paradoxi cally, a common state, does not appear in the book at all. Secondly, Rychlfk poi nts out that already on November 16, 1989, university students in Slovakia had demonstrated against the regime in Bratislava, without any coordination with their Czech counterparts in Prague. This clearly showed Slovak initiati ve and courage. Thirdly, the Charta dissenters were not the only ones in Communist Czechoslovakia, though they appeared in the West as the most prominent ones. Since the mid- I 980s, there had already ex isted two �140 SLOVAKIA main groups of dissenters in Slovakia: the environmentalists, and for the communist regime the far more dangerous Catholic dissenters. Furthermore, Rychlfk cites Slovak emigre historians as well. However, he differentiates between the ' hard core' sympathizers of the J'udaks (the term describing the members of the Slovak People's Party prior to and during WWII) and of the Slovak Republic (19391945), and acceptable ' moderates '. While cliches and stereotypes regarding the past have existed on both sides, Rychlfk shows courage vis a vis his fellow citizens as this most recent perspective may still be something totally new for general Czech audiences. While the author made a sincere effort to be sy mpathetic to Slovak political objectives, there are some instances where important details are missing. For example, in the dispute over the Gabcikovo dam on the Danube between Czechoslovakia and Hungary , the author seems to have limited himself to telling only a part of the story. He sees the Gabcfkovo dispute as exclusively a Slovak problem in which the Czechs were not interested, especially in the last couple of months before the negotiated breakup (pp.308-3 I I). This is only partly true as Josef Vavrousek, the last Czechoslovak federal minister of the environment, seemed particularly keen to be engaged in the negotiations, even to lead them, when Slovak politicians already took the initiative from the federal government. Likewise, the author rightly argues that the forced expatriation of the Magyars, who had collaborated with the fascists in the Slovak (Czechoslovak) territories in 1945, which had stemmed from the Benes Decrees, had negatively affected the current Slovak - Magyar relationship. On the other hand, the author states that such a problem did not arise in the Czech lands with regard to the expulsion of the German minority (p.255). This statement, if meant as a sharp antipode to the Slovak-Magyar relationship, would deserve far more historic and contextual background. Rychlik' s book is a very solid overview of what happened in the ' heart of Europe' after the fall of communism. Due to its complex and balanced perspective, it could serve as a valuable textbook for graduate students and a good primary source for scholars dealing with the last chapter in the history of Czechoslovakia. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2007, Vol. 39 Description An account of the resource Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document REVIEWS SLOVAKIA 131 Jan Steinhtibe l, Nitrianske knieiatstvo: Pociatky stredovekeho Slovenska. Rozpravanie o dejinach nasho tizemia a okolitych krajfn od st!lho vania narodov do zaciatku 12. storocia. Brati slava: Veda, 2004. 575pp., bibliography, index of names, index of places, maps, photos, illustration s. M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa This massive sy nthesis is the culmination of fifteen years of research and publication on the ancestors of the Slovaks in Central Europe. Jan Steinhi.ibel, who works for the Historical Institute of the Sloak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, is a worthy successor to the late Peter Ratkos, the age ing Richard Marsina, and the recentl yretired Matus Kucera , all ex perts on the ancient hi story of the Slovaks. According to Ste inhtibel , the Principality of Nitra was the earliest state of the ancestors of the Slovaks. It started to form in the 6th century, and was independent from 805 to 833. After it was conquered by the nearby Moravians, it remained an important Principality until the demi se of the Great Morav ian Empire in 906. Once the Magyar Arpad dynasty establi shed itself in Central Europe in the 10th century, Nitra, which was inhabited large ly by Slavs, remained a key Principality in the emerging Hungarian Kin gdom until the beginning of the I 2th century. Prince l mri ch, ruler of Nitra and son of King (Sa int) Stephen, was even dubbed " Henricus nobilis dux Sc lavoni e" by a Polish chronicler in I029. And, as long as the Principality existed, its people were called "Nytrenses Sclavi" by Hungarian chroniclers. For three ce nturi es Nitra served as the steppingstone for the future rulers of, first Great Moravia, and later the Kingdom of Hungary. Indeed, the rul ers of Nitra were sovereign over nine counties (large ly coterminous with present-day Slovakia, with the exception of the eastern counties), commanded armies of 3,000 soldiers and often struck their own coins. Eventuall y, however, the early Kings of Hungary, who had traditionally shared their rule wi th their brothers as Princes of Nitra, came to regard this principality as a source of rebellion against them selves or their designated successsors (their leg itimate sons). As a result, in 1108 King Koloman depo- 132 SLOVAKIA sed and blinded his brother Almos, along with the latter's son, and two years later abolished the Principality, along wi th its southern border. Thereafter, medieval chroniclers referred to the local inhabitants si mply as " Sclavi ," but by the 15th century they had become "Slowak." Of course the 18th century Czech linguist Josef Dobrovsky , who claimed that the term "Slovak" or "Slovensko" were recent inventions, did not know any of this. After 336 pages of text, lavishly illustrated with relevant quotations from medieval chroniclers, Steinhiibel concluded that one can trace the beginnings of Slovak history to the Principality of Nitra. Indeed, he continued, one has to look to thi s Principality to find the national, territorial and historical roots of Slovakia. This book is a testament to the deep eruditon of the author. As the 1900 footnotes covering pages 337-495 testify, SteinhUbel mined virtually all (largely Latin) medieval sources written by German, Magyar, Polish, Czech, Ru ssian and Byzantine chroniclers that pertain to Central Europe. He also read the relevant books and articles in the vernacular languages of contemporary scholars of Central Europe and he judiciously illustrated his book with copies of medieval manuscripts , drawings and photos of artifacts. This monograph was a pleasure to read and I will eagerly mine it for relevant quotations for my course on the early history of the Slovaks. Dusan Kovac et. al. Na zaciatku storocia, 1901 -1914. Bratislava: Veda, 2004. 292 pp. , ill., index . GREGORY C. FERENCE Salisbury University This is the first of a scheduled seven volume series entitled Slovensko v 20. storoci (Slovakia in the 2(Jh Century) sponsored by the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, under the chief editorship of Dusan Kovac, a leading Slovak historian. Kovac, one of five historians who wrote chapters in this volume penned the introduction and the first "Raku sko-Uhorsko a slo venska otazka v narodnych vztahoch" (A ustria-Hungary and the Slovak Question in International Affairs) and sixth "Pred prvou svetovou vojnou" (Be- SLOVAKIA 133 fore the First World War) chapters. Other eminent Slovak historians included in this volume are alphabetically: Roman Holec, Chapter 3 "Hospodarstvo" (Economics), Elena Jakesova, chapter 2 "Spolocnost" (Society), Elena Mannova, Chapter 7 "Ideove smery. Kulturny a spolocensky zivot" (Ideological Movements. Cultural and Social Life), and Milan Podrimavsky, Chapters 4 "Krfza liberalneho rezimu 1901-1904" (Crisis of the Liberal Regime 1901-1904) and 5 "Vyvrcholenie politickej krfzy. Koalicna vlada 1905-1910" (Culmination of the Political Crisis. The Coalition Government 1905-1910). Although only these five authors receive credit for the entries, Kovac notes that they relied on the research of another ten historians. This is the most comprehensive general history of Slovakia produced thus far. As Kovac states in his introduction, the Slovak public, and indeed the world, has not until this time possessed a true synthesized historical work written by experts. Previous attempts developed under the totalitarian regime failed to fulfill this goal because they presented distorted interpretations. Kovac hopes this and subsequent works of the series will return to the tradition of noted historian Cubomfr Liptak when he wrote his Slovensko v 20. storoci in 1968 This volume contains traditional aspects of any society, but also gives coverage to areas rarely found in general historical works such as architecture, the beaux arts, mass communication, education, the family , business, and economics . It is not intended to be an all encompassing in-depth study, but rather explores the topics with sufficient coverage without becoming too bogged down in detail. It is meant to be a starting point for further research and study , and it accomplishes this feat quite well. The fourteen years prior to the outbreak of war were a very dynamic and dramatic period, so much so that Slovakia, in the spring of 1914, was quite a different place than in1901 , especially in its urban areas. Despite the Slovaks politically and culturally waging an uphill battle against intensive Magyarization aimed at their assimilation, they fared much better than they had in 1901. The book contains information about the Slovak diaspora, including Budapest, Vienna, the United States, and the Yojvodina/Banat region. The authors explained that a general history of Slovakia and Slovaks before the First World War needs to explore territories other than that of 134 SLOVAKIA Slovakia or Upper Hungary. Indeed, during this time, the true urban center of the Slovaks was Budapest. The work also covers, in much less detail, the other inhabitants of the region including Jews, Germans, Rusyns, and Gypsies (Romany) and provides ample evidence of the ethnic plurali sm of Upper Hungary . At times, too much emphasis appears to be placed on trends and developments throughout Hungary, but, naturall y, it proves impossible to divorce Slovakia from the rest of the Lands of St. Stephen. Each chapter is broken down into numerous short subsections of several pages thereby enabling the reader to easily digest and comprehend them without becoming lost in lengthy discu ssions. Seven charts placed throughout the work and numerous photographs in five section s better illustrate and clarify the points made in the text. The bibliography is intended to be used for further study of the various issues addressed in this work. It contains older essential, fundamental works alongside newly published research. As is often the case for books published in Slovakia, this work contains an index of names, but not subjects, rendering it of marginal value. Overall, this is a fine volume that will become an accepted, starting point for anyone wishing to delve into virtually all aspects of Slovak history at the turn of the last century. Its thoughtful, well constructed chapters present information that piques the interest of the reader. If the quality of this work is upheld in the sc heduled six additional volumes, this series will prove to be a definiti ve collection. Hopefully, an English translation will follow. Ivan A. Petran sky, Stat a katolfcka cirkev na Slovensku 19451946. Nitra: Garmond, 2001, 318pp, summary in English, bibliography, index. JAMES RAMON FELAK University of Washington Ivan Petransky ' s Stat a katolfcka cirkev na Slovensku 1945-1946 covers a brief but crucial period in church-state relations in the history of Slovakia. This was a time of transition between the wartime SLOVAKIA 135 regime, when the Catholic Church had a rel atively pri vi leged place due to its more or less positive relations with the Tiso regime, and the Communist era, when the state brought immense press ure and control on the Church. This period has been largely ignored in the past, though increasingly it is becoming a topic of research across East Central Europe. Petransky used a number of archival sources. At the Slovak National Archive, he employed the collections of the Slovak National Council, the Commission of Education, the Commission of the Interior, and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia. In addition, he made significant use of diocesan archives, in partic ular those of Kosice, Banska Bystrica, and Nitra. These latter sources enabled him to present and discuss conversations that occurred within the church leadership, and he revealed some of the differences of opinion among Slovak bishops over how best to defend Catholic interests and respond to state press ures. They also provided insight into the nature of decision-making and consensus-building within the hierarchy . Among the other sources employed by Petransky are documents from the post- 1948 trial s of Catholic bishops and political leaders, documents of the Foreign Ministry pertaining to relations with the Vatican, memoirs, and articles from the press. After a brief overview of relations between church and state in Czechoslovakia and Slovakia from 191 8 to 1945, Petransky presented a narrative of developments in church-state relations during the period from the liberation of Slovakia from Nazi occupation in the spring of 1945 to the parliamentary elections of May 1946. During this period the Communists tried both to weaken the Catholic Church and its social influence, and to attract Catholics to the Communi st camp, or at least keep them away from the rival Democratic Party. Petransky's narrati ve is followed by the longest section of the book, an examination of a variety conflicts between church and state. These include the state 's attempt at a near-complete takeover of education , the outlawing of a number of Catholic organizations, restriction s on the Catholic press, state claims to the Church' s agricultural property, and the persec ution of bishops, priests, and members of reli gious orders. Petransky also examined the question of Church ties with Slovakia 's illegal underground opposition, and the Church's policies toward s the national minorities, in particular the Magyars. 136 SLOVAKIA Finally, he gave his book an international dimension by looking at the situation of the Catholic Church in Slovakia from the perspectives of the Slovak emigre press and the Vatican. This book has several strengths. It keeps its focus on the issues of church-state relations, while providing sufficient context for understanding how those issues fit into the larger context of post-war Slovakia. Though the author's sympathies are clearly with the Catholics, the work remained fair to all sides. This is not simply a litany of crimes and abuses aga inst the Catholic Church, though there were enough of those. Rather, it is a serious and largely successful attempt to present and ana lyze the complex and dynamic relationship between Church , state, Catholics, and Democrats during a cruc ial period of Slovakia 's modern history. One definitely takes away from this book a deeper understanding of the period and the forces at play in it. It is to be hoped that Mr. Petransky, or someone of his caliber, writes a sequel up to the Communist takeover of February 1948. Anton Hyki sch, Ako chutf politika, Spomienky a zaznamy z rokov 1990-1992. Yydavatel'stvo Pozsony/Pressburg/Bratislava, 2004. 349pp. Index of names. MARCEL JESENSKY University of Ottawa The years I 990-1992 represent one of the most fascinating periods in the modern-day history of Slovakia. During the last months of 1989 the seemingly permanent political , social and eco nomi c order in Czechoslovakia disintegrated and set into motion a process of dramatic reforms that changed the lives of the majority of Slovaks and Czechs. Anton Hykisch, an acclaimed Slovak writer, Christian Democratic politician and member of parliament, and a former diplomat, presents his personal narrative of those dynamic days. He offers an analys is of Slovak society based on his personal diaries and consultations of other primary so urces. Like many of his contemporaries, Hykisch could not resist the challenges of active participation in Slovak society's revitalization and transformation. His long-cherished SLOVAKIA 137 idea of the creation of a Christian political movement in Slovakia materialized in 1990, although not entirely according to his wishes. Should it be a movement or a political party? There was no time for such "details." Everything happened so quickly before the first free elections (since 1946) in 1990. Anton Hykisch became a member of the Slovak Parliament (SNR) for the Christian Democratic Movement (KOH), as well as a member of its Executive Council (Predsednfctvo ). In l 990-1992 Slovakia experienced its own revolution, one pertaining to its identity. What should be Slovakia's place in post-communist Czechoslovakia, Czecho-Slovakia or the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic? How could one re-formulate the relations between Slovaks and Czechs? The " revolutionaries" from the ruling VPN (Verejnost' proti nasiliu), the strongest political force in the aftermath of the " Velvet Revolution" of 1989, wished to transform Slovakia into a non-national civic society. The crowds in Brati slava that brought the "velvet revolutionaries" to power in November 1989, merely one year later denounced many of them as traitors to the Slovak national cause. What went wrong? The author believes that Slovakia experienced twin revo lutions, the "velvet" anti-communist one, as well as a national one. This was contrary to the plans and expectations of president Vaclav Havel's followers in Prague. Slovakia " wanted and had to abandon its twin yoke. ls it so difficult to understand?" (p.51) Hykisc h believes that Slovakia became a victim of the post-November 1989 myth originating in Prague. Havel and hi s colleagues dreamed of proving to the world that " their" Czechoslovakia could defy the national selfdetermination trends prevailing in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. In other words, Slovaks and Czechs should demonstrate their allegedly more advanced moral and civic feelings by defying the laws and trends of national movements, the wave of creation of new national states in Europe (p.52). Slovaks and Czechs allegedly wanted to only be citizens of the world, and Czechoslovakia was merely a way-station to the " blessed civic society of the world" (p.53). To put it more bluntly, Czechoslovakia should not di sintegrate. According to Hykisch, thi s, quixotic task, dream or vision, was politically unrealistic and practically impossible. Throughout the book the reader detects the author's disappoint- 138 SLOVAKIA ment over missed opportunities. Hykisc h believes that the Christian Democrats (KOH) mishandled the question of Slovakia ' s sovereignty. "Had we (i.e. the Christian Democrats), hal f a year before the general elections of June 1992, submitted to ourselves, to our Czech partners and to the world, a serious, economically-sound plan of gradual self-determination or a plan of suitable union of Slovak and Czech states, it would not have to be done after the 1992 elections by somebody else" (p.241). The question of Slovakia's sovereignty played a decisive role in the author 's decision to eventually break with the Christian Democrats and to join a new political party , the Slovak Christian Democratic Movement, led by Jan Klepac. Thi s book offers an interesting, personal , interpretation of the 1990-1992 events in Slovakia and Czechoslovakia. Anton Hykisch 's attractive literary style, as well as his informed and insightful perspecti ve, will not di sappoint those who desire to submerge themselves into the complexities of Slovakia's modern history and the deteriorating Slovak-Czech relationship of the early l 990 's. Jan Rychlfk, Rozpad Ceskoslovenska. Cesko-slovenske vztahy 1989-1992. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press, 2002, 457 pp., notes, summaries in English and German, bibliography , documents, index . JURAJ HOCMAN University of Ottawa Both the " Velvet Revolution" and the "Velvet Divorce" of Czechoslovakia have fascinated many scholars and much has been written about them. After a decade had passed, Jan Rychlik published his interpretation of the breakup of Czechoslovakia. The author is a trained and experienced Czech historian who witnessed the collapse of the communist regime and the emergence of new political elites in Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1980s. He started with the so-called era of "normalization", while analyzing the reasons for the collapse of the ancien regime. He then describes the appearance of the new, inexperienced , Czech and Slovak national political elites. In his introduction Rychlfk stresses the fact that wes- SLOVAKIA 139 tern scholars, such as Eric Stein in his Czecho/Slovakia: Ethnic Conflict, Constitutional Fissure, Negotiated Breakup (1997), looked at the recent events in this country from a legal perspective that lacked empathy for the overlapping, but also diverging histories of the country's constituent parts. By contrast, as Rychlfk rightly points out, it was the residua of the past, not the constitutional issues emerging in 1990-1992, that sealed the fa te of Czechoslovakia (pp.1011 ). For a good history book, however, empathy is not enough. Ryc hlfk added access to primary documents that had not been released or commented on before to hi s personal proximity to the events, which proceeded from a federation to the creation of two separate states. He strengthened his work with narrati ves stemming from interv iews wi th several prominent former di ssidents and moderate politicians such as Petr Pithart and Jan Carnogursky, for they pl ayed a deci sive role in the negotiations between the Czech and Slovak governments in the period 1990-1992. At the same time, Rychlfk demonstrates his familiarity with the sc holarly literature published in the West. While the general picture of what took place in post-communist Czechoslovakia is well-known, Rychlfk adds many detai ls to the story. First, radicals and nationalists appeared on both sides. During the constitutional crisis the names of the radical Slovak politicians were frequently reported in the media. Nevertheless, as the author shows, Jan Slota, Jan Klep ac and Stanislav Panis had their counterparts across the Morava River who voiced Czech national interests. They were Jan Kalvoda, Dagmar Buresova, Jan Bratinka, and Miroslav Macek, to name but a few. Strangely enough, Rudolf Sladek, the leader of the Republican Party , who favored , quite paradoxi cally, a common state, does not appear in the book at all. Secondly, Rychlfk poi nts out that already on November 16, 1989, university students in Slovakia had demonstrated against the regime in Bratislava, without any coordination with their Czech counterparts in Prague. This clearly showed Slovak initiati ve and courage. Thirdly, the Charta dissenters were not the only ones in Communist Czechoslovakia, though they appeared in the West as the most prominent ones. Since the mid- I 980s, there had already ex isted two 140 SLOVAKIA main groups of dissenters in Slovakia: the environmentalists, and for the communist regime the far more dangerous Catholic dissenters. Furthermore, Rychlfk cites Slovak emigre historians as well. However, he differentiates between the ' hard core' sympathizers of the J'udaks (the term describing the members of the Slovak People's Party prior to and during WWII) and of the Slovak Republic (19391945), and acceptable ' moderates '. While cliches and stereotypes regarding the past have existed on both sides, Rychlfk shows courage vis a vis his fellow citizens as this most recent perspective may still be something totally new for general Czech audiences. While the author made a sincere effort to be sy mpathetic to Slovak political objectives, there are some instances where important details are missing. For example, in the dispute over the Gabcikovo dam on the Danube between Czechoslovakia and Hungary , the author seems to have limited himself to telling only a part of the story. He sees the Gabcfkovo dispute as exclusively a Slovak problem in which the Czechs were not interested, especially in the last couple of months before the negotiated breakup (pp.308-3 I I). This is only partly true as Josef Vavrousek, the last Czechoslovak federal minister of the environment, seemed particularly keen to be engaged in the negotiations, even to lead them, when Slovak politicians already took the initiative from the federal government. Likewise, the author rightly argues that the forced expatriation of the Magyars, who had collaborated with the fascists in the Slovak (Czechoslovak) territories in 1945, which had stemmed from the Benes Decrees, had negatively affected the current Slovak - Magyar relationship. On the other hand, the author states that such a problem did not arise in the Czech lands with regard to the expulsion of the German minority (p.255). This statement, if meant as a sharp antipode to the Slovak-Magyar relationship, would deserve far more historic and contextual background. Rychlik' s book is a very solid overview of what happened in the ' heart of Europe' after the fall of communism. Due to its complex and balanced perspective, it could serve as a valuable textbook for graduate students and a good primary source for scholars dealing with the last chapter in the history of Czechoslovakia.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Books Reviews, Slovakia, Vol. 39 (No. 72-73) Description An account of the resource includes:<br /><ul><li>Ján Steinhübel, Nitrianske kniežatstvo: Počiatky stredovekého Slovenska (M. Mark Stolarik), p. 131</li> <li>Dušan Kováč et. al., Na začiatku storočia, 1901-1914 (Gregory C. Ference), p. 132</li> <li>Ivan A. Petranský, Štát a katolícka cirkev na Slovensku 1945-1946 (James Ramon Felak), p. 134</li> <li>Anton Hykisch, Ako chutí politika, Spomienky a záznamy z rokov 1990-1992 (Marcel Jesenský), p. 136</li> <li>Jan Rychlík, Rozpad Československa: Česko-slovenské vztahy 1989-1992 (Juraj Hocman), p. 138</li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Felak, James Ramon, 1957- Ference, Gregory Curtis, 1957- Hocman, Juraj Jesenský, Marcel Stolarik, M. Mark, 1943- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/6f28d140a4a7671aa310bb9eb9cdca00.pdf 32c11d50197ea3dea58a565151e1be3a PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 141 CONTRIBUTORS R. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN earned his Ph .D. in the history of East Central Europe from the Florida State University. He is an independent scholar who co-authored The National Slovak Society: a JOO Year History (Pittsburgh, 1990), and has published articles on the Slovak role in the Revolutions of 1848-49 and on the Slovak National Uprising. DAVID DOELLINGER is an Assistant Professor of History at Western Oregon University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2002. He is currently revising for publication his dissertation: From Prayers to Protests: The Impact of Religiousbased Dissent in the Emergence of Civil Society in Slovakia and the German Democratic Republic. PATRICIA A. KRAFCIK is Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her scholarly presentations and publications have been in Slavic folklore, particularly Russian, Slovak, and Carpatho-Rusyn . IGOR LUKES is a University Professor and a Professor of History and International Affairs at Boston University. He is also an Associate of the Davis Center at Harvard University. Among his many publications is the award-wi nning Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Benes in the 193O's (New York: Oxford , I 996) and, more recently, Rudolf Slansky: His Trials and Trial (Washington , DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 2006). PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI is Professor of History and Political Science and holder of the Chair in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the foremost expert on Ru sy ns in the world, having published numerous books and articles about them. He was also research editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1975-1978), and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples ( 1999). �142 SLOVAKIA JAN SIMKO received hi s PhDr. in English from the Slovak University in 1944, and taught this subject, with brief interruptions, at the renamed Comenius University until 1967 . He studied at the Folger Shakespeare Library and, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he remained in the United States, where he taught Slovak at various educational institutions. He is the author of the comprehensive English Slovak Dictionary (Wauconda, II, 1989) and of numerous artic les in Narodny Kalendar (Pittsburgh). M. MARK STOLARIK is Professor of History and holder of the Chair in Slovak History and Cu lture at the University of Ottawa. He specializes in the hi story of Slovak immigration to North America and has published many books and articles in thi s field, including Growing Up on the South Side: Three Generations of Slovaks in Bethlehem, Penn sylvania , 1880-1976 ( 1985 ) and Immigra tion and Urbanization: The Slovak Experience , 1870-1918 ( 1989). He is c urrent ly writing Where i s my Homeland ? A Slovak Odyssey Thmugh the 2(Jh Centwy. MARTIN VOTRUBA is Director of the Slovak Studies Program in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. The image of Janosik is part of hi s current research and teaching projects, which include editing a special iss ue on Slovak filmmaking for KinoKultura and a dictionary for American learners of Slovak. �SLOVAKIA 143 GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manu scripts for poss ible publication should be sent to the editor. Articles should normall y not exceed twenty-five pages in length , should be typed doubl e-s paced, should include footnotes at the bottom of the page, and should be submitted as one hard copy and one in e lectronic format, using e ither MicrosoftWord or WordPerfec t. Text and format should adhere to the Chicago M anual of Style. Proper orthography and di acritical marks mu st be supplied for all foreign words. Manu sc ripts wi ll not be returned unle ss specifical ly requested and postage is provided. Boo ks for review are to be se nt to the editor. Unsolicited book rev iews are not encouraged. ���THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA A civic and cultural federation of Americans of Slovak Ancestry Organized in 1907 W. NINA HOLY Secretary - Treasurer DANIEL F. TANZONE President Vice Presidents Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner Martha Kana Gabriel Kovac Executive Board Daniel F, Tanzone , W. Nina Holy, John A. Holy, Eileen S. Wilson, John G. Duch , Esq ., Stephanie Seigel , Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, Andrew M. Rajec, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq. , Larry M. Glugosh , Theresa M. Kluchinski, David M. Blazek, John Yuhas, Kenneth A. Arendt, Steven M. Pogorelec, Irene J. Drotleff, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood , Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S.A. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. McMurray, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes - Barre, Pennsylvania THE SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN 'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $ 10.00 per issue � SLOVAKIA 141 CONTRIBUTORS R. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN earned his Ph .D. in the history of East Central Europe from the Florida State University. He is an independent scholar who co-authored The National Slovak Society: a JOO Year History (Pittsburgh, 1990), and has published articles on the Slovak role in the Revolutions of 1848-49 and on the Slovak National Uprising. DAVID DOELLINGER is an Assistant Professor of History at Western Oregon University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2002. He is currently revising for publication his dissertation: From Prayers to Protests: The Impact of Religiousbased Dissent in the Emergence of Civil Society in Slovakia and the German Democratic Republic. PATRICIA A. KRAFCIK is Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her scholarly presentations and publications have been in Slavic folklore, particularly Russian, Slovak, and Carpatho-Rusyn . IGOR LUKES is a University Professor and a Professor of History and International Affairs at Boston University. He is also an Associate of the Davis Center at Harvard University. Among his many publications is the award-wi nning Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Benes in the 193O's (New York: Oxford , I 996) and, more recently, Rudolf Slansky: His Trials and Trial (Washington , DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 2006). PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI is Professor of History and Political Science and holder of the Chair in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the foremost expert on Ru sy ns in the world, having published numerous books and articles about them. He was also research editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1975-1978), and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples ( 1999). �142 SLOVAKIA JAN SIMKO received hi s PhDr. in English from the Slovak University in 1944, and taught this subject, with brief interruptions, at the renamed Comenius University until 1967 . He studied at the Folger Shakespeare Library and, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he remained in the United States, where he taught Slovak at various educational institutions. He is the author of the comprehensive English Slovak Dictionary (Wauconda, II, 1989) and of numerous artic les in Narodny Kalendar (Pittsburgh). M. MARK STOLARIK is Professor of History and holder of the Chair in Slovak History and Cu lture at the University of Ottawa. He specializes in the hi story of Slovak immigration to North America and has published many books and articles in thi s field, including Growing Up on the South Side: Three Generations of Slovaks in Bethlehem, Penn sylvania , 1880-1976 ( 1985 ) and Immigra tion and Urbanization: The Slovak Experience , 1870-1918 ( 1989). He is c urrent ly writing Where i s my Homeland ? A Slovak Odyssey Thmugh the 2(Jh Centwy. MARTIN VOTRUBA is Director of the Slovak Studies Program in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. The image of Janosik is part of hi s current research and teaching projects, which include editing a special iss ue on Slovak filmmaking for KinoKultura and a dictionary for American learners of Slovak. �SLOVAKIA 143 GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manu scripts for poss ible publication should be sent to the editor. Articles should normall y not exceed twenty-five pages in length , should be typed doubl e-s paced, should include footnotes at the bottom of the page, and should be submitted as one hard copy and one in e lectronic format, using e ither MicrosoftWord or WordPerfec t. Text and format should adhere to the Chicago M anual of Style. Proper orthography and di acritical marks mu st be supplied for all foreign words. Manu sc ripts wi ll not be returned unle ss specifical ly requested and postage is provided. Boo ks for review are to be se nt to the editor. Unsolicited book rev iews are not encouraged. ���THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA A civic and cultural federation of Americans of Slovak Ancestry Organized in 1907 W. NINA HOLY Secretary - Treasurer DANIEL F. TANZONE President Vice Presidents Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner Martha Kana Gabriel Kovac Executive Board Daniel F, Tanzone , W. Nina Holy, John A. Holy, Eileen S. Wilson, John G. Duch , Esq ., Stephanie Seigel , Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, Andrew M. Rajec, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq. , Larry M. Glugosh , Theresa M. Kluchinski, David M. Blazek, John Yuhas, Kenneth A. Arendt, Steven M. Pogorelec, Irene J. Drotleff, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood , Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S.A. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. McMurray, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes - Barre, Pennsylvania THE SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN 'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $ 10.00 per issue � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2007, Vol. 39 Description An account of the resource Vol. 39 (No. 72-73), 2007. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 141 CONTRIBUTORS R. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN earned his Ph .D. in the history of East Central Europe from the Florida State University. He is an independent scholar who co-authored The National Slovak Society: a JOO Year History (Pittsburgh, 1990), and has published articles on the Slovak role in the Revolutions of 1848-49 and on the Slovak National Uprising. DAVID DOELLINGER is an Assistant Professor of History at Western Oregon University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2002. He is currently revising for publication his dissertation: From Prayers to Protests: The Impact of Religiousbased Dissent in the Emergence of Civil Society in Slovakia and the German Democratic Republic. PATRICIA A. KRAFCIK is Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her scholarly presentations and publications have been in Slavic folklore, particularly Russian, Slovak, and Carpatho-Rusyn . IGOR LUKES is a University Professor and a Professor of History and International Affairs at Boston University. He is also an Associate of the Davis Center at Harvard University. Among his many publications is the award-wi nning Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Benes in the 193O's (New York: Oxford , I 996) and, more recently, Rudolf Slansky: His Trials and Trial (Washington , DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 2006). PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI is Professor of History and Political Science and holder of the Chair in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the foremost expert on Ru sy ns in the world, having published numerous books and articles about them. He was also research editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1975-1978), and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples ( 1999). 142 SLOVAKIA JAN SIMKO received hi s PhDr. in English from the Slovak University in 1944, and taught this subject, with brief interruptions, at the renamed Comenius University until 1967 . He studied at the Folger Shakespeare Library and, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he remained in the United States, where he taught Slovak at various educational institutions. He is the author of the comprehensive English Slovak Dictionary (Wauconda, II, 1989) and of numerous artic les in Narodny Kalendar (Pittsburgh). M. MARK STOLARIK is Professor of History and holder of the Chair in Slovak History and Cu lture at the University of Ottawa. He specializes in the hi story of Slovak immigration to North America and has published many books and articles in thi s field, including Growing Up on the South Side: Three Generations of Slovaks in Bethlehem, Penn sylvania , 1880-1976 ( 1985 ) and Immigra tion and Urbanization: The Slovak Experience , 1870-1918 ( 1989). He is c urrent ly writing Where i s my Homeland ? A Slovak Odyssey Thmugh the 2(Jh Centwy. MARTIN VOTRUBA is Director of the Slovak Studies Program in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. The image of Janosik is part of hi s current research and teaching projects, which include editing a special iss ue on Slovak filmmaking for KinoKultura and a dictionary for American learners of Slovak. SLOVAKIA 143 GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manu scripts for poss ible publication should be sent to the editor. Articles should normall y not exceed twenty-five pages in length , should be typed doubl e-s paced, should include footnotes at the bottom of the page, and should be submitted as one hard copy and one in e lectronic format, using e ither MicrosoftWord or WordPerfec t. Text and format should adhere to the Chicago M anual of Style. Proper orthography and di acritical marks mu st be supplied for all foreign words. Manu sc ripts wi ll not be returned unle ss specifical ly requested and postage is provided. Boo ks for review are to be se nt to the editor. Unsolicited book rev iews are not encouraged. THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA A civic and cultural federation of Americans of Slovak Ancestry Organized in 1907 W. NINA HOLY Secretary - Treasurer DANIEL F. TANZONE President Vice Presidents Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner Martha Kana Gabriel Kovac Executive Board Daniel F, Tanzone , W. Nina Holy, John A. Holy, Eileen S. Wilson, John G. Duch , Esq ., Stephanie Seigel , Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, Andrew M. Rajec, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq. , Larry M. Glugosh , Theresa M. Kluchinski, David M. Blazek, John Yuhas, Kenneth A. Arendt, Steven M. Pogorelec, Irene J. Drotleff, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood , Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S.A. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. McMurray, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes - Barre, Pennsylvania THE SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN 'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $ 10.00 per issue  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Back Matter, Slovakia, Vol. 39 (No. 72-73) Description An account of the resource includes Contributors; Guidelines for Manuscripts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/0b2415ed1b61d4bf0561f761618c2207.pdf 3c22ea88b7ad0043e61efa6ed647ef36 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA ��SLOVAKIA VOLUME XXXVIII 2005 NUMBERS 70-71 A schol arl y annu al devoted to the hi story, literature and c ulture of the Slovaks the wo rld over Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Editorial Board ROBERT K. EV ANSON Univers ity of Mi ssouri PET ER PETRO University of Briti sh Columbia MICHAEL NOV AK American Enterprise In stitute CAROLS . LEFF Uni vers ity of Illino is JAMES R. FELAK Uni ve rsity of Washingto n PATRICIA KR A FCIK The Evergreen State Co llege Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Mad ison Street Passa ic, NJ 07055 Inquiries regarding subscriptio ns sho uld be sent to the above address . The cost of a sing le issue is $ 10.00 Manuscripts for possib le publication and books for review shou ld be sen t to M. Mark Sto larik , Edi tor, Slo vakia 22 Bren-Maur Road , Nepean, Ontario , Canada . K2J 327 ��Table of Contents ARTICLES The Origin and Development of the Slovak Literary Language Konstantin V. Lifanov .......................... .... .. .. ... ................. ........ ....... 7 The Democratic Party and the Execution of Jozef Tiso James R. Pelak ............ .. ... ..... .. .............. ... ..... .... ..... ............ .... ........ 33 The Autonomy Discourse in Parliamentary Debates during the First Czechoslovak Republic and after the Velvet Revolution Elisabeth Bakke .. ........ .... ............. ................................. .... ............. 52 From Brau· nas to At'jdou - Slovakia, the Slovaks and Slovak Nationali sm Seen from Prague Paa/ Sigurd Hilde... .................. .. .................................................... 81 " Ungrateful Younger Brothers" versus "Arrogant Atheists". CzechSlovak Stereotypes in a Collective Memory Perspective Lone Sarauw ............. .. .............. ........... .............. .. ...... ... .... ..... .... .. l 04 Separate Paths: Czech and Slovak Fore ign Policies Since 1993 James W. Peterson .................... ....................... ..... ... .................... 121 REVIEWS Peter Zenouch, M edzi vychodom a zapadom: Byzantsko-slovanska tradfcia, kulttira a jazyk na vychodnom Slovensku Robert A. Orr ....... ..................... ................ .... ................... .. ........ .. 149 Marian Hronsky , The Struggle for Slovakia and the Treaty of Trianon 1918-1920 Gregory C. Ference .. .. ...... ... .. ..... ......... .... ........... ... ..... .... ............. 152 �SLOVAKIA 4 Jni o kapitanovi Janovi Nalepkovi. Edited by Jozef Nalepka Vladimir Baumgarten ..... .. ... .... .... .... ......... ................................... 154 Zoltan G. Mesko, The Silent Conspiracy L. P. Hinterbuchner ...... .. .......... .................. .. ...... .......................... 157 Maria Dziakova- Bohmova, Dusa na d/ani: Spomienky od Kosfc do New Yorku M. Mark Stolarik ...... .. .. .. ... ................... .. ... ................ ........ ........... 159 Karen Henderson, Slovakia: The Escape from Invisibility Juraj Hocman ............... .................... ........ .... ..... ............. ........ ...... 162 The Slovak Republic: A Decade of Independence ( 1993-2002). Edited by M. Mark Stolarik Carol Skalnik Leff ... ...... ................. ...... ........ .... .... ... ..... .... .. .. .... ... 165 Thomas J. Shell ey, Slovaks on the Hudson Daniel F. Tanzone ............. ..... .. ..... .... .... ........ ..... ........... .... .... ....... 167 June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism M. Mark Stolarik ....................... ............ ........ ......... .......... ............ 169 Contributors ......... ... .. ... .................... ........ ............ .... .......... ... ... ..... ... .. . 17 I G uidelines for Manuscripts ......... ...... ... .... .. ..... .... ......................... ... .. . 173 �ARTICLES �� SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA ��SLOVAKIA VOLUME XXXVIII 2005 NUMBERS 70-71 A schol arl y annu al devoted to the hi story, literature and c ulture of the Slovaks the wo rld over Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Editorial Board ROBERT K. EV ANSON Univers ity of Mi ssouri PET ER PETRO University of Briti sh Columbia MICHAEL NOV AK American Enterprise In stitute CAROLS . LEFF Uni vers ity of Illino is JAMES R. FELAK Uni ve rsity of Washingto n PATRICIA KR A FCIK The Evergreen State Co llege Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Mad ison Street Passa ic, NJ 07055 Inquiries regarding subscriptio ns sho uld be sent to the above address . The cost of a sing le issue is $ 10.00 Manuscripts for possib le publication and books for review shou ld be sen t to M. Mark Sto larik , Edi tor, Slo vakia 22 Bren-Maur Road , Nepean, Ontario , Canada . K2J 327 ��Table of Contents ARTICLES The Origin and Development of the Slovak Literary Language Konstantin V. Lifanov .......................... .... .. .. ... ................. ........ ....... 7 The Democratic Party and the Execution of Jozef Tiso James R. Pelak ............ .. ... ..... .. .............. ... ..... .... ..... ............ .... ........ 33 The Autonomy Discourse in Parliamentary Debates during the First Czechoslovak Republic and after the Velvet Revolution Elisabeth Bakke .. ........ .... ............. ................................. .... ............. 52 From Brau· nas to At'jdou - Slovakia, the Slovaks and Slovak Nationali sm Seen from Prague Paa/ Sigurd Hilde... .................. .. .................................................... 81 " Ungrateful Younger Brothers" versus "Arrogant Atheists". CzechSlovak Stereotypes in a Collective Memory Perspective Lone Sarauw ............. .. .............. ........... .............. .. ...... ... .... ..... .... .. l 04 Separate Paths: Czech and Slovak Fore ign Policies Since 1993 James W. Peterson .................... ....................... ..... ... .................... 121 REVIEWS Peter Zenouch, M edzi vychodom a zapadom: Byzantsko-slovanska tradfcia, kulttira a jazyk na vychodnom Slovensku Robert A. Orr ....... ..................... ................ .... ................... .. ........ .. 149 Marian Hronsky , The Struggle for Slovakia and the Treaty of Trianon 1918-1920 Gregory C. Ference .. .. ...... ... .. ..... ......... .... ........... ... ..... .... ............. 152 �SLOVAKIA 4 Jni o kapitanovi Janovi Nalepkovi. Edited by Jozef Nalepka Vladimir Baumgarten ..... .. ... .... .... .... ......... ................................... 154 Zoltan G. Mesko, The Silent Conspiracy L. P. Hinterbuchner ...... .. .......... .................. .. ...... .......................... 157 Maria Dziakova- Bohmova, Dusa na d/ani: Spomienky od Kosfc do New Yorku M. Mark Stolarik ...... .. .. .. ... ................... .. ... ................ ........ ........... 159 Karen Henderson, Slovakia: The Escape from Invisibility Juraj Hocman ............... .................... ........ .... ..... ............. ........ ...... 162 The Slovak Republic: A Decade of Independence ( 1993-2002). Edited by M. Mark Stolarik Carol Skalnik Leff ... ...... ................. ...... ........ .... .... ... ..... .... .. .. .... ... 165 Thomas J. Shell ey, Slovaks on the Hudson Daniel F. Tanzone ............. ..... .. ..... .... .... ........ ..... ........... .... .... ....... 167 June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism M. Mark Stolarik ....................... ............ ........ ......... .......... ............ 169 Contributors ......... ... .. ... .................... ........ ............ .... .......... ... ... ..... ... .. . 17 I G uidelines for Manuscripts ......... ...... ... .... .. ..... .... ......................... ... .. . 173 �ARTICLES �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2005, Vol. 38 Description An account of the resource Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA SLOVAKIA VOLUME XXXVIII 2005 NUMBERS 70-71 A schol arl y annu al devoted to the hi story, literature and c ulture of the Slovaks the wo rld over Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Editorial Board ROBERT K. EV ANSON Univers ity of Mi ssouri PET ER PETRO University of Briti sh Columbia MICHAEL NOV AK American Enterprise In stitute CAROLS . LEFF Uni vers ity of Illino is JAMES R. FELAK Uni ve rsity of Washingto n PATRICIA KR A FCIK The Evergreen State Co llege Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Mad ison Street Passa ic, NJ 07055 Inquiries regarding subscriptio ns sho uld be sent to the above address . The cost of a sing le issue is $ 10.00 Manuscripts for possib le publication and books for review shou ld be sen t to M. Mark Sto larik , Edi tor, Slo vakia 22 Bren-Maur Road , Nepean, Ontario , Canada . K2J 327 Table of Contents ARTICLES The Origin and Development of the Slovak Literary Language Konstantin V. Lifanov .......................... .... .. .. ... ................. ........ ....... 7 The Democratic Party and the Execution of Jozef Tiso James R. Pelak ............ .. ... ..... .. .............. ... ..... .... ..... ............ .... ........ 33 The Autonomy Discourse in Parliamentary Debates during the First Czechoslovak Republic and after the Velvet Revolution Elisabeth Bakke .. ........ .... ............. ................................. .... ............. 52 From Brau· nas to At'jdou - Slovakia, the Slovaks and Slovak Nationali sm Seen from Prague Paa/ Sigurd Hilde... .................. .. .................................................... 81 " Ungrateful Younger Brothers" versus "Arrogant Atheists". CzechSlovak Stereotypes in a Collective Memory Perspective Lone Sarauw ............. .. .............. ........... .............. .. ...... ... .... ..... .... .. l 04 Separate Paths: Czech and Slovak Fore ign Policies Since 1993 James W. Peterson .................... ....................... ..... ... .................... 121 REVIEWS Peter Zenouch, M edzi vychodom a zapadom: Byzantsko-slovanska tradfcia, kulttira a jazyk na vychodnom Slovensku Robert A. Orr ....... ..................... ................ .... ................... .. ........ .. 149 Marian Hronsky , The Struggle for Slovakia and the Treaty of Trianon 1918-1920 Gregory C. Ference .. .. ...... ... .. ..... ......... .... ........... ... ..... .... ............. 152 SLOVAKIA 4 Jni o kapitanovi Janovi Nalepkovi. Edited by Jozef Nalepka Vladimir Baumgarten ..... .. ... .... .... .... ......... ................................... 154 Zoltan G. Mesko, The Silent Conspiracy L. P. Hinterbuchner ...... .. .......... .................. .. ...... .......................... 157 Maria Dziakova- Bohmova, Dusa na d/ani: Spomienky od Kosfc do New Yorku M. Mark Stolarik ...... .. .. .. ... ................... .. ... ................ ........ ........... 159 Karen Henderson, Slovakia: The Escape from Invisibility Juraj Hocman ............... .................... ........ .... ..... ............. ........ ...... 162 The Slovak Republic: A Decade of Independence ( 1993-2002). Edited by M. Mark Stolarik Carol Skalnik Leff ... ...... ................. ...... ........ .... .... ... ..... .... .. .. .... ... 165 Thomas J. Shell ey, Slovaks on the Hudson Daniel F. Tanzone ............. ..... .. ..... .... .... ........ ..... ........... .... .... ....... 167 June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism M. Mark Stolarik ....................... ............ ........ ......... .......... ............ 169 Contributors ......... ... .. ... .................... ........ ............ .... .......... ... ... ..... ... .. . 17 I G uidelines for Manuscripts ......... ...... ... .... .. ..... .... ......................... ... .. . 173 ARTICLES  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Front Matter, Slovakia, Vol. 38 (No. 70-71) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/225c67a1f19614b755cfcea0f49a34ca.pdf 4d472700766a1ce54206fca5d53c2688 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 7 The Origin and Development of the Slovak Literary Language 1 Konstantin V. Lifanov The history of the Slavic literary languages has developed rapidly over the last few decades as an independent linguistic discipline. Scholars have reviewed the objects of their study and defined them more precisely , and even attempted to develop optimal methods of research, all of which has made it possible for them to make adequate assessments of actual linguistic data, and to avoid imposing their contemporary perceptions on the past. For example, the use of socio1inguistic concepts has been very fruitful in the study of certain Sla- vic literary languages. However, many problems have so far remained uninvestigated. Thus Kretschmer, surveying the overall level of research into Slavic literary languages, declares that in spite of the amount of material that has already appeared, the processes whereby the Slavic literary languages emerged still remain to be worked out, as well as their regularities and specific features. 2 This conclusion also applies to the history of the Slovak literary language. Many texts written in Slovakia before the language was codified remain uninvestigated from the lingui stic point of view. There are hardly any comparative studies of texts of different ge nres or from different eras. Nevertheless , comparative study is the only 1 I deeply thank Professor Robert Orr and Professor M. Mark Stolarik for English corrections of this paper. 2 Anna Krechmer (Anna Kretschmer), " Sravnitel'naja istorija slavjanskich literatur- nych jazykov: Yoprosy metodologiji " , Vjestnik Moskovskogo uni vers iteta. Seria 9. Filologia. 3, I 998, p 48. �8 SLOVAKIA method that makes it poss ible to define the real status of co nc rete for ms a nd to determine, e.g., whether a give n for m is mere ly the result of a language error, because, e.g., a give n wri te r did not know the coeva l language norm , or of sty li stic variat ion arisin g from a g ive n genre of wri tin g, or a typical lin gui st ic feat ure characteristic of the Slovak written tradition as a whole. But if we cannot determine the status of concrete forms , we ca nnot qualify the essence of differe nt lang uage for mati o ns in the hi story of Slovak , a nd therefore we cannot compre he nd the process of the emergence and subseque nt deve lopme nt of the Slovak literary language eithe r. In its turn, this situation in the hi story of the Slovak literary language ope ns up the poss ibility of arbitrary interpretations, ofte n aris ing from extra lin gui st ic factors. Thus it is wide ly believed, mainly outside Slovakia, that the Slovak literary language emerged in the late 18 th century by differe ntiating itse lf from Czech , and that previous ly Slovaks had used Czech as their literary language. We may trace the sources of thi s beli ef to the concepts of some Czech lingui sts3, who did not recognize the di stinctiveness of Slovak and considered it merely a variant of a unitary Czechoslovak language. According to a seco nd view of thi s problem, which has been "official" in Slovak lingui stics since the mid- I 950 's, distinct languages - cultural West Slovak, Central Slovak, and perhaps East Slovak had emerged in Slovakia before the codificatio n of the Slovak literary language. Subsequently Bernolak 's 1787 codification was based o n c ultu ra l W est Slovak a nd Stur's ( I 840 's) on cultural Central Slovak. There is also a third view, accord in g to which the Slovak literary lang uage arose as a res ult of interact ion between the Czech literary language and Slovak (mainl y West Slovak) dialects. It was shared by ' See Albert Prazak , Dejiny spisovne slovenstiny po dobu Sturovu (Brati slava, 1922), A lbert Prazak , Cesi a Slovaci (Praha 1929) and Vaclav Yazny "Spisovny jazyk slove nsky", Ceskos lovenska vlasti veda , Rada 11, Sp isovny jazyk Cesky a s/ovensky (Praha 1936) pp. 145-2 15. �SLOVAKIA 9 many Slovak linguists from I 900-1950.4 We embarked upon the study of thi s problem without preconceptions, and intended to base all conc lusions so lely on the analysis of concrete lin gui stic material and modern literary language theory. We cannot outline our theoretical fram ework in thi s paper, and therefore we can only refer to the first chapter of our book.5 Research into the problem of the Slovak literary language should take as its starting point the 14 th century, when Old Czech began to develop into an interethnic literary lan guage in Central Europe. At the same time it also penetrated into Slovakia. Stani slav, Kiraly , & Pauliny 6 show that in Slovakia copiers of Czec h texts tried to adhere to Czech norms. Infrin gements of these norm s tended to be iso lated and accidental , and may be described as simple errors. But as early as CC 14 - 15 fo ur changes - three phonolog ical and one morpholog ical - are attested in texts quite regul arly: the loss of the phoneme Iii, the loss of jotation in labials before lel < *e, *r, the affrication oft; d ' > c, dz, and the repl ace ment of vocati ves by nominatives. These processes constitute the initial stage of development of Old Czec h in Slovaki a, and its iso lation from the language functionin g in the Czech heartland. In the first place, we studied the further deve lopme nts of th ese phenom e na in th e spiritu a l literature of Slovak Catholics. • See , for exa mple, J. Y lkolinsky (Czambel 's pseudon ym) "O '·prvej " knihe slovenskej ", Z i ve na, 2, 1885, pp 230-240 . Henri ch Bartek, "S pi sov ny j azyk slovensky", Slovenska rec. 6, 1937- 1938, pp 50-57 and l.'.udovft Novak. "Cestina na Slove nsk u a vzn ik spisovnej slovenciny ", Slovenske pohl'ady . 54, 1938, pp 105-111. 159- 173, 2 17-222, 28 1-287. 5 Konstantin V. Lifanov, Genezis slovackogo literaturnogo jazyka . LINCOM Stu - dies in Slavic Linguistics, 21 (Munich 200 I ), pp. 18-4 1. 6 Jan Stani slav . " Zur Frage der Slowazismen in den alttschechi schen Denkmalern ", Zeitschrift fiir Slawistik. Bd. I, Heft 4. 1956. pp. 58-70, Bd. II . Heft I , 1957, pp. 3751 , Peter Kiraly. Zur Frage der altesten slowak ischen Sprachdenkmdlern" , Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiaru m Hungaricae. 4, 1958, pp. I 13- 158 , Eugen Pauliny, "Zac iatky kulturneho jazyka slovenskej narod nos ti ", Jazykovedne stridie. 6, 196 1. pp. 28-39. �SLOVAKIA The re pl ace me nt of /f/ by Ir/ spread ra pidl y, alm ost over a ll S lovak wri tings , inc ludin g sp iritua l literature . By the time " Ol a.h 's Ritu a l" was tra ns lated (ca. I 550 - 1600) Iii was an obvio us, very irreg ul ar arc ha ism (proti nassy m mrskym hfJc hum ). In the re li gious treati ses of B. Smrtnik and A. Macsay , publi shed in 1697 and 171 8 res pecti ve ly, it is attes ted ma inl y in fo rm s of the ve rb ffc i , mos t probabl y as a pure ly orthographi ca l conve nti o n (Prosil ne kdy gedon Prite le sweho rikuce), but it is co mpletely absent in the manuscripts in vesti gated (the Ca ma ldul Bible ( 1756- 1759), and th e se rm ons of Mokos ( 1752- 1774), Vrabel ( I 766), and Bajan ( 1760- 177 1)). The deve lopme nt of /JI after labi a l co nso nants and before l e/ < *e, *~ was sli ghtl y di ffe re nt. The primary stages of thi s process were ide nti ca l to those in vo lved in the repl aceme nt of If/. Thus, according to Paulin /, exa mpl es of th at deve lopme nt still c lea rl y predominated in the I 5th century " Muni ch Confess ion al Formula" ( 16 fo rms with /j/ and three without), but they were refl ected incons iste ntl y as earl y as " Ol a.h 's Ritu al," as a rul e in the idi omati c fo rmul as at the end of verses (s stebau Bohe m Otcem y Duc he m Swatym bud ' cest y c hwa la na wieky wiekow. Amen). The di ffere nti ati o n betwee n genres based on the presence or absence of fo rms w ith or w itho ut /jl is characte ri sti c of later texts. Onl y fo rm s without /JI occ urred in the language of sermons, inc luding Baj an 's (tuto bude lakomec w Negwecsy potrebe), in spite of the situ ati on in hi s nati ve di a lect (Zahorsky), whe re fo rm s w ith /JI are still c urrent. However, fo rms w ith /JI re mained in the " hi ghe r" genres (in the " Bible" a nd re lig io us treati ses) and in Macsay 's la nguage they are used quite freque ntl y (T yto Pobudky ma clowek ws rdcy swem pilne vwafowati ; kri wdy net1pet1). Spec ial vocati ve for ms, and nom inati ves used as vocati ves, were lost in the maj ority of Sl ovak di alects. They were restri cted to animates in spiritual Catho li c literature (radu g se tec hd y Narod Uhersky 7 Eugen Paul iny, ·'Mnfchovska spovedna formu la" , Jazykovedny casopis. 10. no. I , 1959, p. 30. �SLOVAKIA 11 /Vrabel/ - A braham e, A braham e ne wsta hug ruky tweg na djte /Macsay/). In contrast to Literary Old Czech, anim ate noun s w ith palatal ste ms had the same endin gs as nouns with no n-palatal ste ms (chce m rect du sso kresta nska bludica /M okos/ ; Czec h du se!. It is inte resting that these were the very forms that Berno lak codi fied. The hi story of the affricates c and dz(< t'and d ') shows that new fo rm s did not always oust co mpe tin g o lde r fo rms as a res ult of the loss of the oppos ition " literary - non-literary." In thi s case the te ndency was c hanged and the literary language lost the affri cates. They were w ides pread in I 4'h - I S'h century writin gs, but o nl y iso lated examples appeared in I 8'h century Catho li c literature (strhel se weter, zrucil dom /Vrabel/) . Th ese fo ur phe no me na are c uri o us ly s imil ar: they occ urred in literary Old Czech, but onl y sporadi ca ll y, occ urring in tex ts as errors by Czec h copy ists. These fo rm s deve loped into competin g doubl ets in the Slovak writte n language. However, the affri cati on of t'and d' differed from the other phenome na, in th at it made the phonol og ica l syste m more compl ex (the phone mes ga ined an additi onal artic ul atory feature) , while the othe r phe nome na, on the contrary , s implified the system , because they in vol ved the loss of a ph one me, or a pos iti onal vari ant of a phoneme, or a gra mm ati ca l fo rm . He nce we mi ght sugges t th at ph e nome na simpli fy in g a syste m preva il in co mpetiti o n in th e earl y stage of deve lopme nt of a literary la nguage outs ide its core ethni c te rritory, but phe no me na complicatin g it do not. Thi s is also suggested by the fact that it was not until the mid- I 8'h century th at the ph one me dz < *dj pe netrated the la nguage of spiritua l li teratu re; prev io us ly it had been co nsiste ntl y repl aced by /z/, or rare ly by Id '/ (zretedlne p ot wrz uje [pa n- S lovak po twrdzuj e] to wssec ko Job; skrze pokanj z te ho sna se probud'uje [pan-Sl ovak prebudz uje] /Macsay/) . The re was an esse ntial di ffe re nce between sporadi c pheno me na and doubl ets in wri tten Old Czec h. T he latte r survived as vari ants fo r almost the who le hi story of the language of Slovak Cath o li c literature, e .g., the refl exes of so-ca ll ed regress ive uml aut, i.e., the deve- �SLOVAKIA 12 lopment of tautosyllabic -aj- to -ej- in Old Czec h, and the emerge nce of the co nso nant clu ster sr:. c haracterist ic of Old Czech and Central Slovak, from sc- (< *stj-, *skj- , a nd *sk- before fro nt vowe ls). The first phenomenon was subject to a degree of gra mmaticali zation , as may be deduced from the fac t that no n-uml au ted seq ue nces obviously predomin ated in imperati ve fo rm s (ne mess kag obratjtj se ku Pa.nu Bohu /Macsay/) , but variation in the superlati ve forms of adjectives and adverbs was maintain ed as late as the mid- 18 th century, and usage mai nl y depended on the indi vidu al taste of the respecti ve author (pod'te a pod mym stjnem odpocjwagte - eopustili nalezk i swe a cestu nagtwrdssu /the " Bible"/; krize a proti wenstwy trpezliwe znassagme - sa m Tyran ze swym negmlacssym sine m /Vrabel/). Forms w ith sc- a nd st: were used in re li g ious texts throu ghout the pe ri od covered by the research , regardl ess of the orig ins of their authors (gegjho pak narozenj cas gesste oppodal byl - Pridrzme se th gessce S. Paw la /Macsay/). It was onl y in mid- I 8 century sermon s that th e tendency towards regional differentiation of th ese forms e merged: Makos used on ly fo rms with st:, following hi s nati ve Cen- tral Slovak dial ect (kazani takow i mestiane bi zas lu zili ), while Bajan, from Western Slovakia, mostly used forms w ith sc- (kde tenkrat bude Utociisscie hri ssniku). The process of for mati on of lin gui stic norms, which mu st have ex isted , may be observed from the lin gui st ic mate ri al th at ca n be g leaned from the written records. The occ urre nce of nati ve Czech and nati ve Slovak for ms in texts was not random, but governed by certain rules: firstl y the primary literary and non-literary fo rms arose, the n the primary non-literary form usuall y ousted the primary literary one. These processes, however, were subject to the princ ipl e of flexibl e stability8, whereby they were impl e me nted sy nchroni ca ll y, and thu s co ntinuity was ma intain ed be tween th e written languages of diffe re nt epoc hs. Thus, the fo ll ow in g new phe nomena, untypi ca l of " Yi lem Matezius ( Yi lem Matesius), ·'O neobchodimosti stab il'nost i litera turnogo jazyka" . Praiskij lingvisticeskij krniok (Moskva. 1967). p. 38 1 �13 SLOVAKIA earlie r writings, are attested in the tran slation of the "Ol ah Ritual ": □ unco ntracted forms of the gen., dat. and loc. sg. of femi nine adjecti ves e ndin g in fun ctional non -pa lata l conso na nts o usted the corresponding co ntracted forms (podl e tagneg radd y otcowskeg a dobrotiweg wu le twey); □ there was vari ation betwee n the nati ve Czech in str. forms of the pronouns ty and seba with the root vowe l o, a nd the nat ive Slovak ones with the root vowe l e, but the native Slovak forms prevailed (s steba u Bohe m otcem y s Duchem Swatym - s tobou bohem Ot- cem s Duchem Swatym); □ both the short and lon g forms of participl es were used as predi cati ves (za hrj c hy nasse vcinen gest - kterjmz to byl zapaleny proti nassy m mrskym hrjchum), etc. Some phe nome na are first attested in the lang uage of Smrtnik's re li gious treati se: □ the an im ate ge n.-acc. plural (Wide l pyssycych se A nge luw; cf. "Olah Ritua l": ze sy pro nas lidj hrjssne vkri fo wany) ; □ a n epenthetic vowel in masc uline forms of the /-participl e of consonant ste ms (polozil ho na Oltari na hranjcy drew a wstahe / ru ku ; cf. a n examp le fro m " Olah 's Ritu a l": z nes / zuriwy hnew otce tweho wecneho) ; □ the gramm ati ca li zation of piehlask a9 , prese rved in so me form s and lost in others, e.g., it is preserved in participial and verba l adverbia l endings, but beginning to be lost in present verb forms (gako Rewy we wykwjtagicy Winnicy; smegjce se pobij za k bytwe; pred Ssediwinamj wassymj Ml ads sy hore powstawagj - Dijtky zros- 9 Pieh/iska denotes the series of comprehensive progressi ve vowe l changes, unique to earl y Czech within Slavic. which was ori ginall y manifested co nsisten tl y in the morphology. but later reduced due to analogical pre ssures. Basically, it involved the frontin g and raising of vowels after origin ally soft consona nts. e. g .. u/ice < * ulica. biicho < * br ·ucho. see. e. g .. Miroslav Komarek. Historicka mluvnica ceski. 1: Hlis k os l ovf (Praha. 1962). pp. 62-66, I 15-118 , 153; 1964: 17, 18. 54; Charl es Townsend & Laura Janda. Common and Comparati ve Slavic (Indi ana 1996), pp. 9 192. I 6 I. I 63 , 272. �SLOVAKIA 14 tie wchazagu do sklepu); □ the spread of the genitive of the pronoun onilony to the acc., with both forms used as variants (pi su ge y pro tebe - prikazal aby se zem otewrela a za ziwa gych pozrela), etc. The majority of the features peculiar to the language of spiritual literature spread in the first half of the 18 th century. These trends are shown in the lan guage of Macs ay's religious treatises, which a lso contains the following further innovation s: □ masculine loc. pl. forms in -och (zalezelo to znamenj na skut- koch geho zazracnych; cf. nenj wskutcych miloserdenstwj (Smrtnik)); □ the dat. , loc. and instr. pl. of noun s such as kost' fo ll ow the pattern of ulice/iena (pri ledagakyc h wecech se zabaw ugu - a w smetach hrjchuw lezite); □ the spread of the loss of sy llabic sonants in abso lute word- final position , apart from /-participles, where this process took place earlier (Ale o Swaty Otce wyswet li vmysl twug - gakz ty s wilozjl smyse/ geho), etc. However, some Czech elements were very stable and were used almost universally: □ the sequence ji- in word-initial position , in contrast to Slovak i- (gako by mluwil a prisahal gim ("The Bible"); □ velar/alternations in the dat/loc. sg. of feminine nouns (Zadag- jcymu wodi mleka dala a na ssalce knj zatskeg podala ("The Bible") and in the nom pl. of adjectives agreeing with animates (A le zase pocali synowe Yzrahelsty ciniti zle weci ("The Bible"), etc. These processes obviously demon strate the modification of Old Czech as it was transformed into a standardised written language. Its structure consisted of native Czech and native S lovak elements used according to fairly strict rules. Such phenomena, maintained in Slovak, but lost in contemporary Literary Czech, are direct evidence of its clear connection to Old Czech. Apart from analogical doublets in literary Old Czech and in the language of Slovak Catholics, these are as follows: �SLOVAKIA □ 15 the preservati o n of the auxili ary in 3rd person verb fo rm s of the /- parti c ipl e un til the mi d- I 8 th century (a kralostwy sweho nekoncene ho pocatek gest ucinil (Mokos); ze ges t guz pri dwerac h wibehei protj ne mu / Baja n/); suc h fo rm s were co mpl ete ly lost in S lovak di alec ts by abo ut the I 5th ce ntury1°, and they were very ra re in Czec h writings by the 16 th century; 11 □ the e ndin g -u/-ti in the inst. sg. of fe minine noun s and adjec- ti ves, and also so me personal pronouns, in all works of Catho lic literature, inc ludin g authors of Central Sl ovak o ri g in , altho ugh they do not ac tu all y occ ur in Central Slovak (S krotite le Sweta A lexand ra M ladeho kw itnu cj ho strilku swu ra nil a; Pod se mnu odegdi (S mrtni k)); □ no d iphthongs apart from uo in the "Ol ah Ritu al", partic ul arly in Smrtni k 's re li g io us treati se, whi c h co ntinu es th e s itu ati o n in Literary Old Czec h (Oleg obmekssuge kuoie (S mrtni k)); □ gemin ates in the same words as in Literary O ld Czech (podle tagneg raddy Otcows keg /Olah/), etc. The language of S lovak Catho li c literature, howeve r, was indepe nde nt. It deve loped accordin g to its ow n rul es, in co ntrast to those of Old Czec h and Slova k di alec ts. Spec ific processes e merged rapidly, e.g., th e above- me nti o ned grammati ca li zati on of piehlask a, plus the follow ing: □ most masc uline no un s have gen. pl. fo rm s in -u w, whi ch is absent fro m Slova k di alects, and was lost in literary Czech (odwede l od rodiczuw, od prateluw /Vrabel/); □ an oppos iti o n between fe minin e adj ectives with ste m-fin al no n-palata l a nd ste m-fi na l palatal co nso na nts, beca use th e latte r fo rm s also had contracted gen. , dat. a nd loc. fo rm s (V < *Vj V; Mlc zim , abi ch w dnessny (< *-j-) Reczy meg d luhy ne bil /Bajan/), whil e the fo rmer had uncontracted fo rms; □ Ill 11 the de limi tati on of gen. and acc. pl. fo rms of animate nouns as Rudolf K rajcov ic, Nacrt dejfn slovenskeho jazyka (Bratislava, 197 1) p. 143 A rn ost L amprec ht, Dusan Slosar & Jaros lav Bauer, Historicka mlu vnice cestiny (Praha, 1986), p. 244 �SLOVAKIA 16 observed in Macsay ' s lan guage, and in the language of the " Bible" (ge n.: okolo deset ti syc uw wseckych sy lnych a udatnych Muiuw; acc.: kdiz zachwatili dwoch mu iti s knjzat Madyanskych /th e " Bible"/); □ the appearance of spec ial gen. sg. forms of the pronouns ty and seba, with -o- in the root (a le podobne wecy pro sobe od druheho slissetj pohrdagj (S mrtnik)), etc. Many native Slovak elements in the language of Slovak Catholic literature were pan-Slovak, but some of them directly indicate the region of Slovakia which played the main role in the formation of the Slovak written tradition : West Slovak. This is espec iall y true of features that do not occur in other Slovak dialects, primarily Central Slovak, such as , e.g.: □ diphthongs tended to be lost; □ -e in the endings of adjectives with a ste m-fi nal pal atal (ni c nad neho neni twrdsseho /Mokos/; Czech t vrdsfho; North Central Slovak tvrdsieho, South tvrdsiho/tvrdsiho) ; □ non-contracted gen. , dat. , and acc . forms (in the latter case if agreeing with animate noun s) of masc uline and neuter possessive adjectives (abich guss kpredsewzeti mogemu mluwil /Mokos/; Czech memu; Central Slovak m 6jmu); □ epenthetic -e- in masculine /-part iciples (Ce ntral Slovak -o-; a do stawu sweg Boskeg milosti pren esel /Mokos/; Czech pienes /; Central Slovak preniesol) , etc. D moreover, many native Czech e lements remained unchan ged, because they also occur in West Slovak as a whole, or in its SouthWestern subdial ects, e.g.: D the sequence rot- as a reflex of Common Slavic c ircumflex *6rt- (aby rostlo nany Hlozj a Trnj (S mrtnik ); Czech and Wes t Slovak rostlo; Central Slovak nistlo); □ the vowel e as a refl ex of Common Slavic strong *b (a gedna zadruhu wen zkostola wichazali /Mo kos/ ; Czech and West Slovak ven; Central Slovak von ); D the ending -em in the loc. sg. of masc uline and neuter adjec- �17 SLOVAKIA ti ves (aby na hrobowem kamenj tyto slowa wy kresatj dali /M acsay/ ; Czech and West Slovak hrobovem ; Centra l S lovak hrobovom ); □ the endin gs -e and -owe in the no m. pl. of anim ate no un s (nadto y pry tele daleko od stupili od ne ho /the " Bible"/ ; mn ozy p atriarcho we, mnozy kni zata a w udcowe /V rabel/; Czech p hite le , patriarchove, vudcove; West S lovak prate/e, patriarchove, vodcove; Central Slovak priatelia, patriarchovia, vodcovia) , etc. The typical West Slovak elements occ urring in Catho li c literary texts were as fo ll ows: □ the lack o f sy ll abic sonants from ori gin al sequences of conso- nants plus b i b + I (iluc Draku w gest wino geg ich (Smrtnik); Czech i luc; Central Sl ovak i lc; the isogloss was located on the territory o f South-Western (Trnava) di alects); □ the instr. sg. e ndin g -e m in masc uline and ne uter no un s (A sed'e la pod strom em palmowym, ktery m enem gey m sa menowal /the " Bible"/ ; Czec h, Zahorak, and some adj acent Trn ava di alec ts stromem, jmeneml m enem ; Central Slova k and other Wes t S lovak di alects have -om : stromom , menom), etc. Althou gh thi s lin g ui stic form ati on does di splay territori a ll ybased di alect di vergences, mai nl y in sermons, di alectal fea tures have not totall y submerged its characteri sti c pan-di alectal elements. If we compare the lin gui stic structures of Slovak Catholic literature and Berno lak 's codifi cation, we may conc lude that the codi ficati on was not somethin g new in princ iple. Nati ve Czec h fea tures occurring in , e.g., both the language of Slovak Catho li c literature and Berno lak's codifi cati on, clearl y de mo nstrate the c lose co nnec ti on between the two. These features are as fo llows: □ contracted fo rm s of possess ive adjecti ves (m eho, etc.) ; □ dat. sg. fo rms of ori g in all y soft-stem neuter noun s, whi ch d is- pl ay the refl exes of the ceska p fehlask a, i.e., u>i (srdci); □ □ neuter noun s endin g in -nf (stawaiif); parti c ipl es and verba l ad verb s w ith pieh/aska in suffixes ( wolag icf, wolagic); □ the I" person subjuncti ve of by t' in -ch, incl ud in g co mpoun d �SLOVAKIA 18 conjunctions (e.g., abich); □ the sequence ji- in word-initial position (gim), etc. The material being analyzed shows that the language of Catholic literature had many features characteristic of a literary language. It was cultivated, selective, functionally homoge neous, and essentially supra-dialectal. For its definitive identification as such , it needs to be ascertained whether it was only a religious style or multifunctional , and whether it was widespread over the whole of Slovakia. In order to answer the first question we compared the language of Catholic literature to the language of secular baroque poetry , based on the following texts: P. Benickfs [original] "Slovak Verses" ( 1652), S.F. Selecky ' s " Pen Portrait of a Beautiful Lady" ( 170 I), and H. Gavlovic's "The Pastoral School " ( 1775). The language of secular baroque poetry generally coincides with the lan guage of Catholic literature. The linguistic differences in each genre are mainly based on the respective periods of composition ; and not the origins of the authors . In other words, secular baroque poetry may be grouped along with Catholic literature in accordance with its period of composition. The vowel system s of both genres may be characterised by their clear tendency to use long monophthongs instead of native Czech and Central Slovak diphthongs. The native Czech diphthong ou (orthographic au) , also attested in earlier spiritual literature, occurs only in Benicky (Spravedlivim gsaudem I Osemetnim !idem / Pracuje gich chitrost (Benicky); moudrost y cest geho /Olah/ ; Strach Saudu a Ostrost Sudce (Smrtnik)). It is absent from 18 th century works , however, regardless of genre. In contrast to Catholic literature, other diphthongs occur sporadically in the language of Benicky and Gavlovic : the former has two examples of -ia- , and the latter nearly ten of -ie-, and perhaps one example of -iu- (Neb size Rodiczke / Kliatby Materynske / Prinasegj pokuty (Benicky) ; Spiwala sy gedna baba : mam penazy dgessku, I su do zeme zakopane, / newim w kterem br- geiku /Gavlovic/; A gak pangu penezitu, / musiss geg sluziti , / Gak chudobnu budess w dome / dwe chudoby miti (Gavlovic). These phe- �SLOVAKIA 19 nomena may be described as deliberate violations of norm. 12 The wholesale remodelling of the front/back contrast in the vowel system due to the gradual reduction of pieh/aska provides another substantial feature common to secular baroque poetry and Catholic literature. The grammaticalization of piehJaska may also be observed in the language of secular baroque poetry, generally identical to similar processes in the language of Catholic literature. This convergence is manifest in the stability of some grammatical forms , variation in others, and even in the total loss of some forms with piehlaska Thus, participial and verbal adverb endings are the most stable (Had kuzy svu zvleka, / Orlyce z daleka / Letagicz pera pusty (Benicky); czistotu woniczy proto smim potwrdit (Selecky); Ktery mlcy , ku mluweni , / pricynu magice, I Wiceg cyni, nezli zwitas / zamky walagice (Gavlovic). In contrast, at an early stage 3 rd person forms without piehlas- ka began to be replaced by forms with piehlaska and a stage where forms both with and without coexist occurs in the language of Ben icky, which chronologically corresponds to the language of Smrtnik (Nebo u susedu / Pekagj chleb z medu, / Take pryslovy byva - Saty ozdobene, I Czinicz telo pisne / Molove prei iraju (Benicky)). As in the language of Catholic literature, forms with pieh/aska are absent from the language of F. Selecky and H. Gavlovic (Mnozy tez zadagu wzacznost smichu widjet (Selecky); Ne ze zeme, ale z Judi / wiros- tagu zlosti , / Puwod magu w marnych Srdcach I z nedobreg wlchkosti (Gavlovic). The convergence of the main linguistic features of Catholic literature and sec ular baroque poetry also affected the morphological system. The features which have changed are as follows: □ In the language of Benicky the development of animate gen.lace. forms in the plural of nouns is fixed at a stage where both nom./acc. and gen.lace. forms occur. The translation of "Olah ' s Ritual," in which the original nom ./acc. forms are still consistent, repre- 12 See Ian Muk arfovsk ii (Jan Mukai'ovsky), ·"Literaturn yj jazyk i poeticeskij jazy k", Praiskij lingvisticeskij kruiok (Moskva, 1967), pp. 407-408. �SLOVAKIA 20 sents an intermediate stage and the treati se of B. Smrtnik refl ects the e ndpoint of thi s process: the re are no nom ./acc. forms in Selecky and Gavlovic at all (Mas lj se so uditj , / Mu sis svedky mitj , / Tak bude vec vihrana - Yzlast gestlis na vogne / Drz vogak u v s ilne / Czastim napominanim (Benicky); Ked bi g ih ranjenych ona htje la hog it (Se lecky) ; A Kato mu odpowedel : / Nemluw mi nic wice, / bil by zazrak, kdyby zhryzly / Sswabuw nohaw ice (Gavlovi c); □ the loss of the spec ial acc. forms of the pe rso nal pronoun oni/ony (here both Benicky and Smrtnik have doubl ets, and they may be contrasted on the one ha nd with "Ola.h 's Ritual ," the point of departure, and on the other hand , to a ll other writin gs attesting to the e nd of the process (Magj peczet daty , / 0 to se staraty , / Aby ge ginsy stihat - Darmo konom hv yzdat / Kdyz g ich mas napagat / gestlj ze sam nepi ge (Benicky); Prirownam g ich k oczam soko la draheho (Selec ky); Proto wzacny karbunkulu s / y drahe kameni , / ze g ich zridka uhlidame, / w hognosti g ich ne ni (Gav lovic); □ the replace ment of primary forms of /-participles with ste m- fin a l sy ll a bic sonants by forms with epenthetic -e- (Benicky and " Ol a.h 's Ritual " have only forms with sy llabic sonants, they still predomin ate in Smrtnik , whi le 18 th century writings, including the works of Selec ky and Gavlovi c (Zes ze statku panskeho / Zbohatl, v kratky cas / vezme ti to Pan zas (Be nicky); jakbi u kralowneg lasku bil dosahel (Se lec ky ); A Pan os la se u/eke/, / osla dal zabiti, / Tak osel, chtic las ku ziskat, / strati I ziwobiti (Gav lovi c)) have only innovatio ns, etc . The following phenome na may be termed stabl e : □ The consiste nt preservation of alternations in nom . pl. adj ec- tives agree in g with animate noun s (Tak pansty dvorane I Yak nahl e pan vstane / Nec h zanim postupu g u (Benicky); ked by ta czi czerti pgek ni bil y w pe kl e (Se lecky); Nazy na Swet prich adzame / ze ziwota Matk i, / Neprinassame ze sebu / penize a statki (Gavlovic); □ masc uline a nd ne ute r in str. sg. forms in -em (Ne b czasta pri saha / Ciasem dopomaha / ze zustava lhar vetsy (Be ni c ky); nebo s ak samitem okrasle na bi wa (Se lec ky) ; Zena mu fov i ukl ady / z placem spu sob uge, / Geho mi se l vsse li ga kim / s pu s obe m probu ge �SLOVAKIA 21 (Gavl ov ic); bych (Chtje l bih mnihe m zostat, rad bih giste wgedj e l (Selecky); Y kosselu bych predala, / vssak se mu za bo□ th e subjun cti ve in gim, I Kdyz se trochu podnapi gem, / ce la neobstog im (Gav lov ic), etc. Sporadic phe nome na simil ar to those in the language of Catho li c literature may also be fo und in the language of sec ul ar baroque poetry: ge min ate consona nts (Trucow ity y neg le pss u / c udzu Raddu ha ni , I A teprw a gu c hce plnit, / kdyz se guss porani (Gav lov ic); 3d pe rson /-parti cipl es w ith overt a uxili aries (Z iwot ta k cz istotneg c hwa li ges t zas lu zil (Se lecky)), co ntrac ted fe minine loc. sg. Adj ecti ves w ith stem-fi nal palatals (Napomaha k pravde, / V negchitregsi zrade / Sv u ukazuge moc nost (Benicky)), etc. T he lingui sti c di ffe rences arising fro m c hrono log ica l d ive rgences betwee n sec ul ar baroque poetry and Catho li c li teratu re onl y in vo lve detail s, mainl y in stances whe re poets use such language e le me nt s as had already bee n lost or had not yet e merged in Catho li c literature. Thus, fo r instance, H. Gav lov ic used both -om and -um as masc uline nomin al dat. pl. endings, although the latte r fo rm s had already been lost in Cath olic literature by around the l 750's (De n Sed/akom a Noc ia kom I negw ic pos luhu ge, / to Sowa w cy me ry zac ke m / slu ssne oznamuge - Prez ce ly de n Walac h chodi , / a malo spi w nocy, / By mohe l bit proti wlkum I owcam na pomocy) . The masc uline loc. pl. ending -och had already appea red by Beni cky's tim e, sli ghtl y ea rli er than in Catho li c literatu re (Kupcove, fl agnarkj , I V hostincoch krczmarky / Nemagf dluho spavat). Sometimes fo rm s were se lected based on the need fo r a rhy me. Thu s, in G av lov ic we do find 3rd person present forms with piehlaska, but onl y in cases where they are part of a rhyming sche me (Wssec ke wecy cas sw ug magu, / cas gest k fartovani , / Kdyz se zme ni ss c hwa litebne, / zaden te nezhani - Coko li w ge kre m potre by, / to guss stog i w zbytku , / Z bytek w sto loc h we Ike statki / vihana z pribitku). A lingui sti c analys is of sec ul ar baroque poetry and Catho li c literature shows th at th e la nguage fo rmati on in these genres was ide nti ca l. In othe r words, the language of Catho lic lite rature was not onl y �22 SLOVAKIA religiou s. It has already been shown that the language of sec ular baroque poetry, specifically Gavlovic ' s " Pastoral School ", mostly coincides with the language of administrative-legal texts of South-Western origin. Hence it follows that comparing them with administrative- lega l texts from other regions involves in principle the comparison of different genres. And thi s in its turn makes it possible to determine whether thi s language formation was widespread in all region s of Slovakia, which is very important for its definitive identification. We studied thi s problem by comparing the concrete lin guistic features occurring in administrative- lega l texts. Then we also compared different sy nchronic stages of the "Jel sava Town Chronicle" of 15661710 (South Central Slovakia) and the 16 th - 19 th century "Levoca Formu las of Oaths" (East Slovakia) , in order to determine trends in the ir lingui stic development. A comparison of spec ific lin gui stic features from diverse admini strative-legal texts reveals interestin g features in the manifestation of linguistic processes and the di stribution of phenomena in texts of different origins. Thus, all phenomena involving the modification of the Old Czech base are manifested in different texts in the same positions, and therefore many of them were not due to the lingui stic factors contrasting all Slovak dialects with Czech. An examp le of loss is furnished by the history of the phoneme Ii i, which was re placed in all positions by the phoneme Ir/ in regional variants of admini strative-legal writings. An example of maintenance is furni shed by the old instr. sg. feminine ending -11 (- u), which began to be used in Slovak written texts as a component of Old Czech morphological structure , not only in West and East Slovak admin istrative-lega l documents, where it is supported by local dialect usage, but also in Central Slovak. This shows that processes manifested in the written language spread into other reg ions from an epicentre. This examp le is especially interesting, as the Central Slovak ending -ou is formally identical to the new Czech ending -ou from the diphthong ization of - 11 (mezi Mikulasem Kowacze[m] a druhu osobu Matronu Elzbetu �SLOVAKIA 23 Haylowich /1658, Dojc, W es t Slo vakia/; Roli czku ... zo psseniczu posal ( 1728, Spi s, East Slovaki a); vsak z mu matku na vinicu ko mne chodivala zvadzat ( 1728, Krupina, Central Slovakia) 13. Some instances of doublets occur in South-West Slovak admini strati ve -lega l tex ts. As a rule , one member of such pair occurs more frequently , and may be considered the unmarked form. All the invariant feature s of these texts occur in non-South-Western administrative-legal documents Features with doubl et forms show both variants in non-SouthWestern texts, or, less frequ e ntly , only the unmarked variant. " Reg ional variants" had the function of doublets, which differentiated indivisible lan guage formations , but did not separate them into inde pe ndent lingui stic units. Thus, for example, the masc uline and ne ute r oblique adjective case form s with -e- in the endings, the only poss ible variant in South-West Slovak administrative-legal texts (ze Sa czcinskeho trhu spolem issly ( 1725 , Skalica)), also occurred in NorthWest Slovak (ta cesta od kamenneho Snehu na Polianku ( 1633, Pruske)) , North Central Slovak (za Radu Slowutneho a Oppatrneho muze Pana Tomassa Sk/adaneho 11649, Rufomberok/) , South-Central Slovak (pana knam milostiweho a /askaweho ( 1570, Banska Stiavnica)) and East Slovak (stegto strany Yarku mlinskeho /1658 , Sari s - Zemplfn/) texts. Side by side with these form s, their regional variants are also used in non-South-Western texts, e.g., the diphthongs -ie- (pre sirotky zu stale nebohyeho Samuela /166 I , Rufomberok/), -f- (-i-; (Pozdraweni y g iniho mnoho dobriho /1622 , Ban ska Stiavnica/), -o(Agnieha Istvana Radomskoho sestra /1608, Sari s - Zemplfn/). These features, mainl y typical of South-Weste rn written texts, may be seen as invariants, based on their genera l di stribution . Invariants on the level of concrete linguistic elements are always attested in South-Western texts, and therefore the lan guage of South-West administrative- '-' A lthough the M odern Czech and Slovak - ou endings are forma ll y identica l , they constitute the endpoints of two different hi storica l processes : Czech -ou is the reflex of th e diphthongisation of *- u resulting from th e denazali za ti on. fo ll owed by contraction. of * -ojQ ( * -11 < * -oju < * -ojQ). whereas Slovak -ou is simply the refl ex of contracti on. wi th subsequent denazali zati on. of * -ojQ (-ou < * -OQ < * -ojQ). �SLOVAKIA 24 lega l tex ts is genera ll y in varia nt by com pari so n to texts from other reg ion s of Slovakia. The o bvious fact th at Catholic literature and sec ul ar baroque poetry were based o n South-West Slovak dialects shows th at the sa me lin g ui st ic fo rmat io n functioned in a ll kinds of writte n texts, and was widespread in a ll region s of Slovakia. Thu s, the so-ca ll ed c ultural la ng uages were not indepe nde nt lingui stic formations. Firstly , no compl ete li st of distinct features can be revealed for any of the m, because every indi vidu a l isog loss used to c lass ify tex ts of different ori g in s yie ld s different res ults, even of " regiona ll y- based variants" recorded in written tex ts. In other word s, the lang uage of ad mini strative-lega l texts amounts to th e sum of minor loca l var ia nts united into a who le, w itho ut any tran s iti o na l fo rm ation s (so-ca ll ed c ultu ra l lang uages). 14 An ana lys is of the deve lopment of the lang uage of the " Je lsava Town Chronicle" revea ls a number of facts, whi c h are extre me ly important fo r the e luc idati o n of the dynamics of the developme nt of thi s ling ui stic fo rmati o n. There were man y phe nomena in the ear li e r records, as earl y as the I 560's and I 570's , deviating from Czech norms. Firstly, we found pan-Sl ova k features , w hi c h mi g ht have penetra ted writte n tex ts in different reg ions of Slovak ia independently of o ne anothe r (the absence of the phone me Iii and the nati ve Czech diphthong ou, the jotation of lab ia l consona nts before e < *e, *~, etc.). Phe nome na on the th whole untypica l of writte n 16 century texts a lso occ urred (the consiste nt occ urre nce of th e phoneme dz < *dj, for ms bo th with and without j before i in word-initial position, etc .). A few features, howeve r, we re o bviously Centra l Slovak (the diphtho ngs -uo- and -ie-, o < stron g * b , masculine and neuter nomina l in str. sg . forms in -om, masc uline and ne uter possess ive adjecti ve gen. sg. fo rms in -ho, etc .). Adj ecti ves w ith -ie- in the ir endin gs are th e most important, because they simulta neo us ly de mo nstrate th e break w ith the Old Czech writ14 K.McCone and D. Mathews describe similar se ts of probl ems in defining Middle Iri sh and Middle Engli sh respec tively. See Kim McCone. The Early Irish Verb (M aynooth , 1987) , pp. 18 1- 183 and Dav id M atth ews , (U ni versity Park , PA , 2000), pp. 1- 14. �SLOVAKIA 25 ten tradition and show th at some standardi sation processes were carried through in the la nguage of written Central Slovak texts, because these forms have the monophthong iii in South Centra l Slovak dia lects, including Je lsava. At the same time, whi le generall y ac knowl edg ing the impl e mentation of standardi sation processes in the Central Slovak dialects, it should be stated that they were rather weak, due to the occ urre nce of a numbe r of loca l features in the written tex ts. These inc luded, e.g., the almost total loss of the sy llabi c so nant r, the c han ge of ou into 6, primarily attested in the instr. sg . forms of feminine noun s and adjectives, the c hange of c into s, and the appearance of a afte r ve lars, etc. Some features may be found in late 16 th a nd early I 7'h ce ntury texts, which may be described as the rea li sation of two contradictory te ndencies: the wea kness of the loca l c harac te r of record s, because dialectal ele me nt s were lost in the respec tive la nguages (the restoration of sy llabic r, the loss of Gerner features ia < ie and s < c, etc.), and the increas ing occurre nce of features from the Trnava written tradition (the losses of the phoneme /dz/, masc uline and neuter adjectival form s with e in the e ndin gs, a nd di alecta l forms of I-participle bel/biel, etc.). In the I 630 's - I 650's the popul ation of Je lsava accepted th e Counter-Refo rmation , whic h was reflected in the language of the town chronicle. The first te nde ncy we named was modified , because the occ urrence of most of the already exist in g Ce ntral Slovak features in creased , but no new feat ures of Central Slovak orig in appeared in the texts. The second te ndency - followin g the Trnava written tradition - was maintained. The second tendency predominated until the earl y I 8 th ce ntury. W e may therefore conclude that over the whole hi story of th e "Je lsava Town Chronicle", its lang uage gradually adapted to Be rnol ak 's codification of Slovak literary la nguage, and not to Stur' s, as we mi ght ex pect based on the Central Slovak origin �26 SLOVAKIA of th ese texts. 15 The development of the language of the " Levoca Formulas of Oaths" was essentiall y similar: there is an early stratum of Polish di alectal feature s in the texts (e.g., plosive g and the Poli sh reflexes of the *tort formula) , with a layer of East Slovak ones (e.g., the vowe l e < * and reflexes of assibilated t' and d) superimposed. Over time, however, they were lost, because they could not res ist competition from pan-Slovak and West Slovak feature s, which beca me obvious in the early 18 th century, not long after the Counter-Reformation . 16 It is very important to note th at the lan guage of administrativelega l texts was common for both Catholics and Lutherans, in contrast to Catholic literature and secular baroque poetry. The language of popular poetry was also common to both Catholics and Lutherans, and it was on the whole also based on the SouthWestern written tradition. Specifically, however, it was characterised by a very fluid structure, because thi s lin guistic formation in such writings was contrasted to Literary Czech or some Slovak dialect, depending on the genre or contents of the respective verses. Consequently , Czech feature s, atypica l of the Slovak written tradition , penetrated the language of hi storical verse (for instance , the " Book of Verses" (East Slovaki a, 1751 ), or J . Bruk ' s manuscript co ll ectio n (Orava, North Central Slovaki a, 1794) or occasional poetry (for in stance , congratulation from the J. Lany manu script co ll ec tion , late 18th century). And conversely, a number of dialectal features are found in styli sed folksongs (e.g., the D. Kubik collection (Priev idza, Central Slovakia, 1791 )). From the early l 800's a number of Central Slovak feat ures occur in a variety of verses (for examp le, in J. Koll ar 's " Folksongs", the M. M. Krizan collection (Trencfn County, North-West Slovakia, 1839, etc.), which we consider a s ign of the 15 See in detail K[ o nstantin] V. Li fa nov, "Evoljucia j azyka " Je lsavskoj gorodskoj kni g i" 1566- 17 10 gg. i t. naz. Kul\urnyj sred nes lov ac kij j azyk", Zeitschrift filr Sla- wische Philologie. Bd. 58 , Heft I, 1999, pp. 151 - 170. See Ko nsta ntin V Lifanov , Genezis slovatskogo literaturnogo iazyka. LIN CO M 16 St udi es in Slavic Lingui sti cs, 2 1 (Muenchen , 200 I). pp. 163- 170. �SLOVAKIA 27 emergence of a spec ific language , the Centra l Slovak folklore koine, based on North Centra l Slovak di alects. Another sign of thi s phenomenon is the nature of the lingui sti c changes whi ch we find in manuscript copies of the folk songs (for instance, in J. Boczko 's collections fro m Banska Sti av ni ca ( 1830-1 83 1) and J. Jamri ch Junior 's from Gerner ( 1832-1 833)). These copyists were South Central Slovaks by birth , but when they copied songs from the second part of Koll ar 's "Slovak Secul ar Fo lksongs fro m Hun gary" , they gave preference to North Central Sl ovak features. 17 The purest vari ety of the Central Slovak fo lkl ore koine fun ctioned in North Central Slovaki a, and a written form is fi xed in the S.B. Hrobo n manu sc ript collecti on (S ielni ca, Liptov County, No rth Central Slovaki a, 1841 ). Its penetrati on into South Central and West Slovaki a (it did not influence the language of East Slovak folk songs, or minimall y so) took the form of infiltration of some its features. Later the Central Slovak folklore koine turned into a poetic koine, when it began to used in popular poetry as we ll , over the who le territory of Slovaki a (e.g., the verses of J. Szent-Kereszty ( I 822, of So uth Central Slovak ori gin ), the "Samlungen" manu script collection (Trnava, West Slovaki a, 18 17), the Eastern Slovak lawye r F. Balogh's translation of Hungari an poet Y.M. Csokonai' s verse (earl y 1800 's), and not just in the styli zations of folksongs. The Central Slovak fo lkl ore ko ine also penetrated the " hi gh" poetry of Luthera n poets, who had prev iously written in Czec h. The fi rst such works - three verses by S. Chalupka - were published in G . Fejerpataky' s Alm anac in 1834. At first thi s process was also mani fested in the sty li zati ons of folk songs, but in contrast to the popular poetry, it totall y o usted the prev io us lin gui stic system (the Czec h language). Later on it spread into other genres of hi gh poetry (the hymnal song "Nitra, Dear Nitra" was publi shed in the first volume of 17 Konstantin Lifa nov . " Stredos love nske basni cke ko ine pred l.'.. Stu rom", Slovenska rec. 60. 11 0. 5-6. 1995. pp. 264-28 1. �28 SLOVAKIA " Nitra" Almanacs in 1842). 18 Some previously known facts, also ascertained in the process of our study and analyzed by using sociolingui stic concepts, have made it poss ible to offer a ne w view of the origin and the sub seq uent development of the Slovak literary language. Thus, the lingui stic formation functionin g in Catholic literature, sec ul ar baroque poetry, admini strati ve-l ega l tex ts, popular poetry , etc. had all the propert ies of a literary lang uage, and may be called the "Old Slovak Literary language." As the lin gui stic material shows, it had started to take shape from the 1630 's on as a result of its developing di vergence from Literary Old Czech. Its epicentre was West Slovaki a. After the Battl e of Mohacs ( 1526), the capital of Hun gary and the archbishop's res idence were tran sferred to West Slovaki a, to Brati slava and Trnava respectively. Later on, South-West Slovakia 's role in cultural life became even more important, because a university with its ow n printing- house was opened there. At first, lingui stic development among Catholics and Luthera ns was identical. Texts were created by adherents of both confessions according to the " review mechani sm." 19 The common deve lopment of the Old Slovak literary language, however, was ruptured in the early l 600's, when ling ui stic diverge nces among Catholics and Lutheran s arose as a result of an aggressive Counter-Reformation. 18 K[onstantin] V. Li fanov, "Formy proniknovenija sredneslovackogo folk lornogo ko ine v ste ru avtorskoj poezii (konec XVIII v. - pervaja polovi na XIX v.)" , Wiener Slawistiches Jahrbuch, Bd. 44, 1998, pp. 99- 113. 19 It is a free tran slation of the Russ ian term " mechanizm peresceta" used by V. M. Zivov. Its essence concludes in the fact th at rather strong associated bonds between elements gi ven (l iterary) bookish character to a text and corres ponding elementts of people (d ialec tal ) speec h ex isted in th e minds of creators of tex ts. In th e case of adopti on of •'foreign " literary language, its elements contrasted to elemen ts of people speech and were initiall y bookish. Thu s, the opposition between adopted literary language and nati ve dialects was only in the fu nctional sphere. See, for examp le, V . M. Zivov, " Roi] russkogo ce rkov noslavianskogo v istoriji slavjanski ch literaturn yc h jazykov" , Aktual'nyje problemy sla vjansk ogo jazykoznanija (Moskva, 1988), pp. 4998. �SLOVAKIA 29 The Old Slovak literary language continued to develop in a Catho lic environment. It went throu gh all the important stages, including a translation of the whole of the " Bible" ( 1750), th e first Slovak novel : the "Adventures and the Experiences of Young Rene" (1783) , by J.L. Bajza, and its codification by A. Bernolak. The Old Slovak literary language was studied at elementary and secondary school s in different parts of S lovakia, and even at two universities - in Trnava and Kosice.20 Slovak Catholics numbered 75 % of population when emperor Joseph II iss ued the Patent of Toleration ( 1781 ), and perceived Czech as a heretical language. In thi s connection there is no reason to assert that the literary language of S lovaks was Czech prior to Bernol ak 's codification. Slovak Lutherans yielded their positions and had to seek external support , and they found it in Czech reli gious books. As a result, they reverted to the norms of Literary Czech (more exactly, to norms of the " Kralice Bible"), but not in all genres, and di gloss ia 2 1 arose in their environment. In thi s situation Czech was perceived as the high , cultivated form of the native language , whereas Old Slovak literary lan g uage was perceived as " ordinary," and to be used only in administrative-legal texts and popular poetry . Literary Czech and Old Slovak functioned in parallel in the Lutheran and Catholic environments respectively , and Catholi cs contrasted both literary languages, and gradually perceived that some features belonged not just to different functional spheres, but to different languages. As a result a new mechanism - conversion - arose in their environment. In practice it resembled the " review mechani sm", but differed substantially, because so me features were contrasted on the nati ve rather than on the functional level. Thus, Slovak Catholics began to perce ive spec ific features of their language on the leve l of 20 See Izidor Kotulic. " Bernolakovcina a predbernolakovska kulturna slovenc in a··, Pamatnica A ntona Berno/aka (Martin 1992), pp. 81, 88. 21 See Charles A. Ferguson, "Diglossia", Word, 15, 1959, no. 2, pp. 325-340 and Boris A. Uspenskij , Jazykovaia situacija Kijevskoj Rusi I jejo znacenije d!Ja istoriji russkogo literaturnogo jazyka (Moscow , 1983) , pp. 4-5. �SLOVAKIA 30 concrete phoneti c and morphological units, and so me fea tures as belonging to diffe rent periods. Th e situati on amon g Cath o li cs and Lutherans re ma in ed stable until the l 830 's, when the Centra l Slovak folkl ore ko ine penetrated into the sphere of hi gh poetry of Lutheran authors, and made it possible to codify a new literary language. r.. Stur made a major specific contribution by essenti all y changing the phoneti c and morpho logical syste ms of the literary language , but the lex icon fro m th e period of the Old Slovak literary language was maintained. Some features had reached the stage of con versati on (Catho lics perceived them as S lovak as opposed to Czech), and some were at the stage of rev iew (they were regarded as "booki sh/literary" (nati ve Czec h) or as ordin ary (native Slovak). The "ordinary" features codified by Stur were not accepted by Catholi cs, and they de manded that they be replaced by "booki sh" features, as was implemented in the codification of Hattala and Hodza ( 1852). SOURCES Catholic Literature P. Bajan, Sermones, 1760- 1771 (manuscript). Kamaldulska biblia, 1756-1759 (manu script). A. Macsay, Panes primatiarum aneb Chleby prwotjn (Trn ava , 171 8). D . Ma kos, Sermones, 1752- 1774 (manuscript). N. Ol ah, Ordo et ritus sanctae metropolitane ecc/esic Strigonien- sis, quibus parochi et a/ii animarum pastores in ecc/esiis suis uti debent. Viennae Austriae in aedibus Collegii caesarei, Societatis Jezu. Anno M.D.L.X. (manuscript). B. Smrtnik, Kunsst dobre umriti (Trnava, 1697). G. Vrabel, Sermones, 1766 (manuscript). �SLOVAKIA 31 Secular Baroque Poetry " Basne Petra Benickeho", Archiv starych cesko-s/oven skych /istfn , pfsomnostf a dejepisnych povodfn pre dejepis a literattiru Slovakov, Diel II. - Svazok I. (Tun::. sv . Martin, 1873), pp. 5-47. H. Gavlo vic, Wala sk a sskola mrawuw stodola (manuscript); Gerald J. Sabo, ed., Hugo/in 's Gavlo vic's Valaska skola (Co lumbus, Ohio, 1988). Stefan F Selecky, Obraz panye krasneg perem malowany, ktera maw Trnawe swoge prebiwany (manu script); Stefan F Selecky, "Obraz pani krasnej , perem malovany, ktera ma v Trnave svoje prebyvanf", Anto/6gia starsej slovenskej literattiry (Brati slava, 1981 ), pp. 522-530. Administrative-Legal Texts Inquisitiones, Skalica, 1616-1730 (manuscript). Darina Lehotska & Jozef Orlovsky , Najstarsia jelsavska mestska kniha 1566- 1710 (Martin , 1976). Listy Sta/ice IO kopijnfkov, Spis, XVII-XVIII storocie (manu- script). Mar ia Majtanova & Mil an Majtan, Krupin ski prfsne pravc (Bratislava, 1979). Missiles, Banska Stiavnica, XYI.-XYII. storocie (manu script). Obecna kniha obce Dojc, 1622-1836 (manu script). Panstvo Pruske, XVII.-XYIII. storocie (manuscript). Pfsomnosti Sarisskej a Zemplfnskej iupy, XYII.-XYIII. storocie (manuscript). Protocol/um mais mesta Ruiomberka, XYI.-XYII. storoc ie (ma- nuscript). Jozef Stoic, "Jazyk levocskych slovenskyc h prfsah zo XYI.-XIX. storocia", Jazyko vedny sbornfk, 5, l 951, pp. 197-247. Popular Poetry and Folksongs J. Csaplovics, Slowenske Wersse, (Pest, l 822). J. Jamrich ml. , Wselygake Rozlycne Rozprawky k zabawenf �32 SLOVAKIA zepsane, 1832- 1833 (manu script) Jan Koll ar, Narodnie spievanky, zvazok I, (Bratislava, 1953). Jan Misianik , Knii ka ry tmovni (Bratislava, 1952) . Samlungen, 18 17 (manu script). Spevnfk D. Boczka, 1830-183 1 (manu script). Lasz lo Sziklay, " Poznamky k Csokonaiho popularite v slove nskej literature," Sbornfk Filozofickej fak ulty Uni verzity Komen skeho. Philologica, 16, 1964, pp. 12 1-1 3 1. Pave l Josef Safarfk, Jan Kollar, Pjsne swetske lidu slawenskeho w Uhrach, swazek 2 (Pest, 1827). Jozef Skultety, " Literarno-hi storicke drobnost i", Slovenske pohl'ady, 17, 1897, pp. 125- 128. Zbornfk J. Bruka, 1794 (manuscript). Z bornfk M. M. Kriia na, 1839 (manuscript). Zbornfk D . Kubfka, 179 1 (manu sc ript). Zbornfk J. L any, koni ec XVIII . storocia (manu script). � SLOVAKIA 7 The Origin and Development of the Slovak Literary Language 1 Konstantin V. Lifanov The history of the Slavic literary languages has developed rapidly over the last few decades as an independent linguistic discipline. Scholars have reviewed the objects of their study and defined them more precisely , and even attempted to develop optimal methods of research, all of which has made it possible for them to make adequate assessments of actual linguistic data, and to avoid imposing their contemporary perceptions on the past. For example, the use of socio1inguistic concepts has been very fruitful in the study of certain Sla- vic literary languages. However, many problems have so far remained uninvestigated. Thus Kretschmer, surveying the overall level of research into Slavic literary languages, declares that in spite of the amount of material that has already appeared, the processes whereby the Slavic literary languages emerged still remain to be worked out, as well as their regularities and specific features. 2 This conclusion also applies to the history of the Slovak literary language. Many texts written in Slovakia before the language was codified remain uninvestigated from the lingui stic point of view. There are hardly any comparative studies of texts of different ge nres or from different eras. Nevertheless , comparative study is the only 1 I deeply thank Professor Robert Orr and Professor M. Mark Stolarik for English corrections of this paper. 2 Anna Krechmer (Anna Kretschmer), " Sravnitel'naja istorija slavjanskich literatur- nych jazykov: Yoprosy metodologiji " , Vjestnik Moskovskogo uni vers iteta. Seria 9. Filologia. 3, I 998, p 48. �8 SLOVAKIA method that makes it poss ible to define the real status of co nc rete for ms a nd to determine, e.g., whether a give n for m is mere ly the result of a language error, because, e.g., a give n wri te r did not know the coeva l language norm , or of sty li stic variat ion arisin g from a g ive n genre of wri tin g, or a typical lin gui st ic feat ure characteristic of the Slovak written tradition as a whole. But if we cannot determine the status of concrete forms , we ca nnot qualify the essence of differe nt lang uage for mati o ns in the hi story of Slovak , a nd therefore we cannot compre he nd the process of the emergence and subseque nt deve lopme nt of the Slovak literary language eithe r. In its turn, this situation in the hi story of the Slovak literary language ope ns up the poss ibility of arbitrary interpretations, ofte n aris ing from extra lin gui st ic factors. Thus it is wide ly believed, mainly outside Slovakia, that the Slovak literary language emerged in the late 18 th century by differe ntiating itse lf from Czech , and that previous ly Slovaks had used Czech as their literary language. We may trace the sources of thi s beli ef to the concepts of some Czech lingui sts3, who did not recognize the di stinctiveness of Slovak and considered it merely a variant of a unitary Czechoslovak language. According to a seco nd view of thi s problem, which has been "official" in Slovak lingui stics since the mid- I 950 's, distinct languages - cultural West Slovak, Central Slovak, and perhaps East Slovak had emerged in Slovakia before the codificatio n of the Slovak literary language. Subsequently Bernolak 's 1787 codification was based o n c ultu ra l W est Slovak a nd Stur's ( I 840 's) on cultural Central Slovak. There is also a third view, accord in g to which the Slovak literary lang uage arose as a res ult of interact ion between the Czech literary language and Slovak (mainl y West Slovak) dialects. It was shared by ' See Albert Prazak , Dejiny spisovne slovenstiny po dobu Sturovu (Brati slava, 1922), A lbert Prazak , Cesi a Slovaci (Praha 1929) and Vaclav Yazny "Spisovny jazyk slove nsky", Ceskos lovenska vlasti veda , Rada 11, Sp isovny jazyk Cesky a s/ovensky (Praha 1936) pp. 145-2 15. �SLOVAKIA 9 many Slovak linguists from I 900-1950.4 We embarked upon the study of thi s problem without preconceptions, and intended to base all conc lusions so lely on the analysis of concrete lin gui stic material and modern literary language theory. We cannot outline our theoretical fram ework in thi s paper, and therefore we can only refer to the first chapter of our book.5 Research into the problem of the Slovak literary language should take as its starting point the 14 th century, when Old Czech began to develop into an interethnic literary lan guage in Central Europe. At the same time it also penetrated into Slovakia. Stani slav, Kiraly , & Pauliny 6 show that in Slovakia copiers of Czec h texts tried to adhere to Czech norms. Infrin gements of these norm s tended to be iso lated and accidental , and may be described as simple errors. But as early as CC 14 - 15 fo ur changes - three phonolog ical and one morpholog ical - are attested in texts quite regul arly: the loss of the phoneme Iii, the loss of jotation in labials before lel < *e, *r, the affrication oft; d ' > c, dz, and the repl ace ment of vocati ves by nominatives. These processes constitute the initial stage of development of Old Czec h in Slovaki a, and its iso lation from the language functionin g in the Czech heartland. In the first place, we studied the further deve lopme nts of th ese phenom e na in th e spiritu a l literature of Slovak Catholics. • See , for exa mple, J. Y lkolinsky (Czambel 's pseudon ym) "O '·prvej " knihe slovenskej ", Z i ve na, 2, 1885, pp 230-240 . Henri ch Bartek, "S pi sov ny j azyk slovensky", Slovenska rec. 6, 1937- 1938, pp 50-57 and l.'.udovft Novak. "Cestina na Slove nsk u a vzn ik spisovnej slovenciny ", Slovenske pohl'ady . 54, 1938, pp 105-111. 159- 173, 2 17-222, 28 1-287. 5 Konstantin V. Lifanov, Genezis slovackogo literaturnogo jazyka . LINCOM Stu - dies in Slavic Linguistics, 21 (Munich 200 I ), pp. 18-4 1. 6 Jan Stani slav . " Zur Frage der Slowazismen in den alttschechi schen Denkmalern ", Zeitschrift fiir Slawistik. Bd. I, Heft 4. 1956. pp. 58-70, Bd. II . Heft I , 1957, pp. 3751 , Peter Kiraly. Zur Frage der altesten slowak ischen Sprachdenkmdlern" , Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiaru m Hungaricae. 4, 1958, pp. I 13- 158 , Eugen Pauliny, "Zac iatky kulturneho jazyka slovenskej narod nos ti ", Jazykovedne stridie. 6, 196 1. pp. 28-39. �SLOVAKIA The re pl ace me nt of /f/ by Ir/ spread ra pidl y, alm ost over a ll S lovak wri tings , inc ludin g sp iritua l literature . By the time " Ol a.h 's Ritu a l" was tra ns lated (ca. I 550 - 1600) Iii was an obvio us, very irreg ul ar arc ha ism (proti nassy m mrskym hfJc hum ). In the re li gious treati ses of B. Smrtnik and A. Macsay , publi shed in 1697 and 171 8 res pecti ve ly, it is attes ted ma inl y in fo rm s of the ve rb ffc i , mos t probabl y as a pure ly orthographi ca l conve nti o n (Prosil ne kdy gedon Prite le sweho rikuce), but it is co mpletely absent in the manuscripts in vesti gated (the Ca ma ldul Bible ( 1756- 1759), and th e se rm ons of Mokos ( 1752- 1774), Vrabel ( I 766), and Bajan ( 1760- 177 1)). The deve lopme nt of /JI after labi a l co nso nants and before l e/ < *e, *~ was sli ghtl y di ffe re nt. The primary stages of thi s process were ide nti ca l to those in vo lved in the repl aceme nt of If/. Thus, according to Paulin /, exa mpl es of th at deve lopme nt still c lea rl y predominated in the I 5th century " Muni ch Confess ion al Formula" ( 16 fo rms with /j/ and three without), but they were refl ected incons iste ntl y as earl y as " Ol a.h 's Ritu al," as a rul e in the idi omati c fo rmul as at the end of verses (s stebau Bohe m Otcem y Duc he m Swatym bud ' cest y c hwa la na wieky wiekow. Amen). The di ffere nti ati o n betwee n genres based on the presence or absence of fo rms w ith or w itho ut /jl is characte ri sti c of later texts. Onl y fo rm s without /JI occ urred in the language of sermons, inc luding Baj an 's (tuto bude lakomec w Negwecsy potrebe), in spite of the situ ati on in hi s nati ve di a lect (Zahorsky), whe re fo rm s w ith /JI are still c urrent. However, fo rms w ith /JI re mained in the " hi ghe r" genres (in the " Bible" a nd re lig io us treati ses) and in Macsay 's la nguage they are used quite freque ntl y (T yto Pobudky ma clowek ws rdcy swem pilne vwafowati ; kri wdy net1pet1). Spec ial vocati ve for ms, and nom inati ves used as vocati ves, were lost in the maj ority of Sl ovak di alects. They were restri cted to animates in spiritual Catho li c literature (radu g se tec hd y Narod Uhersky 7 Eugen Paul iny, ·'Mnfchovska spovedna formu la" , Jazykovedny casopis. 10. no. I , 1959, p. 30. �SLOVAKIA 11 /Vrabel/ - A braham e, A braham e ne wsta hug ruky tweg na djte /Macsay/). In contrast to Literary Old Czech, anim ate noun s w ith palatal ste ms had the same endin gs as nouns with no n-palatal ste ms (chce m rect du sso kresta nska bludica /M okos/ ; Czec h du se!. It is inte resting that these were the very forms that Berno lak codi fied. The hi story of the affricates c and dz(< t'and d ') shows that new fo rm s did not always oust co mpe tin g o lde r fo rms as a res ult of the loss of the oppos ition " literary - non-literary." In thi s case the te ndency was c hanged and the literary language lost the affri cates. They were w ides pread in I 4'h - I S'h century writin gs, but o nl y iso lated examples appeared in I 8'h century Catho li c literature (strhel se weter, zrucil dom /Vrabel/) . Th ese fo ur phe no me na are c uri o us ly s imil ar: they occ urred in literary Old Czech, but onl y sporadi ca ll y, occ urring in tex ts as errors by Czec h copy ists. These fo rm s deve loped into competin g doubl ets in the Slovak writte n language. However, the affri cati on of t'and d' differed from the other phenome na, in th at it made the phonol og ica l syste m more compl ex (the phone mes ga ined an additi onal artic ul atory feature) , while the othe r phe nome na, on the contrary , s implified the system , because they in vol ved the loss of a ph one me, or a pos iti onal vari ant of a phoneme, or a gra mm ati ca l fo rm . He nce we mi ght sugges t th at ph e nome na simpli fy in g a syste m preva il in co mpetiti o n in th e earl y stage of deve lopme nt of a literary la nguage outs ide its core ethni c te rritory, but phe no me na complicatin g it do not. Thi s is also suggested by the fact that it was not until the mid- I 8'h century th at the ph one me dz < *dj pe netrated the la nguage of spiritua l li teratu re; prev io us ly it had been co nsiste ntl y repl aced by /z/, or rare ly by Id '/ (zretedlne p ot wrz uje [pa n- S lovak po twrdzuj e] to wssec ko Job; skrze pokanj z te ho sna se probud'uje [pan-Sl ovak prebudz uje] /Macsay/) . The re was an esse ntial di ffe re nce between sporadi c pheno me na and doubl ets in wri tten Old Czec h. T he latte r survived as vari ants fo r almost the who le hi story of the language of Slovak Cath o li c literature, e .g., the refl exes of so-ca ll ed regress ive uml aut, i.e., the deve- �SLOVAKIA 12 lopment of tautosyllabic -aj- to -ej- in Old Czec h, and the emerge nce of the co nso nant clu ster sr:. c haracterist ic of Old Czech and Central Slovak, from sc- (< *stj-, *skj- , a nd *sk- before fro nt vowe ls). The first phenomenon was subject to a degree of gra mmaticali zation , as may be deduced from the fac t that no n-uml au ted seq ue nces obviously predomin ated in imperati ve fo rm s (ne mess kag obratjtj se ku Pa.nu Bohu /Macsay/) , but variation in the superlati ve forms of adjectives and adverbs was maintain ed as late as the mid- 18 th century, and usage mai nl y depended on the indi vidu al taste of the respecti ve author (pod'te a pod mym stjnem odpocjwagte - eopustili nalezk i swe a cestu nagtwrdssu /the " Bible"/; krize a proti wenstwy trpezliwe znassagme - sa m Tyran ze swym negmlacssym sine m /Vrabel/). Forms w ith sc- a nd st: were used in re li g ious texts throu ghout the pe ri od covered by the research , regardl ess of the orig ins of their authors (gegjho pak narozenj cas gesste oppodal byl - Pridrzme se th gessce S. Paw la /Macsay/). It was onl y in mid- I 8 century sermon s that th e tendency towards regional differentiation of th ese forms e merged: Makos used on ly fo rms with st:, following hi s nati ve Cen- tral Slovak dial ect (kazani takow i mestiane bi zas lu zili ), while Bajan, from Western Slovakia, mostly used forms w ith sc- (kde tenkrat bude Utociisscie hri ssniku). The process of for mati on of lin gui stic norms, which mu st have ex isted , may be observed from the lin gui st ic mate ri al th at ca n be g leaned from the written records. The occ urre nce of nati ve Czech and nati ve Slovak for ms in texts was not random, but governed by certain rules: firstl y the primary literary and non-literary fo rms arose, the n the primary non-literary form usuall y ousted the primary literary one. These processes, however, were subject to the princ ipl e of flexibl e stability8, whereby they were impl e me nted sy nchroni ca ll y, and thu s co ntinuity was ma intain ed be tween th e written languages of diffe re nt epoc hs. Thus, the fo ll ow in g new phe nomena, untypi ca l of " Yi lem Matezius ( Yi lem Matesius), ·'O neobchodimosti stab il'nost i litera turnogo jazyka" . Praiskij lingvisticeskij krniok (Moskva. 1967). p. 38 1 �13 SLOVAKIA earlie r writings, are attested in the tran slation of the "Ol ah Ritual ": □ unco ntracted forms of the gen., dat. and loc. sg. of femi nine adjecti ves e ndin g in fun ctional non -pa lata l conso na nts o usted the corresponding co ntracted forms (podl e tagneg radd y otcowskeg a dobrotiweg wu le twey); □ there was vari ation betwee n the nati ve Czech in str. forms of the pronouns ty and seba with the root vowe l o, a nd the nat ive Slovak ones with the root vowe l e, but the native Slovak forms prevailed (s steba u Bohe m otcem y s Duchem Swatym - s tobou bohem Ot- cem s Duchem Swatym); □ both the short and lon g forms of participl es were used as predi cati ves (za hrj c hy nasse vcinen gest - kterjmz to byl zapaleny proti nassy m mrskym hrjchum), etc. Some phe nome na are first attested in the lang uage of Smrtnik's re li gious treati se: □ the an im ate ge n.-acc. plural (Wide l pyssycych se A nge luw; cf. "Olah Ritua l": ze sy pro nas lidj hrjssne vkri fo wany) ; □ a n epenthetic vowel in masc uline forms of the /-participl e of consonant ste ms (polozil ho na Oltari na hranjcy drew a wstahe / ru ku ; cf. a n examp le fro m " Olah 's Ritu a l": z nes / zuriwy hnew otce tweho wecneho) ; □ the gramm ati ca li zation of piehlask a9 , prese rved in so me form s and lost in others, e.g., it is preserved in participial and verba l adverbia l endings, but beginning to be lost in present verb forms (gako Rewy we wykwjtagicy Winnicy; smegjce se pobij za k bytwe; pred Ssediwinamj wassymj Ml ads sy hore powstawagj - Dijtky zros- 9 Pieh/iska denotes the series of comprehensive progressi ve vowe l changes, unique to earl y Czech within Slavic. which was ori ginall y manifested co nsisten tl y in the morphology. but later reduced due to analogical pre ssures. Basically, it involved the frontin g and raising of vowels after origin ally soft consona nts. e. g .. u/ice < * ulica. biicho < * br ·ucho. see. e. g .. Miroslav Komarek. Historicka mluvnica ceski. 1: Hlis k os l ovf (Praha. 1962). pp. 62-66, I 15-118 , 153; 1964: 17, 18. 54; Charl es Townsend & Laura Janda. Common and Comparati ve Slavic (Indi ana 1996), pp. 9 192. I 6 I. I 63 , 272. �SLOVAKIA 14 tie wchazagu do sklepu); □ the spread of the genitive of the pronoun onilony to the acc., with both forms used as variants (pi su ge y pro tebe - prikazal aby se zem otewrela a za ziwa gych pozrela), etc. The majority of the features peculiar to the language of spiritual literature spread in the first half of the 18 th century. These trends are shown in the lan guage of Macs ay's religious treatises, which a lso contains the following further innovation s: □ masculine loc. pl. forms in -och (zalezelo to znamenj na skut- koch geho zazracnych; cf. nenj wskutcych miloserdenstwj (Smrtnik)); □ the dat. , loc. and instr. pl. of noun s such as kost' fo ll ow the pattern of ulice/iena (pri ledagakyc h wecech se zabaw ugu - a w smetach hrjchuw lezite); □ the spread of the loss of sy llabic sonants in abso lute word- final position , apart from /-participles, where this process took place earlier (Ale o Swaty Otce wyswet li vmysl twug - gakz ty s wilozjl smyse/ geho), etc. However, some Czech elements were very stable and were used almost universally: □ the sequence ji- in word-initial position , in contrast to Slovak i- (gako by mluwil a prisahal gim ("The Bible"); □ velar/alternations in the dat/loc. sg. of feminine nouns (Zadag- jcymu wodi mleka dala a na ssalce knj zatskeg podala ("The Bible") and in the nom pl. of adjectives agreeing with animates (A le zase pocali synowe Yzrahelsty ciniti zle weci ("The Bible"), etc. These processes obviously demon strate the modification of Old Czech as it was transformed into a standardised written language. Its structure consisted of native Czech and native S lovak elements used according to fairly strict rules. Such phenomena, maintained in Slovak, but lost in contemporary Literary Czech, are direct evidence of its clear connection to Old Czech. Apart from analogical doublets in literary Old Czech and in the language of Slovak Catholics, these are as follows: �SLOVAKIA □ 15 the preservati o n of the auxili ary in 3rd person verb fo rm s of the /- parti c ipl e un til the mi d- I 8 th century (a kralostwy sweho nekoncene ho pocatek gest ucinil (Mokos); ze ges t guz pri dwerac h wibehei protj ne mu / Baja n/); suc h fo rm s were co mpl ete ly lost in S lovak di alec ts by abo ut the I 5th ce ntury1°, and they were very ra re in Czec h writings by the 16 th century; 11 □ the e ndin g -u/-ti in the inst. sg. of fe minine noun s and adjec- ti ves, and also so me personal pronouns, in all works of Catho lic literature, inc ludin g authors of Central Sl ovak o ri g in , altho ugh they do not ac tu all y occ ur in Central Slovak (S krotite le Sweta A lexand ra M ladeho kw itnu cj ho strilku swu ra nil a; Pod se mnu odegdi (S mrtni k)); □ no d iphthongs apart from uo in the "Ol ah Ritu al", partic ul arly in Smrtni k 's re li g io us treati se, whi c h co ntinu es th e s itu ati o n in Literary Old Czec h (Oleg obmekssuge kuoie (S mrtni k)); □ gemin ates in the same words as in Literary O ld Czech (podle tagneg raddy Otcows keg /Olah/), etc. The language of S lovak Catho li c literature, howeve r, was indepe nde nt. It deve loped accordin g to its ow n rul es, in co ntrast to those of Old Czec h and Slova k di alec ts. Spec ific processes e merged rapidly, e.g., th e above- me nti o ned grammati ca li zati on of piehlask a, plus the follow ing: □ most masc uline no un s have gen. pl. fo rm s in -u w, whi ch is absent fro m Slova k di alects, and was lost in literary Czech (odwede l od rodiczuw, od prateluw /Vrabel/); □ an oppos iti o n between fe minin e adj ectives with ste m-fin al no n-palata l a nd ste m-fi na l palatal co nso na nts, beca use th e latte r fo rm s also had contracted gen. , dat. a nd loc. fo rm s (V < *Vj V; Mlc zim , abi ch w dnessny (< *-j-) Reczy meg d luhy ne bil /Bajan/), whil e the fo rmer had uncontracted fo rms; □ Ill 11 the de limi tati on of gen. and acc. pl. fo rms of animate nouns as Rudolf K rajcov ic, Nacrt dejfn slovenskeho jazyka (Bratislava, 197 1) p. 143 A rn ost L amprec ht, Dusan Slosar & Jaros lav Bauer, Historicka mlu vnice cestiny (Praha, 1986), p. 244 �SLOVAKIA 16 observed in Macsay ' s lan guage, and in the language of the " Bible" (ge n.: okolo deset ti syc uw wseckych sy lnych a udatnych Muiuw; acc.: kdiz zachwatili dwoch mu iti s knjzat Madyanskych /th e " Bible"/); □ the appearance of spec ial gen. sg. forms of the pronouns ty and seba, with -o- in the root (a le podobne wecy pro sobe od druheho slissetj pohrdagj (S mrtnik)), etc. Many native Slovak elements in the language of Slovak Catholic literature were pan-Slovak, but some of them directly indicate the region of Slovakia which played the main role in the formation of the Slovak written tradition : West Slovak. This is espec iall y true of features that do not occur in other Slovak dialects, primarily Central Slovak, such as , e.g.: □ diphthongs tended to be lost; □ -e in the endings of adjectives with a ste m-fi nal pal atal (ni c nad neho neni twrdsseho /Mokos/; Czech t vrdsfho; North Central Slovak tvrdsieho, South tvrdsiho/tvrdsiho) ; □ non-contracted gen. , dat. , and acc . forms (in the latter case if agreeing with animate noun s) of masc uline and neuter possessive adjectives (abich guss kpredsewzeti mogemu mluwil /Mokos/; Czech memu; Central Slovak m 6jmu); □ epenthetic -e- in masculine /-part iciples (Ce ntral Slovak -o-; a do stawu sweg Boskeg milosti pren esel /Mokos/; Czech pienes /; Central Slovak preniesol) , etc. D moreover, many native Czech e lements remained unchan ged, because they also occur in West Slovak as a whole, or in its SouthWestern subdial ects, e.g.: D the sequence rot- as a reflex of Common Slavic c ircumflex *6rt- (aby rostlo nany Hlozj a Trnj (S mrtnik ); Czech and Wes t Slovak rostlo; Central Slovak nistlo); □ the vowel e as a refl ex of Common Slavic strong *b (a gedna zadruhu wen zkostola wichazali /Mo kos/ ; Czech and West Slovak ven; Central Slovak von ); D the ending -em in the loc. sg. of masc uline and neuter adjec- �17 SLOVAKIA ti ves (aby na hrobowem kamenj tyto slowa wy kresatj dali /M acsay/ ; Czech and West Slovak hrobovem ; Centra l S lovak hrobovom ); □ the endin gs -e and -owe in the no m. pl. of anim ate no un s (nadto y pry tele daleko od stupili od ne ho /the " Bible"/ ; mn ozy p atriarcho we, mnozy kni zata a w udcowe /V rabel/; Czech p hite le , patriarchove, vudcove; West S lovak prate/e, patriarchove, vodcove; Central Slovak priatelia, patriarchovia, vodcovia) , etc. The typical West Slovak elements occ urring in Catho li c literary texts were as fo ll ows: □ the lack o f sy ll abic sonants from ori gin al sequences of conso- nants plus b i b + I (iluc Draku w gest wino geg ich (Smrtnik); Czech i luc; Central Sl ovak i lc; the isogloss was located on the territory o f South-Western (Trnava) di alects); □ the instr. sg. e ndin g -e m in masc uline and ne uter no un s (A sed'e la pod strom em palmowym, ktery m enem gey m sa menowal /the " Bible"/ ; Czec h, Zahorak, and some adj acent Trn ava di alec ts stromem, jmeneml m enem ; Central Slova k and other Wes t S lovak di alects have -om : stromom , menom), etc. Althou gh thi s lin g ui stic form ati on does di splay territori a ll ybased di alect di vergences, mai nl y in sermons, di alectal fea tures have not totall y submerged its characteri sti c pan-di alectal elements. If we compare the lin gui stic structures of Slovak Catholic literature and Berno lak 's codifi cation, we may conc lude that the codi ficati on was not somethin g new in princ iple. Nati ve Czec h fea tures occurring in , e.g., both the language of Slovak Catho li c literature and Berno lak's codifi cati on, clearl y de mo nstrate the c lose co nnec ti on between the two. These features are as fo llows: □ contracted fo rm s of possess ive adjecti ves (m eho, etc.) ; □ dat. sg. fo rms of ori g in all y soft-stem neuter noun s, whi ch d is- pl ay the refl exes of the ceska p fehlask a, i.e., u>i (srdci); □ □ neuter noun s endin g in -nf (stawaiif); parti c ipl es and verba l ad verb s w ith pieh/aska in suffixes ( wolag icf, wolagic); □ the I" person subjuncti ve of by t' in -ch, incl ud in g co mpoun d �SLOVAKIA 18 conjunctions (e.g., abich); □ the sequence ji- in word-initial position (gim), etc. The material being analyzed shows that the language of Catholic literature had many features characteristic of a literary language. It was cultivated, selective, functionally homoge neous, and essentially supra-dialectal. For its definitive identification as such , it needs to be ascertained whether it was only a religious style or multifunctional , and whether it was widespread over the whole of Slovakia. In order to answer the first question we compared the language of Catholic literature to the language of secular baroque poetry , based on the following texts: P. Benickfs [original] "Slovak Verses" ( 1652), S.F. Selecky ' s " Pen Portrait of a Beautiful Lady" ( 170 I), and H. Gavlovic's "The Pastoral School " ( 1775). The language of secular baroque poetry generally coincides with the lan guage of Catholic literature. The linguistic differences in each genre are mainly based on the respective periods of composition ; and not the origins of the authors . In other words, secular baroque poetry may be grouped along with Catholic literature in accordance with its period of composition. The vowel system s of both genres may be characterised by their clear tendency to use long monophthongs instead of native Czech and Central Slovak diphthongs. The native Czech diphthong ou (orthographic au) , also attested in earlier spiritual literature, occurs only in Benicky (Spravedlivim gsaudem I Osemetnim !idem / Pracuje gich chitrost (Benicky); moudrost y cest geho /Olah/ ; Strach Saudu a Ostrost Sudce (Smrtnik)). It is absent from 18 th century works , however, regardless of genre. In contrast to Catholic literature, other diphthongs occur sporadically in the language of Benicky and Gavlovic : the former has two examples of -ia- , and the latter nearly ten of -ie-, and perhaps one example of -iu- (Neb size Rodiczke / Kliatby Materynske / Prinasegj pokuty (Benicky) ; Spiwala sy gedna baba : mam penazy dgessku, I su do zeme zakopane, / newim w kterem br- geiku /Gavlovic/; A gak pangu penezitu, / musiss geg sluziti , / Gak chudobnu budess w dome / dwe chudoby miti (Gavlovic). These phe- �SLOVAKIA 19 nomena may be described as deliberate violations of norm. 12 The wholesale remodelling of the front/back contrast in the vowel system due to the gradual reduction of pieh/aska provides another substantial feature common to secular baroque poetry and Catholic literature. The grammaticalization of piehJaska may also be observed in the language of secular baroque poetry, generally identical to similar processes in the language of Catholic literature. This convergence is manifest in the stability of some grammatical forms , variation in others, and even in the total loss of some forms with piehlaska Thus, participial and verbal adverb endings are the most stable (Had kuzy svu zvleka, / Orlyce z daleka / Letagicz pera pusty (Benicky); czistotu woniczy proto smim potwrdit (Selecky); Ktery mlcy , ku mluweni , / pricynu magice, I Wiceg cyni, nezli zwitas / zamky walagice (Gavlovic). In contrast, at an early stage 3 rd person forms without piehlas- ka began to be replaced by forms with piehlaska and a stage where forms both with and without coexist occurs in the language of Ben icky, which chronologically corresponds to the language of Smrtnik (Nebo u susedu / Pekagj chleb z medu, / Take pryslovy byva - Saty ozdobene, I Czinicz telo pisne / Molove prei iraju (Benicky)). As in the language of Catholic literature, forms with pieh/aska are absent from the language of F. Selecky and H. Gavlovic (Mnozy tez zadagu wzacznost smichu widjet (Selecky); Ne ze zeme, ale z Judi / wiros- tagu zlosti , / Puwod magu w marnych Srdcach I z nedobreg wlchkosti (Gavlovic). The convergence of the main linguistic features of Catholic literature and sec ular baroque poetry also affected the morphological system. The features which have changed are as follows: □ In the language of Benicky the development of animate gen.lace. forms in the plural of nouns is fixed at a stage where both nom./acc. and gen.lace. forms occur. The translation of "Olah ' s Ritual," in which the original nom ./acc. forms are still consistent, repre- 12 See Ian Muk arfovsk ii (Jan Mukai'ovsky), ·"Literaturn yj jazyk i poeticeskij jazy k", Praiskij lingvisticeskij kruiok (Moskva, 1967), pp. 407-408. �SLOVAKIA 20 sents an intermediate stage and the treati se of B. Smrtnik refl ects the e ndpoint of thi s process: the re are no nom ./acc. forms in Selecky and Gavlovic at all (Mas lj se so uditj , / Mu sis svedky mitj , / Tak bude vec vihrana - Yzlast gestlis na vogne / Drz vogak u v s ilne / Czastim napominanim (Benicky); Ked bi g ih ranjenych ona htje la hog it (Se lecky) ; A Kato mu odpowedel : / Nemluw mi nic wice, / bil by zazrak, kdyby zhryzly / Sswabuw nohaw ice (Gavlovi c); □ the loss of the spec ial acc. forms of the pe rso nal pronoun oni/ony (here both Benicky and Smrtnik have doubl ets, and they may be contrasted on the one ha nd with "Ola.h 's Ritual ," the point of departure, and on the other hand , to a ll other writin gs attesting to the e nd of the process (Magj peczet daty , / 0 to se staraty , / Aby ge ginsy stihat - Darmo konom hv yzdat / Kdyz g ich mas napagat / gestlj ze sam nepi ge (Benicky); Prirownam g ich k oczam soko la draheho (Selec ky); Proto wzacny karbunkulu s / y drahe kameni , / ze g ich zridka uhlidame, / w hognosti g ich ne ni (Gav lovic); □ the replace ment of primary forms of /-participles with ste m- fin a l sy ll a bic sonants by forms with epenthetic -e- (Benicky and " Ol a.h 's Ritual " have only forms with sy llabic sonants, they still predomin ate in Smrtnik , whi le 18 th century writings, including the works of Selec ky and Gavlovi c (Zes ze statku panskeho / Zbohatl, v kratky cas / vezme ti to Pan zas (Be nicky); jakbi u kralowneg lasku bil dosahel (Se lec ky ); A Pan os la se u/eke/, / osla dal zabiti, / Tak osel, chtic las ku ziskat, / strati I ziwobiti (Gav lovi c)) have only innovatio ns, etc . The following phenome na may be termed stabl e : □ The consiste nt preservation of alternations in nom . pl. adj ec- tives agree in g with animate noun s (Tak pansty dvorane I Yak nahl e pan vstane / Nec h zanim postupu g u (Benicky); ked by ta czi czerti pgek ni bil y w pe kl e (Se lecky); Nazy na Swet prich adzame / ze ziwota Matk i, / Neprinassame ze sebu / penize a statki (Gavlovic); □ masc uline a nd ne ute r in str. sg. forms in -em (Ne b czasta pri saha / Ciasem dopomaha / ze zustava lhar vetsy (Be ni c ky); nebo s ak samitem okrasle na bi wa (Se lec ky) ; Zena mu fov i ukl ady / z placem spu sob uge, / Geho mi se l vsse li ga kim / s pu s obe m probu ge �SLOVAKIA 21 (Gavl ov ic); bych (Chtje l bih mnihe m zostat, rad bih giste wgedj e l (Selecky); Y kosselu bych predala, / vssak se mu za bo□ th e subjun cti ve in gim, I Kdyz se trochu podnapi gem, / ce la neobstog im (Gav lov ic), etc. Sporadic phe nome na simil ar to those in the language of Catho li c literature may also be fo und in the language of sec ul ar baroque poetry: ge min ate consona nts (Trucow ity y neg le pss u / c udzu Raddu ha ni , I A teprw a gu c hce plnit, / kdyz se guss porani (Gav lov ic); 3d pe rson /-parti cipl es w ith overt a uxili aries (Z iwot ta k cz istotneg c hwa li ges t zas lu zil (Se lecky)), co ntrac ted fe minine loc. sg. Adj ecti ves w ith stem-fi nal palatals (Napomaha k pravde, / V negchitregsi zrade / Sv u ukazuge moc nost (Benicky)), etc. T he lingui sti c di ffe rences arising fro m c hrono log ica l d ive rgences betwee n sec ul ar baroque poetry and Catho li c li teratu re onl y in vo lve detail s, mainl y in stances whe re poets use such language e le me nt s as had already bee n lost or had not yet e merged in Catho li c literature. Thus, fo r instance, H. Gav lov ic used both -om and -um as masc uline nomin al dat. pl. endings, although the latte r fo rm s had already been lost in Cath olic literature by around the l 750's (De n Sed/akom a Noc ia kom I negw ic pos luhu ge, / to Sowa w cy me ry zac ke m / slu ssne oznamuge - Prez ce ly de n Walac h chodi , / a malo spi w nocy, / By mohe l bit proti wlkum I owcam na pomocy) . The masc uline loc. pl. ending -och had already appea red by Beni cky's tim e, sli ghtl y ea rli er than in Catho li c literatu re (Kupcove, fl agnarkj , I V hostincoch krczmarky / Nemagf dluho spavat). Sometimes fo rm s were se lected based on the need fo r a rhy me. Thu s, in G av lov ic we do find 3rd person present forms with piehlaska, but onl y in cases where they are part of a rhyming sche me (Wssec ke wecy cas sw ug magu, / cas gest k fartovani , / Kdyz se zme ni ss c hwa litebne, / zaden te nezhani - Coko li w ge kre m potre by, / to guss stog i w zbytku , / Z bytek w sto loc h we Ike statki / vihana z pribitku). A lingui sti c analys is of sec ul ar baroque poetry and Catho li c literature shows th at th e la nguage fo rmati on in these genres was ide nti ca l. In othe r words, the language of Catho lic lite rature was not onl y �22 SLOVAKIA religiou s. It has already been shown that the language of sec ular baroque poetry, specifically Gavlovic ' s " Pastoral School ", mostly coincides with the language of administrative-legal texts of South-Western origin. Hence it follows that comparing them with administrative- lega l texts from other regions involves in principle the comparison of different genres. And thi s in its turn makes it possible to determine whether thi s language formation was widespread in all region s of Slovakia, which is very important for its definitive identification. We studied thi s problem by comparing the concrete lin guistic features occurring in administrative- lega l texts. Then we also compared different sy nchronic stages of the "Jel sava Town Chronicle" of 15661710 (South Central Slovakia) and the 16 th - 19 th century "Levoca Formu las of Oaths" (East Slovakia) , in order to determine trends in the ir lingui stic development. A comparison of spec ific lin gui stic features from diverse admini strative-legal texts reveals interestin g features in the manifestation of linguistic processes and the di stribution of phenomena in texts of different origins. Thus, all phenomena involving the modification of the Old Czech base are manifested in different texts in the same positions, and therefore many of them were not due to the lingui stic factors contrasting all Slovak dialects with Czech. An examp le of loss is furnished by the history of the phoneme Ii i, which was re placed in all positions by the phoneme Ir/ in regional variants of admini strative-legal writings. An example of maintenance is furni shed by the old instr. sg. feminine ending -11 (- u), which began to be used in Slovak written texts as a component of Old Czech morphological structure , not only in West and East Slovak admin istrative-lega l documents, where it is supported by local dialect usage, but also in Central Slovak. This shows that processes manifested in the written language spread into other reg ions from an epicentre. This examp le is especially interesting, as the Central Slovak ending -ou is formally identical to the new Czech ending -ou from the diphthong ization of - 11 (mezi Mikulasem Kowacze[m] a druhu osobu Matronu Elzbetu �SLOVAKIA 23 Haylowich /1658, Dojc, W es t Slo vakia/; Roli czku ... zo psseniczu posal ( 1728, Spi s, East Slovaki a); vsak z mu matku na vinicu ko mne chodivala zvadzat ( 1728, Krupina, Central Slovakia) 13. Some instances of doublets occur in South-West Slovak admini strati ve -lega l tex ts. As a rule , one member of such pair occurs more frequently , and may be considered the unmarked form. All the invariant feature s of these texts occur in non-South-Western administrative-legal documents Features with doubl et forms show both variants in non-SouthWestern texts, or, less frequ e ntly , only the unmarked variant. " Reg ional variants" had the function of doublets, which differentiated indivisible lan guage formations , but did not separate them into inde pe ndent lingui stic units. Thus, for example, the masc uline and ne ute r oblique adjective case form s with -e- in the endings, the only poss ible variant in South-West Slovak administrative-legal texts (ze Sa czcinskeho trhu spolem issly ( 1725 , Skalica)), also occurred in NorthWest Slovak (ta cesta od kamenneho Snehu na Polianku ( 1633, Pruske)) , North Central Slovak (za Radu Slowutneho a Oppatrneho muze Pana Tomassa Sk/adaneho 11649, Rufomberok/) , South-Central Slovak (pana knam milostiweho a /askaweho ( 1570, Banska Stiavnica)) and East Slovak (stegto strany Yarku mlinskeho /1658 , Sari s - Zemplfn/) texts. Side by side with these form s, their regional variants are also used in non-South-Western texts, e.g., the diphthongs -ie- (pre sirotky zu stale nebohyeho Samuela /166 I , Rufomberok/), -f- (-i-; (Pozdraweni y g iniho mnoho dobriho /1622 , Ban ska Stiavnica/), -o(Agnieha Istvana Radomskoho sestra /1608, Sari s - Zemplfn/). These features, mainl y typical of South-Weste rn written texts, may be seen as invariants, based on their genera l di stribution . Invariants on the level of concrete linguistic elements are always attested in South-Western texts, and therefore the lan guage of South-West administrative- '-' A lthough the M odern Czech and Slovak - ou endings are forma ll y identica l , they constitute the endpoints of two different hi storica l processes : Czech -ou is the reflex of th e diphthongisation of *- u resulting from th e denazali za ti on. fo ll owed by contraction. of * -ojQ ( * -11 < * -oju < * -ojQ). whereas Slovak -ou is simply the refl ex of contracti on. wi th subsequent denazali zati on. of * -ojQ (-ou < * -OQ < * -ojQ). �SLOVAKIA 24 lega l tex ts is genera ll y in varia nt by com pari so n to texts from other reg ion s of Slovakia. The o bvious fact th at Catholic literature and sec ul ar baroque poetry were based o n South-West Slovak dialects shows th at the sa me lin g ui st ic fo rmat io n functioned in a ll kinds of writte n texts, and was widespread in a ll region s of Slovakia. Thu s, the so-ca ll ed c ultural la ng uages were not indepe nde nt lingui stic formations. Firstly , no compl ete li st of distinct features can be revealed for any of the m, because every indi vidu a l isog loss used to c lass ify tex ts of different ori g in s yie ld s different res ults, even of " regiona ll y- based variants" recorded in written tex ts. In other word s, the lang uage of ad mini strative-lega l texts amounts to th e sum of minor loca l var ia nts united into a who le, w itho ut any tran s iti o na l fo rm ation s (so-ca ll ed c ultu ra l lang uages). 14 An ana lys is of the deve lopment of the lang uage of the " Je lsava Town Chronicle" revea ls a number of facts, whi c h are extre me ly important fo r the e luc idati o n of the dynamics of the developme nt of thi s ling ui stic fo rmati o n. There were man y phe nomena in the ear li e r records, as earl y as the I 560's and I 570's , deviating from Czech norms. Firstly, we found pan-Sl ova k features , w hi c h mi g ht have penetra ted writte n tex ts in different reg ions of Slovak ia independently of o ne anothe r (the absence of the phone me Iii and the nati ve Czech diphthong ou, the jotation of lab ia l consona nts before e < *e, *~, etc.). Phe nome na on the th whole untypica l of writte n 16 century texts a lso occ urred (the consiste nt occ urre nce of th e phoneme dz < *dj, for ms bo th with and without j before i in word-initial position, etc .). A few features, howeve r, we re o bviously Centra l Slovak (the diphtho ngs -uo- and -ie-, o < stron g * b , masculine and neuter nomina l in str. sg . forms in -om, masc uline and ne uter possess ive adjecti ve gen. sg. fo rms in -ho, etc .). Adj ecti ves w ith -ie- in the ir endin gs are th e most important, because they simulta neo us ly de mo nstrate th e break w ith the Old Czech writ14 K.McCone and D. Mathews describe similar se ts of probl ems in defining Middle Iri sh and Middle Engli sh respec tively. See Kim McCone. The Early Irish Verb (M aynooth , 1987) , pp. 18 1- 183 and Dav id M atth ews , (U ni versity Park , PA , 2000), pp. 1- 14. �SLOVAKIA 25 ten tradition and show th at some standardi sation processes were carried through in the la nguage of written Central Slovak texts, because these forms have the monophthong iii in South Centra l Slovak dia lects, including Je lsava. At the same time, whi le generall y ac knowl edg ing the impl e mentation of standardi sation processes in the Central Slovak dialects, it should be stated that they were rather weak, due to the occ urre nce of a numbe r of loca l features in the written tex ts. These inc luded, e.g., the almost total loss of the sy llabi c so nant r, the c han ge of ou into 6, primarily attested in the instr. sg . forms of feminine noun s and adjectives, the c hange of c into s, and the appearance of a afte r ve lars, etc. Some features may be found in late 16 th a nd early I 7'h ce ntury texts, which may be described as the rea li sation of two contradictory te ndencies: the wea kness of the loca l c harac te r of record s, because dialectal ele me nt s were lost in the respec tive la nguages (the restoration of sy llabic r, the loss of Gerner features ia < ie and s < c, etc.), and the increas ing occurre nce of features from the Trnava written tradition (the losses of the phoneme /dz/, masc uline and neuter adjectival form s with e in the e ndin gs, a nd di alecta l forms of I-participle bel/biel, etc.). In the I 630 's - I 650's the popul ation of Je lsava accepted th e Counter-Refo rmation , whic h was reflected in the language of the town chronicle. The first te nde ncy we named was modified , because the occ urrence of most of the already exist in g Ce ntral Slovak features in creased , but no new feat ures of Central Slovak orig in appeared in the texts. The second te ndency - followin g the Trnava written tradition - was maintained. The second tendency predominated until the earl y I 8 th ce ntury. W e may therefore conclude that over the whole hi story of th e "Je lsava Town Chronicle", its lang uage gradually adapted to Be rnol ak 's codification of Slovak literary la nguage, and not to Stur' s, as we mi ght ex pect based on the Central Slovak origin �26 SLOVAKIA of th ese texts. 15 The development of the language of the " Levoca Formulas of Oaths" was essentiall y similar: there is an early stratum of Polish di alectal feature s in the texts (e.g., plosive g and the Poli sh reflexes of the *tort formula) , with a layer of East Slovak ones (e.g., the vowe l e < * and reflexes of assibilated t' and d) superimposed. Over time, however, they were lost, because they could not res ist competition from pan-Slovak and West Slovak feature s, which beca me obvious in the early 18 th century, not long after the Counter-Reformation . 16 It is very important to note th at the lan guage of administrativelega l texts was common for both Catholics and Lutherans, in contrast to Catholic literature and secular baroque poetry. The language of popular poetry was also common to both Catholics and Lutherans, and it was on the whole also based on the SouthWestern written tradition. Specifically, however, it was characterised by a very fluid structure, because thi s lin guistic formation in such writings was contrasted to Literary Czech or some Slovak dialect, depending on the genre or contents of the respective verses. Consequently , Czech feature s, atypica l of the Slovak written tradition , penetrated the language of hi storical verse (for instance , the " Book of Verses" (East Slovaki a, 1751 ), or J . Bruk ' s manuscript co ll ectio n (Orava, North Central Slovaki a, 1794) or occasional poetry (for in stance , congratulation from the J. Lany manu script co ll ec tion , late 18th century). And conversely, a number of dialectal features are found in styli sed folksongs (e.g., the D. Kubik collection (Priev idza, Central Slovakia, 1791 )). From the early l 800's a number of Central Slovak feat ures occur in a variety of verses (for examp le, in J. Koll ar 's " Folksongs", the M. M. Krizan collection (Trencfn County, North-West Slovakia, 1839, etc.), which we consider a s ign of the 15 See in detail K[ o nstantin] V. Li fa nov, "Evoljucia j azyka " Je lsavskoj gorodskoj kni g i" 1566- 17 10 gg. i t. naz. Kul\urnyj sred nes lov ac kij j azyk", Zeitschrift filr Sla- wische Philologie. Bd. 58 , Heft I, 1999, pp. 151 - 170. See Ko nsta ntin V Lifanov , Genezis slovatskogo literaturnogo iazyka. LIN CO M 16 St udi es in Slavic Lingui sti cs, 2 1 (Muenchen , 200 I). pp. 163- 170. �SLOVAKIA 27 emergence of a spec ific language , the Centra l Slovak folklore koine, based on North Centra l Slovak di alects. Another sign of thi s phenomenon is the nature of the lingui sti c changes whi ch we find in manuscript copies of the folk songs (for instance, in J. Boczko 's collections fro m Banska Sti av ni ca ( 1830-1 83 1) and J. Jamri ch Junior 's from Gerner ( 1832-1 833)). These copyists were South Central Slovaks by birth , but when they copied songs from the second part of Koll ar 's "Slovak Secul ar Fo lksongs fro m Hun gary" , they gave preference to North Central Sl ovak features. 17 The purest vari ety of the Central Slovak fo lkl ore koine fun ctioned in North Central Slovaki a, and a written form is fi xed in the S.B. Hrobo n manu sc ript collecti on (S ielni ca, Liptov County, No rth Central Slovaki a, 1841 ). Its penetrati on into South Central and West Slovaki a (it did not influence the language of East Slovak folk songs, or minimall y so) took the form of infiltration of some its features. Later the Central Slovak folklore koine turned into a poetic koine, when it began to used in popular poetry as we ll , over the who le territory of Slovaki a (e.g., the verses of J. Szent-Kereszty ( I 822, of So uth Central Slovak ori gin ), the "Samlungen" manu script collection (Trnava, West Slovaki a, 18 17), the Eastern Slovak lawye r F. Balogh's translation of Hungari an poet Y.M. Csokonai' s verse (earl y 1800 's), and not just in the styli zations of folksongs. The Central Slovak fo lkl ore ko ine also penetrated the " hi gh" poetry of Luthera n poets, who had prev iously written in Czec h. The fi rst such works - three verses by S. Chalupka - were published in G . Fejerpataky' s Alm anac in 1834. At first thi s process was also mani fested in the sty li zati ons of folk songs, but in contrast to the popular poetry, it totall y o usted the prev io us lin gui stic system (the Czec h language). Later on it spread into other genres of hi gh poetry (the hymnal song "Nitra, Dear Nitra" was publi shed in the first volume of 17 Konstantin Lifa nov . " Stredos love nske basni cke ko ine pred l.'.. Stu rom", Slovenska rec. 60. 11 0. 5-6. 1995. pp. 264-28 1. �28 SLOVAKIA " Nitra" Almanacs in 1842). 18 Some previously known facts, also ascertained in the process of our study and analyzed by using sociolingui stic concepts, have made it poss ible to offer a ne w view of the origin and the sub seq uent development of the Slovak literary language. Thus, the lingui stic formation functionin g in Catholic literature, sec ul ar baroque poetry, admini strati ve-l ega l tex ts, popular poetry , etc. had all the propert ies of a literary lang uage, and may be called the "Old Slovak Literary language." As the lin gui stic material shows, it had started to take shape from the 1630 's on as a result of its developing di vergence from Literary Old Czech. Its epicentre was West Slovaki a. After the Battl e of Mohacs ( 1526), the capital of Hun gary and the archbishop's res idence were tran sferred to West Slovaki a, to Brati slava and Trnava respectively. Later on, South-West Slovakia 's role in cultural life became even more important, because a university with its ow n printing- house was opened there. At first, lingui stic development among Catholics and Luthera ns was identical. Texts were created by adherents of both confessions according to the " review mechani sm." 19 The common deve lopment of the Old Slovak literary language, however, was ruptured in the early l 600's, when ling ui stic diverge nces among Catholics and Lutheran s arose as a result of an aggressive Counter-Reformation. 18 K[onstantin] V. Li fanov, "Formy proniknovenija sredneslovackogo folk lornogo ko ine v ste ru avtorskoj poezii (konec XVIII v. - pervaja polovi na XIX v.)" , Wiener Slawistiches Jahrbuch, Bd. 44, 1998, pp. 99- 113. 19 It is a free tran slation of the Russ ian term " mechanizm peresceta" used by V. M. Zivov. Its essence concludes in the fact th at rather strong associated bonds between elements gi ven (l iterary) bookish character to a text and corres ponding elementts of people (d ialec tal ) speec h ex isted in th e minds of creators of tex ts. In th e case of adopti on of •'foreign " literary language, its elements contrasted to elemen ts of people speech and were initiall y bookish. Thu s, the opposition between adopted literary language and nati ve dialects was only in the fu nctional sphere. See, for examp le, V . M. Zivov, " Roi] russkogo ce rkov noslavianskogo v istoriji slavjanski ch literaturn yc h jazykov" , Aktual'nyje problemy sla vjansk ogo jazykoznanija (Moskva, 1988), pp. 4998. �SLOVAKIA 29 The Old Slovak literary language continued to develop in a Catho lic environment. It went throu gh all the important stages, including a translation of the whole of the " Bible" ( 1750), th e first Slovak novel : the "Adventures and the Experiences of Young Rene" (1783) , by J.L. Bajza, and its codification by A. Bernolak. The Old Slovak literary language was studied at elementary and secondary school s in different parts of S lovakia, and even at two universities - in Trnava and Kosice.20 Slovak Catholics numbered 75 % of population when emperor Joseph II iss ued the Patent of Toleration ( 1781 ), and perceived Czech as a heretical language. In thi s connection there is no reason to assert that the literary language of S lovaks was Czech prior to Bernol ak 's codification. Slovak Lutherans yielded their positions and had to seek external support , and they found it in Czech reli gious books. As a result, they reverted to the norms of Literary Czech (more exactly, to norms of the " Kralice Bible"), but not in all genres, and di gloss ia 2 1 arose in their environment. In thi s situation Czech was perceived as the high , cultivated form of the native language , whereas Old Slovak literary lan g uage was perceived as " ordinary," and to be used only in administrative-legal texts and popular poetry . Literary Czech and Old Slovak functioned in parallel in the Lutheran and Catholic environments respectively , and Catholi cs contrasted both literary languages, and gradually perceived that some features belonged not just to different functional spheres, but to different languages. As a result a new mechanism - conversion - arose in their environment. In practice it resembled the " review mechani sm", but differed substantially, because so me features were contrasted on the nati ve rather than on the functional level. Thus, Slovak Catholics began to perce ive spec ific features of their language on the leve l of 20 See Izidor Kotulic. " Bernolakovcina a predbernolakovska kulturna slovenc in a··, Pamatnica A ntona Berno/aka (Martin 1992), pp. 81, 88. 21 See Charles A. Ferguson, "Diglossia", Word, 15, 1959, no. 2, pp. 325-340 and Boris A. Uspenskij , Jazykovaia situacija Kijevskoj Rusi I jejo znacenije d!Ja istoriji russkogo literaturnogo jazyka (Moscow , 1983) , pp. 4-5. �SLOVAKIA 30 concrete phoneti c and morphological units, and so me fea tures as belonging to diffe rent periods. Th e situati on amon g Cath o li cs and Lutherans re ma in ed stable until the l 830 's, when the Centra l Slovak folkl ore ko ine penetrated into the sphere of hi gh poetry of Lutheran authors, and made it possible to codify a new literary language. r.. Stur made a major specific contribution by essenti all y changing the phoneti c and morpho logical syste ms of the literary language , but the lex icon fro m th e period of the Old Slovak literary language was maintained. Some features had reached the stage of con versati on (Catho lics perceived them as S lovak as opposed to Czech), and some were at the stage of rev iew (they were regarded as "booki sh/literary" (nati ve Czec h) or as ordin ary (native Slovak). The "ordinary" features codified by Stur were not accepted by Catholi cs, and they de manded that they be replaced by "booki sh" features, as was implemented in the codification of Hattala and Hodza ( 1852). SOURCES Catholic Literature P. Bajan, Sermones, 1760- 1771 (manuscript). Kamaldulska biblia, 1756-1759 (manu script). A. Macsay, Panes primatiarum aneb Chleby prwotjn (Trn ava , 171 8). D . Ma kos, Sermones, 1752- 1774 (manuscript). N. Ol ah, Ordo et ritus sanctae metropolitane ecc/esic Strigonien- sis, quibus parochi et a/ii animarum pastores in ecc/esiis suis uti debent. Viennae Austriae in aedibus Collegii caesarei, Societatis Jezu. Anno M.D.L.X. (manuscript). B. Smrtnik, Kunsst dobre umriti (Trnava, 1697). G. Vrabel, Sermones, 1766 (manuscript). �SLOVAKIA 31 Secular Baroque Poetry " Basne Petra Benickeho", Archiv starych cesko-s/oven skych /istfn , pfsomnostf a dejepisnych povodfn pre dejepis a literattiru Slovakov, Diel II. - Svazok I. (Tun::. sv . Martin, 1873), pp. 5-47. H. Gavlo vic, Wala sk a sskola mrawuw stodola (manuscript); Gerald J. Sabo, ed., Hugo/in 's Gavlo vic's Valaska skola (Co lumbus, Ohio, 1988). Stefan F Selecky, Obraz panye krasneg perem malowany, ktera maw Trnawe swoge prebiwany (manu script); Stefan F Selecky, "Obraz pani krasnej , perem malovany, ktera ma v Trnave svoje prebyvanf", Anto/6gia starsej slovenskej literattiry (Brati slava, 1981 ), pp. 522-530. Administrative-Legal Texts Inquisitiones, Skalica, 1616-1730 (manuscript). Darina Lehotska & Jozef Orlovsky , Najstarsia jelsavska mestska kniha 1566- 1710 (Martin , 1976). Listy Sta/ice IO kopijnfkov, Spis, XVII-XVIII storocie (manu- script). Mar ia Majtanova & Mil an Majtan, Krupin ski prfsne pravc (Bratislava, 1979). Missiles, Banska Stiavnica, XYI.-XYII. storocie (manu script). Obecna kniha obce Dojc, 1622-1836 (manu script). Panstvo Pruske, XVII.-XYIII. storocie (manuscript). Pfsomnosti Sarisskej a Zemplfnskej iupy, XYII.-XYIII. storocie (manuscript). Protocol/um mais mesta Ruiomberka, XYI.-XYII. storoc ie (ma- nuscript). Jozef Stoic, "Jazyk levocskych slovenskyc h prfsah zo XYI.-XIX. storocia", Jazyko vedny sbornfk, 5, l 951, pp. 197-247. Popular Poetry and Folksongs J. Csaplovics, Slowenske Wersse, (Pest, l 822). J. Jamrich ml. , Wselygake Rozlycne Rozprawky k zabawenf �32 SLOVAKIA zepsane, 1832- 1833 (manu script) Jan Koll ar, Narodnie spievanky, zvazok I, (Bratislava, 1953). Jan Misianik , Knii ka ry tmovni (Bratislava, 1952) . Samlungen, 18 17 (manu script). Spevnfk D. Boczka, 1830-183 1 (manu script). Lasz lo Sziklay, " Poznamky k Csokonaiho popularite v slove nskej literature," Sbornfk Filozofickej fak ulty Uni verzity Komen skeho. Philologica, 16, 1964, pp. 12 1-1 3 1. Pave l Josef Safarfk, Jan Kollar, Pjsne swetske lidu slawenskeho w Uhrach, swazek 2 (Pest, 1827). Jozef Skultety, " Literarno-hi storicke drobnost i", Slovenske pohl'ady, 17, 1897, pp. 125- 128. Zbornfk J. Bruka, 1794 (manuscript). Z bornfk M. M. Kriia na, 1839 (manuscript). Zbornfk D . Kubfka, 179 1 (manu sc ript). Zbornfk J. L any, koni ec XVIII . storocia (manu script). � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2005, Vol. 38 Description An account of the resource Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 7 The Origin and Development of the Slovak Literary Language 1 Konstantin V. Lifanov The history of the Slavic literary languages has developed rapidly over the last few decades as an independent linguistic discipline. Scholars have reviewed the objects of their study and defined them more precisely , and even attempted to develop optimal methods of research, all of which has made it possible for them to make adequate assessments of actual linguistic data, and to avoid imposing their contemporary perceptions on the past. For example, the use of socio1inguistic concepts has been very fruitful in the study of certain Sla- vic literary languages. However, many problems have so far remained uninvestigated. Thus Kretschmer, surveying the overall level of research into Slavic literary languages, declares that in spite of the amount of material that has already appeared, the processes whereby the Slavic literary languages emerged still remain to be worked out, as well as their regularities and specific features. 2 This conclusion also applies to the history of the Slovak literary language. Many texts written in Slovakia before the language was codified remain uninvestigated from the lingui stic point of view. There are hardly any comparative studies of texts of different ge nres or from different eras. Nevertheless , comparative study is the only 1 I deeply thank Professor Robert Orr and Professor M. Mark Stolarik for English corrections of this paper. 2 Anna Krechmer (Anna Kretschmer), " Sravnitel'naja istorija slavjanskich literatur- nych jazykov: Yoprosy metodologiji " , Vjestnik Moskovskogo uni vers iteta. Seria 9. Filologia. 3, I 998, p 48. 8 SLOVAKIA method that makes it poss ible to define the real status of co nc rete for ms a nd to determine, e.g., whether a give n for m is mere ly the result of a language error, because, e.g., a give n wri te r did not know the coeva l language norm , or of sty li stic variat ion arisin g from a g ive n genre of wri tin g, or a typical lin gui st ic feat ure characteristic of the Slovak written tradition as a whole. But if we cannot determine the status of concrete forms , we ca nnot qualify the essence of differe nt lang uage for mati o ns in the hi story of Slovak , a nd therefore we cannot compre he nd the process of the emergence and subseque nt deve lopme nt of the Slovak literary language eithe r. In its turn, this situation in the hi story of the Slovak literary language ope ns up the poss ibility of arbitrary interpretations, ofte n aris ing from extra lin gui st ic factors. Thus it is wide ly believed, mainly outside Slovakia, that the Slovak literary language emerged in the late 18 th century by differe ntiating itse lf from Czech , and that previous ly Slovaks had used Czech as their literary language. We may trace the sources of thi s beli ef to the concepts of some Czech lingui sts3, who did not recognize the di stinctiveness of Slovak and considered it merely a variant of a unitary Czechoslovak language. According to a seco nd view of thi s problem, which has been "official" in Slovak lingui stics since the mid- I 950 's, distinct languages - cultural West Slovak, Central Slovak, and perhaps East Slovak had emerged in Slovakia before the codificatio n of the Slovak literary language. Subsequently Bernolak 's 1787 codification was based o n c ultu ra l W est Slovak a nd Stur's ( I 840 's) on cultural Central Slovak. There is also a third view, accord in g to which the Slovak literary lang uage arose as a res ult of interact ion between the Czech literary language and Slovak (mainl y West Slovak) dialects. It was shared by ' See Albert Prazak , Dejiny spisovne slovenstiny po dobu Sturovu (Brati slava, 1922), A lbert Prazak , Cesi a Slovaci (Praha 1929) and Vaclav Yazny "Spisovny jazyk slove nsky", Ceskos lovenska vlasti veda , Rada 11, Sp isovny jazyk Cesky a s/ovensky (Praha 1936) pp. 145-2 15. SLOVAKIA 9 many Slovak linguists from I 900-1950.4 We embarked upon the study of thi s problem without preconceptions, and intended to base all conc lusions so lely on the analysis of concrete lin gui stic material and modern literary language theory. We cannot outline our theoretical fram ework in thi s paper, and therefore we can only refer to the first chapter of our book.5 Research into the problem of the Slovak literary language should take as its starting point the 14 th century, when Old Czech began to develop into an interethnic literary lan guage in Central Europe. At the same time it also penetrated into Slovakia. Stani slav, Kiraly , & Pauliny 6 show that in Slovakia copiers of Czec h texts tried to adhere to Czech norms. Infrin gements of these norm s tended to be iso lated and accidental , and may be described as simple errors. But as early as CC 14 - 15 fo ur changes - three phonolog ical and one morpholog ical - are attested in texts quite regul arly: the loss of the phoneme Iii, the loss of jotation in labials before lel < *e, *r, the affrication oft; d ' > c, dz, and the repl ace ment of vocati ves by nominatives. These processes constitute the initial stage of development of Old Czec h in Slovaki a, and its iso lation from the language functionin g in the Czech heartland. In the first place, we studied the further deve lopme nts of th ese phenom e na in th e spiritu a l literature of Slovak Catholics. • See , for exa mple, J. Y lkolinsky (Czambel 's pseudon ym) "O '·prvej " knihe slovenskej ", Z i ve na, 2, 1885, pp 230-240 . Henri ch Bartek, "S pi sov ny j azyk slovensky", Slovenska rec. 6, 1937- 1938, pp 50-57 and l.'.udovft Novak. "Cestina na Slove nsk u a vzn ik spisovnej slovenciny ", Slovenske pohl'ady . 54, 1938, pp 105-111. 159- 173, 2 17-222, 28 1-287. 5 Konstantin V. Lifanov, Genezis slovackogo literaturnogo jazyka . LINCOM Stu - dies in Slavic Linguistics, 21 (Munich 200 I ), pp. 18-4 1. 6 Jan Stani slav . " Zur Frage der Slowazismen in den alttschechi schen Denkmalern ", Zeitschrift fiir Slawistik. Bd. I, Heft 4. 1956. pp. 58-70, Bd. II . Heft I , 1957, pp. 3751 , Peter Kiraly. Zur Frage der altesten slowak ischen Sprachdenkmdlern" , Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiaru m Hungaricae. 4, 1958, pp. I 13- 158 , Eugen Pauliny, "Zac iatky kulturneho jazyka slovenskej narod nos ti ", Jazykovedne stridie. 6, 196 1. pp. 28-39. SLOVAKIA The re pl ace me nt of /f/ by Ir/ spread ra pidl y, alm ost over a ll S lovak wri tings , inc ludin g sp iritua l literature . By the time " Ol a.h 's Ritu a l" was tra ns lated (ca. I 550 - 1600) Iii was an obvio us, very irreg ul ar arc ha ism (proti nassy m mrskym hfJc hum ). In the re li gious treati ses of B. Smrtnik and A. Macsay , publi shed in 1697 and 171 8 res pecti ve ly, it is attes ted ma inl y in fo rm s of the ve rb ffc i , mos t probabl y as a pure ly orthographi ca l conve nti o n (Prosil ne kdy gedon Prite le sweho rikuce), but it is co mpletely absent in the manuscripts in vesti gated (the Ca ma ldul Bible ( 1756- 1759), and th e se rm ons of Mokos ( 1752- 1774), Vrabel ( I 766), and Bajan ( 1760- 177 1)). The deve lopme nt of /JI after labi a l co nso nants and before l e/ < *e, *~ was sli ghtl y di ffe re nt. The primary stages of thi s process were ide nti ca l to those in vo lved in the repl aceme nt of If/. Thus, according to Paulin /, exa mpl es of th at deve lopme nt still c lea rl y predominated in the I 5th century " Muni ch Confess ion al Formula" ( 16 fo rms with /j/ and three without), but they were refl ected incons iste ntl y as earl y as " Ol a.h 's Ritu al," as a rul e in the idi omati c fo rmul as at the end of verses (s stebau Bohe m Otcem y Duc he m Swatym bud ' cest y c hwa la na wieky wiekow. Amen). The di ffere nti ati o n betwee n genres based on the presence or absence of fo rms w ith or w itho ut /jl is characte ri sti c of later texts. Onl y fo rm s without /JI occ urred in the language of sermons, inc luding Baj an 's (tuto bude lakomec w Negwecsy potrebe), in spite of the situ ati on in hi s nati ve di a lect (Zahorsky), whe re fo rm s w ith /JI are still c urrent. However, fo rms w ith /JI re mained in the " hi ghe r" genres (in the " Bible" a nd re lig io us treati ses) and in Macsay 's la nguage they are used quite freque ntl y (T yto Pobudky ma clowek ws rdcy swem pilne vwafowati ; kri wdy net1pet1). Spec ial vocati ve for ms, and nom inati ves used as vocati ves, were lost in the maj ority of Sl ovak di alects. They were restri cted to animates in spiritual Catho li c literature (radu g se tec hd y Narod Uhersky 7 Eugen Paul iny, ·'Mnfchovska spovedna formu la" , Jazykovedny casopis. 10. no. I , 1959, p. 30. SLOVAKIA 11 /Vrabel/ - A braham e, A braham e ne wsta hug ruky tweg na djte /Macsay/). In contrast to Literary Old Czech, anim ate noun s w ith palatal ste ms had the same endin gs as nouns with no n-palatal ste ms (chce m rect du sso kresta nska bludica /M okos/ ; Czec h du se!. It is inte resting that these were the very forms that Berno lak codi fied. The hi story of the affricates c and dz(< t'and d ') shows that new fo rm s did not always oust co mpe tin g o lde r fo rms as a res ult of the loss of the oppos ition " literary - non-literary." In thi s case the te ndency was c hanged and the literary language lost the affri cates. They were w ides pread in I 4'h - I S'h century writin gs, but o nl y iso lated examples appeared in I 8'h century Catho li c literature (strhel se weter, zrucil dom /Vrabel/) . Th ese fo ur phe no me na are c uri o us ly s imil ar: they occ urred in literary Old Czech, but onl y sporadi ca ll y, occ urring in tex ts as errors by Czec h copy ists. These fo rm s deve loped into competin g doubl ets in the Slovak writte n language. However, the affri cati on of t'and d' differed from the other phenome na, in th at it made the phonol og ica l syste m more compl ex (the phone mes ga ined an additi onal artic ul atory feature) , while the othe r phe nome na, on the contrary , s implified the system , because they in vol ved the loss of a ph one me, or a pos iti onal vari ant of a phoneme, or a gra mm ati ca l fo rm . He nce we mi ght sugges t th at ph e nome na simpli fy in g a syste m preva il in co mpetiti o n in th e earl y stage of deve lopme nt of a literary la nguage outs ide its core ethni c te rritory, but phe no me na complicatin g it do not. Thi s is also suggested by the fact that it was not until the mid- I 8'h century th at the ph one me dz < *dj pe netrated the la nguage of spiritua l li teratu re; prev io us ly it had been co nsiste ntl y repl aced by /z/, or rare ly by Id '/ (zretedlne p ot wrz uje [pa n- S lovak po twrdzuj e] to wssec ko Job; skrze pokanj z te ho sna se probud'uje [pan-Sl ovak prebudz uje] /Macsay/) . The re was an esse ntial di ffe re nce between sporadi c pheno me na and doubl ets in wri tten Old Czec h. T he latte r survived as vari ants fo r almost the who le hi story of the language of Slovak Cath o li c literature, e .g., the refl exes of so-ca ll ed regress ive uml aut, i.e., the deve- SLOVAKIA 12 lopment of tautosyllabic -aj- to -ej- in Old Czec h, and the emerge nce of the co nso nant clu ster sr:. c haracterist ic of Old Czech and Central Slovak, from sc- (< *stj-, *skj- , a nd *sk- before fro nt vowe ls). The first phenomenon was subject to a degree of gra mmaticali zation , as may be deduced from the fac t that no n-uml au ted seq ue nces obviously predomin ated in imperati ve fo rm s (ne mess kag obratjtj se ku Pa.nu Bohu /Macsay/) , but variation in the superlati ve forms of adjectives and adverbs was maintain ed as late as the mid- 18 th century, and usage mai nl y depended on the indi vidu al taste of the respecti ve author (pod'te a pod mym stjnem odpocjwagte - eopustili nalezk i swe a cestu nagtwrdssu /the " Bible"/; krize a proti wenstwy trpezliwe znassagme - sa m Tyran ze swym negmlacssym sine m /Vrabel/). Forms w ith sc- a nd st: were used in re li g ious texts throu ghout the pe ri od covered by the research , regardl ess of the orig ins of their authors (gegjho pak narozenj cas gesste oppodal byl - Pridrzme se th gessce S. Paw la /Macsay/). It was onl y in mid- I 8 century sermon s that th e tendency towards regional differentiation of th ese forms e merged: Makos used on ly fo rms with st:, following hi s nati ve Cen- tral Slovak dial ect (kazani takow i mestiane bi zas lu zili ), while Bajan, from Western Slovakia, mostly used forms w ith sc- (kde tenkrat bude Utociisscie hri ssniku). The process of for mati on of lin gui stic norms, which mu st have ex isted , may be observed from the lin gui st ic mate ri al th at ca n be g leaned from the written records. The occ urre nce of nati ve Czech and nati ve Slovak for ms in texts was not random, but governed by certain rules: firstl y the primary literary and non-literary fo rms arose, the n the primary non-literary form usuall y ousted the primary literary one. These processes, however, were subject to the princ ipl e of flexibl e stability8, whereby they were impl e me nted sy nchroni ca ll y, and thu s co ntinuity was ma intain ed be tween th e written languages of diffe re nt epoc hs. Thus, the fo ll ow in g new phe nomena, untypi ca l of " Yi lem Matezius ( Yi lem Matesius), ·'O neobchodimosti stab il'nost i litera turnogo jazyka" . Praiskij lingvisticeskij krniok (Moskva. 1967). p. 38 1 13 SLOVAKIA earlie r writings, are attested in the tran slation of the "Ol ah Ritual ": □ unco ntracted forms of the gen., dat. and loc. sg. of femi nine adjecti ves e ndin g in fun ctional non -pa lata l conso na nts o usted the corresponding co ntracted forms (podl e tagneg radd y otcowskeg a dobrotiweg wu le twey); □ there was vari ation betwee n the nati ve Czech in str. forms of the pronouns ty and seba with the root vowe l o, a nd the nat ive Slovak ones with the root vowe l e, but the native Slovak forms prevailed (s steba u Bohe m otcem y s Duchem Swatym - s tobou bohem Ot- cem s Duchem Swatym); □ both the short and lon g forms of participl es were used as predi cati ves (za hrj c hy nasse vcinen gest - kterjmz to byl zapaleny proti nassy m mrskym hrjchum), etc. Some phe nome na are first attested in the lang uage of Smrtnik's re li gious treati se: □ the an im ate ge n.-acc. plural (Wide l pyssycych se A nge luw; cf. "Olah Ritua l": ze sy pro nas lidj hrjssne vkri fo wany) ; □ a n epenthetic vowel in masc uline forms of the /-participl e of consonant ste ms (polozil ho na Oltari na hranjcy drew a wstahe / ru ku ; cf. a n examp le fro m " Olah 's Ritu a l": z nes / zuriwy hnew otce tweho wecneho) ; □ the gramm ati ca li zation of piehlask a9 , prese rved in so me form s and lost in others, e.g., it is preserved in participial and verba l adverbia l endings, but beginning to be lost in present verb forms (gako Rewy we wykwjtagicy Winnicy; smegjce se pobij za k bytwe; pred Ssediwinamj wassymj Ml ads sy hore powstawagj - Dijtky zros- 9 Pieh/iska denotes the series of comprehensive progressi ve vowe l changes, unique to earl y Czech within Slavic. which was ori ginall y manifested co nsisten tl y in the morphology. but later reduced due to analogical pre ssures. Basically, it involved the frontin g and raising of vowels after origin ally soft consona nts. e. g .. u/ice < * ulica. biicho < * br ·ucho. see. e. g .. Miroslav Komarek. Historicka mluvnica ceski. 1: Hlis k os l ovf (Praha. 1962). pp. 62-66, I 15-118 , 153; 1964: 17, 18. 54; Charl es Townsend & Laura Janda. Common and Comparati ve Slavic (Indi ana 1996), pp. 9 192. I 6 I. I 63 , 272. SLOVAKIA 14 tie wchazagu do sklepu); □ the spread of the genitive of the pronoun onilony to the acc., with both forms used as variants (pi su ge y pro tebe - prikazal aby se zem otewrela a za ziwa gych pozrela), etc. The majority of the features peculiar to the language of spiritual literature spread in the first half of the 18 th century. These trends are shown in the lan guage of Macs ay's religious treatises, which a lso contains the following further innovation s: □ masculine loc. pl. forms in -och (zalezelo to znamenj na skut- koch geho zazracnych; cf. nenj wskutcych miloserdenstwj (Smrtnik)); □ the dat. , loc. and instr. pl. of noun s such as kost' fo ll ow the pattern of ulice/iena (pri ledagakyc h wecech se zabaw ugu - a w smetach hrjchuw lezite); □ the spread of the loss of sy llabic sonants in abso lute word- final position , apart from /-participles, where this process took place earlier (Ale o Swaty Otce wyswet li vmysl twug - gakz ty s wilozjl smyse/ geho), etc. However, some Czech elements were very stable and were used almost universally: □ the sequence ji- in word-initial position , in contrast to Slovak i- (gako by mluwil a prisahal gim ("The Bible"); □ velar/alternations in the dat/loc. sg. of feminine nouns (Zadag- jcymu wodi mleka dala a na ssalce knj zatskeg podala ("The Bible") and in the nom pl. of adjectives agreeing with animates (A le zase pocali synowe Yzrahelsty ciniti zle weci ("The Bible"), etc. These processes obviously demon strate the modification of Old Czech as it was transformed into a standardised written language. Its structure consisted of native Czech and native S lovak elements used according to fairly strict rules. Such phenomena, maintained in Slovak, but lost in contemporary Literary Czech, are direct evidence of its clear connection to Old Czech. Apart from analogical doublets in literary Old Czech and in the language of Slovak Catholics, these are as follows: SLOVAKIA □ 15 the preservati o n of the auxili ary in 3rd person verb fo rm s of the /- parti c ipl e un til the mi d- I 8 th century (a kralostwy sweho nekoncene ho pocatek gest ucinil (Mokos); ze ges t guz pri dwerac h wibehei protj ne mu / Baja n/); suc h fo rm s were co mpl ete ly lost in S lovak di alec ts by abo ut the I 5th ce ntury1°, and they were very ra re in Czec h writings by the 16 th century; 11 □ the e ndin g -u/-ti in the inst. sg. of fe minine noun s and adjec- ti ves, and also so me personal pronouns, in all works of Catho lic literature, inc ludin g authors of Central Sl ovak o ri g in , altho ugh they do not ac tu all y occ ur in Central Slovak (S krotite le Sweta A lexand ra M ladeho kw itnu cj ho strilku swu ra nil a; Pod se mnu odegdi (S mrtni k)); □ no d iphthongs apart from uo in the "Ol ah Ritu al", partic ul arly in Smrtni k 's re li g io us treati se, whi c h co ntinu es th e s itu ati o n in Literary Old Czec h (Oleg obmekssuge kuoie (S mrtni k)); □ gemin ates in the same words as in Literary O ld Czech (podle tagneg raddy Otcows keg /Olah/), etc. The language of S lovak Catho li c literature, howeve r, was indepe nde nt. It deve loped accordin g to its ow n rul es, in co ntrast to those of Old Czec h and Slova k di alec ts. Spec ific processes e merged rapidly, e.g., th e above- me nti o ned grammati ca li zati on of piehlask a, plus the follow ing: □ most masc uline no un s have gen. pl. fo rm s in -u w, whi ch is absent fro m Slova k di alects, and was lost in literary Czech (odwede l od rodiczuw, od prateluw /Vrabel/); □ an oppos iti o n between fe minin e adj ectives with ste m-fin al no n-palata l a nd ste m-fi na l palatal co nso na nts, beca use th e latte r fo rm s also had contracted gen. , dat. a nd loc. fo rm s (V < *Vj V; Mlc zim , abi ch w dnessny (< *-j-) Reczy meg d luhy ne bil /Bajan/), whil e the fo rmer had uncontracted fo rms; □ Ill 11 the de limi tati on of gen. and acc. pl. fo rms of animate nouns as Rudolf K rajcov ic, Nacrt dejfn slovenskeho jazyka (Bratislava, 197 1) p. 143 A rn ost L amprec ht, Dusan Slosar & Jaros lav Bauer, Historicka mlu vnice cestiny (Praha, 1986), p. 244 SLOVAKIA 16 observed in Macsay ' s lan guage, and in the language of the " Bible" (ge n.: okolo deset ti syc uw wseckych sy lnych a udatnych Muiuw; acc.: kdiz zachwatili dwoch mu iti s knjzat Madyanskych /th e " Bible"/); □ the appearance of spec ial gen. sg. forms of the pronouns ty and seba, with -o- in the root (a le podobne wecy pro sobe od druheho slissetj pohrdagj (S mrtnik)), etc. Many native Slovak elements in the language of Slovak Catholic literature were pan-Slovak, but some of them directly indicate the region of Slovakia which played the main role in the formation of the Slovak written tradition : West Slovak. This is espec iall y true of features that do not occur in other Slovak dialects, primarily Central Slovak, such as , e.g.: □ diphthongs tended to be lost; □ -e in the endings of adjectives with a ste m-fi nal pal atal (ni c nad neho neni twrdsseho /Mokos/; Czech t vrdsfho; North Central Slovak tvrdsieho, South tvrdsiho/tvrdsiho) ; □ non-contracted gen. , dat. , and acc . forms (in the latter case if agreeing with animate noun s) of masc uline and neuter possessive adjectives (abich guss kpredsewzeti mogemu mluwil /Mokos/; Czech memu; Central Slovak m 6jmu); □ epenthetic -e- in masculine /-part iciples (Ce ntral Slovak -o-; a do stawu sweg Boskeg milosti pren esel /Mokos/; Czech pienes /; Central Slovak preniesol) , etc. D moreover, many native Czech e lements remained unchan ged, because they also occur in West Slovak as a whole, or in its SouthWestern subdial ects, e.g.: D the sequence rot- as a reflex of Common Slavic c ircumflex *6rt- (aby rostlo nany Hlozj a Trnj (S mrtnik ); Czech and Wes t Slovak rostlo; Central Slovak nistlo); □ the vowel e as a refl ex of Common Slavic strong *b (a gedna zadruhu wen zkostola wichazali /Mo kos/ ; Czech and West Slovak ven; Central Slovak von ); D the ending -em in the loc. sg. of masc uline and neuter adjec- 17 SLOVAKIA ti ves (aby na hrobowem kamenj tyto slowa wy kresatj dali /M acsay/ ; Czech and West Slovak hrobovem ; Centra l S lovak hrobovom ); □ the endin gs -e and -owe in the no m. pl. of anim ate no un s (nadto y pry tele daleko od stupili od ne ho /the " Bible"/ ; mn ozy p atriarcho we, mnozy kni zata a w udcowe /V rabel/; Czech p hite le , patriarchove, vudcove; West S lovak prate/e, patriarchove, vodcove; Central Slovak priatelia, patriarchovia, vodcovia) , etc. The typical West Slovak elements occ urring in Catho li c literary texts were as fo ll ows: □ the lack o f sy ll abic sonants from ori gin al sequences of conso- nants plus b i b + I (iluc Draku w gest wino geg ich (Smrtnik); Czech i luc; Central Sl ovak i lc; the isogloss was located on the territory o f South-Western (Trnava) di alects); □ the instr. sg. e ndin g -e m in masc uline and ne uter no un s (A sed'e la pod strom em palmowym, ktery m enem gey m sa menowal /the " Bible"/ ; Czec h, Zahorak, and some adj acent Trn ava di alec ts stromem, jmeneml m enem ; Central Slova k and other Wes t S lovak di alects have -om : stromom , menom), etc. Althou gh thi s lin g ui stic form ati on does di splay territori a ll ybased di alect di vergences, mai nl y in sermons, di alectal fea tures have not totall y submerged its characteri sti c pan-di alectal elements. If we compare the lin gui stic structures of Slovak Catholic literature and Berno lak 's codifi cation, we may conc lude that the codi ficati on was not somethin g new in princ iple. Nati ve Czec h fea tures occurring in , e.g., both the language of Slovak Catho li c literature and Berno lak's codifi cati on, clearl y de mo nstrate the c lose co nnec ti on between the two. These features are as fo llows: □ contracted fo rm s of possess ive adjecti ves (m eho, etc.) ; □ dat. sg. fo rms of ori g in all y soft-stem neuter noun s, whi ch d is- pl ay the refl exes of the ceska p fehlask a, i.e., u>i (srdci); □ □ neuter noun s endin g in -nf (stawaiif); parti c ipl es and verba l ad verb s w ith pieh/aska in suffixes ( wolag icf, wolagic); □ the I" person subjuncti ve of by t' in -ch, incl ud in g co mpoun d SLOVAKIA 18 conjunctions (e.g., abich); □ the sequence ji- in word-initial position (gim), etc. The material being analyzed shows that the language of Catholic literature had many features characteristic of a literary language. It was cultivated, selective, functionally homoge neous, and essentially supra-dialectal. For its definitive identification as such , it needs to be ascertained whether it was only a religious style or multifunctional , and whether it was widespread over the whole of Slovakia. In order to answer the first question we compared the language of Catholic literature to the language of secular baroque poetry , based on the following texts: P. Benickfs [original] "Slovak Verses" ( 1652), S.F. Selecky ' s " Pen Portrait of a Beautiful Lady" ( 170 I), and H. Gavlovic's "The Pastoral School " ( 1775). The language of secular baroque poetry generally coincides with the lan guage of Catholic literature. The linguistic differences in each genre are mainly based on the respective periods of composition ; and not the origins of the authors . In other words, secular baroque poetry may be grouped along with Catholic literature in accordance with its period of composition. The vowel system s of both genres may be characterised by their clear tendency to use long monophthongs instead of native Czech and Central Slovak diphthongs. The native Czech diphthong ou (orthographic au) , also attested in earlier spiritual literature, occurs only in Benicky (Spravedlivim gsaudem I Osemetnim !idem / Pracuje gich chitrost (Benicky); moudrost y cest geho /Olah/ ; Strach Saudu a Ostrost Sudce (Smrtnik)). It is absent from 18 th century works , however, regardless of genre. In contrast to Catholic literature, other diphthongs occur sporadically in the language of Benicky and Gavlovic : the former has two examples of -ia- , and the latter nearly ten of -ie-, and perhaps one example of -iu- (Neb size Rodiczke / Kliatby Materynske / Prinasegj pokuty (Benicky) ; Spiwala sy gedna baba : mam penazy dgessku, I su do zeme zakopane, / newim w kterem br- geiku /Gavlovic/; A gak pangu penezitu, / musiss geg sluziti , / Gak chudobnu budess w dome / dwe chudoby miti (Gavlovic). These phe- SLOVAKIA 19 nomena may be described as deliberate violations of norm. 12 The wholesale remodelling of the front/back contrast in the vowel system due to the gradual reduction of pieh/aska provides another substantial feature common to secular baroque poetry and Catholic literature. The grammaticalization of piehJaska may also be observed in the language of secular baroque poetry, generally identical to similar processes in the language of Catholic literature. This convergence is manifest in the stability of some grammatical forms , variation in others, and even in the total loss of some forms with piehlaska Thus, participial and verbal adverb endings are the most stable (Had kuzy svu zvleka, / Orlyce z daleka / Letagicz pera pusty (Benicky); czistotu woniczy proto smim potwrdit (Selecky); Ktery mlcy , ku mluweni , / pricynu magice, I Wiceg cyni, nezli zwitas / zamky walagice (Gavlovic). In contrast, at an early stage 3 rd person forms without piehlas- ka began to be replaced by forms with piehlaska and a stage where forms both with and without coexist occurs in the language of Ben icky, which chronologically corresponds to the language of Smrtnik (Nebo u susedu / Pekagj chleb z medu, / Take pryslovy byva - Saty ozdobene, I Czinicz telo pisne / Molove prei iraju (Benicky)). As in the language of Catholic literature, forms with pieh/aska are absent from the language of F. Selecky and H. Gavlovic (Mnozy tez zadagu wzacznost smichu widjet (Selecky); Ne ze zeme, ale z Judi / wiros- tagu zlosti , / Puwod magu w marnych Srdcach I z nedobreg wlchkosti (Gavlovic). The convergence of the main linguistic features of Catholic literature and sec ular baroque poetry also affected the morphological system. The features which have changed are as follows: □ In the language of Benicky the development of animate gen.lace. forms in the plural of nouns is fixed at a stage where both nom./acc. and gen.lace. forms occur. The translation of "Olah ' s Ritual," in which the original nom ./acc. forms are still consistent, repre- 12 See Ian Muk arfovsk ii (Jan Mukai'ovsky), ·"Literaturn yj jazyk i poeticeskij jazy k", Praiskij lingvisticeskij kruiok (Moskva, 1967), pp. 407-408. SLOVAKIA 20 sents an intermediate stage and the treati se of B. Smrtnik refl ects the e ndpoint of thi s process: the re are no nom ./acc. forms in Selecky and Gavlovic at all (Mas lj se so uditj , / Mu sis svedky mitj , / Tak bude vec vihrana - Yzlast gestlis na vogne / Drz vogak u v s ilne / Czastim napominanim (Benicky); Ked bi g ih ranjenych ona htje la hog it (Se lecky) ; A Kato mu odpowedel : / Nemluw mi nic wice, / bil by zazrak, kdyby zhryzly / Sswabuw nohaw ice (Gavlovi c); □ the loss of the spec ial acc. forms of the pe rso nal pronoun oni/ony (here both Benicky and Smrtnik have doubl ets, and they may be contrasted on the one ha nd with "Ola.h 's Ritual ," the point of departure, and on the other hand , to a ll other writin gs attesting to the e nd of the process (Magj peczet daty , / 0 to se staraty , / Aby ge ginsy stihat - Darmo konom hv yzdat / Kdyz g ich mas napagat / gestlj ze sam nepi ge (Benicky); Prirownam g ich k oczam soko la draheho (Selec ky); Proto wzacny karbunkulu s / y drahe kameni , / ze g ich zridka uhlidame, / w hognosti g ich ne ni (Gav lovic); □ the replace ment of primary forms of /-participles with ste m- fin a l sy ll a bic sonants by forms with epenthetic -e- (Benicky and " Ol a.h 's Ritual " have only forms with sy llabic sonants, they still predomin ate in Smrtnik , whi le 18 th century writings, including the works of Selec ky and Gavlovi c (Zes ze statku panskeho / Zbohatl, v kratky cas / vezme ti to Pan zas (Be nicky); jakbi u kralowneg lasku bil dosahel (Se lec ky ); A Pan os la se u/eke/, / osla dal zabiti, / Tak osel, chtic las ku ziskat, / strati I ziwobiti (Gav lovi c)) have only innovatio ns, etc . The following phenome na may be termed stabl e : □ The consiste nt preservation of alternations in nom . pl. adj ec- tives agree in g with animate noun s (Tak pansty dvorane I Yak nahl e pan vstane / Nec h zanim postupu g u (Benicky); ked by ta czi czerti pgek ni bil y w pe kl e (Se lecky); Nazy na Swet prich adzame / ze ziwota Matk i, / Neprinassame ze sebu / penize a statki (Gavlovic); □ masc uline a nd ne ute r in str. sg. forms in -em (Ne b czasta pri saha / Ciasem dopomaha / ze zustava lhar vetsy (Be ni c ky); nebo s ak samitem okrasle na bi wa (Se lec ky) ; Zena mu fov i ukl ady / z placem spu sob uge, / Geho mi se l vsse li ga kim / s pu s obe m probu ge SLOVAKIA 21 (Gavl ov ic); bych (Chtje l bih mnihe m zostat, rad bih giste wgedj e l (Selecky); Y kosselu bych predala, / vssak se mu za bo□ th e subjun cti ve in gim, I Kdyz se trochu podnapi gem, / ce la neobstog im (Gav lov ic), etc. Sporadic phe nome na simil ar to those in the language of Catho li c literature may also be fo und in the language of sec ul ar baroque poetry: ge min ate consona nts (Trucow ity y neg le pss u / c udzu Raddu ha ni , I A teprw a gu c hce plnit, / kdyz se guss porani (Gav lov ic); 3d pe rson /-parti cipl es w ith overt a uxili aries (Z iwot ta k cz istotneg c hwa li ges t zas lu zil (Se lecky)), co ntrac ted fe minine loc. sg. Adj ecti ves w ith stem-fi nal palatals (Napomaha k pravde, / V negchitregsi zrade / Sv u ukazuge moc nost (Benicky)), etc. T he lingui sti c di ffe rences arising fro m c hrono log ica l d ive rgences betwee n sec ul ar baroque poetry and Catho li c li teratu re onl y in vo lve detail s, mainl y in stances whe re poets use such language e le me nt s as had already bee n lost or had not yet e merged in Catho li c literature. Thus, fo r instance, H. Gav lov ic used both -om and -um as masc uline nomin al dat. pl. endings, although the latte r fo rm s had already been lost in Cath olic literature by around the l 750's (De n Sed/akom a Noc ia kom I negw ic pos luhu ge, / to Sowa w cy me ry zac ke m / slu ssne oznamuge - Prez ce ly de n Walac h chodi , / a malo spi w nocy, / By mohe l bit proti wlkum I owcam na pomocy) . The masc uline loc. pl. ending -och had already appea red by Beni cky's tim e, sli ghtl y ea rli er than in Catho li c literatu re (Kupcove, fl agnarkj , I V hostincoch krczmarky / Nemagf dluho spavat). Sometimes fo rm s were se lected based on the need fo r a rhy me. Thu s, in G av lov ic we do find 3rd person present forms with piehlaska, but onl y in cases where they are part of a rhyming sche me (Wssec ke wecy cas sw ug magu, / cas gest k fartovani , / Kdyz se zme ni ss c hwa litebne, / zaden te nezhani - Coko li w ge kre m potre by, / to guss stog i w zbytku , / Z bytek w sto loc h we Ike statki / vihana z pribitku). A lingui sti c analys is of sec ul ar baroque poetry and Catho li c literature shows th at th e la nguage fo rmati on in these genres was ide nti ca l. In othe r words, the language of Catho lic lite rature was not onl y 22 SLOVAKIA religiou s. It has already been shown that the language of sec ular baroque poetry, specifically Gavlovic ' s " Pastoral School ", mostly coincides with the language of administrative-legal texts of South-Western origin. Hence it follows that comparing them with administrative- lega l texts from other regions involves in principle the comparison of different genres. And thi s in its turn makes it possible to determine whether thi s language formation was widespread in all region s of Slovakia, which is very important for its definitive identification. We studied thi s problem by comparing the concrete lin guistic features occurring in administrative- lega l texts. Then we also compared different sy nchronic stages of the "Jel sava Town Chronicle" of 15661710 (South Central Slovakia) and the 16 th - 19 th century "Levoca Formu las of Oaths" (East Slovakia) , in order to determine trends in the ir lingui stic development. A comparison of spec ific lin gui stic features from diverse admini strative-legal texts reveals interestin g features in the manifestation of linguistic processes and the di stribution of phenomena in texts of different origins. Thus, all phenomena involving the modification of the Old Czech base are manifested in different texts in the same positions, and therefore many of them were not due to the lingui stic factors contrasting all Slovak dialects with Czech. An examp le of loss is furnished by the history of the phoneme Ii i, which was re placed in all positions by the phoneme Ir/ in regional variants of admini strative-legal writings. An example of maintenance is furni shed by the old instr. sg. feminine ending -11 (- u), which began to be used in Slovak written texts as a component of Old Czech morphological structure , not only in West and East Slovak admin istrative-lega l documents, where it is supported by local dialect usage, but also in Central Slovak. This shows that processes manifested in the written language spread into other reg ions from an epicentre. This examp le is especially interesting, as the Central Slovak ending -ou is formally identical to the new Czech ending -ou from the diphthong ization of - 11 (mezi Mikulasem Kowacze[m] a druhu osobu Matronu Elzbetu SLOVAKIA 23 Haylowich /1658, Dojc, W es t Slo vakia/; Roli czku ... zo psseniczu posal ( 1728, Spi s, East Slovaki a); vsak z mu matku na vinicu ko mne chodivala zvadzat ( 1728, Krupina, Central Slovakia) 13. Some instances of doublets occur in South-West Slovak admini strati ve -lega l tex ts. As a rule , one member of such pair occurs more frequently , and may be considered the unmarked form. All the invariant feature s of these texts occur in non-South-Western administrative-legal documents Features with doubl et forms show both variants in non-SouthWestern texts, or, less frequ e ntly , only the unmarked variant. " Reg ional variants" had the function of doublets, which differentiated indivisible lan guage formations , but did not separate them into inde pe ndent lingui stic units. Thus, for example, the masc uline and ne ute r oblique adjective case form s with -e- in the endings, the only poss ible variant in South-West Slovak administrative-legal texts (ze Sa czcinskeho trhu spolem issly ( 1725 , Skalica)), also occurred in NorthWest Slovak (ta cesta od kamenneho Snehu na Polianku ( 1633, Pruske)) , North Central Slovak (za Radu Slowutneho a Oppatrneho muze Pana Tomassa Sk/adaneho 11649, Rufomberok/) , South-Central Slovak (pana knam milostiweho a /askaweho ( 1570, Banska Stiavnica)) and East Slovak (stegto strany Yarku mlinskeho /1658 , Sari s - Zemplfn/) texts. Side by side with these form s, their regional variants are also used in non-South-Western texts, e.g., the diphthongs -ie- (pre sirotky zu stale nebohyeho Samuela /166 I , Rufomberok/), -f- (-i-; (Pozdraweni y g iniho mnoho dobriho /1622 , Ban ska Stiavnica/), -o(Agnieha Istvana Radomskoho sestra /1608, Sari s - Zemplfn/). These features, mainl y typical of South-Weste rn written texts, may be seen as invariants, based on their genera l di stribution . Invariants on the level of concrete linguistic elements are always attested in South-Western texts, and therefore the lan guage of South-West administrative- '-' A lthough the M odern Czech and Slovak - ou endings are forma ll y identica l , they constitute the endpoints of two different hi storica l processes : Czech -ou is the reflex of th e diphthongisation of *- u resulting from th e denazali za ti on. fo ll owed by contraction. of * -ojQ ( * -11 < * -oju < * -ojQ). whereas Slovak -ou is simply the refl ex of contracti on. wi th subsequent denazali zati on. of * -ojQ (-ou < * -OQ < * -ojQ). SLOVAKIA 24 lega l tex ts is genera ll y in varia nt by com pari so n to texts from other reg ion s of Slovakia. The o bvious fact th at Catholic literature and sec ul ar baroque poetry were based o n South-West Slovak dialects shows th at the sa me lin g ui st ic fo rmat io n functioned in a ll kinds of writte n texts, and was widespread in a ll region s of Slovakia. Thu s, the so-ca ll ed c ultural la ng uages were not indepe nde nt lingui stic formations. Firstly , no compl ete li st of distinct features can be revealed for any of the m, because every indi vidu a l isog loss used to c lass ify tex ts of different ori g in s yie ld s different res ults, even of " regiona ll y- based variants" recorded in written tex ts. In other word s, the lang uage of ad mini strative-lega l texts amounts to th e sum of minor loca l var ia nts united into a who le, w itho ut any tran s iti o na l fo rm ation s (so-ca ll ed c ultu ra l lang uages). 14 An ana lys is of the deve lopment of the lang uage of the " Je lsava Town Chronicle" revea ls a number of facts, whi c h are extre me ly important fo r the e luc idati o n of the dynamics of the developme nt of thi s ling ui stic fo rmati o n. There were man y phe nomena in the ear li e r records, as earl y as the I 560's and I 570's , deviating from Czech norms. Firstly, we found pan-Sl ova k features , w hi c h mi g ht have penetra ted writte n tex ts in different reg ions of Slovak ia independently of o ne anothe r (the absence of the phone me Iii and the nati ve Czech diphthong ou, the jotation of lab ia l consona nts before e < *e, *~, etc.). Phe nome na on the th whole untypica l of writte n 16 century texts a lso occ urred (the consiste nt occ urre nce of th e phoneme dz < *dj, for ms bo th with and without j before i in word-initial position, etc .). A few features, howeve r, we re o bviously Centra l Slovak (the diphtho ngs -uo- and -ie-, o < stron g * b , masculine and neuter nomina l in str. sg . forms in -om, masc uline and ne uter possess ive adjecti ve gen. sg. fo rms in -ho, etc .). Adj ecti ves w ith -ie- in the ir endin gs are th e most important, because they simulta neo us ly de mo nstrate th e break w ith the Old Czech writ14 K.McCone and D. Mathews describe similar se ts of probl ems in defining Middle Iri sh and Middle Engli sh respec tively. See Kim McCone. The Early Irish Verb (M aynooth , 1987) , pp. 18 1- 183 and Dav id M atth ews , (U ni versity Park , PA , 2000), pp. 1- 14. SLOVAKIA 25 ten tradition and show th at some standardi sation processes were carried through in the la nguage of written Central Slovak texts, because these forms have the monophthong iii in South Centra l Slovak dia lects, including Je lsava. At the same time, whi le generall y ac knowl edg ing the impl e mentation of standardi sation processes in the Central Slovak dialects, it should be stated that they were rather weak, due to the occ urre nce of a numbe r of loca l features in the written tex ts. These inc luded, e.g., the almost total loss of the sy llabi c so nant r, the c han ge of ou into 6, primarily attested in the instr. sg . forms of feminine noun s and adjectives, the c hange of c into s, and the appearance of a afte r ve lars, etc. Some features may be found in late 16 th a nd early I 7'h ce ntury texts, which may be described as the rea li sation of two contradictory te ndencies: the wea kness of the loca l c harac te r of record s, because dialectal ele me nt s were lost in the respec tive la nguages (the restoration of sy llabic r, the loss of Gerner features ia < ie and s < c, etc.), and the increas ing occurre nce of features from the Trnava written tradition (the losses of the phoneme /dz/, masc uline and neuter adjectival form s with e in the e ndin gs, a nd di alecta l forms of I-participle bel/biel, etc.). In the I 630 's - I 650's the popul ation of Je lsava accepted th e Counter-Refo rmation , whic h was reflected in the language of the town chronicle. The first te nde ncy we named was modified , because the occ urrence of most of the already exist in g Ce ntral Slovak features in creased , but no new feat ures of Central Slovak orig in appeared in the texts. The second te ndency - followin g the Trnava written tradition - was maintained. The second tendency predominated until the earl y I 8 th ce ntury. W e may therefore conclude that over the whole hi story of th e "Je lsava Town Chronicle", its lang uage gradually adapted to Be rnol ak 's codification of Slovak literary la nguage, and not to Stur' s, as we mi ght ex pect based on the Central Slovak origin 26 SLOVAKIA of th ese texts. 15 The development of the language of the " Levoca Formulas of Oaths" was essentiall y similar: there is an early stratum of Polish di alectal feature s in the texts (e.g., plosive g and the Poli sh reflexes of the *tort formula) , with a layer of East Slovak ones (e.g., the vowe l e < * and reflexes of assibilated t' and d) superimposed. Over time, however, they were lost, because they could not res ist competition from pan-Slovak and West Slovak feature s, which beca me obvious in the early 18 th century, not long after the Counter-Reformation . 16 It is very important to note th at the lan guage of administrativelega l texts was common for both Catholics and Lutherans, in contrast to Catholic literature and secular baroque poetry. The language of popular poetry was also common to both Catholics and Lutherans, and it was on the whole also based on the SouthWestern written tradition. Specifically, however, it was characterised by a very fluid structure, because thi s lin guistic formation in such writings was contrasted to Literary Czech or some Slovak dialect, depending on the genre or contents of the respective verses. Consequently , Czech feature s, atypica l of the Slovak written tradition , penetrated the language of hi storical verse (for instance , the " Book of Verses" (East Slovaki a, 1751 ), or J . Bruk ' s manuscript co ll ectio n (Orava, North Central Slovaki a, 1794) or occasional poetry (for in stance , congratulation from the J. Lany manu script co ll ec tion , late 18th century). And conversely, a number of dialectal features are found in styli sed folksongs (e.g., the D. Kubik collection (Priev idza, Central Slovakia, 1791 )). From the early l 800's a number of Central Slovak feat ures occur in a variety of verses (for examp le, in J. Koll ar 's " Folksongs", the M. M. Krizan collection (Trencfn County, North-West Slovakia, 1839, etc.), which we consider a s ign of the 15 See in detail K[ o nstantin] V. Li fa nov, "Evoljucia j azyka " Je lsavskoj gorodskoj kni g i" 1566- 17 10 gg. i t. naz. Kul\urnyj sred nes lov ac kij j azyk", Zeitschrift filr Sla- wische Philologie. Bd. 58 , Heft I, 1999, pp. 151 - 170. See Ko nsta ntin V Lifanov , Genezis slovatskogo literaturnogo iazyka. LIN CO M 16 St udi es in Slavic Lingui sti cs, 2 1 (Muenchen , 200 I). pp. 163- 170. SLOVAKIA 27 emergence of a spec ific language , the Centra l Slovak folklore koine, based on North Centra l Slovak di alects. Another sign of thi s phenomenon is the nature of the lingui sti c changes whi ch we find in manuscript copies of the folk songs (for instance, in J. Boczko 's collections fro m Banska Sti av ni ca ( 1830-1 83 1) and J. Jamri ch Junior 's from Gerner ( 1832-1 833)). These copyists were South Central Slovaks by birth , but when they copied songs from the second part of Koll ar 's "Slovak Secul ar Fo lksongs fro m Hun gary" , they gave preference to North Central Sl ovak features. 17 The purest vari ety of the Central Slovak fo lkl ore koine fun ctioned in North Central Slovaki a, and a written form is fi xed in the S.B. Hrobo n manu sc ript collecti on (S ielni ca, Liptov County, No rth Central Slovaki a, 1841 ). Its penetrati on into South Central and West Slovaki a (it did not influence the language of East Slovak folk songs, or minimall y so) took the form of infiltration of some its features. Later the Central Slovak folklore koine turned into a poetic koine, when it began to used in popular poetry as we ll , over the who le territory of Slovaki a (e.g., the verses of J. Szent-Kereszty ( I 822, of So uth Central Slovak ori gin ), the "Samlungen" manu script collection (Trnava, West Slovaki a, 18 17), the Eastern Slovak lawye r F. Balogh's translation of Hungari an poet Y.M. Csokonai' s verse (earl y 1800 's), and not just in the styli zations of folksongs. The Central Slovak fo lkl ore ko ine also penetrated the " hi gh" poetry of Luthera n poets, who had prev iously written in Czec h. The fi rst such works - three verses by S. Chalupka - were published in G . Fejerpataky' s Alm anac in 1834. At first thi s process was also mani fested in the sty li zati ons of folk songs, but in contrast to the popular poetry, it totall y o usted the prev io us lin gui stic system (the Czec h language). Later on it spread into other genres of hi gh poetry (the hymnal song "Nitra, Dear Nitra" was publi shed in the first volume of 17 Konstantin Lifa nov . " Stredos love nske basni cke ko ine pred l.'.. Stu rom", Slovenska rec. 60. 11 0. 5-6. 1995. pp. 264-28 1. 28 SLOVAKIA " Nitra" Almanacs in 1842). 18 Some previously known facts, also ascertained in the process of our study and analyzed by using sociolingui stic concepts, have made it poss ible to offer a ne w view of the origin and the sub seq uent development of the Slovak literary language. Thus, the lingui stic formation functionin g in Catholic literature, sec ul ar baroque poetry, admini strati ve-l ega l tex ts, popular poetry , etc. had all the propert ies of a literary lang uage, and may be called the "Old Slovak Literary language." As the lin gui stic material shows, it had started to take shape from the 1630 's on as a result of its developing di vergence from Literary Old Czech. Its epicentre was West Slovaki a. After the Battl e of Mohacs ( 1526), the capital of Hun gary and the archbishop's res idence were tran sferred to West Slovaki a, to Brati slava and Trnava respectively. Later on, South-West Slovakia 's role in cultural life became even more important, because a university with its ow n printing- house was opened there. At first, lingui stic development among Catholics and Luthera ns was identical. Texts were created by adherents of both confessions according to the " review mechani sm." 19 The common deve lopment of the Old Slovak literary language, however, was ruptured in the early l 600's, when ling ui stic diverge nces among Catholics and Lutheran s arose as a result of an aggressive Counter-Reformation. 18 K[onstantin] V. Li fanov, "Formy proniknovenija sredneslovackogo folk lornogo ko ine v ste ru avtorskoj poezii (konec XVIII v. - pervaja polovi na XIX v.)" , Wiener Slawistiches Jahrbuch, Bd. 44, 1998, pp. 99- 113. 19 It is a free tran slation of the Russ ian term " mechanizm peresceta" used by V. M. Zivov. Its essence concludes in the fact th at rather strong associated bonds between elements gi ven (l iterary) bookish character to a text and corres ponding elementts of people (d ialec tal ) speec h ex isted in th e minds of creators of tex ts. In th e case of adopti on of •'foreign " literary language, its elements contrasted to elemen ts of people speech and were initiall y bookish. Thu s, the opposition between adopted literary language and nati ve dialects was only in the fu nctional sphere. See, for examp le, V . M. Zivov, " Roi] russkogo ce rkov noslavianskogo v istoriji slavjanski ch literaturn yc h jazykov" , Aktual'nyje problemy sla vjansk ogo jazykoznanija (Moskva, 1988), pp. 4998. SLOVAKIA 29 The Old Slovak literary language continued to develop in a Catho lic environment. It went throu gh all the important stages, including a translation of the whole of the " Bible" ( 1750), th e first Slovak novel : the "Adventures and the Experiences of Young Rene" (1783) , by J.L. Bajza, and its codification by A. Bernolak. The Old Slovak literary language was studied at elementary and secondary school s in different parts of S lovakia, and even at two universities - in Trnava and Kosice.20 Slovak Catholics numbered 75 % of population when emperor Joseph II iss ued the Patent of Toleration ( 1781 ), and perceived Czech as a heretical language. In thi s connection there is no reason to assert that the literary language of S lovaks was Czech prior to Bernol ak 's codification. Slovak Lutherans yielded their positions and had to seek external support , and they found it in Czech reli gious books. As a result, they reverted to the norms of Literary Czech (more exactly, to norms of the " Kralice Bible"), but not in all genres, and di gloss ia 2 1 arose in their environment. In thi s situation Czech was perceived as the high , cultivated form of the native language , whereas Old Slovak literary lan g uage was perceived as " ordinary," and to be used only in administrative-legal texts and popular poetry . Literary Czech and Old Slovak functioned in parallel in the Lutheran and Catholic environments respectively , and Catholi cs contrasted both literary languages, and gradually perceived that some features belonged not just to different functional spheres, but to different languages. As a result a new mechanism - conversion - arose in their environment. In practice it resembled the " review mechani sm", but differed substantially, because so me features were contrasted on the nati ve rather than on the functional level. Thus, Slovak Catholics began to perce ive spec ific features of their language on the leve l of 20 See Izidor Kotulic. " Bernolakovcina a predbernolakovska kulturna slovenc in a··, Pamatnica A ntona Berno/aka (Martin 1992), pp. 81, 88. 21 See Charles A. Ferguson, "Diglossia", Word, 15, 1959, no. 2, pp. 325-340 and Boris A. Uspenskij , Jazykovaia situacija Kijevskoj Rusi I jejo znacenije d!Ja istoriji russkogo literaturnogo jazyka (Moscow , 1983) , pp. 4-5. SLOVAKIA 30 concrete phoneti c and morphological units, and so me fea tures as belonging to diffe rent periods. Th e situati on amon g Cath o li cs and Lutherans re ma in ed stable until the l 830 's, when the Centra l Slovak folkl ore ko ine penetrated into the sphere of hi gh poetry of Lutheran authors, and made it possible to codify a new literary language. r.. Stur made a major specific contribution by essenti all y changing the phoneti c and morpho logical syste ms of the literary language , but the lex icon fro m th e period of the Old Slovak literary language was maintained. Some features had reached the stage of con versati on (Catho lics perceived them as S lovak as opposed to Czech), and some were at the stage of rev iew (they were regarded as "booki sh/literary" (nati ve Czec h) or as ordin ary (native Slovak). The "ordinary" features codified by Stur were not accepted by Catholi cs, and they de manded that they be replaced by "booki sh" features, as was implemented in the codification of Hattala and Hodza ( 1852). SOURCES Catholic Literature P. Bajan, Sermones, 1760- 1771 (manuscript). Kamaldulska biblia, 1756-1759 (manu script). A. Macsay, Panes primatiarum aneb Chleby prwotjn (Trn ava , 171 8). D . Ma kos, Sermones, 1752- 1774 (manuscript). N. Ol ah, Ordo et ritus sanctae metropolitane ecc/esic Strigonien- sis, quibus parochi et a/ii animarum pastores in ecc/esiis suis uti debent. Viennae Austriae in aedibus Collegii caesarei, Societatis Jezu. Anno M.D.L.X. (manuscript). B. Smrtnik, Kunsst dobre umriti (Trnava, 1697). G. Vrabel, Sermones, 1766 (manuscript). SLOVAKIA 31 Secular Baroque Poetry " Basne Petra Benickeho", Archiv starych cesko-s/oven skych /istfn , pfsomnostf a dejepisnych povodfn pre dejepis a literattiru Slovakov, Diel II. - Svazok I. (Tun::. sv . Martin, 1873), pp. 5-47. H. Gavlo vic, Wala sk a sskola mrawuw stodola (manuscript); Gerald J. Sabo, ed., Hugo/in 's Gavlo vic's Valaska skola (Co lumbus, Ohio, 1988). Stefan F Selecky, Obraz panye krasneg perem malowany, ktera maw Trnawe swoge prebiwany (manu script); Stefan F Selecky, "Obraz pani krasnej , perem malovany, ktera ma v Trnave svoje prebyvanf", Anto/6gia starsej slovenskej literattiry (Brati slava, 1981 ), pp. 522-530. Administrative-Legal Texts Inquisitiones, Skalica, 1616-1730 (manuscript). Darina Lehotska & Jozef Orlovsky , Najstarsia jelsavska mestska kniha 1566- 1710 (Martin , 1976). Listy Sta/ice IO kopijnfkov, Spis, XVII-XVIII storocie (manu- script). Mar ia Majtanova & Mil an Majtan, Krupin ski prfsne pravc (Bratislava, 1979). Missiles, Banska Stiavnica, XYI.-XYII. storocie (manu script). Obecna kniha obce Dojc, 1622-1836 (manu script). Panstvo Pruske, XVII.-XYIII. storocie (manuscript). Pfsomnosti Sarisskej a Zemplfnskej iupy, XYII.-XYIII. storocie (manuscript). Protocol/um mais mesta Ruiomberka, XYI.-XYII. storoc ie (ma- nuscript). Jozef Stoic, "Jazyk levocskych slovenskyc h prfsah zo XYI.-XIX. storocia", Jazyko vedny sbornfk, 5, l 951, pp. 197-247. Popular Poetry and Folksongs J. Csaplovics, Slowenske Wersse, (Pest, l 822). J. Jamrich ml. , Wselygake Rozlycne Rozprawky k zabawenf 32 SLOVAKIA zepsane, 1832- 1833 (manu script) Jan Koll ar, Narodnie spievanky, zvazok I, (Bratislava, 1953). Jan Misianik , Knii ka ry tmovni (Bratislava, 1952) . Samlungen, 18 17 (manu script). Spevnfk D. Boczka, 1830-183 1 (manu script). Lasz lo Sziklay, " Poznamky k Csokonaiho popularite v slove nskej literature," Sbornfk Filozofickej fak ulty Uni verzity Komen skeho. Philologica, 16, 1964, pp. 12 1-1 3 1. Pave l Josef Safarfk, Jan Kollar, Pjsne swetske lidu slawenskeho w Uhrach, swazek 2 (Pest, 1827). Jozef Skultety, " Literarno-hi storicke drobnost i", Slovenske pohl'ady, 17, 1897, pp. 125- 128. Zbornfk J. Bruka, 1794 (manuscript). Z bornfk M. M. Kriia na, 1839 (manuscript). Zbornfk D . Kubfka, 179 1 (manu sc ript). Zbornfk J. L any, koni ec XVIII . storocia (manu script).  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Origin and Development of the Slovak Literary Language Description An account of the resource Konstantin V. Lifanov Slovakia, Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005 pp. 7-32 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lifanov, Konstantin Vasilʹevich Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/5ba51466eb2c6a48d6534028ecbcea2d.pdf c28a1530c11c2ff3197ecce61b791010 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 33 The Democratic Party and the Execution of Jozef Tiso James Ramon Felak On April 15 , 1947, Igor Daxne r, Chairman of the National Court in Brati s lava, pronounced the verd ict agai nst Father Jozef Ti so, the head of Slovakia's wartime state that was closely alli ed with Naz i Germany. The Co urt found Ti so guilty of 95 of 11 3 charges aga inst him, in c ludin g treason, betraya l of the Slovak National Uprising , co ll aborati on with the Naz is, and de portation of Slovak Jews to Naz i death ca mps. Hi s sente nce was death by han g in g, to be carried out within 48 hours. At once, Tiso, along w ith hi s two defense attorneys , submitted a requ est for c le me ncy. 1 Thi s pape r w ill in vesti gate the fate of thi s request, the last official chance to spare Ti so from death. Though the final deci sion on clemency rested with Czechoslovakia ' s Pres ide nt Edvard Be nes, the request passed like a hot potato over the next dozen ho urs, from Daxner to Slovakia's Commissioner of th e Interior Iva n Stefanik, to Slovakia ' s c hi ef organ of se lf-governme nt , the Slovak Nation al Council (SNC) , to the Czechoslovak gove rnme nt in Prague , and ultimatel y to Be nes. De mocra tic Party (DP) leaders had lobbi ed for c lemency during the tri al, voted for it at the gove rnme nt 's mee tin g on the eve nin g of April 16, a nd frantically appea led on its behalf to Be nes in the hours before Tiso ' s exec uti on. However, they c uri ously refused to take a stand for clemency at the meeting of the SNC's Pres idium on the afternoon of April 16, where they had a 3-to-2 majority and where a stand on Ti so 's behalf would have g ive n offic ial sanction to the view , w idely shared by many and 1 ' One of the three prosecutors. l.'.udovft Ri gan. also made a request for clemency to the Court; K arel K aplan, Dva retribucnf procesy . Komentovane dokumenty, (Prague. I 992), p. 221 (Document 37). �SLOVAKIA 34 probably most Slovaks, that Tiso should not be executed. The Democrats' refusal to take a stand in the SNC meant that Tiso's opponents could point to the failure of any official Slovak organs to recommend clemency as proof that his execution reflected the will of the Slovak people. The fate of Jozef Tiso was very much connected with the DP's fortunes in Czechoslovak and Slovak politics . Shortly after her liberation from Nazi rule and reattachment to Czechoslovakia, Slovakia had only two significant political parties-the Communist Party of Slovakia (CPS) and the Democratic Party (DP). The latter, in many ways a legacy of the interwar Agrarian party, emerged out of the Lutheran-dominated wing of the resistance to the Tiso regime. When the Catholic and nationalist Slovak People's Party (SPP) was outlawed at war ' s end , many Slovak Catholics became political orphans.2 In the spring of 1946, however, the DP adopted them through the so-called April Agreement, a pact between the party's leaders and important Catholic political activi sts whereby Catholics were promised a large share of influence in the DP and a Democratic commitment to promote the Catholic Church ' s position on issues such as education in exchange for Catholic electoral support. The fruit of the April Agreement was a landslide victory for the DP over the Communists in the May 1946 parliamentary elections, with Democrats winning 63 % of the vote to the Communists' 30%. From that point on , the CPS focused its energies on undoing the electoral results by seeking to paralyze, fracture , or dis solve the DP. Among other things, the Tiso trial figured in Communist calculations of how to cripple their rival. The Communist plan was to force the DP to navigate between the Scylla of angering its Catholic members and voters , who had hopes that the Democrats would rescue Tiso from a death sentence, and the Charybdis of being sucked into a police investigation for 2 Catholics comprised nearly 80% of the Slovak population. The majority of Slovak Catholics voted for the SPP during the interwar period. �SLOVAKIA 35 allegations of pandering to the reactionaries and war criminals it was all egedl y harboring th anks to the April Agreeme nt. Idea ll y, the DP wo uld be di scredited in the eyes of Catholics as an ineffectua l and lukewarm defe nder of Ti so, while concurrently di sc redited in the eyes of everyone else as a haven for reactionaries. With little room for mane uver, and in the face of enormo us press ure, the DP had to face thi s chall enge. What fo ll ows is how the Com muni sts were able to acco mpli sh these end s, partl y due to the ir own tactics, partl y due to the dynami c of the situ ati on, and part ly due to the cho ices made by the Democrats. Ri ght after the anno unceme nt of the verd ict, Ti so's lawyers, Ernest Zabkay and Martin Greco, submitted an official requ est for c lemency, as king for a more "appropriate" sentence for the ir c lient. 3 They particularly stressed lega l tec hni ca lities. Tiso's lawyers argued th at the defense was not all owed to speak with the acc used without the sec urity organs present-a violati on of a fund amental principle of criminal tri al procedure-and that the defense did not have certain archiv al materials at its disposal , while the prosec uti on did. Furthermore, records of testimony were not made avail able within the requisite three days, but lagged by nearly two month s, thereby mak in g it impossible for the defense to c ite testimon y made after January 15 in its concluding statements. In addition to these and a number of other technicalities, Tiso ' s lawyers arg ued th at the trial was po litica ll y biased, both because Daxner himse lf was bi ased, as the SNC itself had recognized in the past, and because, despite a leg islati ve order ca llin g for political pari ty in the Senate, no me mbers of the DP took part in the judg ment. Tiso's attorn eys a lso arg ued that Tiso was being puni shed for eve nts beyond his co ntro l. They claimed th at he did not prepare for Slovakia's independence in 1939, or he lp cause it, and that he showed no initiative and intention ality in hi s cooperation wi th Nazi Germany. Rather, he simpl y tri ed to make the best of a bad situ ation that was thru st upo n him . Finally, Ti so's atto rneys, in the .1 Kaplan, Ova retribucnf procesy. pp. 2 15-2 19 (Document 35) . �SLOVAKIA 36 onl y argument that the DP would make its ow n, argued th at clemency would strengthen Czech-Slovak relations, e liminate the threat of ill will between Slovakia ' s Catholics and Protestants, and strengthen ti es between Slovak emigrants and their motherl and. The National Court quick ly decided agai nst recommending c lemency for Ti so, and passed Tiso ' s request on to Slovak Commissioner of Ju stice Ivan Stefanik , a Democrat. Stefa nik in turn supported Tiso's request, and submitted a proposal to the Presidium of the SNC, which read , " I propose that the death se ntence of Dr. Jozef Ti so be commuted to life impri sonment. " 4 The proposal was to the point, absent the argumentation included in Ti so ' s request, and un like Ti so ' s request, allowed for no sentence less than life impri sonment. On April 16, the SNC ' s Presidium met to consider Stefa nik ' s proposal, along with some other matters connected with Ti so ' s tri al. When the Pres idium convened, it was already under enormous pressure. By law , Tiso ' s exec ution was to be carried out within 48 hours of the announcement of the verdict, so matters had to be considered quickly. Moreover, the gove rnm ent in Prag ue was meet in g later that day to discuss c lemency , and was eagerly awaiting the views of Slovakia 's leadin g organs on the matter. Adding to the pressure was the fact that the Presidium received the 214 page judgment aga inst Tiso only shortl y before its meeti ng.5 Moreover, te legrams, letters, and petitions (for and against c leme ncy) were pourin g in to the President 's office, the government, and the SNC, while Parti san and labor organizations staged anti-Ti so rallies across Slovakia and de legation s from trade union s, hou sing estates, and espec ially resistance organizations arrived in Brati slava to add their presence to the de liberations. 6 Though there were no reported cases of violence, it is not difficult to imagine the presence of these groups, enco uraged if not orchestrated by the Communists, adding a menac in g character to 4 K aplan , Dva relribucnf procesy. p. 220 (Document 36). ' Th e DP claimed the Presidium had onl y ten minutes to look over the length y judgmen t; see Cas. April 23 , 1947 , no. 93, p. I. 6 Cas, Apri l 23, 1947, no. 93 , p. I. �SLOVAKIA 37 the already inte nse pressure on the Presidium , or more prec ise ly, its Democratic me mbers. For example, a consortium of major res istance organi zati o ns iss ued a decl aration on April 16 th at conde mned c lemency as a "s hameful defilement (popl'u vanie) of all the sac rifi ces of o ur nation al stru gg le" th at co uld e mbolde n Ti so's supporte rs into provokin g unrest in S lovakia aimed at undermining the Re public.7 If cle mency was gra nted to Tiso, these organizations promi sed to assess the situation and cons ide r what mean s to emp loy in de fe nse of the Republic and the ga ins of the Slovak National Upri sin g. The DP had a majority on the Presi dium , which conta ined three Democrats (Jozef Lettrich, who was chairman of both the DP and the SNC, Andrej Cvincek, Milan Po la k) a nd two Communi sts (Karol Smidke, Ivan Horvath ). Nevertheless, the Pres idium did not e ndorse Stefanik's proposa l for c le me nc y; rather, it reso lved to submit the proposa l to the governme nt without co mme nt. In hi s me moirs, Jan Ursfny, a top DP leader and its Deputy Chairman, argued that Lettric h went into the meetin g with the intention of avo idin g debate over clemency, a position Ursfny strongly advised against. 8 Lettrich 's behav ior at the meeting does betray the actions of a man inte nt on avoi ding debate. 9 First of all , most of the meetin g 's di scuss ion dea lt with De mocratic di ssati sfaction with Daxner's ha ndling of the tri al. Whe n the Presidium did get around to the Ti so verdict, Le ttri c h made it clear th at he fe lt th at the press ure of time mad e it imposs ible to acq uire sufficie nt knowledge to take a pos ition on c le mency, and that any recommendation would thu s have to be " politica l." The Communi st Horvath the n proposed that the Presidium take no stand , but simpl y pass on Stefa nik 's proposa l to the government without co mment. He argued that a recomme nd ation from the SNC was ne ithe r requi- 1 Pravda. Apri l 18, 1947 . no. 90, p. I: th e Slovak term pop!ii vct nie could be rendered as .. spitting on". • Jan Ursfny. Z m6jho i i votct. (M artin . 2000), pp. 123- 124. " See Sl ovensky narod ny archfv (hereafter referred to as SNA). Fond Urad predsednfctva Slovenskej narodnej rady , Carton 139, Folder 134. Folios 49-58 , S R Presidiu m meetin g of A pril 16. 1947. �SLOVAKIA 38 red nor necessary, for it was the government and Benes whose views would be decisive. According to Horvath, since the Communists were opposed to clemency, they would be unable to support Stefanik ' s proposa l, and hence any vote in the SNC would be on a parti san basis, setting a bad precedent for future Communist-Democratic cooperation. When it came time to vote on Horvath ' s proposal , the Presidium accepted it unanimously. Before examining why the SNC , or more specifically its Democratic members, opted not to recommend c lemency for Tiso, let us track the proposal ' s course to Prague and ultimately to Benes. The Communists and Social Democrats were openly hostile to Tiso, and the non-parti san mini sters, Ludvfk Svoboda (Defense) and Jan Masaryk (Foreign Affairs), could be expected to be so as well. Together, these constituted 13 of the 23 members of the government, enough to tip any vote to Ti so's detriment. On top of that, the Czech National Soc ialists were at best ambivalent. A number of leading National Socialists opposed clemency and wanted their party to vote against it or at least to abstain. 10 However, Minister of Justice Prokop Drtina, one of the party's top leaders, had earlier assured Lettrich that he would support clemency provided the SNC did. 11 In the last of a series of meetings on the issue , held right before the government session began , Drtina managed to convince his colleagues to agree to the following position : to oppose clemency, but only after first proposing that the request for clemency be returned to the Presid ium of the SNC for that organ's recommendation. In thi s way, Drtina could present himself as makin g a good faith effort to honor hi s promise to Lettrich , while entertaining hopes that a vote to return the request to the SNC would fail, thu s getting himself off the hook. 12 The government meeting opened at approximately 5: 15 p.m ., after a delay of over an hour as its members waited for reports from ° Kaplan. Dva retribucnf procesy. p. 25 . 1 " Prokop Drtina. Ceskos lovensko muj osud, II. 2, (Toronto, I 982). pp. 297-298. 302. 12 Drtina, Ceskoslovensko muj osud. II , 2, p. 302. �SLOVAKIA 39 Slovakia. 13 Within ten minutes, a delegation of representatives from the Union of Czechoslovak Partisans and so me similar organizations asked to be admitted. Since the National Socialists had yet to arrive, mak ing their last minute plans in a nearby room , the meetin g was adjourned for 45 minutes while the parti san organizations were given the opportunity to press ure the mini sters to vote against clemency. 14 Once the de legation s had their say and engaged some of the mini sters over the iss ue , and the National Sociali st mini sters had arrived, the meeting was reconvened. Prime Mini ster Kl ement Gottwald began by sharin g two pieces of information he had just rece ived from Slovaki a- the memorandum from the SNC' s Pres idium pass in g on Stefanik's proposal for clemency without comment, and a telegram from Gu stav Husak, Chairman of Slovakia 's Board of Commissioners (Cabinet). Husak noted that Stefanik 's proposal did not reflect the views of the Board of Commissioners nor its Presidium, whose standpoint Stefanik did not seek, and should therefore be regarded as hi s own personal proposal. Husak added that he did not agree with the proposa l. Thus, the meeting opened with reports from Slovakia 's two chief political organs, neither of which endorsed clemency. Gottwald, leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party , then proposed that the government reso lve aga inst clemency, since the National Court in Brati slava recommended against it, and the Pres idium of the SNC did not recommend for it. In a long and sometimes pass ionate debate, mini sters from both sides weighed in on the que stion, with positions breaking down along party lines. The Communists led the charge against clemency. Vladimfr Clementi s, State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and a Slovak, read a CPS 13 For the minutes of the meeting. see K apl an, Dva retribucnf procesy. pp. 225-254. 14 Ursfny . in his memoirs, recou nts be ing asked by one member of the parti san dele- gati on: "M r. Deput y Chairman, tell me, w ith whom do you wan t to go. w ith th e Ludak underground. or with us?" A nother partisan representati ve. however, spoke up for Ursfny as ··one of the greates t partisans. " (see Ursfny, Z m6jho i ivota, p. 125): see footnote 17 for an ex planation of the term " Ludak. " �40 SLOVAKIA decl aration that la id o ut the Co mmuni st pos iti on. The dec larati o n stressed the did acti c function of the tri al, that is, its purpose in di sco urag ing enemies of the Republic. A death sentence co uld do that far better than a life sentence in thi s res pect. C lemency, on the co ntrary, would onl y encou rage enemi es of the state and sympathizers of Ti so and hi s reg ime . Reactionari es, as before, were tryin g to take over Slovaki a "even at the price of the Re public." 15 The dec laration arg ued that c leme ncy would evoke di stru st in the judic ial sys tem. Veterans of the Sl ovak Nati onal Upri sin g would be upset with the de parture from the idea ls of the res istance; peo ple wo uld note the inj ustice of lesser crimin als hav ing been more harshl y puni shed than Ti so; and politics would be seen once more as " panske huncutst vo", that is "gentl emen's mi sc hi ef." 16 The declarati o n noted in parti cul ar that Ti so showed no remorse for hi s crimes, and in fac t gave succor to th e Re public 's ene mi es in hi s co ncludin g statement at hi s tri al. Much of what Cleme nti s read was identica l to a dec larati on made a day earli er by Slovaki a's res istance organi zati o ns, testifyin g to the leadin g ro le the Co mmuni sts pl ayed in those orga ni zati o ns and the success the party had in coordin atin g various soc ial orga ni zati ons on behalf of its objecti ves . Indeed , both dec laration s co nc luded with the sa me threat to assess the s ituation and consider what mea ns to employ in defense of the Republic and its character. Czech Communi sts also spoke out again st clemency, asserting th at Ti so was a traitor and a war crimina l, and that fa ilin g to exec ute him would be a blow to Czec hos lovakia 's unity and inde pendence. Communi st speakers also arg ued th at it was the will of th e Slovak people that Ti so be exec u- 15 The express ion ··ani za ce nu republiky", th at is, •·even at the price of the rep ublic" . was a reference to a statement made by HSL:S leader A ndrej Hlin ka at a rall y in Trencfn in 1932, where he asse rted th e degree to whi ch his party wo uld pu rsue Slovak interests; see James Ramon Felak, •A l the Price of the Republic·_. Hlinka 's Slovak People 's Party. 1929- 1938. (Pittsburg h, 1994 ), p. 96. 16 " Poli tika je panske huncutstvo" was an expression curre nt among Slovaks , rooted in Slovakia ' s feudal pas t. It was the recog nition by peasan ts th at pol itics was the domain where the lords made mi sch ief. �SLOVAKIA 41 ted , as ev ide nced by the pos iti ons of the Nati ona l Co urt, the SNC, and the Board of Co mmi ss ione rs, all organs composed e ntire ly of Slova ks and re prese nting S lovakia. Thi s was why, the Czec h Co mmuni st Vac lav Kopecky noted , the DP would not speak up fo r c leme ncy on the SNC's Pres idium. Th e Soc ia l De mocrati c mini sters we re just as o pposed to c lemency as the Communi sts, and no less assertive about the ir pos iti on. Zdene k Fierlin ger, the leader of the SOP and a Deputy Prime Minister, argued th at a vote fo r c le me ncy wo uld upset Czec hoslovaki a's alli es in the Slav ic world , in part because it would fu e l Slova k independe nce, whi c h itse lf th reate ned Czec hos lovaki a 's border w ith the Sov iet Uni o n. Fie rlinger even re marked th at how o ne voted o n the cleme ncy questi on was a test of one's patri oti sm. With respect to the reli g io us dim e ns ion of the ques ti o n, the Soc ial De mocrati c leade r asserted th at the fac t of Tiso's be ing a priest was not a miti gating c irc um stance, but rathe r one th at made matters worse. He noted th at it was not good for the Catho lic Churc h to e ncumbe r itse lf with Ti so . Whil e Fie rlinger re prese nted the pro-C ommuni st left-win g of the SOP, that party's ri ght-wing was no less vehe me nt about Ti so. Vaclav Maj er, the leader of the ri ght-wing Soc ial De mocrats, referred to the Sl ovak pri est as one of the chi e f war crimin als, guilty of mass murder. The most ex te ns ive attac k on Ti so a nd argume nt against cle me ncy, however, came not fro m the mini ste rs o f the le fti st parties, but from the oste nsibl y ne utra l (a lbeit c loset Communi st) Ludvfk Svoboda, the Mini ster o f Defe nse. As a Czec hoslovak hero of both the First and Second World Wars, Svoboda's word s carri ed a certain cac het. Svoboda spoke at le ngth about why T iso mu st die . He came o ut strong ly aga inst so-ca ll ed ha lf-so luti o ns; at ha nd was a definiti ve hi stori ca l qu esti o n w ith long- te rm impli cati o ns th at sho uld not be judged accordin g to the needs a nd mood of the mo me nt. Ti so was �42 SLOVAKIA not just a war criminal ; he was the sy mbol of " Ludakism," 17 fasci sm, treason , and collaboration . To grant clemency to Tiso, according to Svoboda, would render hi s trial vain and superfluous. If alive, Ti so would remain to poison cooperation and unity between Czechs and Slovaks; clemency would encourage hi s supporters, while disappointing others. Like many speakers and writers of the time, Svoboda noted that Tiso showed no remorse. He ca lled for a firm and resolute action agai nst him as a means of strengthening Czechoslovakia's international position and prestige. To those w ho argued th at Ti so should be spared because he was a priest, Svoboda dec lared that "we are not judging a priest, but a traitor, a destroyer of the Czechoslovak state, and a criminal. That Tiso is a priest only makes matters worse; he profaned the priestly office and Church at a time when thou sands of other priests fought bravely again st Nazi sm and perished in concentration camps and prisons." On the other s ide of the equation were those mini sters who championed c lemency-on ly the Democrats and Czech Populi sts. Here the most prominent speaker was Ursfny . The Democratic Deputy Chairman argued that clemency would improve relations between Czechs and Slovaks, Lutherans and Catholics, and aid in the overall consolidation of the post-war Republic. Such a goodwi ll gesture might also win over some of Czechoslovakia' s enemi es. Ursfny noted that religiou s fee lings ran strong in Slovakia, where the exec ution of a priest was a serious , and potentiall y upsetting matter. He pointed out that many good people were for clemency, includin g so me bishops and hi gh functionari es in the Lutheran church , a church that itself had suffered under Ti so's regi me. The Democratic Minister of Transportation Ivan Pietor also spelled out a number of reasons for clemency. He argued that Ti so was popular among the majority of Slovaks, and that the preva ilin g majority of Slovaks would vote for 17 Lud aki sm, or "l'udactvo" was the term employed to refer to fo ll owers of th e Slovak People 's Party, whose members were know n as '• Ludaks" or " l'udaci ." It best approximates the Engli sh word " Populi sm. " Communi sts applied the term to any Slovak Catholics they did not like. �SLOVAKIA 43 clemency if given the chance, thou gh thi s did not mean they agreed with Ti so ' s politics. He too noted that important Lutheran leaders sent ardent appeals on Tiso's behalf in the interest of the peaceful deve lopment of Slovaki a and Czechoslovakia. The g iven politica l s ituation , accordin g to Pietor, demanded statesmanlike thinkin g, wi sdom , and sensiti vity to the prevailing political condition s and mood. In such a co ntext, clemency would be a gesture to win over hearts in Slovakia and bring the Czech and Slovak nation s together. While the Court may have unanimou sly estab lished Tiso 's guilt and ca ll ed for hi s exec ution , that was a judicial decision , not a political one. What the Republic now faced was a manifestly political deci sion , and that was the task of the government to settl e, in accordance with political considerations. The Czec h Populi sts, as members of a Catholic party with moderate inclinations, also supported clemency. Minister Franti se k Ha.la (Post Office), him se lf a Catholic priest, presented c le mency as the most suitable solution for Czechoslovak and Slovak interests. The Populi st Adolf Prochazka (Health ) remarked that c lemency was the des ire of most Slovaks, and of the Lutheran church leadership . Jan Kopecky (Mini ster without Portfolio) supported clemency as a way to consolidate the Repub li c, and reminded hi s mini sterial colleagues that life impri sonment was not tantamount to acq uittal. In makin g hi s case, Ursfny co ntended that the SNC did not recommend aga inst c lemency ; rather it was not the Pres idium 's function to ex press a position on the proposa l, but only to pass it on to the government. Technically , he was correct because the Second Prague Agreement of April I I , 1946, the statute under which such matters were regulated , stated that the commissioner's proposal be submitted to the go vernment "v ia the Pres idium of the Slovak National Counci l. " 18 However, this strict construction is not the way the SNC had hitherto been dealing with proposa ls. Gottwald snide ly noted that the '" Jan Mechyr. Slo vensko v Ceskoslovensku : Slovensko-ceske vztahy I 9 I 8- 199 I . (Prague. 1991 ). �44 SLOVAKIA Pres idium had sudde nl y dec ided in thi s case to limit itse lf to the ro le of a post office, and al ong with Fie rlinger, he regarded Ursfny 's expl a nati on as sophi stry. They were not bu ying th e De moc rats ' claim that the Pres idium ' s position was not a fa ilure to endorse c le mency. It was the centri st parties, however, that ex pressed the most anger over the SNC 's sile nce regardin g c leme ncy - a sil e nce th at, because the DP had a majority in the Pres idium, was c learl y bl a med on the De mocrats. A number of Nati ona l Soc iali st and Populi st mini ste rs vo iced their indi gnati on at the SNC's atte mpt to pass th e buck. Jaroslav Stra nsky (Edu cati on) said th at he wa nted Ursfny and hi s frie nds to recogni ze the situ ation into whi ch they had gotte n the governme nt , whi c h thanks to the m now had to dec ide on a matter about whi c h it did not have s uffic ie nt kn ow ledge. In thi s s itu ati on, th e gove rnm e nt co uld be bl a med if Ti so did not get cle me ncy, thereby bein g burde ned with what is primaril y a Sl ovak pro bl e m. Drtina, s imil arly, sa id he was perpl exed by the Pres idium ' s unex pected course of acti on, one whi ch now put the go vernme nt in a diffi c ult situati on. He pro posed se ndin g th e pro posal bac k to th e Pres idium fo r its opini o n, in acco rdance with the Second Prague Agree me nt, whi c h stipul ated that the governme nt return proposa ls to the SNC's Pres idium if it had objecti ons to them from the point of view of statew ide inte res ts. Foll o win g suit , Nation a l Soc ia li st Mini ste r o f Fore ig n Trade Hube rt Ripka noted hi s party ' s astoni shme nt at th e SNC's acti on - how it limited its ro le to th at of a mailbox in the way it interpre ted the Seco nd Prag ue Agree me nt. He noted th at Sl ovaki a ' s se lf-proc laimed leadin g orga n did not have the courage to ex press itse lf on a questi on of suc h importance fo r the future and fa te of the Slovak people . Accordin g to Ripka, it was c lear that the SNC Pres idium wa nted to shi ft the res po nsibility for Ti so's fate o nto the governme nt. He in sisted that the Pres idum ex press itse lf on the iss ue, and as qui ckl y as poss ibl e. Hala, spea kin g for th e Czech Populi sts, echoed the sentiments o f the Nation al Soc ia li sts, notin g th at the Presidium ' s action greatl y surpri sed him and that it see med to want to pass responsibility onto the governme nt. �SLOVAKIA 45 While the National Sociali sts and Populi sts expressed agreement with Drtina 's motion to return the proposa l to the SNC, the leftist parties adamantly opposed it. Gottwald, Fierlinger, and others noted that the SNC had already taken a position by failing to endorse clemency. They argued that further delay of Ti so's execution would only drag thin gs out, sustain a state of tension and provoke and evoke supporters of Ti so, as well as open the floodgates for clemency for others sentenced to death. When Drtina 's motion to return the proposal to the Presidium of the SNC came to a vote, it was defeated 13 to I0 . The voting broke down according to party lines: the National Socialists, Populists, and Democrats supported the proposal; the leftist parties and non-parti san ministers opposed it. While the Populists may well have sincerely believed that the best remedy for the crisis would have been for the SNC to voice its opinion on the matter, the National Socialists made and supported the motion simply for cosmetic purposes, hoping that it would fail. 19 The Democrats, of course, were in a quite unenviable position. The motion' s failure meant that they would not be g iven a second chance to make a stand for clemency in the Presidium. At the same time, it is not certain that they would have known what to do with a second chance; the factors that kept them from endorsing clemency the first time around were still operative. As the debate over Stefanik 's proposal resumed , the National Socialists came out against clemency, and sought to present the anticlemency position as the one identified with Slovakia. Drtina, noting th at the government was not fully informed of the detail s of the case, thought the matter should be best settled by Slovakia, as it indeed was - a Slovak Court had establi shed Tiso's guilt and had unanimously rejected clemency, which the SNC had also failed to recommend. Ripka , de mon stratin g the sort of Czech ignorance of Slovakia that ran kles Slovaks, claimed that Ti so, long before 1938 , was as bad or worse than Vojtech Tuka, Ti so 's main political rival during the war 19 Drtina adm its thi s in hi s me moirs: see Ceskoslovensko mu) osud, II , 2, p. 302. �46 SLOVAKIA and the leader of the radically pro-Nazi faction ple 's Party. 20 in the Slovak Peo- Because the consequences of Ludakism had not yet di- sappeared from Slovakia, clemency should be rejected. Ripka not only came out again st it, but also appealed to the DP and Czech Populists to abstain on the vote, so the government could present a united front. He addressed the Democrats with the rebuke that, if they did not vote for clemency in Slovakia, they should not now at the governmental level, where the domestic and international ramifications of such a vote were great. After more di sc uss ion, the government ultimately passed a resolution voicing its opposition to c lemency, on the grounds th at the National Court in Brati slava had recommended against it, and that the Pres idium of the SNC did not endorse it when pass ing Stefanik's proposal on to Prague. The vote was 17 in favor , 6 against. All mini sters rejected c lemency except those from the DP and Czech People 's Party. The meeting was adjourned at 8:50 p.m. Shortly thereafter, Gottwald took the government 's recommendation to Benes, who accepted it and informed Slovakia's Commissioner of Ju stice that hi s request for clemency had been officially denied. 2 1 Upon learn in g of the dec ision , Lettrich made a last-ditch intervention , telephoning Benes ' s chancellery. He conveyed the message that the government's standpoint was in conflict with Article I.b. of the Second Prague Agreement, which instructed the government, if it had objections aga inst a proposal from Slovaki a, to return that proposal to the SNC' s Presidium, not pass it on to Benes with a 20 Tuka was a notoriou s ri ghti st rad ica l who made a political career out of intriguing with foreign enemi es of the Czec hos lovak Republi c almost right from th e Republi c ' s founding. He spent most of th e 1930s in pri son for treason, and was executed for war crimes in the summer of 1946. we ll before the tri al of Tiso. 21 K apl an, D va retribucnf procesy, p. 27: Benes had informed Gottwald the day before th at he planned to ac t in accordance wi th whatever th e governm ent recommended regardin g clemency fo r Tiso, K apl an, D va retribucnf procesy, pp. 222-224 (Document 38). �SLOVAKIA 47 recommendation. 22 Lettrich warned Benes of possible " immense political consequences" that could resu lt from a rejection of clemency, and fo r which the DP could not accept responsibility . Lettrich conc luded by notin g th at the DP had an absolute majority in the SNC and its Pres idium and fully agreed with Stefanik ' s proposal, considering clemency as a paramount state and nation al interest. Benes received the message early the next morning, instructing hi s chancellery to tell Lettrich that he had gone to the countryside, and would discuss the matter with Gottw ald if Lettrich so desired. 23 Ursfny too attempted an appeal on behalf of clemency, and also found out that the rej ection of clemency was an accomplished fact and that Benes was incommunicado. 24 Stefanik him self made a final attempt on Tiso ' s behalf, asking the National Court that Tiso be tran sferred to the jail of the Office of the Public Prosec utor, so he could be questioned regarding some other cases. Thi s the National Court rejected on the ground s that Ti so could be just as eas ily be questioned at its own jail. 25 With all avenues for clemency now ex hausted , Ti so was hanged early on the morning of April 18, officiall y pronounced dead at 5:30 a.m. It was no surpri se that Ti so was found guilty, nor th at he was sentenced to die. Nor was it astoni shing that the majority of government mini sters in Prague rejected the reco mmendation for clemency, and that Benes acted in accordance with their position. But what was puzzling was the behavior of the DP -supporting clemency in Prague , but not in Bratislava; desperately appealin g for clemency on the 22 Mi chal Barn ovsky , Na ceste k monopolu moci, ( Bratislava , 1993) , p. 145 n; K apl an, Dva retribucnf procesy, p. 28. 23 Kaplan , D va retribucnf procesy, p. 28 ; Robert Letz, S/ovensko v rokoch I 945- 1948, (Bratislava, 1994 ), p. 48 . 24 Ursfny, Z m6jho t i vota, p. 127 . 25 K aplan, Dva retribucnf procesy, p. 29; the motive behind this attempt was to delay Ti so ' s exec uti on and thu s increase the chances that he would ultimately receive clemency . �48 SLOVAKIA eve of Tiso 's exec uti on, while letting the issue pass right throu gh the hands of the SNC Presidium that they had dominated the day before. Did the DP want the appeal for c lemency to fail? Such a view ca n be found in the po lice record , where a report me nti ons that Lettrich was opposed to cle me ncy for Tiso. 26 Like many scenarios sketched out by police inform ants, however, this one seems to be w ithout merit. Lettrich had earli er lobbi ed Tiso ' s three prosecutors for c lemency, and had persuaded Minister of Ju sti ce Drtina to promi se hi s support as well. These are hardl y the acti ons of a man desiring Tiso 's execution . Other ex planat io ns must li e behind the timidity of Lettrich and the DP at the notoriou s SNC Pres idium meeting of April 16. Hi storian s who have exa mined the meetin g, a nd the issue of clemency overall, ha ve co me up with a numbe r of ex pl anation s, which will be di sc ussed here in ascend in g order of pl a usibility and influence. 27 Most dubi o us is the view th at the De mocrats trusted that Benes would grant clemency regardless of the recommendations he rece ived. Whil e the re appare ntly was public spec ulation that Be nes mi ght spare Tiso, the DP leadership had littl e reason to put their tru st in such suppos ition s. Benes had already g ive n Lettrich and Ursfny quite c lear indication s of hi s oppositi on to cle mency. 28 Another of the weaker arguments for why the SNC did not take a stand on c le me ncy was the one the DP used to ex pl ai n itse lf at the 26 Barno vsky, Na ceste. p. 130. 27 For exp lanati ons of why the OS acted the way it did at th e SNR Pres idiu m mee- ting of Apri l 16, see Barnovsky , Na ceste, p. 130: Letz, Slovensko. pp. 47-48: Kaplan . Ova relribucnf procesy, pp. 24-26 : Ursfny, Z m6jho i i vota. pp. 123- 124 : for the DP ' s attempt to j ustify its ac ti ons at the time, see Cas. April 23, 1947. no. 93 . p. I. 28 Lettrich , in a meeting with the three state prosecutors of the Tiso trial on March 12. I 94 7, mentioned that he had discussed the matter of clemency for Tiso w ith Benes on two occasions, and th at Benes's positi on was th at he would not take a stand but rather all ow th e governmen t' s decis ion on th e matter to guide him : (see SNA. Demokraticka strana, Carton 2, Bundle 99 , Folios 1-2): moreover. Ursfny claims in hi s memoirs that in fall of 1946. Daxner asked Benes how he shou ld handle the Tiso case, to which Benes replied, " I th in k that he deserves death, but thi s is an affair for an independent court. "; (see Ursfny, Z m6jho i ivota. p. 11 3). �SLOVAKIA 49 government meetin g of April 16 and thereafter, i.e. that accordin g to the 2 nd Prague Agreement , the S C's role in the process was simpl y to pass proposals on to the Government and not to co mment on them, and that i f the government had obj ection s to Stefanik's proposa l, it wo uld soli cit the SNC Presidium 's views on it. Upon refl ec ti on, thi s ex plan ati on holds no more water th an it did at the tim e. A party that believed Slovak organs should speak for Slovakia, and a good bit of whose appeal was based on its advocacy of autonomy fo r Slovakia, is behav ing out of character w hen it surrenders to Prague the prerogati ve to decide on a matter so c lose to th e hearts of so many Slovaks. Another ex pl anation put forth by the DP was that it lacked sufficient time to stud y the doc umentation pertinent to th e Tiso tri al. Whil e on the surface thi s is true , still , the SNC was not being asked to render a lega l or judicial judgment, but a politi ca l one. In the latter case, the party could have made up its mind on a pos ition long before the verdi ct, as the Communists had. M ore convincing are the views th at th e DP was simpl y afra id th at a vote for clemency wo uld prompt the Communi sts to provoke a politica l crisis in Slovakia, halting cooperation w ithin the SNC, mobili zing Parti san and trade union groups against the Democrats, and forcing Prague to step in . Indeed, such threats and pressures were already ev ident on the Slovak political stage for over a yea r, and were com mon everywhere else in East Central Europe w here Communi st parti es were acti ve. In thi s view , the DP simpl y lost its nerve and opted to pass the matter on to Prague ra ther than deal w ith it in Bra ti slava. Thi s explanati on seems va lid enough because Communi st pres sure was al ways an influence. However, i f fear of reperc uss ions was the main reason for keeping the DP quiet, w hy did Democrats vote for clemency at the government sess ions in Prag ue? Wa s it to gi ve public assura nce to th eir co nstitu ents th at th ey opposed clemency , but at a ven ue w here they did not have to worry about their vote carry ing any influence and thereby provoking a clemency- induced �SLOVAKIA 50 cris is back home? This question is moot , give n the influence of the most significant factor of all. A final ex pl anati on is most like ly the crucial o ne - that the DP could not co unt on one of its own representatives on the Presidi um , Milan Po lak , to vote for c le mency. Po lak ' s record, both before and after 1947, place him on the left wing of the DP. A former Parti san, and leader in the Parti sa n vetera ns' movement, Po lak collaborated with the Communists durin g and after the February co up of 1948 . 29 Unable to co unt on hi s vote, Lettrich preferred no vote on c lemency to one in which Polak would abstain or vote no. Thus he chose the leas t pa inful but st ill damaging option. While many of Slovakia ' s Catholics would be upset if the DP-controll ed Presidium failed to take a vote on clemency, they wo uld be even more outraged if a DPcontrolled Pres idium rejected clemency, or could not mu ste r th e three votes needed to pass it. Ursfny 's memo irs prov ide further ev idence for thi s ex planation. Ursfny reported that, when on a vis it to the United States in the fa ll of 1967 , he spoke by telephone with Lettrich , who told him that he wanted the SNC to avoid the iss ue of clemency because Pol ak wo uld not have voted for it. 30 Thus, while the DP owed its success to a large ly Catholic e lectorate, it contained a core of resistance veterans who simpl y could not countenance anything short of Ti so's exec ution. Since the leader of those veterans he ld the deciding vote on the SNC Presidium , the DP 's efforts to support c le mency were futile. Tho ugh the DP had good reason to suspect that Polak would not vote for c lemency, the Communists had their own fears that he mi ght not vote aga inst it. This ex plains why the Communists on the SNC were as eager as the Democrats to pass the matter on to Prague. A number of factors contributed to the exec ution of Jozef Tiso-a Pres ident who disliked him and welcomed hi s exec ution ; a gove rn ment where the cards were stacked agai nst him from the start , with 19 See Barnovsky , Na ceste, pp. 240, 245 , for Pol ak ' s acti vity during the .. February Crisis" of 1948. )o Ursfny, Z mojho i ivoui, p. 124. �SLOVAKIA 51 the Soc ial Democrats, Nati onal Soc iali sts, and non-parti san mini sters un sy mpatheti c to hi s cause; a Co mmuni st Party and the labor and res istance orga ni zati ons it mo bili zed workin g agg ressive ly aga in st him ; a staunchl y anti -Ti so j udge; and Ti so 's own wartime acti vities, whi ch made a death se nte nce pl ausi bl e. Nothin g th at th e DP did could have spared Ti so from exec utio n in thi s contex t. Neverthe less, th e way the Democrats mane uvered th ro ugh the cri s is had several consequ ences. The DP did eno ugh for T iso to buttress Communi st arguments that the Democrats catered to the Ludaks they were all eged ly harboring, arg uments th at in the ensuing months would mu shroom into the arrest of several leading De mocrats for ant i-state co nspiracy. At the same time, the DP 's fa ilure to sec ure an SNC vote on T iso's beha lf made it eas ier for the government 's Co mmuni st and non-Cath o li c Czec h parti es to argue th at Slo vaki a was opposed to c lemency fo r Tiso, thu s he lpin g abso lve Czechs of any charges that T iso's exec uti on was a Czech operati on done against the w ill of the Slovak people . Fin all y, the DP's impotence in defending T iso led to increased di si llusionment amo ng S lovak ia's Catho lic voters. For the DP, the who le undertaking was a lose-lose situ ati on, an indi cati on of just how d ifficult th at party's road was in spite of, or better said , on acco unt of, its bi g e lec tora l victo ry in May of 1946. To a great ex tent, the events surroundin g the iss ue of c lemency fo r Jozef Tiso were a mi crocos m of th e proble mati c pos itio n of the De mocrati c Party in postwar Czechos lovak ia. � SLOVAKIA 33 The Democratic Party and the Execution of Jozef Tiso James Ramon Felak On April 15 , 1947, Igor Daxne r, Chairman of the National Court in Brati s lava, pronounced the verd ict agai nst Father Jozef Ti so, the head of Slovakia's wartime state that was closely alli ed with Naz i Germany. The Co urt found Ti so guilty of 95 of 11 3 charges aga inst him, in c ludin g treason, betraya l of the Slovak National Uprising , co ll aborati on with the Naz is, and de portation of Slovak Jews to Naz i death ca mps. Hi s sente nce was death by han g in g, to be carried out within 48 hours. At once, Tiso, along w ith hi s two defense attorneys , submitted a requ est for c le me ncy. 1 Thi s pape r w ill in vesti gate the fate of thi s request, the last official chance to spare Ti so from death. Though the final deci sion on clemency rested with Czechoslovakia ' s Pres ide nt Edvard Be nes, the request passed like a hot potato over the next dozen ho urs, from Daxner to Slovakia's Commissioner of th e Interior Iva n Stefanik, to Slovakia ' s c hi ef organ of se lf-governme nt , the Slovak Nation al Council (SNC) , to the Czechoslovak gove rnme nt in Prague , and ultimatel y to Be nes. De mocra tic Party (DP) leaders had lobbi ed for c lemency during the tri al, voted for it at the gove rnme nt 's mee tin g on the eve nin g of April 16, a nd frantically appea led on its behalf to Be nes in the hours before Tiso ' s exec uti on. However, they c uri ously refused to take a stand for clemency at the meeting of the SNC's Pres idium on the afternoon of April 16, where they had a 3-to-2 majority and where a stand on Ti so 's behalf would have g ive n offic ial sanction to the view , w idely shared by many and 1 ' One of the three prosecutors. l.'.udovft Ri gan. also made a request for clemency to the Court; K arel K aplan, Dva retribucnf procesy . Komentovane dokumenty, (Prague. I 992), p. 221 (Document 37). �SLOVAKIA 34 probably most Slovaks, that Tiso should not be executed. The Democrats' refusal to take a stand in the SNC meant that Tiso's opponents could point to the failure of any official Slovak organs to recommend clemency as proof that his execution reflected the will of the Slovak people. The fate of Jozef Tiso was very much connected with the DP's fortunes in Czechoslovak and Slovak politics . Shortly after her liberation from Nazi rule and reattachment to Czechoslovakia, Slovakia had only two significant political parties-the Communist Party of Slovakia (CPS) and the Democratic Party (DP). The latter, in many ways a legacy of the interwar Agrarian party, emerged out of the Lutheran-dominated wing of the resistance to the Tiso regime. When the Catholic and nationalist Slovak People's Party (SPP) was outlawed at war ' s end , many Slovak Catholics became political orphans.2 In the spring of 1946, however, the DP adopted them through the so-called April Agreement, a pact between the party's leaders and important Catholic political activi sts whereby Catholics were promised a large share of influence in the DP and a Democratic commitment to promote the Catholic Church ' s position on issues such as education in exchange for Catholic electoral support. The fruit of the April Agreement was a landslide victory for the DP over the Communists in the May 1946 parliamentary elections, with Democrats winning 63 % of the vote to the Communists' 30%. From that point on , the CPS focused its energies on undoing the electoral results by seeking to paralyze, fracture , or dis solve the DP. Among other things, the Tiso trial figured in Communist calculations of how to cripple their rival. The Communist plan was to force the DP to navigate between the Scylla of angering its Catholic members and voters , who had hopes that the Democrats would rescue Tiso from a death sentence, and the Charybdis of being sucked into a police investigation for 2 Catholics comprised nearly 80% of the Slovak population. The majority of Slovak Catholics voted for the SPP during the interwar period. �SLOVAKIA 35 allegations of pandering to the reactionaries and war criminals it was all egedl y harboring th anks to the April Agreeme nt. Idea ll y, the DP wo uld be di scredited in the eyes of Catholics as an ineffectua l and lukewarm defe nder of Ti so, while concurrently di sc redited in the eyes of everyone else as a haven for reactionaries. With little room for mane uver, and in the face of enormo us press ure, the DP had to face thi s chall enge. What fo ll ows is how the Com muni sts were able to acco mpli sh these end s, partl y due to the ir own tactics, partl y due to the dynami c of the situ ati on, and part ly due to the cho ices made by the Democrats. Ri ght after the anno unceme nt of the verd ict, Ti so's lawyers, Ernest Zabkay and Martin Greco, submitted an official requ est for c lemency, as king for a more "appropriate" sentence for the ir c lient. 3 They particularly stressed lega l tec hni ca lities. Tiso's lawyers argued th at the defense was not all owed to speak with the acc used without the sec urity organs present-a violati on of a fund amental principle of criminal tri al procedure-and that the defense did not have certain archiv al materials at its disposal , while the prosec uti on did. Furthermore, records of testimony were not made avail able within the requisite three days, but lagged by nearly two month s, thereby mak in g it impossible for the defense to c ite testimon y made after January 15 in its concluding statements. In addition to these and a number of other technicalities, Tiso ' s lawyers arg ued th at the trial was po litica ll y biased, both because Daxner himse lf was bi ased, as the SNC itself had recognized in the past, and because, despite a leg islati ve order ca llin g for political pari ty in the Senate, no me mbers of the DP took part in the judg ment. Tiso's attorn eys a lso arg ued that Tiso was being puni shed for eve nts beyond his co ntro l. They claimed th at he did not prepare for Slovakia's independence in 1939, or he lp cause it, and that he showed no initiative and intention ality in hi s cooperation wi th Nazi Germany. Rather, he simpl y tri ed to make the best of a bad situ ation that was thru st upo n him . Finally, Ti so's atto rneys, in the .1 Kaplan, Ova retribucnf procesy. pp. 2 15-2 19 (Document 35) . �SLOVAKIA 36 onl y argument that the DP would make its ow n, argued th at clemency would strengthen Czech-Slovak relations, e liminate the threat of ill will between Slovakia ' s Catholics and Protestants, and strengthen ti es between Slovak emigrants and their motherl and. The National Court quick ly decided agai nst recommending c lemency for Ti so, and passed Tiso ' s request on to Slovak Commissioner of Ju stice Ivan Stefanik , a Democrat. Stefa nik in turn supported Tiso's request, and submitted a proposal to the Presidium of the SNC, which read , " I propose that the death se ntence of Dr. Jozef Ti so be commuted to life impri sonment. " 4 The proposal was to the point, absent the argumentation included in Ti so ' s request, and un like Ti so ' s request, allowed for no sentence less than life impri sonment. On April 16, the SNC ' s Presidium met to consider Stefa nik ' s proposal, along with some other matters connected with Ti so ' s tri al. When the Pres idium convened, it was already under enormous pressure. By law , Tiso ' s exec ution was to be carried out within 48 hours of the announcement of the verdict, so matters had to be considered quickly. Moreover, the gove rnm ent in Prag ue was meet in g later that day to discuss c lemency , and was eagerly awaiting the views of Slovakia 's leadin g organs on the matter. Adding to the pressure was the fact that the Presidium received the 214 page judgment aga inst Tiso only shortl y before its meeti ng.5 Moreover, te legrams, letters, and petitions (for and against c leme ncy) were pourin g in to the President 's office, the government, and the SNC, while Parti san and labor organizations staged anti-Ti so rallies across Slovakia and de legation s from trade union s, hou sing estates, and espec ially resistance organizations arrived in Brati slava to add their presence to the de liberations. 6 Though there were no reported cases of violence, it is not difficult to imagine the presence of these groups, enco uraged if not orchestrated by the Communists, adding a menac in g character to 4 K aplan , Dva relribucnf procesy. p. 220 (Document 36). ' Th e DP claimed the Presidium had onl y ten minutes to look over the length y judgmen t; see Cas. April 23 , 1947 , no. 93, p. I. 6 Cas, Apri l 23, 1947, no. 93 , p. I. �SLOVAKIA 37 the already inte nse pressure on the Presidium , or more prec ise ly, its Democratic me mbers. For example, a consortium of major res istance organi zati o ns iss ued a decl aration on April 16 th at conde mned c lemency as a "s hameful defilement (popl'u vanie) of all the sac rifi ces of o ur nation al stru gg le" th at co uld e mbolde n Ti so's supporte rs into provokin g unrest in S lovakia aimed at undermining the Re public.7 If cle mency was gra nted to Tiso, these organizations promi sed to assess the situation and cons ide r what mean s to emp loy in de fe nse of the Republic and the ga ins of the Slovak National Upri sin g. The DP had a majority on the Presi dium , which conta ined three Democrats (Jozef Lettrich, who was chairman of both the DP and the SNC, Andrej Cvincek, Milan Po la k) a nd two Communi sts (Karol Smidke, Ivan Horvath ). Nevertheless, the Pres idium did not e ndorse Stefanik's proposa l for c le me nc y; rather, it reso lved to submit the proposa l to the governme nt without co mme nt. In hi s me moirs, Jan Ursfny, a top DP leader and its Deputy Chairman, argued that Lettric h went into the meetin g with the intention of avo idin g debate over clemency, a position Ursfny strongly advised against. 8 Lettrich 's behav ior at the meeting does betray the actions of a man inte nt on avoi ding debate. 9 First of all , most of the meetin g 's di scuss ion dea lt with De mocratic di ssati sfaction with Daxner's ha ndling of the tri al. Whe n the Presidium did get around to the Ti so verdict, Le ttri c h made it clear th at he fe lt th at the press ure of time mad e it imposs ible to acq uire sufficie nt knowledge to take a pos ition on c le mency, and that any recommendation would thu s have to be " politica l." The Communi st Horvath the n proposed that the Presidium take no stand , but simpl y pass on Stefa nik 's proposa l to the government without co mment. He argued that a recomme nd ation from the SNC was ne ithe r requi- 1 Pravda. Apri l 18, 1947 . no. 90, p. I: th e Slovak term pop!ii vct nie could be rendered as .. spitting on". • Jan Ursfny. Z m6jho i i votct. (M artin . 2000), pp. 123- 124. " See Sl ovensky narod ny archfv (hereafter referred to as SNA). Fond Urad predsednfctva Slovenskej narodnej rady , Carton 139, Folder 134. Folios 49-58 , S R Presidiu m meetin g of A pril 16. 1947. �SLOVAKIA 38 red nor necessary, for it was the government and Benes whose views would be decisive. According to Horvath, since the Communists were opposed to clemency, they would be unable to support Stefanik ' s proposa l, and hence any vote in the SNC would be on a parti san basis, setting a bad precedent for future Communist-Democratic cooperation. When it came time to vote on Horvath ' s proposal , the Presidium accepted it unanimously. Before examining why the SNC , or more specifically its Democratic members, opted not to recommend c lemency for Tiso, let us track the proposal ' s course to Prague and ultimately to Benes. The Communists and Social Democrats were openly hostile to Tiso, and the non-parti san mini sters, Ludvfk Svoboda (Defense) and Jan Masaryk (Foreign Affairs), could be expected to be so as well. Together, these constituted 13 of the 23 members of the government, enough to tip any vote to Ti so's detriment. On top of that, the Czech National Soc ialists were at best ambivalent. A number of leading National Socialists opposed clemency and wanted their party to vote against it or at least to abstain. 10 However, Minister of Justice Prokop Drtina, one of the party's top leaders, had earlier assured Lettrich that he would support clemency provided the SNC did. 11 In the last of a series of meetings on the issue , held right before the government session began , Drtina managed to convince his colleagues to agree to the following position : to oppose clemency, but only after first proposing that the request for clemency be returned to the Presid ium of the SNC for that organ's recommendation. In thi s way, Drtina could present himself as makin g a good faith effort to honor hi s promise to Lettrich , while entertaining hopes that a vote to return the request to the SNC would fail, thu s getting himself off the hook. 12 The government meeting opened at approximately 5: 15 p.m ., after a delay of over an hour as its members waited for reports from ° Kaplan. Dva retribucnf procesy. p. 25 . 1 " Prokop Drtina. Ceskos lovensko muj osud, II. 2, (Toronto, I 982). pp. 297-298. 302. 12 Drtina, Ceskoslovensko muj osud. II , 2, p. 302. �SLOVAKIA 39 Slovakia. 13 Within ten minutes, a delegation of representatives from the Union of Czechoslovak Partisans and so me similar organizations asked to be admitted. Since the National Socialists had yet to arrive, mak ing their last minute plans in a nearby room , the meetin g was adjourned for 45 minutes while the parti san organizations were given the opportunity to press ure the mini sters to vote against clemency. 14 Once the de legation s had their say and engaged some of the mini sters over the iss ue , and the National Sociali st mini sters had arrived, the meeting was reconvened. Prime Mini ster Kl ement Gottwald began by sharin g two pieces of information he had just rece ived from Slovaki a- the memorandum from the SNC' s Pres idium pass in g on Stefanik's proposal for clemency without comment, and a telegram from Gu stav Husak, Chairman of Slovakia 's Board of Commissioners (Cabinet). Husak noted that Stefanik 's proposal did not reflect the views of the Board of Commissioners nor its Presidium, whose standpoint Stefanik did not seek, and should therefore be regarded as hi s own personal proposal. Husak added that he did not agree with the proposa l. Thus, the meeting opened with reports from Slovakia 's two chief political organs, neither of which endorsed clemency. Gottwald, leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party , then proposed that the government reso lve aga inst clemency, since the National Court in Brati slava recommended against it, and the Pres idium of the SNC did not recommend for it. In a long and sometimes pass ionate debate, mini sters from both sides weighed in on the que stion, with positions breaking down along party lines. The Communists led the charge against clemency. Vladimfr Clementi s, State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and a Slovak, read a CPS 13 For the minutes of the meeting. see K apl an, Dva retribucnf procesy. pp. 225-254. 14 Ursfny . in his memoirs, recou nts be ing asked by one member of the parti san dele- gati on: "M r. Deput y Chairman, tell me, w ith whom do you wan t to go. w ith th e Ludak underground. or with us?" A nother partisan representati ve. however, spoke up for Ursfny as ··one of the greates t partisans. " (see Ursfny, Z m6jho i ivota, p. 125): see footnote 17 for an ex planation of the term " Ludak. " �40 SLOVAKIA decl aration that la id o ut the Co mmuni st pos iti on. The dec larati o n stressed the did acti c function of the tri al, that is, its purpose in di sco urag ing enemies of the Republic. A death sentence co uld do that far better than a life sentence in thi s res pect. C lemency, on the co ntrary, would onl y encou rage enemi es of the state and sympathizers of Ti so and hi s reg ime . Reactionari es, as before, were tryin g to take over Slovaki a "even at the price of the Re public." 15 The dec laration arg ued that c leme ncy would evoke di stru st in the judic ial sys tem. Veterans of the Sl ovak Nati onal Upri sin g would be upset with the de parture from the idea ls of the res istance; peo ple wo uld note the inj ustice of lesser crimin als hav ing been more harshl y puni shed than Ti so; and politics would be seen once more as " panske huncutst vo", that is "gentl emen's mi sc hi ef." 16 The declarati o n noted in parti cul ar that Ti so showed no remorse for hi s crimes, and in fac t gave succor to th e Re public 's ene mi es in hi s co ncludin g statement at hi s tri al. Much of what Cleme nti s read was identica l to a dec larati on made a day earli er by Slovaki a's res istance organi zati o ns, testifyin g to the leadin g ro le the Co mmuni sts pl ayed in those orga ni zati o ns and the success the party had in coordin atin g various soc ial orga ni zati ons on behalf of its objecti ves . Indeed , both dec laration s co nc luded with the sa me threat to assess the s ituation and consider what mea ns to employ in defense of the Republic and its character. Czech Communi sts also spoke out again st clemency, asserting th at Ti so was a traitor and a war crimina l, and that fa ilin g to exec ute him would be a blow to Czec hos lovakia 's unity and inde pendence. Communi st speakers also arg ued th at it was the will of th e Slovak people that Ti so be exec u- 15 The express ion ··ani za ce nu republiky", th at is, •·even at the price of the rep ublic" . was a reference to a statement made by HSL:S leader A ndrej Hlin ka at a rall y in Trencfn in 1932, where he asse rted th e degree to whi ch his party wo uld pu rsue Slovak interests; see James Ramon Felak, •A l the Price of the Republic·_. Hlinka 's Slovak People 's Party. 1929- 1938. (Pittsburg h, 1994 ), p. 96. 16 " Poli tika je panske huncutstvo" was an expression curre nt among Slovaks , rooted in Slovakia ' s feudal pas t. It was the recog nition by peasan ts th at pol itics was the domain where the lords made mi sch ief. �SLOVAKIA 41 ted , as ev ide nced by the pos iti ons of the Nati ona l Co urt, the SNC, and the Board of Co mmi ss ione rs, all organs composed e ntire ly of Slova ks and re prese nting S lovakia. Thi s was why, the Czec h Co mmuni st Vac lav Kopecky noted , the DP would not speak up fo r c leme ncy on the SNC's Pres idium. Th e Soc ia l De mocrati c mini sters we re just as o pposed to c lemency as the Communi sts, and no less assertive about the ir pos iti on. Zdene k Fierlin ger, the leader of the SOP and a Deputy Prime Minister, argued th at a vote fo r c le me ncy wo uld upset Czec hoslovaki a's alli es in the Slav ic world , in part because it would fu e l Slova k independe nce, whi c h itse lf th reate ned Czec hos lovaki a 's border w ith the Sov iet Uni o n. Fie rlinger even re marked th at how o ne voted o n the cleme ncy questi on was a test of one's patri oti sm. With respect to the reli g io us dim e ns ion of the ques ti o n, the Soc ial De mocrati c leade r asserted th at the fac t of Tiso's be ing a priest was not a miti gating c irc um stance, but rathe r one th at made matters worse. He noted th at it was not good for the Catho lic Churc h to e ncumbe r itse lf with Ti so . Whil e Fie rlinger re prese nted the pro-C ommuni st left-win g of the SOP, that party's ri ght-wing was no less vehe me nt about Ti so. Vaclav Maj er, the leader of the ri ght-wing Soc ial De mocrats, referred to the Sl ovak pri est as one of the chi e f war crimin als, guilty of mass murder. The most ex te ns ive attac k on Ti so a nd argume nt against cle me ncy, however, came not fro m the mini ste rs o f the le fti st parties, but from the oste nsibl y ne utra l (a lbeit c loset Communi st) Ludvfk Svoboda, the Mini ster o f Defe nse. As a Czec hoslovak hero of both the First and Second World Wars, Svoboda's word s carri ed a certain cac het. Svoboda spoke at le ngth about why T iso mu st die . He came o ut strong ly aga inst so-ca ll ed ha lf-so luti o ns; at ha nd was a definiti ve hi stori ca l qu esti o n w ith long- te rm impli cati o ns th at sho uld not be judged accordin g to the needs a nd mood of the mo me nt. Ti so was �42 SLOVAKIA not just a war criminal ; he was the sy mbol of " Ludakism," 17 fasci sm, treason , and collaboration . To grant clemency to Tiso, according to Svoboda, would render hi s trial vain and superfluous. If alive, Ti so would remain to poison cooperation and unity between Czechs and Slovaks; clemency would encourage hi s supporters, while disappointing others. Like many speakers and writers of the time, Svoboda noted that Tiso showed no remorse. He ca lled for a firm and resolute action agai nst him as a means of strengthening Czechoslovakia's international position and prestige. To those w ho argued th at Ti so should be spared because he was a priest, Svoboda dec lared that "we are not judging a priest, but a traitor, a destroyer of the Czechoslovak state, and a criminal. That Tiso is a priest only makes matters worse; he profaned the priestly office and Church at a time when thou sands of other priests fought bravely again st Nazi sm and perished in concentration camps and prisons." On the other s ide of the equation were those mini sters who championed c lemency-on ly the Democrats and Czech Populi sts. Here the most prominent speaker was Ursfny . The Democratic Deputy Chairman argued that clemency would improve relations between Czechs and Slovaks, Lutherans and Catholics, and aid in the overall consolidation of the post-war Republic. Such a goodwi ll gesture might also win over some of Czechoslovakia' s enemi es. Ursfny noted that religiou s fee lings ran strong in Slovakia, where the exec ution of a priest was a serious , and potentiall y upsetting matter. He pointed out that many good people were for clemency, includin g so me bishops and hi gh functionari es in the Lutheran church , a church that itself had suffered under Ti so's regi me. The Democratic Minister of Transportation Ivan Pietor also spelled out a number of reasons for clemency. He argued that Ti so was popular among the majority of Slovaks, and that the preva ilin g majority of Slovaks would vote for 17 Lud aki sm, or "l'udactvo" was the term employed to refer to fo ll owers of th e Slovak People 's Party, whose members were know n as '• Ludaks" or " l'udaci ." It best approximates the Engli sh word " Populi sm. " Communi sts applied the term to any Slovak Catholics they did not like. �SLOVAKIA 43 clemency if given the chance, thou gh thi s did not mean they agreed with Ti so ' s politics. He too noted that important Lutheran leaders sent ardent appeals on Tiso's behalf in the interest of the peaceful deve lopment of Slovaki a and Czechoslovakia. The g iven politica l s ituation , accordin g to Pietor, demanded statesmanlike thinkin g, wi sdom , and sensiti vity to the prevailing political condition s and mood. In such a co ntext, clemency would be a gesture to win over hearts in Slovakia and bring the Czech and Slovak nation s together. While the Court may have unanimou sly estab lished Tiso 's guilt and ca ll ed for hi s exec ution , that was a judicial decision , not a political one. What the Republic now faced was a manifestly political deci sion , and that was the task of the government to settl e, in accordance with political considerations. The Czec h Populi sts, as members of a Catholic party with moderate inclinations, also supported clemency. Minister Franti se k Ha.la (Post Office), him se lf a Catholic priest, presented c le mency as the most suitable solution for Czechoslovak and Slovak interests. The Populi st Adolf Prochazka (Health ) remarked that c lemency was the des ire of most Slovaks, and of the Lutheran church leadership . Jan Kopecky (Mini ster without Portfolio) supported clemency as a way to consolidate the Repub li c, and reminded hi s mini sterial colleagues that life impri sonment was not tantamount to acq uittal. In makin g hi s case, Ursfny co ntended that the SNC did not recommend aga inst c lemency ; rather it was not the Pres idium 's function to ex press a position on the proposa l, but only to pass it on to the government. Technically , he was correct because the Second Prague Agreement of April I I , 1946, the statute under which such matters were regulated , stated that the commissioner's proposal be submitted to the go vernment "v ia the Pres idium of the Slovak National Counci l. " 18 However, this strict construction is not the way the SNC had hitherto been dealing with proposa ls. Gottwald snide ly noted that the '" Jan Mechyr. Slo vensko v Ceskoslovensku : Slovensko-ceske vztahy I 9 I 8- 199 I . (Prague. 1991 ). �44 SLOVAKIA Pres idium had sudde nl y dec ided in thi s case to limit itse lf to the ro le of a post office, and al ong with Fie rlinger, he regarded Ursfny 's expl a nati on as sophi stry. They were not bu ying th e De moc rats ' claim that the Pres idium ' s position was not a fa ilure to endorse c le mency. It was the centri st parties, however, that ex pressed the most anger over the SNC 's sile nce regardin g c leme ncy - a sil e nce th at, because the DP had a majority in the Pres idium, was c learl y bl a med on the De mocrats. A number of Nati ona l Soc iali st and Populi st mini ste rs vo iced their indi gnati on at the SNC's atte mpt to pass th e buck. Jaroslav Stra nsky (Edu cati on) said th at he wa nted Ursfny and hi s frie nds to recogni ze the situ ation into whi ch they had gotte n the governme nt , whi c h thanks to the m now had to dec ide on a matter about whi c h it did not have s uffic ie nt kn ow ledge. In thi s s itu ati on, th e gove rnm e nt co uld be bl a med if Ti so did not get cle me ncy, thereby bein g burde ned with what is primaril y a Sl ovak pro bl e m. Drtina, s imil arly, sa id he was perpl exed by the Pres idium ' s unex pected course of acti on, one whi ch now put the go vernme nt in a diffi c ult situati on. He pro posed se ndin g th e pro posal bac k to th e Pres idium fo r its opini o n, in acco rdance with the Second Prague Agree me nt, whi c h stipul ated that the governme nt return proposa ls to the SNC's Pres idium if it had objecti ons to them from the point of view of statew ide inte res ts. Foll o win g suit , Nation a l Soc ia li st Mini ste r o f Fore ig n Trade Hube rt Ripka noted hi s party ' s astoni shme nt at th e SNC's acti on - how it limited its ro le to th at of a mailbox in the way it interpre ted the Seco nd Prag ue Agree me nt. He noted th at Sl ovaki a ' s se lf-proc laimed leadin g orga n did not have the courage to ex press itse lf on a questi on of suc h importance fo r the future and fa te of the Slovak people . Accordin g to Ripka, it was c lear that the SNC Pres idium wa nted to shi ft the res po nsibility for Ti so's fate o nto the governme nt. He in sisted that the Pres idum ex press itse lf on the iss ue, and as qui ckl y as poss ibl e. Hala, spea kin g for th e Czech Populi sts, echoed the sentiments o f the Nation al Soc ia li sts, notin g th at the Presidium ' s action greatl y surpri sed him and that it see med to want to pass responsibility onto the governme nt. �SLOVAKIA 45 While the National Sociali sts and Populi sts expressed agreement with Drtina 's motion to return the proposa l to the SNC, the leftist parties adamantly opposed it. Gottwald, Fierlinger, and others noted that the SNC had already taken a position by failing to endorse clemency. They argued that further delay of Ti so's execution would only drag thin gs out, sustain a state of tension and provoke and evoke supporters of Ti so, as well as open the floodgates for clemency for others sentenced to death. When Drtina 's motion to return the proposal to the Presidium of the SNC came to a vote, it was defeated 13 to I0 . The voting broke down according to party lines: the National Socialists, Populists, and Democrats supported the proposal; the leftist parties and non-parti san ministers opposed it. While the Populists may well have sincerely believed that the best remedy for the crisis would have been for the SNC to voice its opinion on the matter, the National Socialists made and supported the motion simply for cosmetic purposes, hoping that it would fail. 19 The Democrats, of course, were in a quite unenviable position. The motion' s failure meant that they would not be g iven a second chance to make a stand for clemency in the Presidium. At the same time, it is not certain that they would have known what to do with a second chance; the factors that kept them from endorsing clemency the first time around were still operative. As the debate over Stefanik 's proposal resumed , the National Socialists came out against clemency, and sought to present the anticlemency position as the one identified with Slovakia. Drtina, noting th at the government was not fully informed of the detail s of the case, thought the matter should be best settled by Slovakia, as it indeed was - a Slovak Court had establi shed Tiso's guilt and had unanimously rejected clemency, which the SNC had also failed to recommend. Ripka , de mon stratin g the sort of Czech ignorance of Slovakia that ran kles Slovaks, claimed that Ti so, long before 1938 , was as bad or worse than Vojtech Tuka, Ti so 's main political rival during the war 19 Drtina adm its thi s in hi s me moirs: see Ceskoslovensko mu) osud, II , 2, p. 302. �46 SLOVAKIA and the leader of the radically pro-Nazi faction ple 's Party. 20 in the Slovak Peo- Because the consequences of Ludakism had not yet di- sappeared from Slovakia, clemency should be rejected. Ripka not only came out again st it, but also appealed to the DP and Czech Populists to abstain on the vote, so the government could present a united front. He addressed the Democrats with the rebuke that, if they did not vote for clemency in Slovakia, they should not now at the governmental level, where the domestic and international ramifications of such a vote were great. After more di sc uss ion, the government ultimately passed a resolution voicing its opposition to c lemency, on the grounds th at the National Court in Brati slava had recommended against it, and that the Pres idium of the SNC did not endorse it when pass ing Stefanik's proposal on to Prague. The vote was 17 in favor , 6 against. All mini sters rejected c lemency except those from the DP and Czech People 's Party. The meeting was adjourned at 8:50 p.m. Shortly thereafter, Gottwald took the government 's recommendation to Benes, who accepted it and informed Slovakia's Commissioner of Ju stice that hi s request for clemency had been officially denied. 2 1 Upon learn in g of the dec ision , Lettrich made a last-ditch intervention , telephoning Benes ' s chancellery. He conveyed the message that the government's standpoint was in conflict with Article I.b. of the Second Prague Agreement, which instructed the government, if it had objections aga inst a proposal from Slovaki a, to return that proposal to the SNC' s Presidium, not pass it on to Benes with a 20 Tuka was a notoriou s ri ghti st rad ica l who made a political career out of intriguing with foreign enemi es of the Czec hos lovak Republi c almost right from th e Republi c ' s founding. He spent most of th e 1930s in pri son for treason, and was executed for war crimes in the summer of 1946. we ll before the tri al of Tiso. 21 K apl an, D va retribucnf procesy, p. 27: Benes had informed Gottwald the day before th at he planned to ac t in accordance wi th whatever th e governm ent recommended regardin g clemency fo r Tiso, K apl an, D va retribucnf procesy, pp. 222-224 (Document 38). �SLOVAKIA 47 recommendation. 22 Lettrich warned Benes of possible " immense political consequences" that could resu lt from a rejection of clemency, and fo r which the DP could not accept responsibility . Lettrich conc luded by notin g th at the DP had an absolute majority in the SNC and its Pres idium and fully agreed with Stefanik ' s proposal, considering clemency as a paramount state and nation al interest. Benes received the message early the next morning, instructing hi s chancellery to tell Lettrich that he had gone to the countryside, and would discuss the matter with Gottw ald if Lettrich so desired. 23 Ursfny too attempted an appeal on behalf of clemency, and also found out that the rej ection of clemency was an accomplished fact and that Benes was incommunicado. 24 Stefanik him self made a final attempt on Tiso ' s behalf, asking the National Court that Tiso be tran sferred to the jail of the Office of the Public Prosec utor, so he could be questioned regarding some other cases. Thi s the National Court rejected on the ground s that Ti so could be just as eas ily be questioned at its own jail. 25 With all avenues for clemency now ex hausted , Ti so was hanged early on the morning of April 18, officiall y pronounced dead at 5:30 a.m. It was no surpri se that Ti so was found guilty, nor th at he was sentenced to die. Nor was it astoni shing that the majority of government mini sters in Prague rejected the reco mmendation for clemency, and that Benes acted in accordance with their position. But what was puzzling was the behavior of the DP -supporting clemency in Prague , but not in Bratislava; desperately appealin g for clemency on the 22 Mi chal Barn ovsky , Na ceste k monopolu moci, ( Bratislava , 1993) , p. 145 n; K apl an, Dva retribucnf procesy, p. 28. 23 Kaplan , D va retribucnf procesy, p. 28 ; Robert Letz, S/ovensko v rokoch I 945- 1948, (Bratislava, 1994 ), p. 48 . 24 Ursfny, Z m6jho t i vota, p. 127 . 25 K aplan, Dva retribucnf procesy, p. 29; the motive behind this attempt was to delay Ti so ' s exec uti on and thu s increase the chances that he would ultimately receive clemency . �48 SLOVAKIA eve of Tiso 's exec uti on, while letting the issue pass right throu gh the hands of the SNC Presidium that they had dominated the day before. Did the DP want the appeal for c lemency to fail? Such a view ca n be found in the po lice record , where a report me nti ons that Lettrich was opposed to cle me ncy for Tiso. 26 Like many scenarios sketched out by police inform ants, however, this one seems to be w ithout merit. Lettrich had earli er lobbi ed Tiso ' s three prosecutors for c lemency, and had persuaded Minister of Ju sti ce Drtina to promi se hi s support as well. These are hardl y the acti ons of a man desiring Tiso 's execution . Other ex planat io ns must li e behind the timidity of Lettrich and the DP at the notoriou s SNC Pres idium meeting of April 16. Hi storian s who have exa mined the meetin g, a nd the issue of clemency overall, ha ve co me up with a numbe r of ex pl anation s, which will be di sc ussed here in ascend in g order of pl a usibility and influence. 27 Most dubi o us is the view th at the De mocrats trusted that Benes would grant clemency regardless of the recommendations he rece ived. Whil e the re appare ntly was public spec ulation that Be nes mi ght spare Tiso, the DP leadership had littl e reason to put their tru st in such suppos ition s. Benes had already g ive n Lettrich and Ursfny quite c lear indication s of hi s oppositi on to cle mency. 28 Another of the weaker arguments for why the SNC did not take a stand on c le me ncy was the one the DP used to ex pl ai n itse lf at the 26 Barno vsky, Na ceste. p. 130. 27 For exp lanati ons of why the OS acted the way it did at th e SNR Pres idiu m mee- ting of Apri l 16, see Barnovsky , Na ceste, p. 130: Letz, Slovensko. pp. 47-48: Kaplan . Ova relribucnf procesy, pp. 24-26 : Ursfny, Z m6jho i i vota. pp. 123- 124 : for the DP ' s attempt to j ustify its ac ti ons at the time, see Cas. April 23, 1947. no. 93 . p. I. 28 Lettrich , in a meeting with the three state prosecutors of the Tiso trial on March 12. I 94 7, mentioned that he had discussed the matter of clemency for Tiso w ith Benes on two occasions, and th at Benes's positi on was th at he would not take a stand but rather all ow th e governmen t' s decis ion on th e matter to guide him : (see SNA. Demokraticka strana, Carton 2, Bundle 99 , Folios 1-2): moreover. Ursfny claims in hi s memoirs that in fall of 1946. Daxner asked Benes how he shou ld handle the Tiso case, to which Benes replied, " I th in k that he deserves death, but thi s is an affair for an independent court. "; (see Ursfny, Z m6jho i ivota. p. 11 3). �SLOVAKIA 49 government meetin g of April 16 and thereafter, i.e. that accordin g to the 2 nd Prague Agreement , the S C's role in the process was simpl y to pass proposals on to the Government and not to co mment on them, and that i f the government had obj ection s to Stefanik's proposa l, it wo uld soli cit the SNC Presidium 's views on it. Upon refl ec ti on, thi s ex plan ati on holds no more water th an it did at the tim e. A party that believed Slovak organs should speak for Slovakia, and a good bit of whose appeal was based on its advocacy of autonomy fo r Slovakia, is behav ing out of character w hen it surrenders to Prague the prerogati ve to decide on a matter so c lose to th e hearts of so many Slovaks. Another ex pl anation put forth by the DP was that it lacked sufficient time to stud y the doc umentation pertinent to th e Tiso tri al. Whil e on the surface thi s is true , still , the SNC was not being asked to render a lega l or judicial judgment, but a politi ca l one. In the latter case, the party could have made up its mind on a pos ition long before the verdi ct, as the Communists had. M ore convincing are the views th at th e DP was simpl y afra id th at a vote for clemency wo uld prompt the Communi sts to provoke a politica l crisis in Slovakia, halting cooperation w ithin the SNC, mobili zing Parti san and trade union groups against the Democrats, and forcing Prague to step in . Indeed, such threats and pressures were already ev ident on the Slovak political stage for over a yea r, and were com mon everywhere else in East Central Europe w here Communi st parti es were acti ve. In thi s view , the DP simpl y lost its nerve and opted to pass the matter on to Prague ra ther than deal w ith it in Bra ti slava. Thi s explanati on seems va lid enough because Communi st pres sure was al ways an influence. However, i f fear of reperc uss ions was the main reason for keeping the DP quiet, w hy did Democrats vote for clemency at the government sess ions in Prag ue? Wa s it to gi ve public assura nce to th eir co nstitu ents th at th ey opposed clemency , but at a ven ue w here they did not have to worry about their vote carry ing any influence and thereby provoking a clemency- induced �SLOVAKIA 50 cris is back home? This question is moot , give n the influence of the most significant factor of all. A final ex pl anati on is most like ly the crucial o ne - that the DP could not co unt on one of its own representatives on the Presidi um , Milan Po lak , to vote for c le mency. Po lak ' s record, both before and after 1947, place him on the left wing of the DP. A former Parti san, and leader in the Parti sa n vetera ns' movement, Po lak collaborated with the Communists durin g and after the February co up of 1948 . 29 Unable to co unt on hi s vote, Lettrich preferred no vote on c lemency to one in which Polak would abstain or vote no. Thus he chose the leas t pa inful but st ill damaging option. While many of Slovakia ' s Catholics would be upset if the DP-controll ed Presidium failed to take a vote on clemency, they wo uld be even more outraged if a DPcontrolled Pres idium rejected clemency, or could not mu ste r th e three votes needed to pass it. Ursfny 's memo irs prov ide further ev idence for thi s ex planation. Ursfny reported that, when on a vis it to the United States in the fa ll of 1967 , he spoke by telephone with Lettrich , who told him that he wanted the SNC to avoid the iss ue of clemency because Pol ak wo uld not have voted for it. 30 Thus, while the DP owed its success to a large ly Catholic e lectorate, it contained a core of resistance veterans who simpl y could not countenance anything short of Ti so's exec ution. Since the leader of those veterans he ld the deciding vote on the SNC Presidium , the DP 's efforts to support c le mency were futile. Tho ugh the DP had good reason to suspect that Polak would not vote for c lemency, the Communists had their own fears that he mi ght not vote aga inst it. This ex plains why the Communists on the SNC were as eager as the Democrats to pass the matter on to Prague. A number of factors contributed to the exec ution of Jozef Tiso-a Pres ident who disliked him and welcomed hi s exec ution ; a gove rn ment where the cards were stacked agai nst him from the start , with 19 See Barnovsky , Na ceste, pp. 240, 245 , for Pol ak ' s acti vity during the .. February Crisis" of 1948. )o Ursfny, Z mojho i ivoui, p. 124. �SLOVAKIA 51 the Soc ial Democrats, Nati onal Soc iali sts, and non-parti san mini sters un sy mpatheti c to hi s cause; a Co mmuni st Party and the labor and res istance orga ni zati ons it mo bili zed workin g agg ressive ly aga in st him ; a staunchl y anti -Ti so j udge; and Ti so 's own wartime acti vities, whi ch made a death se nte nce pl ausi bl e. Nothin g th at th e DP did could have spared Ti so from exec utio n in thi s contex t. Neverthe less, th e way the Democrats mane uvered th ro ugh the cri s is had several consequ ences. The DP did eno ugh for T iso to buttress Communi st arguments that the Democrats catered to the Ludaks they were all eged ly harboring, arg uments th at in the ensuing months would mu shroom into the arrest of several leading De mocrats for ant i-state co nspiracy. At the same time, the DP 's fa ilure to sec ure an SNC vote on T iso's beha lf made it eas ier for the government 's Co mmuni st and non-Cath o li c Czec h parti es to argue th at Slo vaki a was opposed to c lemency fo r Tiso, thu s he lpin g abso lve Czechs of any charges that T iso's exec uti on was a Czech operati on done against the w ill of the Slovak people . Fin all y, the DP's impotence in defending T iso led to increased di si llusionment amo ng S lovak ia's Catho lic voters. For the DP, the who le undertaking was a lose-lose situ ati on, an indi cati on of just how d ifficult th at party's road was in spite of, or better said , on acco unt of, its bi g e lec tora l victo ry in May of 1946. To a great ex tent, the events surroundin g the iss ue of c lemency fo r Jozef Tiso were a mi crocos m of th e proble mati c pos itio n of the De mocrati c Party in postwar Czechos lovak ia. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2005, Vol. 38 Description An account of the resource Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 33 The Democratic Party and the Execution of Jozef Tiso James Ramon Felak On April 15 , 1947, Igor Daxne r, Chairman of the National Court in Brati s lava, pronounced the verd ict agai nst Father Jozef Ti so, the head of Slovakia's wartime state that was closely alli ed with Naz i Germany. The Co urt found Ti so guilty of 95 of 11 3 charges aga inst him, in c ludin g treason, betraya l of the Slovak National Uprising , co ll aborati on with the Naz is, and de portation of Slovak Jews to Naz i death ca mps. Hi s sente nce was death by han g in g, to be carried out within 48 hours. At once, Tiso, along w ith hi s two defense attorneys , submitted a requ est for c le me ncy. 1 Thi s pape r w ill in vesti gate the fate of thi s request, the last official chance to spare Ti so from death. Though the final deci sion on clemency rested with Czechoslovakia ' s Pres ide nt Edvard Be nes, the request passed like a hot potato over the next dozen ho urs, from Daxner to Slovakia's Commissioner of th e Interior Iva n Stefanik, to Slovakia ' s c hi ef organ of se lf-governme nt , the Slovak Nation al Council (SNC) , to the Czechoslovak gove rnme nt in Prague , and ultimatel y to Be nes. De mocra tic Party (DP) leaders had lobbi ed for c lemency during the tri al, voted for it at the gove rnme nt 's mee tin g on the eve nin g of April 16, a nd frantically appea led on its behalf to Be nes in the hours before Tiso ' s exec uti on. However, they c uri ously refused to take a stand for clemency at the meeting of the SNC's Pres idium on the afternoon of April 16, where they had a 3-to-2 majority and where a stand on Ti so 's behalf would have g ive n offic ial sanction to the view , w idely shared by many and 1 ' One of the three prosecutors. l.'.udovft Ri gan. also made a request for clemency to the Court; K arel K aplan, Dva retribucnf procesy . Komentovane dokumenty, (Prague. I 992), p. 221 (Document 37). SLOVAKIA 34 probably most Slovaks, that Tiso should not be executed. The Democrats' refusal to take a stand in the SNC meant that Tiso's opponents could point to the failure of any official Slovak organs to recommend clemency as proof that his execution reflected the will of the Slovak people. The fate of Jozef Tiso was very much connected with the DP's fortunes in Czechoslovak and Slovak politics . Shortly after her liberation from Nazi rule and reattachment to Czechoslovakia, Slovakia had only two significant political parties-the Communist Party of Slovakia (CPS) and the Democratic Party (DP). The latter, in many ways a legacy of the interwar Agrarian party, emerged out of the Lutheran-dominated wing of the resistance to the Tiso regime. When the Catholic and nationalist Slovak People's Party (SPP) was outlawed at war ' s end , many Slovak Catholics became political orphans.2 In the spring of 1946, however, the DP adopted them through the so-called April Agreement, a pact between the party's leaders and important Catholic political activi sts whereby Catholics were promised a large share of influence in the DP and a Democratic commitment to promote the Catholic Church ' s position on issues such as education in exchange for Catholic electoral support. The fruit of the April Agreement was a landslide victory for the DP over the Communists in the May 1946 parliamentary elections, with Democrats winning 63 % of the vote to the Communists' 30%. From that point on , the CPS focused its energies on undoing the electoral results by seeking to paralyze, fracture , or dis solve the DP. Among other things, the Tiso trial figured in Communist calculations of how to cripple their rival. The Communist plan was to force the DP to navigate between the Scylla of angering its Catholic members and voters , who had hopes that the Democrats would rescue Tiso from a death sentence, and the Charybdis of being sucked into a police investigation for 2 Catholics comprised nearly 80% of the Slovak population. The majority of Slovak Catholics voted for the SPP during the interwar period. SLOVAKIA 35 allegations of pandering to the reactionaries and war criminals it was all egedl y harboring th anks to the April Agreeme nt. Idea ll y, the DP wo uld be di scredited in the eyes of Catholics as an ineffectua l and lukewarm defe nder of Ti so, while concurrently di sc redited in the eyes of everyone else as a haven for reactionaries. With little room for mane uver, and in the face of enormo us press ure, the DP had to face thi s chall enge. What fo ll ows is how the Com muni sts were able to acco mpli sh these end s, partl y due to the ir own tactics, partl y due to the dynami c of the situ ati on, and part ly due to the cho ices made by the Democrats. Ri ght after the anno unceme nt of the verd ict, Ti so's lawyers, Ernest Zabkay and Martin Greco, submitted an official requ est for c lemency, as king for a more "appropriate" sentence for the ir c lient. 3 They particularly stressed lega l tec hni ca lities. Tiso's lawyers argued th at the defense was not all owed to speak with the acc used without the sec urity organs present-a violati on of a fund amental principle of criminal tri al procedure-and that the defense did not have certain archiv al materials at its disposal , while the prosec uti on did. Furthermore, records of testimony were not made avail able within the requisite three days, but lagged by nearly two month s, thereby mak in g it impossible for the defense to c ite testimon y made after January 15 in its concluding statements. In addition to these and a number of other technicalities, Tiso ' s lawyers arg ued th at the trial was po litica ll y biased, both because Daxner himse lf was bi ased, as the SNC itself had recognized in the past, and because, despite a leg islati ve order ca llin g for political pari ty in the Senate, no me mbers of the DP took part in the judg ment. Tiso's attorn eys a lso arg ued that Tiso was being puni shed for eve nts beyond his co ntro l. They claimed th at he did not prepare for Slovakia's independence in 1939, or he lp cause it, and that he showed no initiative and intention ality in hi s cooperation wi th Nazi Germany. Rather, he simpl y tri ed to make the best of a bad situ ation that was thru st upo n him . Finally, Ti so's atto rneys, in the .1 Kaplan, Ova retribucnf procesy. pp. 2 15-2 19 (Document 35) . SLOVAKIA 36 onl y argument that the DP would make its ow n, argued th at clemency would strengthen Czech-Slovak relations, e liminate the threat of ill will between Slovakia ' s Catholics and Protestants, and strengthen ti es between Slovak emigrants and their motherl and. The National Court quick ly decided agai nst recommending c lemency for Ti so, and passed Tiso ' s request on to Slovak Commissioner of Ju stice Ivan Stefanik , a Democrat. Stefa nik in turn supported Tiso's request, and submitted a proposal to the Presidium of the SNC, which read , " I propose that the death se ntence of Dr. Jozef Ti so be commuted to life impri sonment. " 4 The proposal was to the point, absent the argumentation included in Ti so ' s request, and un like Ti so ' s request, allowed for no sentence less than life impri sonment. On April 16, the SNC ' s Presidium met to consider Stefa nik ' s proposal, along with some other matters connected with Ti so ' s tri al. When the Pres idium convened, it was already under enormous pressure. By law , Tiso ' s exec ution was to be carried out within 48 hours of the announcement of the verdict, so matters had to be considered quickly. Moreover, the gove rnm ent in Prag ue was meet in g later that day to discuss c lemency , and was eagerly awaiting the views of Slovakia 's leadin g organs on the matter. Adding to the pressure was the fact that the Presidium received the 214 page judgment aga inst Tiso only shortl y before its meeti ng.5 Moreover, te legrams, letters, and petitions (for and against c leme ncy) were pourin g in to the President 's office, the government, and the SNC, while Parti san and labor organizations staged anti-Ti so rallies across Slovakia and de legation s from trade union s, hou sing estates, and espec ially resistance organizations arrived in Brati slava to add their presence to the de liberations. 6 Though there were no reported cases of violence, it is not difficult to imagine the presence of these groups, enco uraged if not orchestrated by the Communists, adding a menac in g character to 4 K aplan , Dva relribucnf procesy. p. 220 (Document 36). ' Th e DP claimed the Presidium had onl y ten minutes to look over the length y judgmen t; see Cas. April 23 , 1947 , no. 93, p. I. 6 Cas, Apri l 23, 1947, no. 93 , p. I. SLOVAKIA 37 the already inte nse pressure on the Presidium , or more prec ise ly, its Democratic me mbers. For example, a consortium of major res istance organi zati o ns iss ued a decl aration on April 16 th at conde mned c lemency as a "s hameful defilement (popl'u vanie) of all the sac rifi ces of o ur nation al stru gg le" th at co uld e mbolde n Ti so's supporte rs into provokin g unrest in S lovakia aimed at undermining the Re public.7 If cle mency was gra nted to Tiso, these organizations promi sed to assess the situation and cons ide r what mean s to emp loy in de fe nse of the Republic and the ga ins of the Slovak National Upri sin g. The DP had a majority on the Presi dium , which conta ined three Democrats (Jozef Lettrich, who was chairman of both the DP and the SNC, Andrej Cvincek, Milan Po la k) a nd two Communi sts (Karol Smidke, Ivan Horvath ). Nevertheless, the Pres idium did not e ndorse Stefanik's proposa l for c le me nc y; rather, it reso lved to submit the proposa l to the governme nt without co mme nt. In hi s me moirs, Jan Ursfny, a top DP leader and its Deputy Chairman, argued that Lettric h went into the meetin g with the intention of avo idin g debate over clemency, a position Ursfny strongly advised against. 8 Lettrich 's behav ior at the meeting does betray the actions of a man inte nt on avoi ding debate. 9 First of all , most of the meetin g 's di scuss ion dea lt with De mocratic di ssati sfaction with Daxner's ha ndling of the tri al. Whe n the Presidium did get around to the Ti so verdict, Le ttri c h made it clear th at he fe lt th at the press ure of time mad e it imposs ible to acq uire sufficie nt knowledge to take a pos ition on c le mency, and that any recommendation would thu s have to be " politica l." The Communi st Horvath the n proposed that the Presidium take no stand , but simpl y pass on Stefa nik 's proposa l to the government without co mment. He argued that a recomme nd ation from the SNC was ne ithe r requi- 1 Pravda. Apri l 18, 1947 . no. 90, p. I: th e Slovak term pop!ii vct nie could be rendered as .. spitting on". • Jan Ursfny. Z m6jho i i votct. (M artin . 2000), pp. 123- 124. " See Sl ovensky narod ny archfv (hereafter referred to as SNA). Fond Urad predsednfctva Slovenskej narodnej rady , Carton 139, Folder 134. Folios 49-58 , S R Presidiu m meetin g of A pril 16. 1947. SLOVAKIA 38 red nor necessary, for it was the government and Benes whose views would be decisive. According to Horvath, since the Communists were opposed to clemency, they would be unable to support Stefanik ' s proposa l, and hence any vote in the SNC would be on a parti san basis, setting a bad precedent for future Communist-Democratic cooperation. When it came time to vote on Horvath ' s proposal , the Presidium accepted it unanimously. Before examining why the SNC , or more specifically its Democratic members, opted not to recommend c lemency for Tiso, let us track the proposal ' s course to Prague and ultimately to Benes. The Communists and Social Democrats were openly hostile to Tiso, and the non-parti san mini sters, Ludvfk Svoboda (Defense) and Jan Masaryk (Foreign Affairs), could be expected to be so as well. Together, these constituted 13 of the 23 members of the government, enough to tip any vote to Ti so's detriment. On top of that, the Czech National Soc ialists were at best ambivalent. A number of leading National Socialists opposed clemency and wanted their party to vote against it or at least to abstain. 10 However, Minister of Justice Prokop Drtina, one of the party's top leaders, had earlier assured Lettrich that he would support clemency provided the SNC did. 11 In the last of a series of meetings on the issue , held right before the government session began , Drtina managed to convince his colleagues to agree to the following position : to oppose clemency, but only after first proposing that the request for clemency be returned to the Presid ium of the SNC for that organ's recommendation. In thi s way, Drtina could present himself as makin g a good faith effort to honor hi s promise to Lettrich , while entertaining hopes that a vote to return the request to the SNC would fail, thu s getting himself off the hook. 12 The government meeting opened at approximately 5: 15 p.m ., after a delay of over an hour as its members waited for reports from ° Kaplan. Dva retribucnf procesy. p. 25 . 1 " Prokop Drtina. Ceskos lovensko muj osud, II. 2, (Toronto, I 982). pp. 297-298. 302. 12 Drtina, Ceskoslovensko muj osud. II , 2, p. 302. SLOVAKIA 39 Slovakia. 13 Within ten minutes, a delegation of representatives from the Union of Czechoslovak Partisans and so me similar organizations asked to be admitted. Since the National Socialists had yet to arrive, mak ing their last minute plans in a nearby room , the meetin g was adjourned for 45 minutes while the parti san organizations were given the opportunity to press ure the mini sters to vote against clemency. 14 Once the de legation s had their say and engaged some of the mini sters over the iss ue , and the National Sociali st mini sters had arrived, the meeting was reconvened. Prime Mini ster Kl ement Gottwald began by sharin g two pieces of information he had just rece ived from Slovaki a- the memorandum from the SNC' s Pres idium pass in g on Stefanik's proposal for clemency without comment, and a telegram from Gu stav Husak, Chairman of Slovakia 's Board of Commissioners (Cabinet). Husak noted that Stefanik 's proposal did not reflect the views of the Board of Commissioners nor its Presidium, whose standpoint Stefanik did not seek, and should therefore be regarded as hi s own personal proposal. Husak added that he did not agree with the proposa l. Thus, the meeting opened with reports from Slovakia 's two chief political organs, neither of which endorsed clemency. Gottwald, leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party , then proposed that the government reso lve aga inst clemency, since the National Court in Brati slava recommended against it, and the Pres idium of the SNC did not recommend for it. In a long and sometimes pass ionate debate, mini sters from both sides weighed in on the que stion, with positions breaking down along party lines. The Communists led the charge against clemency. Vladimfr Clementi s, State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and a Slovak, read a CPS 13 For the minutes of the meeting. see K apl an, Dva retribucnf procesy. pp. 225-254. 14 Ursfny . in his memoirs, recou nts be ing asked by one member of the parti san dele- gati on: "M r. Deput y Chairman, tell me, w ith whom do you wan t to go. w ith th e Ludak underground. or with us?" A nother partisan representati ve. however, spoke up for Ursfny as ··one of the greates t partisans. " (see Ursfny, Z m6jho i ivota, p. 125): see footnote 17 for an ex planation of the term " Ludak. " 40 SLOVAKIA decl aration that la id o ut the Co mmuni st pos iti on. The dec larati o n stressed the did acti c function of the tri al, that is, its purpose in di sco urag ing enemies of the Republic. A death sentence co uld do that far better than a life sentence in thi s res pect. C lemency, on the co ntrary, would onl y encou rage enemi es of the state and sympathizers of Ti so and hi s reg ime . Reactionari es, as before, were tryin g to take over Slovaki a "even at the price of the Re public." 15 The dec laration arg ued that c leme ncy would evoke di stru st in the judic ial sys tem. Veterans of the Sl ovak Nati onal Upri sin g would be upset with the de parture from the idea ls of the res istance; peo ple wo uld note the inj ustice of lesser crimin als hav ing been more harshl y puni shed than Ti so; and politics would be seen once more as " panske huncutst vo", that is "gentl emen's mi sc hi ef." 16 The declarati o n noted in parti cul ar that Ti so showed no remorse for hi s crimes, and in fac t gave succor to th e Re public 's ene mi es in hi s co ncludin g statement at hi s tri al. Much of what Cleme nti s read was identica l to a dec larati on made a day earli er by Slovaki a's res istance organi zati o ns, testifyin g to the leadin g ro le the Co mmuni sts pl ayed in those orga ni zati o ns and the success the party had in coordin atin g various soc ial orga ni zati ons on behalf of its objecti ves . Indeed , both dec laration s co nc luded with the sa me threat to assess the s ituation and consider what mea ns to employ in defense of the Republic and its character. Czech Communi sts also spoke out again st clemency, asserting th at Ti so was a traitor and a war crimina l, and that fa ilin g to exec ute him would be a blow to Czec hos lovakia 's unity and inde pendence. Communi st speakers also arg ued th at it was the will of th e Slovak people that Ti so be exec u- 15 The express ion ··ani za ce nu republiky", th at is, •·even at the price of the rep ublic" . was a reference to a statement made by HSL:S leader A ndrej Hlin ka at a rall y in Trencfn in 1932, where he asse rted th e degree to whi ch his party wo uld pu rsue Slovak interests; see James Ramon Felak, •A l the Price of the Republic·_. Hlinka 's Slovak People 's Party. 1929- 1938. (Pittsburg h, 1994 ), p. 96. 16 " Poli tika je panske huncutstvo" was an expression curre nt among Slovaks , rooted in Slovakia ' s feudal pas t. It was the recog nition by peasan ts th at pol itics was the domain where the lords made mi sch ief. SLOVAKIA 41 ted , as ev ide nced by the pos iti ons of the Nati ona l Co urt, the SNC, and the Board of Co mmi ss ione rs, all organs composed e ntire ly of Slova ks and re prese nting S lovakia. Thi s was why, the Czec h Co mmuni st Vac lav Kopecky noted , the DP would not speak up fo r c leme ncy on the SNC's Pres idium. Th e Soc ia l De mocrati c mini sters we re just as o pposed to c lemency as the Communi sts, and no less assertive about the ir pos iti on. Zdene k Fierlin ger, the leader of the SOP and a Deputy Prime Minister, argued th at a vote fo r c le me ncy wo uld upset Czec hoslovaki a's alli es in the Slav ic world , in part because it would fu e l Slova k independe nce, whi c h itse lf th reate ned Czec hos lovaki a 's border w ith the Sov iet Uni o n. Fie rlinger even re marked th at how o ne voted o n the cleme ncy questi on was a test of one's patri oti sm. With respect to the reli g io us dim e ns ion of the ques ti o n, the Soc ial De mocrati c leade r asserted th at the fac t of Tiso's be ing a priest was not a miti gating c irc um stance, but rathe r one th at made matters worse. He noted th at it was not good for the Catho lic Churc h to e ncumbe r itse lf with Ti so . Whil e Fie rlinger re prese nted the pro-C ommuni st left-win g of the SOP, that party's ri ght-wing was no less vehe me nt about Ti so. Vaclav Maj er, the leader of the ri ght-wing Soc ial De mocrats, referred to the Sl ovak pri est as one of the chi e f war crimin als, guilty of mass murder. The most ex te ns ive attac k on Ti so a nd argume nt against cle me ncy, however, came not fro m the mini ste rs o f the le fti st parties, but from the oste nsibl y ne utra l (a lbeit c loset Communi st) Ludvfk Svoboda, the Mini ster o f Defe nse. As a Czec hoslovak hero of both the First and Second World Wars, Svoboda's word s carri ed a certain cac het. Svoboda spoke at le ngth about why T iso mu st die . He came o ut strong ly aga inst so-ca ll ed ha lf-so luti o ns; at ha nd was a definiti ve hi stori ca l qu esti o n w ith long- te rm impli cati o ns th at sho uld not be judged accordin g to the needs a nd mood of the mo me nt. Ti so was 42 SLOVAKIA not just a war criminal ; he was the sy mbol of " Ludakism," 17 fasci sm, treason , and collaboration . To grant clemency to Tiso, according to Svoboda, would render hi s trial vain and superfluous. If alive, Ti so would remain to poison cooperation and unity between Czechs and Slovaks; clemency would encourage hi s supporters, while disappointing others. Like many speakers and writers of the time, Svoboda noted that Tiso showed no remorse. He ca lled for a firm and resolute action agai nst him as a means of strengthening Czechoslovakia's international position and prestige. To those w ho argued th at Ti so should be spared because he was a priest, Svoboda dec lared that "we are not judging a priest, but a traitor, a destroyer of the Czechoslovak state, and a criminal. That Tiso is a priest only makes matters worse; he profaned the priestly office and Church at a time when thou sands of other priests fought bravely again st Nazi sm and perished in concentration camps and prisons." On the other s ide of the equation were those mini sters who championed c lemency-on ly the Democrats and Czech Populi sts. Here the most prominent speaker was Ursfny . The Democratic Deputy Chairman argued that clemency would improve relations between Czechs and Slovaks, Lutherans and Catholics, and aid in the overall consolidation of the post-war Republic. Such a goodwi ll gesture might also win over some of Czechoslovakia' s enemi es. Ursfny noted that religiou s fee lings ran strong in Slovakia, where the exec ution of a priest was a serious , and potentiall y upsetting matter. He pointed out that many good people were for clemency, includin g so me bishops and hi gh functionari es in the Lutheran church , a church that itself had suffered under Ti so's regi me. The Democratic Minister of Transportation Ivan Pietor also spelled out a number of reasons for clemency. He argued that Ti so was popular among the majority of Slovaks, and that the preva ilin g majority of Slovaks would vote for 17 Lud aki sm, or "l'udactvo" was the term employed to refer to fo ll owers of th e Slovak People 's Party, whose members were know n as '• Ludaks" or " l'udaci ." It best approximates the Engli sh word " Populi sm. " Communi sts applied the term to any Slovak Catholics they did not like. SLOVAKIA 43 clemency if given the chance, thou gh thi s did not mean they agreed with Ti so ' s politics. He too noted that important Lutheran leaders sent ardent appeals on Tiso's behalf in the interest of the peaceful deve lopment of Slovaki a and Czechoslovakia. The g iven politica l s ituation , accordin g to Pietor, demanded statesmanlike thinkin g, wi sdom , and sensiti vity to the prevailing political condition s and mood. In such a co ntext, clemency would be a gesture to win over hearts in Slovakia and bring the Czech and Slovak nation s together. While the Court may have unanimou sly estab lished Tiso 's guilt and ca ll ed for hi s exec ution , that was a judicial decision , not a political one. What the Republic now faced was a manifestly political deci sion , and that was the task of the government to settl e, in accordance with political considerations. The Czec h Populi sts, as members of a Catholic party with moderate inclinations, also supported clemency. Minister Franti se k Ha.la (Post Office), him se lf a Catholic priest, presented c le mency as the most suitable solution for Czechoslovak and Slovak interests. The Populi st Adolf Prochazka (Health ) remarked that c lemency was the des ire of most Slovaks, and of the Lutheran church leadership . Jan Kopecky (Mini ster without Portfolio) supported clemency as a way to consolidate the Repub li c, and reminded hi s mini sterial colleagues that life impri sonment was not tantamount to acq uittal. In makin g hi s case, Ursfny co ntended that the SNC did not recommend aga inst c lemency ; rather it was not the Pres idium 's function to ex press a position on the proposa l, but only to pass it on to the government. Technically , he was correct because the Second Prague Agreement of April I I , 1946, the statute under which such matters were regulated , stated that the commissioner's proposal be submitted to the go vernment "v ia the Pres idium of the Slovak National Counci l. " 18 However, this strict construction is not the way the SNC had hitherto been dealing with proposa ls. Gottwald snide ly noted that the '" Jan Mechyr. Slo vensko v Ceskoslovensku : Slovensko-ceske vztahy I 9 I 8- 199 I . (Prague. 1991 ). 44 SLOVAKIA Pres idium had sudde nl y dec ided in thi s case to limit itse lf to the ro le of a post office, and al ong with Fie rlinger, he regarded Ursfny 's expl a nati on as sophi stry. They were not bu ying th e De moc rats ' claim that the Pres idium ' s position was not a fa ilure to endorse c le mency. It was the centri st parties, however, that ex pressed the most anger over the SNC 's sile nce regardin g c leme ncy - a sil e nce th at, because the DP had a majority in the Pres idium, was c learl y bl a med on the De mocrats. A number of Nati ona l Soc iali st and Populi st mini ste rs vo iced their indi gnati on at the SNC's atte mpt to pass th e buck. Jaroslav Stra nsky (Edu cati on) said th at he wa nted Ursfny and hi s frie nds to recogni ze the situ ation into whi ch they had gotte n the governme nt , whi c h thanks to the m now had to dec ide on a matter about whi c h it did not have s uffic ie nt kn ow ledge. In thi s s itu ati on, th e gove rnm e nt co uld be bl a med if Ti so did not get cle me ncy, thereby bein g burde ned with what is primaril y a Sl ovak pro bl e m. Drtina, s imil arly, sa id he was perpl exed by the Pres idium ' s unex pected course of acti on, one whi ch now put the go vernme nt in a diffi c ult situati on. He pro posed se ndin g th e pro posal bac k to th e Pres idium fo r its opini o n, in acco rdance with the Second Prague Agree me nt, whi c h stipul ated that the governme nt return proposa ls to the SNC's Pres idium if it had objecti ons to them from the point of view of statew ide inte res ts. Foll o win g suit , Nation a l Soc ia li st Mini ste r o f Fore ig n Trade Hube rt Ripka noted hi s party ' s astoni shme nt at th e SNC's acti on - how it limited its ro le to th at of a mailbox in the way it interpre ted the Seco nd Prag ue Agree me nt. He noted th at Sl ovaki a ' s se lf-proc laimed leadin g orga n did not have the courage to ex press itse lf on a questi on of suc h importance fo r the future and fa te of the Slovak people . Accordin g to Ripka, it was c lear that the SNC Pres idium wa nted to shi ft the res po nsibility for Ti so's fate o nto the governme nt. He in sisted that the Pres idum ex press itse lf on the iss ue, and as qui ckl y as poss ibl e. Hala, spea kin g for th e Czech Populi sts, echoed the sentiments o f the Nation al Soc ia li sts, notin g th at the Presidium ' s action greatl y surpri sed him and that it see med to want to pass responsibility onto the governme nt. SLOVAKIA 45 While the National Sociali sts and Populi sts expressed agreement with Drtina 's motion to return the proposa l to the SNC, the leftist parties adamantly opposed it. Gottwald, Fierlinger, and others noted that the SNC had already taken a position by failing to endorse clemency. They argued that further delay of Ti so's execution would only drag thin gs out, sustain a state of tension and provoke and evoke supporters of Ti so, as well as open the floodgates for clemency for others sentenced to death. When Drtina 's motion to return the proposal to the Presidium of the SNC came to a vote, it was defeated 13 to I0 . The voting broke down according to party lines: the National Socialists, Populists, and Democrats supported the proposal; the leftist parties and non-parti san ministers opposed it. While the Populists may well have sincerely believed that the best remedy for the crisis would have been for the SNC to voice its opinion on the matter, the National Socialists made and supported the motion simply for cosmetic purposes, hoping that it would fail. 19 The Democrats, of course, were in a quite unenviable position. The motion' s failure meant that they would not be g iven a second chance to make a stand for clemency in the Presidium. At the same time, it is not certain that they would have known what to do with a second chance; the factors that kept them from endorsing clemency the first time around were still operative. As the debate over Stefanik 's proposal resumed , the National Socialists came out against clemency, and sought to present the anticlemency position as the one identified with Slovakia. Drtina, noting th at the government was not fully informed of the detail s of the case, thought the matter should be best settled by Slovakia, as it indeed was - a Slovak Court had establi shed Tiso's guilt and had unanimously rejected clemency, which the SNC had also failed to recommend. Ripka , de mon stratin g the sort of Czech ignorance of Slovakia that ran kles Slovaks, claimed that Ti so, long before 1938 , was as bad or worse than Vojtech Tuka, Ti so 's main political rival during the war 19 Drtina adm its thi s in hi s me moirs: see Ceskoslovensko mu) osud, II , 2, p. 302. 46 SLOVAKIA and the leader of the radically pro-Nazi faction ple 's Party. 20 in the Slovak Peo- Because the consequences of Ludakism had not yet di- sappeared from Slovakia, clemency should be rejected. Ripka not only came out again st it, but also appealed to the DP and Czech Populists to abstain on the vote, so the government could present a united front. He addressed the Democrats with the rebuke that, if they did not vote for clemency in Slovakia, they should not now at the governmental level, where the domestic and international ramifications of such a vote were great. After more di sc uss ion, the government ultimately passed a resolution voicing its opposition to c lemency, on the grounds th at the National Court in Brati slava had recommended against it, and that the Pres idium of the SNC did not endorse it when pass ing Stefanik's proposal on to Prague. The vote was 17 in favor , 6 against. All mini sters rejected c lemency except those from the DP and Czech People 's Party. The meeting was adjourned at 8:50 p.m. Shortly thereafter, Gottwald took the government 's recommendation to Benes, who accepted it and informed Slovakia's Commissioner of Ju stice that hi s request for clemency had been officially denied. 2 1 Upon learn in g of the dec ision , Lettrich made a last-ditch intervention , telephoning Benes ' s chancellery. He conveyed the message that the government's standpoint was in conflict with Article I.b. of the Second Prague Agreement, which instructed the government, if it had objections aga inst a proposal from Slovaki a, to return that proposal to the SNC' s Presidium, not pass it on to Benes with a 20 Tuka was a notoriou s ri ghti st rad ica l who made a political career out of intriguing with foreign enemi es of the Czec hos lovak Republi c almost right from th e Republi c ' s founding. He spent most of th e 1930s in pri son for treason, and was executed for war crimes in the summer of 1946. we ll before the tri al of Tiso. 21 K apl an, D va retribucnf procesy, p. 27: Benes had informed Gottwald the day before th at he planned to ac t in accordance wi th whatever th e governm ent recommended regardin g clemency fo r Tiso, K apl an, D va retribucnf procesy, pp. 222-224 (Document 38). SLOVAKIA 47 recommendation. 22 Lettrich warned Benes of possible " immense political consequences" that could resu lt from a rejection of clemency, and fo r which the DP could not accept responsibility . Lettrich conc luded by notin g th at the DP had an absolute majority in the SNC and its Pres idium and fully agreed with Stefanik ' s proposal, considering clemency as a paramount state and nation al interest. Benes received the message early the next morning, instructing hi s chancellery to tell Lettrich that he had gone to the countryside, and would discuss the matter with Gottw ald if Lettrich so desired. 23 Ursfny too attempted an appeal on behalf of clemency, and also found out that the rej ection of clemency was an accomplished fact and that Benes was incommunicado. 24 Stefanik him self made a final attempt on Tiso ' s behalf, asking the National Court that Tiso be tran sferred to the jail of the Office of the Public Prosec utor, so he could be questioned regarding some other cases. Thi s the National Court rejected on the ground s that Ti so could be just as eas ily be questioned at its own jail. 25 With all avenues for clemency now ex hausted , Ti so was hanged early on the morning of April 18, officiall y pronounced dead at 5:30 a.m. It was no surpri se that Ti so was found guilty, nor th at he was sentenced to die. Nor was it astoni shing that the majority of government mini sters in Prague rejected the reco mmendation for clemency, and that Benes acted in accordance with their position. But what was puzzling was the behavior of the DP -supporting clemency in Prague , but not in Bratislava; desperately appealin g for clemency on the 22 Mi chal Barn ovsky , Na ceste k monopolu moci, ( Bratislava , 1993) , p. 145 n; K apl an, Dva retribucnf procesy, p. 28. 23 Kaplan , D va retribucnf procesy, p. 28 ; Robert Letz, S/ovensko v rokoch I 945- 1948, (Bratislava, 1994 ), p. 48 . 24 Ursfny, Z m6jho t i vota, p. 127 . 25 K aplan, Dva retribucnf procesy, p. 29; the motive behind this attempt was to delay Ti so ' s exec uti on and thu s increase the chances that he would ultimately receive clemency . 48 SLOVAKIA eve of Tiso 's exec uti on, while letting the issue pass right throu gh the hands of the SNC Presidium that they had dominated the day before. Did the DP want the appeal for c lemency to fail? Such a view ca n be found in the po lice record , where a report me nti ons that Lettrich was opposed to cle me ncy for Tiso. 26 Like many scenarios sketched out by police inform ants, however, this one seems to be w ithout merit. Lettrich had earli er lobbi ed Tiso ' s three prosecutors for c lemency, and had persuaded Minister of Ju sti ce Drtina to promi se hi s support as well. These are hardl y the acti ons of a man desiring Tiso 's execution . Other ex planat io ns must li e behind the timidity of Lettrich and the DP at the notoriou s SNC Pres idium meeting of April 16. Hi storian s who have exa mined the meetin g, a nd the issue of clemency overall, ha ve co me up with a numbe r of ex pl anation s, which will be di sc ussed here in ascend in g order of pl a usibility and influence. 27 Most dubi o us is the view th at the De mocrats trusted that Benes would grant clemency regardless of the recommendations he rece ived. Whil e the re appare ntly was public spec ulation that Be nes mi ght spare Tiso, the DP leadership had littl e reason to put their tru st in such suppos ition s. Benes had already g ive n Lettrich and Ursfny quite c lear indication s of hi s oppositi on to cle mency. 28 Another of the weaker arguments for why the SNC did not take a stand on c le me ncy was the one the DP used to ex pl ai n itse lf at the 26 Barno vsky, Na ceste. p. 130. 27 For exp lanati ons of why the OS acted the way it did at th e SNR Pres idiu m mee- ting of Apri l 16, see Barnovsky , Na ceste, p. 130: Letz, Slovensko. pp. 47-48: Kaplan . Ova relribucnf procesy, pp. 24-26 : Ursfny, Z m6jho i i vota. pp. 123- 124 : for the DP ' s attempt to j ustify its ac ti ons at the time, see Cas. April 23, 1947. no. 93 . p. I. 28 Lettrich , in a meeting with the three state prosecutors of the Tiso trial on March 12. I 94 7, mentioned that he had discussed the matter of clemency for Tiso w ith Benes on two occasions, and th at Benes's positi on was th at he would not take a stand but rather all ow th e governmen t' s decis ion on th e matter to guide him : (see SNA. Demokraticka strana, Carton 2, Bundle 99 , Folios 1-2): moreover. Ursfny claims in hi s memoirs that in fall of 1946. Daxner asked Benes how he shou ld handle the Tiso case, to which Benes replied, " I th in k that he deserves death, but thi s is an affair for an independent court. "; (see Ursfny, Z m6jho i ivota. p. 11 3). SLOVAKIA 49 government meetin g of April 16 and thereafter, i.e. that accordin g to the 2 nd Prague Agreement , the S C's role in the process was simpl y to pass proposals on to the Government and not to co mment on them, and that i f the government had obj ection s to Stefanik's proposa l, it wo uld soli cit the SNC Presidium 's views on it. Upon refl ec ti on, thi s ex plan ati on holds no more water th an it did at the tim e. A party that believed Slovak organs should speak for Slovakia, and a good bit of whose appeal was based on its advocacy of autonomy fo r Slovakia, is behav ing out of character w hen it surrenders to Prague the prerogati ve to decide on a matter so c lose to th e hearts of so many Slovaks. Another ex pl anation put forth by the DP was that it lacked sufficient time to stud y the doc umentation pertinent to th e Tiso tri al. Whil e on the surface thi s is true , still , the SNC was not being asked to render a lega l or judicial judgment, but a politi ca l one. In the latter case, the party could have made up its mind on a pos ition long before the verdi ct, as the Communists had. M ore convincing are the views th at th e DP was simpl y afra id th at a vote for clemency wo uld prompt the Communi sts to provoke a politica l crisis in Slovakia, halting cooperation w ithin the SNC, mobili zing Parti san and trade union groups against the Democrats, and forcing Prague to step in . Indeed, such threats and pressures were already ev ident on the Slovak political stage for over a yea r, and were com mon everywhere else in East Central Europe w here Communi st parti es were acti ve. In thi s view , the DP simpl y lost its nerve and opted to pass the matter on to Prague ra ther than deal w ith it in Bra ti slava. Thi s explanati on seems va lid enough because Communi st pres sure was al ways an influence. However, i f fear of reperc uss ions was the main reason for keeping the DP quiet, w hy did Democrats vote for clemency at the government sess ions in Prag ue? Wa s it to gi ve public assura nce to th eir co nstitu ents th at th ey opposed clemency , but at a ven ue w here they did not have to worry about their vote carry ing any influence and thereby provoking a clemency- induced SLOVAKIA 50 cris is back home? This question is moot , give n the influence of the most significant factor of all. A final ex pl anati on is most like ly the crucial o ne - that the DP could not co unt on one of its own representatives on the Presidi um , Milan Po lak , to vote for c le mency. Po lak ' s record, both before and after 1947, place him on the left wing of the DP. A former Parti san, and leader in the Parti sa n vetera ns' movement, Po lak collaborated with the Communists durin g and after the February co up of 1948 . 29 Unable to co unt on hi s vote, Lettrich preferred no vote on c lemency to one in which Polak would abstain or vote no. Thus he chose the leas t pa inful but st ill damaging option. While many of Slovakia ' s Catholics would be upset if the DP-controll ed Presidium failed to take a vote on clemency, they wo uld be even more outraged if a DPcontrolled Pres idium rejected clemency, or could not mu ste r th e three votes needed to pass it. Ursfny 's memo irs prov ide further ev idence for thi s ex planation. Ursfny reported that, when on a vis it to the United States in the fa ll of 1967 , he spoke by telephone with Lettrich , who told him that he wanted the SNC to avoid the iss ue of clemency because Pol ak wo uld not have voted for it. 30 Thus, while the DP owed its success to a large ly Catholic e lectorate, it contained a core of resistance veterans who simpl y could not countenance anything short of Ti so's exec ution. Since the leader of those veterans he ld the deciding vote on the SNC Presidium , the DP 's efforts to support c le mency were futile. Tho ugh the DP had good reason to suspect that Polak would not vote for c lemency, the Communists had their own fears that he mi ght not vote aga inst it. This ex plains why the Communists on the SNC were as eager as the Democrats to pass the matter on to Prague. A number of factors contributed to the exec ution of Jozef Tiso-a Pres ident who disliked him and welcomed hi s exec ution ; a gove rn ment where the cards were stacked agai nst him from the start , with 19 See Barnovsky , Na ceste, pp. 240, 245 , for Pol ak ' s acti vity during the .. February Crisis" of 1948. )o Ursfny, Z mojho i ivoui, p. 124. SLOVAKIA 51 the Soc ial Democrats, Nati onal Soc iali sts, and non-parti san mini sters un sy mpatheti c to hi s cause; a Co mmuni st Party and the labor and res istance orga ni zati ons it mo bili zed workin g agg ressive ly aga in st him ; a staunchl y anti -Ti so j udge; and Ti so 's own wartime acti vities, whi ch made a death se nte nce pl ausi bl e. Nothin g th at th e DP did could have spared Ti so from exec utio n in thi s contex t. Neverthe less, th e way the Democrats mane uvered th ro ugh the cri s is had several consequ ences. The DP did eno ugh for T iso to buttress Communi st arguments that the Democrats catered to the Ludaks they were all eged ly harboring, arg uments th at in the ensuing months would mu shroom into the arrest of several leading De mocrats for ant i-state co nspiracy. At the same time, the DP 's fa ilure to sec ure an SNC vote on T iso's beha lf made it eas ier for the government 's Co mmuni st and non-Cath o li c Czec h parti es to argue th at Slo vaki a was opposed to c lemency fo r Tiso, thu s he lpin g abso lve Czechs of any charges that T iso's exec uti on was a Czech operati on done against the w ill of the Slovak people . Fin all y, the DP's impotence in defending T iso led to increased di si llusionment amo ng S lovak ia's Catho lic voters. For the DP, the who le undertaking was a lose-lose situ ati on, an indi cati on of just how d ifficult th at party's road was in spite of, or better said , on acco unt of, its bi g e lec tora l victo ry in May of 1946. To a great ex tent, the events surroundin g the iss ue of c lemency fo r Jozef Tiso were a mi crocos m of th e proble mati c pos itio n of the De mocrati c Party in postwar Czechos lovak ia.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Democratic Party and the Execution of Jozef Tiso Description An account of the resource James Ramon Felak Slovakia, Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005 pp. 33-51 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Felak, James Ramon, 1957- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/ec550c677d62ab56f7bdecb75deac4df.pdf 5b42a7eefdb03b512ec55b30ecbbf712 PDF Text Text 52 SLOVAKIA The Autonomy Discourse in Parliamentary Debates during the First Czechoslovak Republic and after the Velvet Revolution 1 E li sabeth Bakke " We approve the political progra m, w hi ch e ndeavors to unite the Czec hs a nd Slovaks in[to] an indepe nd e nt state of the Czech la nd s and Slovakia. Slovakia sha ll ha ve its own ad mini strati o n, its ow n parli ament and its own courts. The Slovak language shall be the officia l language in the sc hoo l[s], in office[sl and in public li fe in genera l. The Czecho-Slovak state sha ll be a republic , its constitution sha ll be democratic. [ ...] The detail ed reg ulati o ns for the estab lishment of the Czecho-Slovak state are left to the li berated Czechs and Slovaks and the ir lega l representati ves." The Pittsburgh Agreement of May 30th, 1918 2 ' An earli er version of thi s art icle was presented at the 34th National Conven ti on of the AAASS in Pittsburgh. 2 1- 24 November. 2002. 2 Thi s Agreeme nt was signed by the Slovak League of America . th e Czech National A lli ance. th e Al li ance of Czec h Ca th oli cs. representing Czech and Slovak emigrc organi zations in the USA. and T omas G. M asaryk. President of the Czechos lovak ati ona l Council in Pari s. I have quoted th e Engli sh version from The Slovaks and the Pittsburgh Pact (Chicago: Th e Slova k Cath ol ic Federati on of America. 1934). 27. The Slovak ori gin al is reprinted in Edvard Benes. Svetov,i valka a nase revoluce. Vol. Ill (Dokumenty). (Prague: C in-Orbis . 1929) . 365. See also M. Mark Stolarik. 'The Role of Amer ican Slova ks in th e C rea tion of Czecho-S lovak ia. 19 14- 19 18"'. �SLOVAKIA 53 Slovak autonomy was on the agenda throughout Czechoslovakia 's 74 years of existence, from the beginning to the bitter end. Although it may be argued that inexperienced politicians, short deadlines , rigid constitutional amendment procedures and conflicting economic priorities also played a role in the breakup, the long-term conflict that drove Czechoslovakia apart were the closely-related matters of political autonomy and recognition of the Slovaks as a separate nation. 3 What was at stake was not only the institutional set-up and division of power; for the Slovaks, separate political institutions were also important symbols of national individuality and ownership to the shared Czecho-Slovak state. The roots of the conflict go back to the founding of Czechoslovakia in October of 19 I 8. The Czechs and Slovaks had no prior shared statehood tradition s (save perhaps Great Moravia in the ninth century), and independence was not even on the agenda before World War I. Starting in 1915, the independence movement abroad, with Tomas G. Masaryk at the helm, tried to convince the Allies that a Czechoslovak Republic should be established, invoking the principle of national self-determination on behalf of the "Czechoslovak nation. " In the First Czechoslovak Republic the idea that the Czechs and Slovaks were one nation (albeit with two tribes) became official state ideology , and it went hand-in-hand with political centralism. 4 Slovak Studies VIII (Rome, 1968) for a very interesting acco unt of the circumsta nces that led to its signin g and the subseq uent course of even ts in th e new lyfounded Repub lic. 3 For a discussion of the breakup see Eric Stein , Czecho/Slovakia. Ethnic Conflict, Constitutional Fissure. Negotiated Breakup (A nn Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997); Jirf Musil , ed., The End of Czechoslovakia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995 ); Jan Rychlfk, Rozpad Ceskoslovenska . Cesko-slovenske vztahy 1989- 1992 (Bratis lava : AEP, 2002); Carol Skalnik Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics. Nation Versus State (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997). 4 For details see Elisabeth Bakke, Doomed to Failure? The Czechoslovak Nation Project and the Slovak Autonomist Reaction 19/9- 1938 (Oslo: Series of Dissertations submitted to the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Un iversity of Oslo, no. 11 /1999). �SLOVAKIA 54 Howeve r, a sub sta nti al pa rt of th e Sl ova k po liti ca l e lite opposed both , de ma ndir.g recog nition of the Slovak nati on and autonomy fo r Slovaki a. The Pittsburgh Agreeme nt became important both beca use it defin ed the contents of Slovak a utonomy and because Masaryk had signed it. Afte r World War II , Czec hos lovaki sm was abandoned, but poli ti ca l centra li sm was not, and th e federali zati on of Czech os lov aki a aft er the Sov iet in vas ion in 1968 did not give Slovak po liti ca l insti tution s any rea l dec ision-m aking power. Afte r the Ve lvet Revo lution in 1989, political autonomy for Slovaki a reappeared on the agenda, and became a major iss ue in the di spute over C zechos lovaki a's new constitution . The main purpose of the present article is to co mpare the autonomy de bates durin g the First Republic and after the Ve lve t Re volu ti o n, in orde r to establi sh continuity and change. The research ques ti o ns are: I . How were the de mands fo r autonomy substa nti ated, and what were the main argume nts aga inst it? 2. Wh at role did the princ ipl e of nation al se lf-de te rmin ati on pl ay in the debates in the two peri ods? The First Re public was a unitary state , and autonom y as such was ne ver on the age nda of the Parliame nt in the interwar pe ri od. Of th e three a utonom y proposa ls th at made it to th e Parli a me nt, two were bl oc ked in committees, whil e the third was adopted without any de bate after th e fa teful Muni c h agree me nt in 1938. My analys is of the inte rwar di sco urse is th e refore based o n a se lec ti o n of govern me nt in a ugurati on de bates and budgetary debates, as we ll as c lippings from Slovak, the main autono mi st ne wspaper. 5 After 1989 seve ral de bates were re levant to the autono my di scourse: In the Federal Parliament I have analyzed the 1990 " hyphen de bate," the de bate on the compete ncy law , a nd the two de bates about the break-up of Czechos lovaki a in the fa ll of 1992. In the res- ' T he analys is of the debate in the interwar period is a condensed version of a part of Chapter 13 of my PhD di ssertat ion. For detai ls see Bakke (ibid. 1999). �SLOVAKIA 55 pec ti ve Czech and Sl ovak Nati onal Council s (Republi c Asse mblies), I have analyzed the 1992 debates on the Sl ovak D ecl aration of Sovereignty, the Slovak Con stitution, and the Czech Constituti on. I will structure the arti cle around the foll owin g three points: I . Th e in stituti onal set-up and th e contents of the autonomy demands. 2. The co mpos iti on and stability of the elite constellations on either side of the conflict. 3. The main arg uments a) in favor of autonomy and b) against autonomy. wi th spec ial emphas is on how they relate to the principle of nati onal sel f-determinati on. 1. The Institutional Set-up and the Contents of the Autonomy Demandi Czec hos lovakia was from the outset presented as the nati on-state of the Czechos lovak nation. 6 Thi s was codified in the 1920 Constituti on, which al so gave the First Czechos lovak Republic a unitary, centrali zed state form and a bi ca meral leg islature. Czec hos lovaki a was at first di vided into 22 co unties, but the county sys tem was implemented onl y in Sl ovaki a and fro m 1928 , four prov inces repl aced the counties (see tabl e I ). In the interw ar peri od, the demands for autonomy were defined in term s of separate Sl ovak instituti ons with dec ision-making powers in matters of vital importance for th e Slovaks as a nati on. The core demands were that Sl ovaki a should have " its own admini strati on, its own parli ament and its ow n co urts," cf. the Pittsburgh Ag reement. M ost of the autonomy proposa ls also included a separate Sl ovak government, but none of the three autonomy proposals that made it into the Parli ament went beyond an asymmetric federati on.7 " In reality. th e Czec hs and Slovaks togeth er comprised 65.5 percent of the populati on. Germans 23.4 percent. Magyars 5.6 percent. Ruthenians 3.5 percen t. Jews 1.4 perce nt. and Po les 0.6 percen t in the 1921 cens us. See Scftanr lidu v repub lice ceskosloven.~ke ze dne 15. unora I 921. Dfl I. (Prague: Statnf ufad statistick y. I 924 ). 7 See Bakke (ibid .. 1999). 465- 77 for a more detailed overv iew of the autonomy proposa ls. See also James Ramon Fe lak. '·A t the Price of the Republic ··. Hlinka ·s �SLOVAKIA 56 The 1938 Constitutional a me ndm ent that inaugurated the shortli ved Second Republi c was based on the third a utonomy proposal of the Slovak People 's Party, which had been submitted in August 1938. The Second Re public co mbined a federa l state form with separate Slovak institutions : a leg islat ive asse mbl y (D iet), a se parate administration and separate co urts. The Slovak gove rnme nt was acco untabl e to the Die t, and received exec uti ve power in all matters under its juri sdi ction , as we ll as many matters unde r central jurisdiction. Slovak became the officia l lang uage in S lovakia, and separate c iti zenship was introduced. After World War II , the Czechos lovak govern me nt recognized the S lovaks as a separate nati on a nd the Slovak National Co un ci l (w hi c h de fac to controlled the liberated parts of Slovakia) as its representative. An exec utive Board of Commissioners was also establi shed. However, through the three Prague agreements and the two first postwar constituti ons, Slovak institution s were gradua ll y stripped of their power and co mpete nce, and Czechoslovakia return ed to a centrali st, unitary state fo rm , with a unicamera l leg is lature. 8 Part of the reaso n for the c la mpdow n o n the Slovak organs was the victory of the De mocratic Party in the 1946 e lectio ns, w hi c h convinced the Communists th at Slovakia could not be tru sted. 9 Slovak People ·s Party. 1929-J 938 (Pi tt sburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, I 994). especially pp. 30, 80- 1, 19 1- 92. ij The 1960 Constitution aboli shed the Board of Commissioners. See Program prve dom;Jcf v/ady repub liky vlady narodnf fronty Cechu a Slovaku, (Prag ue: Mini sterstvo l nformacf. 1945). I 6-17: Jaros lav Chovanec & Peter Mozolfk, Historicke a statopravne korene sa mostatn ost i slovenskej republiky , (Yydavatel's tvo Procom , Brati slava, 1994), 38, 11 4- 122; Michal Barn ovsky. " Tri prazske dohody", in Cesko- slovenske vztahy - Slovensko-ceske vzthhy (Liberec: Technick a Un i verzi ta, 1998). 119 ff.: Elisabeth Bakke, "The Principle of National Self-de termination in Czechoslovak Consti tuti ons 1920- 1992" . CEPSR. no. I O (2002), 173- 98 . 9 The Democratic Party received 62 .0 percent of th e votes in Slovakia. See Michal Barnovsky & Edita l vanickova, eds, Prve povojnove volby v strednej a j uhovychod- nej Eur6pe (Bratislava: VEDA, 1998). 2 15- 18. �57 SLOVAKIA Table 1: State Form, Administrative Structure and Institutional Set-up in Czechoslovak Constitutions and Constitutional Amendments Year 1920 State-forming State form Administrative nation Czechoslovak Un itary 22 co unties : Centra lized, from 1928 four bicameral legislature nation Institutional set-up structure provinces 1938 Czech and Federal Slovak nations 1948 Czech and Unitary Slovak nations Four provi nces : Asymmetric: Bohem ia. M ora- bicamera l via, Slovak ia. & separate Slovak Sub-Carpathian instituti ons with Ruthenia extensi ve powers Two prov inces , Asy mmetric; The Czech lands unicamera l & separate and Slovak ia Slovak inst itutions with lim ited powers 1960 Czech and Uni ta ry Slovak nati ons Two prov inces, Asymme tric: unicame- the Czech lands ra l & separate Slovak and Slovak ia institut ions with more l imited powers 1968 Czech and Federal Slovak nations Two repub lics, Symmetric: bicameral, T he Czech Re- federa l & separate publ ic and the Czech and Slovak Slovak Republ ic institut ions Source: A ll cons titutions can be found in Sbfrka zakonii a naHzenf stalU ceskoslovenskeho. During the Prag ue Spring of 1968, the questi on of Slovak autonomy reappeared on the agenda. The initi ati ve to amend the constituti on ca me from the Slovak Nati onal Council , and thi s time a sy mmetri c so luti on was pro posed, sy mboli zing the equality of the two state-forming nati ons. 10 Accordin g to the 1968 Constitution, Czecho- ' 0 T he process towards federa li za ti on is doc umented in Jozef Za tk uli ak, Fede- ra lizacia Ceskoslovenskeho Staw 1968- 1970. Vznik Cesko-sl ovenskej fede racie �SLOVAKIA 58 slovakia became a federation of two republics, the Czech and th e Slovak Republic s, each with their ow n assemblies (National Councils), and their own govern ments. The bicameral federal legis lature consisted of the proporti onall y elected Chamber of the Peop le, and the Chamber of Nations where the two Republics were represented on equal terms. For important dec isions, a majority was req uired in the Peop le's chamber, as we ll as in the separate Czech and Slovak parts of the Chamber of Nations, in effect giving the Slovaks veto powers. The 1968 Constitution provided the in stitutional foundations for Slovak autonomy, but in practice the political system remained centralized. The original division of power in the 1968 Constitution changed in favor of the federal level during the "Normali zation " of th e early 1970s, and fo rmal decision-making rul es and divi sion of powers did not matter much during Communism . As Carol Skalnik Leff has pointed out, however, federation plu s democra ti zation was a power eq uation. 11 After the Velvet Revo lution in 1989, th e 1968 Constitution acquired new importance; first , it determined the procedures for the adoption of a new constitution (a three-fifths majority in all parts of the federal parliament), and second, it became the point of departure for the negoti ati ons about the contents of a new constitutional settl ement. Under th e new, democratic co nditi ons, the Slovak minorit y had an excell ent bargaining position , since any cons ti tutional settlement required Slovak co nsent. After 1989 the questi on was, therefore, not whether Slovakia should have autonomy, but the ex tent of that autonomy. Separate Slovak institutions were taken for roku 1968 (B rn o: Nak ladatelstvi Doplnek, 1996). See also Jaros lav Krejci & Pave l Machonin , Czechos lovakia 19/8- 92. A U1bora to1y for Social Change (London: Macmill an, I 996), 45-7: Chovanec & Mozolik, (op.cit. , I 994). 48-52: Ales Gerloch . Jiri Hrebej & Vladimir Zoubek. Us tavnf sys tem Ceske republiky ( Prague: Prospektrum, 1999). 51-4 : Carol Skalni k Leff, National Conf7ict in Czechoslo vakia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 988), 243 ff. 11 Leff, 132-33. �SLOVAKIA 59 granted, and autonomy now became a matter of allocating more decision-making power to the Republics. The " hyphen delJate" in the sprin g of 1990 was a foreboding of the problems that lay ahead. It was Pres ide nt Vaclav Havel who inadvertently started it. In Janu ary of 1990, without prior consultations, he submitted a constitutional amendment to the federal Parliament, proposing to drop the word "Soc iali st" from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic . Much to hi s and many others' surpri se, thi s trigged a bitter di spute about whether the name of the Republic should be spelled with or without a hyphe n. The main alternatives were the "Czec ho-S lovak Republic ," favored by a majority of the Slovaks, and the "Czechoslovak Federal Republic ," favored by a majority of the Czechs. Stalemate in the federal Parliament at first resulted in the absurd dec ision to spe ll the word "Czechoslovak" in one word in the Czech Republic and with a hyphen in Slovakia. Thi s was presented as a concession to "S lovak grammar. " This deci sion caused demonstration s in Slovakia, after which the Parliament made a hasty retreat and settled for the "Czech and Slovak Federal Republic ." 12 Negotiations about a new Czechoslovak Constitution started after the elections in June of 1990, but soon ran into trouble. As before, the Czech political elite was generally in favor of more centralized solutions than the Slovaks. The difference was that the Czech majority , rea li zing that a unitary state was not an option , now favored a " function al federation," while the majority of the Slovak political elite increas ing ly leaned toward s confederal rather than federal so lutions. 13 A temporary settl e me nt was reached in the Competency Law 12 Milan Sutovec. Semi6za aka politikum alebo ·'pomlckova vojna." (Bra ti slava: Kalli gram , I 999). 299 ff. 13 Opinion polls cons istently showed th at th e public in the Czech Republic preferred a unitary state. with a federation as the second most popular option. while a confederation never exceeded 6 percent support. By con trast, a confedera ti on or a federation was th e preferred state form in Slovakia. See table 12.3. in Sharon L. Wolchik, ''The Politi cs of Transition and the Break-up of Czechos lovakia," in Jiff Musil. ed. , op.cit.. 235. �SLOVAKIA 60 of December 1990, whi c h more-or-less reestabli shed the co mpetency di vision of the 1968 Constitutio n. However, whil e thi s was abo ut as fa r as the Czechs we re w illing to go , the S lova ks looked at the Co mpete ncy Law merely as a po int of departure fo r further negoti ati ons. The core of the confli ct was the all ocati on of compe te nce and power in two specific areas: Eco nomi c po li cy a nd intern ati ona l re lations. The majority of the S lovak elite pressed fo r S lovak " visibility" in intern ati ona l rel ati ons, and wanted to all ocate more power in economi c matte rs to the Republics . The Czec h side wanted the federa l leve l to be stron g e nough to carry o ut the econo mi c reform s necessar y fo r th e tra ns iti o n to a market econo my, and wanted th e state internati onall y to speak with one vo ice . The negoti atio ns fa il ed to produce an acceptabl e co mpromi se befo re the 1992 elections, 14 and since the vic torious Czec h and Sl ovak parti es di sag reed fund ame nta ll y o n the iss ues of econo mic reform and state fo rm , they dec ided to di vide the state. It turn ed out th at both sides prefe rred a break-up rathe r than accepting the favo red state form of the othe r party, des pite the fac t that before the e lec ti ons, the future ex iste nce of Czec hos lovak ia was still ta ke n fo r granted . The onl y party th at advocated secess io n w as the Sl ova k Nationa l Party. 2. The Composition and Stability of the Elite Constellations In the inter- war peri od, the e lite conste ll atio ns fac in g eac h other were c lear-cut and quite stable. A clear majority of the Czec hos lovak parties was ce ntra li st a nd in fa vor of Czechoslo vaki sm. Thi s camp co mpri sed the e ntire Czech political e lite and a substanti al pa rt of the Slovak political e lite. Inte restingly, the major ce ntrali st pl ayers in the interw ar clashes about autonomy in the Parli ame nt were Slovak s, not Czec hs, a nd like th e ir adversaries, they were posin g as the c ha mpi ons of Slovak inte rests/the Slovak nati on. The two most influe nti al 14 T he negoti ators did reach a co mpromi se in the spring of 1992, but th is was turned down by th e pres idium of th e Slovak Nati onal Counci l. See Rychl fk , Roz pad. 2 18- 20. �SLOVAKIA 61 Slovak centrali sts were the Agrarian Mi Ian Hodza ( 1878- I 944) and the Social Democrat I van Derer ( 1884- 1973). They represented their parties in the Parli ament during the entire First Republi c and betwee n th em, the two men served as mini sters for 23 yea rs. Milan Hodza even became the first Slovak Prime Mini ster in 1935. Apart from these two, the A grarian Anton Stefanek ( I 877-1964) and the Czechoslovak National Socialist Igor Hrusovsky ( 1872- 1937), both seasoned parli amentari ans, played an espec iall y acti ve role in th e debates. By co ntrast, two Slovak parti es represented th e autonomist ca mp. arguing that the Slovaks were a nation of their own and, therefore, entitl ed to autonomy. 15 The larges t autonomi st party was the Slovak Peopl e's Party . Its co-founder and chairman Andrej Hlinka ( 1864- 1938), whose name was added to the party's title in 1925, was a dominatin g fi gure in the stru gg le for Slovak autonomy until hi s death in August of 1938. 16 Ferdinand (Ferdi s) Juriga ( 1878-1950) had been the onl y Slovak deputy in th e Hungari an Parli ament of 19 14 and he continued to defend Slovak autonomy in the Parliament also of the First Republi c. Jozef Ti so ( 1887- 1947) played an important role in the 1930s, as did editor-in-chief of Slovak, Karol Sidor ( 1901 - 53). The Slovak Nati onal Party never had more than one deputy - its chairman M artin Razus ( 1888- 1937) - and pl ayed a more peripheral role. After the Velvet Revolution, elite constellations were more vo latile. The Slovak political elite was from the outset divided on the quest ion of state form, the preferred so lution s ranging from mildl y federa li st to a loose confederat ion. From 1991 the Slovak National Party started to advocate independence, but already in 1990 th e chairman of the Christian Democratic Movement, Jan Carnogursky, argued th at Slovakia should enter the European Community as an in- " In addition. some of th e national minority parties and the Communists su pported autonomy. but for other reasons. '" See Felak. Ac Che Price of Che Republic. 1994: A lena Bartl ova. A ndrej Hlinka. ( Bratislava: Obzor. 1991 ). �SLOVAKIA 62 de pende nt state. Hi s party was earl y in favo r of a confederal so luti on, but o nl y as a te mporary so luti on, until both Re publi cs joined the European Community. 17 Public Aga inst Vi o le nce was be ing pulled in o ppos ite direc ti o ns, and whe n the c irc le around Vl adimfr Mec ia r broke o ut and fo rmed the Moveme nt fo r a De mocrati c Slovaki a in 1991 , the liberal , federa li st oriented w in g re ma ined , whil e the national populi sts w ith confedera l lea nings fo ll owed Mec iar. In the 1992 e lecti on Mec iar' s Move me nt fo r a De mocrati c S lovaki a appeared as the main champion of Slovak interests. The Czec h politica l e lite was fro m the o utset more indiffe rent to the nati onal questi on. Wh ile Public Aga inst Vi o le nce had the nati onal questi o n as o ne of its top pri o riti es , it was co mpl ete ly absent fro m the agenda of C ivic Forum in the first e lecti o n. In stead , " bac k to Eu ro pe" and e limination of communi sm we re the top pri oriti es. 18 Espec iall y after the " ma nagers" aro und Vac lav Kl aus won over the di ss ide nt w in g of C ivic Forum in 199 1, the leadin g Czec h po liti ca l e lite united in favo r of a stro ng fe derati o n. In th e 1992 e lec ti o n Kl aus' C ivic De mocratic Party ca me o ut as the main c hampi on of a federa l so luti on. The Move me nt fo r a De mocrati c S lovaki a and the C ivi c De mocrati c Party won the e lecti ons in th e ir respective Re publics, whil e parti es th at took a more mode rate stand on the questi on of state fo rm lost. Once the victors w ith Vac lav Kl aus and Vl adimfr Mec iar at the he lm had dec ided to di vide the state, fo rmer ene mi es beca me alli es, and the e lite conste ll ati ons changed according ly. The fo rme r oppone nts in the negoti ati o ns on state fo rm now united in favo r of a break-up , aga inst a motl ey c rew of oppos ition parti es, co mpri sing Czec h and Slovak Communi st and Soc ial De mocrati c parties, as we ll as Miros lav Slade k 's ultra- nati ona li st Republican Party of C zec hoslo vaki a. 17 Stein , Czecho/Slovakia. 67 . 93-4. '~Oskar Krejci. Kniha o volbich. (Prag ue: Victori a Pu bli sh ing. 1994). 2 10- 11. �SLOVAKIA 63 3. The Arguments in Favor of Autonomy If we turn to the actual arg ume nts, the main impress ion is that there were e lements of continuity as well as c ha nge when we go from the interwar period to the post-Communist period. On the one hand, the argume nts in favor of autonomy were located within the sa me nat io nalist di sco urse in both periods . On the other hand , the composition of the arg uments in favor of autonomy changed, and so did the contents of the autonomy demands, as we have seen. In the interwar period, the principle of national se lf-determination was used as an arg ument in favor of an asymmetric federation; after 1989 it was first used as an argument in favor of confederal so lutions, and then in favor of an independent Slovak state. Arguments in Favor of Autonomy During the First Republic In the inter-war period , the cornerstone of the a utonomists was the existence of an individual and sovereign Slovak nation , and the core message was that this Slovak nation was entitl ed to auto nomy. The premi se linkin g national identity to the matter of state form was the principle of national se lf-determination, understood as the ri ght of cu ltu ra ll y distinct nation s to se lf-governance. 19 In the a utonomist scheme, the Slovak nation had used thi s right to divorce the Magyars and join the Czec hs in a Czech and Slovak nation-state. Moreove r, as a free a nd equa l nation , the S lovaks were entit led to manage the ir own affairs and, therefore , to autonomo us political institutions. In practice, autonomy demands were always made on be half of Slovakia, yet for the a utonomists this amo unted to the same , s ince they regarded Slovakia as the homeland of the Slovaks, despite its substantial national minoriti es. 19 The principle of national self-determination can be interpreted in at least two other ways: as the right of the people to choose their government without coercion , i.e. popular sovereig nty - or as th e right of independent states to manage their affa irs without foreign intervention. See e.g. 0yvind 0sterud, Nasjonenes selvbestemmel- sesrett. (Oslo: Un iversitetsforlaget. 1984). 150 ff. �64 SLOVAKIA The Slovak a uto nomi sts argued a lon g three ma in lin es. First, they argued that Slovakia was discriminated aga in st in vario us ways, and that autono my was necessary to a ll eviate S lovakia's ill s. Second , they arg ued that Slovakia was entit led to auto no my by virtu e of various " co ntrac ts" (e.g. th e Pittsburgh Agreement). Finally, they argued that the Slovaks had the right to auto nom y s impl y because they were a natio n (the classical nation ali st arg umen t). The point of departure for the deprivation mguments was that the Slovaks were an indi vid ua l nati o n wit h separate nationa l interests, and that these national interests were not properly loo ked after under th e present centrali zed state form. Here S lovak grievances were turned into reasons for autonomy, and autonomy was the so lution to everythin g. Most of the gr ieva nce arguments for auton o my were associated with the use of Slovak as the offic ial lang uage in Slovakia and w ith (w hite-co llar) jobs fo r the Slovak inte lli gentsia. The sig na l words were " Slovak bread" . For in sta nce, before th e 1929 e lec ti on, the a utonomi st news paper Slovak argued that " a uto nomy does no t only mean political ri g hts, but a lso bread. When we get our own administration , our ow n asse mbly and our own courts, only Slovaks will be e mpl oyed there. [ ... ] The auton o mo us adm ini strati o n of the Slova k home land will compel the e mployers first a nd foremost to gran t the Slovaks work and bread." 20 Accord in g to the contract oriented lin e of arg um e nts , Slovakia had the right to autonomy by virtue of certai n (a ll eged ly) binding doc um e nts or "co ntracts". The point of departure was again that the Slovaks were an indi vidu a l and sovere ig n natio n, and th at S lovakia was the ho me la nd of the Slovaks. The argume nt was that Slovakia had been promised autono my, a nd th at thi s promise was lega ll y bindin g. However, fo r a co ntract to be va lid , it must be stipul ated th at the sig natori es had the right to s ig n agreements on behalf of those they were said to represent - in this case th e Czec h and Slovak nati o ns. 20 Slovak no. 240, 22 October I929. p. 3. �SLOVAKIA 65 Several of the many declarations and agreements that were formulated during World War I were used as arguments for (or against) autonomy . However, two documents stand out: The Pittsburgh Agreement of May 30th , 1918, and the Martin Declaration of October 30th , 1918. The former was a clear asset, while the latter soon became a liability (see next subsection). The Martin Declaration had been adopted at an as sembly of all Slovak political parties in Turciansky Svaty Martin. For the autonomists , the significance of the Martin Declaration was that through this act, the Slovaks had voluntarily joined the Czechs as equal s in one state, and they had therefore an equally large part in its founding as the Czechs. Moreover, as an equal nation which had entered the state voluntarily, the Slovaks had the right to autonomy. In effect, the autonomi sts gave the Martin declaration state-forming significance. This was also reflected in repeated attempts to turn October 30th into a national holiday. Compared to the other wartime declarations , however, the Pittsburgh Agreement had some obvious advantages. First and foremost , it had greater symbolic potential as an official agreement binding the government, because Czechoslovakia's first president and co-founder Tomas G. Masaryk had signed it, along with Czech and Slovak emigre leaders in the United States. 2 1 Second, the Agreement contained the most important autonomy demands. From the moment the Pittsburgh Agreement became known in Slovakia in the spring of 1919, it was invoked in every single debate where autonomy was " M asaryk was not Pres ident at th e tim e, of course, but on the initi ati ve of th e Slov ak L eague he signed a calliographed version of the Ag ree ment on November 14th. 19 I 8, the very same day he was elected Pres ident of the Republic. Besides. on October 3 1st. 19 18, th e Czec hoslov ak Nation al Committee had declared as bindin g all ac ti ons by members of the pro visional government abroad (including M asaryk). It may be argued that if the decl arati on of the establi shment of th e Czechos lovak state was valid. then the authori zation of Masaryk 's ac ti ons was valid as we ll. In practice, th e va lidity of th e Pittsburgh Agreement was a political , not a lega l matter. For the tex t of the statement , see Benes (op. cit. . 1929). 490. See also M. M ark Stolarik (op. cit. , 1968), 49. �SLOVAKIA 66 mentioned. At first glance, this Agreement would seem to be a stable element in the argumentation for Slovak autonomy. However, the usage varied. Early in the period, the autonomists would present the Pittsburgh Agreement as a Magna Charta granting the Slovaks the right to autonomy. Later, it became more common to present it as a binding contract. The concept of a Magna Charta brings to mind a sovereign granting hi s subjects certain rights and privileges, and it was Masaryk who (implicitly) had this role. When the Pittsburgh Agreement was presented as a contract, the contracting partners were at first the Czech and Slovak nation s. However, especially after it became public knowledge in 1922 that President Masaryk had actually drafted it, he was increasingly presented as a contracting partner. This shift can also be seen as an answer to the centralist claim that the American Czechs and Slovaks were not the leg itimate representatives of their co-nationals at home. However, the third and most common use, especially in the 1930s, was the Pittsburgh Agreement as "our program" or as an expression of the will of the Slovak nation (not just a small faction, but of all Slovaks). The point of departure was that the Slovaks were an individual nation with a natural right to self-determination, and therefore to autonomy if it so wishes. This usage was associated with the third , classical nationalist line of argument, which rested on three premises: I. that the Slovaks were an individual nation ; 2. that nation s had the right to self-determination; and 3. that the Slovak autonomists represented the true will of the Slovak nation - which was autonomy. The second premise was often implicit, while a lot of effort was put into defending Slovak individuality and the right to speak on the Slovaks ' behalf. The autonomists employed two main strategies to substantiate their claim. One strategy was to argue from the majority, which meant resorting to "advanced math". Election results here came in handy. In a parliamentary debate in 1933, Jozef Tiso argued that as a majority, the autonomists had the right to speak on behalf of the �SLOVAKIA 67 Slovak nation. Upon subtracting the stipulated Czech and Magyar votes from the votes cast for the centralist parties in Slovakia, he ended up with 402,320 votes for the centralist parties and 427,443 votes for the Slovak People ' s Party and the Slovak National Party put together. 22 A second strategy was personal attacks (argumentum ad homi- nem), which were often used to defend the existence of a Slovak nation as well as the claim for autonomy. The autonomists would then accuse Slovak deputies belonging to the Czechoslovak parties of being " renegades," " Phari sees," "sodomites" and "careerists ," and, therefore, not worthy of representing the Slovak nation. In his rather biblical language, the chairman of the Slovak People ' s Party, Andrej Hlinka, argued in 1927 that "S lovakia is ours, only we are Slovaks, you sold out the Slovak language for a bowl of Czechoslovak lentils eight years ago. " 23 Continuity and change after 1989 After 1989, the core message was still that the Slovaks were entitled to national se lf-determination "q ua nation," although the contents of this self-determination had changed from an asymmetric federation to confederate so lutions or even independence. The most important changes compared to the interwar period were, first , that there was no longer any need to defend the existence of an individual Slovak nation , since that was taken for granted, and second, a change in th e composition of the arguments. Deprivation arguments and contract oriented arguments were nearly absent, while classical nationalist arguments now dominated , and the principle of national se lf-determination was invoked more explicitly. 22 30 I. schuze poslanecke snemov ny N.S .R.C. dne 29 . li stopadu 1933. in Tesnopi- secke zpravy o scht1zfch poslanecke snemovny Narodnfho shromaidenf republiky ceskoslovenske. Ill. volebnf obdobf. (Prague. 1929- 35), 47- 50. 23 Hlinka, Slovak no. 86, 16 April , I 927 , p. I. "Sodomi tes•· referred to Social Demo- crats. as a play on wo rd s. �SLOVAKIA 68 There are, of co urse, some differe nces between the various debates, which is perha ps not surpri sin g, sin ce the topics of the debates a lso differed. The principle of nati ona l se lf-determi nati o n was most ex plicitly vo iced in the 1992 debates in the federa l parliament (th e two debates on the break- up of Czec hos lovak ia), a nd in the Slovak National Council (the de bates on the S lovak Declaration of Sovere ig nty and the Slovak Constitution ). Conve rse ly. thi s principle was more impli c it in the 1990 " hyphen debate". The " hyphe n debate" is perhaps the most atyp ica l, in terms of topic ("Czecho-Slo vak Republic" with a hyphen versus "Czechos lovak Federal Republic") as we ll as types of arg ume nt. First, thi s is rea ll y the o nl y debate where identity pl ayed any major part. Ide ntity arg uments appeared in two forms: On the one hand , it was arg ued that for the S lovaks, to spe ll the word Czecho-Slovak w ithout a hyphe n was tantamo unt to accepting the abe rrati o n of Czec hos lova ki sm. On the o ther hand , it was arg ued that th e hyphe n ex pressed Slovak nati o na l indi vidu a lity and the equa l standing of the Czech and Slovak nati o ns in the federati o n. Second, the hyphe n debate is the only debate where the Pittsburg h Agreement was me ntion ed more than o nce. However, of th e six speake rs referrin g to it, o ne appea led to the Agreement to substantiate the c laim for a hyph e n in the "Czecho-Slovak" Rep ubli c. (thi s is how the word was spelled in the orig ina l), while the rest bas ically referred to it as an express io n of the eq ual status of the two natio ns e ntering the state , or as a part of the hi storical narrative lead ing up to the federalization. Nobody referred to it as a contrac t, and the Czech National Socialist Bi anka Hykova even quoted Masaryk to the effect that it was o nl y a n agreement between American Czechs and Slovaks. 2-1 Contract oriented arguments thus disappeared a ltogeth er, and refere nces to the Pittsburg h Agreeme nt and/or the Martin Dec lara20 See Zprava o 26. spolecne sc hi'1zi snemovny lidu a snemovny narodu. 29.3. 1990. in Federalnf shromaidenf Ceskoslovenske socialisticke republiky V. vo lebnf obdobf. ( 1986-90), 25 1. 253 , 256, 270, 304. �SLOVAKIA 69 tion were rare. A utonomy was ex plicitly mentioned in the contex t of the Pittsburgh Ag reement onl y once, in the second debate abou t th e brea k-up of th e state. According to I va n Simko from the Chri stian Democratic Movement, Slovak organization s in the U nited States had made an agreement wi th Masaryk "as a leading personality of Czech po litica l li fe" to fo rm a shared state where Sl ovaki a was to have an autonomous position. Thi s agreement was unfortun ately not honored , he argued. 25 Depri vation arg uments were al so rare . The phrase " Slovak bread" occurred onl y once: In the first debate on the break -up of the state in September 1992, Michal Ko vac from the Mo ve ment for a Democratic Slovaki a ( later to beco me Slovaki a's first pres ident) argued that in a normally functioning federation , it wo uld not be possible for the standard of li ving in Slovaki a to drop as much as it had in onl y two yea rs. In another four years , he argued, " Would we not be in the hi storica l situation w here we have already been, that the Slovak nation would have to go abroad for bread, because there would not be bread for people in Slovakia? And we wou ld be as weakened as we once were under dear father Masaryk." 26 However, in the interw ar period " Slovak bread" was usuall y tantamount to w hite-collar jobs for the yo ung Slovak intelli gentsia in Slovaki a, whi le here th e lack of " bread " obvious ly refers to general unemployment. The probl em was real enough - in the earl y 1990s the unemployment ra te in Slovak ia was three or four times the Czech average. 27 25 Zprava o 5. spo lecne schu zi snemovny lidu a snemo vny narodu. 18.11 . 1992 . 25 .1 1.1 992. in Federi ln f shromiidenf Ceske a S/ovenske Federaci vnf republiky. V il. vo lebnf obdobf. ( 1992). 7 17. 2 '' Zprava o 4. spo lec ne sc huzi snemo vny lidu a snemov ny narodu 29.9. 1992. in Fe- denilni shro m;ii deni Ceske a S/ovenske Federaci vnf republiky. V II. vo lebnf obdobf, ( 1992). 60 I. 27 11. 8 percent in Slovaki a vers us 4. 1 percent in the Czec h Republic in 199 1: 10.3 percent versus 2.6 percent in 1992. Transition reporc I 996. (L ondon. The European Bank fo r Reconstructi on and Deve lopment. I 996). However. th e difference was even larger in 1993. the first yea r of independence. �SLOVAKIA 70 Finall y, compared to the interwar period , classica l nationalist ar g uments were much more co mmon , and the principle of nation al self-determination was invoked more ex plicitly. In the debate about the allocation of competence between the Republics and the Federation it was used as an argument in favor of returnin g to the original 1968 Constitution. 28 Y et, the most co mmon use of th e principle of national self-determination was as an argument in favor of establi shing an independent Slovak state or dividin g Czechoslovakia. There are, however, some interestin g nation al differences between actors in how they used it. Slovak deputies speaking in favor of Slovak independence invoked the principle of national self-determination on behalf of the Slovak nation . They regarded it as an inalienable, natural ri ght, and in one instance, even as a God-given ri ght. 29 An independent Slovak state was presented as the fulfillment of IO00 years of strugg le for Slovak individuality and sovereignty , and as the result of a natural , hi storical process of national emancipation . In the words of HZDS deputy chairman Au gustfn Marian Huska , " the Constitution is the fulfillm ent and lega l enac tment of th e ri ght to se lf-determination . ( ... )To the Slovak s, whose consciousness was molded by more than a thou sand years under foreign rule , the feeling of dependence had become second nature. Slowly, but persistently they formed an awareness of the need for self-determination , the need to search for, find , 28 Zprava o 9. spolecne schi°1zi snemovny lidu a snernovn y narodu. 11 .- 12. 12. 1990. in Federalnf shromaidenf CSFR. ( 1990-1992) . < ww,~ .p,p.c:dckni h/ I 990fs/sbn/-stcn -prot/009,c: hu t./s009077. html/ d> [2 Febru ary, 2004]. See also the debate on th e Slovak declaration of so vereignty. Stenograficka sprava o 3. sch6dzi Slovenskej narodnej rndy konanej 17. j ul a 1992. < www .nr,r.sk/i ndexarch.a,p> ]4 Febru ary. 2004 J. 29 Sedovic (S lovak National Part y), Zprava o 5. spol ec ne schu zi SL a SN , 18. 11 . 1992. in Federalnf shro,mii denf Ceske a Slovenske Federati vnf republiky. VII. volebnf obdobf. ( 1992). 788. �71 SLOVAKIA ex press. a nd at las t rea li ze sovere ig nty." 30 S lova ki a was in o th e r word s pi ctured as a nati on-state a nd the S lova ks as the state-forming nati o n. Howeve r, in the de bates in the Sl ovak Nation a l Counc il , Slovak deputi es, inc ludin g Prime Mini ster Vl adim fr Mec iar, at the same tim e pro mi sed to res pec t the eq ua l rig hts of a ll c iti ze ns, nati o na l minorities and ethni c groups. De puti es re presentin g th e Magyar mino rity in the S lovak Nationa l Counc il recog ni zed o r eve n s uppo rted the S lovak ri g ht to selfde te rmin ati o n, but argued that the princ ipl e sho uld a lso appl y to the nati o na l mino riti es. Thi s was a n arg ume nt in favo r of auto no my. At the same time, Magyar deputi es arg ued th at S lovaki a sho uld not be presented as a nati o n- state in the Co nstituti o n, bec au se it was not nation all y ho moge neous. Founding the state o n the nati o na l princ ipl e meant turnin g the minoriti es into second-c lass c iti zens, they argued . Czec h de puti es co nsiste ntly presented the break-up of Czec hoslovaki a as a matte r of se lf- determinati o n fo r the Slovak nati o n. The 1992 e lecti o n. the Slovak Dec larati o n of Sovere ig nty, and the Slovak Constituti o n were take n as proof th at the S lovak natio n did wa nt inde pende nce. In the words of Prime Mini ste r Vacl av Kl aus of the Czec h Re publi c: "The S lova k nati o n used the o ppo rtunity to co mpl e te its nati o na l e manc ipati o n by fo undin g its own state. Thi s is a rea lity we mu st res pect. " 3 1 T he arg ume nt th at the Czec hs had no ri ght to deny th e S lovak natio n its rig ht to se lf-de termin ati o n was a lso used aga in st ho ld in g a referend um in the Czech Republi c; Czec h c itizens could no t dec ide whet her the S lovaks sho uld beco me a statefo rming natio n o r no t. Interestin g ly, the princi pl e of nati o na l se lf-determin ati o n was not even o nce in voked o n be ha lf of the Czec h na- -'" For Huska ·s statement and the debate on the Const itut ion. see Stenograficka sprava o 5. sch6dzi S lovenskej mirodnej rady kona nej 31. augusta a I . septembra 1992. <www.nr,r. ., k/indexarch.a,p> 14 February . 20041. -' 1 K laus in th e debate on th e Czech Constitution . Ceskii narodnf rada I 992- 1992. Stenoprotokoly. I 0. schuze. 16.- 17. 12. 1992. <www.psp.cz/cknih/ I 992cnr/,tenprot/O I 0schuzi> 13 February. 2004J. �SLOVAKIA 72 tion .32 The reason is obvious: The Czechs did not regard the establi shme nt of the Czec h Republic as a state-formin g process, but as a restoration of Czech statehood , which expl icitly included Czechoslovak state tradition s. But the n the Czechs a lways rega rded Czechoslovakia as their state. Apart from the princ ipl e of national se lf-determination , the main lin e of argument in favor of di ssolution may be termed reali st. It was argued that the federation did not work or that it was a lread y dead, that it was too late to save the state, and now the important thing was to e nd the state in a peaceful , orderly, cultivated , adult and leg itimate fashion , and to ensure good ne ighborl y relation s be twee n the future inde pe nde nt states. 4. The Centralist Arguments Against Autonomy If we turn to the centra li st side, di sco ntinuity 1s th e word that first co mes to mind. In the inte rwar period , the centrali st arg ume nts against a utonomy were located within a nation a li st di sco urse, and mirrored the autonomist arguments to a large ex tent , the difference be ing th at the centralists based the ir arg uments on an a lte rn ative national id eo logy - Czec hos lovakism . After 1989 , the "ce ntra li st" arg um e nts changed profoundly . Czechos lov akism had been abandoned already in 1945 , and the unitary state form in 1968. The "centrali sts" afte r 1989 were , the refore, centra li sts on ly re lative to those advocating confederate so luti ons, a nd in the las t instance, inde pe ndence for Slovakia. " The principle of national se l f-de term ination was invoked on behalf of the .. Moravian nati on" ( 1.5 million . accord ing to the 199 1 census). but then as an argument in favor of Moravi an autonomy in a Czecho-Morav ian federation . See espec ially the speec hes of deputies Jan Jeg la and Jiff Bfl y (both from the Moravi an movement H SD-SMS) . Ceska narodnf rada 1992- 1992 . Stenoprotokoly. 10. sc huze , 16.17. 12. 1992. < www.psp.cz/eknih/ 1992<.:nr/~tenprot/0 I 0schuz/> 13 Febru ary , 2004J. �SLOVAKIA 73 Centralist Arguments during the First Republic ln the inter-war period, the co rnerstone of the ce ntra li st argumentati on was that the Czechs and Slovak s were one Czechoslovak nati on (a lbe it w ith two tri bes), and the core message was th at a ce ntra li zed state form was necessary to preserve nati onal unity and th e integrity of th e state. T he premi se linking nati onal identity to state fo rm was the principl e of nati onal se l f-determin ati on. According to the centrali sts, the Czechos lovak nati on had used its ri ght to self-determ ination to re uni te in a Czechos lovak nati on-state, and thi s unity had to be preserved.·13 A uto nomy for Slovak ia was seen as a th reat to Czechos lovak nationa l unity as we ll as state in tegrity , first because it wo uld dri ve th e two tribes of the Czechos lovak nati on apart, and second , beca use granting Slovaki a autonomy wo ul d be tantamoun t to recogni zing th e Slovak s as a separate nati on, w hich would j eopardi ze the state's ra ison d'etre. Th e centra lists co untered the depri vati on arguments of the autonomi sts in two ways . On the one hand, they denied that the Slovak s were d iscrimin ated agai nst, and on the other hand , they rejec ted autonomy as a suitabl e remedy to Slovaki a's alleged ill s. What was needed to help Slovak ia was not autonomy, but more unity, especiall y economica ll y, the ce ntra li sts argued. Thi s was entirely in line w ith thei r overall "strength th ro ugh unity" message. However, their main artill ery was aimed at the contract-oriented arguments, and espec iall y the Pi tts burgh Agreement. T he main ar guments were: I . T he A meri ca n Czechs and Slovaks were not leg itimate represe ntati ves of th eir co-n ati onals at home, and had no ri ght to dec ide on their behal f; 2. The Pittsburg h Agreement was one of many, and thus had a certain hi stori ca l va lue; but in order to be va lid, it wo uld need the co nse nt of Czechs and Slovak s at home; and 3. Leg itimate Slovak represe ntati ves had conse nted to Czec hos lovak ·'-' There was no big difference between the Slovak autonomists and the Czechoslovak cen tralists in terms of the co ntents of national identity. In both cases . national identi ty was defined in terms of culture. language and ancestry. See Bakke (op.c it. , 1999). especia ll y Chapter I 0. fo r documentati on. �SLOVAKIA 74 national and state unity in the Constitu ti on of 1920, as we ll as at assem bli es before and after Pittsburg h. The first arg ume nt was especia ll y damag in g, since it went to the core of a ll the auto no mi st argument s assoc iated w ith the Pittsburg h Agreement , in va lid atin g the Agreement as a Magna C harta, as a binding contract, a nd as an express io n of the will of the Slovak natio n. It was more difficult for the ce ntra li sts to de nou nce the leg iti macy of Masaryk as a represe ntati ve of the Czec hos lovak state, but the Pres ident did his best to free him se lf and the government of any obligation. Masaryk c la imed that he had sig ned the Pittsburg h Agreement in order to "appease a sma ll Slovak fact io n that dreamed of God know s what sort of independence for Slovakia ," and di smi ssed it as "a loca l pac t between American Czechs and Slovaks, signed by American citizens." 34 There is littl e doubt that Masaryk drafted the Agreement in order to ap pease a part of the Slovak League, but o ne may wo nder why this was important to him if he rega rded the m mere ly as American citizens. I think Mark Stol arik has a va lid point when he arg ues that th e American Slovaks he lped legiti mi ze th e creation of Czechoslovakia in the abse nce of a mandate from the Slovaks in Hungary (caused by war censorship).·15 Masaryk a lso tried , un successfu ll y, to di sc redit the Pittsburg h Agreement through quasi- lega li sti c arguments. In a le tte r to Andrej Hlinka on October 12th, 1929, Masaryk c laimed that the Pittsburgh Agreement was "a forge ry," because at the time, the em ig re organization of the Slovaks present in Pitts burgh , "the [Slovak l Leag ue lega ll y did no t ex ist, and it was recognized by th e Government o nl y in 191 9." Hlinka evide ntl y wrote the Slovak Leag ue , w hi ch retorted th at the re was " no doubt a bout th e a uthe nti c ity of th e Pittsburg h Agreement," and A merica n lega l experts confirmed th at there was no " Tomas G. Masaryk, Svetova revoluce. (Prague: Orbis a Ci n. 1925). 262-263. 35 M . Mark Stolarik (op.c it.. 1968). 54. �SLOVAKIA 75 difference between chartered a nd unc hartered orga ni zatio ns w ith respect to entering such ag ree me nts. 36 T o prop up the claim that leg itim ate Slovak representatives had co nsented to Czec hos lovak nat io na l and state unity after Pitts burg h, the ce ntrali sts preferred to use the Martin Dec lara ti o n of October 30th , 19 18, since thi s Dec laration had been unanimou sly accepted at a n asse mbl y of a ll Slovak po liti ca l part ies. In the beg innin g, they also used the 1920 Constitution for th e same purpose, but the trouble was th at th e Slovak Club in the Constitutional Assembly was coo pted , and arguably not representative of Slovak opinion. The ma in reason why the Martin Dec larati on was s uc h a n asset for the centrali sts, was the sente nce statin g th at the "S lovak nati o n is lingui sti ca ll y as we ll as culturally-historically pa rt of th e unitary Czec ho-Sl ovak nation ." Moreover, the asse mbl y at M artin had demanded nat io na l se lf-dete rmin ation on behalf of this "Czecho-S lovak nat io n," w hil e at the sa me time it was s il e nt on auton omy. The ce ntrali sts thu s used it as proof of Czechoslovak national and state unity, and as proof of the will of the Slovaks to e nter s uc h a unity. (Rumor in Slovakia had it th at the passage o n Czechoslovak national unity was not in the original text. This was , however, refuted in 1923 by Emil Stodola and Samue l Zoch, who had dra fted it).:17 Finally , the centrali sts counte red the c lass ic a l nati o na li st arg ume nt by rejecting the first premi se, that the Slovaks were an indi vidual nation, a nd the third premise. that the autonomi sts represented the tru e w ill of the Slovak nati o n. They presented the Slovaks as a tribe of th e Czechoslovak nati o n, and the Slovak me mbe rs o f the ce nt ral ist parties as the leg itim ate Slovak rep rese ntat ives. At the sa me time, they accepted the seco nd premi se, th at nati o ns had th e -' 6 The letter is pub lished as Document No. 30 in Joseph A. Mikus. Slova kia. A Poli- tica l and Constitutional Histo1y . (Brati slava: SAP. I 995) 209-2 10. The answer of th e Slovak League was published in Slo vak no. 194. 27 August. 1930. p. I. See also M. Mark Stolarik (op. cit.. 1968). 48-49. 52. -' 7 V ac lav Chaloupecky: Martinshi deklilrace 19- 20. II jejf politicke osudy (Prague. I 928). �SLOVAKIA 76 right to sel f-determin ati on, but as we have seen, th ey in vo ked thi s prin ciple on behalf of th e Czec hos lovak nati on. A n I va n Derer specialty was the argument th at i f the Slovak s had been an indi vidual nati on, then they w ould have th e ri ght to secess ion, not onl y to autonomy. 38 B oth sides had their share of argumentati on errors. T he ce ntrali sts argued from maj ority (a rg umentum ad populum ) in the earl y 1920s, w hen they recei ved the maj ority of the Slovak votes, and personal attacks (arg umentum ad hominem) were ac tu all y mos t co mmon on th e centrali st side. probabl y because they fi tted so we ll into their genera l strength-th ro ugh-unity argument. T he Slovak autonomi sts were accused of being " M agyarones" or " new Slovaks," thereby impl y ing th at they had other loya lties or identities,'9 and of being paid by the Hungari an government. In both cases, the M agyars had the ro le of ·'bogeyman" . T hi s M agyarone ca rd was used to expl ain w hy the Slovaks had turned away from the Czechs in the past and in the present , and to co unter th e autonomi st c laim th at they we re the so le leg itimate representati ves of the Slovak nati on. I f the ce ntra li sts believed th at Sl ovak autonomy would j eopardi ze Czechos lovak nati onal unity and th e integrit y of th e state, it w as quite log ica l to acc use th e autonomi sts of being renegades (though probabl y not very smart). Profound Changes after 1989 After 1989 there was not much left of the former ce ntra list arguments, which is not surpri sing considering that Czec hos lovaki srn had 18 • I van Derer. Ceskos/ovensk;i otizkil. (Prague : Orbis. 1935). 88- 90. 39 Both labels we re commonly used about people of Slovak origi n who had become more or less ass imil ated during Hungari an rul e. but who turned back after 19 18. There we re some known M agyarones among the autonomists (chiefl y Franti sek Jehlicka and Yoj tech/ Bela Tuka). but the lead ing figures (Hlin ka. Juri ga) had defended Slovak interests also under Hungary. T he total number of people who ac tu ally switched nati onal affi l iatio n from Magyar to Slovak i n the firs t ten years of Czec hos lovaki a cannot be ascertained prec ise ly, but an educated guess is th at it was betwee n 250.000 and half a million. See Bak ke (op.cit. . 1999). 305- 307. �SLOVAKIA 77 been abandoned and a unitary state form was no longer an option. Th e "centralists" still accepted the principle of nati onal self- determinati on; however, they now recogni zed the Czec hs and Slovaks as equal , state-forming nation s and Czechoslovakia as a Czech and Slova k nati on-state. As long as state form was sti 11 on the agenda, the players on the "centrali st" side were mostly Czechs, and the task was to defend a " function al federation ," which meant to preserve the powers of the federation v is-a-vi s the Republics. Once the break-up of the state appeared on the agenda after the 1992 electi ons, however , th e "centra li st" pl ayers were Czech and Slovak opposition parti es and the task was now to preserve a common Czechoslovak state. In the hy ph en debate, as we ll as in the co mpetenc y debate, Czech deputi es explicitly presented th e federal state form as an express ion of the equality of the Czechs and Slovaks. The main Czech arguments against th e hy phen were that it was divi sive, and that it was unacceptable to the Czech publi c. This probabl y had something to do with the fact that the Second Czecho-Slovak Republi c ( 1938-- 39) was spelled with a hyphen. It was also argued that it was grammati ca ll y probl emati c, th at the original spelling had been without a hyphen (an hi stori ca l argument), and th at the Morav ians would feel offended (an identity argument). The main arguments in favor of a strong federation were that it was necessary in order to carry out the economic reform s and to fulfill Czechos lovakia 's internati onal obligati ons. For the Czech elite, the power and competency of the Czech Republic was irrelevant. In fact, I have onl y found one example of a Czec h deputy in vok ing nat ional interests, and he arg ued th at a confederate solution would be contrary to Czech interests.-lO The Czech and Slovak opposition parties that defended Czec hoslovaki a's ex istence in the debates in the fall of 1992 were mostly Socialists and Communists, but also included the ultra-nati onali st ' 0 M andl er (Libera l Democra ti c Part y). Zprava o 9. spol ecne schuzi SL a S . 11.- 12.1 2. 1990, in Fedenilnf shromaf.difof Ceske a Slovenske Federativnf Republiky V I . vo lebnf obdobf ( 1990), <www.psp.c z/ci,.nih/ 19901\h,bnf!.,tcnprot/009,c:hud ,009()77. htrn ll d> [4 February 2004 1. �78 SLOVAKIA Republican s. Even thoug h this opposition accepted th e principle of national se lf-determination , they mostly interpreted it in the origina l meanin g - as popular sovereignty . The totally dominating line of argument was that the only leg itimate way of dividin g Czechoslovakia according to the principle of se lf-determination was to let the citizens decide by popular vote, a nd that it was unacceptable to divide the state against the will of the peopl e. In the first debate on dissolution , thi s was supported by a hi storical a nalogy. By accident, the debate was held 54 years after the fateful Munich agreement, and the opposition argued that a new Munich was about to happen: Again the fate of the Czechoslovak state wou ld be dec ided without asking the peop le. In the first debate the oppos ition parties advocated a refere ndum before the decision was made; in the second debate a ratifying pl ebisc ite. The motive was obvious ly to save the state, since all opin ion poll s showed that a clear majority was in favor. However, very few deputies ac tually defended the me rits of Czechoslovakia, although a handful of Czechs professed their love for the shared homeland , or invoked the legacy of the founding fathers , mostly T.G. Masary k and Milan Rasti slav Stefanik. Finally, a weak echo of the inte rwar debate could be heard in claims that separation would be a threat to the future existence of the Czech and Slovak nation s (reminiscent of the strength-through-unity argument), and in charges of treason (personal attac ks). Ne ither line of argument was very common. The claim that voting in favor of disso luti on was an act of treason was a preserve of the ultra-nationalist Republican Party of Czec hos lovakia. The debates a lso had their amusing sides, for in stance in the use of metaphors. The federation was alternately see n as a leaking ship, a train being pulled in opposite directions , and an old patient with a severe heart condit ion , whi le the establishment of the new states was compared to giving birth to twins! �SLOVAKIA 79 5. Summary and Conclusion [n the inter-war period, Czechoslovakia was a unitary , centralized state, and autonomy was a matter of separate Slovak institutions. After 1989, Czechoslovakia was a sy mm etric federation of two nationa l Republic s. Separate Slovak inst itutions were, therefore, no longer an iss ue, and autonomy became a matter of allocating more deci s ion-makin g power to the Republic s. However, in both cases, there was a conflict over state form, and in both cases the content of that conflict was how centralized the state should be. As for the actors , the e lite constellations were most stable in the inte rw ar pe riod . However, as lon g as the conflict was about state form, the Czech political elite was in favor of the most centralized so lution , while the Slovak elite was divided . Once the break-up of Czechoslovakia was on the agenda, the re were Czech and Slovak parties on both si des. If we focus on the main arguments on either side, we can obse rve continuity as well as change. Durin g the First Republic , the arguments of both sides were located within a nationali st discourse, but they founded their argume ntation on alternative nation al ideologies. The centralists invoked the principle of national se lf-dete rmination on behalf of the "Czechoslovak nation", the autonomists on behalf of the Slovak nation . After the Velvet Revolution , the autonomist argume nts were still located within a nationali st di scourse, and when the victorious part ies in the 1992 elections dec ided to divide the state, the Czech si de simply adopted the Slovak arg uments. By contrast, the "centrali st" arguments in the debate on state form were mainly economic, while the arguments in the debate on the break-up of Czechoslovakia were procedural. The most strik in g feature of the autonomy di sco urse after 1989 is therefore the asy mmetry of the arguments on both sides. Let us now address th e question of how the arguments related to the principle of national se lf-determination : On the autonomist side, the core message was the sa me in both periods; that the Slovaks were e ntitl ed to autonomy or se lf-determination "qu a nation ." Howeve r, �80 SLOVAKIA the principle of natio na l se lf-d etermin a ti o n was in voked more ex plicitl y after the Velvet Revo lution . On the centra li st side, the principle was used as an argument against a utono my in the interwar period , and w ith a certain twist, against the break-up of Czechos lovakia in 1992 . In the latter case, se lf-de te rmin ation was understood as popul ar sovere ignty - i.e . as a democratic principle. It is also inte res tin g that after 1989, the principl e of nation a l se lfdetermination was consistently invoked on behalf of the Slovaks, not on behalf of the Czechs, other than in the context of Czechoslovakia as the nation- state of two individual , sovere ign nations. In conclusion , the continuity was strongest on the autonomist side , alth ough th e conte nts of nation al se lf-determination c hanged from autonom y to independence. On the "centrali st" side, most of the a mmunition aga inst Slovak autonomy was gone once the concept of a Czechoslovak nation was abandoned. � 52 SLOVAKIA The Autonomy Discourse in Parliamentary Debates during the First Czechoslovak Republic and after the Velvet Revolution 1 E li sabeth Bakke " We approve the political progra m, w hi ch e ndeavors to unite the Czec hs a nd Slovaks in[to] an indepe nd e nt state of the Czech la nd s and Slovakia. Slovakia sha ll ha ve its own ad mini strati o n, its ow n parli ament and its own courts. The Slovak language shall be the officia l language in the sc hoo l[s], in office[sl and in public li fe in genera l. The Czecho-Slovak state sha ll be a republic , its constitution sha ll be democratic. [ ...] The detail ed reg ulati o ns for the estab lishment of the Czecho-Slovak state are left to the li berated Czechs and Slovaks and the ir lega l representati ves." The Pittsburgh Agreement of May 30th, 1918 2 ' An earli er version of thi s art icle was presented at the 34th National Conven ti on of the AAASS in Pittsburgh. 2 1- 24 November. 2002. 2 Thi s Agreeme nt was signed by the Slovak League of America . th e Czech National A lli ance. th e Al li ance of Czec h Ca th oli cs. representing Czech and Slovak emigrc organi zations in the USA. and T omas G. M asaryk. President of the Czechos lovak ati ona l Council in Pari s. I have quoted th e Engli sh version from The Slovaks and the Pittsburgh Pact (Chicago: Th e Slova k Cath ol ic Federati on of America. 1934). 27. The Slovak ori gin al is reprinted in Edvard Benes. Svetov,i valka a nase revoluce. Vol. Ill (Dokumenty). (Prague: C in-Orbis . 1929) . 365. See also M. Mark Stolarik. 'The Role of Amer ican Slova ks in th e C rea tion of Czecho-S lovak ia. 19 14- 19 18"'. �SLOVAKIA 53 Slovak autonomy was on the agenda throughout Czechoslovakia 's 74 years of existence, from the beginning to the bitter end. Although it may be argued that inexperienced politicians, short deadlines , rigid constitutional amendment procedures and conflicting economic priorities also played a role in the breakup, the long-term conflict that drove Czechoslovakia apart were the closely-related matters of political autonomy and recognition of the Slovaks as a separate nation. 3 What was at stake was not only the institutional set-up and division of power; for the Slovaks, separate political institutions were also important symbols of national individuality and ownership to the shared Czecho-Slovak state. The roots of the conflict go back to the founding of Czechoslovakia in October of 19 I 8. The Czechs and Slovaks had no prior shared statehood tradition s (save perhaps Great Moravia in the ninth century), and independence was not even on the agenda before World War I. Starting in 1915, the independence movement abroad, with Tomas G. Masaryk at the helm, tried to convince the Allies that a Czechoslovak Republic should be established, invoking the principle of national self-determination on behalf of the "Czechoslovak nation. " In the First Czechoslovak Republic the idea that the Czechs and Slovaks were one nation (albeit with two tribes) became official state ideology , and it went hand-in-hand with political centralism. 4 Slovak Studies VIII (Rome, 1968) for a very interesting acco unt of the circumsta nces that led to its signin g and the subseq uent course of even ts in th e new lyfounded Repub lic. 3 For a discussion of the breakup see Eric Stein , Czecho/Slovakia. Ethnic Conflict, Constitutional Fissure. Negotiated Breakup (A nn Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997); Jirf Musil , ed., The End of Czechoslovakia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995 ); Jan Rychlfk, Rozpad Ceskoslovenska . Cesko-slovenske vztahy 1989- 1992 (Bratis lava : AEP, 2002); Carol Skalnik Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics. Nation Versus State (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997). 4 For details see Elisabeth Bakke, Doomed to Failure? The Czechoslovak Nation Project and the Slovak Autonomist Reaction 19/9- 1938 (Oslo: Series of Dissertations submitted to the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Un iversity of Oslo, no. 11 /1999). �SLOVAKIA 54 Howeve r, a sub sta nti al pa rt of th e Sl ova k po liti ca l e lite opposed both , de ma ndir.g recog nition of the Slovak nati on and autonomy fo r Slovaki a. The Pittsburgh Agreeme nt became important both beca use it defin ed the contents of Slovak a utonomy and because Masaryk had signed it. Afte r World War II , Czec hos lovaki sm was abandoned, but poli ti ca l centra li sm was not, and th e federali zati on of Czech os lov aki a aft er the Sov iet in vas ion in 1968 did not give Slovak po liti ca l insti tution s any rea l dec ision-m aking power. Afte r the Ve lvet Revo lution in 1989, political autonomy for Slovaki a reappeared on the agenda, and became a major iss ue in the di spute over C zechos lovaki a's new constitution . The main purpose of the present article is to co mpare the autonomy de bates durin g the First Republic and after the Ve lve t Re volu ti o n, in orde r to establi sh continuity and change. The research ques ti o ns are: I . How were the de mands fo r autonomy substa nti ated, and what were the main argume nts aga inst it? 2. Wh at role did the princ ipl e of nation al se lf-de te rmin ati on pl ay in the debates in the two peri ods? The First Re public was a unitary state , and autonom y as such was ne ver on the age nda of the Parliame nt in the interwar pe ri od. Of th e three a utonom y proposa ls th at made it to th e Parli a me nt, two were bl oc ked in committees, whil e the third was adopted without any de bate after th e fa teful Muni c h agree me nt in 1938. My analys is of the inte rwar di sco urse is th e refore based o n a se lec ti o n of govern me nt in a ugurati on de bates and budgetary debates, as we ll as c lippings from Slovak, the main autono mi st ne wspaper. 5 After 1989 seve ral de bates were re levant to the autono my di scourse: In the Federal Parliament I have analyzed the 1990 " hyphen de bate," the de bate on the compete ncy law , a nd the two de bates about the break-up of Czechos lovaki a in the fa ll of 1992. In the res- ' T he analys is of the debate in the interwar period is a condensed version of a part of Chapter 13 of my PhD di ssertat ion. For detai ls see Bakke (ibid. 1999). �SLOVAKIA 55 pec ti ve Czech and Sl ovak Nati onal Council s (Republi c Asse mblies), I have analyzed the 1992 debates on the Sl ovak D ecl aration of Sovereignty, the Slovak Con stitution, and the Czech Constituti on. I will structure the arti cle around the foll owin g three points: I . Th e in stituti onal set-up and th e contents of the autonomy demands. 2. The co mpos iti on and stability of the elite constellations on either side of the conflict. 3. The main arg uments a) in favor of autonomy and b) against autonomy. wi th spec ial emphas is on how they relate to the principle of nati onal sel f-determinati on. 1. The Institutional Set-up and the Contents of the Autonomy Demandi Czec hos lovakia was from the outset presented as the nati on-state of the Czechos lovak nation. 6 Thi s was codified in the 1920 Constituti on, which al so gave the First Czechos lovak Republic a unitary, centrali zed state form and a bi ca meral leg islature. Czec hos lovaki a was at first di vided into 22 co unties, but the county sys tem was implemented onl y in Sl ovaki a and fro m 1928 , four prov inces repl aced the counties (see tabl e I ). In the interw ar peri od, the demands for autonomy were defined in term s of separate Sl ovak instituti ons with dec ision-making powers in matters of vital importance for th e Slovaks as a nati on. The core demands were that Sl ovaki a should have " its own admini strati on, its own parli ament and its ow n co urts," cf. the Pittsburgh Ag reement. M ost of the autonomy proposa ls also included a separate Sl ovak government, but none of the three autonomy proposals that made it into the Parli ament went beyond an asymmetric federati on.7 " In reality. th e Czec hs and Slovaks togeth er comprised 65.5 percent of the populati on. Germans 23.4 percent. Magyars 5.6 percent. Ruthenians 3.5 percen t. Jews 1.4 perce nt. and Po les 0.6 percen t in the 1921 cens us. See Scftanr lidu v repub lice ceskosloven.~ke ze dne 15. unora I 921. Dfl I. (Prague: Statnf ufad statistick y. I 924 ). 7 See Bakke (ibid .. 1999). 465- 77 for a more detailed overv iew of the autonomy proposa ls. See also James Ramon Fe lak. '·A t the Price of the Republic ··. Hlinka ·s �SLOVAKIA 56 The 1938 Constitutional a me ndm ent that inaugurated the shortli ved Second Republi c was based on the third a utonomy proposal of the Slovak People 's Party, which had been submitted in August 1938. The Second Re public co mbined a federa l state form with separate Slovak institutions : a leg islat ive asse mbl y (D iet), a se parate administration and separate co urts. The Slovak gove rnme nt was acco untabl e to the Die t, and received exec uti ve power in all matters under its juri sdi ction , as we ll as many matters unde r central jurisdiction. Slovak became the officia l lang uage in S lovakia, and separate c iti zenship was introduced. After World War II , the Czechos lovak govern me nt recognized the S lovaks as a separate nati on a nd the Slovak National Co un ci l (w hi c h de fac to controlled the liberated parts of Slovakia) as its representative. An exec utive Board of Commissioners was also establi shed. However, through the three Prague agreements and the two first postwar constituti ons, Slovak institution s were gradua ll y stripped of their power and co mpete nce, and Czechoslovakia return ed to a centrali st, unitary state fo rm , with a unicamera l leg is lature. 8 Part of the reaso n for the c la mpdow n o n the Slovak organs was the victory of the De mocratic Party in the 1946 e lectio ns, w hi c h convinced the Communists th at Slovakia could not be tru sted. 9 Slovak People ·s Party. 1929-J 938 (Pi tt sburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, I 994). especially pp. 30, 80- 1, 19 1- 92. ij The 1960 Constitution aboli shed the Board of Commissioners. See Program prve dom;Jcf v/ady repub liky vlady narodnf fronty Cechu a Slovaku, (Prag ue: Mini sterstvo l nformacf. 1945). I 6-17: Jaros lav Chovanec & Peter Mozolfk, Historicke a statopravne korene sa mostatn ost i slovenskej republiky , (Yydavatel's tvo Procom , Brati slava, 1994), 38, 11 4- 122; Michal Barn ovsky. " Tri prazske dohody", in Cesko- slovenske vztahy - Slovensko-ceske vzthhy (Liberec: Technick a Un i verzi ta, 1998). 119 ff.: Elisabeth Bakke, "The Principle of National Self-de termination in Czechoslovak Consti tuti ons 1920- 1992" . CEPSR. no. I O (2002), 173- 98 . 9 The Democratic Party received 62 .0 percent of th e votes in Slovakia. See Michal Barnovsky & Edita l vanickova, eds, Prve povojnove volby v strednej a j uhovychod- nej Eur6pe (Bratislava: VEDA, 1998). 2 15- 18. �57 SLOVAKIA Table 1: State Form, Administrative Structure and Institutional Set-up in Czechoslovak Constitutions and Constitutional Amendments Year 1920 State-forming State form Administrative nation Czechoslovak Un itary 22 co unties : Centra lized, from 1928 four bicameral legislature nation Institutional set-up structure provinces 1938 Czech and Federal Slovak nations 1948 Czech and Unitary Slovak nations Four provi nces : Asymmetric: Bohem ia. M ora- bicamera l via, Slovak ia. & separate Slovak Sub-Carpathian instituti ons with Ruthenia extensi ve powers Two prov inces , Asy mmetric; The Czech lands unicamera l & separate and Slovak ia Slovak inst itutions with lim ited powers 1960 Czech and Uni ta ry Slovak nati ons Two prov inces, Asymme tric: unicame- the Czech lands ra l & separate Slovak and Slovak ia institut ions with more l imited powers 1968 Czech and Federal Slovak nations Two repub lics, Symmetric: bicameral, T he Czech Re- federa l & separate publ ic and the Czech and Slovak Slovak Republ ic institut ions Source: A ll cons titutions can be found in Sbfrka zakonii a naHzenf stalU ceskoslovenskeho. During the Prag ue Spring of 1968, the questi on of Slovak autonomy reappeared on the agenda. The initi ati ve to amend the constituti on ca me from the Slovak Nati onal Council , and thi s time a sy mmetri c so luti on was pro posed, sy mboli zing the equality of the two state-forming nati ons. 10 Accordin g to the 1968 Constitution, Czecho- ' 0 T he process towards federa li za ti on is doc umented in Jozef Za tk uli ak, Fede- ra lizacia Ceskoslovenskeho Staw 1968- 1970. Vznik Cesko-sl ovenskej fede racie �SLOVAKIA 58 slovakia became a federation of two republics, the Czech and th e Slovak Republic s, each with their ow n assemblies (National Councils), and their own govern ments. The bicameral federal legis lature consisted of the proporti onall y elected Chamber of the Peop le, and the Chamber of Nations where the two Republics were represented on equal terms. For important dec isions, a majority was req uired in the Peop le's chamber, as we ll as in the separate Czech and Slovak parts of the Chamber of Nations, in effect giving the Slovaks veto powers. The 1968 Constitution provided the in stitutional foundations for Slovak autonomy, but in practice the political system remained centralized. The original division of power in the 1968 Constitution changed in favor of the federal level during the "Normali zation " of th e early 1970s, and fo rmal decision-making rul es and divi sion of powers did not matter much during Communism . As Carol Skalnik Leff has pointed out, however, federation plu s democra ti zation was a power eq uation. 11 After the Velvet Revo lution in 1989, th e 1968 Constitution acquired new importance; first , it determined the procedures for the adoption of a new constitution (a three-fifths majority in all parts of the federal parliament), and second, it became the point of departure for the negoti ati ons about the contents of a new constitutional settl ement. Under th e new, democratic co nditi ons, the Slovak minorit y had an excell ent bargaining position , since any cons ti tutional settlement required Slovak co nsent. After 1989 the questi on was, therefore, not whether Slovakia should have autonomy, but the ex tent of that autonomy. Separate Slovak institutions were taken for roku 1968 (B rn o: Nak ladatelstvi Doplnek, 1996). See also Jaros lav Krejci & Pave l Machonin , Czechos lovakia 19/8- 92. A U1bora to1y for Social Change (London: Macmill an, I 996), 45-7: Chovanec & Mozolik, (op.cit. , I 994). 48-52: Ales Gerloch . Jiri Hrebej & Vladimir Zoubek. Us tavnf sys tem Ceske republiky ( Prague: Prospektrum, 1999). 51-4 : Carol Skalni k Leff, National Conf7ict in Czechoslo vakia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 988), 243 ff. 11 Leff, 132-33. �SLOVAKIA 59 granted, and autonomy now became a matter of allocating more decision-making power to the Republics. The " hyphen delJate" in the sprin g of 1990 was a foreboding of the problems that lay ahead. It was Pres ide nt Vaclav Havel who inadvertently started it. In Janu ary of 1990, without prior consultations, he submitted a constitutional amendment to the federal Parliament, proposing to drop the word "Soc iali st" from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic . Much to hi s and many others' surpri se, thi s trigged a bitter di spute about whether the name of the Republic should be spelled with or without a hyphe n. The main alternatives were the "Czec ho-S lovak Republic ," favored by a majority of the Slovaks, and the "Czechoslovak Federal Republic ," favored by a majority of the Czechs. Stalemate in the federal Parliament at first resulted in the absurd dec ision to spe ll the word "Czechoslovak" in one word in the Czech Republic and with a hyphen in Slovakia. Thi s was presented as a concession to "S lovak grammar. " This deci sion caused demonstration s in Slovakia, after which the Parliament made a hasty retreat and settled for the "Czech and Slovak Federal Republic ." 12 Negotiations about a new Czechoslovak Constitution started after the elections in June of 1990, but soon ran into trouble. As before, the Czech political elite was generally in favor of more centralized solutions than the Slovaks. The difference was that the Czech majority , rea li zing that a unitary state was not an option , now favored a " function al federation," while the majority of the Slovak political elite increas ing ly leaned toward s confederal rather than federal so lutions. 13 A temporary settl e me nt was reached in the Competency Law 12 Milan Sutovec. Semi6za aka politikum alebo ·'pomlckova vojna." (Bra ti slava: Kalli gram , I 999). 299 ff. 13 Opinion polls cons istently showed th at th e public in the Czech Republic preferred a unitary state. with a federation as the second most popular option. while a confederation never exceeded 6 percent support. By con trast, a confedera ti on or a federation was th e preferred state form in Slovakia. See table 12.3. in Sharon L. Wolchik, ''The Politi cs of Transition and the Break-up of Czechos lovakia," in Jiff Musil. ed. , op.cit.. 235. �SLOVAKIA 60 of December 1990, whi c h more-or-less reestabli shed the co mpetency di vision of the 1968 Constitutio n. However, whil e thi s was abo ut as fa r as the Czechs we re w illing to go , the S lova ks looked at the Co mpete ncy Law merely as a po int of departure fo r further negoti ati ons. The core of the confli ct was the all ocati on of compe te nce and power in two specific areas: Eco nomi c po li cy a nd intern ati ona l re lations. The majority of the S lovak elite pressed fo r S lovak " visibility" in intern ati ona l rel ati ons, and wanted to all ocate more power in economi c matte rs to the Republics . The Czec h side wanted the federa l leve l to be stron g e nough to carry o ut the econo mi c reform s necessar y fo r th e tra ns iti o n to a market econo my, and wanted th e state internati onall y to speak with one vo ice . The negoti atio ns fa il ed to produce an acceptabl e co mpromi se befo re the 1992 elections, 14 and since the vic torious Czec h and Sl ovak parti es di sag reed fund ame nta ll y o n the iss ues of econo mic reform and state fo rm , they dec ided to di vide the state. It turn ed out th at both sides prefe rred a break-up rathe r than accepting the favo red state form of the othe r party, des pite the fac t that before the e lec ti ons, the future ex iste nce of Czec hos lovak ia was still ta ke n fo r granted . The onl y party th at advocated secess io n w as the Sl ova k Nationa l Party. 2. The Composition and Stability of the Elite Constellations In the inter- war peri od, the e lite conste ll atio ns fac in g eac h other were c lear-cut and quite stable. A clear majority of the Czec hos lovak parties was ce ntra li st a nd in fa vor of Czechoslo vaki sm. Thi s camp co mpri sed the e ntire Czech political e lite and a substanti al pa rt of the Slovak political e lite. Inte restingly, the major ce ntrali st pl ayers in the interw ar clashes about autonomy in the Parli ame nt were Slovak s, not Czec hs, a nd like th e ir adversaries, they were posin g as the c ha mpi ons of Slovak inte rests/the Slovak nati on. The two most influe nti al 14 T he negoti ators did reach a co mpromi se in the spring of 1992, but th is was turned down by th e pres idium of th e Slovak Nati onal Counci l. See Rychl fk , Roz pad. 2 18- 20. �SLOVAKIA 61 Slovak centrali sts were the Agrarian Mi Ian Hodza ( 1878- I 944) and the Social Democrat I van Derer ( 1884- 1973). They represented their parties in the Parli ament during the entire First Republi c and betwee n th em, the two men served as mini sters for 23 yea rs. Milan Hodza even became the first Slovak Prime Mini ster in 1935. Apart from these two, the A grarian Anton Stefanek ( I 877-1964) and the Czechoslovak National Socialist Igor Hrusovsky ( 1872- 1937), both seasoned parli amentari ans, played an espec iall y acti ve role in th e debates. By co ntrast, two Slovak parti es represented th e autonomist ca mp. arguing that the Slovaks were a nation of their own and, therefore, entitl ed to autonomy. 15 The larges t autonomi st party was the Slovak Peopl e's Party . Its co-founder and chairman Andrej Hlinka ( 1864- 1938), whose name was added to the party's title in 1925, was a dominatin g fi gure in the stru gg le for Slovak autonomy until hi s death in August of 1938. 16 Ferdinand (Ferdi s) Juriga ( 1878-1950) had been the onl y Slovak deputy in th e Hungari an Parli ament of 19 14 and he continued to defend Slovak autonomy in the Parliament also of the First Republi c. Jozef Ti so ( 1887- 1947) played an important role in the 1930s, as did editor-in-chief of Slovak, Karol Sidor ( 1901 - 53). The Slovak Nati onal Party never had more than one deputy - its chairman M artin Razus ( 1888- 1937) - and pl ayed a more peripheral role. After the Velvet Revolution, elite constellations were more vo latile. The Slovak political elite was from the outset divided on the quest ion of state form, the preferred so lution s ranging from mildl y federa li st to a loose confederat ion. From 1991 the Slovak National Party started to advocate independence, but already in 1990 th e chairman of the Christian Democratic Movement, Jan Carnogursky, argued th at Slovakia should enter the European Community as an in- " In addition. some of th e national minority parties and the Communists su pported autonomy. but for other reasons. '" See Felak. Ac Che Price of Che Republic. 1994: A lena Bartl ova. A ndrej Hlinka. ( Bratislava: Obzor. 1991 ). �SLOVAKIA 62 de pende nt state. Hi s party was earl y in favo r of a confederal so luti on, but o nl y as a te mporary so luti on, until both Re publi cs joined the European Community. 17 Public Aga inst Vi o le nce was be ing pulled in o ppos ite direc ti o ns, and whe n the c irc le around Vl adimfr Mec ia r broke o ut and fo rmed the Moveme nt fo r a De mocrati c Slovaki a in 1991 , the liberal , federa li st oriented w in g re ma ined , whil e the national populi sts w ith confedera l lea nings fo ll owed Mec iar. In the 1992 e lecti on Mec iar' s Move me nt fo r a De mocrati c S lovaki a appeared as the main champion of Slovak interests. The Czec h politica l e lite was fro m the o utset more indiffe rent to the nati onal questi on. Wh ile Public Aga inst Vi o le nce had the nati onal questi o n as o ne of its top pri o riti es , it was co mpl ete ly absent fro m the agenda of C ivic Forum in the first e lecti o n. In stead , " bac k to Eu ro pe" and e limination of communi sm we re the top pri oriti es. 18 Espec iall y after the " ma nagers" aro und Vac lav Kl aus won over the di ss ide nt w in g of C ivic Forum in 199 1, the leadin g Czec h po liti ca l e lite united in favo r of a stro ng fe derati o n. In th e 1992 e lec ti o n Kl aus' C ivic De mocratic Party ca me o ut as the main c hampi on of a federa l so luti on. The Move me nt fo r a De mocrati c S lovaki a and the C ivi c De mocrati c Party won the e lecti ons in th e ir respective Re publics, whil e parti es th at took a more mode rate stand on the questi on of state fo rm lost. Once the victors w ith Vac lav Kl aus and Vl adimfr Mec iar at the he lm had dec ided to di vide the state, fo rmer ene mi es beca me alli es, and the e lite conste ll ati ons changed according ly. The fo rme r oppone nts in the negoti ati o ns on state fo rm now united in favo r of a break-up , aga inst a motl ey c rew of oppos ition parti es, co mpri sing Czec h and Slovak Communi st and Soc ial De mocrati c parties, as we ll as Miros lav Slade k 's ultra- nati ona li st Republican Party of C zec hoslo vaki a. 17 Stein , Czecho/Slovakia. 67 . 93-4. '~Oskar Krejci. Kniha o volbich. (Prag ue: Victori a Pu bli sh ing. 1994). 2 10- 11. �SLOVAKIA 63 3. The Arguments in Favor of Autonomy If we turn to the actual arg ume nts, the main impress ion is that there were e lements of continuity as well as c ha nge when we go from the interwar period to the post-Communist period. On the one hand, the argume nts in favor of autonomy were located within the sa me nat io nalist di sco urse in both periods . On the other hand , the composition of the arg uments in favor of autonomy changed, and so did the contents of the autonomy demands, as we have seen. In the interwar period, the principle of national se lf-determination was used as an arg ument in favor of an asymmetric federation; after 1989 it was first used as an argument in favor of confederal so lutions, and then in favor of an independent Slovak state. Arguments in Favor of Autonomy During the First Republic In the inter-war period , the cornerstone of the a utonomists was the existence of an individual and sovereign Slovak nation , and the core message was that this Slovak nation was entitl ed to auto nomy. The premi se linkin g national identity to the matter of state form was the principle of national se lf-determination, understood as the ri ght of cu ltu ra ll y distinct nation s to se lf-governance. 19 In the a utonomist scheme, the Slovak nation had used thi s right to divorce the Magyars and join the Czec hs in a Czech and Slovak nation-state. Moreove r, as a free a nd equa l nation , the S lovaks were entit led to manage the ir own affairs and, therefore , to autonomo us political institutions. In practice, autonomy demands were always made on be half of Slovakia, yet for the a utonomists this amo unted to the same , s ince they regarded Slovakia as the homeland of the Slovaks, despite its substantial national minoriti es. 19 The principle of national self-determination can be interpreted in at least two other ways: as the right of the people to choose their government without coercion , i.e. popular sovereig nty - or as th e right of independent states to manage their affa irs without foreign intervention. See e.g. 0yvind 0sterud, Nasjonenes selvbestemmel- sesrett. (Oslo: Un iversitetsforlaget. 1984). 150 ff. �64 SLOVAKIA The Slovak a uto nomi sts argued a lon g three ma in lin es. First, they argued that Slovakia was discriminated aga in st in vario us ways, and that autono my was necessary to a ll eviate S lovakia's ill s. Second , they arg ued that Slovakia was entit led to auto no my by virtu e of various " co ntrac ts" (e.g. th e Pittsburgh Agreement). Finally, they argued that the Slovaks had the right to auto nom y s impl y because they were a natio n (the classical nation ali st arg umen t). The point of departure for the deprivation mguments was that the Slovaks were an indi vid ua l nati o n wit h separate nationa l interests, and that these national interests were not properly loo ked after under th e present centrali zed state form. Here S lovak grievances were turned into reasons for autonomy, and autonomy was the so lution to everythin g. Most of the gr ieva nce arguments for auton o my were associated with the use of Slovak as the offic ial lang uage in Slovakia and w ith (w hite-co llar) jobs fo r the Slovak inte lli gentsia. The sig na l words were " Slovak bread" . For in sta nce, before th e 1929 e lec ti on, the a utonomi st news paper Slovak argued that " a uto nomy does no t only mean political ri g hts, but a lso bread. When we get our own administration , our ow n asse mbly and our own courts, only Slovaks will be e mpl oyed there. [ ... ] The auton o mo us adm ini strati o n of the Slova k home land will compel the e mployers first a nd foremost to gran t the Slovaks work and bread." 20 Accord in g to the contract oriented lin e of arg um e nts , Slovakia had the right to autonomy by virtue of certai n (a ll eged ly) binding doc um e nts or "co ntracts". The point of departure was again that the Slovaks were an indi vidu a l and sovere ig n natio n, and th at S lovakia was the ho me la nd of the Slovaks. The argume nt was that Slovakia had been promised autono my, a nd th at thi s promise was lega ll y bindin g. However, fo r a co ntract to be va lid , it must be stipul ated th at the sig natori es had the right to s ig n agreements on behalf of those they were said to represent - in this case th e Czec h and Slovak nati o ns. 20 Slovak no. 240, 22 October I929. p. 3. �SLOVAKIA 65 Several of the many declarations and agreements that were formulated during World War I were used as arguments for (or against) autonomy . However, two documents stand out: The Pittsburgh Agreement of May 30th , 1918, and the Martin Declaration of October 30th , 1918. The former was a clear asset, while the latter soon became a liability (see next subsection). The Martin Declaration had been adopted at an as sembly of all Slovak political parties in Turciansky Svaty Martin. For the autonomists , the significance of the Martin Declaration was that through this act, the Slovaks had voluntarily joined the Czechs as equal s in one state, and they had therefore an equally large part in its founding as the Czechs. Moreover, as an equal nation which had entered the state voluntarily, the Slovaks had the right to autonomy. In effect, the autonomi sts gave the Martin declaration state-forming significance. This was also reflected in repeated attempts to turn October 30th into a national holiday. Compared to the other wartime declarations , however, the Pittsburgh Agreement had some obvious advantages. First and foremost , it had greater symbolic potential as an official agreement binding the government, because Czechoslovakia's first president and co-founder Tomas G. Masaryk had signed it, along with Czech and Slovak emigre leaders in the United States. 2 1 Second, the Agreement contained the most important autonomy demands. From the moment the Pittsburgh Agreement became known in Slovakia in the spring of 1919, it was invoked in every single debate where autonomy was " M asaryk was not Pres ident at th e tim e, of course, but on the initi ati ve of th e Slov ak L eague he signed a calliographed version of the Ag ree ment on November 14th. 19 I 8, the very same day he was elected Pres ident of the Republic. Besides. on October 3 1st. 19 18, th e Czec hoslov ak Nation al Committee had declared as bindin g all ac ti ons by members of the pro visional government abroad (including M asaryk). It may be argued that if the decl arati on of the establi shment of th e Czechos lovak state was valid. then the authori zation of Masaryk 's ac ti ons was valid as we ll. In practice, th e va lidity of th e Pittsburgh Agreement was a political , not a lega l matter. For the tex t of the statement , see Benes (op. cit. . 1929). 490. See also M. M ark Stolarik (op. cit. , 1968), 49. �SLOVAKIA 66 mentioned. At first glance, this Agreement would seem to be a stable element in the argumentation for Slovak autonomy. However, the usage varied. Early in the period, the autonomists would present the Pittsburgh Agreement as a Magna Charta granting the Slovaks the right to autonomy. Later, it became more common to present it as a binding contract. The concept of a Magna Charta brings to mind a sovereign granting hi s subjects certain rights and privileges, and it was Masaryk who (implicitly) had this role. When the Pittsburgh Agreement was presented as a contract, the contracting partners were at first the Czech and Slovak nation s. However, especially after it became public knowledge in 1922 that President Masaryk had actually drafted it, he was increasingly presented as a contracting partner. This shift can also be seen as an answer to the centralist claim that the American Czechs and Slovaks were not the leg itimate representatives of their co-nationals at home. However, the third and most common use, especially in the 1930s, was the Pittsburgh Agreement as "our program" or as an expression of the will of the Slovak nation (not just a small faction, but of all Slovaks). The point of departure was that the Slovaks were an individual nation with a natural right to self-determination, and therefore to autonomy if it so wishes. This usage was associated with the third , classical nationalist line of argument, which rested on three premises: I. that the Slovaks were an individual nation ; 2. that nation s had the right to self-determination; and 3. that the Slovak autonomists represented the true will of the Slovak nation - which was autonomy. The second premise was often implicit, while a lot of effort was put into defending Slovak individuality and the right to speak on the Slovaks ' behalf. The autonomists employed two main strategies to substantiate their claim. One strategy was to argue from the majority, which meant resorting to "advanced math". Election results here came in handy. In a parliamentary debate in 1933, Jozef Tiso argued that as a majority, the autonomists had the right to speak on behalf of the �SLOVAKIA 67 Slovak nation. Upon subtracting the stipulated Czech and Magyar votes from the votes cast for the centralist parties in Slovakia, he ended up with 402,320 votes for the centralist parties and 427,443 votes for the Slovak People ' s Party and the Slovak National Party put together. 22 A second strategy was personal attacks (argumentum ad homi- nem), which were often used to defend the existence of a Slovak nation as well as the claim for autonomy. The autonomists would then accuse Slovak deputies belonging to the Czechoslovak parties of being " renegades," " Phari sees," "sodomites" and "careerists ," and, therefore, not worthy of representing the Slovak nation. In his rather biblical language, the chairman of the Slovak People ' s Party, Andrej Hlinka, argued in 1927 that "S lovakia is ours, only we are Slovaks, you sold out the Slovak language for a bowl of Czechoslovak lentils eight years ago. " 23 Continuity and change after 1989 After 1989, the core message was still that the Slovaks were entitled to national se lf-determination "q ua nation," although the contents of this self-determination had changed from an asymmetric federation to confederate so lutions or even independence. The most important changes compared to the interwar period were, first , that there was no longer any need to defend the existence of an individual Slovak nation , since that was taken for granted, and second, a change in th e composition of the arguments. Deprivation arguments and contract oriented arguments were nearly absent, while classical nationalist arguments now dominated , and the principle of national se lf-determination was invoked more explicitly. 22 30 I. schuze poslanecke snemov ny N.S .R.C. dne 29 . li stopadu 1933. in Tesnopi- secke zpravy o scht1zfch poslanecke snemovny Narodnfho shromaidenf republiky ceskoslovenske. Ill. volebnf obdobf. (Prague. 1929- 35), 47- 50. 23 Hlinka, Slovak no. 86, 16 April , I 927 , p. I. "Sodomi tes•· referred to Social Demo- crats. as a play on wo rd s. �SLOVAKIA 68 There are, of co urse, some differe nces between the various debates, which is perha ps not surpri sin g, sin ce the topics of the debates a lso differed. The principle of nati ona l se lf-determi nati o n was most ex plicitly vo iced in the 1992 debates in the federa l parliament (th e two debates on the break- up of Czec hos lovak ia), a nd in the Slovak National Council (the de bates on the S lovak Declaration of Sovere ig nty and the Slovak Constitution ). Conve rse ly. thi s principle was more impli c it in the 1990 " hyphen debate". The " hyphe n debate" is perhaps the most atyp ica l, in terms of topic ("Czecho-Slo vak Republic" with a hyphen versus "Czechos lovak Federal Republic") as we ll as types of arg ume nt. First, thi s is rea ll y the o nl y debate where identity pl ayed any major part. Ide ntity arg uments appeared in two forms: On the one hand , it was arg ued that for the S lovaks, to spe ll the word Czecho-Slovak w ithout a hyphe n was tantamo unt to accepting the abe rrati o n of Czec hos lova ki sm. On the o ther hand , it was arg ued that th e hyphe n ex pressed Slovak nati o na l indi vidu a lity and the equa l standing of the Czech and Slovak nati o ns in the federati o n. Second, the hyphe n debate is the only debate where the Pittsburg h Agreement was me ntion ed more than o nce. However, of th e six speake rs referrin g to it, o ne appea led to the Agreement to substantiate the c laim for a hyph e n in the "Czecho-Slovak" Rep ubli c. (thi s is how the word was spelled in the orig ina l), while the rest bas ically referred to it as an express io n of the eq ual status of the two natio ns e ntering the state , or as a part of the hi storical narrative lead ing up to the federalization. Nobody referred to it as a contrac t, and the Czech National Socialist Bi anka Hykova even quoted Masaryk to the effect that it was o nl y a n agreement between American Czechs and Slovaks. 2-1 Contract oriented arguments thus disappeared a ltogeth er, and refere nces to the Pittsburg h Agreeme nt and/or the Martin Dec lara20 See Zprava o 26. spolecne sc hi'1zi snemovny lidu a snemovny narodu. 29.3. 1990. in Federalnf shromaidenf Ceskoslovenske socialisticke republiky V. vo lebnf obdobf. ( 1986-90), 25 1. 253 , 256, 270, 304. �SLOVAKIA 69 tion were rare. A utonomy was ex plicitly mentioned in the contex t of the Pittsburgh Ag reement onl y once, in the second debate abou t th e brea k-up of th e state. According to I va n Simko from the Chri stian Democratic Movement, Slovak organization s in the U nited States had made an agreement wi th Masaryk "as a leading personality of Czech po litica l li fe" to fo rm a shared state where Sl ovaki a was to have an autonomous position. Thi s agreement was unfortun ately not honored , he argued. 25 Depri vation arg uments were al so rare . The phrase " Slovak bread" occurred onl y once: In the first debate on the break -up of the state in September 1992, Michal Ko vac from the Mo ve ment for a Democratic Slovaki a ( later to beco me Slovaki a's first pres ident) argued that in a normally functioning federation , it wo uld not be possible for the standard of li ving in Slovaki a to drop as much as it had in onl y two yea rs. In another four years , he argued, " Would we not be in the hi storica l situation w here we have already been, that the Slovak nation would have to go abroad for bread, because there would not be bread for people in Slovakia? And we wou ld be as weakened as we once were under dear father Masaryk." 26 However, in the interw ar period " Slovak bread" was usuall y tantamount to w hite-collar jobs for the yo ung Slovak intelli gentsia in Slovaki a, whi le here th e lack of " bread " obvious ly refers to general unemployment. The probl em was real enough - in the earl y 1990s the unemployment ra te in Slovak ia was three or four times the Czech average. 27 25 Zprava o 5. spo lecne schu zi snemovny lidu a snemo vny narodu. 18.11 . 1992 . 25 .1 1.1 992. in Federi ln f shromiidenf Ceske a S/ovenske Federaci vnf republiky. V il. vo lebnf obdobf. ( 1992). 7 17. 2 '' Zprava o 4. spo lec ne sc huzi snemo vny lidu a snemov ny narodu 29.9. 1992. in Fe- denilni shro m;ii deni Ceske a S/ovenske Federaci vnf republiky. V II. vo lebnf obdobf, ( 1992). 60 I. 27 11. 8 percent in Slovaki a vers us 4. 1 percent in the Czec h Republic in 199 1: 10.3 percent versus 2.6 percent in 1992. Transition reporc I 996. (L ondon. The European Bank fo r Reconstructi on and Deve lopment. I 996). However. th e difference was even larger in 1993. the first yea r of independence. �SLOVAKIA 70 Finall y, compared to the interwar period , classica l nationalist ar g uments were much more co mmon , and the principle of nation al self-determination was invoked more ex plicitly. In the debate about the allocation of competence between the Republics and the Federation it was used as an argument in favor of returnin g to the original 1968 Constitution. 28 Y et, the most co mmon use of th e principle of national self-determination was as an argument in favor of establi shing an independent Slovak state or dividin g Czechoslovakia. There are, however, some interestin g nation al differences between actors in how they used it. Slovak deputies speaking in favor of Slovak independence invoked the principle of national self-determination on behalf of the Slovak nation . They regarded it as an inalienable, natural ri ght, and in one instance, even as a God-given ri ght. 29 An independent Slovak state was presented as the fulfillment of IO00 years of strugg le for Slovak individuality and sovereignty , and as the result of a natural , hi storical process of national emancipation . In the words of HZDS deputy chairman Au gustfn Marian Huska , " the Constitution is the fulfillm ent and lega l enac tment of th e ri ght to se lf-determination . ( ... )To the Slovak s, whose consciousness was molded by more than a thou sand years under foreign rule , the feeling of dependence had become second nature. Slowly, but persistently they formed an awareness of the need for self-determination , the need to search for, find , 28 Zprava o 9. spolecne schi°1zi snemovny lidu a snernovn y narodu. 11 .- 12. 12. 1990. in Federalnf shromaidenf CSFR. ( 1990-1992) . < ww,~ .p,p.c:dckni h/ I 990fs/sbn/-stcn -prot/009,c: hu t./s009077. html/ d> [2 Febru ary, 2004]. See also the debate on th e Slovak declaration of so vereignty. Stenograficka sprava o 3. sch6dzi Slovenskej narodnej rndy konanej 17. j ul a 1992. < www .nr,r.sk/i ndexarch.a,p> ]4 Febru ary. 2004 J. 29 Sedovic (S lovak National Part y), Zprava o 5. spol ec ne schu zi SL a SN , 18. 11 . 1992. in Federalnf shro,mii denf Ceske a Slovenske Federati vnf republiky. VII. volebnf obdobf. ( 1992). 788. �71 SLOVAKIA ex press. a nd at las t rea li ze sovere ig nty." 30 S lova ki a was in o th e r word s pi ctured as a nati on-state a nd the S lova ks as the state-forming nati o n. Howeve r, in the de bates in the Sl ovak Nation a l Counc il , Slovak deputi es, inc ludin g Prime Mini ster Vl adim fr Mec iar, at the same tim e pro mi sed to res pec t the eq ua l rig hts of a ll c iti ze ns, nati o na l minorities and ethni c groups. De puti es re presentin g th e Magyar mino rity in the S lovak Nationa l Counc il recog ni zed o r eve n s uppo rted the S lovak ri g ht to selfde te rmin ati o n, but argued that the princ ipl e sho uld a lso appl y to the nati o na l mino riti es. Thi s was a n arg ume nt in favo r of auto no my. At the same time, Magyar deputi es arg ued th at S lovaki a sho uld not be presented as a nati o n- state in the Co nstituti o n, bec au se it was not nation all y ho moge neous. Founding the state o n the nati o na l princ ipl e meant turnin g the minoriti es into second-c lass c iti zens, they argued . Czec h de puti es co nsiste ntly presented the break-up of Czec hoslovaki a as a matte r of se lf- determinati o n fo r the Slovak nati o n. The 1992 e lecti o n. the Slovak Dec larati o n of Sovere ig nty, and the Slovak Constituti o n were take n as proof th at the S lovak natio n did wa nt inde pende nce. In the words of Prime Mini ste r Vacl av Kl aus of the Czec h Re publi c: "The S lova k nati o n used the o ppo rtunity to co mpl e te its nati o na l e manc ipati o n by fo undin g its own state. Thi s is a rea lity we mu st res pect. " 3 1 T he arg ume nt th at the Czec hs had no ri ght to deny th e S lovak natio n its rig ht to se lf-de termin ati o n was a lso used aga in st ho ld in g a referend um in the Czech Republi c; Czec h c itizens could no t dec ide whet her the S lovaks sho uld beco me a statefo rming natio n o r no t. Interestin g ly, the princi pl e of nati o na l se lf-determin ati o n was not even o nce in voked o n be ha lf of the Czec h na- -'" For Huska ·s statement and the debate on the Const itut ion. see Stenograficka sprava o 5. sch6dzi S lovenskej mirodnej rady kona nej 31. augusta a I . septembra 1992. <www.nr,r. ., k/indexarch.a,p> 14 February . 20041. -' 1 K laus in th e debate on th e Czech Constitution . Ceskii narodnf rada I 992- 1992. Stenoprotokoly. I 0. schuze. 16.- 17. 12. 1992. <www.psp.cz/cknih/ I 992cnr/,tenprot/O I 0schuzi> 13 February. 2004J. �SLOVAKIA 72 tion .32 The reason is obvious: The Czechs did not regard the establi shme nt of the Czec h Republic as a state-formin g process, but as a restoration of Czech statehood , which expl icitly included Czechoslovak state tradition s. But the n the Czechs a lways rega rded Czechoslovakia as their state. Apart from the princ ipl e of national se lf-determination , the main lin e of argument in favor of di ssolution may be termed reali st. It was argued that the federation did not work or that it was a lread y dead, that it was too late to save the state, and now the important thing was to e nd the state in a peaceful , orderly, cultivated , adult and leg itimate fashion , and to ensure good ne ighborl y relation s be twee n the future inde pe nde nt states. 4. The Centralist Arguments Against Autonomy If we turn to the centra li st side, di sco ntinuity 1s th e word that first co mes to mind. In the inte rwar period , the centrali st arg ume nts against a utonomy were located within a nation a li st di sco urse, and mirrored the autonomist arguments to a large ex tent , the difference be ing th at the centralists based the ir arg uments on an a lte rn ative national id eo logy - Czec hos lovakism . After 1989 , the "ce ntra li st" arg um e nts changed profoundly . Czechos lov akism had been abandoned already in 1945 , and the unitary state form in 1968. The "centrali sts" afte r 1989 were , the refore, centra li sts on ly re lative to those advocating confederate so luti ons, a nd in the las t instance, inde pe ndence for Slovakia. " The principle of national se l f-de term ination was invoked on behalf of the .. Moravian nati on" ( 1.5 million . accord ing to the 199 1 census). but then as an argument in favor of Moravi an autonomy in a Czecho-Morav ian federation . See espec ially the speec hes of deputies Jan Jeg la and Jiff Bfl y (both from the Moravi an movement H SD-SMS) . Ceska narodnf rada 1992- 1992 . Stenoprotokoly. 10. sc huze , 16.17. 12. 1992. < www.psp.cz/eknih/ 1992<.:nr/~tenprot/0 I 0schuz/> 13 Febru ary , 2004J. �SLOVAKIA 73 Centralist Arguments during the First Republic ln the inter-war period, the co rnerstone of the ce ntra li st argumentati on was that the Czechs and Slovak s were one Czechoslovak nati on (a lbe it w ith two tri bes), and the core message was th at a ce ntra li zed state form was necessary to preserve nati onal unity and th e integrity of th e state. T he premi se linking nati onal identity to state fo rm was the principl e of nati onal se l f-determin ati on. According to the centrali sts, the Czechos lovak nati on had used its ri ght to self-determ ination to re uni te in a Czechos lovak nati on-state, and thi s unity had to be preserved.·13 A uto nomy for Slovak ia was seen as a th reat to Czechos lovak nationa l unity as we ll as state in tegrity , first because it wo uld dri ve th e two tribes of the Czechos lovak nati on apart, and second , beca use granting Slovaki a autonomy wo ul d be tantamoun t to recogni zing th e Slovak s as a separate nati on, w hich would j eopardi ze the state's ra ison d'etre. Th e centra lists co untered the depri vati on arguments of the autonomi sts in two ways . On the one hand, they denied that the Slovak s were d iscrimin ated agai nst, and on the other hand , they rejec ted autonomy as a suitabl e remedy to Slovaki a's alleged ill s. What was needed to help Slovak ia was not autonomy, but more unity, especiall y economica ll y, the ce ntra li sts argued. Thi s was entirely in line w ith thei r overall "strength th ro ugh unity" message. However, their main artill ery was aimed at the contract-oriented arguments, and espec iall y the Pi tts burgh Agreement. T he main ar guments were: I . T he A meri ca n Czechs and Slovaks were not leg itimate represe ntati ves of th eir co-n ati onals at home, and had no ri ght to dec ide on their behal f; 2. The Pittsburg h Agreement was one of many, and thus had a certain hi stori ca l va lue; but in order to be va lid, it wo uld need the co nse nt of Czechs and Slovak s at home; and 3. Leg itimate Slovak represe ntati ves had conse nted to Czec hos lovak ·'-' There was no big difference between the Slovak autonomists and the Czechoslovak cen tralists in terms of the co ntents of national identity. In both cases . national identi ty was defined in terms of culture. language and ancestry. See Bakke (op.c it. , 1999). especia ll y Chapter I 0. fo r documentati on. �SLOVAKIA 74 national and state unity in the Constitu ti on of 1920, as we ll as at assem bli es before and after Pittsburg h. The first arg ume nt was especia ll y damag in g, since it went to the core of a ll the auto no mi st argument s assoc iated w ith the Pittsburg h Agreement , in va lid atin g the Agreement as a Magna C harta, as a binding contract, a nd as an express io n of the will of the Slovak natio n. It was more difficult for the ce ntra li sts to de nou nce the leg iti macy of Masaryk as a represe ntati ve of the Czec hos lovak state, but the Pres ident did his best to free him se lf and the government of any obligation. Masaryk c la imed that he had sig ned the Pittsburg h Agreement in order to "appease a sma ll Slovak fact io n that dreamed of God know s what sort of independence for Slovakia ," and di smi ssed it as "a loca l pac t between American Czechs and Slovaks, signed by American citizens." 34 There is littl e doubt that Masaryk drafted the Agreement in order to ap pease a part of the Slovak League, but o ne may wo nder why this was important to him if he rega rded the m mere ly as American citizens. I think Mark Stol arik has a va lid point when he arg ues that th e American Slovaks he lped legiti mi ze th e creation of Czechoslovakia in the abse nce of a mandate from the Slovaks in Hungary (caused by war censorship).·15 Masaryk a lso tried , un successfu ll y, to di sc redit the Pittsburg h Agreement through quasi- lega li sti c arguments. In a le tte r to Andrej Hlinka on October 12th, 1929, Masaryk c laimed that the Pittsburgh Agreement was "a forge ry," because at the time, the em ig re organization of the Slovaks present in Pitts burgh , "the [Slovak l Leag ue lega ll y did no t ex ist, and it was recognized by th e Government o nl y in 191 9." Hlinka evide ntl y wrote the Slovak Leag ue , w hi ch retorted th at the re was " no doubt a bout th e a uthe nti c ity of th e Pittsburg h Agreement," and A merica n lega l experts confirmed th at there was no " Tomas G. Masaryk, Svetova revoluce. (Prague: Orbis a Ci n. 1925). 262-263. 35 M . Mark Stolarik (op.c it.. 1968). 54. �SLOVAKIA 75 difference between chartered a nd unc hartered orga ni zatio ns w ith respect to entering such ag ree me nts. 36 T o prop up the claim that leg itim ate Slovak representatives had co nsented to Czec hos lovak nat io na l and state unity after Pitts burg h, the ce ntrali sts preferred to use the Martin Dec lara ti o n of October 30th , 19 18, since thi s Dec laration had been unanimou sly accepted at a n asse mbl y of a ll Slovak po liti ca l part ies. In the beg innin g, they also used the 1920 Constitution for th e same purpose, but the trouble was th at th e Slovak Club in the Constitutional Assembly was coo pted , and arguably not representative of Slovak opinion. The ma in reason why the Martin Dec larati on was s uc h a n asset for the centrali sts, was the sente nce statin g th at the "S lovak nati o n is lingui sti ca ll y as we ll as culturally-historically pa rt of th e unitary Czec ho-Sl ovak nation ." Moreover, the asse mbl y at M artin had demanded nat io na l se lf-dete rmin ation on behalf of this "Czecho-S lovak nat io n," w hil e at the sa me time it was s il e nt on auton omy. The ce ntrali sts thu s used it as proof of Czechoslovak national and state unity, and as proof of the will of the Slovaks to e nter s uc h a unity. (Rumor in Slovakia had it th at the passage o n Czechoslovak national unity was not in the original text. This was , however, refuted in 1923 by Emil Stodola and Samue l Zoch, who had dra fted it).:17 Finally , the centrali sts counte red the c lass ic a l nati o na li st arg ume nt by rejecting the first premi se, that the Slovaks were an indi vidual nation, a nd the third premise. that the autonomi sts represented the tru e w ill of the Slovak nati o n. They presented the Slovaks as a tribe of th e Czechoslovak nati o n, and the Slovak me mbe rs o f the ce nt ral ist parties as the leg itim ate Slovak rep rese ntat ives. At the sa me time, they accepted the seco nd premi se, th at nati o ns had th e -' 6 The letter is pub lished as Document No. 30 in Joseph A. Mikus. Slova kia. A Poli- tica l and Constitutional Histo1y . (Brati slava: SAP. I 995) 209-2 10. The answer of th e Slovak League was published in Slo vak no. 194. 27 August. 1930. p. I. See also M. Mark Stolarik (op. cit.. 1968). 48-49. 52. -' 7 V ac lav Chaloupecky: Martinshi deklilrace 19- 20. II jejf politicke osudy (Prague. I 928). �SLOVAKIA 76 right to sel f-determin ati on, but as we have seen, th ey in vo ked thi s prin ciple on behalf of th e Czec hos lovak nati on. A n I va n Derer specialty was the argument th at i f the Slovak s had been an indi vidual nati on, then they w ould have th e ri ght to secess ion, not onl y to autonomy. 38 B oth sides had their share of argumentati on errors. T he ce ntrali sts argued from maj ority (a rg umentum ad populum ) in the earl y 1920s, w hen they recei ved the maj ority of the Slovak votes, and personal attacks (arg umentum ad hominem) were ac tu all y mos t co mmon on th e centrali st side. probabl y because they fi tted so we ll into their genera l strength-th ro ugh-unity argument. T he Slovak autonomi sts were accused of being " M agyarones" or " new Slovaks," thereby impl y ing th at they had other loya lties or identities,'9 and of being paid by the Hungari an government. In both cases, the M agyars had the ro le of ·'bogeyman" . T hi s M agyarone ca rd was used to expl ain w hy the Slovaks had turned away from the Czechs in the past and in the present , and to co unter th e autonomi st c laim th at they we re the so le leg itimate representati ves of the Slovak nati on. I f the ce ntra li sts believed th at Sl ovak autonomy would j eopardi ze Czechos lovak nati onal unity and th e integrit y of th e state, it w as quite log ica l to acc use th e autonomi sts of being renegades (though probabl y not very smart). Profound Changes after 1989 After 1989 there was not much left of the former ce ntra list arguments, which is not surpri sing considering that Czec hos lovaki srn had 18 • I van Derer. Ceskos/ovensk;i otizkil. (Prague : Orbis. 1935). 88- 90. 39 Both labels we re commonly used about people of Slovak origi n who had become more or less ass imil ated during Hungari an rul e. but who turned back after 19 18. There we re some known M agyarones among the autonomists (chiefl y Franti sek Jehlicka and Yoj tech/ Bela Tuka). but the lead ing figures (Hlin ka. Juri ga) had defended Slovak interests also under Hungary. T he total number of people who ac tu ally switched nati onal affi l iatio n from Magyar to Slovak i n the firs t ten years of Czec hos lovaki a cannot be ascertained prec ise ly, but an educated guess is th at it was betwee n 250.000 and half a million. See Bak ke (op.cit. . 1999). 305- 307. �SLOVAKIA 77 been abandoned and a unitary state form was no longer an option. Th e "centralists" still accepted the principle of nati onal self- determinati on; however, they now recogni zed the Czec hs and Slovaks as equal , state-forming nation s and Czechoslovakia as a Czech and Slova k nati on-state. As long as state form was sti 11 on the agenda, the players on the "centrali st" side were mostly Czechs, and the task was to defend a " function al federation ," which meant to preserve the powers of the federation v is-a-vi s the Republics. Once the break-up of the state appeared on the agenda after the 1992 electi ons, however , th e "centra li st" pl ayers were Czech and Slovak opposition parti es and the task was now to preserve a common Czechoslovak state. In the hy ph en debate, as we ll as in the co mpetenc y debate, Czech deputi es explicitly presented th e federal state form as an express ion of the equality of the Czechs and Slovaks. The main Czech arguments against th e hy phen were that it was divi sive, and that it was unacceptable to the Czech publi c. This probabl y had something to do with the fact that the Second Czecho-Slovak Republi c ( 1938-- 39) was spelled with a hyphen. It was also argued that it was grammati ca ll y probl emati c, th at the original spelling had been without a hyphen (an hi stori ca l argument), and th at the Morav ians would feel offended (an identity argument). The main arguments in favor of a strong federation were that it was necessary in order to carry out the economic reform s and to fulfill Czechos lovakia 's internati onal obligati ons. For the Czech elite, the power and competency of the Czech Republic was irrelevant. In fact, I have onl y found one example of a Czec h deputy in vok ing nat ional interests, and he arg ued th at a confederate solution would be contrary to Czech interests.-lO The Czech and Slovak opposition parties that defended Czec hoslovaki a's ex istence in the debates in the fall of 1992 were mostly Socialists and Communists, but also included the ultra-nati onali st ' 0 M andl er (Libera l Democra ti c Part y). Zprava o 9. spol ecne schuzi SL a S . 11.- 12.1 2. 1990, in Fedenilnf shromaf.difof Ceske a Slovenske Federativnf Republiky V I . vo lebnf obdobf ( 1990), <www.psp.c z/ci,.nih/ 19901\h,bnf!.,tcnprot/009,c:hud ,009()77. htrn ll d> [4 February 2004 1. �78 SLOVAKIA Republican s. Even thoug h this opposition accepted th e principle of national se lf-determination , they mostly interpreted it in the origina l meanin g - as popular sovereignty . The totally dominating line of argument was that the only leg itimate way of dividin g Czechoslovakia according to the principle of se lf-determination was to let the citizens decide by popular vote, a nd that it was unacceptable to divide the state against the will of the peopl e. In the first debate on dissolution , thi s was supported by a hi storical a nalogy. By accident, the debate was held 54 years after the fateful Munich agreement, and the opposition argued that a new Munich was about to happen: Again the fate of the Czechoslovak state wou ld be dec ided without asking the peop le. In the first debate the oppos ition parties advocated a refere ndum before the decision was made; in the second debate a ratifying pl ebisc ite. The motive was obvious ly to save the state, since all opin ion poll s showed that a clear majority was in favor. However, very few deputies ac tually defended the me rits of Czechoslovakia, although a handful of Czechs professed their love for the shared homeland , or invoked the legacy of the founding fathers , mostly T.G. Masary k and Milan Rasti slav Stefanik. Finally, a weak echo of the inte rwar debate could be heard in claims that separation would be a threat to the future existence of the Czech and Slovak nation s (reminiscent of the strength-through-unity argument), and in charges of treason (personal attac ks). Ne ither line of argument was very common. The claim that voting in favor of disso luti on was an act of treason was a preserve of the ultra-nationalist Republican Party of Czec hos lovakia. The debates a lso had their amusing sides, for in stance in the use of metaphors. The federation was alternately see n as a leaking ship, a train being pulled in opposite directions , and an old patient with a severe heart condit ion , whi le the establishment of the new states was compared to giving birth to twins! �SLOVAKIA 79 5. Summary and Conclusion [n the inter-war period, Czechoslovakia was a unitary , centralized state, and autonomy was a matter of separate Slovak institutions. After 1989, Czechoslovakia was a sy mm etric federation of two nationa l Republic s. Separate Slovak inst itutions were, therefore, no longer an iss ue, and autonomy became a matter of allocating more deci s ion-makin g power to the Republic s. However, in both cases, there was a conflict over state form, and in both cases the content of that conflict was how centralized the state should be. As for the actors , the e lite constellations were most stable in the inte rw ar pe riod . However, as lon g as the conflict was about state form, the Czech political elite was in favor of the most centralized so lution , while the Slovak elite was divided . Once the break-up of Czechoslovakia was on the agenda, the re were Czech and Slovak parties on both si des. If we focus on the main arguments on either side, we can obse rve continuity as well as change. Durin g the First Republic , the arguments of both sides were located within a nationali st discourse, but they founded their argume ntation on alternative nation al ideologies. The centralists invoked the principle of national se lf-dete rmination on behalf of the "Czechoslovak nation", the autonomists on behalf of the Slovak nation . After the Velvet Revolution , the autonomist argume nts were still located within a nationali st di scourse, and when the victorious part ies in the 1992 elections dec ided to divide the state, the Czech si de simply adopted the Slovak arg uments. By contrast, the "centrali st" arguments in the debate on state form were mainly economic, while the arguments in the debate on the break-up of Czechoslovakia were procedural. The most strik in g feature of the autonomy di sco urse after 1989 is therefore the asy mmetry of the arguments on both sides. Let us now address th e question of how the arguments related to the principle of national se lf-determination : On the autonomist side, the core message was the sa me in both periods; that the Slovaks were e ntitl ed to autonomy or se lf-determination "qu a nation ." Howeve r, �80 SLOVAKIA the principle of natio na l se lf-d etermin a ti o n was in voked more ex plicitl y after the Velvet Revo lution . On the centra li st side, the principle was used as an argument against a utono my in the interwar period , and w ith a certain twist, against the break-up of Czechos lovakia in 1992 . In the latter case, se lf-de te rmin ation was understood as popul ar sovere ignty - i.e . as a democratic principle. It is also inte res tin g that after 1989, the principl e of nation a l se lfdetermination was consistently invoked on behalf of the Slovaks, not on behalf of the Czechs, other than in the context of Czechoslovakia as the nation- state of two individual , sovere ign nations. In conclusion , the continuity was strongest on the autonomist side , alth ough th e conte nts of nation al se lf-determination c hanged from autonom y to independence. On the "centrali st" side, most of the a mmunition aga inst Slovak autonomy was gone once the concept of a Czechoslovak nation was abandoned. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2005, Vol. 38 Description An account of the resource Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 52 SLOVAKIA The Autonomy Discourse in Parliamentary Debates during the First Czechoslovak Republic and after the Velvet Revolution 1 E li sabeth Bakke " We approve the political progra m, w hi ch e ndeavors to unite the Czec hs a nd Slovaks in[to] an indepe nd e nt state of the Czech la nd s and Slovakia. Slovakia sha ll ha ve its own ad mini strati o n, its ow n parli ament and its own courts. The Slovak language shall be the officia l language in the sc hoo l[s], in office[sl and in public li fe in genera l. The Czecho-Slovak state sha ll be a republic , its constitution sha ll be democratic. [ ...] The detail ed reg ulati o ns for the estab lishment of the Czecho-Slovak state are left to the li berated Czechs and Slovaks and the ir lega l representati ves." The Pittsburgh Agreement of May 30th, 1918 2 ' An earli er version of thi s art icle was presented at the 34th National Conven ti on of the AAASS in Pittsburgh. 2 1- 24 November. 2002. 2 Thi s Agreeme nt was signed by the Slovak League of America . th e Czech National A lli ance. th e Al li ance of Czec h Ca th oli cs. representing Czech and Slovak emigrc organi zations in the USA. and T omas G. M asaryk. President of the Czechos lovak ati ona l Council in Pari s. I have quoted th e Engli sh version from The Slovaks and the Pittsburgh Pact (Chicago: Th e Slova k Cath ol ic Federati on of America. 1934). 27. The Slovak ori gin al is reprinted in Edvard Benes. Svetov,i valka a nase revoluce. Vol. Ill (Dokumenty). (Prague: C in-Orbis . 1929) . 365. See also M. Mark Stolarik. 'The Role of Amer ican Slova ks in th e C rea tion of Czecho-S lovak ia. 19 14- 19 18"'. SLOVAKIA 53 Slovak autonomy was on the agenda throughout Czechoslovakia 's 74 years of existence, from the beginning to the bitter end. Although it may be argued that inexperienced politicians, short deadlines , rigid constitutional amendment procedures and conflicting economic priorities also played a role in the breakup, the long-term conflict that drove Czechoslovakia apart were the closely-related matters of political autonomy and recognition of the Slovaks as a separate nation. 3 What was at stake was not only the institutional set-up and division of power; for the Slovaks, separate political institutions were also important symbols of national individuality and ownership to the shared Czecho-Slovak state. The roots of the conflict go back to the founding of Czechoslovakia in October of 19 I 8. The Czechs and Slovaks had no prior shared statehood tradition s (save perhaps Great Moravia in the ninth century), and independence was not even on the agenda before World War I. Starting in 1915, the independence movement abroad, with Tomas G. Masaryk at the helm, tried to convince the Allies that a Czechoslovak Republic should be established, invoking the principle of national self-determination on behalf of the "Czechoslovak nation. " In the First Czechoslovak Republic the idea that the Czechs and Slovaks were one nation (albeit with two tribes) became official state ideology , and it went hand-in-hand with political centralism. 4 Slovak Studies VIII (Rome, 1968) for a very interesting acco unt of the circumsta nces that led to its signin g and the subseq uent course of even ts in th e new lyfounded Repub lic. 3 For a discussion of the breakup see Eric Stein , Czecho/Slovakia. Ethnic Conflict, Constitutional Fissure. Negotiated Breakup (A nn Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997); Jirf Musil , ed., The End of Czechoslovakia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995 ); Jan Rychlfk, Rozpad Ceskoslovenska . Cesko-slovenske vztahy 1989- 1992 (Bratis lava : AEP, 2002); Carol Skalnik Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics. Nation Versus State (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997). 4 For details see Elisabeth Bakke, Doomed to Failure? The Czechoslovak Nation Project and the Slovak Autonomist Reaction 19/9- 1938 (Oslo: Series of Dissertations submitted to the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Un iversity of Oslo, no. 11 /1999). SLOVAKIA 54 Howeve r, a sub sta nti al pa rt of th e Sl ova k po liti ca l e lite opposed both , de ma ndir.g recog nition of the Slovak nati on and autonomy fo r Slovaki a. The Pittsburgh Agreeme nt became important both beca use it defin ed the contents of Slovak a utonomy and because Masaryk had signed it. Afte r World War II , Czec hos lovaki sm was abandoned, but poli ti ca l centra li sm was not, and th e federali zati on of Czech os lov aki a aft er the Sov iet in vas ion in 1968 did not give Slovak po liti ca l insti tution s any rea l dec ision-m aking power. Afte r the Ve lvet Revo lution in 1989, political autonomy for Slovaki a reappeared on the agenda, and became a major iss ue in the di spute over C zechos lovaki a's new constitution . The main purpose of the present article is to co mpare the autonomy de bates durin g the First Republic and after the Ve lve t Re volu ti o n, in orde r to establi sh continuity and change. The research ques ti o ns are: I . How were the de mands fo r autonomy substa nti ated, and what were the main argume nts aga inst it? 2. Wh at role did the princ ipl e of nation al se lf-de te rmin ati on pl ay in the debates in the two peri ods? The First Re public was a unitary state , and autonom y as such was ne ver on the age nda of the Parliame nt in the interwar pe ri od. Of th e three a utonom y proposa ls th at made it to th e Parli a me nt, two were bl oc ked in committees, whil e the third was adopted without any de bate after th e fa teful Muni c h agree me nt in 1938. My analys is of the inte rwar di sco urse is th e refore based o n a se lec ti o n of govern me nt in a ugurati on de bates and budgetary debates, as we ll as c lippings from Slovak, the main autono mi st ne wspaper. 5 After 1989 seve ral de bates were re levant to the autono my di scourse: In the Federal Parliament I have analyzed the 1990 " hyphen de bate," the de bate on the compete ncy law , a nd the two de bates about the break-up of Czechos lovaki a in the fa ll of 1992. In the res- ' T he analys is of the debate in the interwar period is a condensed version of a part of Chapter 13 of my PhD di ssertat ion. For detai ls see Bakke (ibid. 1999). SLOVAKIA 55 pec ti ve Czech and Sl ovak Nati onal Council s (Republi c Asse mblies), I have analyzed the 1992 debates on the Sl ovak D ecl aration of Sovereignty, the Slovak Con stitution, and the Czech Constituti on. I will structure the arti cle around the foll owin g three points: I . Th e in stituti onal set-up and th e contents of the autonomy demands. 2. The co mpos iti on and stability of the elite constellations on either side of the conflict. 3. The main arg uments a) in favor of autonomy and b) against autonomy. wi th spec ial emphas is on how they relate to the principle of nati onal sel f-determinati on. 1. The Institutional Set-up and the Contents of the Autonomy Demandi Czec hos lovakia was from the outset presented as the nati on-state of the Czechos lovak nation. 6 Thi s was codified in the 1920 Constituti on, which al so gave the First Czechos lovak Republic a unitary, centrali zed state form and a bi ca meral leg islature. Czec hos lovaki a was at first di vided into 22 co unties, but the county sys tem was implemented onl y in Sl ovaki a and fro m 1928 , four prov inces repl aced the counties (see tabl e I ). In the interw ar peri od, the demands for autonomy were defined in term s of separate Sl ovak instituti ons with dec ision-making powers in matters of vital importance for th e Slovaks as a nati on. The core demands were that Sl ovaki a should have " its own admini strati on, its own parli ament and its ow n co urts," cf. the Pittsburgh Ag reement. M ost of the autonomy proposa ls also included a separate Sl ovak government, but none of the three autonomy proposals that made it into the Parli ament went beyond an asymmetric federati on.7 " In reality. th e Czec hs and Slovaks togeth er comprised 65.5 percent of the populati on. Germans 23.4 percent. Magyars 5.6 percent. Ruthenians 3.5 percen t. Jews 1.4 perce nt. and Po les 0.6 percen t in the 1921 cens us. See Scftanr lidu v repub lice ceskosloven.~ke ze dne 15. unora I 921. Dfl I. (Prague: Statnf ufad statistick y. I 924 ). 7 See Bakke (ibid .. 1999). 465- 77 for a more detailed overv iew of the autonomy proposa ls. See also James Ramon Fe lak. '·A t the Price of the Republic ··. Hlinka ·s SLOVAKIA 56 The 1938 Constitutional a me ndm ent that inaugurated the shortli ved Second Republi c was based on the third a utonomy proposal of the Slovak People 's Party, which had been submitted in August 1938. The Second Re public co mbined a federa l state form with separate Slovak institutions : a leg islat ive asse mbl y (D iet), a se parate administration and separate co urts. The Slovak gove rnme nt was acco untabl e to the Die t, and received exec uti ve power in all matters under its juri sdi ction , as we ll as many matters unde r central jurisdiction. Slovak became the officia l lang uage in S lovakia, and separate c iti zenship was introduced. After World War II , the Czechos lovak govern me nt recognized the S lovaks as a separate nati on a nd the Slovak National Co un ci l (w hi c h de fac to controlled the liberated parts of Slovakia) as its representative. An exec utive Board of Commissioners was also establi shed. However, through the three Prague agreements and the two first postwar constituti ons, Slovak institution s were gradua ll y stripped of their power and co mpete nce, and Czechoslovakia return ed to a centrali st, unitary state fo rm , with a unicamera l leg is lature. 8 Part of the reaso n for the c la mpdow n o n the Slovak organs was the victory of the De mocratic Party in the 1946 e lectio ns, w hi c h convinced the Communists th at Slovakia could not be tru sted. 9 Slovak People ·s Party. 1929-J 938 (Pi tt sburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, I 994). especially pp. 30, 80- 1, 19 1- 92. ij The 1960 Constitution aboli shed the Board of Commissioners. See Program prve dom;Jcf v/ady repub liky vlady narodnf fronty Cechu a Slovaku, (Prag ue: Mini sterstvo l nformacf. 1945). I 6-17: Jaros lav Chovanec & Peter Mozolfk, Historicke a statopravne korene sa mostatn ost i slovenskej republiky , (Yydavatel's tvo Procom , Brati slava, 1994), 38, 11 4- 122; Michal Barn ovsky. " Tri prazske dohody", in Cesko- slovenske vztahy - Slovensko-ceske vzthhy (Liberec: Technick a Un i verzi ta, 1998). 119 ff.: Elisabeth Bakke, "The Principle of National Self-de termination in Czechoslovak Consti tuti ons 1920- 1992" . CEPSR. no. I O (2002), 173- 98 . 9 The Democratic Party received 62 .0 percent of th e votes in Slovakia. See Michal Barnovsky & Edita l vanickova, eds, Prve povojnove volby v strednej a j uhovychod- nej Eur6pe (Bratislava: VEDA, 1998). 2 15- 18. 57 SLOVAKIA Table 1: State Form, Administrative Structure and Institutional Set-up in Czechoslovak Constitutions and Constitutional Amendments Year 1920 State-forming State form Administrative nation Czechoslovak Un itary 22 co unties : Centra lized, from 1928 four bicameral legislature nation Institutional set-up structure provinces 1938 Czech and Federal Slovak nations 1948 Czech and Unitary Slovak nations Four provi nces : Asymmetric: Bohem ia. M ora- bicamera l via, Slovak ia. & separate Slovak Sub-Carpathian instituti ons with Ruthenia extensi ve powers Two prov inces , Asy mmetric; The Czech lands unicamera l & separate and Slovak ia Slovak inst itutions with lim ited powers 1960 Czech and Uni ta ry Slovak nati ons Two prov inces, Asymme tric: unicame- the Czech lands ra l & separate Slovak and Slovak ia institut ions with more l imited powers 1968 Czech and Federal Slovak nations Two repub lics, Symmetric: bicameral, T he Czech Re- federa l & separate publ ic and the Czech and Slovak Slovak Republ ic institut ions Source: A ll cons titutions can be found in Sbfrka zakonii a naHzenf stalU ceskoslovenskeho. During the Prag ue Spring of 1968, the questi on of Slovak autonomy reappeared on the agenda. The initi ati ve to amend the constituti on ca me from the Slovak Nati onal Council , and thi s time a sy mmetri c so luti on was pro posed, sy mboli zing the equality of the two state-forming nati ons. 10 Accordin g to the 1968 Constitution, Czecho- ' 0 T he process towards federa li za ti on is doc umented in Jozef Za tk uli ak, Fede- ra lizacia Ceskoslovenskeho Staw 1968- 1970. Vznik Cesko-sl ovenskej fede racie SLOVAKIA 58 slovakia became a federation of two republics, the Czech and th e Slovak Republic s, each with their ow n assemblies (National Councils), and their own govern ments. The bicameral federal legis lature consisted of the proporti onall y elected Chamber of the Peop le, and the Chamber of Nations where the two Republics were represented on equal terms. For important dec isions, a majority was req uired in the Peop le's chamber, as we ll as in the separate Czech and Slovak parts of the Chamber of Nations, in effect giving the Slovaks veto powers. The 1968 Constitution provided the in stitutional foundations for Slovak autonomy, but in practice the political system remained centralized. The original division of power in the 1968 Constitution changed in favor of the federal level during the "Normali zation " of th e early 1970s, and fo rmal decision-making rul es and divi sion of powers did not matter much during Communism . As Carol Skalnik Leff has pointed out, however, federation plu s democra ti zation was a power eq uation. 11 After the Velvet Revo lution in 1989, th e 1968 Constitution acquired new importance; first , it determined the procedures for the adoption of a new constitution (a three-fifths majority in all parts of the federal parliament), and second, it became the point of departure for the negoti ati ons about the contents of a new constitutional settl ement. Under th e new, democratic co nditi ons, the Slovak minorit y had an excell ent bargaining position , since any cons ti tutional settlement required Slovak co nsent. After 1989 the questi on was, therefore, not whether Slovakia should have autonomy, but the ex tent of that autonomy. Separate Slovak institutions were taken for roku 1968 (B rn o: Nak ladatelstvi Doplnek, 1996). See also Jaros lav Krejci & Pave l Machonin , Czechos lovakia 19/8- 92. A U1bora to1y for Social Change (London: Macmill an, I 996), 45-7: Chovanec & Mozolik, (op.cit. , I 994). 48-52: Ales Gerloch . Jiri Hrebej & Vladimir Zoubek. Us tavnf sys tem Ceske republiky ( Prague: Prospektrum, 1999). 51-4 : Carol Skalni k Leff, National Conf7ict in Czechoslo vakia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 988), 243 ff. 11 Leff, 132-33. SLOVAKIA 59 granted, and autonomy now became a matter of allocating more decision-making power to the Republics. The " hyphen delJate" in the sprin g of 1990 was a foreboding of the problems that lay ahead. It was Pres ide nt Vaclav Havel who inadvertently started it. In Janu ary of 1990, without prior consultations, he submitted a constitutional amendment to the federal Parliament, proposing to drop the word "Soc iali st" from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic . Much to hi s and many others' surpri se, thi s trigged a bitter di spute about whether the name of the Republic should be spelled with or without a hyphe n. The main alternatives were the "Czec ho-S lovak Republic ," favored by a majority of the Slovaks, and the "Czechoslovak Federal Republic ," favored by a majority of the Czechs. Stalemate in the federal Parliament at first resulted in the absurd dec ision to spe ll the word "Czechoslovak" in one word in the Czech Republic and with a hyphen in Slovakia. Thi s was presented as a concession to "S lovak grammar. " This deci sion caused demonstration s in Slovakia, after which the Parliament made a hasty retreat and settled for the "Czech and Slovak Federal Republic ." 12 Negotiations about a new Czechoslovak Constitution started after the elections in June of 1990, but soon ran into trouble. As before, the Czech political elite was generally in favor of more centralized solutions than the Slovaks. The difference was that the Czech majority , rea li zing that a unitary state was not an option , now favored a " function al federation," while the majority of the Slovak political elite increas ing ly leaned toward s confederal rather than federal so lutions. 13 A temporary settl e me nt was reached in the Competency Law 12 Milan Sutovec. Semi6za aka politikum alebo ·'pomlckova vojna." (Bra ti slava: Kalli gram , I 999). 299 ff. 13 Opinion polls cons istently showed th at th e public in the Czech Republic preferred a unitary state. with a federation as the second most popular option. while a confederation never exceeded 6 percent support. By con trast, a confedera ti on or a federation was th e preferred state form in Slovakia. See table 12.3. in Sharon L. Wolchik, ''The Politi cs of Transition and the Break-up of Czechos lovakia," in Jiff Musil. ed. , op.cit.. 235. SLOVAKIA 60 of December 1990, whi c h more-or-less reestabli shed the co mpetency di vision of the 1968 Constitutio n. However, whil e thi s was abo ut as fa r as the Czechs we re w illing to go , the S lova ks looked at the Co mpete ncy Law merely as a po int of departure fo r further negoti ati ons. The core of the confli ct was the all ocati on of compe te nce and power in two specific areas: Eco nomi c po li cy a nd intern ati ona l re lations. The majority of the S lovak elite pressed fo r S lovak " visibility" in intern ati ona l rel ati ons, and wanted to all ocate more power in economi c matte rs to the Republics . The Czec h side wanted the federa l leve l to be stron g e nough to carry o ut the econo mi c reform s necessar y fo r th e tra ns iti o n to a market econo my, and wanted th e state internati onall y to speak with one vo ice . The negoti atio ns fa il ed to produce an acceptabl e co mpromi se befo re the 1992 elections, 14 and since the vic torious Czec h and Sl ovak parti es di sag reed fund ame nta ll y o n the iss ues of econo mic reform and state fo rm , they dec ided to di vide the state. It turn ed out th at both sides prefe rred a break-up rathe r than accepting the favo red state form of the othe r party, des pite the fac t that before the e lec ti ons, the future ex iste nce of Czec hos lovak ia was still ta ke n fo r granted . The onl y party th at advocated secess io n w as the Sl ova k Nationa l Party. 2. The Composition and Stability of the Elite Constellations In the inter- war peri od, the e lite conste ll atio ns fac in g eac h other were c lear-cut and quite stable. A clear majority of the Czec hos lovak parties was ce ntra li st a nd in fa vor of Czechoslo vaki sm. Thi s camp co mpri sed the e ntire Czech political e lite and a substanti al pa rt of the Slovak political e lite. Inte restingly, the major ce ntrali st pl ayers in the interw ar clashes about autonomy in the Parli ame nt were Slovak s, not Czec hs, a nd like th e ir adversaries, they were posin g as the c ha mpi ons of Slovak inte rests/the Slovak nati on. The two most influe nti al 14 T he negoti ators did reach a co mpromi se in the spring of 1992, but th is was turned down by th e pres idium of th e Slovak Nati onal Counci l. See Rychl fk , Roz pad. 2 18- 20. SLOVAKIA 61 Slovak centrali sts were the Agrarian Mi Ian Hodza ( 1878- I 944) and the Social Democrat I van Derer ( 1884- 1973). They represented their parties in the Parli ament during the entire First Republi c and betwee n th em, the two men served as mini sters for 23 yea rs. Milan Hodza even became the first Slovak Prime Mini ster in 1935. Apart from these two, the A grarian Anton Stefanek ( I 877-1964) and the Czechoslovak National Socialist Igor Hrusovsky ( 1872- 1937), both seasoned parli amentari ans, played an espec iall y acti ve role in th e debates. By co ntrast, two Slovak parti es represented th e autonomist ca mp. arguing that the Slovaks were a nation of their own and, therefore, entitl ed to autonomy. 15 The larges t autonomi st party was the Slovak Peopl e's Party . Its co-founder and chairman Andrej Hlinka ( 1864- 1938), whose name was added to the party's title in 1925, was a dominatin g fi gure in the stru gg le for Slovak autonomy until hi s death in August of 1938. 16 Ferdinand (Ferdi s) Juriga ( 1878-1950) had been the onl y Slovak deputy in th e Hungari an Parli ament of 19 14 and he continued to defend Slovak autonomy in the Parliament also of the First Republi c. Jozef Ti so ( 1887- 1947) played an important role in the 1930s, as did editor-in-chief of Slovak, Karol Sidor ( 1901 - 53). The Slovak Nati onal Party never had more than one deputy - its chairman M artin Razus ( 1888- 1937) - and pl ayed a more peripheral role. After the Velvet Revolution, elite constellations were more vo latile. The Slovak political elite was from the outset divided on the quest ion of state form, the preferred so lution s ranging from mildl y federa li st to a loose confederat ion. From 1991 the Slovak National Party started to advocate independence, but already in 1990 th e chairman of the Christian Democratic Movement, Jan Carnogursky, argued th at Slovakia should enter the European Community as an in- " In addition. some of th e national minority parties and the Communists su pported autonomy. but for other reasons. '" See Felak. Ac Che Price of Che Republic. 1994: A lena Bartl ova. A ndrej Hlinka. ( Bratislava: Obzor. 1991 ). SLOVAKIA 62 de pende nt state. Hi s party was earl y in favo r of a confederal so luti on, but o nl y as a te mporary so luti on, until both Re publi cs joined the European Community. 17 Public Aga inst Vi o le nce was be ing pulled in o ppos ite direc ti o ns, and whe n the c irc le around Vl adimfr Mec ia r broke o ut and fo rmed the Moveme nt fo r a De mocrati c Slovaki a in 1991 , the liberal , federa li st oriented w in g re ma ined , whil e the national populi sts w ith confedera l lea nings fo ll owed Mec iar. In the 1992 e lecti on Mec iar' s Move me nt fo r a De mocrati c S lovaki a appeared as the main champion of Slovak interests. The Czec h politica l e lite was fro m the o utset more indiffe rent to the nati onal questi on. Wh ile Public Aga inst Vi o le nce had the nati onal questi o n as o ne of its top pri o riti es , it was co mpl ete ly absent fro m the agenda of C ivic Forum in the first e lecti o n. In stead , " bac k to Eu ro pe" and e limination of communi sm we re the top pri oriti es. 18 Espec iall y after the " ma nagers" aro und Vac lav Kl aus won over the di ss ide nt w in g of C ivic Forum in 199 1, the leadin g Czec h po liti ca l e lite united in favo r of a stro ng fe derati o n. In th e 1992 e lec ti o n Kl aus' C ivic De mocratic Party ca me o ut as the main c hampi on of a federa l so luti on. The Move me nt fo r a De mocrati c S lovaki a and the C ivi c De mocrati c Party won the e lecti ons in th e ir respective Re publics, whil e parti es th at took a more mode rate stand on the questi on of state fo rm lost. Once the victors w ith Vac lav Kl aus and Vl adimfr Mec iar at the he lm had dec ided to di vide the state, fo rmer ene mi es beca me alli es, and the e lite conste ll ati ons changed according ly. The fo rme r oppone nts in the negoti ati o ns on state fo rm now united in favo r of a break-up , aga inst a motl ey c rew of oppos ition parti es, co mpri sing Czec h and Slovak Communi st and Soc ial De mocrati c parties, as we ll as Miros lav Slade k 's ultra- nati ona li st Republican Party of C zec hoslo vaki a. 17 Stein , Czecho/Slovakia. 67 . 93-4. '~Oskar Krejci. Kniha o volbich. (Prag ue: Victori a Pu bli sh ing. 1994). 2 10- 11. SLOVAKIA 63 3. The Arguments in Favor of Autonomy If we turn to the actual arg ume nts, the main impress ion is that there were e lements of continuity as well as c ha nge when we go from the interwar period to the post-Communist period. On the one hand, the argume nts in favor of autonomy were located within the sa me nat io nalist di sco urse in both periods . On the other hand , the composition of the arg uments in favor of autonomy changed, and so did the contents of the autonomy demands, as we have seen. In the interwar period, the principle of national se lf-determination was used as an arg ument in favor of an asymmetric federation; after 1989 it was first used as an argument in favor of confederal so lutions, and then in favor of an independent Slovak state. Arguments in Favor of Autonomy During the First Republic In the inter-war period , the cornerstone of the a utonomists was the existence of an individual and sovereign Slovak nation , and the core message was that this Slovak nation was entitl ed to auto nomy. The premi se linkin g national identity to the matter of state form was the principle of national se lf-determination, understood as the ri ght of cu ltu ra ll y distinct nation s to se lf-governance. 19 In the a utonomist scheme, the Slovak nation had used thi s right to divorce the Magyars and join the Czec hs in a Czech and Slovak nation-state. Moreove r, as a free a nd equa l nation , the S lovaks were entit led to manage the ir own affairs and, therefore , to autonomo us political institutions. In practice, autonomy demands were always made on be half of Slovakia, yet for the a utonomists this amo unted to the same , s ince they regarded Slovakia as the homeland of the Slovaks, despite its substantial national minoriti es. 19 The principle of national self-determination can be interpreted in at least two other ways: as the right of the people to choose their government without coercion , i.e. popular sovereig nty - or as th e right of independent states to manage their affa irs without foreign intervention. See e.g. 0yvind 0sterud, Nasjonenes selvbestemmel- sesrett. (Oslo: Un iversitetsforlaget. 1984). 150 ff. 64 SLOVAKIA The Slovak a uto nomi sts argued a lon g three ma in lin es. First, they argued that Slovakia was discriminated aga in st in vario us ways, and that autono my was necessary to a ll eviate S lovakia's ill s. Second , they arg ued that Slovakia was entit led to auto no my by virtu e of various " co ntrac ts" (e.g. th e Pittsburgh Agreement). Finally, they argued that the Slovaks had the right to auto nom y s impl y because they were a natio n (the classical nation ali st arg umen t). The point of departure for the deprivation mguments was that the Slovaks were an indi vid ua l nati o n wit h separate nationa l interests, and that these national interests were not properly loo ked after under th e present centrali zed state form. Here S lovak grievances were turned into reasons for autonomy, and autonomy was the so lution to everythin g. Most of the gr ieva nce arguments for auton o my were associated with the use of Slovak as the offic ial lang uage in Slovakia and w ith (w hite-co llar) jobs fo r the Slovak inte lli gentsia. The sig na l words were " Slovak bread" . For in sta nce, before th e 1929 e lec ti on, the a utonomi st news paper Slovak argued that " a uto nomy does no t only mean political ri g hts, but a lso bread. When we get our own administration , our ow n asse mbly and our own courts, only Slovaks will be e mpl oyed there. [ ... ] The auton o mo us adm ini strati o n of the Slova k home land will compel the e mployers first a nd foremost to gran t the Slovaks work and bread." 20 Accord in g to the contract oriented lin e of arg um e nts , Slovakia had the right to autonomy by virtue of certai n (a ll eged ly) binding doc um e nts or "co ntracts". The point of departure was again that the Slovaks were an indi vidu a l and sovere ig n natio n, and th at S lovakia was the ho me la nd of the Slovaks. The argume nt was that Slovakia had been promised autono my, a nd th at thi s promise was lega ll y bindin g. However, fo r a co ntract to be va lid , it must be stipul ated th at the sig natori es had the right to s ig n agreements on behalf of those they were said to represent - in this case th e Czec h and Slovak nati o ns. 20 Slovak no. 240, 22 October I929. p. 3. SLOVAKIA 65 Several of the many declarations and agreements that were formulated during World War I were used as arguments for (or against) autonomy . However, two documents stand out: The Pittsburgh Agreement of May 30th , 1918, and the Martin Declaration of October 30th , 1918. The former was a clear asset, while the latter soon became a liability (see next subsection). The Martin Declaration had been adopted at an as sembly of all Slovak political parties in Turciansky Svaty Martin. For the autonomists , the significance of the Martin Declaration was that through this act, the Slovaks had voluntarily joined the Czechs as equal s in one state, and they had therefore an equally large part in its founding as the Czechs. Moreover, as an equal nation which had entered the state voluntarily, the Slovaks had the right to autonomy. In effect, the autonomi sts gave the Martin declaration state-forming significance. This was also reflected in repeated attempts to turn October 30th into a national holiday. Compared to the other wartime declarations , however, the Pittsburgh Agreement had some obvious advantages. First and foremost , it had greater symbolic potential as an official agreement binding the government, because Czechoslovakia's first president and co-founder Tomas G. Masaryk had signed it, along with Czech and Slovak emigre leaders in the United States. 2 1 Second, the Agreement contained the most important autonomy demands. From the moment the Pittsburgh Agreement became known in Slovakia in the spring of 1919, it was invoked in every single debate where autonomy was " M asaryk was not Pres ident at th e tim e, of course, but on the initi ati ve of th e Slov ak L eague he signed a calliographed version of the Ag ree ment on November 14th. 19 I 8, the very same day he was elected Pres ident of the Republic. Besides. on October 3 1st. 19 18, th e Czec hoslov ak Nation al Committee had declared as bindin g all ac ti ons by members of the pro visional government abroad (including M asaryk). It may be argued that if the decl arati on of the establi shment of th e Czechos lovak state was valid. then the authori zation of Masaryk 's ac ti ons was valid as we ll. In practice, th e va lidity of th e Pittsburgh Agreement was a political , not a lega l matter. For the tex t of the statement , see Benes (op. cit. . 1929). 490. See also M. M ark Stolarik (op. cit. , 1968), 49. SLOVAKIA 66 mentioned. At first glance, this Agreement would seem to be a stable element in the argumentation for Slovak autonomy. However, the usage varied. Early in the period, the autonomists would present the Pittsburgh Agreement as a Magna Charta granting the Slovaks the right to autonomy. Later, it became more common to present it as a binding contract. The concept of a Magna Charta brings to mind a sovereign granting hi s subjects certain rights and privileges, and it was Masaryk who (implicitly) had this role. When the Pittsburgh Agreement was presented as a contract, the contracting partners were at first the Czech and Slovak nation s. However, especially after it became public knowledge in 1922 that President Masaryk had actually drafted it, he was increasingly presented as a contracting partner. This shift can also be seen as an answer to the centralist claim that the American Czechs and Slovaks were not the leg itimate representatives of their co-nationals at home. However, the third and most common use, especially in the 1930s, was the Pittsburgh Agreement as "our program" or as an expression of the will of the Slovak nation (not just a small faction, but of all Slovaks). The point of departure was that the Slovaks were an individual nation with a natural right to self-determination, and therefore to autonomy if it so wishes. This usage was associated with the third , classical nationalist line of argument, which rested on three premises: I. that the Slovaks were an individual nation ; 2. that nation s had the right to self-determination; and 3. that the Slovak autonomists represented the true will of the Slovak nation - which was autonomy. The second premise was often implicit, while a lot of effort was put into defending Slovak individuality and the right to speak on the Slovaks ' behalf. The autonomists employed two main strategies to substantiate their claim. One strategy was to argue from the majority, which meant resorting to "advanced math". Election results here came in handy. In a parliamentary debate in 1933, Jozef Tiso argued that as a majority, the autonomists had the right to speak on behalf of the SLOVAKIA 67 Slovak nation. Upon subtracting the stipulated Czech and Magyar votes from the votes cast for the centralist parties in Slovakia, he ended up with 402,320 votes for the centralist parties and 427,443 votes for the Slovak People ' s Party and the Slovak National Party put together. 22 A second strategy was personal attacks (argumentum ad homi- nem), which were often used to defend the existence of a Slovak nation as well as the claim for autonomy. The autonomists would then accuse Slovak deputies belonging to the Czechoslovak parties of being " renegades," " Phari sees," "sodomites" and "careerists ," and, therefore, not worthy of representing the Slovak nation. In his rather biblical language, the chairman of the Slovak People ' s Party, Andrej Hlinka, argued in 1927 that "S lovakia is ours, only we are Slovaks, you sold out the Slovak language for a bowl of Czechoslovak lentils eight years ago. " 23 Continuity and change after 1989 After 1989, the core message was still that the Slovaks were entitled to national se lf-determination "q ua nation," although the contents of this self-determination had changed from an asymmetric federation to confederate so lutions or even independence. The most important changes compared to the interwar period were, first , that there was no longer any need to defend the existence of an individual Slovak nation , since that was taken for granted, and second, a change in th e composition of the arguments. Deprivation arguments and contract oriented arguments were nearly absent, while classical nationalist arguments now dominated , and the principle of national se lf-determination was invoked more explicitly. 22 30 I. schuze poslanecke snemov ny N.S .R.C. dne 29 . li stopadu 1933. in Tesnopi- secke zpravy o scht1zfch poslanecke snemovny Narodnfho shromaidenf republiky ceskoslovenske. Ill. volebnf obdobf. (Prague. 1929- 35), 47- 50. 23 Hlinka, Slovak no. 86, 16 April , I 927 , p. I. "Sodomi tes•· referred to Social Demo- crats. as a play on wo rd s. SLOVAKIA 68 There are, of co urse, some differe nces between the various debates, which is perha ps not surpri sin g, sin ce the topics of the debates a lso differed. The principle of nati ona l se lf-determi nati o n was most ex plicitly vo iced in the 1992 debates in the federa l parliament (th e two debates on the break- up of Czec hos lovak ia), a nd in the Slovak National Council (the de bates on the S lovak Declaration of Sovere ig nty and the Slovak Constitution ). Conve rse ly. thi s principle was more impli c it in the 1990 " hyphen debate". The " hyphe n debate" is perhaps the most atyp ica l, in terms of topic ("Czecho-Slo vak Republic" with a hyphen versus "Czechos lovak Federal Republic") as we ll as types of arg ume nt. First, thi s is rea ll y the o nl y debate where identity pl ayed any major part. Ide ntity arg uments appeared in two forms: On the one hand , it was arg ued that for the S lovaks, to spe ll the word Czecho-Slovak w ithout a hyphe n was tantamo unt to accepting the abe rrati o n of Czec hos lova ki sm. On the o ther hand , it was arg ued that th e hyphe n ex pressed Slovak nati o na l indi vidu a lity and the equa l standing of the Czech and Slovak nati o ns in the federati o n. Second, the hyphe n debate is the only debate where the Pittsburg h Agreement was me ntion ed more than o nce. However, of th e six speake rs referrin g to it, o ne appea led to the Agreement to substantiate the c laim for a hyph e n in the "Czecho-Slovak" Rep ubli c. (thi s is how the word was spelled in the orig ina l), while the rest bas ically referred to it as an express io n of the eq ual status of the two natio ns e ntering the state , or as a part of the hi storical narrative lead ing up to the federalization. Nobody referred to it as a contrac t, and the Czech National Socialist Bi anka Hykova even quoted Masaryk to the effect that it was o nl y a n agreement between American Czechs and Slovaks. 2-1 Contract oriented arguments thus disappeared a ltogeth er, and refere nces to the Pittsburg h Agreeme nt and/or the Martin Dec lara20 See Zprava o 26. spolecne sc hi'1zi snemovny lidu a snemovny narodu. 29.3. 1990. in Federalnf shromaidenf Ceskoslovenske socialisticke republiky V. vo lebnf obdobf. ( 1986-90), 25 1. 253 , 256, 270, 304. SLOVAKIA 69 tion were rare. A utonomy was ex plicitly mentioned in the contex t of the Pittsburgh Ag reement onl y once, in the second debate abou t th e brea k-up of th e state. According to I va n Simko from the Chri stian Democratic Movement, Slovak organization s in the U nited States had made an agreement wi th Masaryk "as a leading personality of Czech po litica l li fe" to fo rm a shared state where Sl ovaki a was to have an autonomous position. Thi s agreement was unfortun ately not honored , he argued. 25 Depri vation arg uments were al so rare . The phrase " Slovak bread" occurred onl y once: In the first debate on the break -up of the state in September 1992, Michal Ko vac from the Mo ve ment for a Democratic Slovaki a ( later to beco me Slovaki a's first pres ident) argued that in a normally functioning federation , it wo uld not be possible for the standard of li ving in Slovaki a to drop as much as it had in onl y two yea rs. In another four years , he argued, " Would we not be in the hi storica l situation w here we have already been, that the Slovak nation would have to go abroad for bread, because there would not be bread for people in Slovakia? And we wou ld be as weakened as we once were under dear father Masaryk." 26 However, in the interw ar period " Slovak bread" was usuall y tantamount to w hite-collar jobs for the yo ung Slovak intelli gentsia in Slovaki a, whi le here th e lack of " bread " obvious ly refers to general unemployment. The probl em was real enough - in the earl y 1990s the unemployment ra te in Slovak ia was three or four times the Czech average. 27 25 Zprava o 5. spo lecne schu zi snemovny lidu a snemo vny narodu. 18.11 . 1992 . 25 .1 1.1 992. in Federi ln f shromiidenf Ceske a S/ovenske Federaci vnf republiky. V il. vo lebnf obdobf. ( 1992). 7 17. 2 '' Zprava o 4. spo lec ne sc huzi snemo vny lidu a snemov ny narodu 29.9. 1992. in Fe- denilni shro m;ii deni Ceske a S/ovenske Federaci vnf republiky. V II. vo lebnf obdobf, ( 1992). 60 I. 27 11. 8 percent in Slovaki a vers us 4. 1 percent in the Czec h Republic in 199 1: 10.3 percent versus 2.6 percent in 1992. Transition reporc I 996. (L ondon. The European Bank fo r Reconstructi on and Deve lopment. I 996). However. th e difference was even larger in 1993. the first yea r of independence. SLOVAKIA 70 Finall y, compared to the interwar period , classica l nationalist ar g uments were much more co mmon , and the principle of nation al self-determination was invoked more ex plicitly. In the debate about the allocation of competence between the Republics and the Federation it was used as an argument in favor of returnin g to the original 1968 Constitution. 28 Y et, the most co mmon use of th e principle of national self-determination was as an argument in favor of establi shing an independent Slovak state or dividin g Czechoslovakia. There are, however, some interestin g nation al differences between actors in how they used it. Slovak deputies speaking in favor of Slovak independence invoked the principle of national self-determination on behalf of the Slovak nation . They regarded it as an inalienable, natural ri ght, and in one instance, even as a God-given ri ght. 29 An independent Slovak state was presented as the fulfillment of IO00 years of strugg le for Slovak individuality and sovereignty , and as the result of a natural , hi storical process of national emancipation . In the words of HZDS deputy chairman Au gustfn Marian Huska , " the Constitution is the fulfillm ent and lega l enac tment of th e ri ght to se lf-determination . ( ... )To the Slovak s, whose consciousness was molded by more than a thou sand years under foreign rule , the feeling of dependence had become second nature. Slowly, but persistently they formed an awareness of the need for self-determination , the need to search for, find , 28 Zprava o 9. spolecne schi°1zi snemovny lidu a snernovn y narodu. 11 .- 12. 12. 1990. in Federalnf shromaidenf CSFR. ( 1990-1992) . < ww,~ .p,p.c:dckni h/ I 990fs/sbn/-stcn -prot/009,c: hu t./s009077. html/ d> [2 Febru ary, 2004]. See also the debate on th e Slovak declaration of so vereignty. Stenograficka sprava o 3. sch6dzi Slovenskej narodnej rndy konanej 17. j ul a 1992. < www .nr,r.sk/i ndexarch.a,p> ]4 Febru ary. 2004 J. 29 Sedovic (S lovak National Part y), Zprava o 5. spol ec ne schu zi SL a SN , 18. 11 . 1992. in Federalnf shro,mii denf Ceske a Slovenske Federati vnf republiky. VII. volebnf obdobf. ( 1992). 788. 71 SLOVAKIA ex press. a nd at las t rea li ze sovere ig nty." 30 S lova ki a was in o th e r word s pi ctured as a nati on-state a nd the S lova ks as the state-forming nati o n. Howeve r, in the de bates in the Sl ovak Nation a l Counc il , Slovak deputi es, inc ludin g Prime Mini ster Vl adim fr Mec iar, at the same tim e pro mi sed to res pec t the eq ua l rig hts of a ll c iti ze ns, nati o na l minorities and ethni c groups. De puti es re presentin g th e Magyar mino rity in the S lovak Nationa l Counc il recog ni zed o r eve n s uppo rted the S lovak ri g ht to selfde te rmin ati o n, but argued that the princ ipl e sho uld a lso appl y to the nati o na l mino riti es. Thi s was a n arg ume nt in favo r of auto no my. At the same time, Magyar deputi es arg ued th at S lovaki a sho uld not be presented as a nati o n- state in the Co nstituti o n, bec au se it was not nation all y ho moge neous. Founding the state o n the nati o na l princ ipl e meant turnin g the minoriti es into second-c lass c iti zens, they argued . Czec h de puti es co nsiste ntly presented the break-up of Czec hoslovaki a as a matte r of se lf- determinati o n fo r the Slovak nati o n. The 1992 e lecti o n. the Slovak Dec larati o n of Sovere ig nty, and the Slovak Constituti o n were take n as proof th at the S lovak natio n did wa nt inde pende nce. In the words of Prime Mini ste r Vacl av Kl aus of the Czec h Re publi c: "The S lova k nati o n used the o ppo rtunity to co mpl e te its nati o na l e manc ipati o n by fo undin g its own state. Thi s is a rea lity we mu st res pect. " 3 1 T he arg ume nt th at the Czec hs had no ri ght to deny th e S lovak natio n its rig ht to se lf-de termin ati o n was a lso used aga in st ho ld in g a referend um in the Czech Republi c; Czec h c itizens could no t dec ide whet her the S lovaks sho uld beco me a statefo rming natio n o r no t. Interestin g ly, the princi pl e of nati o na l se lf-determin ati o n was not even o nce in voked o n be ha lf of the Czec h na- -'" For Huska ·s statement and the debate on the Const itut ion. see Stenograficka sprava o 5. sch6dzi S lovenskej mirodnej rady kona nej 31. augusta a I . septembra 1992. <www.nr,r. ., k/indexarch.a,p> 14 February . 20041. -' 1 K laus in th e debate on th e Czech Constitution . Ceskii narodnf rada I 992- 1992. Stenoprotokoly. I 0. schuze. 16.- 17. 12. 1992. <www.psp.cz/cknih/ I 992cnr/,tenprot/O I 0schuzi> 13 February. 2004J. SLOVAKIA 72 tion .32 The reason is obvious: The Czechs did not regard the establi shme nt of the Czec h Republic as a state-formin g process, but as a restoration of Czech statehood , which expl icitly included Czechoslovak state tradition s. But the n the Czechs a lways rega rded Czechoslovakia as their state. Apart from the princ ipl e of national se lf-determination , the main lin e of argument in favor of di ssolution may be termed reali st. It was argued that the federation did not work or that it was a lread y dead, that it was too late to save the state, and now the important thing was to e nd the state in a peaceful , orderly, cultivated , adult and leg itimate fashion , and to ensure good ne ighborl y relation s be twee n the future inde pe nde nt states. 4. The Centralist Arguments Against Autonomy If we turn to the centra li st side, di sco ntinuity 1s th e word that first co mes to mind. In the inte rwar period , the centrali st arg ume nts against a utonomy were located within a nation a li st di sco urse, and mirrored the autonomist arguments to a large ex tent , the difference be ing th at the centralists based the ir arg uments on an a lte rn ative national id eo logy - Czec hos lovakism . After 1989 , the "ce ntra li st" arg um e nts changed profoundly . Czechos lov akism had been abandoned already in 1945 , and the unitary state form in 1968. The "centrali sts" afte r 1989 were , the refore, centra li sts on ly re lative to those advocating confederate so luti ons, a nd in the las t instance, inde pe ndence for Slovakia. " The principle of national se l f-de term ination was invoked on behalf of the .. Moravian nati on" ( 1.5 million . accord ing to the 199 1 census). but then as an argument in favor of Moravi an autonomy in a Czecho-Morav ian federation . See espec ially the speec hes of deputies Jan Jeg la and Jiff Bfl y (both from the Moravi an movement H SD-SMS) . Ceska narodnf rada 1992- 1992 . Stenoprotokoly. 10. sc huze , 16.17. 12. 1992. < www.psp.cz/eknih/ 1992<.:nr/~tenprot/0 I 0schuz/> 13 Febru ary , 2004J. SLOVAKIA 73 Centralist Arguments during the First Republic ln the inter-war period, the co rnerstone of the ce ntra li st argumentati on was that the Czechs and Slovak s were one Czechoslovak nati on (a lbe it w ith two tri bes), and the core message was th at a ce ntra li zed state form was necessary to preserve nati onal unity and th e integrity of th e state. T he premi se linking nati onal identity to state fo rm was the principl e of nati onal se l f-determin ati on. According to the centrali sts, the Czechos lovak nati on had used its ri ght to self-determ ination to re uni te in a Czechos lovak nati on-state, and thi s unity had to be preserved.·13 A uto nomy for Slovak ia was seen as a th reat to Czechos lovak nationa l unity as we ll as state in tegrity , first because it wo uld dri ve th e two tribes of the Czechos lovak nati on apart, and second , beca use granting Slovaki a autonomy wo ul d be tantamoun t to recogni zing th e Slovak s as a separate nati on, w hich would j eopardi ze the state's ra ison d'etre. Th e centra lists co untered the depri vati on arguments of the autonomi sts in two ways . On the one hand, they denied that the Slovak s were d iscrimin ated agai nst, and on the other hand , they rejec ted autonomy as a suitabl e remedy to Slovaki a's alleged ill s. What was needed to help Slovak ia was not autonomy, but more unity, especiall y economica ll y, the ce ntra li sts argued. Thi s was entirely in line w ith thei r overall "strength th ro ugh unity" message. However, their main artill ery was aimed at the contract-oriented arguments, and espec iall y the Pi tts burgh Agreement. T he main ar guments were: I . T he A meri ca n Czechs and Slovaks were not leg itimate represe ntati ves of th eir co-n ati onals at home, and had no ri ght to dec ide on their behal f; 2. The Pittsburg h Agreement was one of many, and thus had a certain hi stori ca l va lue; but in order to be va lid, it wo uld need the co nse nt of Czechs and Slovak s at home; and 3. Leg itimate Slovak represe ntati ves had conse nted to Czec hos lovak ·'-' There was no big difference between the Slovak autonomists and the Czechoslovak cen tralists in terms of the co ntents of national identity. In both cases . national identi ty was defined in terms of culture. language and ancestry. See Bakke (op.c it. , 1999). especia ll y Chapter I 0. fo r documentati on. SLOVAKIA 74 national and state unity in the Constitu ti on of 1920, as we ll as at assem bli es before and after Pittsburg h. The first arg ume nt was especia ll y damag in g, since it went to the core of a ll the auto no mi st argument s assoc iated w ith the Pittsburg h Agreement , in va lid atin g the Agreement as a Magna C harta, as a binding contract, a nd as an express io n of the will of the Slovak natio n. It was more difficult for the ce ntra li sts to de nou nce the leg iti macy of Masaryk as a represe ntati ve of the Czec hos lovak state, but the Pres ident did his best to free him se lf and the government of any obligation. Masaryk c la imed that he had sig ned the Pittsburg h Agreement in order to "appease a sma ll Slovak fact io n that dreamed of God know s what sort of independence for Slovakia ," and di smi ssed it as "a loca l pac t between American Czechs and Slovaks, signed by American citizens." 34 There is littl e doubt that Masaryk drafted the Agreement in order to ap pease a part of the Slovak League, but o ne may wo nder why this was important to him if he rega rded the m mere ly as American citizens. I think Mark Stol arik has a va lid point when he arg ues that th e American Slovaks he lped legiti mi ze th e creation of Czechoslovakia in the abse nce of a mandate from the Slovaks in Hungary (caused by war censorship).·15 Masaryk a lso tried , un successfu ll y, to di sc redit the Pittsburg h Agreement through quasi- lega li sti c arguments. In a le tte r to Andrej Hlinka on October 12th, 1929, Masaryk c laimed that the Pittsburgh Agreement was "a forge ry," because at the time, the em ig re organization of the Slovaks present in Pitts burgh , "the [Slovak l Leag ue lega ll y did no t ex ist, and it was recognized by th e Government o nl y in 191 9." Hlinka evide ntl y wrote the Slovak Leag ue , w hi ch retorted th at the re was " no doubt a bout th e a uthe nti c ity of th e Pittsburg h Agreement," and A merica n lega l experts confirmed th at there was no " Tomas G. Masaryk, Svetova revoluce. (Prague: Orbis a Ci n. 1925). 262-263. 35 M . Mark Stolarik (op.c it.. 1968). 54. SLOVAKIA 75 difference between chartered a nd unc hartered orga ni zatio ns w ith respect to entering such ag ree me nts. 36 T o prop up the claim that leg itim ate Slovak representatives had co nsented to Czec hos lovak nat io na l and state unity after Pitts burg h, the ce ntrali sts preferred to use the Martin Dec lara ti o n of October 30th , 19 18, since thi s Dec laration had been unanimou sly accepted at a n asse mbl y of a ll Slovak po liti ca l part ies. In the beg innin g, they also used the 1920 Constitution for th e same purpose, but the trouble was th at th e Slovak Club in the Constitutional Assembly was coo pted , and arguably not representative of Slovak opinion. The ma in reason why the Martin Dec larati on was s uc h a n asset for the centrali sts, was the sente nce statin g th at the "S lovak nati o n is lingui sti ca ll y as we ll as culturally-historically pa rt of th e unitary Czec ho-Sl ovak nation ." Moreover, the asse mbl y at M artin had demanded nat io na l se lf-dete rmin ation on behalf of this "Czecho-S lovak nat io n," w hil e at the sa me time it was s il e nt on auton omy. The ce ntrali sts thu s used it as proof of Czechoslovak national and state unity, and as proof of the will of the Slovaks to e nter s uc h a unity. (Rumor in Slovakia had it th at the passage o n Czechoslovak national unity was not in the original text. This was , however, refuted in 1923 by Emil Stodola and Samue l Zoch, who had dra fted it).:17 Finally , the centrali sts counte red the c lass ic a l nati o na li st arg ume nt by rejecting the first premi se, that the Slovaks were an indi vidual nation, a nd the third premise. that the autonomi sts represented the tru e w ill of the Slovak nati o n. They presented the Slovaks as a tribe of th e Czechoslovak nati o n, and the Slovak me mbe rs o f the ce nt ral ist parties as the leg itim ate Slovak rep rese ntat ives. At the sa me time, they accepted the seco nd premi se, th at nati o ns had th e -' 6 The letter is pub lished as Document No. 30 in Joseph A. Mikus. Slova kia. A Poli- tica l and Constitutional Histo1y . (Brati slava: SAP. I 995) 209-2 10. The answer of th e Slovak League was published in Slo vak no. 194. 27 August. 1930. p. I. See also M. Mark Stolarik (op. cit.. 1968). 48-49. 52. -' 7 V ac lav Chaloupecky: Martinshi deklilrace 19- 20. II jejf politicke osudy (Prague. I 928). SLOVAKIA 76 right to sel f-determin ati on, but as we have seen, th ey in vo ked thi s prin ciple on behalf of th e Czec hos lovak nati on. A n I va n Derer specialty was the argument th at i f the Slovak s had been an indi vidual nati on, then they w ould have th e ri ght to secess ion, not onl y to autonomy. 38 B oth sides had their share of argumentati on errors. T he ce ntrali sts argued from maj ority (a rg umentum ad populum ) in the earl y 1920s, w hen they recei ved the maj ority of the Slovak votes, and personal attacks (arg umentum ad hominem) were ac tu all y mos t co mmon on th e centrali st side. probabl y because they fi tted so we ll into their genera l strength-th ro ugh-unity argument. T he Slovak autonomi sts were accused of being " M agyarones" or " new Slovaks," thereby impl y ing th at they had other loya lties or identities,'9 and of being paid by the Hungari an government. In both cases, the M agyars had the ro le of ·'bogeyman" . T hi s M agyarone ca rd was used to expl ain w hy the Slovaks had turned away from the Czechs in the past and in the present , and to co unter th e autonomi st c laim th at they we re the so le leg itimate representati ves of the Slovak nati on. I f the ce ntra li sts believed th at Sl ovak autonomy would j eopardi ze Czechos lovak nati onal unity and th e integrit y of th e state, it w as quite log ica l to acc use th e autonomi sts of being renegades (though probabl y not very smart). Profound Changes after 1989 After 1989 there was not much left of the former ce ntra list arguments, which is not surpri sing considering that Czec hos lovaki srn had 18 • I van Derer. Ceskos/ovensk;i otizkil. (Prague : Orbis. 1935). 88- 90. 39 Both labels we re commonly used about people of Slovak origi n who had become more or less ass imil ated during Hungari an rul e. but who turned back after 19 18. There we re some known M agyarones among the autonomists (chiefl y Franti sek Jehlicka and Yoj tech/ Bela Tuka). but the lead ing figures (Hlin ka. Juri ga) had defended Slovak interests also under Hungary. T he total number of people who ac tu ally switched nati onal affi l iatio n from Magyar to Slovak i n the firs t ten years of Czec hos lovaki a cannot be ascertained prec ise ly, but an educated guess is th at it was betwee n 250.000 and half a million. See Bak ke (op.cit. . 1999). 305- 307. SLOVAKIA 77 been abandoned and a unitary state form was no longer an option. Th e "centralists" still accepted the principle of nati onal self- determinati on; however, they now recogni zed the Czec hs and Slovaks as equal , state-forming nation s and Czechoslovakia as a Czech and Slova k nati on-state. As long as state form was sti 11 on the agenda, the players on the "centrali st" side were mostly Czechs, and the task was to defend a " function al federation ," which meant to preserve the powers of the federation v is-a-vi s the Republics. Once the break-up of the state appeared on the agenda after the 1992 electi ons, however , th e "centra li st" pl ayers were Czech and Slovak opposition parti es and the task was now to preserve a common Czechoslovak state. In the hy ph en debate, as we ll as in the co mpetenc y debate, Czech deputi es explicitly presented th e federal state form as an express ion of the equality of the Czechs and Slovaks. The main Czech arguments against th e hy phen were that it was divi sive, and that it was unacceptable to the Czech publi c. This probabl y had something to do with the fact that the Second Czecho-Slovak Republi c ( 1938-- 39) was spelled with a hyphen. It was also argued that it was grammati ca ll y probl emati c, th at the original spelling had been without a hyphen (an hi stori ca l argument), and th at the Morav ians would feel offended (an identity argument). The main arguments in favor of a strong federation were that it was necessary in order to carry out the economic reform s and to fulfill Czechos lovakia 's internati onal obligati ons. For the Czech elite, the power and competency of the Czech Republic was irrelevant. In fact, I have onl y found one example of a Czec h deputy in vok ing nat ional interests, and he arg ued th at a confederate solution would be contrary to Czech interests.-lO The Czech and Slovak opposition parties that defended Czec hoslovaki a's ex istence in the debates in the fall of 1992 were mostly Socialists and Communists, but also included the ultra-nati onali st ' 0 M andl er (Libera l Democra ti c Part y). Zprava o 9. spol ecne schuzi SL a S . 11.- 12.1 2. 1990, in Fedenilnf shromaf.difof Ceske a Slovenske Federativnf Republiky V I . vo lebnf obdobf ( 1990), <www.psp.c z/ci,.nih/ 19901\h,bnf!.,tcnprot/009,c:hud ,009()77. htrn ll d> [4 February 2004 1. 78 SLOVAKIA Republican s. Even thoug h this opposition accepted th e principle of national se lf-determination , they mostly interpreted it in the origina l meanin g - as popular sovereignty . The totally dominating line of argument was that the only leg itimate way of dividin g Czechoslovakia according to the principle of se lf-determination was to let the citizens decide by popular vote, a nd that it was unacceptable to divide the state against the will of the peopl e. In the first debate on dissolution , thi s was supported by a hi storical a nalogy. By accident, the debate was held 54 years after the fateful Munich agreement, and the opposition argued that a new Munich was about to happen: Again the fate of the Czechoslovak state wou ld be dec ided without asking the peop le. In the first debate the oppos ition parties advocated a refere ndum before the decision was made; in the second debate a ratifying pl ebisc ite. The motive was obvious ly to save the state, since all opin ion poll s showed that a clear majority was in favor. However, very few deputies ac tually defended the me rits of Czechoslovakia, although a handful of Czechs professed their love for the shared homeland , or invoked the legacy of the founding fathers , mostly T.G. Masary k and Milan Rasti slav Stefanik. Finally, a weak echo of the inte rwar debate could be heard in claims that separation would be a threat to the future existence of the Czech and Slovak nation s (reminiscent of the strength-through-unity argument), and in charges of treason (personal attac ks). Ne ither line of argument was very common. The claim that voting in favor of disso luti on was an act of treason was a preserve of the ultra-nationalist Republican Party of Czec hos lovakia. The debates a lso had their amusing sides, for in stance in the use of metaphors. The federation was alternately see n as a leaking ship, a train being pulled in opposite directions , and an old patient with a severe heart condit ion , whi le the establishment of the new states was compared to giving birth to twins! SLOVAKIA 79 5. Summary and Conclusion [n the inter-war period, Czechoslovakia was a unitary , centralized state, and autonomy was a matter of separate Slovak institutions. After 1989, Czechoslovakia was a sy mm etric federation of two nationa l Republic s. Separate Slovak inst itutions were, therefore, no longer an iss ue, and autonomy became a matter of allocating more deci s ion-makin g power to the Republic s. However, in both cases, there was a conflict over state form, and in both cases the content of that conflict was how centralized the state should be. As for the actors , the e lite constellations were most stable in the inte rw ar pe riod . However, as lon g as the conflict was about state form, the Czech political elite was in favor of the most centralized so lution , while the Slovak elite was divided . Once the break-up of Czechoslovakia was on the agenda, the re were Czech and Slovak parties on both si des. If we focus on the main arguments on either side, we can obse rve continuity as well as change. Durin g the First Republic , the arguments of both sides were located within a nationali st discourse, but they founded their argume ntation on alternative nation al ideologies. The centralists invoked the principle of national se lf-dete rmination on behalf of the "Czechoslovak nation", the autonomists on behalf of the Slovak nation . After the Velvet Revolution , the autonomist argume nts were still located within a nationali st di scourse, and when the victorious part ies in the 1992 elections dec ided to divide the state, the Czech si de simply adopted the Slovak arg uments. By contrast, the "centrali st" arguments in the debate on state form were mainly economic, while the arguments in the debate on the break-up of Czechoslovakia were procedural. The most strik in g feature of the autonomy di sco urse after 1989 is therefore the asy mmetry of the arguments on both sides. Let us now address th e question of how the arguments related to the principle of national se lf-determination : On the autonomist side, the core message was the sa me in both periods; that the Slovaks were e ntitl ed to autonomy or se lf-determination "qu a nation ." Howeve r, 80 SLOVAKIA the principle of natio na l se lf-d etermin a ti o n was in voked more ex plicitl y after the Velvet Revo lution . On the centra li st side, the principle was used as an argument against a utono my in the interwar period , and w ith a certain twist, against the break-up of Czechos lovakia in 1992 . In the latter case, se lf-de te rmin ation was understood as popul ar sovere ignty - i.e . as a democratic principle. It is also inte res tin g that after 1989, the principl e of nation a l se lfdetermination was consistently invoked on behalf of the Slovaks, not on behalf of the Czechs, other than in the context of Czechoslovakia as the nation- state of two individual , sovere ign nations. In conclusion , the continuity was strongest on the autonomist side , alth ough th e conte nts of nation al se lf-determination c hanged from autonom y to independence. On the "centrali st" side, most of the a mmunition aga inst Slovak autonomy was gone once the concept of a Czechoslovak nation was abandoned.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Autonomy Discourse in Parliamentary Debates during the First Czechoslovak Republic and after the Velvet Revolution Description An account of the resource Elisabeth Bakke Slovakia, Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005 pp. 52-80 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bakke, Elisabeth Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/fb2ab3a578d038d57e9b181c3c6076c1.pdf 32d484c7344930be58908110a965a896 PDF Text Text 81 SLOVAKIA From Bratr nas to At'jdou Slovakia, the Slovaks and Slovak Nationalism seen from Prague 1 Paa! Sigurd Hilde The Velvet Divorce between the Czech and Slovak parts of the Czech and Slovak Federal Repub lic (CSFR) was a political undertaking. All public opinion polls taken in the period 1990-1992 showed a clear majority in favour of a common state among both Slovaks and Czechs.2 The decision to divide the country came as a result of a compromise between two political parties - or more specifically, between two politicians: Vaclav Klaus of the (Czech) Civic Democratic Party and Vladimfr Meciar of the (Slovak) Movement for a Democratic Slovakia. While both Klaus and Meciar argued that they wanted to preserve the common state, their visions of such a Czech and Slovak state were so disparate that an agreement to differ was the only possibility. Most detailed studies of the break-up agree that if either of them , Meciar or Klaus, were to be identified as 'more guilty' in promoting the break-up, it would not be the Slovak nationali st Meci ar, but the Czech ' Thatcherite ' Klaus. 3 Ultimately, what sank the good ship Czechoslovakia was that the Czech captain, the ' A sli ghtly different version of thi s arti cle was originall y published in Norwegian in Nordisk @stforum, Yol . 15/2. 200 I , pp.5-16. 2 See. for example, Sharon Wolchik: 'The Pol itics of Ethnicity in Post-Communist Czechoslovakia', fast European Politics and Society, Vol. 8/ 1994. I , pp.153-188. 3 See, for example, Abby Innes: Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye. London. 200 I , particularly pp. 176-2 19. �SLOVAKIA 82 o ne that had a lw ays fo ught the hardest to keep it a fl oat, gave the order to sc uttle. The a im of thi s paper is to prov ide a n in sig ht into the deve lopme nt of the vi e ws on Slovaki a, Slovaks and Slova k nati o na li sm in th e Czec h Land s: fro m the ideas unde rl y in g the creati o n of Czech oslova ki a in 19 18 to those leading to the di sso luti o n of th at country in 1992. Natu ra ll y, the re is no c lear 'Czec h view ' of matters re lating to Sl ova ki a. Even if one di srega rds indi vidu a l o pini o ns and con ce ntrates o n what mi g ht be ca ll ed c ultura l ' heteroste reotypes' (v ie ws of the othe r), o ne w ill still find , fo r in stance, strong reg io na l differe nces w ithin the Czech La nd s. Any ana lys is of the ' Czec h view ' will thu s, eve n in the best case, be a probl e mati c prese ntati o n o f e lu sive collecti ve attitudes. Furthe rm ore, give n the absence of publi c opinio n surveys fo r most of the peri od studi ed , it is imposs ibl e to asce rta in ho w representati ve suc h attitudes were. The pi cture of Sl o va ki a presented here will be based to a large deg ree o n the attitudes ex pressed by leadin g po liti c ia ns, jo urn a li sts a nd o th er ' opini o n-fo rmers' in the Czec h Lands. For thi s reaso n the arti c le will present o pini o ns mo re typi ca l of Prague tha n. fo r in stance, Mo ra via, whe re co ntacts w ith Slovaks a nd Sl ovaki a we re more direct. Ho we ve r, as an earli er study , simil ar to thi s, argued , ' in Prag ue and in the C zec h Land s in genera l there are few opportunities to ga in a broad , direct impress ion of Slovaks, and the Czec h view of the Slovak is the refore the res ult of tra nsmitted , dedu ced impress io ns. ' 4 Whe n attitudes are acqui red ma inl y indirec tl y, opini o n-formers pl ay an important rol e. Gi ve n the limited scope of thi s arti c le, th e many theoreti cal and methodo log ica l pro bl e ms of suc h a stud y ca nno t be e xamined. Interestin g a nd impo rtant aspec ts, suc h as the inte raction between th e C zech and Slo va k he teroste reotypes o f eac h othe r, will al so have to be ig no red . Gi ven these limitati o ns, thi s articl e beco mes a mere in - 0 Petr Pi'fh oda : ' Slovac i ces kyma ocima'. Svedect vf, Vol. I 3/52. 1976, p.637. T he arti cle was publi shed under the pseudonym Jan Prfbram. �SLOVAKIA 83 troducti o n to the issue - an introducti o n th at mi g ht mo ti vate othe rs to make a c loser and broader examin atio n. Three aspects - three stages In her exce ll e nt stud y of the co nfli c t betwee n S lova ks a nd Czec hs, Caro l Ska lnik Leff a na lysed the develo pme nt of a se nse of mutu a l resentment betwee n the two gro ups. 5 A lmost througho ut Czechos lovak hi sto ry, there was persiste nt o ppos it ion fro m the Czec hdo min ated politi ca l leade rship , bo th de mocrati c a nd Co m m uni st, aga in st ful fi llin g pro mi ses of a uto no my for the Slova k part of the co untry. On the one hand , thi s fa ilure to live up to the pro m ises of 19 18, 1945 and , some argue, 1968, led to the deve lo pme nt of a sense of betraya l in Slovak ia. On the ot her ha nd, in creas ing numbers of Czec hs ex pressed a nger over what they perce ived as S lovak in gratitude - Slovak ungratefuln ess fo r a ll the ass istance Czec hs affo rded Slovaki a. Moreove r, the way Slovak po liti c ians, in the Czec h perception, ex pl o ited tim es of crisis in Czec hos lovaki a to pro mo te the ir narrow nati o na li st ai ms ca used pa rti c ul ar rese ntm ent. T h is deeprooted mutu al resentme nt was, Leff arg ued in 1987 , o ne of th e ma in reasons why the co nfl ic t betwee n the Czec hs a nd S lovaks wo ul d rema in an unresolved pro bl e m.6 She was soon to be proven right. If o ne examines the Czec h view of S lovaki a, Slovaks and S lovak natio na li sm mo re broad ly than Leff, it is poss ible to ide nti fy two furth er impo rta nt aspec ts of the Czec h view. The firs t mi g ht be des cribed as big-brothe rl y co nce rn . Ma ny Czec h inte ll ect ua ls, po li tic ians and other Slova ko ph iles we re ge nuine ly interes ted in and conce rned abo ut th e we lfare and fate of the S lova ks. T he ir e ngagement was we ll in tended and , espec ia ll y before 19 18 but a lso later, of g reat he lp to Slova k inte ll ec tu a l a nd c ultu ra l li fe. However, no t in fre qu e ntl y d id thi s bi g brothe rl y co nce rn deve lop into a peda nt ic a nd 5 Carol Skalni k Leff: Na tional Conf7ict in Czechoslovakia. Princeton . 1987 , particu larly pp. 148-177. 6 Ibid .. p. 282 . �84 SLOVAKI A arroga nt pate rn a li sm . Not surpri s in g ly, thi s was not favo urabl y received in Slovak ia. T he seco nd aspec t of the Czec h view of S lova ki a a nd the S lovaks is best described as a lac k of aware ness. Average know ledge of po liti ca l a nd eco no mi c conditi o ns in S lova ki a a nd S lova k c ul ture was never ex tensive in the Czech Lands. Partic ul arl y impo rtant was th e w id espread ig norance of the c ultu ra l, soc ia l and es pec iall y re li g iou s diffe re nces betwee n th e average Czec h and Slovak. Hi sto ri ca ll y, thi s un aware ness was to a large degree a res ult of th e qui ck and re lati ve ly pa inl ess acce ptance by the Czec hs of a Czechos lovak ide ntity and the offic ia l ideo logy of the ex iste nce of a Czec hos lovak nati o n. Thi s lack of kn o wl edge often led to in sensiti vity to wards Slovak di stin cti ve ness. Czech po liti c ia ns thu s occas io na ll y made po litica l dec isio ns that suited co nditio ns in the Czec h La nds w itho ut proper concern fo r the di ffe rent impac t the ir po lic ies mi g ht have on Slovaki a. C learl y, th ere is no c lear-c ut di stinc ti o n betwee n the three analytica l aspects of the Czec h view of Slovaks and Slovak nationa li sm. A ll three were present to a greate r o r lesser ex tent th rougho ut the hi story of co ntacts between the two gro ups, and they overl ap. To a certa in degree, however, th ey re prese nt stages throu g h whi c h ma in strea m o pini o n in th e Czec h La nd s went as time progressed . Bi gbrothe rl y co ncern was c learly the most important facet in th e pre19 18 pe ri od and in the ear ly years of the First Repu bli c. The inte rwar pe ri od is most stro ng ly marked by the Prague leadership ' s ig norance of the parti c ul ar soc ia l, econo mi c and re li g io us conditi o ns in Slovak ia. After the dra mati c eve nts in 1938 and 1939, wi th the Mu ni c h Acco rd, S lova k a uto no my a nd la te r ' ind e pe nde nce ' durin g Wo rl d W ar II , Czec h rese ntme nt towards the Slovaks, a nd espec iall y S lovak nat io na li sm, beco mes in creas in g ly impo rta nt. Fi fty years later, thi s animos ity was to dec ide the fa te of the co mm on Czec h and Sl ovak state. �SLOVAKIA 85 Big Brother In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the overarching aim of Czech political parties was to force Vienna to acce pt increased autonomy for ' the hi storic lands ' (basically today 's Czech Republic) within the Habsburg Monarchy. The idea of a wider Slav cooperation within the Empire, particularly with th e Slovaks, had ga in ed stre ngth among Czech intell ec tual s from about the 1830s. However, after the success of Hung aria n nat ion ali sm in th e 1867 Ausgleich, Czech leaders became concerned not to a ntagoni se their potential allies in Budapest. The result was that 'Czec h politicians, thou gh sy mpathetic toward [the Slovaks], were re luctant to inte rfere on the ir behalf in Hungary, for this would constitute a violation of Hungary 's state rights and mi ght jeo pardize the Czech program that was based on Bohemia's hi storic state ri ghts. ' 7 The lack of broader politica l cooperation did not preve nt an increasing activism in favour of the c ulturall y oppressed Slovaks, especially among Czech intellectua ls. Whil e Czech culture and society , and Czech nationalism, deve loped rapidly in line with the rapid social and economic deve lopm e nts in the re lativel y liberal Austrian part of the Monarch y, the s itu ation for Slovak culture a nd nationali sm was much more difficult. Particularly after 1867, the Hun garian authoriti es led a heavy-handed assimilation policy (Magyarisation) towards the minorities in Hungary . Many Czech intellectuals expressed a deep sy mpathy for the fate of what they saw as their Slovak brethren in Hun gary and the Slovak national dema nd s. 8 Especially 7 Victor S. Mamatey: 'The Estab li shment of the Republic'. in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomfr Luza (eds.): A History or the Czechosl ovak Republic: 19 18- 1948. Princeton . 1973 , pp. 3-38 (9). 8 Under th e leadership of L'.udovit Stur. Jozef Miloslav Hurban and Michal Miloslav Hodza, a Slovak National Council , formed in Vienna on 16 September I 848 , gave Slovak nationalism its first clear political expression in form of the declaration De mands or the Slovak Nation. Thirteen years later, this time inspired mainly by Stefan Marko Daxner and Jan Francisci, an even clearer national programme was formulated in the 186 1 Memorandum or the Slovak Nation. See Dusan Kovac: Dejiny Slovenska. Prague. 1998. pp. I 19- 13 1. �SLOVAKIA 86 from th e 1880s , ac ti ve support fo r Slovak nati onali st intell ec tu als increased. As H. Gordon Sk ill ing wrote: 'from the leighteen] eighties on, there graduall y deve loped, among Czech cultu ra l and pro fes sional persons, a substanti al concern for the Slovaks and a desire to promote Czech and Slovak cooperati on. ' 9 M ost importantl y, the Czech interest in Sl ovaki a took an organised fo rm w ith th e creati on of Ceskoslovanska j edn ota (Czec hos lav Unity), in 1895 . Thi s organi sati on offered fin ancial support to Slovak publi cati ons, grants for Slovak students in the Czech L ands and promoted Czech in vestments in Slovaki a. 1° Furthermore, Ceskoslovan- ska jedn ota sought to spread in form ati on about Sl ovaki a and the Slovaks among Czechs. Thi s w illingness to help the Sl ovaks did not di sappear with the es tabli shment of th e Czec hoslovak state in 19 18. With the gradu al ' liberation ' of what the new Czechos lovak authoriti es considered to be 'S lovaki a' (no admini strati ve boundari es ex isted), a new admini strati on had to be establi shed. The old admini strati ve apparatu s in Hungary consisted almost exc lusive ly of M agyars (ethni c Hungari ans) or ass imil ated intelligenti fro m other cultures. M ost of these refu sed to work for the new Czechos lovak state. As there were far from sufficient educated, patri oti c Sl ovaks to take over the admini strati on, officials had to be imported from the Czech L ands. The first major immi grati on ca me in the spring of 19 19, when ra il way and postal workers in Sl ovaki a stopped work ing to protest again st the new regime. A t th e urgent request of K ornel Stodola, the official res ponsibl e for ra il ways, ' several th ousand patri oti c Czech 9 H . Gordon Ski lling: T. G. Ma.r nryk : Against the Current. 1882- 19 14. London . 1994. p.68 (hereafter Ski ll ing: Mw;ary k). JU Mi ros lav Pek nfk: ·K profi lu slovensko-ceskych vztahov pred prvou sve tovou voj - nou'. in Mi lan Podrimavsky and Dusan Kovac (eds.) : Slovensko ,w zaciatku 20. storocia (Spo /ocnost: stat a narod v siiradniciach doby). Brati slava. 1999. pp.9 1-9 3: Mari e L. Neudorn: ' Slovakia in the Czech Press at the Turn of the ineteen th and Twe nti eth Ce ntu ries' . in John Morison (ed. ): The Czech and Slovak Experience: Selected Papers fro m the Fourth World Cong ress for So viet and East European Studies. Harrogille. I 990. London . 1992. pp. 38-6 I. �SLOVAKIA 87 vo lunteers hurri ed fro m Bohe mi a a nd Mo ra via and at a mo me nt 's notice.' 11 Late r, me mbe rs of othe r profess ion a l groups ca me to take up vacant pos iti o ns in S lovaki a: sc hoo lteac hers, uni versity lec ture rs, gend armes, tax collectors a nd bureaucrats of a ll so rts. It has bee n estimated th at 50-60 000 Czec hs went to Sl ovaki a in 19 19-20 and about as many aga in in the years up to 1930. 12 Whil e undo ubtedl y moti vated partl y by the ava il ability of jobs, the w illin g ness to uproot and move to still un safe S lova ki a o n sho rt no ti ce does suggest at least some idea li sm amo ng the vo lunteers. In 19 19-20 there was still armed confli ct betwee n Hun gari an and Czechoslo va k fo rces fo r control o ve r Slovaki a. Even fo r an un e mpl oyed bu reaucrat it could no t have been an easy dec isio n to move there. Few Czec hs can be seen to have do ne mo re to ra ise sy mpathy fo r the Sl o vaks a nd the ir fa te th an To mas Garri g ue Masaryk. Bo rn in Hodonfn , in the Slov acko reg io n of Morav ia, Masaryk ca me fro m a reg ion o n the bo rde r betwee n Czec h and Sl ova k lang uage and c ul ture. Hi s fa ther was Sl ova k and hi s moth er a Germ ani sed C zec h. 13 Gi ven thi s bac kg round , the idea of Czec h and Slovak politica l cooperation mu st have co me easil y to M asaryk. In hi s po litica l li fe , he became one of the ma in propo ne nts of suc h cooperati o n among Czec h politi c ians. As a pro fessor at the C harl es Uni ve rs ity in Prag ue, he was the ma in so urce of in spirati o n fo r a g roup of Slovak stu dents who wo uld later make up an impo rta nt part of the po liti ca l e lite in Czechoslova ki a. Th ese stude nts , best know n as hlasisti, afte r th e name of the ir j o urn a l Hlas (Vo ice), beca me the ma in supporte rs of the C zechos lovak idea in Slovaki a. 14 Yet, despite hi s ge nuin e co nce rn for the S lovaks, M asary k 's speec hes and arti c les at times ex pressed a pa te rn a li st and arroga nt 11 R. W. Seton-Watson : A History of the Czechs and Slovaks. London. 1943. p.323. 12 Jan M ec hyr: Slovensko v Ceskoslovensku : Slovensko-ceske vztahy I 9 I 8- 199 I. Prague. 199 1. p.27. 1 '- K arel Capek: Hovory s T. G. M asa1y kem. Prag ue. 1947. pp.8-9, I I 8. 14 Vl ad im ir Bakos: Questions of the Nation in Slo va k Thoug ht. Brati slava. 1999. pp.1 3-57 . �88 SLOVAKIA attitude toward s Slovak culture and hi story . For instance, Masaryk rej ected calls for a plebisc ite in Slovakia after World War l, arg uin g that 'one cannot allow such a vote there, since the Slovaks have bee n so oppressed that they have never had the opportunity to think politically and they would not know in whose hand s to put th eir fate. ' 15 Even c learer was hi s comment on rece nt negotiation s with Slovak leaders in a letter to hi s dau ghter Alice, in 1924: 'It is necessary to be patient with the Slovaks - they are children, or rather spoilt brats.' 16 Given the relatively low educational level and minimal political experience of most Slovaks in 1918 , claims about their immaturity clearly had some justification in the first years after the establi shme nt of Czechoslovakia. However, Czech politicians continued throu ghout the ex istence of the Czechoslovak state to explain the lack of understanding for their policies in Slovakia as a sign of the politica l immaturity of Slovaks. Commenting on relations between Czech and Slovak exiles during World War II, for instance, Edvard Be nes informed the British Foreign Mini stry , that ' the re existed unity among the Czechs while the Slovaks, he conceded, because of their political immaturity, reflected the divided opinions at home.' 17 Also in the post-Communist period , Slovak nationalism , and especially its more radical expressions, were presented as clear signs of the political immaturity of the Slovaks. 'Everyone has the right to live his nineteenth century,' became a common remark in sarcastic comments. 18 " Quoted in Robert 8. Pynsent: ' Masaryk 's ·' Path of Democracy". Or: The Democrati c National Socialist Ideal'. in K atarina A. M . K ocourek (ed.): T. G. Masaiyk 1850- /937. A Collection of Essays to Commemora te the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Thomas G. Masaryk . London, 2000, p. 35 -57 (41 ) (a specia l issue of Masa1yk Journal). 16 Quoted in Zbynek Zeman and Antonin Klimek: The Life of Eduard Benes: Cze- choslovakia in Peace and War. Oxford , 1997, p.5 I (herea fter Zeman and Klimek: Eduard Benes) . 17 Quoted ibid. pp.168-69. 18 Otto U lc: 'Czechoslovakia ' s Velvet Divorce ' , East European Quarterly, Vol.30/3, 1996, pp. 33 1-352 (340). �SLOVAKIA 89 From a Czech po int of view, the re lati o nship between the C zechs and Sl ovaks was c learl y a bi g broth er - littl e brother re lati o nship. The Czech partner in the Czec h-S lovak unio n was c learl y superior in po pulati o n (abo ut 2: I), and fo r most of the hi sto ry of the common state a lso in soc io-econo mic deve lo pment (for example, in education , car-ow nership , numbe r of te le pho nes , etc .). Czech nationa li sts could be proud of a ri c h nati o na l hi story a nd a hi g hl y deve lo ped Czec h c ulture, whil e Slovak nati o na li sts, for hi stori ca l reasons, had less to brag abo ut. The pi cture of Slovaki a as a less deve lo ped, less c ultured ' hinte rl and ' re ma in ed in Czec h po pul ar c ulture, parti c ul arl y in Prague, eve n after Slovak ia reac hed a basica ll y equ al leve l of soc io-econo mi c developme nt (abo ut I 980) . 19 As Petr Prfh oda, the pse udo nymo us Jan Prfbram, observed in the ex ile jo urna l Svedect vfin 1976: T he charac te ri sti c tra its of [the Czec h view of Slovaks a nd S lovaki a] have o ne co mmo n de no m inato r: an a lbe it unc lear, th o ug h multi face ted inferiority. Slovaks see m primiti ve, imm ature, emo ti o na ll y unrestra ined and uneducated [ ... ] The na ivety and lack of ex pe ri e nce amo ng those who come to the unknow n Czec h e nvironme nt is qui c kl y mi sunde rstood as stupidity. A Slovak is qu ite simpl y asc ribed a child 's menta li ty .20 Ignorance On the first page of its 27 Nove mber 1935 iss ue, in an artic le by the fa mo us Czec h jo urn a li st Ferdin and Pe routka, the influenti al journal Pl ftomnost (Presence) asked its readers: ' Do you know of anyone who unde rstand s Slova ki a?' 2 1 F ifty-fi ve years late r, Vac lav Have l' s ad visor Pe te r Hun c ik to ld the Ch a irm a n of th e Sl ova k N ati o na l 19 M il an K ucera and Zdenek Pavlfk: ·Czech and Slovak Demograph y ·, in Jiff M usil (ed.): The End or Czechoslovak ia. Budapest, 1995 , pp. 15-39. 20 Prfhoda: ·s Jovaci ceskyma oc ima' , p.643. 21 Ferd inand Peroutka: ·Nevfte o nekom , kdo rozu mf Slovensku?' , Prfto mnos t, Vo l. 12/47. 1935 , p. I . as reprod uced in Anton Ras la: Zastupova l som ceskoslovensky stat - vyznanie. Presov, 1999, p.268. �90 SLOVAKIA Co un c il , Fra nti se k Mi k losko, th at the Pres ide nt a lways had mi graines whe n he trave ll ed in Slovaki a. 22 Thi s was no t due to the c lim ate, but beca use Have l fe lt great unease abo ut not know ing Slovaki a. Such ac know ledge me nts refl ect the limited kno wl edge of Slovaki a and the Slovaks in the C zech Land s. As Prfhoda o bserved : ' Of all the ne ig hbo urin g nati o ns we know the S lovaks the leas t and ex press the least interest in the m and the ir nat io n. Admittedl y, we have been introdu ced th e best to th e Sl ova ks, but we kn ow th e leas t abo ut the m. ' 23 It is poss ible to ide nti fy severa l reasons fo r thi s lac k of know ledge and understanding. Partl y, it was a res ult of the somew hat confusin g nature of Slovak po liti cs . A lmost thro ugho ut the histo ry of Czechoslovaki a, the politica l e lite in Slova ki a was di vided o n the iss ue of inc reased se lf-governm e nt. Pe ri odi ca ll y, thi s inte rn a l stru gg le amon g S lovak po liti c ians over whethe r S lovaks did or did not want a uto no my mu st have been confu s in g eve n for th e most interested C zech o bserver. Gu stav Hu sak, fo r exampl e, contributed to muddlin g the picture of S lovak nati o na li sm : fro m be ing the prime propo ne nt o f th e federa li sati o n of Czec hos lova ki a befo re a nd durin g the 1968 ' Prag ue S prin g', Hu sak sudde nl y changed into a pro po ne nt of ce ntrali sati o n o nce he was in po wer in Prag ue. Thi s s ituation was exacerbated by the lac k of opportunity pro po nents of inc reased Sl ovak se lf- rul e had to prese nt thei r views to the Czech publi c. Genera ll y, the Slovak po liti c ians who most eas il y ga ined access to the pages of the Prag ue press were those in favo ur of centra li sed rul e. Furth e rmo re, the lac k of know ledge a nd unde rstand in g of S lovaki a a mo ng Czec hs was a res ult of a lac k of in terest in S lova k affa irs. Slovaki a was, at least in the in ter- war peri od, a po liti ca ll y less impo rta nt part of the country. Even if sy mpathy fo r the S lovaks had pl ayed a ro le in the suppo rt C zec h po li tic ians gave the pl ans fo r an inde pe nde nt Czec hos lova ki a, th e re we re o ther impo rt a nt reaso ns 22 Frantsiek M iklosko: Cas stretnutf. Brati slava, 1996, p.44. 23 Pffhoda: ·s tovaci ceskyma oci ma', p.643. �91 SLOVAKIA why they wanted a union . The main ' problem ' in Czech hi story has been the question of the Czechs ' position as a small nation surrounded by Germans. In Slovakia and the Slovaks, Czech leaders found a doub le solution to their problem. As a people, the Slovaks represented a biological reinforcement to the Czech , renamed the Czechoslovak, nation , making it the majority nation in the new state. They thus helped legitimate Czech(oslovak) domination of Czechoslovakia. (One should not forget that there were about 50 per cent more German than Slovak speakin g citizens (3 versus 2 million ) in interwar Czechoslovakia.) As a territory . Slovakia formed a bridge out of the German encirclement towards Ru ssia, which before 1917 was perceived as a rival of Germany and protector of the Slavs, and towards Czechoslovakia ·s all y Romania. For those perceivin g the state from such a ' Great-Czech ' point of view, Czechos lovakia was merely 'a reestabli shment of th e Czech state, reinforced by the Slovak territorie s, which were so weak and neglected that it was simply not necessary to see them as a separate entity. ' 24 The most important reason for the lack of knowl edge and understandin g of Slovakia among Czechs was , however. the uncritical acceptance of the Czechoslovak idea by most Czechs. In th e interwar yea rs, the Czechoslovak ideo logy was a pillar ce ntral to the very existence of the state. Even Masaryk argued th at ' there is no such thing as a Slovak nation 25 paganda ' . l- .. I; that is an invention of Hungarian pro- In Slovakia, on the other hand, the idea of one Czecho- slovak nation met res istance, [i]n the minds of th e Czechs, the notions of 'Czec h' and ' Czechoslovak' had blended into one by th e end of the Second World War at the latest. A significa nt conseq uence of thi s psycho- soci al operation was the removal of the Slovaks as a distinct ethni c entity from the Czech field of vis ion . The Slovaks eventuall y began to be perceived as H L.:.ubomfr Liptak: Slovensko v 20. storocf. Bratisl ava. 1998. 2nd edition. p. 128 . 15 Pynse nt : ' Masaryk ·s "Pa th of Democracy''". p.41. �92 SLOVAKIA part of the same nat iona l organi sm - almost as the advocates of the Czechoslovak concept would like to have it only thi s organi sm was not Czechoslovak but Czech.26 The net result of thi s process was that the social, c ultura l and reli g ious differences betwee n the Czechs and Slovaks became invisible to the majority of Czechs who never learned to kn ow the Slovaks and Slovakia directly. Thi s aga in led to the anticipatio n that Slovaks would have a s imil ar world view and would react in the sa me way as Czechs to events and po li c ies. The co nsequences of such anticipation varied over time. In the inter-war period , it was the insensitive attitude of the new regime towards the Catholic Church that was most important. Czech nation alism had the Hu ss ite peri od as its Golden Age; a Golden Age that was termin ated by the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 and the following violent co unterReform ation in Bohemia and , to a somew hat lesser degree, Morav ia. With the sec ulari sing impact of the industriali sation and urbani sati on of the Czech Lands in the nineteenth century, thi s gave Czech nationalism a not only sec ul ar, but often an openly anti-Catho lic edge. 27 Although the Protestant minority was proportionately bi gger in Slovakia than in the Czech Land s, there was no clear connection between anti-Catholici sm and nation ali sm even amon g Protestant Slovak nat ionali sts. On the contrary, one direction within the Slovak nati ona l move ment was closely co nnec ted to the Catholic fa ith . The Catholic national ists, led from the early twentieth century by Andrej Hlinka, were more skeptica l of cooperation with the Czec hs than were the hlasi sti. Man y Czech politicians and intellec tu a ls were, from the point of view of Slovak Catholics, dangerously radical liberals, if not atheist anti-Catholics. 28 When the declaration of Czechoslovak independence on 28 October 1918 was followed by a wave of 26 Zdenek Suda: ' Slovakia in Czech Nati onal Consciousness ' , in Musil (ed.): The End of Czechoslovakia, p.1 39- 155 ( 11 8) (hereafter Suda: ' Slovakia ' ). 27 R. W. Seton-Watson: A History of the Czechs and Slovaks. London, 1943, p.33 1. 28 Jan Rychl fk : Cesi a Slovaci ve 20. stoletf: Cesko-sl ovenske vztahy , 19 14- 1945. Bratislava, 1997, p.38 (hereafter Rychlfk: Cesi a Slo vac1). �SLOVAKIA 93 anti-Catholic gestures in the Czech Lands, the worst fears of the Slovak Catholics were reali sed . As lsmo Nurmi wrote: ' if the anti-Catholic mood was fashionable in the Czech lands, it was not so in Slovak ia and even less so when a numbe r of desecration s of reli g iou s c ult objects, churches, statues, crosses etc. were committed [ ... ] also in Slovakia [by] civil servants and particularly the Czechoslovak Army.' 29 The attempt to create a Czechoslovak national hi story and tradition with the Hussite era as pivotal was a clear sign of the lac k of understanding among Czech (and some Slovak) leade rs for the position of the Catholic Church in Slovakia. Masaryk 's official ' inclusion ' of Slovakia in the Hu ss ite tradition on the basis of Jan Ji skra 's ' crusade ' into Slovakia was not only hi storically dubiou s, but also, and not surpri sin gly, rejected by the Slovak Catholic clergy. As Suda wrote: ' To the Catholic majority of the Slovaks, among whom Catholicism had a very pronounced conservative tin ge typical of a pre-modern society , a common programme with the Czechs based on the traditions of the Protestant Reformation must have been almost an anathema. ' 30 After 1948, with the industriali sation of Slo vaki a unde r Communi st rul e, the religious differen ces be tween the Czech a nd Slovak parts of the common state were so mew hat diffused. Albeit a clear scepticism towards 'Czech liberali sm ' was visible in Christian democratic circles in Slovakia also after the collapse of Communism, another as pec t of the Czech ignorance of Slovak affairs beca me more important. As noted above , very many Czechs saw Czechoslovakia and the ' Czechoslovak nation ' as their state and nation , quite often interpreted as a Czech state a nd nation that included the Slovaks. After World War II , the rec reation of Czechoslovakia was acco mpanied by an official recog niti on by all political leaders, albeit some Czec h politicians were reluctant to do so, of the ex iste nce of two 29 lsmo Nurmi: Slo vakia - A Playground for Na tionalism and National Identity. 191 8- /920 : M anifestations of the Na tional Identity of Slovaks. Hel sinki. 1999. pp. 92-93. 30 Suda : ·Slovakia ' . p.11 5. �SLOVAKIA 94 fo un d in g nati ons in the co untry . Thi s princ ipl e was reaffirmed with the federa li sati on of 1968. Despite thi s offic ial recogniti on, there was ve ry littl e understanding a mong Czec hs of S lovak atte mpts to promote the ir separate ide ntity. Proba bl y the best kn ow n exa mpl e of S lova k po li tic ians ' dema nd s fo r 'v isibility and equ a lity ' fo r S lovaki a w ithin Czec hos lovaki a was the stru gg le fo r the name of the federati on in the sprin g of 1990 . Th e so-ca ll ed ' hy phe n-wa r ' sta rted w he n new ly e lec ted Pres ide nt Vac lav Have l suggested c ha ng in g the offic ial name of the Republic, the Czechoslovak Soc iali st Republic, by mere de leti on of the word ' Sociali st' . Whil e fo r mos t Czec hs thi s so luti on mu st have see med natural , it ran into oppos iti on in S lovaki a? A Sl ovak co unter-proposa l, the Czec ho-Slovak Re public, or just Czec ho-Slovaki a, a name that made Slovaki a more vi s ibl e to the world , was, however, not acceptabl e to most Czec h po liti c ians. The reasons given fo r thi s were that th e hyphe n had been used in the name of the Second Republi c (1938 -39, th at is, afte r the Muni c h Accord), a nd beca use ' C zec ho' (Ces k o) was not consi de red a pro pe r word in the Czech language. As one leading comme ntator compl ained in Lidove noviny: ' We in the Czec h Land s perce ive the insiste nt de mand of Sl ovaki a fo r a di vidin g line in the na me of the Re public as tac tl ess and coarse. " 2 Onl y afte r two mo nth s o f de bate in the three nati onal asse mbli es (the Czec h, Slova k and Federa l) and the mass medi a was a compromi se fo und : The Czec h and Slovak Federa l Republic. Have l quic kl y rea li sed th at he had made a mi stake by not consul ting politic ians fro m both the Czec h a nd Sl ova k Re pu b li cs before making hi s suggestion public. In a n atte mpt to rec ti fy the s itu ati on the hospitali sed Have l sent a le tter to the Federal Asse mbl y in February, where he stated : -' ' M il an Su tovec: Semi6za aka pol i tik um a/ebo "Pom lckov;-i vojna ". Brati slava, 1999, pp. 174- 196 (hereafter Sutovec: Pomlckova vojna). -' 2 Ji ff Hanak: 'Nespraved li ve a tedy neprijatelne' . Lidove Noviny. 28 M arch 1990. p.l. �SLOVAKIA 95 We a ll kn o w th at thi s hyphe n, whi ch fo r a ll Czechs seems ridi c ul o us, unnecessary and ugly, is mo re tha n just a hyphe n. In thi s hyphe n o ne ca n find severa l decades, if not ce ntu ries of th e hi sto ry of the S lo va k nati o n [ ... ] The Sl o vak nation is ri g htfull y tryin g to fin d its ide ntity, fo r reason s Czec hs probabl y do n ' t understa nd , eve n if they o ught to understand them.33 Resentment Exampl es of Czec h skepti c ism a nd resentment to ward s Slo vak nati o na li sm ca n be fo und as earl y as the middl e of th e nine teenth century. From the late 1840s, a majo rity of Slovak inte ll ectua ls ado pted the new codifi cati o n of th e S lovak lang uage , as publi shed in 1846 by Cudovft Stur, as a pl atfo rm fo r the Sl ovak national programme. This met w ith strong res istance fro m Czech and Slovak inte llectua ls promotin g Czec h-Sl ovak unity: they saw the Slovaki zed versio n of Hu ss ite Bible Czec h used by ma ny Slovak inte llec tua ls until then, as the clearest bo nd between Czechs and Slovaks.34 If in the inte rwar years Czec hos lovak leade rs cons idered Slovak nati o na li sm a pro bl e m, it was ma inl y after 1938 th at o pe nl y hostil e attitudes toward s it e merged. The ex pl oi tatio n by Slovak nati o na li sts of the weakness of the Czec hos lovak reg ime after the Munich cri sis to push trou gh thei r de mands fo r a uto no my, c ulmin atin g in the ac ceptance by the Slovak leade rs of German de mand s fo r Slovak indepe ndence in M arc h 1939, was conside red a stab in the back by most Czechs. 35 Durin g the Second World W ar, Ed vard Be nes, the C zechoslovak Pres ide nt-in -ex il e, was o ne of the sharpest cri tics of what he considered the Slovak be traya l. He was ' o bstin ate in defending the Czec hos lovak ca use: its betraya l by the Slovaks mattered more to him than the grow ing press ure from Moscow. He be li e ved th at the " As quoted in Sutovec: Pomlckova vojna, pp.269-27 1. 34 Sk illing: Masary k, p. 69. 35 Petr Pffhoda: ' M utual Perceptions in Czech-S lovak Relationshi ps ', in M usil (ed .): The End of Czechoslovakia. pp. 128- 138 ( 134 ). �96 SLOVAKIA Slovak heresy undermined the ve ry fo undations of the state, and Czechoslovaki sm was for him a part of the foundations. ' 36 Throu ghout the war, Benes and other Czech politi cians fought for the reestabli shment of the First (th at is, pre-Muni ch) Republi c. Most Slovak politici ans, howe ver, including former Czechos lovak Prime Minster Milan Hodza, con sidered thi s a less th an optim um solution. 37 Only reluctantly , given th e situation in Slovakia after the Slovak National Upri sing in the autum n of 1944, was Benes forced to accept a de facto asymmetric federalisation of post-war Czechoslo va ki a. However, despite previou s agreements, most importantl y the Kosice Government Programme, drafted by the first pro visional government after the country was partly -liberated from the East, the question of Slovaki a's position within the country cont inued to divide the Czec h and Slovak non-Comm uni st parties after the war. The willin gness of the Czec h democratic parti es to coo perate with the Communi sts in reducin g the powers of the Slovak nation al organs , cruci all y after the 1946 elections, contrib uted to undermining the position of the Democratic Party in Slo va ki a. The Czechos lovak Communi st Party was thu s abl e to exploit ' the anti -Sl ovak nati onali sm among Czech political parties and [ ... ] the isolated position of the Slovak democrats. ' 38 Thi s clearly weakened the democrats' ability to oppose the Communi sts' increasing political power in the country. During and after 1968 , the negati ve view of Slo vak nationali sm and Slovakia in the Czech L ands was reinforced. After the Soviet-led in vas ion on 2 1 Au gust 1968, 'sociali sm with a human face ' was gradually di smantled and replaced by ' norm ali sation '. Th e only maj or reform of the Prague Spring to survive was the dec ision to federalize Czechoslovakia. In Sl ovaki a thi s decision w as generall y interpreted 36 37 Zeman and Klimek : Eduard Bene{ p.203. Milan Hodza : Federarion in Cenrra l Europe: Renections and Reminiscences. London. 1942, pp.93-94. 38 Ji rf K ocian: ·Narodnf soc ialis te a slovenska otazka 1945- I 948 ". in Michal Bar- novsky (ed.) : Od dikratury k diktature. Brati slava. 1995 . pp.57-65 (6 I ). (hereafter K oc ian: ' Narodnf socialiste') �SLOVAKIA 97 as a more just organi sation of the common state. In the Czech Lands, however, many saw federalisation as a further example of the Slovak nationali sts' skill in drawing advantages from Czechoslovakia's mi sfortune. The fact th at the new party leade r and late r Pres ident of Czechoslovakia, Gu stav Hu sak, was Slovak, also contributed to the negative picture of Slovakia and Slovaks. As Petr Pithart wrote: the Czech public was di sappointed, even di sg usted, by the Slovaks ' ex peri e nce of havin g ga ined sati sfac tion with federalization; at best, it was seen as foolishness a nd at worst, as blind se lfi shness and eve n betrayal. ( ... ) in the Czec h Lands there was an increasing ly obvious di sg ust for the regime and for the Slovaks, as the ones through whom normali zation was allegedly introduced and carried out. 39 A s ign of the growing irritation with and resentment toward s Slovak nationa li sm and Slovaks in ge ne ral in the Czech Lands, was the increas in g ly popul a r de mand that Czech taxpayers should not have to subsidi se the ungrateful Slovaks. Already in 1933 Czechoslovak Prime Min ster Ja n Malypete r had rejected the demand for Slovak autonomy on the grounds that Slovakia would not be able to pay its way . In the Czech press, headlines read along the lines: ' We are paying for Slovakia ' .40 Thi s be lief that the Czechs were subsidis in g th e Slovaks was observed also by Prfhoda forty-three years late r: ' In the Czech Lands the view of Slovak parasiti sm [parazitismu s] is common and it is formulated more or less like thi s: we Czechs are payin g for the Slovaks. ' 41 The Czechoslovak Communist Party was committed to so lvin g the probl e m of Slovak nation alism, which it interpreted as a mainly eco nomic iss ue , through equ ali zat ion of the standard of li ving bet- 39 Petr Pithart: ' Towards a Shared Freedom ' , in Mu sil (ed.): Th e End of Czechoslovakia.pp.20 1-222 (206). 40 Vi ctor S. Mamatey: ' The Development of Czechoslovak Democ racy ', in Mamatey and Luza (eds.) : A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, pp.99-166 ( 15 1). 41 Prfhoda: "S lovac i ces kyma ocima', p.647. �SLOVAKIA 98 wee n the Czech and Slovak parts of the co unty. Economic transfers, parti cul arly through a higher level of in vestment in Sl ovaki a were, therefore, considered important. They continued even during the di ffic ult years in the 1970s and 1980s, but were kept secret, probabl y to avoid un favo urable reactions in the Czech L ands. After the co llapse of Communi sm, opposition to w hat was popularl y referred to as the Czech ' money pipeline' (p enezovod) to Slovak ia was quickl y made into a politi cal demand. In the first formal ro und of negoti ation s on th e future of the fe derati on after the co ll apse of Communi sm, in Lnare in April 1990, the Czech delegati on demanded a halt to Czec h subsidies to Slovaki a.42 From Czech to Czechoslovak nationalism and back As noted earlier, the Czechos lov ak directi on within Czech poli ti cs was by no means dominant pri or to W orld W ar I. Czec h nationali sts concentrated mainl y on defending and enhancing Czech autonomy w ithin th e Habsburg M onarchy. With the success of the Czec hoslovak idea in the Entente capitals in 19 17-1 8, however, most Czec h nati onali sts quite quickl y became convinced Czec hos lovak nati onali sts; Czech nati onali sm was ex panded to include th e Sl ovaks, the Czec hs' ' little bro ther ' in Hungary. Cultura ll y and economi ca ll y wea k, the Slovaks posed no threat to either Czech culture or politica l and economic dominati on of the new state. A nd after all , as M asaryk himse lf pointed out, the Slovaks were merely Czec hs w ith a slightly di fferent hi story. Th e attachment o f Czech politi cians to the Czech os lovak idea ca n be clearl y see n after W orld W ar II. In 1968 , a document supposedly written by members of th e (Czec h) Nation al Soc iali st Party 4 in I 946 was pub I ished in the Slova k press . ' Its authors argued th at the bes t way to so lve the problem of Slovak nati onalism was fo rced ass imil ati on of the Sl ovaks into good Czec hoslovaks. Whil e seri ous • • 2 BBC Summa1y of World Broadcast. EE/0738 B/2. 13 Apri I 1990. 3 T he document was first publi shed in Vac lav Kral: Cestou k tinoru, Prague, I 956, but attrac ted relati ve ly little attention until reproduced in the mass medi a in 1968. �99 SLOVAKIA doubts exist as to th e authenticity of thi s ' Memorandum on Slovakia' , most hi storian s seem to agree that the idea of turnin g the Slovaks into good Czechoslovaks was not alien to certain leading Czech politicians at the time. 44 The reaction to what was perceived as the Slovak betraya l of 1938-39 was increased Czechoslovak nationali sm. However, during the Communist period , a nd particul ar ly after 1968 , Czech nationalism gradually gained supporters in the Czech Lands . As Prfhoda wrote in 1976: 'I am not sure how thin gs are in Slovakia, but among Czechs the concept of a com mon state is being re-eva luated these days . I have eve n heard : let the Ru ss ia ns make Slovakia into a union republic or something and leave us in peace!' 45 Obviou sly , ne ither Czech nor Slovak separat ism was politically acceptable durin g Communist rul e. After th e 'Velvet Revo lution' , however, influe ntial vo ices soo n e merged in the Czech Land s questioning the union with the Slovaks. As earl y as the beginning of May 1990, in the aftermath of the hyphe n war, the Czech writer Ludvfk Vaculfk, the author of the 'Two thousand words' manifesto in 1968, wrote a sharpl y worded articl e in Litenimf noviny. 46 ' W e Czechs have a great debt to the Slovaks,' Yaculfk argued. This debt was due to the fact that the Czechs had happily made Slovakia ' theirs' without takin g into account what it meant to be Slovak. Through their behaviour, however, the Slovaks had made it difficult for the Czechs to appreciate thi s debt. Th e Czechs had g ive n the Slovaks the ir industry and inte lli gentsia, so mething that had only caused the Slovaks to ' until thi s day complain about the qua lity of these supplies'. The Czechs had give n the Slovaks a way out of defeat as a separate state during World War II. Even Communism , brou g ht to Slovakia by Czechs afte r the war, had g ive n the Slovaks more in material terms than it had to the Czechs. When the Czechs then tri ed to ease th e die- 44 See Koc ian: ' Narodnf soc iali ste' . passim: Rychlfk: Ce.si II Slo vaci. pp. 54-55: ·Na okraj diskusie: 0 tzv. Slovenskom memoranda Cs. narodne sociali stickej strany ', Nase snahy . Vol. I 9/2. 1983. p. 9. 45 Prfhoda: ' Slovaci ceskyma ocima ' . p.653. 41 ' Ludvik Vaculfk: ' Nase slovenska otazk a', Litenimf noviny. Vol.1 /5, 1990. p.2. �SLOVAK IA 100 tatorship during 1968, the Slovaks saw thi s as a Czech matter and instead forced through 'autonomy '. For this they escaped with lighter puni shment during the era of ' normali sation .' Now aga in , after the col lapse of Communism, when Czechs were trying th eir utmost finally to defeat the dictatorial regime , the Slovaks were 'coming with their prestige demands'. ' Do we need thi s?' he asks rhetorically and then concludes : We have found ourse lves with a thankless task in th e fate of the Slo vaks, and I think th at we should end it without se lf-pity - more with a smil e into th e mirror. [ ... l Why should the Slovaks ha ve to force out of us, centimetre by ce ntimetre, somethin g that they can have in one go? By separating from the Slovaks , purely of our ow n volition , we " lose" - judging from experience to date - economic losses. Politicall y we lose th e Hungarian and Ruth ene problem s. We put another border between us and th e Soviet Union. 47 At th e time of hi s writ ing, Yaculfk ' s recommendation th at th e Czec hs should dispense with the Slovaks accorded with neither public nor political opinion in the Czech Republic. At that stage not even the most radical Czech politician s were promoting divi sion of the state. Gradually , however, the need to resolve the probl em of th e common state w ith the Slovaks once and for all became pressing. As Yaculfk observed in December of 1990: 'Public opinion poll s show that 75 percent of Czechs are said to favour a common state with the Slovaks. Had one, on the other hand , asked if we should let the Slovaks go, just as many would probabl y have answered " yes" to thi s as we ll. ' 48 In Slovakia, the question of the statu s of the Slovak Republic within the Czech and Slovak state became a centra l political topic . 47 Ibid. The double quotation marks arou nd -- Jose" were added to make th e irony more vi sible. The original tex t is : ' Od loucenfm od Slovaku. jez j e vyhradne v nasf vu li. ztratfme - souzeno dosavadnf zkusenostf - ekonomicke ztraty. • 48 Ludvik Yaculfk: ' M ec iar mozna odejde' . Litenimf noviny . Vol. I /39. I 990. p.2. �SLOVAKIA 101 Sl ovak politicians began to co mpete over w ho co uld present a programme th at would benefit and pro mote Slovaki a the most. Thi s led to a gradual radi ca li sati on of Slovak demands in the negoti ation s on the future of the federati on. Such radica li sati on in turn provoked a voc iferou s reaction in the Czech L ands. Th e influenti al Czec h j ournal R esp ekt refl ec ted th e growin g antagoni sm toward s Sl ovaki a in th e Czec h L ands. Headlines from the Spring of 1992 such as ' The supreme Slovak irrespon sibility' ( 17 Febru ary, p.2), ' B alkan model on the hori zo n: how long w ill the Czech-Slovak statu s quo las t?" (24 Febru ary, p.2) and 'A bsurd parliamentary drama: who saves Slovak ia from sovereignty?' (6 A pril , p.2) ev ince an increas ingly criti ca l view o f Sl ovak politi cs . In the issue th at co incided with the electi ons of 8 June, the criticism ca me to its logica l co nclu sion . Peter Schutz, Respekt 's (Sl ovak-Hungari an) correspondent in Slovak ia, wrote in the arti cle ' Slovaki a adheres to nati onal soc iali sm': ' The shameful result of thi s electi on formul ated onl y one alternati ve - either lMec iar 's party] HZDS disintegrates, or the CSFR. ' 49 Vl adimfr Ml ynar ex pressed the same message in the subtitle o f hi s arti cle in the same issue: 'A lone into Euro pe or together into the Balkans'. 50 Parti cul arl y the politi ca l ri ght in th e Czec h Lands increasingly saw Slovaki a as an obstac le on the road ' back ' to Europe. After the 1990 elec ti ons, th e ri ght had graduall y strengthened its pos ition among the Czech elec torate. In Slovaki a, on the other hand , it was the more reform- scepti ca l and patri oti c parti es on the politica l left that had enjoyed greater success. Gi ven th e spec ial minority veto of both the Czec h and Slovak groups of deputies in th e House of Nati ons of the Federal Assembl y, a left-patri otic maj ority in Slovaki a was a worry ing prospec t for the Czech proponents of radi ca l reform s. A month before th e parliam entary election s in June 1992, V aclav 09 Peter Sch utz: ·s tovensko sa prihlasilo k narodnemu socializmu - Pos lcdne zvone- nie pre federaciu ·, Respekt. 8- 14 June 1992, p.2. ~ V lad imir Ml ynar: ·v Cechac h tes ne vftezstvf prav ice - lecne na Balka n·. Respekt, 8- 14 June 1992. p.3. Sarni do Evropy nebo spo- �102 SLOVA KI A Kl aus made it c lear that if a fu ncti o na l federa ti o n was not poss ible after the e lect io ns, he and his partners were ' ready to create a mec hani sm for a q uick, c ivili sed and prob le m-free div isio n of the state. ' 51 Conclusion By the late summ er of 1992, th e do min ant view of Slovak ia in C zec h po liti cs had, in a se nse, co me full c irc le to co inc ide with the views th at preva il ed pri o r to W o rl d W ar I. Fro m hav ing bee n a strateg ica ll y less attrac ti ve partne r in the seco nd ha lf of the nineteenth ce ntury, Sl ovaki a beca me a strateg ic asset in the firs t ha lf of th e twenti eth . Afte r W o rld W ar II , however, S lovak ia a nd th e S lovaks gradu a ll y lost the ir strateg ic impo rt a nce for the Czec hs. The large Ge rm an mino rity in the Czec h Lands was ex pe ll ed in the firs t years after the war, taking the edge off the Ge rman threat. Furthermore, fo r C zec h democ rats, the Communi st co up of Febru ary 194 8 put an e nd to a ll ideas of seekin g sec urity a nd integrati o n in the East, th ro ugh Slova ki a. In stead , they now turn ed exc lu sive ly to the West: to th e US , NATO . the E uro pean Co mmunity and eve n the o ld ri va l, Ge rmany. At the th resho ld of the twenty- first ce ntury, Slova ki a, w ith its c umbe rso me soc ia li st eco no my, its po puli st nati o na li sm , and its pro bl e ms with Hun ga ry over the Hungari an mino rity in Slovaki a and the G abc fk ovo- Nagy maros da m projec t o n the Da nube, aga in became a strateg ic burden. The Czec hos lovak traditi o n and adhe re nce to the Czec hos lovak idea were still strong in the Czec h Lands. Tho ugh the Czec h politica l ri ght had the suppo rt of gro ups suc h as The Czec h Initi ati ve, whic h gathered aro und 50,000 sig natures in favo ur of Czec h independe nce in fo ur days in June 1992 in Prague, most Czec hs were still in favo ur of a co mm o n state w ith the Slova ks. 52 Thu s Kl aus and hi s partners co uld not push throug h a break-up w itho ut so me effort. Co nsequ ent ly, as Abby Innes wrote: ' Kl a us preferred a strategy o f shi ftin g res- 51 As cited in Marian Lesko: Meciar a meciarizm us: polit ik bez .~kruptif" politika bez zabran. Bratis lava. 1997, p.78. 52 BBC Summary of World Broadcast. EE/ 14 12 B/5. 20 June I 992. �SLOVAKIA 103 po ns ibility fo r the confli c t e ntire ly onto the Slovak side and c la imed th at it was now "ev ide nt th at votes fo r the HZ DS are votes fo r th e di visio n o f the state". ' 53 Give n th at th e do min a nt Czec h im age of S lovak nati o na li sm, a nd of Vl adim ir Mec iar, was negative, Kl aus was lucky in hav in g hi s tas k made eas ier. Hi s ca mpa ig n was furth er ass isted by th e oppos iti o n of the leading S lova k parti es to th e ree lection of Pres ide nt Vac lav Have l in Jul y. Hav ing fa il ed to be ree lec te d , Have l res ig ned pre m ature ly whe n th e Slo va k Nation a l Co unc il passed a large ly sy mbo li c dec larati o n of sovere ig nty o n 17 Jul y. Have l, prev io us ly o ne of the leading pro po ne nts of the co mmo n state, now le nt hi s support to a di visio n of the state. 54 The first day of Janu ary 1993 saw the creati o n of two new states: the C zec h Re publi c and the Sl ovak Re publi c. Of the two, the Czec h Republi c c learl y adopted the mantl e of successor to Czec hos lovaki a. T he new Czec h state had the sa me capita l, the same fl ag (in breac h o f an earli e r agree me nt) and the sa me pres ide nt. C zec h co mpani es and even po liti ca l parties fo r a lo ng time ke pt the word 'Czechos lovak ' in the ir na me (for exampl e, the S in CSA, Czec h[os lovak] A irlin es). Mos t things re ma ined as they had bee n, exce pt w ith o ut the Slovaks. As Vaculfk had po inted o ut so po ig nantl y in 1990: ' Whe n th e "Federati o n" started crac king in its fo undatio n, I got the idea fo r a new , in spi rin g ly o ptimi sti c so luti o n: whe n S lov aki a breaks away there w ill be no o ne to preve nt us fro m ca lling o ur state Czec hos lovak ia ... ' 55 " A bby Innes: ' T he Breakup of Czechos lovak ia: T he Impact of Part y Deve lopment on the Separation of the State· . Eust European Politics and Society. Vol. I I /3. 1997. pp. 393-435 (424). '" I va n L amper and V ladimir Ml ynar: ·skoncila ceskoslovenska statnost: Rozhovor s pos lednfm prezi dentem CSFR Vac lave m Havlem ' . Respekt. 20-27 July 1992. p.4. " Vac ulfk: ' Meciar mofoa odejde'. p.2 . � 81 SLOVAKIA From Bratr nas to At'jdou Slovakia, the Slovaks and Slovak Nationalism seen from Prague 1 Paa! Sigurd Hilde The Velvet Divorce between the Czech and Slovak parts of the Czech and Slovak Federal Repub lic (CSFR) was a political undertaking. All public opinion polls taken in the period 1990-1992 showed a clear majority in favour of a common state among both Slovaks and Czechs.2 The decision to divide the country came as a result of a compromise between two political parties - or more specifically, between two politicians: Vaclav Klaus of the (Czech) Civic Democratic Party and Vladimfr Meciar of the (Slovak) Movement for a Democratic Slovakia. While both Klaus and Meciar argued that they wanted to preserve the common state, their visions of such a Czech and Slovak state were so disparate that an agreement to differ was the only possibility. Most detailed studies of the break-up agree that if either of them , Meciar or Klaus, were to be identified as 'more guilty' in promoting the break-up, it would not be the Slovak nationali st Meci ar, but the Czech ' Thatcherite ' Klaus. 3 Ultimately, what sank the good ship Czechoslovakia was that the Czech captain, the ' A sli ghtly different version of thi s arti cle was originall y published in Norwegian in Nordisk @stforum, Yol . 15/2. 200 I , pp.5-16. 2 See. for example, Sharon Wolchik: 'The Pol itics of Ethnicity in Post-Communist Czechoslovakia', fast European Politics and Society, Vol. 8/ 1994. I , pp.153-188. 3 See, for example, Abby Innes: Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye. London. 200 I , particularly pp. 176-2 19. �SLOVAKIA 82 o ne that had a lw ays fo ught the hardest to keep it a fl oat, gave the order to sc uttle. The a im of thi s paper is to prov ide a n in sig ht into the deve lopme nt of the vi e ws on Slovaki a, Slovaks and Slova k nati o na li sm in th e Czec h Land s: fro m the ideas unde rl y in g the creati o n of Czech oslova ki a in 19 18 to those leading to the di sso luti o n of th at country in 1992. Natu ra ll y, the re is no c lear 'Czec h view ' of matters re lating to Sl ova ki a. Even if one di srega rds indi vidu a l o pini o ns and con ce ntrates o n what mi g ht be ca ll ed c ultura l ' heteroste reotypes' (v ie ws of the othe r), o ne w ill still find , fo r in stance, strong reg io na l differe nces w ithin the Czech La nd s. Any ana lys is of the ' Czec h view ' will thu s, eve n in the best case, be a probl e mati c prese ntati o n o f e lu sive collecti ve attitudes. Furthe rm ore, give n the absence of publi c opinio n surveys fo r most of the peri od studi ed , it is imposs ibl e to asce rta in ho w representati ve suc h attitudes were. The pi cture of Sl o va ki a presented here will be based to a large deg ree o n the attitudes ex pressed by leadin g po liti c ia ns, jo urn a li sts a nd o th er ' opini o n-fo rmers' in the Czec h Lands. For thi s reaso n the arti c le will present o pini o ns mo re typi ca l of Prague tha n. fo r in stance, Mo ra via, whe re co ntacts w ith Slovaks a nd Sl ovaki a we re more direct. Ho we ve r, as an earli er study , simil ar to thi s, argued , ' in Prag ue and in the C zec h Land s in genera l there are few opportunities to ga in a broad , direct impress ion of Slovaks, and the Czec h view of the Slovak is the refore the res ult of tra nsmitted , dedu ced impress io ns. ' 4 Whe n attitudes are acqui red ma inl y indirec tl y, opini o n-formers pl ay an important rol e. Gi ve n the limited scope of thi s arti c le, th e many theoreti cal and methodo log ica l pro bl e ms of suc h a stud y ca nno t be e xamined. Interestin g a nd impo rtant aspec ts, suc h as the inte raction between th e C zech and Slo va k he teroste reotypes o f eac h othe r, will al so have to be ig no red . Gi ven these limitati o ns, thi s articl e beco mes a mere in - 0 Petr Pi'fh oda : ' Slovac i ces kyma ocima'. Svedect vf, Vol. I 3/52. 1976, p.637. T he arti cle was publi shed under the pseudonym Jan Prfbram. �SLOVAKIA 83 troducti o n to the issue - an introducti o n th at mi g ht mo ti vate othe rs to make a c loser and broader examin atio n. Three aspects - three stages In her exce ll e nt stud y of the co nfli c t betwee n S lova ks a nd Czec hs, Caro l Ska lnik Leff a na lysed the develo pme nt of a se nse of mutu a l resentment betwee n the two gro ups. 5 A lmost througho ut Czechos lovak hi sto ry, there was persiste nt o ppos it ion fro m the Czec hdo min ated politi ca l leade rship , bo th de mocrati c a nd Co m m uni st, aga in st ful fi llin g pro mi ses of a uto no my for the Slova k part of the co untry. On the one hand , thi s fa ilure to live up to the pro m ises of 19 18, 1945 and , some argue, 1968, led to the deve lo pme nt of a sense of betraya l in Slovak ia. On the ot her ha nd, in creas ing numbers of Czec hs ex pressed a nger over what they perce ived as S lovak in gratitude - Slovak ungratefuln ess fo r a ll the ass istance Czec hs affo rded Slovaki a. Moreove r, the way Slovak po liti c ians, in the Czec h perception, ex pl o ited tim es of crisis in Czec hos lovaki a to pro mo te the ir narrow nati o na li st ai ms ca used pa rti c ul ar rese ntm ent. T h is deeprooted mutu al resentme nt was, Leff arg ued in 1987 , o ne of th e ma in reasons why the co nfl ic t betwee n the Czec hs a nd S lovaks wo ul d rema in an unresolved pro bl e m.6 She was soon to be proven right. If o ne examines the Czec h view of S lovaki a, Slovaks and S lovak natio na li sm mo re broad ly than Leff, it is poss ible to ide nti fy two furth er impo rta nt aspec ts of the Czec h view. The firs t mi g ht be des cribed as big-brothe rl y co nce rn . Ma ny Czec h inte ll ect ua ls, po li tic ians and other Slova ko ph iles we re ge nuine ly interes ted in and conce rned abo ut th e we lfare and fate of the S lova ks. T he ir e ngagement was we ll in tended and , espec ia ll y before 19 18 but a lso later, of g reat he lp to Slova k inte ll ec tu a l a nd c ultu ra l li fe. However, no t in fre qu e ntl y d id thi s bi g brothe rl y co nce rn deve lop into a peda nt ic a nd 5 Carol Skalni k Leff: Na tional Conf7ict in Czechoslovakia. Princeton . 1987 , particu larly pp. 148-177. 6 Ibid .. p. 282 . �84 SLOVAKI A arroga nt pate rn a li sm . Not surpri s in g ly, thi s was not favo urabl y received in Slovak ia. T he seco nd aspec t of the Czec h view of S lova ki a a nd the S lovaks is best described as a lac k of aware ness. Average know ledge of po liti ca l a nd eco no mi c conditi o ns in S lova ki a a nd S lova k c ul ture was never ex tensive in the Czech Lands. Partic ul arl y impo rtant was th e w id espread ig norance of the c ultu ra l, soc ia l and es pec iall y re li g iou s diffe re nces betwee n th e average Czec h and Slovak. Hi sto ri ca ll y, thi s un aware ness was to a large degree a res ult of th e qui ck and re lati ve ly pa inl ess acce ptance by the Czec hs of a Czechos lovak ide ntity and the offic ia l ideo logy of the ex iste nce of a Czec hos lovak nati o n. Thi s lack of kn o wl edge often led to in sensiti vity to wards Slovak di stin cti ve ness. Czech po liti c ia ns thu s occas io na ll y made po litica l dec isio ns that suited co nditio ns in the Czec h La nds w itho ut proper concern fo r the di ffe rent impac t the ir po lic ies mi g ht have on Slovaki a. C learl y, th ere is no c lear-c ut di stinc ti o n betwee n the three analytica l aspects of the Czec h view of Slovaks and Slovak nationa li sm. A ll three were present to a greate r o r lesser ex tent th rougho ut the hi story of co ntacts between the two gro ups, and they overl ap. To a certa in degree, however, th ey re prese nt stages throu g h whi c h ma in strea m o pini o n in th e Czec h La nd s went as time progressed . Bi gbrothe rl y co ncern was c learly the most important facet in th e pre19 18 pe ri od and in the ear ly years of the First Repu bli c. The inte rwar pe ri od is most stro ng ly marked by the Prague leadership ' s ig norance of the parti c ul ar soc ia l, econo mi c and re li g io us conditi o ns in Slovak ia. After the dra mati c eve nts in 1938 and 1939, wi th the Mu ni c h Acco rd, S lova k a uto no my a nd la te r ' ind e pe nde nce ' durin g Wo rl d W ar II , Czec h rese ntme nt towards the Slovaks, a nd espec iall y S lovak nat io na li sm, beco mes in creas in g ly impo rta nt. Fi fty years later, thi s animos ity was to dec ide the fa te of the co mm on Czec h and Sl ovak state. �SLOVAKIA 85 Big Brother In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the overarching aim of Czech political parties was to force Vienna to acce pt increased autonomy for ' the hi storic lands ' (basically today 's Czech Republic) within the Habsburg Monarchy. The idea of a wider Slav cooperation within the Empire, particularly with th e Slovaks, had ga in ed stre ngth among Czech intell ec tual s from about the 1830s. However, after the success of Hung aria n nat ion ali sm in th e 1867 Ausgleich, Czech leaders became concerned not to a ntagoni se their potential allies in Budapest. The result was that 'Czec h politicians, thou gh sy mpathetic toward [the Slovaks], were re luctant to inte rfere on the ir behalf in Hungary, for this would constitute a violation of Hungary 's state rights and mi ght jeo pardize the Czech program that was based on Bohemia's hi storic state ri ghts. ' 7 The lack of broader politica l cooperation did not preve nt an increasing activism in favour of the c ulturall y oppressed Slovaks, especially among Czech intellectua ls. Whil e Czech culture and society , and Czech nationalism, deve loped rapidly in line with the rapid social and economic deve lopm e nts in the re lativel y liberal Austrian part of the Monarch y, the s itu ation for Slovak culture a nd nationali sm was much more difficult. Particularly after 1867, the Hun garian authoriti es led a heavy-handed assimilation policy (Magyarisation) towards the minorities in Hungary . Many Czech intellectuals expressed a deep sy mpathy for the fate of what they saw as their Slovak brethren in Hun gary and the Slovak national dema nd s. 8 Especially 7 Victor S. Mamatey: 'The Estab li shment of the Republic'. in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomfr Luza (eds.): A History or the Czechosl ovak Republic: 19 18- 1948. Princeton . 1973 , pp. 3-38 (9). 8 Under th e leadership of L'.udovit Stur. Jozef Miloslav Hurban and Michal Miloslav Hodza, a Slovak National Council , formed in Vienna on 16 September I 848 , gave Slovak nationalism its first clear political expression in form of the declaration De mands or the Slovak Nation. Thirteen years later, this time inspired mainly by Stefan Marko Daxner and Jan Francisci, an even clearer national programme was formulated in the 186 1 Memorandum or the Slovak Nation. See Dusan Kovac: Dejiny Slovenska. Prague. 1998. pp. I 19- 13 1. �SLOVAKIA 86 from th e 1880s , ac ti ve support fo r Slovak nati onali st intell ec tu als increased. As H. Gordon Sk ill ing wrote: 'from the leighteen] eighties on, there graduall y deve loped, among Czech cultu ra l and pro fes sional persons, a substanti al concern for the Slovaks and a desire to promote Czech and Slovak cooperati on. ' 9 M ost importantl y, the Czech interest in Sl ovaki a took an organised fo rm w ith th e creati on of Ceskoslovanska j edn ota (Czec hos lav Unity), in 1895 . Thi s organi sati on offered fin ancial support to Slovak publi cati ons, grants for Slovak students in the Czech L ands and promoted Czech in vestments in Slovaki a. 1° Furthermore, Ceskoslovan- ska jedn ota sought to spread in form ati on about Sl ovaki a and the Slovaks among Czechs. Thi s w illingness to help the Sl ovaks did not di sappear with the es tabli shment of th e Czec hoslovak state in 19 18. With the gradu al ' liberation ' of what the new Czechos lovak authoriti es considered to be 'S lovaki a' (no admini strati ve boundari es ex isted), a new admini strati on had to be establi shed. The old admini strati ve apparatu s in Hungary consisted almost exc lusive ly of M agyars (ethni c Hungari ans) or ass imil ated intelligenti fro m other cultures. M ost of these refu sed to work for the new Czechos lovak state. As there were far from sufficient educated, patri oti c Sl ovaks to take over the admini strati on, officials had to be imported from the Czech L ands. The first major immi grati on ca me in the spring of 19 19, when ra il way and postal workers in Sl ovaki a stopped work ing to protest again st the new regime. A t th e urgent request of K ornel Stodola, the official res ponsibl e for ra il ways, ' several th ousand patri oti c Czech 9 H . Gordon Ski lling: T. G. Ma.r nryk : Against the Current. 1882- 19 14. London . 1994. p.68 (hereafter Ski ll ing: Mw;ary k). JU Mi ros lav Pek nfk: ·K profi lu slovensko-ceskych vztahov pred prvou sve tovou voj - nou'. in Mi lan Podrimavsky and Dusan Kovac (eds.) : Slovensko ,w zaciatku 20. storocia (Spo /ocnost: stat a narod v siiradniciach doby). Brati slava. 1999. pp.9 1-9 3: Mari e L. Neudorn: ' Slovakia in the Czech Press at the Turn of the ineteen th and Twe nti eth Ce ntu ries' . in John Morison (ed. ): The Czech and Slovak Experience: Selected Papers fro m the Fourth World Cong ress for So viet and East European Studies. Harrogille. I 990. London . 1992. pp. 38-6 I. �SLOVAKIA 87 vo lunteers hurri ed fro m Bohe mi a a nd Mo ra via and at a mo me nt 's notice.' 11 Late r, me mbe rs of othe r profess ion a l groups ca me to take up vacant pos iti o ns in S lovaki a: sc hoo lteac hers, uni versity lec ture rs, gend armes, tax collectors a nd bureaucrats of a ll so rts. It has bee n estimated th at 50-60 000 Czec hs went to Sl ovaki a in 19 19-20 and about as many aga in in the years up to 1930. 12 Whil e undo ubtedl y moti vated partl y by the ava il ability of jobs, the w illin g ness to uproot and move to still un safe S lova ki a o n sho rt no ti ce does suggest at least some idea li sm amo ng the vo lunteers. In 19 19-20 there was still armed confli ct betwee n Hun gari an and Czechoslo va k fo rces fo r control o ve r Slovaki a. Even fo r an un e mpl oyed bu reaucrat it could no t have been an easy dec isio n to move there. Few Czec hs can be seen to have do ne mo re to ra ise sy mpathy fo r the Sl o vaks a nd the ir fa te th an To mas Garri g ue Masaryk. Bo rn in Hodonfn , in the Slov acko reg io n of Morav ia, Masaryk ca me fro m a reg ion o n the bo rde r betwee n Czec h and Sl ova k lang uage and c ul ture. Hi s fa ther was Sl ova k and hi s moth er a Germ ani sed C zec h. 13 Gi ven thi s bac kg round , the idea of Czec h and Slovak politica l cooperation mu st have co me easil y to M asaryk. In hi s po litica l li fe , he became one of the ma in propo ne nts of suc h cooperati o n among Czec h politi c ians. As a pro fessor at the C harl es Uni ve rs ity in Prag ue, he was the ma in so urce of in spirati o n fo r a g roup of Slovak stu dents who wo uld later make up an impo rta nt part of the po liti ca l e lite in Czechoslova ki a. Th ese stude nts , best know n as hlasisti, afte r th e name of the ir j o urn a l Hlas (Vo ice), beca me the ma in supporte rs of the C zechos lovak idea in Slovaki a. 14 Yet, despite hi s ge nuin e co nce rn for the S lovaks, M asary k 's speec hes and arti c les at times ex pressed a pa te rn a li st and arroga nt 11 R. W. Seton-Watson : A History of the Czechs and Slovaks. London. 1943. p.323. 12 Jan M ec hyr: Slovensko v Ceskoslovensku : Slovensko-ceske vztahy I 9 I 8- 199 I. Prague. 199 1. p.27. 1 '- K arel Capek: Hovory s T. G. M asa1y kem. Prag ue. 1947. pp.8-9, I I 8. 14 Vl ad im ir Bakos: Questions of the Nation in Slo va k Thoug ht. Brati slava. 1999. pp.1 3-57 . �88 SLOVAKIA attitude toward s Slovak culture and hi story . For instance, Masaryk rej ected calls for a plebisc ite in Slovakia after World War l, arg uin g that 'one cannot allow such a vote there, since the Slovaks have bee n so oppressed that they have never had the opportunity to think politically and they would not know in whose hand s to put th eir fate. ' 15 Even c learer was hi s comment on rece nt negotiation s with Slovak leaders in a letter to hi s dau ghter Alice, in 1924: 'It is necessary to be patient with the Slovaks - they are children, or rather spoilt brats.' 16 Given the relatively low educational level and minimal political experience of most Slovaks in 1918 , claims about their immaturity clearly had some justification in the first years after the establi shme nt of Czechoslovakia. However, Czech politicians continued throu ghout the ex istence of the Czechoslovak state to explain the lack of understanding for their policies in Slovakia as a sign of the politica l immaturity of Slovaks. Commenting on relations between Czech and Slovak exiles during World War II, for instance, Edvard Be nes informed the British Foreign Mini stry , that ' the re existed unity among the Czechs while the Slovaks, he conceded, because of their political immaturity, reflected the divided opinions at home.' 17 Also in the post-Communist period , Slovak nationalism , and especially its more radical expressions, were presented as clear signs of the political immaturity of the Slovaks. 'Everyone has the right to live his nineteenth century,' became a common remark in sarcastic comments. 18 " Quoted in Robert 8. Pynsent: ' Masaryk 's ·' Path of Democracy". Or: The Democrati c National Socialist Ideal'. in K atarina A. M . K ocourek (ed.): T. G. Masaiyk 1850- /937. A Collection of Essays to Commemora te the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Thomas G. Masaryk . London, 2000, p. 35 -57 (41 ) (a specia l issue of Masa1yk Journal). 16 Quoted in Zbynek Zeman and Antonin Klimek: The Life of Eduard Benes: Cze- choslovakia in Peace and War. Oxford , 1997, p.5 I (herea fter Zeman and Klimek: Eduard Benes) . 17 Quoted ibid. pp.168-69. 18 Otto U lc: 'Czechoslovakia ' s Velvet Divorce ' , East European Quarterly, Vol.30/3, 1996, pp. 33 1-352 (340). �SLOVAKIA 89 From a Czech po int of view, the re lati o nship between the C zechs and Sl ovaks was c learl y a bi g broth er - littl e brother re lati o nship. The Czech partner in the Czec h-S lovak unio n was c learl y superior in po pulati o n (abo ut 2: I), and fo r most of the hi sto ry of the common state a lso in soc io-econo mic deve lo pment (for example, in education , car-ow nership , numbe r of te le pho nes , etc .). Czech nationa li sts could be proud of a ri c h nati o na l hi story a nd a hi g hl y deve lo ped Czec h c ulture, whil e Slovak nati o na li sts, for hi stori ca l reasons, had less to brag abo ut. The pi cture of Slovaki a as a less deve lo ped, less c ultured ' hinte rl and ' re ma in ed in Czec h po pul ar c ulture, parti c ul arl y in Prague, eve n after Slovak ia reac hed a basica ll y equ al leve l of soc io-econo mi c developme nt (abo ut I 980) . 19 As Petr Prfh oda, the pse udo nymo us Jan Prfbram, observed in the ex ile jo urna l Svedect vfin 1976: T he charac te ri sti c tra its of [the Czec h view of Slovaks a nd S lovaki a] have o ne co mmo n de no m inato r: an a lbe it unc lear, th o ug h multi face ted inferiority. Slovaks see m primiti ve, imm ature, emo ti o na ll y unrestra ined and uneducated [ ... ] The na ivety and lack of ex pe ri e nce amo ng those who come to the unknow n Czec h e nvironme nt is qui c kl y mi sunde rstood as stupidity. A Slovak is qu ite simpl y asc ribed a child 's menta li ty .20 Ignorance On the first page of its 27 Nove mber 1935 iss ue, in an artic le by the fa mo us Czec h jo urn a li st Ferdin and Pe routka, the influenti al journal Pl ftomnost (Presence) asked its readers: ' Do you know of anyone who unde rstand s Slova ki a?' 2 1 F ifty-fi ve years late r, Vac lav Have l' s ad visor Pe te r Hun c ik to ld the Ch a irm a n of th e Sl ova k N ati o na l 19 M il an K ucera and Zdenek Pavlfk: ·Czech and Slovak Demograph y ·, in Jiff M usil (ed.): The End or Czechoslovak ia. Budapest, 1995 , pp. 15-39. 20 Prfhoda: ·s Jovaci ceskyma oc ima' , p.643. 21 Ferd inand Peroutka: ·Nevfte o nekom , kdo rozu mf Slovensku?' , Prfto mnos t, Vo l. 12/47. 1935 , p. I . as reprod uced in Anton Ras la: Zastupova l som ceskoslovensky stat - vyznanie. Presov, 1999, p.268. �90 SLOVAKIA Co un c il , Fra nti se k Mi k losko, th at the Pres ide nt a lways had mi graines whe n he trave ll ed in Slovaki a. 22 Thi s was no t due to the c lim ate, but beca use Have l fe lt great unease abo ut not know ing Slovaki a. Such ac know ledge me nts refl ect the limited kno wl edge of Slovaki a and the Slovaks in the C zech Land s. As Prfhoda o bserved : ' Of all the ne ig hbo urin g nati o ns we know the S lovaks the leas t and ex press the least interest in the m and the ir nat io n. Admittedl y, we have been introdu ced th e best to th e Sl ova ks, but we kn ow th e leas t abo ut the m. ' 23 It is poss ible to ide nti fy severa l reasons fo r thi s lac k of know ledge and understanding. Partl y, it was a res ult of the somew hat confusin g nature of Slovak po liti cs . A lmost thro ugho ut the histo ry of Czechoslovaki a, the politica l e lite in Slova ki a was di vided o n the iss ue of inc reased se lf-governm e nt. Pe ri odi ca ll y, thi s inte rn a l stru gg le amon g S lovak po liti c ians over whethe r S lovaks did or did not want a uto no my mu st have been confu s in g eve n for th e most interested C zech o bserver. Gu stav Hu sak, fo r exampl e, contributed to muddlin g the picture of S lovak nati o na li sm : fro m be ing the prime propo ne nt o f th e federa li sati o n of Czec hos lova ki a befo re a nd durin g the 1968 ' Prag ue S prin g', Hu sak sudde nl y changed into a pro po ne nt of ce ntrali sati o n o nce he was in po wer in Prag ue. Thi s s ituation was exacerbated by the lac k of opportunity pro po nents of inc reased Sl ovak se lf- rul e had to prese nt thei r views to the Czech publi c. Genera ll y, the Slovak po liti c ians who most eas il y ga ined access to the pages of the Prag ue press were those in favo ur of centra li sed rul e. Furth e rmo re, the lac k of know ledge a nd unde rstand in g of S lovaki a a mo ng Czec hs was a res ult of a lac k of in terest in S lova k affa irs. Slovaki a was, at least in the in ter- war peri od, a po liti ca ll y less impo rta nt part of the country. Even if sy mpathy fo r the S lovaks had pl ayed a ro le in the suppo rt C zec h po li tic ians gave the pl ans fo r an inde pe nde nt Czec hos lova ki a, th e re we re o ther impo rt a nt reaso ns 22 Frantsiek M iklosko: Cas stretnutf. Brati slava, 1996, p.44. 23 Pffhoda: ·s tovaci ceskyma oci ma', p.643. �91 SLOVAKIA why they wanted a union . The main ' problem ' in Czech hi story has been the question of the Czechs ' position as a small nation surrounded by Germans. In Slovakia and the Slovaks, Czech leaders found a doub le solution to their problem. As a people, the Slovaks represented a biological reinforcement to the Czech , renamed the Czechoslovak, nation , making it the majority nation in the new state. They thus helped legitimate Czech(oslovak) domination of Czechoslovakia. (One should not forget that there were about 50 per cent more German than Slovak speakin g citizens (3 versus 2 million ) in interwar Czechoslovakia.) As a territory . Slovakia formed a bridge out of the German encirclement towards Ru ssia, which before 1917 was perceived as a rival of Germany and protector of the Slavs, and towards Czechoslovakia ·s all y Romania. For those perceivin g the state from such a ' Great-Czech ' point of view, Czechos lovakia was merely 'a reestabli shment of th e Czech state, reinforced by the Slovak territorie s, which were so weak and neglected that it was simply not necessary to see them as a separate entity. ' 24 The most important reason for the lack of knowl edge and understandin g of Slovakia among Czechs was , however. the uncritical acceptance of the Czechoslovak idea by most Czechs. In th e interwar yea rs, the Czechoslovak ideo logy was a pillar ce ntral to the very existence of the state. Even Masaryk argued th at ' there is no such thing as a Slovak nation 25 paganda ' . l- .. I; that is an invention of Hungarian pro- In Slovakia, on the other hand, the idea of one Czecho- slovak nation met res istance, [i]n the minds of th e Czechs, the notions of 'Czec h' and ' Czechoslovak' had blended into one by th e end of the Second World War at the latest. A significa nt conseq uence of thi s psycho- soci al operation was the removal of the Slovaks as a distinct ethni c entity from the Czech field of vis ion . The Slovaks eventuall y began to be perceived as H L.:.ubomfr Liptak: Slovensko v 20. storocf. Bratisl ava. 1998. 2nd edition. p. 128 . 15 Pynse nt : ' Masaryk ·s "Pa th of Democracy''". p.41. �92 SLOVAKIA part of the same nat iona l organi sm - almost as the advocates of the Czechoslovak concept would like to have it only thi s organi sm was not Czechoslovak but Czech.26 The net result of thi s process was that the social, c ultura l and reli g ious differences betwee n the Czechs and Slovaks became invisible to the majority of Czechs who never learned to kn ow the Slovaks and Slovakia directly. Thi s aga in led to the anticipatio n that Slovaks would have a s imil ar world view and would react in the sa me way as Czechs to events and po li c ies. The co nsequences of such anticipation varied over time. In the inter-war period , it was the insensitive attitude of the new regime towards the Catholic Church that was most important. Czech nation alism had the Hu ss ite peri od as its Golden Age; a Golden Age that was termin ated by the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 and the following violent co unterReform ation in Bohemia and , to a somew hat lesser degree, Morav ia. With the sec ulari sing impact of the industriali sation and urbani sati on of the Czech Lands in the nineteenth century, thi s gave Czech nationalism a not only sec ul ar, but often an openly anti-Catho lic edge. 27 Although the Protestant minority was proportionately bi gger in Slovakia than in the Czech Land s, there was no clear connection between anti-Catholici sm and nation ali sm even amon g Protestant Slovak nat ionali sts. On the contrary, one direction within the Slovak nati ona l move ment was closely co nnec ted to the Catholic fa ith . The Catholic national ists, led from the early twentieth century by Andrej Hlinka, were more skeptica l of cooperation with the Czec hs than were the hlasi sti. Man y Czech politicians and intellec tu a ls were, from the point of view of Slovak Catholics, dangerously radical liberals, if not atheist anti-Catholics. 28 When the declaration of Czechoslovak independence on 28 October 1918 was followed by a wave of 26 Zdenek Suda: ' Slovakia in Czech Nati onal Consciousness ' , in Musil (ed.): The End of Czechoslovakia, p.1 39- 155 ( 11 8) (hereafter Suda: ' Slovakia ' ). 27 R. W. Seton-Watson: A History of the Czechs and Slovaks. London, 1943, p.33 1. 28 Jan Rychl fk : Cesi a Slovaci ve 20. stoletf: Cesko-sl ovenske vztahy , 19 14- 1945. Bratislava, 1997, p.38 (hereafter Rychlfk: Cesi a Slo vac1). �SLOVAKIA 93 anti-Catholic gestures in the Czech Lands, the worst fears of the Slovak Catholics were reali sed . As lsmo Nurmi wrote: ' if the anti-Catholic mood was fashionable in the Czech lands, it was not so in Slovak ia and even less so when a numbe r of desecration s of reli g iou s c ult objects, churches, statues, crosses etc. were committed [ ... ] also in Slovakia [by] civil servants and particularly the Czechoslovak Army.' 29 The attempt to create a Czechoslovak national hi story and tradition with the Hussite era as pivotal was a clear sign of the lac k of understanding among Czech (and some Slovak) leade rs for the position of the Catholic Church in Slovakia. Masaryk 's official ' inclusion ' of Slovakia in the Hu ss ite tradition on the basis of Jan Ji skra 's ' crusade ' into Slovakia was not only hi storically dubiou s, but also, and not surpri sin gly, rejected by the Slovak Catholic clergy. As Suda wrote: ' To the Catholic majority of the Slovaks, among whom Catholicism had a very pronounced conservative tin ge typical of a pre-modern society , a common programme with the Czechs based on the traditions of the Protestant Reformation must have been almost an anathema. ' 30 After 1948, with the industriali sation of Slo vaki a unde r Communi st rul e, the religious differen ces be tween the Czech a nd Slovak parts of the common state were so mew hat diffused. Albeit a clear scepticism towards 'Czech liberali sm ' was visible in Christian democratic circles in Slovakia also after the collapse of Communism, another as pec t of the Czech ignorance of Slovak affairs beca me more important. As noted above , very many Czechs saw Czechoslovakia and the ' Czechoslovak nation ' as their state and nation , quite often interpreted as a Czech state a nd nation that included the Slovaks. After World War II , the rec reation of Czechoslovakia was acco mpanied by an official recog niti on by all political leaders, albeit some Czec h politicians were reluctant to do so, of the ex iste nce of two 29 lsmo Nurmi: Slo vakia - A Playground for Na tionalism and National Identity. 191 8- /920 : M anifestations of the Na tional Identity of Slovaks. Hel sinki. 1999. pp. 92-93. 30 Suda : ·Slovakia ' . p.11 5. �SLOVAKIA 94 fo un d in g nati ons in the co untry . Thi s princ ipl e was reaffirmed with the federa li sati on of 1968. Despite thi s offic ial recogniti on, there was ve ry littl e understanding a mong Czec hs of S lovak atte mpts to promote the ir separate ide ntity. Proba bl y the best kn ow n exa mpl e of S lova k po li tic ians ' dema nd s fo r 'v isibility and equ a lity ' fo r S lovaki a w ithin Czec hos lovaki a was the stru gg le fo r the name of the federati on in the sprin g of 1990 . Th e so-ca ll ed ' hy phe n-wa r ' sta rted w he n new ly e lec ted Pres ide nt Vac lav Have l suggested c ha ng in g the offic ial name of the Republic, the Czechoslovak Soc iali st Republic, by mere de leti on of the word ' Sociali st' . Whil e fo r mos t Czec hs thi s so luti on mu st have see med natural , it ran into oppos iti on in S lovaki a? A Sl ovak co unter-proposa l, the Czec ho-Slovak Re public, or just Czec ho-Slovaki a, a name that made Slovaki a more vi s ibl e to the world , was, however, not acceptabl e to most Czec h po liti c ians. The reasons given fo r thi s were that th e hyphe n had been used in the name of the Second Republi c (1938 -39, th at is, afte r the Muni c h Accord), a nd beca use ' C zec ho' (Ces k o) was not consi de red a pro pe r word in the Czech language. As one leading comme ntator compl ained in Lidove noviny: ' We in the Czec h Land s perce ive the insiste nt de mand of Sl ovaki a fo r a di vidin g line in the na me of the Re public as tac tl ess and coarse. " 2 Onl y afte r two mo nth s o f de bate in the three nati onal asse mbli es (the Czec h, Slova k and Federa l) and the mass medi a was a compromi se fo und : The Czec h and Slovak Federa l Republic. Have l quic kl y rea li sed th at he had made a mi stake by not consul ting politic ians fro m both the Czec h a nd Sl ova k Re pu b li cs before making hi s suggestion public. In a n atte mpt to rec ti fy the s itu ati on the hospitali sed Have l sent a le tter to the Federal Asse mbl y in February, where he stated : -' ' M il an Su tovec: Semi6za aka pol i tik um a/ebo "Pom lckov;-i vojna ". Brati slava, 1999, pp. 174- 196 (hereafter Sutovec: Pomlckova vojna). -' 2 Ji ff Hanak: 'Nespraved li ve a tedy neprijatelne' . Lidove Noviny. 28 M arch 1990. p.l. �SLOVAKIA 95 We a ll kn o w th at thi s hyphe n, whi ch fo r a ll Czechs seems ridi c ul o us, unnecessary and ugly, is mo re tha n just a hyphe n. In thi s hyphe n o ne ca n find severa l decades, if not ce ntu ries of th e hi sto ry of the S lo va k nati o n [ ... ] The Sl o vak nation is ri g htfull y tryin g to fin d its ide ntity, fo r reason s Czec hs probabl y do n ' t understa nd , eve n if they o ught to understand them.33 Resentment Exampl es of Czec h skepti c ism a nd resentment to ward s Slo vak nati o na li sm ca n be fo und as earl y as the middl e of th e nine teenth century. From the late 1840s, a majo rity of Slovak inte ll ectua ls ado pted the new codifi cati o n of th e S lovak lang uage , as publi shed in 1846 by Cudovft Stur, as a pl atfo rm fo r the Sl ovak national programme. This met w ith strong res istance fro m Czech and Slovak inte llectua ls promotin g Czec h-Sl ovak unity: they saw the Slovaki zed versio n of Hu ss ite Bible Czec h used by ma ny Slovak inte llec tua ls until then, as the clearest bo nd between Czechs and Slovaks.34 If in the inte rwar years Czec hos lovak leade rs cons idered Slovak nati o na li sm a pro bl e m, it was ma inl y after 1938 th at o pe nl y hostil e attitudes toward s it e merged. The ex pl oi tatio n by Slovak nati o na li sts of the weakness of the Czec hos lovak reg ime after the Munich cri sis to push trou gh thei r de mands fo r a uto no my, c ulmin atin g in the ac ceptance by the Slovak leade rs of German de mand s fo r Slovak indepe ndence in M arc h 1939, was conside red a stab in the back by most Czechs. 35 Durin g the Second World W ar, Ed vard Be nes, the C zechoslovak Pres ide nt-in -ex il e, was o ne of the sharpest cri tics of what he considered the Slovak be traya l. He was ' o bstin ate in defending the Czec hos lovak ca use: its betraya l by the Slovaks mattered more to him than the grow ing press ure from Moscow. He be li e ved th at the " As quoted in Sutovec: Pomlckova vojna, pp.269-27 1. 34 Sk illing: Masary k, p. 69. 35 Petr Pffhoda: ' M utual Perceptions in Czech-S lovak Relationshi ps ', in M usil (ed .): The End of Czechoslovakia. pp. 128- 138 ( 134 ). �96 SLOVAKIA Slovak heresy undermined the ve ry fo undations of the state, and Czechoslovaki sm was for him a part of the foundations. ' 36 Throu ghout the war, Benes and other Czech politi cians fought for the reestabli shment of the First (th at is, pre-Muni ch) Republi c. Most Slovak politici ans, howe ver, including former Czechos lovak Prime Minster Milan Hodza, con sidered thi s a less th an optim um solution. 37 Only reluctantly , given th e situation in Slovakia after the Slovak National Upri sing in the autum n of 1944, was Benes forced to accept a de facto asymmetric federalisation of post-war Czechoslo va ki a. However, despite previou s agreements, most importantl y the Kosice Government Programme, drafted by the first pro visional government after the country was partly -liberated from the East, the question of Slovaki a's position within the country cont inued to divide the Czec h and Slovak non-Comm uni st parties after the war. The willin gness of the Czec h democratic parti es to coo perate with the Communi sts in reducin g the powers of the Slovak nation al organs , cruci all y after the 1946 elections, contrib uted to undermining the position of the Democratic Party in Slo va ki a. The Czechos lovak Communi st Party was thu s abl e to exploit ' the anti -Sl ovak nati onali sm among Czech political parties and [ ... ] the isolated position of the Slovak democrats. ' 38 Thi s clearly weakened the democrats' ability to oppose the Communi sts' increasing political power in the country. During and after 1968 , the negati ve view of Slo vak nationali sm and Slovakia in the Czech L ands was reinforced. After the Soviet-led in vas ion on 2 1 Au gust 1968, 'sociali sm with a human face ' was gradually di smantled and replaced by ' norm ali sation '. Th e only maj or reform of the Prague Spring to survive was the dec ision to federalize Czechoslovakia. In Sl ovaki a thi s decision w as generall y interpreted 36 37 Zeman and Klimek : Eduard Bene{ p.203. Milan Hodza : Federarion in Cenrra l Europe: Renections and Reminiscences. London. 1942, pp.93-94. 38 Ji rf K ocian: ·Narodnf soc ialis te a slovenska otazka 1945- I 948 ". in Michal Bar- novsky (ed.) : Od dikratury k diktature. Brati slava. 1995 . pp.57-65 (6 I ). (hereafter K oc ian: ' Narodnf socialiste') �SLOVAKIA 97 as a more just organi sation of the common state. In the Czech Lands, however, many saw federalisation as a further example of the Slovak nationali sts' skill in drawing advantages from Czechoslovakia's mi sfortune. The fact th at the new party leade r and late r Pres ident of Czechoslovakia, Gu stav Hu sak, was Slovak, also contributed to the negative picture of Slovakia and Slovaks. As Petr Pithart wrote: the Czech public was di sappointed, even di sg usted, by the Slovaks ' ex peri e nce of havin g ga ined sati sfac tion with federalization; at best, it was seen as foolishness a nd at worst, as blind se lfi shness and eve n betrayal. ( ... ) in the Czec h Lands there was an increasing ly obvious di sg ust for the regime and for the Slovaks, as the ones through whom normali zation was allegedly introduced and carried out. 39 A s ign of the growing irritation with and resentment toward s Slovak nationa li sm and Slovaks in ge ne ral in the Czech Lands, was the increas in g ly popul a r de mand that Czech taxpayers should not have to subsidi se the ungrateful Slovaks. Already in 1933 Czechoslovak Prime Min ster Ja n Malypete r had rejected the demand for Slovak autonomy on the grounds that Slovakia would not be able to pay its way . In the Czech press, headlines read along the lines: ' We are paying for Slovakia ' .40 Thi s be lief that the Czechs were subsidis in g th e Slovaks was observed also by Prfhoda forty-three years late r: ' In the Czech Lands the view of Slovak parasiti sm [parazitismu s] is common and it is formulated more or less like thi s: we Czechs are payin g for the Slovaks. ' 41 The Czechoslovak Communist Party was committed to so lvin g the probl e m of Slovak nation alism, which it interpreted as a mainly eco nomic iss ue , through equ ali zat ion of the standard of li ving bet- 39 Petr Pithart: ' Towards a Shared Freedom ' , in Mu sil (ed.): Th e End of Czechoslovakia.pp.20 1-222 (206). 40 Vi ctor S. Mamatey: ' The Development of Czechoslovak Democ racy ', in Mamatey and Luza (eds.) : A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, pp.99-166 ( 15 1). 41 Prfhoda: "S lovac i ces kyma ocima', p.647. �SLOVAKIA 98 wee n the Czech and Slovak parts of the co unty. Economic transfers, parti cul arly through a higher level of in vestment in Sl ovaki a were, therefore, considered important. They continued even during the di ffic ult years in the 1970s and 1980s, but were kept secret, probabl y to avoid un favo urable reactions in the Czech L ands. After the co llapse of Communi sm, opposition to w hat was popularl y referred to as the Czech ' money pipeline' (p enezovod) to Slovak ia was quickl y made into a politi cal demand. In the first formal ro und of negoti ation s on th e future of the fe derati on after the co ll apse of Communi sm, in Lnare in April 1990, the Czech delegati on demanded a halt to Czec h subsidies to Slovaki a.42 From Czech to Czechoslovak nationalism and back As noted earlier, the Czechos lov ak directi on within Czech poli ti cs was by no means dominant pri or to W orld W ar I. Czec h nationali sts concentrated mainl y on defending and enhancing Czech autonomy w ithin th e Habsburg M onarchy. With the success of the Czec hoslovak idea in the Entente capitals in 19 17-1 8, however, most Czec h nati onali sts quite quickl y became convinced Czec hos lovak nati onali sts; Czech nati onali sm was ex panded to include th e Sl ovaks, the Czec hs' ' little bro ther ' in Hungary. Cultura ll y and economi ca ll y wea k, the Slovaks posed no threat to either Czech culture or politica l and economic dominati on of the new state. A nd after all , as M asaryk himse lf pointed out, the Slovaks were merely Czec hs w ith a slightly di fferent hi story. Th e attachment o f Czech politi cians to the Czech os lovak idea ca n be clearl y see n after W orld W ar II. In 1968 , a document supposedly written by members of th e (Czec h) Nation al Soc iali st Party 4 in I 946 was pub I ished in the Slova k press . ' Its authors argued th at the bes t way to so lve the problem of Slovak nati onalism was fo rced ass imil ati on of the Sl ovaks into good Czec hoslovaks. Whil e seri ous • • 2 BBC Summa1y of World Broadcast. EE/0738 B/2. 13 Apri I 1990. 3 T he document was first publi shed in Vac lav Kral: Cestou k tinoru, Prague, I 956, but attrac ted relati ve ly little attention until reproduced in the mass medi a in 1968. �99 SLOVAKIA doubts exist as to th e authenticity of thi s ' Memorandum on Slovakia' , most hi storian s seem to agree that the idea of turnin g the Slovaks into good Czechoslovaks was not alien to certain leading Czech politicians at the time. 44 The reaction to what was perceived as the Slovak betraya l of 1938-39 was increased Czechoslovak nationali sm. However, during the Communist period , a nd particul ar ly after 1968 , Czech nationalism gradually gained supporters in the Czech Lands . As Prfhoda wrote in 1976: 'I am not sure how thin gs are in Slovakia, but among Czechs the concept of a com mon state is being re-eva luated these days . I have eve n heard : let the Ru ss ia ns make Slovakia into a union republic or something and leave us in peace!' 45 Obviou sly , ne ither Czech nor Slovak separat ism was politically acceptable durin g Communist rul e. After th e 'Velvet Revo lution' , however, influe ntial vo ices soo n e merged in the Czech Land s questioning the union with the Slovaks. As earl y as the beginning of May 1990, in the aftermath of the hyphe n war, the Czech writer Ludvfk Vaculfk, the author of the 'Two thousand words' manifesto in 1968, wrote a sharpl y worded articl e in Litenimf noviny. 46 ' W e Czechs have a great debt to the Slovaks,' Yaculfk argued. This debt was due to the fact that the Czechs had happily made Slovakia ' theirs' without takin g into account what it meant to be Slovak. Through their behaviour, however, the Slovaks had made it difficult for the Czechs to appreciate thi s debt. Th e Czechs had g ive n the Slovaks the ir industry and inte lli gentsia, so mething that had only caused the Slovaks to ' until thi s day complain about the qua lity of these supplies'. The Czechs had give n the Slovaks a way out of defeat as a separate state during World War II. Even Communism , brou g ht to Slovakia by Czechs afte r the war, had g ive n the Slovaks more in material terms than it had to the Czechs. When the Czechs then tri ed to ease th e die- 44 See Koc ian: ' Narodnf soc iali ste' . passim: Rychlfk: Ce.si II Slo vaci. pp. 54-55: ·Na okraj diskusie: 0 tzv. Slovenskom memoranda Cs. narodne sociali stickej strany ', Nase snahy . Vol. I 9/2. 1983. p. 9. 45 Prfhoda: ' Slovaci ceskyma ocima ' . p.653. 41 ' Ludvik Vaculfk: ' Nase slovenska otazk a', Litenimf noviny. Vol.1 /5, 1990. p.2. �SLOVAK IA 100 tatorship during 1968, the Slovaks saw thi s as a Czech matter and instead forced through 'autonomy '. For this they escaped with lighter puni shment during the era of ' normali sation .' Now aga in , after the col lapse of Communism, when Czechs were trying th eir utmost finally to defeat the dictatorial regime , the Slovaks were 'coming with their prestige demands'. ' Do we need thi s?' he asks rhetorically and then concludes : We have found ourse lves with a thankless task in th e fate of the Slo vaks, and I think th at we should end it without se lf-pity - more with a smil e into th e mirror. [ ... l Why should the Slovaks ha ve to force out of us, centimetre by ce ntimetre, somethin g that they can have in one go? By separating from the Slovaks , purely of our ow n volition , we " lose" - judging from experience to date - economic losses. Politicall y we lose th e Hungarian and Ruth ene problem s. We put another border between us and th e Soviet Union. 47 At th e time of hi s writ ing, Yaculfk ' s recommendation th at th e Czec hs should dispense with the Slovaks accorded with neither public nor political opinion in the Czech Republic. At that stage not even the most radical Czech politician s were promoting divi sion of the state. Gradually , however, the need to resolve the probl em of th e common state w ith the Slovaks once and for all became pressing. As Yaculfk observed in December of 1990: 'Public opinion poll s show that 75 percent of Czechs are said to favour a common state with the Slovaks. Had one, on the other hand , asked if we should let the Slovaks go, just as many would probabl y have answered " yes" to thi s as we ll. ' 48 In Slovakia, the question of the statu s of the Slovak Republic within the Czech and Slovak state became a centra l political topic . 47 Ibid. The double quotation marks arou nd -- Jose" were added to make th e irony more vi sible. The original tex t is : ' Od loucenfm od Slovaku. jez j e vyhradne v nasf vu li. ztratfme - souzeno dosavadnf zkusenostf - ekonomicke ztraty. • 48 Ludvik Yaculfk: ' M ec iar mozna odejde' . Litenimf noviny . Vol. I /39. I 990. p.2. �SLOVAKIA 101 Sl ovak politicians began to co mpete over w ho co uld present a programme th at would benefit and pro mote Slovaki a the most. Thi s led to a gradual radi ca li sati on of Slovak demands in the negoti ation s on the future of the federati on. Such radica li sati on in turn provoked a voc iferou s reaction in the Czech L ands. Th e influenti al Czec h j ournal R esp ekt refl ec ted th e growin g antagoni sm toward s Sl ovaki a in th e Czec h L ands. Headlines from the Spring of 1992 such as ' The supreme Slovak irrespon sibility' ( 17 Febru ary, p.2), ' B alkan model on the hori zo n: how long w ill the Czech-Slovak statu s quo las t?" (24 Febru ary, p.2) and 'A bsurd parliamentary drama: who saves Slovak ia from sovereignty?' (6 A pril , p.2) ev ince an increas ingly criti ca l view o f Sl ovak politi cs . In the issue th at co incided with the electi ons of 8 June, the criticism ca me to its logica l co nclu sion . Peter Schutz, Respekt 's (Sl ovak-Hungari an) correspondent in Slovak ia, wrote in the arti cle ' Slovaki a adheres to nati onal soc iali sm': ' The shameful result of thi s electi on formul ated onl y one alternati ve - either lMec iar 's party] HZDS disintegrates, or the CSFR. ' 49 Vl adimfr Ml ynar ex pressed the same message in the subtitle o f hi s arti cle in the same issue: 'A lone into Euro pe or together into the Balkans'. 50 Parti cul arl y the politi ca l ri ght in th e Czec h Lands increasingly saw Slovaki a as an obstac le on the road ' back ' to Europe. After the 1990 elec ti ons, th e ri ght had graduall y strengthened its pos ition among the Czech elec torate. In Slovaki a, on the other hand , it was the more reform- scepti ca l and patri oti c parti es on the politica l left that had enjoyed greater success. Gi ven th e spec ial minority veto of both the Czec h and Slovak groups of deputies in th e House of Nati ons of the Federal Assembl y, a left-patri otic maj ority in Slovaki a was a worry ing prospec t for the Czech proponents of radi ca l reform s. A month before th e parliam entary election s in June 1992, V aclav 09 Peter Sch utz: ·s tovensko sa prihlasilo k narodnemu socializmu - Pos lcdne zvone- nie pre federaciu ·, Respekt. 8- 14 June 1992, p.2. ~ V lad imir Ml ynar: ·v Cechac h tes ne vftezstvf prav ice - lecne na Balka n·. Respekt, 8- 14 June 1992. p.3. Sarni do Evropy nebo spo- �102 SLOVA KI A Kl aus made it c lear that if a fu ncti o na l federa ti o n was not poss ible after the e lect io ns, he and his partners were ' ready to create a mec hani sm for a q uick, c ivili sed and prob le m-free div isio n of the state. ' 51 Conclusion By the late summ er of 1992, th e do min ant view of Slovak ia in C zec h po liti cs had, in a se nse, co me full c irc le to co inc ide with the views th at preva il ed pri o r to W o rl d W ar I. Fro m hav ing bee n a strateg ica ll y less attrac ti ve partne r in the seco nd ha lf of the nineteenth ce ntury, Sl ovaki a beca me a strateg ic asset in the firs t ha lf of th e twenti eth . Afte r W o rld W ar II , however, S lovak ia a nd th e S lovaks gradu a ll y lost the ir strateg ic impo rt a nce for the Czec hs. The large Ge rm an mino rity in the Czec h Lands was ex pe ll ed in the firs t years after the war, taking the edge off the Ge rman threat. Furthermore, fo r C zec h democ rats, the Communi st co up of Febru ary 194 8 put an e nd to a ll ideas of seekin g sec urity a nd integrati o n in the East, th ro ugh Slova ki a. In stead , they now turn ed exc lu sive ly to the West: to th e US , NATO . the E uro pean Co mmunity and eve n the o ld ri va l, Ge rmany. At the th resho ld of the twenty- first ce ntury, Slova ki a, w ith its c umbe rso me soc ia li st eco no my, its po puli st nati o na li sm , and its pro bl e ms with Hun ga ry over the Hungari an mino rity in Slovaki a and the G abc fk ovo- Nagy maros da m projec t o n the Da nube, aga in became a strateg ic burden. The Czec hos lovak traditi o n and adhe re nce to the Czec hos lovak idea were still strong in the Czec h Lands. Tho ugh the Czec h politica l ri ght had the suppo rt of gro ups suc h as The Czec h Initi ati ve, whic h gathered aro und 50,000 sig natures in favo ur of Czec h independe nce in fo ur days in June 1992 in Prague, most Czec hs were still in favo ur of a co mm o n state w ith the Slova ks. 52 Thu s Kl aus and hi s partners co uld not push throug h a break-up w itho ut so me effort. Co nsequ ent ly, as Abby Innes wrote: ' Kl a us preferred a strategy o f shi ftin g res- 51 As cited in Marian Lesko: Meciar a meciarizm us: polit ik bez .~kruptif" politika bez zabran. Bratis lava. 1997, p.78. 52 BBC Summary of World Broadcast. EE/ 14 12 B/5. 20 June I 992. �SLOVAKIA 103 po ns ibility fo r the confli c t e ntire ly onto the Slovak side and c la imed th at it was now "ev ide nt th at votes fo r the HZ DS are votes fo r th e di visio n o f the state". ' 53 Give n th at th e do min a nt Czec h im age of S lovak nati o na li sm, a nd of Vl adim ir Mec iar, was negative, Kl aus was lucky in hav in g hi s tas k made eas ier. Hi s ca mpa ig n was furth er ass isted by th e oppos iti o n of the leading S lova k parti es to th e ree lection of Pres ide nt Vac lav Have l in Jul y. Hav ing fa il ed to be ree lec te d , Have l res ig ned pre m ature ly whe n th e Slo va k Nation a l Co unc il passed a large ly sy mbo li c dec larati o n of sovere ig nty o n 17 Jul y. Have l, prev io us ly o ne of the leading pro po ne nts of the co mmo n state, now le nt hi s support to a di visio n of the state. 54 The first day of Janu ary 1993 saw the creati o n of two new states: the C zec h Re publi c and the Sl ovak Re publi c. Of the two, the Czec h Republi c c learl y adopted the mantl e of successor to Czec hos lovaki a. T he new Czec h state had the sa me capita l, the same fl ag (in breac h o f an earli e r agree me nt) and the sa me pres ide nt. C zec h co mpani es and even po liti ca l parties fo r a lo ng time ke pt the word 'Czechos lovak ' in the ir na me (for exampl e, the S in CSA, Czec h[os lovak] A irlin es). Mos t things re ma ined as they had bee n, exce pt w ith o ut the Slovaks. As Vaculfk had po inted o ut so po ig nantl y in 1990: ' Whe n th e "Federati o n" started crac king in its fo undatio n, I got the idea fo r a new , in spi rin g ly o ptimi sti c so luti o n: whe n S lov aki a breaks away there w ill be no o ne to preve nt us fro m ca lling o ur state Czec hos lovak ia ... ' 55 " A bby Innes: ' T he Breakup of Czechos lovak ia: T he Impact of Part y Deve lopment on the Separation of the State· . Eust European Politics and Society. Vol. I I /3. 1997. pp. 393-435 (424). '" I va n L amper and V ladimir Ml ynar: ·skoncila ceskoslovenska statnost: Rozhovor s pos lednfm prezi dentem CSFR Vac lave m Havlem ' . Respekt. 20-27 July 1992. p.4. " Vac ulfk: ' Meciar mofoa odejde'. p.2 . � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2005, Vol. 38 Description An account of the resource Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 81 SLOVAKIA From Bratr nas to At'jdou Slovakia, the Slovaks and Slovak Nationalism seen from Prague 1 Paa! Sigurd Hilde The Velvet Divorce between the Czech and Slovak parts of the Czech and Slovak Federal Repub lic (CSFR) was a political undertaking. All public opinion polls taken in the period 1990-1992 showed a clear majority in favour of a common state among both Slovaks and Czechs.2 The decision to divide the country came as a result of a compromise between two political parties - or more specifically, between two politicians: Vaclav Klaus of the (Czech) Civic Democratic Party and Vladimfr Meciar of the (Slovak) Movement for a Democratic Slovakia. While both Klaus and Meciar argued that they wanted to preserve the common state, their visions of such a Czech and Slovak state were so disparate that an agreement to differ was the only possibility. Most detailed studies of the break-up agree that if either of them , Meciar or Klaus, were to be identified as 'more guilty' in promoting the break-up, it would not be the Slovak nationali st Meci ar, but the Czech ' Thatcherite ' Klaus. 3 Ultimately, what sank the good ship Czechoslovakia was that the Czech captain, the ' A sli ghtly different version of thi s arti cle was originall y published in Norwegian in Nordisk @stforum, Yol . 15/2. 200 I , pp.5-16. 2 See. for example, Sharon Wolchik: 'The Pol itics of Ethnicity in Post-Communist Czechoslovakia', fast European Politics and Society, Vol. 8/ 1994. I , pp.153-188. 3 See, for example, Abby Innes: Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye. London. 200 I , particularly pp. 176-2 19. SLOVAKIA 82 o ne that had a lw ays fo ught the hardest to keep it a fl oat, gave the order to sc uttle. The a im of thi s paper is to prov ide a n in sig ht into the deve lopme nt of the vi e ws on Slovaki a, Slovaks and Slova k nati o na li sm in th e Czec h Land s: fro m the ideas unde rl y in g the creati o n of Czech oslova ki a in 19 18 to those leading to the di sso luti o n of th at country in 1992. Natu ra ll y, the re is no c lear 'Czec h view ' of matters re lating to Sl ova ki a. Even if one di srega rds indi vidu a l o pini o ns and con ce ntrates o n what mi g ht be ca ll ed c ultura l ' heteroste reotypes' (v ie ws of the othe r), o ne w ill still find , fo r in stance, strong reg io na l differe nces w ithin the Czech La nd s. Any ana lys is of the ' Czec h view ' will thu s, eve n in the best case, be a probl e mati c prese ntati o n o f e lu sive collecti ve attitudes. Furthe rm ore, give n the absence of publi c opinio n surveys fo r most of the peri od studi ed , it is imposs ibl e to asce rta in ho w representati ve suc h attitudes were. The pi cture of Sl o va ki a presented here will be based to a large deg ree o n the attitudes ex pressed by leadin g po liti c ia ns, jo urn a li sts a nd o th er ' opini o n-fo rmers' in the Czec h Lands. For thi s reaso n the arti c le will present o pini o ns mo re typi ca l of Prague tha n. fo r in stance, Mo ra via, whe re co ntacts w ith Slovaks a nd Sl ovaki a we re more direct. Ho we ve r, as an earli er study , simil ar to thi s, argued , ' in Prag ue and in the C zec h Land s in genera l there are few opportunities to ga in a broad , direct impress ion of Slovaks, and the Czec h view of the Slovak is the refore the res ult of tra nsmitted , dedu ced impress io ns. ' 4 Whe n attitudes are acqui red ma inl y indirec tl y, opini o n-formers pl ay an important rol e. Gi ve n the limited scope of thi s arti c le, th e many theoreti cal and methodo log ica l pro bl e ms of suc h a stud y ca nno t be e xamined. Interestin g a nd impo rtant aspec ts, suc h as the inte raction between th e C zech and Slo va k he teroste reotypes o f eac h othe r, will al so have to be ig no red . Gi ven these limitati o ns, thi s articl e beco mes a mere in - 0 Petr Pi'fh oda : ' Slovac i ces kyma ocima'. Svedect vf, Vol. I 3/52. 1976, p.637. T he arti cle was publi shed under the pseudonym Jan Prfbram. SLOVAKIA 83 troducti o n to the issue - an introducti o n th at mi g ht mo ti vate othe rs to make a c loser and broader examin atio n. Three aspects - three stages In her exce ll e nt stud y of the co nfli c t betwee n S lova ks a nd Czec hs, Caro l Ska lnik Leff a na lysed the develo pme nt of a se nse of mutu a l resentment betwee n the two gro ups. 5 A lmost througho ut Czechos lovak hi sto ry, there was persiste nt o ppos it ion fro m the Czec hdo min ated politi ca l leade rship , bo th de mocrati c a nd Co m m uni st, aga in st ful fi llin g pro mi ses of a uto no my for the Slova k part of the co untry. On the one hand , thi s fa ilure to live up to the pro m ises of 19 18, 1945 and , some argue, 1968, led to the deve lo pme nt of a sense of betraya l in Slovak ia. On the ot her ha nd, in creas ing numbers of Czec hs ex pressed a nger over what they perce ived as S lovak in gratitude - Slovak ungratefuln ess fo r a ll the ass istance Czec hs affo rded Slovaki a. Moreove r, the way Slovak po liti c ians, in the Czec h perception, ex pl o ited tim es of crisis in Czec hos lovaki a to pro mo te the ir narrow nati o na li st ai ms ca used pa rti c ul ar rese ntm ent. T h is deeprooted mutu al resentme nt was, Leff arg ued in 1987 , o ne of th e ma in reasons why the co nfl ic t betwee n the Czec hs a nd S lovaks wo ul d rema in an unresolved pro bl e m.6 She was soon to be proven right. If o ne examines the Czec h view of S lovaki a, Slovaks and S lovak natio na li sm mo re broad ly than Leff, it is poss ible to ide nti fy two furth er impo rta nt aspec ts of the Czec h view. The firs t mi g ht be des cribed as big-brothe rl y co nce rn . Ma ny Czec h inte ll ect ua ls, po li tic ians and other Slova ko ph iles we re ge nuine ly interes ted in and conce rned abo ut th e we lfare and fate of the S lova ks. T he ir e ngagement was we ll in tended and , espec ia ll y before 19 18 but a lso later, of g reat he lp to Slova k inte ll ec tu a l a nd c ultu ra l li fe. However, no t in fre qu e ntl y d id thi s bi g brothe rl y co nce rn deve lop into a peda nt ic a nd 5 Carol Skalni k Leff: Na tional Conf7ict in Czechoslovakia. Princeton . 1987 , particu larly pp. 148-177. 6 Ibid .. p. 282 . 84 SLOVAKI A arroga nt pate rn a li sm . Not surpri s in g ly, thi s was not favo urabl y received in Slovak ia. T he seco nd aspec t of the Czec h view of S lova ki a a nd the S lovaks is best described as a lac k of aware ness. Average know ledge of po liti ca l a nd eco no mi c conditi o ns in S lova ki a a nd S lova k c ul ture was never ex tensive in the Czech Lands. Partic ul arl y impo rtant was th e w id espread ig norance of the c ultu ra l, soc ia l and es pec iall y re li g iou s diffe re nces betwee n th e average Czec h and Slovak. Hi sto ri ca ll y, thi s un aware ness was to a large degree a res ult of th e qui ck and re lati ve ly pa inl ess acce ptance by the Czec hs of a Czechos lovak ide ntity and the offic ia l ideo logy of the ex iste nce of a Czec hos lovak nati o n. Thi s lack of kn o wl edge often led to in sensiti vity to wards Slovak di stin cti ve ness. Czech po liti c ia ns thu s occas io na ll y made po litica l dec isio ns that suited co nditio ns in the Czec h La nds w itho ut proper concern fo r the di ffe rent impac t the ir po lic ies mi g ht have on Slovaki a. C learl y, th ere is no c lear-c ut di stinc ti o n betwee n the three analytica l aspects of the Czec h view of Slovaks and Slovak nationa li sm. A ll three were present to a greate r o r lesser ex tent th rougho ut the hi story of co ntacts between the two gro ups, and they overl ap. To a certa in degree, however, th ey re prese nt stages throu g h whi c h ma in strea m o pini o n in th e Czec h La nd s went as time progressed . Bi gbrothe rl y co ncern was c learly the most important facet in th e pre19 18 pe ri od and in the ear ly years of the First Repu bli c. The inte rwar pe ri od is most stro ng ly marked by the Prague leadership ' s ig norance of the parti c ul ar soc ia l, econo mi c and re li g io us conditi o ns in Slovak ia. After the dra mati c eve nts in 1938 and 1939, wi th the Mu ni c h Acco rd, S lova k a uto no my a nd la te r ' ind e pe nde nce ' durin g Wo rl d W ar II , Czec h rese ntme nt towards the Slovaks, a nd espec iall y S lovak nat io na li sm, beco mes in creas in g ly impo rta nt. Fi fty years later, thi s animos ity was to dec ide the fa te of the co mm on Czec h and Sl ovak state. SLOVAKIA 85 Big Brother In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the overarching aim of Czech political parties was to force Vienna to acce pt increased autonomy for ' the hi storic lands ' (basically today 's Czech Republic) within the Habsburg Monarchy. The idea of a wider Slav cooperation within the Empire, particularly with th e Slovaks, had ga in ed stre ngth among Czech intell ec tual s from about the 1830s. However, after the success of Hung aria n nat ion ali sm in th e 1867 Ausgleich, Czech leaders became concerned not to a ntagoni se their potential allies in Budapest. The result was that 'Czec h politicians, thou gh sy mpathetic toward [the Slovaks], were re luctant to inte rfere on the ir behalf in Hungary, for this would constitute a violation of Hungary 's state rights and mi ght jeo pardize the Czech program that was based on Bohemia's hi storic state ri ghts. ' 7 The lack of broader politica l cooperation did not preve nt an increasing activism in favour of the c ulturall y oppressed Slovaks, especially among Czech intellectua ls. Whil e Czech culture and society , and Czech nationalism, deve loped rapidly in line with the rapid social and economic deve lopm e nts in the re lativel y liberal Austrian part of the Monarch y, the s itu ation for Slovak culture a nd nationali sm was much more difficult. Particularly after 1867, the Hun garian authoriti es led a heavy-handed assimilation policy (Magyarisation) towards the minorities in Hungary . Many Czech intellectuals expressed a deep sy mpathy for the fate of what they saw as their Slovak brethren in Hun gary and the Slovak national dema nd s. 8 Especially 7 Victor S. Mamatey: 'The Estab li shment of the Republic'. in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomfr Luza (eds.): A History or the Czechosl ovak Republic: 19 18- 1948. Princeton . 1973 , pp. 3-38 (9). 8 Under th e leadership of L'.udovit Stur. Jozef Miloslav Hurban and Michal Miloslav Hodza, a Slovak National Council , formed in Vienna on 16 September I 848 , gave Slovak nationalism its first clear political expression in form of the declaration De mands or the Slovak Nation. Thirteen years later, this time inspired mainly by Stefan Marko Daxner and Jan Francisci, an even clearer national programme was formulated in the 186 1 Memorandum or the Slovak Nation. See Dusan Kovac: Dejiny Slovenska. Prague. 1998. pp. I 19- 13 1. SLOVAKIA 86 from th e 1880s , ac ti ve support fo r Slovak nati onali st intell ec tu als increased. As H. Gordon Sk ill ing wrote: 'from the leighteen] eighties on, there graduall y deve loped, among Czech cultu ra l and pro fes sional persons, a substanti al concern for the Slovaks and a desire to promote Czech and Slovak cooperati on. ' 9 M ost importantl y, the Czech interest in Sl ovaki a took an organised fo rm w ith th e creati on of Ceskoslovanska j edn ota (Czec hos lav Unity), in 1895 . Thi s organi sati on offered fin ancial support to Slovak publi cati ons, grants for Slovak students in the Czech L ands and promoted Czech in vestments in Slovaki a. 1° Furthermore, Ceskoslovan- ska jedn ota sought to spread in form ati on about Sl ovaki a and the Slovaks among Czechs. Thi s w illingness to help the Sl ovaks did not di sappear with the es tabli shment of th e Czec hoslovak state in 19 18. With the gradu al ' liberation ' of what the new Czechos lovak authoriti es considered to be 'S lovaki a' (no admini strati ve boundari es ex isted), a new admini strati on had to be establi shed. The old admini strati ve apparatu s in Hungary consisted almost exc lusive ly of M agyars (ethni c Hungari ans) or ass imil ated intelligenti fro m other cultures. M ost of these refu sed to work for the new Czechos lovak state. As there were far from sufficient educated, patri oti c Sl ovaks to take over the admini strati on, officials had to be imported from the Czech L ands. The first major immi grati on ca me in the spring of 19 19, when ra il way and postal workers in Sl ovaki a stopped work ing to protest again st the new regime. A t th e urgent request of K ornel Stodola, the official res ponsibl e for ra il ways, ' several th ousand patri oti c Czech 9 H . Gordon Ski lling: T. G. Ma.r nryk : Against the Current. 1882- 19 14. London . 1994. p.68 (hereafter Ski ll ing: Mw;ary k). JU Mi ros lav Pek nfk: ·K profi lu slovensko-ceskych vztahov pred prvou sve tovou voj - nou'. in Mi lan Podrimavsky and Dusan Kovac (eds.) : Slovensko ,w zaciatku 20. storocia (Spo /ocnost: stat a narod v siiradniciach doby). Brati slava. 1999. pp.9 1-9 3: Mari e L. Neudorn: ' Slovakia in the Czech Press at the Turn of the ineteen th and Twe nti eth Ce ntu ries' . in John Morison (ed. ): The Czech and Slovak Experience: Selected Papers fro m the Fourth World Cong ress for So viet and East European Studies. Harrogille. I 990. London . 1992. pp. 38-6 I. SLOVAKIA 87 vo lunteers hurri ed fro m Bohe mi a a nd Mo ra via and at a mo me nt 's notice.' 11 Late r, me mbe rs of othe r profess ion a l groups ca me to take up vacant pos iti o ns in S lovaki a: sc hoo lteac hers, uni versity lec ture rs, gend armes, tax collectors a nd bureaucrats of a ll so rts. It has bee n estimated th at 50-60 000 Czec hs went to Sl ovaki a in 19 19-20 and about as many aga in in the years up to 1930. 12 Whil e undo ubtedl y moti vated partl y by the ava il ability of jobs, the w illin g ness to uproot and move to still un safe S lova ki a o n sho rt no ti ce does suggest at least some idea li sm amo ng the vo lunteers. In 19 19-20 there was still armed confli ct betwee n Hun gari an and Czechoslo va k fo rces fo r control o ve r Slovaki a. Even fo r an un e mpl oyed bu reaucrat it could no t have been an easy dec isio n to move there. Few Czec hs can be seen to have do ne mo re to ra ise sy mpathy fo r the Sl o vaks a nd the ir fa te th an To mas Garri g ue Masaryk. Bo rn in Hodonfn , in the Slov acko reg io n of Morav ia, Masaryk ca me fro m a reg ion o n the bo rde r betwee n Czec h and Sl ova k lang uage and c ul ture. Hi s fa ther was Sl ova k and hi s moth er a Germ ani sed C zec h. 13 Gi ven thi s bac kg round , the idea of Czec h and Slovak politica l cooperation mu st have co me easil y to M asaryk. In hi s po litica l li fe , he became one of the ma in propo ne nts of suc h cooperati o n among Czec h politi c ians. As a pro fessor at the C harl es Uni ve rs ity in Prag ue, he was the ma in so urce of in spirati o n fo r a g roup of Slovak stu dents who wo uld later make up an impo rta nt part of the po liti ca l e lite in Czechoslova ki a. Th ese stude nts , best know n as hlasisti, afte r th e name of the ir j o urn a l Hlas (Vo ice), beca me the ma in supporte rs of the C zechos lovak idea in Slovaki a. 14 Yet, despite hi s ge nuin e co nce rn for the S lovaks, M asary k 's speec hes and arti c les at times ex pressed a pa te rn a li st and arroga nt 11 R. W. Seton-Watson : A History of the Czechs and Slovaks. London. 1943. p.323. 12 Jan M ec hyr: Slovensko v Ceskoslovensku : Slovensko-ceske vztahy I 9 I 8- 199 I. Prague. 199 1. p.27. 1 '- K arel Capek: Hovory s T. G. M asa1y kem. Prag ue. 1947. pp.8-9, I I 8. 14 Vl ad im ir Bakos: Questions of the Nation in Slo va k Thoug ht. Brati slava. 1999. pp.1 3-57 . 88 SLOVAKIA attitude toward s Slovak culture and hi story . For instance, Masaryk rej ected calls for a plebisc ite in Slovakia after World War l, arg uin g that 'one cannot allow such a vote there, since the Slovaks have bee n so oppressed that they have never had the opportunity to think politically and they would not know in whose hand s to put th eir fate. ' 15 Even c learer was hi s comment on rece nt negotiation s with Slovak leaders in a letter to hi s dau ghter Alice, in 1924: 'It is necessary to be patient with the Slovaks - they are children, or rather spoilt brats.' 16 Given the relatively low educational level and minimal political experience of most Slovaks in 1918 , claims about their immaturity clearly had some justification in the first years after the establi shme nt of Czechoslovakia. However, Czech politicians continued throu ghout the ex istence of the Czechoslovak state to explain the lack of understanding for their policies in Slovakia as a sign of the politica l immaturity of Slovaks. Commenting on relations between Czech and Slovak exiles during World War II, for instance, Edvard Be nes informed the British Foreign Mini stry , that ' the re existed unity among the Czechs while the Slovaks, he conceded, because of their political immaturity, reflected the divided opinions at home.' 17 Also in the post-Communist period , Slovak nationalism , and especially its more radical expressions, were presented as clear signs of the political immaturity of the Slovaks. 'Everyone has the right to live his nineteenth century,' became a common remark in sarcastic comments. 18 " Quoted in Robert 8. Pynsent: ' Masaryk 's ·' Path of Democracy". Or: The Democrati c National Socialist Ideal'. in K atarina A. M . K ocourek (ed.): T. G. Masaiyk 1850- /937. A Collection of Essays to Commemora te the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Thomas G. Masaryk . London, 2000, p. 35 -57 (41 ) (a specia l issue of Masa1yk Journal). 16 Quoted in Zbynek Zeman and Antonin Klimek: The Life of Eduard Benes: Cze- choslovakia in Peace and War. Oxford , 1997, p.5 I (herea fter Zeman and Klimek: Eduard Benes) . 17 Quoted ibid. pp.168-69. 18 Otto U lc: 'Czechoslovakia ' s Velvet Divorce ' , East European Quarterly, Vol.30/3, 1996, pp. 33 1-352 (340). SLOVAKIA 89 From a Czech po int of view, the re lati o nship between the C zechs and Sl ovaks was c learl y a bi g broth er - littl e brother re lati o nship. The Czech partner in the Czec h-S lovak unio n was c learl y superior in po pulati o n (abo ut 2: I), and fo r most of the hi sto ry of the common state a lso in soc io-econo mic deve lo pment (for example, in education , car-ow nership , numbe r of te le pho nes , etc .). Czech nationa li sts could be proud of a ri c h nati o na l hi story a nd a hi g hl y deve lo ped Czec h c ulture, whil e Slovak nati o na li sts, for hi stori ca l reasons, had less to brag abo ut. The pi cture of Slovaki a as a less deve lo ped, less c ultured ' hinte rl and ' re ma in ed in Czec h po pul ar c ulture, parti c ul arl y in Prague, eve n after Slovak ia reac hed a basica ll y equ al leve l of soc io-econo mi c developme nt (abo ut I 980) . 19 As Petr Prfh oda, the pse udo nymo us Jan Prfbram, observed in the ex ile jo urna l Svedect vfin 1976: T he charac te ri sti c tra its of [the Czec h view of Slovaks a nd S lovaki a] have o ne co mmo n de no m inato r: an a lbe it unc lear, th o ug h multi face ted inferiority. Slovaks see m primiti ve, imm ature, emo ti o na ll y unrestra ined and uneducated [ ... ] The na ivety and lack of ex pe ri e nce amo ng those who come to the unknow n Czec h e nvironme nt is qui c kl y mi sunde rstood as stupidity. A Slovak is qu ite simpl y asc ribed a child 's menta li ty .20 Ignorance On the first page of its 27 Nove mber 1935 iss ue, in an artic le by the fa mo us Czec h jo urn a li st Ferdin and Pe routka, the influenti al journal Pl ftomnost (Presence) asked its readers: ' Do you know of anyone who unde rstand s Slova ki a?' 2 1 F ifty-fi ve years late r, Vac lav Have l' s ad visor Pe te r Hun c ik to ld the Ch a irm a n of th e Sl ova k N ati o na l 19 M il an K ucera and Zdenek Pavlfk: ·Czech and Slovak Demograph y ·, in Jiff M usil (ed.): The End or Czechoslovak ia. Budapest, 1995 , pp. 15-39. 20 Prfhoda: ·s Jovaci ceskyma oc ima' , p.643. 21 Ferd inand Peroutka: ·Nevfte o nekom , kdo rozu mf Slovensku?' , Prfto mnos t, Vo l. 12/47. 1935 , p. I . as reprod uced in Anton Ras la: Zastupova l som ceskoslovensky stat - vyznanie. Presov, 1999, p.268. 90 SLOVAKIA Co un c il , Fra nti se k Mi k losko, th at the Pres ide nt a lways had mi graines whe n he trave ll ed in Slovaki a. 22 Thi s was no t due to the c lim ate, but beca use Have l fe lt great unease abo ut not know ing Slovaki a. Such ac know ledge me nts refl ect the limited kno wl edge of Slovaki a and the Slovaks in the C zech Land s. As Prfhoda o bserved : ' Of all the ne ig hbo urin g nati o ns we know the S lovaks the leas t and ex press the least interest in the m and the ir nat io n. Admittedl y, we have been introdu ced th e best to th e Sl ova ks, but we kn ow th e leas t abo ut the m. ' 23 It is poss ible to ide nti fy severa l reasons fo r thi s lac k of know ledge and understanding. Partl y, it was a res ult of the somew hat confusin g nature of Slovak po liti cs . A lmost thro ugho ut the histo ry of Czechoslovaki a, the politica l e lite in Slova ki a was di vided o n the iss ue of inc reased se lf-governm e nt. Pe ri odi ca ll y, thi s inte rn a l stru gg le amon g S lovak po liti c ians over whethe r S lovaks did or did not want a uto no my mu st have been confu s in g eve n for th e most interested C zech o bserver. Gu stav Hu sak, fo r exampl e, contributed to muddlin g the picture of S lovak nati o na li sm : fro m be ing the prime propo ne nt o f th e federa li sati o n of Czec hos lova ki a befo re a nd durin g the 1968 ' Prag ue S prin g', Hu sak sudde nl y changed into a pro po ne nt of ce ntrali sati o n o nce he was in po wer in Prag ue. Thi s s ituation was exacerbated by the lac k of opportunity pro po nents of inc reased Sl ovak se lf- rul e had to prese nt thei r views to the Czech publi c. Genera ll y, the Slovak po liti c ians who most eas il y ga ined access to the pages of the Prag ue press were those in favo ur of centra li sed rul e. Furth e rmo re, the lac k of know ledge a nd unde rstand in g of S lovaki a a mo ng Czec hs was a res ult of a lac k of in terest in S lova k affa irs. Slovaki a was, at least in the in ter- war peri od, a po liti ca ll y less impo rta nt part of the country. Even if sy mpathy fo r the S lovaks had pl ayed a ro le in the suppo rt C zec h po li tic ians gave the pl ans fo r an inde pe nde nt Czec hos lova ki a, th e re we re o ther impo rt a nt reaso ns 22 Frantsiek M iklosko: Cas stretnutf. Brati slava, 1996, p.44. 23 Pffhoda: ·s tovaci ceskyma oci ma', p.643. 91 SLOVAKIA why they wanted a union . The main ' problem ' in Czech hi story has been the question of the Czechs ' position as a small nation surrounded by Germans. In Slovakia and the Slovaks, Czech leaders found a doub le solution to their problem. As a people, the Slovaks represented a biological reinforcement to the Czech , renamed the Czechoslovak, nation , making it the majority nation in the new state. They thus helped legitimate Czech(oslovak) domination of Czechoslovakia. (One should not forget that there were about 50 per cent more German than Slovak speakin g citizens (3 versus 2 million ) in interwar Czechoslovakia.) As a territory . Slovakia formed a bridge out of the German encirclement towards Ru ssia, which before 1917 was perceived as a rival of Germany and protector of the Slavs, and towards Czechoslovakia ·s all y Romania. For those perceivin g the state from such a ' Great-Czech ' point of view, Czechos lovakia was merely 'a reestabli shment of th e Czech state, reinforced by the Slovak territorie s, which were so weak and neglected that it was simply not necessary to see them as a separate entity. ' 24 The most important reason for the lack of knowl edge and understandin g of Slovakia among Czechs was , however. the uncritical acceptance of the Czechoslovak idea by most Czechs. In th e interwar yea rs, the Czechoslovak ideo logy was a pillar ce ntral to the very existence of the state. Even Masaryk argued th at ' there is no such thing as a Slovak nation 25 paganda ' . l- .. I; that is an invention of Hungarian pro- In Slovakia, on the other hand, the idea of one Czecho- slovak nation met res istance, [i]n the minds of th e Czechs, the notions of 'Czec h' and ' Czechoslovak' had blended into one by th e end of the Second World War at the latest. A significa nt conseq uence of thi s psycho- soci al operation was the removal of the Slovaks as a distinct ethni c entity from the Czech field of vis ion . The Slovaks eventuall y began to be perceived as H L.:.ubomfr Liptak: Slovensko v 20. storocf. Bratisl ava. 1998. 2nd edition. p. 128 . 15 Pynse nt : ' Masaryk ·s "Pa th of Democracy''". p.41. 92 SLOVAKIA part of the same nat iona l organi sm - almost as the advocates of the Czechoslovak concept would like to have it only thi s organi sm was not Czechoslovak but Czech.26 The net result of thi s process was that the social, c ultura l and reli g ious differences betwee n the Czechs and Slovaks became invisible to the majority of Czechs who never learned to kn ow the Slovaks and Slovakia directly. Thi s aga in led to the anticipatio n that Slovaks would have a s imil ar world view and would react in the sa me way as Czechs to events and po li c ies. The co nsequences of such anticipation varied over time. In the inter-war period , it was the insensitive attitude of the new regime towards the Catholic Church that was most important. Czech nation alism had the Hu ss ite peri od as its Golden Age; a Golden Age that was termin ated by the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 and the following violent co unterReform ation in Bohemia and , to a somew hat lesser degree, Morav ia. With the sec ulari sing impact of the industriali sation and urbani sati on of the Czech Lands in the nineteenth century, thi s gave Czech nationalism a not only sec ul ar, but often an openly anti-Catho lic edge. 27 Although the Protestant minority was proportionately bi gger in Slovakia than in the Czech Land s, there was no clear connection between anti-Catholici sm and nation ali sm even amon g Protestant Slovak nat ionali sts. On the contrary, one direction within the Slovak nati ona l move ment was closely co nnec ted to the Catholic fa ith . The Catholic national ists, led from the early twentieth century by Andrej Hlinka, were more skeptica l of cooperation with the Czec hs than were the hlasi sti. Man y Czech politicians and intellec tu a ls were, from the point of view of Slovak Catholics, dangerously radical liberals, if not atheist anti-Catholics. 28 When the declaration of Czechoslovak independence on 28 October 1918 was followed by a wave of 26 Zdenek Suda: ' Slovakia in Czech Nati onal Consciousness ' , in Musil (ed.): The End of Czechoslovakia, p.1 39- 155 ( 11 8) (hereafter Suda: ' Slovakia ' ). 27 R. W. Seton-Watson: A History of the Czechs and Slovaks. London, 1943, p.33 1. 28 Jan Rychl fk : Cesi a Slovaci ve 20. stoletf: Cesko-sl ovenske vztahy , 19 14- 1945. Bratislava, 1997, p.38 (hereafter Rychlfk: Cesi a Slo vac1). SLOVAKIA 93 anti-Catholic gestures in the Czech Lands, the worst fears of the Slovak Catholics were reali sed . As lsmo Nurmi wrote: ' if the anti-Catholic mood was fashionable in the Czech lands, it was not so in Slovak ia and even less so when a numbe r of desecration s of reli g iou s c ult objects, churches, statues, crosses etc. were committed [ ... ] also in Slovakia [by] civil servants and particularly the Czechoslovak Army.' 29 The attempt to create a Czechoslovak national hi story and tradition with the Hussite era as pivotal was a clear sign of the lac k of understanding among Czech (and some Slovak) leade rs for the position of the Catholic Church in Slovakia. Masaryk 's official ' inclusion ' of Slovakia in the Hu ss ite tradition on the basis of Jan Ji skra 's ' crusade ' into Slovakia was not only hi storically dubiou s, but also, and not surpri sin gly, rejected by the Slovak Catholic clergy. As Suda wrote: ' To the Catholic majority of the Slovaks, among whom Catholicism had a very pronounced conservative tin ge typical of a pre-modern society , a common programme with the Czechs based on the traditions of the Protestant Reformation must have been almost an anathema. ' 30 After 1948, with the industriali sation of Slo vaki a unde r Communi st rul e, the religious differen ces be tween the Czech a nd Slovak parts of the common state were so mew hat diffused. Albeit a clear scepticism towards 'Czech liberali sm ' was visible in Christian democratic circles in Slovakia also after the collapse of Communism, another as pec t of the Czech ignorance of Slovak affairs beca me more important. As noted above , very many Czechs saw Czechoslovakia and the ' Czechoslovak nation ' as their state and nation , quite often interpreted as a Czech state a nd nation that included the Slovaks. After World War II , the rec reation of Czechoslovakia was acco mpanied by an official recog niti on by all political leaders, albeit some Czec h politicians were reluctant to do so, of the ex iste nce of two 29 lsmo Nurmi: Slo vakia - A Playground for Na tionalism and National Identity. 191 8- /920 : M anifestations of the Na tional Identity of Slovaks. Hel sinki. 1999. pp. 92-93. 30 Suda : ·Slovakia ' . p.11 5. SLOVAKIA 94 fo un d in g nati ons in the co untry . Thi s princ ipl e was reaffirmed with the federa li sati on of 1968. Despite thi s offic ial recogniti on, there was ve ry littl e understanding a mong Czec hs of S lovak atte mpts to promote the ir separate ide ntity. Proba bl y the best kn ow n exa mpl e of S lova k po li tic ians ' dema nd s fo r 'v isibility and equ a lity ' fo r S lovaki a w ithin Czec hos lovaki a was the stru gg le fo r the name of the federati on in the sprin g of 1990 . Th e so-ca ll ed ' hy phe n-wa r ' sta rted w he n new ly e lec ted Pres ide nt Vac lav Have l suggested c ha ng in g the offic ial name of the Republic, the Czechoslovak Soc iali st Republic, by mere de leti on of the word ' Sociali st' . Whil e fo r mos t Czec hs thi s so luti on mu st have see med natural , it ran into oppos iti on in S lovaki a? A Sl ovak co unter-proposa l, the Czec ho-Slovak Re public, or just Czec ho-Slovaki a, a name that made Slovaki a more vi s ibl e to the world , was, however, not acceptabl e to most Czec h po liti c ians. The reasons given fo r thi s were that th e hyphe n had been used in the name of the Second Republi c (1938 -39, th at is, afte r the Muni c h Accord), a nd beca use ' C zec ho' (Ces k o) was not consi de red a pro pe r word in the Czech language. As one leading comme ntator compl ained in Lidove noviny: ' We in the Czec h Land s perce ive the insiste nt de mand of Sl ovaki a fo r a di vidin g line in the na me of the Re public as tac tl ess and coarse. " 2 Onl y afte r two mo nth s o f de bate in the three nati onal asse mbli es (the Czec h, Slova k and Federa l) and the mass medi a was a compromi se fo und : The Czec h and Slovak Federa l Republic. Have l quic kl y rea li sed th at he had made a mi stake by not consul ting politic ians fro m both the Czec h a nd Sl ova k Re pu b li cs before making hi s suggestion public. In a n atte mpt to rec ti fy the s itu ati on the hospitali sed Have l sent a le tter to the Federal Asse mbl y in February, where he stated : -' ' M il an Su tovec: Semi6za aka pol i tik um a/ebo "Pom lckov;-i vojna ". Brati slava, 1999, pp. 174- 196 (hereafter Sutovec: Pomlckova vojna). -' 2 Ji ff Hanak: 'Nespraved li ve a tedy neprijatelne' . Lidove Noviny. 28 M arch 1990. p.l. SLOVAKIA 95 We a ll kn o w th at thi s hyphe n, whi ch fo r a ll Czechs seems ridi c ul o us, unnecessary and ugly, is mo re tha n just a hyphe n. In thi s hyphe n o ne ca n find severa l decades, if not ce ntu ries of th e hi sto ry of the S lo va k nati o n [ ... ] The Sl o vak nation is ri g htfull y tryin g to fin d its ide ntity, fo r reason s Czec hs probabl y do n ' t understa nd , eve n if they o ught to understand them.33 Resentment Exampl es of Czec h skepti c ism a nd resentment to ward s Slo vak nati o na li sm ca n be fo und as earl y as the middl e of th e nine teenth century. From the late 1840s, a majo rity of Slovak inte ll ectua ls ado pted the new codifi cati o n of th e S lovak lang uage , as publi shed in 1846 by Cudovft Stur, as a pl atfo rm fo r the Sl ovak national programme. This met w ith strong res istance fro m Czech and Slovak inte llectua ls promotin g Czec h-Sl ovak unity: they saw the Slovaki zed versio n of Hu ss ite Bible Czec h used by ma ny Slovak inte llec tua ls until then, as the clearest bo nd between Czechs and Slovaks.34 If in the inte rwar years Czec hos lovak leade rs cons idered Slovak nati o na li sm a pro bl e m, it was ma inl y after 1938 th at o pe nl y hostil e attitudes toward s it e merged. The ex pl oi tatio n by Slovak nati o na li sts of the weakness of the Czec hos lovak reg ime after the Munich cri sis to push trou gh thei r de mands fo r a uto no my, c ulmin atin g in the ac ceptance by the Slovak leade rs of German de mand s fo r Slovak indepe ndence in M arc h 1939, was conside red a stab in the back by most Czechs. 35 Durin g the Second World W ar, Ed vard Be nes, the C zechoslovak Pres ide nt-in -ex il e, was o ne of the sharpest cri tics of what he considered the Slovak be traya l. He was ' o bstin ate in defending the Czec hos lovak ca use: its betraya l by the Slovaks mattered more to him than the grow ing press ure from Moscow. He be li e ved th at the " As quoted in Sutovec: Pomlckova vojna, pp.269-27 1. 34 Sk illing: Masary k, p. 69. 35 Petr Pffhoda: ' M utual Perceptions in Czech-S lovak Relationshi ps ', in M usil (ed .): The End of Czechoslovakia. pp. 128- 138 ( 134 ). 96 SLOVAKIA Slovak heresy undermined the ve ry fo undations of the state, and Czechoslovaki sm was for him a part of the foundations. ' 36 Throu ghout the war, Benes and other Czech politi cians fought for the reestabli shment of the First (th at is, pre-Muni ch) Republi c. Most Slovak politici ans, howe ver, including former Czechos lovak Prime Minster Milan Hodza, con sidered thi s a less th an optim um solution. 37 Only reluctantly , given th e situation in Slovakia after the Slovak National Upri sing in the autum n of 1944, was Benes forced to accept a de facto asymmetric federalisation of post-war Czechoslo va ki a. However, despite previou s agreements, most importantl y the Kosice Government Programme, drafted by the first pro visional government after the country was partly -liberated from the East, the question of Slovaki a's position within the country cont inued to divide the Czec h and Slovak non-Comm uni st parties after the war. The willin gness of the Czec h democratic parti es to coo perate with the Communi sts in reducin g the powers of the Slovak nation al organs , cruci all y after the 1946 elections, contrib uted to undermining the position of the Democratic Party in Slo va ki a. The Czechos lovak Communi st Party was thu s abl e to exploit ' the anti -Sl ovak nati onali sm among Czech political parties and [ ... ] the isolated position of the Slovak democrats. ' 38 Thi s clearly weakened the democrats' ability to oppose the Communi sts' increasing political power in the country. During and after 1968 , the negati ve view of Slo vak nationali sm and Slovakia in the Czech L ands was reinforced. After the Soviet-led in vas ion on 2 1 Au gust 1968, 'sociali sm with a human face ' was gradually di smantled and replaced by ' norm ali sation '. Th e only maj or reform of the Prague Spring to survive was the dec ision to federalize Czechoslovakia. In Sl ovaki a thi s decision w as generall y interpreted 36 37 Zeman and Klimek : Eduard Bene{ p.203. Milan Hodza : Federarion in Cenrra l Europe: Renections and Reminiscences. London. 1942, pp.93-94. 38 Ji rf K ocian: ·Narodnf soc ialis te a slovenska otazka 1945- I 948 ". in Michal Bar- novsky (ed.) : Od dikratury k diktature. Brati slava. 1995 . pp.57-65 (6 I ). (hereafter K oc ian: ' Narodnf socialiste') SLOVAKIA 97 as a more just organi sation of the common state. In the Czech Lands, however, many saw federalisation as a further example of the Slovak nationali sts' skill in drawing advantages from Czechoslovakia's mi sfortune. The fact th at the new party leade r and late r Pres ident of Czechoslovakia, Gu stav Hu sak, was Slovak, also contributed to the negative picture of Slovakia and Slovaks. As Petr Pithart wrote: the Czech public was di sappointed, even di sg usted, by the Slovaks ' ex peri e nce of havin g ga ined sati sfac tion with federalization; at best, it was seen as foolishness a nd at worst, as blind se lfi shness and eve n betrayal. ( ... ) in the Czec h Lands there was an increasing ly obvious di sg ust for the regime and for the Slovaks, as the ones through whom normali zation was allegedly introduced and carried out. 39 A s ign of the growing irritation with and resentment toward s Slovak nationa li sm and Slovaks in ge ne ral in the Czech Lands, was the increas in g ly popul a r de mand that Czech taxpayers should not have to subsidi se the ungrateful Slovaks. Already in 1933 Czechoslovak Prime Min ster Ja n Malypete r had rejected the demand for Slovak autonomy on the grounds that Slovakia would not be able to pay its way . In the Czech press, headlines read along the lines: ' We are paying for Slovakia ' .40 Thi s be lief that the Czechs were subsidis in g th e Slovaks was observed also by Prfhoda forty-three years late r: ' In the Czech Lands the view of Slovak parasiti sm [parazitismu s] is common and it is formulated more or less like thi s: we Czechs are payin g for the Slovaks. ' 41 The Czechoslovak Communist Party was committed to so lvin g the probl e m of Slovak nation alism, which it interpreted as a mainly eco nomic iss ue , through equ ali zat ion of the standard of li ving bet- 39 Petr Pithart: ' Towards a Shared Freedom ' , in Mu sil (ed.): Th e End of Czechoslovakia.pp.20 1-222 (206). 40 Vi ctor S. Mamatey: ' The Development of Czechoslovak Democ racy ', in Mamatey and Luza (eds.) : A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, pp.99-166 ( 15 1). 41 Prfhoda: "S lovac i ces kyma ocima', p.647. SLOVAKIA 98 wee n the Czech and Slovak parts of the co unty. Economic transfers, parti cul arly through a higher level of in vestment in Sl ovaki a were, therefore, considered important. They continued even during the di ffic ult years in the 1970s and 1980s, but were kept secret, probabl y to avoid un favo urable reactions in the Czech L ands. After the co llapse of Communi sm, opposition to w hat was popularl y referred to as the Czech ' money pipeline' (p enezovod) to Slovak ia was quickl y made into a politi cal demand. In the first formal ro und of negoti ation s on th e future of the fe derati on after the co ll apse of Communi sm, in Lnare in April 1990, the Czech delegati on demanded a halt to Czec h subsidies to Slovaki a.42 From Czech to Czechoslovak nationalism and back As noted earlier, the Czechos lov ak directi on within Czech poli ti cs was by no means dominant pri or to W orld W ar I. Czec h nationali sts concentrated mainl y on defending and enhancing Czech autonomy w ithin th e Habsburg M onarchy. With the success of the Czec hoslovak idea in the Entente capitals in 19 17-1 8, however, most Czec h nati onali sts quite quickl y became convinced Czec hos lovak nati onali sts; Czech nati onali sm was ex panded to include th e Sl ovaks, the Czec hs' ' little bro ther ' in Hungary. Cultura ll y and economi ca ll y wea k, the Slovaks posed no threat to either Czech culture or politica l and economic dominati on of the new state. A nd after all , as M asaryk himse lf pointed out, the Slovaks were merely Czec hs w ith a slightly di fferent hi story. Th e attachment o f Czech politi cians to the Czech os lovak idea ca n be clearl y see n after W orld W ar II. In 1968 , a document supposedly written by members of th e (Czec h) Nation al Soc iali st Party 4 in I 946 was pub I ished in the Slova k press . ' Its authors argued th at the bes t way to so lve the problem of Slovak nati onalism was fo rced ass imil ati on of the Sl ovaks into good Czec hoslovaks. Whil e seri ous • • 2 BBC Summa1y of World Broadcast. EE/0738 B/2. 13 Apri I 1990. 3 T he document was first publi shed in Vac lav Kral: Cestou k tinoru, Prague, I 956, but attrac ted relati ve ly little attention until reproduced in the mass medi a in 1968. 99 SLOVAKIA doubts exist as to th e authenticity of thi s ' Memorandum on Slovakia' , most hi storian s seem to agree that the idea of turnin g the Slovaks into good Czechoslovaks was not alien to certain leading Czech politicians at the time. 44 The reaction to what was perceived as the Slovak betraya l of 1938-39 was increased Czechoslovak nationali sm. However, during the Communist period , a nd particul ar ly after 1968 , Czech nationalism gradually gained supporters in the Czech Lands . As Prfhoda wrote in 1976: 'I am not sure how thin gs are in Slovakia, but among Czechs the concept of a com mon state is being re-eva luated these days . I have eve n heard : let the Ru ss ia ns make Slovakia into a union republic or something and leave us in peace!' 45 Obviou sly , ne ither Czech nor Slovak separat ism was politically acceptable durin g Communist rul e. After th e 'Velvet Revo lution' , however, influe ntial vo ices soo n e merged in the Czech Land s questioning the union with the Slovaks. As earl y as the beginning of May 1990, in the aftermath of the hyphe n war, the Czech writer Ludvfk Vaculfk, the author of the 'Two thousand words' manifesto in 1968, wrote a sharpl y worded articl e in Litenimf noviny. 46 ' W e Czechs have a great debt to the Slovaks,' Yaculfk argued. This debt was due to the fact that the Czechs had happily made Slovakia ' theirs' without takin g into account what it meant to be Slovak. Through their behaviour, however, the Slovaks had made it difficult for the Czechs to appreciate thi s debt. Th e Czechs had g ive n the Slovaks the ir industry and inte lli gentsia, so mething that had only caused the Slovaks to ' until thi s day complain about the qua lity of these supplies'. The Czechs had give n the Slovaks a way out of defeat as a separate state during World War II. Even Communism , brou g ht to Slovakia by Czechs afte r the war, had g ive n the Slovaks more in material terms than it had to the Czechs. When the Czechs then tri ed to ease th e die- 44 See Koc ian: ' Narodnf soc iali ste' . passim: Rychlfk: Ce.si II Slo vaci. pp. 54-55: ·Na okraj diskusie: 0 tzv. Slovenskom memoranda Cs. narodne sociali stickej strany ', Nase snahy . Vol. I 9/2. 1983. p. 9. 45 Prfhoda: ' Slovaci ceskyma ocima ' . p.653. 41 ' Ludvik Vaculfk: ' Nase slovenska otazk a', Litenimf noviny. Vol.1 /5, 1990. p.2. SLOVAK IA 100 tatorship during 1968, the Slovaks saw thi s as a Czech matter and instead forced through 'autonomy '. For this they escaped with lighter puni shment during the era of ' normali sation .' Now aga in , after the col lapse of Communism, when Czechs were trying th eir utmost finally to defeat the dictatorial regime , the Slovaks were 'coming with their prestige demands'. ' Do we need thi s?' he asks rhetorically and then concludes : We have found ourse lves with a thankless task in th e fate of the Slo vaks, and I think th at we should end it without se lf-pity - more with a smil e into th e mirror. [ ... l Why should the Slovaks ha ve to force out of us, centimetre by ce ntimetre, somethin g that they can have in one go? By separating from the Slovaks , purely of our ow n volition , we " lose" - judging from experience to date - economic losses. Politicall y we lose th e Hungarian and Ruth ene problem s. We put another border between us and th e Soviet Union. 47 At th e time of hi s writ ing, Yaculfk ' s recommendation th at th e Czec hs should dispense with the Slovaks accorded with neither public nor political opinion in the Czech Republic. At that stage not even the most radical Czech politician s were promoting divi sion of the state. Gradually , however, the need to resolve the probl em of th e common state w ith the Slovaks once and for all became pressing. As Yaculfk observed in December of 1990: 'Public opinion poll s show that 75 percent of Czechs are said to favour a common state with the Slovaks. Had one, on the other hand , asked if we should let the Slovaks go, just as many would probabl y have answered " yes" to thi s as we ll. ' 48 In Slovakia, the question of the statu s of the Slovak Republic within the Czech and Slovak state became a centra l political topic . 47 Ibid. The double quotation marks arou nd -- Jose" were added to make th e irony more vi sible. The original tex t is : ' Od loucenfm od Slovaku. jez j e vyhradne v nasf vu li. ztratfme - souzeno dosavadnf zkusenostf - ekonomicke ztraty. • 48 Ludvik Yaculfk: ' M ec iar mozna odejde' . Litenimf noviny . Vol. I /39. I 990. p.2. SLOVAKIA 101 Sl ovak politicians began to co mpete over w ho co uld present a programme th at would benefit and pro mote Slovaki a the most. Thi s led to a gradual radi ca li sati on of Slovak demands in the negoti ation s on the future of the federati on. Such radica li sati on in turn provoked a voc iferou s reaction in the Czech L ands. Th e influenti al Czec h j ournal R esp ekt refl ec ted th e growin g antagoni sm toward s Sl ovaki a in th e Czec h L ands. Headlines from the Spring of 1992 such as ' The supreme Slovak irrespon sibility' ( 17 Febru ary, p.2), ' B alkan model on the hori zo n: how long w ill the Czech-Slovak statu s quo las t?" (24 Febru ary, p.2) and 'A bsurd parliamentary drama: who saves Slovak ia from sovereignty?' (6 A pril , p.2) ev ince an increas ingly criti ca l view o f Sl ovak politi cs . In the issue th at co incided with the electi ons of 8 June, the criticism ca me to its logica l co nclu sion . Peter Schutz, Respekt 's (Sl ovak-Hungari an) correspondent in Slovak ia, wrote in the arti cle ' Slovaki a adheres to nati onal soc iali sm': ' The shameful result of thi s electi on formul ated onl y one alternati ve - either lMec iar 's party] HZDS disintegrates, or the CSFR. ' 49 Vl adimfr Ml ynar ex pressed the same message in the subtitle o f hi s arti cle in the same issue: 'A lone into Euro pe or together into the Balkans'. 50 Parti cul arl y the politi ca l ri ght in th e Czec h Lands increasingly saw Slovaki a as an obstac le on the road ' back ' to Europe. After the 1990 elec ti ons, th e ri ght had graduall y strengthened its pos ition among the Czech elec torate. In Slovaki a, on the other hand , it was the more reform- scepti ca l and patri oti c parti es on the politica l left that had enjoyed greater success. Gi ven th e spec ial minority veto of both the Czec h and Slovak groups of deputies in th e House of Nati ons of the Federal Assembl y, a left-patri otic maj ority in Slovaki a was a worry ing prospec t for the Czech proponents of radi ca l reform s. A month before th e parliam entary election s in June 1992, V aclav 09 Peter Sch utz: ·s tovensko sa prihlasilo k narodnemu socializmu - Pos lcdne zvone- nie pre federaciu ·, Respekt. 8- 14 June 1992, p.2. ~ V lad imir Ml ynar: ·v Cechac h tes ne vftezstvf prav ice - lecne na Balka n·. Respekt, 8- 14 June 1992. p.3. Sarni do Evropy nebo spo- 102 SLOVA KI A Kl aus made it c lear that if a fu ncti o na l federa ti o n was not poss ible after the e lect io ns, he and his partners were ' ready to create a mec hani sm for a q uick, c ivili sed and prob le m-free div isio n of the state. ' 51 Conclusion By the late summ er of 1992, th e do min ant view of Slovak ia in C zec h po liti cs had, in a se nse, co me full c irc le to co inc ide with the views th at preva il ed pri o r to W o rl d W ar I. Fro m hav ing bee n a strateg ica ll y less attrac ti ve partne r in the seco nd ha lf of the nineteenth ce ntury, Sl ovaki a beca me a strateg ic asset in the firs t ha lf of th e twenti eth . Afte r W o rld W ar II , however, S lovak ia a nd th e S lovaks gradu a ll y lost the ir strateg ic impo rt a nce for the Czec hs. The large Ge rm an mino rity in the Czec h Lands was ex pe ll ed in the firs t years after the war, taking the edge off the Ge rman threat. Furthermore, fo r C zec h democ rats, the Communi st co up of Febru ary 194 8 put an e nd to a ll ideas of seekin g sec urity a nd integrati o n in the East, th ro ugh Slova ki a. In stead , they now turn ed exc lu sive ly to the West: to th e US , NATO . the E uro pean Co mmunity and eve n the o ld ri va l, Ge rmany. At the th resho ld of the twenty- first ce ntury, Slova ki a, w ith its c umbe rso me soc ia li st eco no my, its po puli st nati o na li sm , and its pro bl e ms with Hun ga ry over the Hungari an mino rity in Slovaki a and the G abc fk ovo- Nagy maros da m projec t o n the Da nube, aga in became a strateg ic burden. The Czec hos lovak traditi o n and adhe re nce to the Czec hos lovak idea were still strong in the Czec h Lands. Tho ugh the Czec h politica l ri ght had the suppo rt of gro ups suc h as The Czec h Initi ati ve, whic h gathered aro und 50,000 sig natures in favo ur of Czec h independe nce in fo ur days in June 1992 in Prague, most Czec hs were still in favo ur of a co mm o n state w ith the Slova ks. 52 Thu s Kl aus and hi s partners co uld not push throug h a break-up w itho ut so me effort. Co nsequ ent ly, as Abby Innes wrote: ' Kl a us preferred a strategy o f shi ftin g res- 51 As cited in Marian Lesko: Meciar a meciarizm us: polit ik bez .~kruptif" politika bez zabran. Bratis lava. 1997, p.78. 52 BBC Summary of World Broadcast. EE/ 14 12 B/5. 20 June I 992. SLOVAKIA 103 po ns ibility fo r the confli c t e ntire ly onto the Slovak side and c la imed th at it was now "ev ide nt th at votes fo r the HZ DS are votes fo r th e di visio n o f the state". ' 53 Give n th at th e do min a nt Czec h im age of S lovak nati o na li sm, a nd of Vl adim ir Mec iar, was negative, Kl aus was lucky in hav in g hi s tas k made eas ier. Hi s ca mpa ig n was furth er ass isted by th e oppos iti o n of the leading S lova k parti es to th e ree lection of Pres ide nt Vac lav Have l in Jul y. Hav ing fa il ed to be ree lec te d , Have l res ig ned pre m ature ly whe n th e Slo va k Nation a l Co unc il passed a large ly sy mbo li c dec larati o n of sovere ig nty o n 17 Jul y. Have l, prev io us ly o ne of the leading pro po ne nts of the co mmo n state, now le nt hi s support to a di visio n of the state. 54 The first day of Janu ary 1993 saw the creati o n of two new states: the C zec h Re publi c and the Sl ovak Re publi c. Of the two, the Czec h Republi c c learl y adopted the mantl e of successor to Czec hos lovaki a. T he new Czec h state had the sa me capita l, the same fl ag (in breac h o f an earli e r agree me nt) and the sa me pres ide nt. C zec h co mpani es and even po liti ca l parties fo r a lo ng time ke pt the word 'Czechos lovak ' in the ir na me (for exampl e, the S in CSA, Czec h[os lovak] A irlin es). Mos t things re ma ined as they had bee n, exce pt w ith o ut the Slovaks. As Vaculfk had po inted o ut so po ig nantl y in 1990: ' Whe n th e "Federati o n" started crac king in its fo undatio n, I got the idea fo r a new , in spi rin g ly o ptimi sti c so luti o n: whe n S lov aki a breaks away there w ill be no o ne to preve nt us fro m ca lling o ur state Czec hos lovak ia ... ' 55 " A bby Innes: ' T he Breakup of Czechos lovak ia: T he Impact of Part y Deve lopment on the Separation of the State· . Eust European Politics and Society. Vol. I I /3. 1997. pp. 393-435 (424). '" I va n L amper and V ladimir Ml ynar: ·skoncila ceskoslovenska statnost: Rozhovor s pos lednfm prezi dentem CSFR Vac lave m Havlem ' . Respekt. 20-27 July 1992. p.4. " Vac ulfk: ' Meciar mofoa odejde'. p.2 .  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Bratr náš to Aťjdou - Slovakia, the Slovaks and Slovak Nationalism seen from Prague Description An account of the resource Paal Sigurd Hilde Slovakia, Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005 pp. 81-103 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hilde, Paal Sigurd, 1970- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/d921c2674cb9cdd8b5f466434569a89d.pdf dbff8b3493ac8960d46e827c9a213670 PDF Text Text 104 SLOVAKIA "Ungrateful Younger Brothers" versus "Arrogant Atheists." Czech-Slovak Stereotypes in a Collective Memory Perspective. Lone Sarauw On January I , 1993 , Czechoslovakia was divided in a process that has been characterized as a "vel vet divorce. " 56 Compared to the ways in which other post-communi st states were fa lling apart at the time, thi s seems a va lid description . However , the split was ca used by severe confli cts betwee n the two parts of the state. Scholars have given a number of reasons for the di vo rce : I ) The Czech desire for democracy and a market economy clashed with Slovak insistence upon nati onal eq uality. 57 2) Despite grow ing macro-structu ra l simil ariti es, one Czechoslovak soc iety never managed to replace the Czech and Slovak soc ieti es that had been brought together in a com mon state. 58 3) Th e w inners of the parli amentary elec tion s in 1992, th e Sl ovak Vl adimfr Meciar and the Czech V aclav Kl aus, were unabl e to 56 See Otto U lc: "C zechos lovak ia' s ve l vet divorce. " East European Quarterly 30. September ( 1996). pp. 33 1-352. 57 5 " Ibid. Ji ff Mu sil : '"C zec h and Slovak Soc iety." in Jiff Mu sil (ed.): Th e End or Czechoslova kia (Budapest. L ondon, New York: Central European University Press 1995). 77-94. �SLOVAKIA 105 come to te rm s w ith the constitutional arrangement of Czechoslovakia, beca use they were unwillin g to put the interests of the common state before their own power ambi tions. 59 And more co uld be found. As a contrib uti on to the debate over the break-up, thi s artic le inte nd s to look at th e role of stereotypes and collective memory in it, the argument being that hi story was mobili zed in the media de bates prior to the partition , and that it happe ned in a way that en hanced the di ffere nces rather than the likenesses of the two peopl es.60 As a result of thi s th e population graduall y came to accept the partition of the common state, even if the majority of the population never supported it. 6 1 The concept "collective me mory" has been defi ned as "a soc iety 's co ll ected production of me mory," 62 whi ch suppli es the soc iety with a fee ling of belong ing together by sharing the same past. One of the probl e ms in Czec hoslovakia seems to have bee n the lack of such a feelin g of sharing the same past in both halves of the state. Despite the fact that, apart from World W ar II , Czechs and Slovaks lived together in one state between 19 18 and I 993 , their co ll ective me mories of this li fe together differ to a considerab le ex tent. 59 Abby Innes: ·'T he Breakup of Czechos lovakia: The Impac t of Party Development on the Separa ti on of the State," East European Politics and Societies (EEPS) , Vol. I I , No. 3, Fall ( 1997), 393-435 . 60 Si l via Mihali kova: •• arod ne symbo ly slovenskej statnosti", Politologicka revue 2, prosinec, ( 1996), 56. 61 An opi ni on poll from Jul y 1992 shows th at 53 % of the Czechs and 42 % of the Slovaks w ished lo maintain th e co mmon state. whi le respecti ve ly 24 % and 32 % w ished the slate to be divided (Sharon W olchi k : ·The Politics of Transition and th e Break-U p of Czec hos lova ki a," in Ji ff Musi l (ed .): Th e End of' Czechos lova kia. (Budapest : Centra l European Universi ty Press 1995 , 233). 62 Claus Bry ld and Anette Warrin g: Besaette/sestiden som kollektiv erindring. Histo- rie- og traditionsfor va llning at' krig og besaettelse 1945- 1997. (Rosk ilde: Rosk ilde Uni versitetsforlag 1998), 19-20. �106 SLOVAKIA In the medi a debates in the peri od leading up to the break-up of C zec hos lovakia hi story , or rather memory ,63 was mobi Ii zed as proof of the inevitability and desirability of the divorce. Because thi s was the aim of the partic ipants of the debate, chrono logy was irre levant and hi story became ' hori zontali zed ' so to speak. As Silvia Mi halikova has formulated it, "osten sible or rea l sins committed centuries ago merge with wrongs done in th e last decades and are at the same time th e reaso n for today 's mi sunderstandin gs and hatred."64 Thus, the mobilization of past conflicts e nabl ed the two nation s to blame eac h other for their current probl ems, which is wh at thi s article intend s to show using examples from the literary newspapers of th e Czech Land s and Slovakia, Literarnf noviny and Literarny tyi- dennik,65 prior to the break-up. Wh en looking for archetypical examp les of the Czech and S lovak stereotypes or images of each other, the "arroga nt atheists" and " ungrateful younger brothers" of the headlines were the first ideas about the Czech and S lovak images of each other that came to mind . Therefore, it came as a surprise that it was rather imposs ibl e to find any examples of the stereotype of the Czechs as dangerous atheists they are presented as being arrogant, though. The lack of proof of the idea that the Slovak image of the Czec hs would see them as atheists 0 -' Pierre Nora has formu lated thi s di st incti on be tween history and memory in terms of a fund amen tal opposi ti on . .. Memory is life [ ... ] a bond tying us to the etern al presen t[ ... ] it is affec ti ve and mag ica l l and] onl y accom modates th ose facts that suit it .'' whereas hi story is .. the reconstru cti on , al ways problematic and incomplete j ... I a representati on of the past I th at I ca ll s fo r analys is and criti cism' ' (Pierre Nora: "Between Memory and H istory: Les Lieux de M emoire" . Representations Vol 0, No. 26 Special Issue: M emory and Cou nter-M emory. Spring ( I 989) , 8-9). A less ri gid di stincti on has been pro posed by A nne Erikse n. who sees hi story and memory as being equally important aspec ts of the co llecti ve memory th at combine to create the entire co llec ti ve memory (A nne Eriksen: Del var nae annet under krigen. 2. verdenskrig i norsk kollektivtradisjon. (Oslo: Pax 1995). r,., Mihalikova: ·'Narodne symboly," 55. 65 In the literary newspapers the past was mobili zed more obviously and cru dely but not in a different way th an in mos t other newspapers. Thus, they serve well as illustrations of a process that was happening in the press in general. �SLOVAKIA 107 was fru strating , and it raised the question where thi s idea came from. It stemmed from the Christian Democratic Movement (Kresfansko De mokraticke Hnutie, KOH) , which, according to Miroslav Kusy , wanted to protect Slovakia from " des tructive liberal and freethinking influences from the Czech Lands." Besides, the stereotype had been used frequently in the interwar period , but the industrialization and urbanization of Slovakia since then had turned the mostly rural soc iety into one where Catholics did not necessarily consider their interests as Catholics to be more important than their economic and cultural conditions. 66 Also, as Petr Prfhod a has stated , the image of the Czechs as atheists was a well-known Czech stereotype of the Slovak view of them ,67 indirectly testifyin g to a Czech stereotype of the Slovaks as ' religiou s. ' 68 The image that eventually turned out to be the most pervasive was one of the Czechs as Czechoslovakist69 colonialists exploiting Slovakia. And as colonialists, they were described as arrogant in wanting to rule over Slovakia, even though they did not know it properly. It should be pointed out that the difficulty in having the stereo- '"' Miroslav Ku sy: ··S lovak Exceptionalism". in Musil (ed.): The End. 147- 149 . See also Martin Butora and Zora Butorova: " Slovakia: The Iden tit y Chal lenges of the Newly Born State". Socia l Research. Vol. 60. No. 4, Winter ( 1993). 7 13-7 14. and Sona Szomol anyi: UParadox kon zervativi zmu na Slovensku .'· Domino Efekt. Vol. 2. No. 15. ( 1993). 4. 67 Petr Prfhoda: '·Mutual Perceptions in Czech -Slovak Relationships•·, in: Musil (ed.) : The End. 134. "" Al so th e nationali sti c Slovak news paper ··s Jovak Nation·• (Slovensky mirod) was checked for the atheist image. but it could not be found even here . This probably reflects the fact that the image was propagated by the KDH . which was a quite unpopu lar part y those days among its non -ad herents. and whic h was often reproached in Slovensky mirod. 69 As a way of legitimising th e new Czechos lovak Republic in 19 18, the doctrine of one Czechoslovak nati on w ith two branche s. a Czech and a Slovak one. was propa gated to comp ly wi th the intention of president Woodrow Wilson to gi ve national self-determinat ion to the nations of Cen tral and Eastern Europe . The doctrine was officia ll y abandoned onl y afler World War II. �108 SLOVAKIA types co nfirmed did not co ncern the Czech newspaper, the se l fimage of the Czechs as 'rational' notwithstanding. 70 The most co mmonl y cited example of the Czech perception of the Slovaks as ungra tefu l yo unger brothers was an article by the writer Lud vfk Vaculfk in Literarnf noviny from 1990 entitled: " Our Slova k Questi on. " 7 1 The first thin g to be noticed about Vaculfk 's article is the co ndescending tone of the titl e: The Slovak questi on is ' our ' ques ti on, that is ' us' meaning the Czechs , not the Slovak s. 72 Vaculfk beg ins his arti cle by definin g himself as being Czech by nation ality, but Czechoslovak as a citi ze n, but he nevertheless repeatedl y speaks in the name of ' us, th e Czec hs,' whi ch substanti all y weakens hi s claim to being a truly Czechoslovak citizen. Throu ghout hi s tex t, Vaculfk uses exampl es from hi story to argue for a separati on from the Slo vaks. First, he bl ames the Slovaks for never having dealt with the fasc ism of their wartime state ( 19391945). They escaped thi s obligation by rejoining the Czechs in Czechos lovakia, and wh en, after a few yea rs, they were forced into a communi st regime, they did not reall y mind , si nce they ga ined a lot more economicall y from co mmuni sm than did the Czechs. There is no inner log ic between these two situati ons other th an th e fac t th at Vaculfk 's description of them makes the Slovaks look as if they have no principl es, going more or less direc tl y from accepting fascism to accepting co mmuni sm. He co ntinues by bl ami ng the Slovaks fo r prey ing on the Czech s' struggle for democracy in 1968, since th e only reform that survived the W arsaw Pac t in vas ion was the federali zation of the state, " When we in I 968 tri ed to free ourse lves from 70 L adis lav Holy : The Lillie Czech and the Gre<I/ Czech Na tion. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 104. 71 72 " Nase slovenska otazka". Litenimf noviny (M ay 3, 1990). I +3 . Yacu l fk's titl e was in spired by the titl e of T.G. Masaryk ·s book ··The Czech Question" (C:eska otazka) from 1895 on the Czech rebirth in the 19th century and it outlined hi s po litica l progra mme for the Czech nati on. But where Masaryk treated his own nation. Yacu lfk by the use of the word ··our" implies th at the Czechs have a ri ght to objectify and defi ne the Slovaks. �SLOVAKIA 109 the dictatorship, the Slovaks regarded it as our business and went for autonomy. When we were then puni shed for the rebellion , they , because they had not compromised th emse lves very much with us, received a more gentle puni shment; and that their autonomy, which they gained from our rebellion , for us meant a sharpenin g of the punishment, does not cross their mind s." 73 When Vaculfk describes the Slovak ga in of autonomy as a sharpenin g of the puni shment for the Czechs , this testifies to hi s belief, not only in centralism , but also that the Czechs have the right to control Slovaki a. When employing these im ages he attempts to mobilize the Czech memory of the Slovaks as traitors both in 1938-39, when they ga ined their own state whereas the Czech lands were turned into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and in the Prague Spring of 1968. Later on Vaculfk contradicts his argument of th e Slovak sati sfaction with the communist regime by claiming that they left it to the Czechs to defeat the communists and then again brought up their claims for autonomy: "as if they thought: you brou ght us your communism, now you take it away again, Czechs! " 74 According to Vaculfk, the Slovaks, being objects rather than subjects of hi story, unlike the Czechs have always managed to escape the existential question: Who are we and what do we want? Thi s even counts for the Slovak National Uprising during World War II, which in Vaculfk 's view was too brief and too limited territoriall y to count as proof of Slovak pro-C zec hos lov ak ism. Vaculfk only mention s the anti-fascist element of the upri si ng and neg lects the fact that the leaders of the resistance movement clearly stated a wish to reunite with the Czechs after 73 " Kdyz jsme se v roce 1968 poku sili uvolnit se z diktatury , povazovali to Slovaci za nasi staro st a sli si za autonomif. K dyz my pak byli za vzpouru ztrestan i, oni , j elikoz se s nami moc nezkompromitovali, dostali mfrnejsf trest; a ze jejich autono- mie, kterou z nasf vzpoury vyzfska li , znamenala pro nas zostfenf trestu, to jim nenapada." 74 "jako by si mysleli: Privezli j ste nam sem v,is komuni smus, odvezte si ho zas, Cesi 1" - Many Slovaks after 1989 have pointed ou t that in 1946 40 % of th e Czechs voted com muni st, and only 30 % of the Slovaks, suggesting that comm uni sm was a predomi nantly Czech idea. �SLOVAKIA 110 th e wa r,75 whi c h was inco ns iste nt w ith hi s prev io us acc usati o ns aga inst the Slovak s fo r not hav ing co me to te rm s w ith the fasc ism of the ir wartime state . The first time Vaculfk mobili zes the " littl e brothe r" im age he c laims that the Slovak s, s ince they do not have a nybody else against whom to prove the ir adulthood , mi stake nl y tried it o ut on the Czechs. Later on he continues th at, afte r the fa ll of co mmuni sm, th e Sl ovak nation fin a ll y had the cha nce to start looking fo r its ow n happiness, by whi ch it would grow one more leve l. The most c rude exa mple of the im age comes w he n Vac ulfk re plies to Mil an Si mec ka, a Czec h write r li vin g in Slovaki a, who had w ritte n to the Czec hs th at the ir yo un ger brothe r had grow n up a nd now should ha ve hi s ow n bed. Vac ul fk 's repl y was as fo ll ows: "As we know our youn ger brothe r, he w ill want to have hi s bed by the window in the summer and by the ove n in the w inte r. No bed , littl e broth e r, ha ve yo ur o wn littl e ho use!" 76 And finall y, he li sts reaso ns why just now is the ri ght time to get rid of the Slovaks, one of whi c h is th at 70 years ago it wo uld have bee n interpreted as de ny ing he lp to the younger brother. Thus, Vac ulfk mobili zes the Czec h image of the ungrateful younger brother and the coll ective me mory of Slovak betrayal s to make hi s po int th at the Czec hs would be better off without the Slovaks. It is hard not to find Vac ulfk a bit patronizing, but hi s views we re not e xce pti onal a mong the Czec hs. In the articl e " Re lie f with a dec ision," 77 fo urteen intellectu als 78 agreed th at it was bette r to let the Slovaks go, if th at was what they wanted , so th at the Czec hs co uld stand as the true he irs of Czec hos lovaki a and thereby keep the name of the 75 See I.:.ubomir Liptak : S/ovensko v 20. storocf. (Brat islava : K all igram 2000), 25 1- 252. 76 ·'A le j ak mladsfho brat ffc ka zname, bude v lete chtft tu pos tylku u ok na a v zime u pece. Zadnou postylku, bra tfe. domecek mej si 1" 77 " Uleva z rozhodnutf" . L itenim f noviny June 18, 1992, I. 78 The article was signed by Ji ff K olar, K arel Siktanc, K arel Pecka, Lud vfk Yacul fk , V lad im ir K ar ffk , I van Werni sc h, Jan Lopatka, Sergej Mac honi n, Pfemys l Rut. Dusan K arpatsky, Yrati slav Farber, Ji ff Cies lar, Mi ros lav Kl omfnek, M ilan Jungmann, all men of literature. �SLOVAKIA 111 state. Se manti ca ll y, Czechoslovaki a w itho ut Slova ki a does not make muc h sense, but to the authors of the arti cle there was c learly anothe r aspect to Czechos lova ki a th an the territori al one. T he ir be li ef that Czechos lovak ia w ithout Slovaki a made sense indi cated that they pe rce ived th e Czech s as be in g in some undefin ed ma nner more trul y Czec hos lova k th an the Slovaks and that they reserved the ri ght to defin e the character of the co mmon state fo r the Czechs. Bes ides, they saw the diffe re nt res ults of the e lection s in June 1992 in the two parts of the country as an exampl e of the Czech desire fo r a free economy and po liti ca l de moc rac y on the o ne hand , and on the oth er of the Slovak longin g fo r a soc iety directed by the state a nd with e le me nts of nati onal soci ali sm. And they furth e rmore inte rpre ted the S lovak res ult as an ex press ion of a Slovak long ing fo r their own indepe nde nt state, in spite of the fac t th at th e onl y Slovak party with inde pe nde nce as part of its e lec ti on prog ramme was the Slova k Nati onal Party (Sl ovenska narodna strana, SNS), whi ch ga ined onl y 9.4 % of the votes in Slovakia.79 The arti cle was writte n in a tone th at sugges ted ne utrality and objecti vity, whil e the co nte nt was in fac t stron gly po le mi ca l. " If it is so that onl y e rectin g one's ow n state is the sign o f adulth ood and se lf-justifi cati on of a nation , we do not have reasons fo r counting it as a fa ilure a nd loss, what we since 19 18 have contributed to Slovaki a in that respect materi all y and mora ll y. The found ation of Czechos lova ki a co mpl eted the Czech nati o nal reawake nin g, and if the Slovaks today c ut the mse lves loose fro m us, it means th at they are still lac kin g somethin g to reac h the same pos iti on and consc iousness, and we do not have the ri ght to keep the m fro m that. " 80 In thi s argu- 79 K aren Henderson: T he Slovak Republic, in : Bogdan Szajkowsk i (ed.): Po litica l Parties of Eastern Europe. Russia & the Successor S tates. (Harlow: Longman In for- mati on and Reference 1994 ). 529. ' 0 ·'Je- li tom u tak, ze teprve ustave nf vlas tn fho statu je znamenfm dospe losti a sveprav nosti naroda, nemame duvod pocftat si za pro hru a ztratu , cfm jsme k tomu Slovensku od rok u 19 18 hmotne i moraine prispeli . Zalozenfm Ceskos lovenske republik y se dov rsilo ceske narodn f obroze nf, a j estli ze se Slovaci dnes od nas odpo- �SLOVAKIA 112 ment th e Slovaks are the ones cutting themselves loose because they want to 'g row up ' and become indepe ndent of the Czechs who have helped the m " materially and morally" ever s ince the foundation of the common state. "Let it be obvious that it is the Slovaks who step out of the federation, and that we the n are the successor state , which keeps its ob li gations, treaties and relation s to th e world around us. The Czech kingdom united hi storicall y with Moravia does not need to be confirmed once again by any Rome, Frankfurt or Vienna." 8 1 So, the Czech Lands are a hi storically natural unity , wh ich does not in any way need Slovakia. They cont inue: " Without artificia l nationalizing, all questions can be named and also so lved in a more rational way" 82 - again, they are suggesting that the Slovaks are irrational and nationalistic as opposed to the rational Czechs. The Slovak image of the Czechs was propagated no less directly . In a series of articles in Literarny tyidennfk entitled " If Slovakia wants to be Slovakia ... ,"83 the writer Mi lan Ferko treated severa l subjects concern ing Slovak autonomy or independence. He held that after th e parliamentary e lectio ns in June 1992 when Vl adimfr Meciar 's Movement for a Democratic S lovakia (Hnutie za demokraticke Slovensko, HZDS ) won in Slovakia, the Czechs finally began to understand that the Slovaks really wanted to be inde pendent, and stated, " Some Czech politicians are beg inning to abandon [ ... ] the pos ition of historical arrogance and eco nomic super iorit y." 84 He thereby confirmed the image of the arroga nt Czechs who wanted to jujf. znamena to, ze jim k tem uz stavu a vedomf jeste neco chybf. a my nemame pravo je od toho zdrfovat." 81 "At' se stane zrejmym, ze jsou to Slovaci. kdo vystupujf z federace. a my pak jsme nastupni cky stat. jen z zus tane ve svych zavazcfch , sm lou vach a vztazfch k okolnfmu svetu. Ceske kralovstvf spoj ene hi storick y s Moravou se nepotre buje davat zadnym Rfmem. Frankfurtem ci Vfdnf znovu potvrzovat. " 82 .. Bez 83 " Ak Slovensko chce byt'Slovenskom .. ... 84 " Niektorf cesk f politici zacfnaju opu stat' [ .. . J pozfcie historickej arogancie a ekono- umeleho nacionalizovanf dajf se vsechny otazky pojmenovat i resi t vecneji ." mickej nadradenost i." " Ak Slovensko chce byt' Slovenskom ..." Vil. Literarny dennik June 27. 1992, 12. tyz- �SLOVAKIA 113 keep the Slovaks in an inferior position and he continued, " With the help of international financial superpowers , Prague decided about the fate of Slovakia, which has to remain in a vassal relationship to the Czech Lands." 85 According to Ferko, the Slovak government had also become arrogant, and the politicians of Public Again st Violence (Verejnost' proti nasiliu , VPN) had become " slaves of Prague' s neocolonial relationship to Slovakia" 86 and sought " to continue to infiltrate into the Slovak political life ideas of Masaryki sm and cosmopolitani sm in the fra mework of which there is no place for the Slovak nation. " 87 T.G. Masaryk was the first president of Czechos lovakia , and Czech s and Slovaks have very di ss imilar view s of him . To the Czechs he epitomizes democracy , whereas many Slovaks see him as the representative of the state ideology of the First Republic ( 19181938), the Czechoslovakism, according to which Czec hs and Slovaks were two branches of the same Czechoslovak nation . Many Slovaks belie ve that Czechoslovaki sm suppressed their national identity, and their view of the First Republic and of Masaryk is influenced by thi s negative vie w of the state ideology. The Slovak view of Masaryk is also tainted by the fact that in 1918 he signed an agreement with a group of Czech and Slovak emigres in Pittsburgh , according to which Slovakia was promi sed some form of autonomy in the new Czechoslovak state. For variou s reason s thi s promise was never fulfill ed,88 and thi s has left an impression among some Slovaks that Masaryk and the Czechs delibe ratel y broke their promi ses becau se xs -- Pra ha pros tred nfctvom medzin arod nyc h fin ancnych ve l'mocf rozhod la o osude Sl ovenska, ktore ma zostat' vo vaza lskom pomere k Cecham." Ak Slovensko chce byt' Slovenskom ... VI. Literam y tyidennik M ay 23, 1992, 3. 86 " ''otrokmi prazs keho neokolonialisti ckeho vztahu k Slovensku. " Ibid. 7 " d'alej in f iltrovat' do slovenskeho politickeho zivota myslienk y masaryki zmu a kozmopoliti zmu , v ramci ktoryc h niet miesta pre slovensky narod."' Ibid. 88 Part of the reason why Sl ovaki a was not granted autonomy was th at in the new Czechos lovak state there was a Germ an mi nority of the same size as th e Slovak popul ati on. and if the Sl ovaks had gained autonomy it wo uld have been very di fficult to find a va lid argument why the Germ ans should not have autonomy, too. �SLOVAKJA 114 th ey wished to maintain the ir control ove r Slovakia. Furthermore, whe n Ferko attacked Masaryk it wen t to the very heart of the Czech se lf-understandin g and co uld serve as proof to the Czec hs that the Slovaks did not rea ll y understand what democracy was a ll about. Anoth er im age from hi story that Ferko mobilizes is the Slovak wartime state , whi c h he presents as hav in g raised ge nera l Slovak se lf-co nsc iou sness, the spirit of e nterpri se, a nd the will to be equa l with the rest of the world . 89 Thi s is a totally different im age of the Slovak State than the one propagated by Vac ul fk who saw it only as a sy mbol of fascism , with which the Slo va ks had still not dealt. To Ferko the fa sc ism of the state was less sig nificant than the fac t th at it was Slovak. According to him , the e lect io ns in Jun e 1992 showed that neo-fasc ist te nde nci es were growing in oth er parts of Czec hoslovak ia, but not in Slovakia - leavi ng o nl y the Czec h land s infected wi th it. 911 He re, Ferko turn s Vaculfk 's accusation of the Slovaks' lac k of se ttleme nt w ith the wart ime fascism aga in st the Czechs - poss ibl y beca use he was aware that hi s arg ume nt was not very solid. In the very last issue of Literarny tyidennfk before the partiti o n, Vladimfr Min ac (one of Slovakia 's lead in g writers) propagated hi s less than pos iti ve im age of the Czec hs: "God save us from learning from the Czec hs the e mpty ideo log ica l rhetoric , the spl e ndid mora1ity, whi ch is limited to word s, the Have l-like e mptiness, which hides in itse lf o nl y a mad dwarf. " 9 1 In ridi c ulin g Vaclav Have l, Min ac insulted anothe r icon of the Czec h se lf-unders tandin g: Have l as the successor to Masaryk as the good philosopher-pres ide nt. And he was co mpl ete ly aware of thi s w he n he mentioned the myth of Masaryk 's '" Ferko: "'Ak Slovensko .. . VII ". ° Ferko 9 wi th out doubt hints at th e amazing elec ti on results or the Czec h Miroslav Sl,1dek ' s neo-fasc ist Republi ca n Party, which gained over 6 % of the votes in the Czech lands (Peter Bugge : The Czech Republi c, in: Szajkowsk i (ed.): Politica l Parties. 158- 159). "' " Bozec hrai\ , aby sme sa naucil i od Cechov prazdnej idologickej retorike. onej skvelej moralke, ktora sa obm edzuje na slova. onej hav lovskej prazdnote. ktora utaj uje v sebe iba zuriveho trpas lfka."' " Odkiar a kam , Slovaci 'I" ("Wherefrom and whereto, Slovaks?") Literamy tyi dennfk Dec. 19, 1992 , 11 . �SLOVAKIA 115 model democracy and deemed it " shrieking Bohemian glass in the necklace of the legend" 92 - instead of being real jewels, that is. When dismi ss ing the first Czechoslovak Republic like this, Mimic reflected the views of one-third of the Slovak populace, which did not consider it democratic, but in opposition to the majority of the Czech population, 93 and so he , like Yaculfk, invoked the collective memory in order to create an impression of Czech-Slovak incompatibility. Furthermore, Mimic painted a picture of the First Republic as a time when many Czechs came to Slovakia allegedly to help build it, but when they taught in school s at all level s, they taught Czechos lovak instead of Slovak, and when they founded the Slovak National Theatre , it was in reality one more Czech National Theatre. So the Czechs did not help out of pure brotherly sacrifice, but out of a desire to turn the Slovaks into Czechs. Later, Mimic reproduced the stereotype of the Czechs as being arrogant enough to want to decide over Slovakia without the appropriate understanding: " Again and again they go into political battle with the Slovaks with the same reproaches and with the sa me lack of knowledge of the Slovak world. They still tutor, still look after and protect in the way that every coloniali st has protected hi s colony. " 94 He re , the image of the Czechs as malevolent colonialists was used to create the impress ion that a veritable war was being waged between the evil Czech politicians and the Slovak people-and not onl y this: 9 ' 93 skrfpajuce ces ke skl o v mi hrdelnfku legendy. 37 % of th e Slovaks and 70 % of the Czechs sa w th e First Republi c as a model democracy. whereas anoth er 33 % of th e Slovaks did not think it was democrati c at all. (Marian Timorack y : Yerejna mienka o ce sko-slovenskych vztahoch. in: Fedor Gal (ed. ): One.for krize cesko-slovenskych vztaht1. (Praha: SLON 1992), 8 1-82 . Thi s probabl y refl ec ts th e Sl ovak res istance aga inst M asaryk ·s Czechos lovaki sm. which Ferko attacked, too. "" ·· v zdy znovu a znov u tiahnu do politickeho zapasu so Slo vakmi s tymi istyrni vycitkami a s tou istou neznalostbu slovenskeho sveta. Stale tutorcia, stale opatruju a ochrai\uju tak, ako kazdy kol oni ali sta ochrai\ova l svoju kol 6niu. " '·Odki al' a karn , Slovac i?" Litenirny tyidennlk Dec. 19, 1992, 11. �116 SLOVAKIA betwee n the Czech and Slovak worlds. 95 By portraying Czechs and Slovaks as living in different worlds , Minac made the partition of the common state look natural and desirab le as it enabled the small Slovak nation to fulfil its destiny as an authentic small nation facing the threatening international consumer society. And he concluded, " Behind us stay the o ld enmities and mi sunderstandin gs, a serva nt 's conflicts and rebellion s. Before us is our new di gnity." 96 As thi s ana lysis has shown , the Czech and Slovak collective memories were used to explain the differences between Czechs and Slovaks and to legitimize the break-up. Thi s way of usin g the past was made poss ible by the hu ge soc ietal changes since the Ve lvet Revolution in 1989. When communism fe ll , there was a broadly felt need to rewrite history in order to get rid of the ideolog ica ll y deformed historical interpretation s of the communists and thi s led to two different phenomena. On the one hand , the new situ at ion led to an uncovering of 'wh ite spots ' in the hi story of the Czechs and Slovaks. On the other, thi s rewriting made room for new deformations of history. Silvia Mihalikova has described this phenome non , which was common for the entire post-communi st world, as a use of arguments from the past according to a principle of se lf-service: people simply chose the historical facts, persons, and conceptions that suited their momentary purposes. 97 95 Thi s image of the Czechs and Slovaks li ving in different worlds was shared by at least the Czech political weekly, Respekt, whose front page of the elect ion issue in 1992 read in large red letters 'Two civi li za ti ons" and conti nued in the main comment: "A lone into Europe or toge ther to the Balkans" ( Respekt June 8-14, I 992, I ). See Peter Bugge : The Use of the Middle: Mitteleuropa vs. Strednf Evropa. In : European Review of History , Vol. 6. No. I . 1999, 30-3 1 and Vladimir Macura: Masarykovy boty a jine semi(o) fejetony. (Praha: Prazska imagin ace 1993). 48-49 for a further elaborat ion of the Czech imaging of the Slovaks as belonging to the Balkans . % " Za nami ostavaju stare nepriatel'stva a nedorozumenia, sluhovs ke spory a vzbury . Pred nami je nasa nova d6stojnost'. " " Odkial' a kam . Slovaci ?" Literarny tj idennfk Dec. 19. 1992. 11. 97 Mihalikova: Narodne symboly, 54-56. �SLOVAKIA 117 The se lf-serv ice aspec t of the use of hi story was supported by the communist ideo logization of the culture, includin g the schools. The hi story that had been to ld by the regime and taught in sc hool s was perce ived as inh erentl y wrong , and therefore , as Tony Judt has argued, a plurality of memories was created when parents told their children what hi story was ' reall y' like. Every hi story that was told by the reg ime was by implication fa lse, which meant th at every hi story not to ld by the regime mu st by implication be true. 98 This was the reason, not onl y for the very different Czec h and Slovak collective memories, but also for the overa ll low level of knowl edge about and reflection on the nation al hi story. Key period s in Czechoslovak hi story co ncernin g the mutual Czech-Slovak relation ship can be li sted as follows : I) the First Republic 19 I 8- 1938, 2) the destruction of Czechoslovakia and th e creati on of the Slovak State durin g World War II, 3) the Slovak National Uprising against the fascists in 1944, 4) the Prague Spring in 1968, 5) the Normalization 1969-1 989. When lookin g at the articles that we have analysed here, it is c lear that Vaculfk employed al l of them. In hi s interpretation : the First Rep ublic was a time when the Czechs he lped the ir un grateful younger brothers; the Slovak State came into bein g when the Slovaks betrayed the Czechs; the Slovak National Upri sin g was not necessaril y for a renewal of Czechoslovakia; in the Prague Spring the Slovaks preyed on the Czech strugg le for democracy; and durin g Norma li zati on the Slovaks suffered less than the Czec hs. In the same vei n, Mil an Ferko and Vladimfr Mimic invoked the Slovak collective memory of the First Republic as a period of Czechoslovakism th at did not properly ack now ledge the character and needs of the Slovaks, and the Czechs did what they could to turn the Slovaks into Czec hs. The reason why Ferko and Mimic both used thi s period probabl y lay in the fact th at Czechoslovakism was the 'state ideo logy' of the First Rep ublic , which made it easy to attack 9 ' Tony Judt: The Past is Another Cou ntry : Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe , in: Dcedalus. Vol. 21. No. 4, 1992, I OI. �SLOVAK IA 118 Czech arrogance towards the Slovaks. As opposed to this , the legacy of all the other significant periods seemed in some way or another too ambiguous to be exp loited from Minac ' s and Ferko ' s points of view. 99 This reflects the fact that Czechs and Slovaks not on ly experienced the events differently at the time, but also that their memories of them today are very different. And this then shows us that the socia li zation of the population ' s memories since 1918 was not successful in providing the two nations with a common co ll ective memory of the past that they shared as parts of the same state. In stead, those who after 1989 wished to do otherwise were ab le, like Vaculfk, Minac , Ferko, and others, to mobilize conflicts from the past and link them together regardless of any inner logic and chrono logy. They painted a picture of a basic Czech-Slovak incompatibility and a common history consisting of conflicts, betrayals, and wrongdoings that made a divorce look c learly preferable to a continued malfunctionin g marriage. 100 In Slovakia, the discu ss ions about the common history of the Czechs and the Slovaks became polarized to the degree that two directly opposite interpretations were propagated. The relevant criterion for arguments became the question whether the common state had been favourable or disadvantageous to the Slovaks. 101 Slovak so99 The Slovak State was fascist: the National Uprising was directed aga in st the inde- pendent Slovak State; resu lting from th e Prague Spring was th e federalism that Ferko and Minac fo ught aga inst but which neverth eless meant progress in th e Czech-Slovak relationship; and Normalization was not see n as too bad a period for th e Slovaks . ' 00 The metaphor of the marriage was also frequently used in the debate, see e.g. Miroslav Ku sy : '·Konfederacnf k lam·• (""Confederation delusion'"). Literarnf no viny Aug. 6. 1992. 1+3. 0 ' ' Mihalikova: Narodne symboly, 58. An ex traordinary feature of th e Slovak contex t was the fact that very ac tive participants in the debate were exi les like Stefan Polakovic or Milan S. Durica. who either had been in ex ile ever since World War II beca use of their ro le in the Slovak State or they came from thi s environment. They saw as their greatest task res torin g Slovak independence from th e Czechs and seemed not to reali ze that Slovak society had changed since their heyday during the �SLOVAKIA 119 ciety was to a very large ex tent di vided over interpretations of hi story , the nature of Slovak nation al identity, and wishes for the future, and in fact the Slovaks who engaged in the de bates on the CzechSlovak past spent as much or even more energy blaming eac h other, rather than blaming the Czechs. 102 In contrast to thi s deep divi sion , the Czechs may have disagreed on many thing s, but by and large there was unanimity concerning subjects such as these. In the Czech debate, the efforts to create a separate Czech state grad uall y came to be seen as a way of guardin g Kl aus' rapid economic reform s from the " irrati o nal" Slovaks a nd Czech democracy from the alleged Slovak inclin ation to national soc iali sm and a stron g state, images which were mobili zed by the frequent use of exa mples from the Czech collective me mory. It is furthermore interesting that an opinion poll in October of 1990 showed that more than 50 % of the Czechs believed in the idea of one Czechoslovak nation . 1w While most Czechs and Slovaks perce ived of them se lves as be in g simultaneously Czechoslovaks and e ithe r Czechs or Slovaks, most Czechs, who unconsciously conceived of the two layers of the ir identification as being identical , had never paid much attention to the conce pt of a Czech identification as be in g different from their ide ntific ation as Czechoslovaks. Most Slovaks , on the other hand , were very much aware that there was a difference between their Slovak and their Czechoslovak identification . 104 Whe n the newspaper debates invoked the war. In co ntrast to the hi stori ans who had li ved throu gh the communi st period at home and those who had been in exile becau se of their di sagreements with the co mmuni st regime. thi s group of hi storians saw nothing but disadvantages for the Slovaks in the com mon Czechos lovak Republic. 102 According to Soiia Szomolanyi. different perceptions of key fi gures and events in Slovak history not onl y divided . but outri ght polari zed th e population (Szomo lany i 1994 : 76). '"' Timoracky : Yerejna mienka. 7 1-72. ' 04 Thi s was strengthened by th e asy mmetri ca l conditi ons after 19 I 8. e.g. when in school tex tbooks Czech hi story was made Czechos lovak simply by adding " slovak" to th e adjec ti ve (E li sabeth Bakke: Cechoslovak izmu s v skol skych uceb ni ciach ( 19 18- 1938). Historicky casopis. Vo l. 47. o 2. 1999: 242-243) or when on ly the �120 SLOVAKIA past, it happened in a way that mobili zed images that em phasized the differences rather than the s imil ariti es between th e tw o nation a l groups. In thi s way the Czech and Slovak layers of the Czec hoslovak population 's identifi cat ion were stre ngthened to the detriment of the Czechoslovak layer. And the di scre pancy that was mob ili zed between the Czech and Slovak images of themselves, the other, and the future of the common state is undoubted ly part of the answer to the question why the common Czechoslovak state eventually broke up. Slovaks had their own Communist Party (KSS) whereas the Czechos lovak Communist Party (KSC) served both as the Czech and the all-state party. � 104 SLOVAKIA "Ungrateful Younger Brothers" versus "Arrogant Atheists." Czech-Slovak Stereotypes in a Collective Memory Perspective. Lone Sarauw On January I , 1993 , Czechoslovakia was divided in a process that has been characterized as a "vel vet divorce. " 56 Compared to the ways in which other post-communi st states were fa lling apart at the time, thi s seems a va lid description . However , the split was ca used by severe confli cts betwee n the two parts of the state. Scholars have given a number of reasons for the di vo rce : I ) The Czech desire for democracy and a market economy clashed with Slovak insistence upon nati onal eq uality. 57 2) Despite grow ing macro-structu ra l simil ariti es, one Czechoslovak soc iety never managed to replace the Czech and Slovak soc ieti es that had been brought together in a com mon state. 58 3) Th e w inners of the parli amentary elec tion s in 1992, th e Sl ovak Vl adimfr Meciar and the Czech V aclav Kl aus, were unabl e to 56 See Otto U lc: "C zechos lovak ia' s ve l vet divorce. " East European Quarterly 30. September ( 1996). pp. 33 1-352. 57 5 " Ibid. Ji ff Mu sil : '"C zec h and Slovak Soc iety." in Jiff Mu sil (ed.): Th e End or Czechoslova kia (Budapest. L ondon, New York: Central European University Press 1995). 77-94. �SLOVAKIA 105 come to te rm s w ith the constitutional arrangement of Czechoslovakia, beca use they were unwillin g to put the interests of the common state before their own power ambi tions. 59 And more co uld be found. As a contrib uti on to the debate over the break-up, thi s artic le inte nd s to look at th e role of stereotypes and collective memory in it, the argument being that hi story was mobili zed in the media de bates prior to the partition , and that it happe ned in a way that en hanced the di ffere nces rather than the likenesses of the two peopl es.60 As a result of thi s th e population graduall y came to accept the partition of the common state, even if the majority of the population never supported it. 6 1 The concept "collective me mory" has been defi ned as "a soc iety 's co ll ected production of me mory," 62 whi ch suppli es the soc iety with a fee ling of belong ing together by sharing the same past. One of the probl e ms in Czec hoslovakia seems to have bee n the lack of such a feelin g of sharing the same past in both halves of the state. Despite the fact that, apart from World W ar II , Czechs and Slovaks lived together in one state between 19 18 and I 993 , their co ll ective me mories of this li fe together differ to a considerab le ex tent. 59 Abby Innes: ·'T he Breakup of Czechos lovakia: The Impac t of Party Development on the Separa ti on of the State," East European Politics and Societies (EEPS) , Vol. I I , No. 3, Fall ( 1997), 393-435 . 60 Si l via Mihali kova: •• arod ne symbo ly slovenskej statnosti", Politologicka revue 2, prosinec, ( 1996), 56. 61 An opi ni on poll from Jul y 1992 shows th at 53 % of the Czechs and 42 % of the Slovaks w ished lo maintain th e co mmon state. whi le respecti ve ly 24 % and 32 % w ished the slate to be divided (Sharon W olchi k : ·The Politics of Transition and th e Break-U p of Czec hos lova ki a," in Ji ff Musi l (ed .): Th e End of' Czechos lova kia. (Budapest : Centra l European Universi ty Press 1995 , 233). 62 Claus Bry ld and Anette Warrin g: Besaette/sestiden som kollektiv erindring. Histo- rie- og traditionsfor va llning at' krig og besaettelse 1945- 1997. (Rosk ilde: Rosk ilde Uni versitetsforlag 1998), 19-20. �106 SLOVAKIA In the medi a debates in the peri od leading up to the break-up of C zec hos lovakia hi story , or rather memory ,63 was mobi Ii zed as proof of the inevitability and desirability of the divorce. Because thi s was the aim of the partic ipants of the debate, chrono logy was irre levant and hi story became ' hori zontali zed ' so to speak. As Silvia Mi halikova has formulated it, "osten sible or rea l sins committed centuries ago merge with wrongs done in th e last decades and are at the same time th e reaso n for today 's mi sunderstandin gs and hatred."64 Thus, the mobilization of past conflicts e nabl ed the two nation s to blame eac h other for their current probl ems, which is wh at thi s article intend s to show using examples from the literary newspapers of th e Czech Land s and Slovakia, Literarnf noviny and Literarny tyi- dennik,65 prior to the break-up. Wh en looking for archetypical examp les of the Czech and S lovak stereotypes or images of each other, the "arroga nt atheists" and " ungrateful younger brothers" of the headlines were the first ideas about the Czech and S lovak images of each other that came to mind . Therefore, it came as a surprise that it was rather imposs ibl e to find any examples of the stereotype of the Czechs as dangerous atheists they are presented as being arrogant, though. The lack of proof of the idea that the Slovak image of the Czec hs would see them as atheists 0 -' Pierre Nora has formu lated thi s di st incti on be tween history and memory in terms of a fund amen tal opposi ti on . .. Memory is life [ ... ] a bond tying us to the etern al presen t[ ... ] it is affec ti ve and mag ica l l and] onl y accom modates th ose facts that suit it .'' whereas hi story is .. the reconstru cti on , al ways problematic and incomplete j ... I a representati on of the past I th at I ca ll s fo r analys is and criti cism' ' (Pierre Nora: "Between Memory and H istory: Les Lieux de M emoire" . Representations Vol 0, No. 26 Special Issue: M emory and Cou nter-M emory. Spring ( I 989) , 8-9). A less ri gid di stincti on has been pro posed by A nne Erikse n. who sees hi story and memory as being equally important aspec ts of the co llecti ve memory th at combine to create the entire co llec ti ve memory (A nne Eriksen: Del var nae annet under krigen. 2. verdenskrig i norsk kollektivtradisjon. (Oslo: Pax 1995). r,., Mihalikova: ·'Narodne symboly," 55. 65 In the literary newspapers the past was mobili zed more obviously and cru dely but not in a different way th an in mos t other newspapers. Thus, they serve well as illustrations of a process that was happening in the press in general. �SLOVAKIA 107 was fru strating , and it raised the question where thi s idea came from. It stemmed from the Christian Democratic Movement (Kresfansko De mokraticke Hnutie, KOH) , which, according to Miroslav Kusy , wanted to protect Slovakia from " des tructive liberal and freethinking influences from the Czech Lands." Besides, the stereotype had been used frequently in the interwar period , but the industrialization and urbanization of Slovakia since then had turned the mostly rural soc iety into one where Catholics did not necessarily consider their interests as Catholics to be more important than their economic and cultural conditions. 66 Also, as Petr Prfhod a has stated , the image of the Czechs as atheists was a well-known Czech stereotype of the Slovak view of them ,67 indirectly testifyin g to a Czech stereotype of the Slovaks as ' religiou s. ' 68 The image that eventually turned out to be the most pervasive was one of the Czechs as Czechoslovakist69 colonialists exploiting Slovakia. And as colonialists, they were described as arrogant in wanting to rule over Slovakia, even though they did not know it properly. It should be pointed out that the difficulty in having the stereo- '"' Miroslav Ku sy: ··S lovak Exceptionalism". in Musil (ed.): The End. 147- 149 . See also Martin Butora and Zora Butorova: " Slovakia: The Iden tit y Chal lenges of the Newly Born State". Socia l Research. Vol. 60. No. 4, Winter ( 1993). 7 13-7 14. and Sona Szomol anyi: UParadox kon zervativi zmu na Slovensku .'· Domino Efekt. Vol. 2. No. 15. ( 1993). 4. 67 Petr Prfhoda: '·Mutual Perceptions in Czech -Slovak Relationships•·, in: Musil (ed.) : The End. 134. "" Al so th e nationali sti c Slovak news paper ··s Jovak Nation·• (Slovensky mirod) was checked for the atheist image. but it could not be found even here . This probably reflects the fact that the image was propagated by the KDH . which was a quite unpopu lar part y those days among its non -ad herents. and whic h was often reproached in Slovensky mirod. 69 As a way of legitimising th e new Czechos lovak Republic in 19 18, the doctrine of one Czechoslovak nati on w ith two branche s. a Czech and a Slovak one. was propa gated to comp ly wi th the intention of president Woodrow Wilson to gi ve national self-determinat ion to the nations of Cen tral and Eastern Europe . The doctrine was officia ll y abandoned onl y afler World War II. �108 SLOVAKIA types co nfirmed did not co ncern the Czech newspaper, the se l fimage of the Czechs as 'rational' notwithstanding. 70 The most co mmonl y cited example of the Czech perception of the Slovaks as ungra tefu l yo unger brothers was an article by the writer Lud vfk Vaculfk in Literarnf noviny from 1990 entitled: " Our Slova k Questi on. " 7 1 The first thin g to be noticed about Vaculfk 's article is the co ndescending tone of the titl e: The Slovak questi on is ' our ' ques ti on, that is ' us' meaning the Czechs , not the Slovak s. 72 Vaculfk beg ins his arti cle by definin g himself as being Czech by nation ality, but Czechoslovak as a citi ze n, but he nevertheless repeatedl y speaks in the name of ' us, th e Czec hs,' whi ch substanti all y weakens hi s claim to being a truly Czechoslovak citizen. Throu ghout hi s tex t, Vaculfk uses exampl es from hi story to argue for a separati on from the Slo vaks. First, he bl ames the Slovaks for never having dealt with the fasc ism of their wartime state ( 19391945). They escaped thi s obligation by rejoining the Czechs in Czechos lovakia, and wh en, after a few yea rs, they were forced into a communi st regime, they did not reall y mind , si nce they ga ined a lot more economicall y from co mmuni sm than did the Czechs. There is no inner log ic between these two situati ons other th an th e fac t th at Vaculfk 's description of them makes the Slovaks look as if they have no principl es, going more or less direc tl y from accepting fascism to accepting co mmuni sm. He co ntinues by bl ami ng the Slovaks fo r prey ing on the Czech s' struggle for democracy in 1968, since th e only reform that survived the W arsaw Pac t in vas ion was the federali zation of the state, " When we in I 968 tri ed to free ourse lves from 70 L adis lav Holy : The Lillie Czech and the Gre<I/ Czech Na tion. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 104. 71 72 " Nase slovenska otazka". Litenimf noviny (M ay 3, 1990). I +3 . Yacu l fk's titl e was in spired by the titl e of T.G. Masaryk ·s book ··The Czech Question" (C:eska otazka) from 1895 on the Czech rebirth in the 19th century and it outlined hi s po litica l progra mme for the Czech nati on. But where Masaryk treated his own nation. Yacu lfk by the use of the word ··our" implies th at the Czechs have a ri ght to objectify and defi ne the Slovaks. �SLOVAKIA 109 the dictatorship, the Slovaks regarded it as our business and went for autonomy. When we were then puni shed for the rebellion , they , because they had not compromised th emse lves very much with us, received a more gentle puni shment; and that their autonomy, which they gained from our rebellion , for us meant a sharpenin g of the punishment, does not cross their mind s." 73 When Vaculfk describes the Slovak ga in of autonomy as a sharpenin g of the puni shment for the Czechs , this testifies to hi s belief, not only in centralism , but also that the Czechs have the right to control Slovaki a. When employing these im ages he attempts to mobilize the Czech memory of the Slovaks as traitors both in 1938-39, when they ga ined their own state whereas the Czech lands were turned into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and in the Prague Spring of 1968. Later on Vaculfk contradicts his argument of th e Slovak sati sfaction with the communist regime by claiming that they left it to the Czechs to defeat the communists and then again brought up their claims for autonomy: "as if they thought: you brou ght us your communism, now you take it away again, Czechs! " 74 According to Vaculfk, the Slovaks, being objects rather than subjects of hi story, unlike the Czechs have always managed to escape the existential question: Who are we and what do we want? Thi s even counts for the Slovak National Uprising during World War II, which in Vaculfk 's view was too brief and too limited territoriall y to count as proof of Slovak pro-C zec hos lov ak ism. Vaculfk only mention s the anti-fascist element of the upri si ng and neg lects the fact that the leaders of the resistance movement clearly stated a wish to reunite with the Czechs after 73 " Kdyz jsme se v roce 1968 poku sili uvolnit se z diktatury , povazovali to Slovaci za nasi staro st a sli si za autonomif. K dyz my pak byli za vzpouru ztrestan i, oni , j elikoz se s nami moc nezkompromitovali, dostali mfrnejsf trest; a ze jejich autono- mie, kterou z nasf vzpoury vyzfska li , znamenala pro nas zostfenf trestu, to jim nenapada." 74 "jako by si mysleli: Privezli j ste nam sem v,is komuni smus, odvezte si ho zas, Cesi 1" - Many Slovaks after 1989 have pointed ou t that in 1946 40 % of th e Czechs voted com muni st, and only 30 % of the Slovaks, suggesting that comm uni sm was a predomi nantly Czech idea. �SLOVAKIA 110 th e wa r,75 whi c h was inco ns iste nt w ith hi s prev io us acc usati o ns aga inst the Slovak s fo r not hav ing co me to te rm s w ith the fasc ism of the ir wartime state . The first time Vaculfk mobili zes the " littl e brothe r" im age he c laims that the Slovak s, s ince they do not have a nybody else against whom to prove the ir adulthood , mi stake nl y tried it o ut on the Czechs. Later on he continues th at, afte r the fa ll of co mmuni sm, th e Sl ovak nation fin a ll y had the cha nce to start looking fo r its ow n happiness, by whi ch it would grow one more leve l. The most c rude exa mple of the im age comes w he n Vac ulfk re plies to Mil an Si mec ka, a Czec h write r li vin g in Slovaki a, who had w ritte n to the Czec hs th at the ir yo un ger brothe r had grow n up a nd now should ha ve hi s ow n bed. Vac ul fk 's repl y was as fo ll ows: "As we know our youn ger brothe r, he w ill want to have hi s bed by the window in the summer and by the ove n in the w inte r. No bed , littl e broth e r, ha ve yo ur o wn littl e ho use!" 76 And finall y, he li sts reaso ns why just now is the ri ght time to get rid of the Slovaks, one of whi c h is th at 70 years ago it wo uld have bee n interpreted as de ny ing he lp to the younger brother. Thus, Vac ulfk mobili zes the Czec h image of the ungrateful younger brother and the coll ective me mory of Slovak betrayal s to make hi s po int th at the Czec hs would be better off without the Slovaks. It is hard not to find Vac ulfk a bit patronizing, but hi s views we re not e xce pti onal a mong the Czec hs. In the articl e " Re lie f with a dec ision," 77 fo urteen intellectu als 78 agreed th at it was bette r to let the Slovaks go, if th at was what they wanted , so th at the Czec hs co uld stand as the true he irs of Czec hos lovaki a and thereby keep the name of the 75 See I.:.ubomir Liptak : S/ovensko v 20. storocf. (Brat islava : K all igram 2000), 25 1- 252. 76 ·'A le j ak mladsfho brat ffc ka zname, bude v lete chtft tu pos tylku u ok na a v zime u pece. Zadnou postylku, bra tfe. domecek mej si 1" 77 " Uleva z rozhodnutf" . L itenim f noviny June 18, 1992, I. 78 The article was signed by Ji ff K olar, K arel Siktanc, K arel Pecka, Lud vfk Yacul fk , V lad im ir K ar ffk , I van Werni sc h, Jan Lopatka, Sergej Mac honi n, Pfemys l Rut. Dusan K arpatsky, Yrati slav Farber, Ji ff Cies lar, Mi ros lav Kl omfnek, M ilan Jungmann, all men of literature. �SLOVAKIA 111 state. Se manti ca ll y, Czechoslovaki a w itho ut Slova ki a does not make muc h sense, but to the authors of the arti cle there was c learly anothe r aspect to Czechos lova ki a th an the territori al one. T he ir be li ef that Czechos lovak ia w ithout Slovaki a made sense indi cated that they pe rce ived th e Czech s as be in g in some undefin ed ma nner more trul y Czec hos lova k th an the Slovaks and that they reserved the ri ght to defin e the character of the co mmon state fo r the Czechs. Bes ides, they saw the diffe re nt res ults of the e lection s in June 1992 in the two parts of the country as an exampl e of the Czech desire fo r a free economy and po liti ca l de moc rac y on the o ne hand , and on the oth er of the Slovak longin g fo r a soc iety directed by the state a nd with e le me nts of nati onal soci ali sm. And they furth e rmore inte rpre ted the S lovak res ult as an ex press ion of a Slovak long ing fo r their own indepe nde nt state, in spite of the fac t th at th e onl y Slovak party with inde pe nde nce as part of its e lec ti on prog ramme was the Slova k Nati onal Party (Sl ovenska narodna strana, SNS), whi ch ga ined onl y 9.4 % of the votes in Slovakia.79 The arti cle was writte n in a tone th at sugges ted ne utrality and objecti vity, whil e the co nte nt was in fac t stron gly po le mi ca l. " If it is so that onl y e rectin g one's ow n state is the sign o f adulth ood and se lf-justifi cati on of a nation , we do not have reasons fo r counting it as a fa ilure a nd loss, what we since 19 18 have contributed to Slovaki a in that respect materi all y and mora ll y. The found ation of Czechos lova ki a co mpl eted the Czech nati o nal reawake nin g, and if the Slovaks today c ut the mse lves loose fro m us, it means th at they are still lac kin g somethin g to reac h the same pos iti on and consc iousness, and we do not have the ri ght to keep the m fro m that. " 80 In thi s argu- 79 K aren Henderson: T he Slovak Republic, in : Bogdan Szajkowsk i (ed.): Po litica l Parties of Eastern Europe. Russia & the Successor S tates. (Harlow: Longman In for- mati on and Reference 1994 ). 529. ' 0 ·'Je- li tom u tak, ze teprve ustave nf vlas tn fho statu je znamenfm dospe losti a sveprav nosti naroda, nemame duvod pocftat si za pro hru a ztratu , cfm jsme k tomu Slovensku od rok u 19 18 hmotne i moraine prispeli . Zalozenfm Ceskos lovenske republik y se dov rsilo ceske narodn f obroze nf, a j estli ze se Slovaci dnes od nas odpo- �SLOVAKIA 112 ment th e Slovaks are the ones cutting themselves loose because they want to 'g row up ' and become indepe ndent of the Czechs who have helped the m " materially and morally" ever s ince the foundation of the common state. "Let it be obvious that it is the Slovaks who step out of the federation, and that we the n are the successor state , which keeps its ob li gations, treaties and relation s to th e world around us. The Czech kingdom united hi storicall y with Moravia does not need to be confirmed once again by any Rome, Frankfurt or Vienna." 8 1 So, the Czech Lands are a hi storically natural unity , wh ich does not in any way need Slovakia. They cont inue: " Without artificia l nationalizing, all questions can be named and also so lved in a more rational way" 82 - again, they are suggesting that the Slovaks are irrational and nationalistic as opposed to the rational Czechs. The Slovak image of the Czechs was propagated no less directly . In a series of articles in Literarny tyidennfk entitled " If Slovakia wants to be Slovakia ... ,"83 the writer Mi lan Ferko treated severa l subjects concern ing Slovak autonomy or independence. He held that after th e parliamentary e lectio ns in June 1992 when Vl adimfr Meciar 's Movement for a Democratic S lovakia (Hnutie za demokraticke Slovensko, HZDS ) won in Slovakia, the Czechs finally began to understand that the Slovaks really wanted to be inde pendent, and stated, " Some Czech politicians are beg inning to abandon [ ... ] the pos ition of historical arrogance and eco nomic super iorit y." 84 He thereby confirmed the image of the arroga nt Czechs who wanted to jujf. znamena to, ze jim k tem uz stavu a vedomf jeste neco chybf. a my nemame pravo je od toho zdrfovat." 81 "At' se stane zrejmym, ze jsou to Slovaci. kdo vystupujf z federace. a my pak jsme nastupni cky stat. jen z zus tane ve svych zavazcfch , sm lou vach a vztazfch k okolnfmu svetu. Ceske kralovstvf spoj ene hi storick y s Moravou se nepotre buje davat zadnym Rfmem. Frankfurtem ci Vfdnf znovu potvrzovat. " 82 .. Bez 83 " Ak Slovensko chce byt'Slovenskom .. ... 84 " Niektorf cesk f politici zacfnaju opu stat' [ .. . J pozfcie historickej arogancie a ekono- umeleho nacionalizovanf dajf se vsechny otazky pojmenovat i resi t vecneji ." mickej nadradenost i." " Ak Slovensko chce byt' Slovenskom ..." Vil. Literarny dennik June 27. 1992, 12. tyz- �SLOVAKIA 113 keep the Slovaks in an inferior position and he continued, " With the help of international financial superpowers , Prague decided about the fate of Slovakia, which has to remain in a vassal relationship to the Czech Lands." 85 According to Ferko, the Slovak government had also become arrogant, and the politicians of Public Again st Violence (Verejnost' proti nasiliu , VPN) had become " slaves of Prague' s neocolonial relationship to Slovakia" 86 and sought " to continue to infiltrate into the Slovak political life ideas of Masaryki sm and cosmopolitani sm in the fra mework of which there is no place for the Slovak nation. " 87 T.G. Masaryk was the first president of Czechos lovakia , and Czech s and Slovaks have very di ss imilar view s of him . To the Czechs he epitomizes democracy , whereas many Slovaks see him as the representative of the state ideology of the First Republic ( 19181938), the Czechoslovakism, according to which Czec hs and Slovaks were two branches of the same Czechoslovak nation . Many Slovaks belie ve that Czechoslovaki sm suppressed their national identity, and their view of the First Republic and of Masaryk is influenced by thi s negative vie w of the state ideology. The Slovak view of Masaryk is also tainted by the fact that in 1918 he signed an agreement with a group of Czech and Slovak emigres in Pittsburgh , according to which Slovakia was promi sed some form of autonomy in the new Czechoslovak state. For variou s reason s thi s promise was never fulfill ed,88 and thi s has left an impression among some Slovaks that Masaryk and the Czechs delibe ratel y broke their promi ses becau se xs -- Pra ha pros tred nfctvom medzin arod nyc h fin ancnych ve l'mocf rozhod la o osude Sl ovenska, ktore ma zostat' vo vaza lskom pomere k Cecham." Ak Slovensko chce byt' Slovenskom ... VI. Literam y tyidennik M ay 23, 1992, 3. 86 " ''otrokmi prazs keho neokolonialisti ckeho vztahu k Slovensku. " Ibid. 7 " d'alej in f iltrovat' do slovenskeho politickeho zivota myslienk y masaryki zmu a kozmopoliti zmu , v ramci ktoryc h niet miesta pre slovensky narod."' Ibid. 88 Part of the reason why Sl ovaki a was not granted autonomy was th at in the new Czechos lovak state there was a Germ an mi nority of the same size as th e Slovak popul ati on. and if the Sl ovaks had gained autonomy it wo uld have been very di fficult to find a va lid argument why the Germ ans should not have autonomy, too. �SLOVAKJA 114 th ey wished to maintain the ir control ove r Slovakia. Furthermore, whe n Ferko attacked Masaryk it wen t to the very heart of the Czech se lf-understandin g and co uld serve as proof to the Czec hs that the Slovaks did not rea ll y understand what democracy was a ll about. Anoth er im age from hi story that Ferko mobilizes is the Slovak wartime state , whi c h he presents as hav in g raised ge nera l Slovak se lf-co nsc iou sness, the spirit of e nterpri se, a nd the will to be equa l with the rest of the world . 89 Thi s is a totally different im age of the Slovak State than the one propagated by Vac ul fk who saw it only as a sy mbol of fascism , with which the Slo va ks had still not dealt. To Ferko the fa sc ism of the state was less sig nificant than the fac t th at it was Slovak. According to him , the e lect io ns in Jun e 1992 showed that neo-fasc ist te nde nci es were growing in oth er parts of Czec hoslovak ia, but not in Slovakia - leavi ng o nl y the Czec h land s infected wi th it. 911 He re, Ferko turn s Vaculfk 's accusation of the Slovaks' lac k of se ttleme nt w ith the wart ime fascism aga in st the Czechs - poss ibl y beca use he was aware that hi s arg ume nt was not very solid. In the very last issue of Literarny tyidennfk before the partiti o n, Vladimfr Min ac (one of Slovakia 's lead in g writers) propagated hi s less than pos iti ve im age of the Czec hs: "God save us from learning from the Czec hs the e mpty ideo log ica l rhetoric , the spl e ndid mora1ity, whi ch is limited to word s, the Have l-like e mptiness, which hides in itse lf o nl y a mad dwarf. " 9 1 In ridi c ulin g Vaclav Have l, Min ac insulted anothe r icon of the Czec h se lf-unders tandin g: Have l as the successor to Masaryk as the good philosopher-pres ide nt. And he was co mpl ete ly aware of thi s w he n he mentioned the myth of Masaryk 's '" Ferko: "'Ak Slovensko .. . VII ". ° Ferko 9 wi th out doubt hints at th e amazing elec ti on results or the Czec h Miroslav Sl,1dek ' s neo-fasc ist Republi ca n Party, which gained over 6 % of the votes in the Czech lands (Peter Bugge : The Czech Republi c, in: Szajkowsk i (ed.): Politica l Parties. 158- 159). "' " Bozec hrai\ , aby sme sa naucil i od Cechov prazdnej idologickej retorike. onej skvelej moralke, ktora sa obm edzuje na slova. onej hav lovskej prazdnote. ktora utaj uje v sebe iba zuriveho trpas lfka."' " Odkiar a kam , Slovaci 'I" ("Wherefrom and whereto, Slovaks?") Literamy tyi dennfk Dec. 19, 1992 , 11 . �SLOVAKIA 115 model democracy and deemed it " shrieking Bohemian glass in the necklace of the legend" 92 - instead of being real jewels, that is. When dismi ss ing the first Czechoslovak Republic like this, Mimic reflected the views of one-third of the Slovak populace, which did not consider it democratic, but in opposition to the majority of the Czech population, 93 and so he , like Yaculfk, invoked the collective memory in order to create an impression of Czech-Slovak incompatibility. Furthermore, Mimic painted a picture of the First Republic as a time when many Czechs came to Slovakia allegedly to help build it, but when they taught in school s at all level s, they taught Czechos lovak instead of Slovak, and when they founded the Slovak National Theatre , it was in reality one more Czech National Theatre. So the Czechs did not help out of pure brotherly sacrifice, but out of a desire to turn the Slovaks into Czechs. Later, Mimic reproduced the stereotype of the Czechs as being arrogant enough to want to decide over Slovakia without the appropriate understanding: " Again and again they go into political battle with the Slovaks with the same reproaches and with the sa me lack of knowledge of the Slovak world. They still tutor, still look after and protect in the way that every coloniali st has protected hi s colony. " 94 He re , the image of the Czechs as malevolent colonialists was used to create the impress ion that a veritable war was being waged between the evil Czech politicians and the Slovak people-and not onl y this: 9 ' 93 skrfpajuce ces ke skl o v mi hrdelnfku legendy. 37 % of th e Slovaks and 70 % of the Czechs sa w th e First Republi c as a model democracy. whereas anoth er 33 % of th e Slovaks did not think it was democrati c at all. (Marian Timorack y : Yerejna mienka o ce sko-slovenskych vztahoch. in: Fedor Gal (ed. ): One.for krize cesko-slovenskych vztaht1. (Praha: SLON 1992), 8 1-82 . Thi s probabl y refl ec ts th e Sl ovak res istance aga inst M asaryk ·s Czechos lovaki sm. which Ferko attacked, too. "" ·· v zdy znovu a znov u tiahnu do politickeho zapasu so Slo vakmi s tymi istyrni vycitkami a s tou istou neznalostbu slovenskeho sveta. Stale tutorcia, stale opatruju a ochrai\uju tak, ako kazdy kol oni ali sta ochrai\ova l svoju kol 6niu. " '·Odki al' a karn , Slovac i?" Litenirny tyidennlk Dec. 19, 1992, 11. �116 SLOVAKIA betwee n the Czech and Slovak worlds. 95 By portraying Czechs and Slovaks as living in different worlds , Minac made the partition of the common state look natural and desirab le as it enabled the small Slovak nation to fulfil its destiny as an authentic small nation facing the threatening international consumer society. And he concluded, " Behind us stay the o ld enmities and mi sunderstandin gs, a serva nt 's conflicts and rebellion s. Before us is our new di gnity." 96 As thi s ana lysis has shown , the Czech and Slovak collective memories were used to explain the differences between Czechs and Slovaks and to legitimize the break-up. Thi s way of usin g the past was made poss ible by the hu ge soc ietal changes since the Ve lvet Revolution in 1989. When communism fe ll , there was a broadly felt need to rewrite history in order to get rid of the ideolog ica ll y deformed historical interpretation s of the communists and thi s led to two different phenomena. On the one hand , the new situ at ion led to an uncovering of 'wh ite spots ' in the hi story of the Czechs and Slovaks. On the other, thi s rewriting made room for new deformations of history. Silvia Mihalikova has described this phenome non , which was common for the entire post-communi st world, as a use of arguments from the past according to a principle of se lf-service: people simply chose the historical facts, persons, and conceptions that suited their momentary purposes. 97 95 Thi s image of the Czechs and Slovaks li ving in different worlds was shared by at least the Czech political weekly, Respekt, whose front page of the elect ion issue in 1992 read in large red letters 'Two civi li za ti ons" and conti nued in the main comment: "A lone into Europe or toge ther to the Balkans" ( Respekt June 8-14, I 992, I ). See Peter Bugge : The Use of the Middle: Mitteleuropa vs. Strednf Evropa. In : European Review of History , Vol. 6. No. I . 1999, 30-3 1 and Vladimir Macura: Masarykovy boty a jine semi(o) fejetony. (Praha: Prazska imagin ace 1993). 48-49 for a further elaborat ion of the Czech imaging of the Slovaks as belonging to the Balkans . % " Za nami ostavaju stare nepriatel'stva a nedorozumenia, sluhovs ke spory a vzbury . Pred nami je nasa nova d6stojnost'. " " Odkial' a kam . Slovaci ?" Literarny tj idennfk Dec. 19. 1992. 11. 97 Mihalikova: Narodne symboly, 54-56. �SLOVAKIA 117 The se lf-serv ice aspec t of the use of hi story was supported by the communist ideo logization of the culture, includin g the schools. The hi story that had been to ld by the regime and taught in sc hool s was perce ived as inh erentl y wrong , and therefore , as Tony Judt has argued, a plurality of memories was created when parents told their children what hi story was ' reall y' like. Every hi story that was told by the reg ime was by implication fa lse, which meant th at every hi story not to ld by the regime mu st by implication be true. 98 This was the reason, not onl y for the very different Czec h and Slovak collective memories, but also for the overa ll low level of knowl edge about and reflection on the nation al hi story. Key period s in Czechoslovak hi story co ncernin g the mutual Czech-Slovak relation ship can be li sted as follows : I) the First Republic 19 I 8- 1938, 2) the destruction of Czechoslovakia and th e creati on of the Slovak State durin g World War II, 3) the Slovak National Uprising against the fascists in 1944, 4) the Prague Spring in 1968, 5) the Normalization 1969-1 989. When lookin g at the articles that we have analysed here, it is c lear that Vaculfk employed al l of them. In hi s interpretation : the First Rep ublic was a time when the Czechs he lped the ir un grateful younger brothers; the Slovak State came into bein g when the Slovaks betrayed the Czechs; the Slovak National Upri sin g was not necessaril y for a renewal of Czechoslovakia; in the Prague Spring the Slovaks preyed on the Czech strugg le for democracy; and durin g Norma li zati on the Slovaks suffered less than the Czec hs. In the same vei n, Mil an Ferko and Vladimfr Mimic invoked the Slovak collective memory of the First Republic as a period of Czechoslovakism th at did not properly ack now ledge the character and needs of the Slovaks, and the Czechs did what they could to turn the Slovaks into Czec hs. The reason why Ferko and Mimic both used thi s period probabl y lay in the fact th at Czechoslovakism was the 'state ideo logy' of the First Rep ublic , which made it easy to attack 9 ' Tony Judt: The Past is Another Cou ntry : Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe , in: Dcedalus. Vol. 21. No. 4, 1992, I OI. �SLOVAK IA 118 Czech arrogance towards the Slovaks. As opposed to this , the legacy of all the other significant periods seemed in some way or another too ambiguous to be exp loited from Minac ' s and Ferko ' s points of view. 99 This reflects the fact that Czechs and Slovaks not on ly experienced the events differently at the time, but also that their memories of them today are very different. And this then shows us that the socia li zation of the population ' s memories since 1918 was not successful in providing the two nations with a common co ll ective memory of the past that they shared as parts of the same state. In stead, those who after 1989 wished to do otherwise were ab le, like Vaculfk, Minac , Ferko, and others, to mobilize conflicts from the past and link them together regardless of any inner logic and chrono logy. They painted a picture of a basic Czech-Slovak incompatibility and a common history consisting of conflicts, betrayals, and wrongdoings that made a divorce look c learly preferable to a continued malfunctionin g marriage. 100 In Slovakia, the discu ss ions about the common history of the Czechs and the Slovaks became polarized to the degree that two directly opposite interpretations were propagated. The relevant criterion for arguments became the question whether the common state had been favourable or disadvantageous to the Slovaks. 101 Slovak so99 The Slovak State was fascist: the National Uprising was directed aga in st the inde- pendent Slovak State; resu lting from th e Prague Spring was th e federalism that Ferko and Minac fo ught aga inst but which neverth eless meant progress in th e Czech-Slovak relationship; and Normalization was not see n as too bad a period for th e Slovaks . ' 00 The metaphor of the marriage was also frequently used in the debate, see e.g. Miroslav Ku sy : '·Konfederacnf k lam·• (""Confederation delusion'"). Literarnf no viny Aug. 6. 1992. 1+3. 0 ' ' Mihalikova: Narodne symboly, 58. An ex traordinary feature of th e Slovak contex t was the fact that very ac tive participants in the debate were exi les like Stefan Polakovic or Milan S. Durica. who either had been in ex ile ever since World War II beca use of their ro le in the Slovak State or they came from thi s environment. They saw as their greatest task res torin g Slovak independence from th e Czechs and seemed not to reali ze that Slovak society had changed since their heyday during the �SLOVAKIA 119 ciety was to a very large ex tent di vided over interpretations of hi story , the nature of Slovak nation al identity, and wishes for the future, and in fact the Slovaks who engaged in the de bates on the CzechSlovak past spent as much or even more energy blaming eac h other, rather than blaming the Czechs. 102 In contrast to thi s deep divi sion , the Czechs may have disagreed on many thing s, but by and large there was unanimity concerning subjects such as these. In the Czech debate, the efforts to create a separate Czech state grad uall y came to be seen as a way of guardin g Kl aus' rapid economic reform s from the " irrati o nal" Slovaks a nd Czech democracy from the alleged Slovak inclin ation to national soc iali sm and a stron g state, images which were mobili zed by the frequent use of exa mples from the Czech collective me mory. It is furthermore interesting that an opinion poll in October of 1990 showed that more than 50 % of the Czechs believed in the idea of one Czechoslovak nation . 1w While most Czechs and Slovaks perce ived of them se lves as be in g simultaneously Czechoslovaks and e ithe r Czechs or Slovaks, most Czechs, who unconsciously conceived of the two layers of the ir identification as being identical , had never paid much attention to the conce pt of a Czech identification as be in g different from their ide ntific ation as Czechoslovaks. Most Slovaks , on the other hand , were very much aware that there was a difference between their Slovak and their Czechoslovak identification . 104 Whe n the newspaper debates invoked the war. In co ntrast to the hi stori ans who had li ved throu gh the communi st period at home and those who had been in exile becau se of their di sagreements with the co mmuni st regime. thi s group of hi storians saw nothing but disadvantages for the Slovaks in the com mon Czechos lovak Republic. 102 According to Soiia Szomolanyi. different perceptions of key fi gures and events in Slovak history not onl y divided . but outri ght polari zed th e population (Szomo lany i 1994 : 76). '"' Timoracky : Yerejna mienka. 7 1-72. ' 04 Thi s was strengthened by th e asy mmetri ca l conditi ons after 19 I 8. e.g. when in school tex tbooks Czech hi story was made Czechos lovak simply by adding " slovak" to th e adjec ti ve (E li sabeth Bakke: Cechoslovak izmu s v skol skych uceb ni ciach ( 19 18- 1938). Historicky casopis. Vo l. 47. o 2. 1999: 242-243) or when on ly the �120 SLOVAKIA past, it happened in a way that mobili zed images that em phasized the differences rather than the s imil ariti es between th e tw o nation a l groups. In thi s way the Czech and Slovak layers of the Czec hoslovak population 's identifi cat ion were stre ngthened to the detriment of the Czechoslovak layer. And the di scre pancy that was mob ili zed between the Czech and Slovak images of themselves, the other, and the future of the common state is undoubted ly part of the answer to the question why the common Czechoslovak state eventually broke up. Slovaks had their own Communist Party (KSS) whereas the Czechos lovak Communist Party (KSC) served both as the Czech and the all-state party. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2005, Vol. 38 Description An account of the resource Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 104 SLOVAKIA "Ungrateful Younger Brothers" versus "Arrogant Atheists." Czech-Slovak Stereotypes in a Collective Memory Perspective. Lone Sarauw On January I , 1993 , Czechoslovakia was divided in a process that has been characterized as a "vel vet divorce. " 56 Compared to the ways in which other post-communi st states were fa lling apart at the time, thi s seems a va lid description . However , the split was ca used by severe confli cts betwee n the two parts of the state. Scholars have given a number of reasons for the di vo rce : I ) The Czech desire for democracy and a market economy clashed with Slovak insistence upon nati onal eq uality. 57 2) Despite grow ing macro-structu ra l simil ariti es, one Czechoslovak soc iety never managed to replace the Czech and Slovak soc ieti es that had been brought together in a com mon state. 58 3) Th e w inners of the parli amentary elec tion s in 1992, th e Sl ovak Vl adimfr Meciar and the Czech V aclav Kl aus, were unabl e to 56 See Otto U lc: "C zechos lovak ia' s ve l vet divorce. " East European Quarterly 30. September ( 1996). pp. 33 1-352. 57 5 " Ibid. Ji ff Mu sil : '"C zec h and Slovak Soc iety." in Jiff Mu sil (ed.): Th e End or Czechoslova kia (Budapest. L ondon, New York: Central European University Press 1995). 77-94. SLOVAKIA 105 come to te rm s w ith the constitutional arrangement of Czechoslovakia, beca use they were unwillin g to put the interests of the common state before their own power ambi tions. 59 And more co uld be found. As a contrib uti on to the debate over the break-up, thi s artic le inte nd s to look at th e role of stereotypes and collective memory in it, the argument being that hi story was mobili zed in the media de bates prior to the partition , and that it happe ned in a way that en hanced the di ffere nces rather than the likenesses of the two peopl es.60 As a result of thi s th e population graduall y came to accept the partition of the common state, even if the majority of the population never supported it. 6 1 The concept "collective me mory" has been defi ned as "a soc iety 's co ll ected production of me mory," 62 whi ch suppli es the soc iety with a fee ling of belong ing together by sharing the same past. One of the probl e ms in Czec hoslovakia seems to have bee n the lack of such a feelin g of sharing the same past in both halves of the state. Despite the fact that, apart from World W ar II , Czechs and Slovaks lived together in one state between 19 18 and I 993 , their co ll ective me mories of this li fe together differ to a considerab le ex tent. 59 Abby Innes: ·'T he Breakup of Czechos lovakia: The Impac t of Party Development on the Separa ti on of the State," East European Politics and Societies (EEPS) , Vol. I I , No. 3, Fall ( 1997), 393-435 . 60 Si l via Mihali kova: •• arod ne symbo ly slovenskej statnosti", Politologicka revue 2, prosinec, ( 1996), 56. 61 An opi ni on poll from Jul y 1992 shows th at 53 % of the Czechs and 42 % of the Slovaks w ished lo maintain th e co mmon state. whi le respecti ve ly 24 % and 32 % w ished the slate to be divided (Sharon W olchi k : ·The Politics of Transition and th e Break-U p of Czec hos lova ki a," in Ji ff Musi l (ed .): Th e End of' Czechos lova kia. (Budapest : Centra l European Universi ty Press 1995 , 233). 62 Claus Bry ld and Anette Warrin g: Besaette/sestiden som kollektiv erindring. Histo- rie- og traditionsfor va llning at' krig og besaettelse 1945- 1997. (Rosk ilde: Rosk ilde Uni versitetsforlag 1998), 19-20. 106 SLOVAKIA In the medi a debates in the peri od leading up to the break-up of C zec hos lovakia hi story , or rather memory ,63 was mobi Ii zed as proof of the inevitability and desirability of the divorce. Because thi s was the aim of the partic ipants of the debate, chrono logy was irre levant and hi story became ' hori zontali zed ' so to speak. As Silvia Mi halikova has formulated it, "osten sible or rea l sins committed centuries ago merge with wrongs done in th e last decades and are at the same time th e reaso n for today 's mi sunderstandin gs and hatred."64 Thus, the mobilization of past conflicts e nabl ed the two nation s to blame eac h other for their current probl ems, which is wh at thi s article intend s to show using examples from the literary newspapers of th e Czech Land s and Slovakia, Literarnf noviny and Literarny tyi- dennik,65 prior to the break-up. Wh en looking for archetypical examp les of the Czech and S lovak stereotypes or images of each other, the "arroga nt atheists" and " ungrateful younger brothers" of the headlines were the first ideas about the Czech and S lovak images of each other that came to mind . Therefore, it came as a surprise that it was rather imposs ibl e to find any examples of the stereotype of the Czechs as dangerous atheists they are presented as being arrogant, though. The lack of proof of the idea that the Slovak image of the Czec hs would see them as atheists 0 -' Pierre Nora has formu lated thi s di st incti on be tween history and memory in terms of a fund amen tal opposi ti on . .. Memory is life [ ... ] a bond tying us to the etern al presen t[ ... ] it is affec ti ve and mag ica l l and] onl y accom modates th ose facts that suit it .'' whereas hi story is .. the reconstru cti on , al ways problematic and incomplete j ... I a representati on of the past I th at I ca ll s fo r analys is and criti cism' ' (Pierre Nora: "Between Memory and H istory: Les Lieux de M emoire" . Representations Vol 0, No. 26 Special Issue: M emory and Cou nter-M emory. Spring ( I 989) , 8-9). A less ri gid di stincti on has been pro posed by A nne Erikse n. who sees hi story and memory as being equally important aspec ts of the co llecti ve memory th at combine to create the entire co llec ti ve memory (A nne Eriksen: Del var nae annet under krigen. 2. verdenskrig i norsk kollektivtradisjon. (Oslo: Pax 1995). r,., Mihalikova: ·'Narodne symboly," 55. 65 In the literary newspapers the past was mobili zed more obviously and cru dely but not in a different way th an in mos t other newspapers. Thus, they serve well as illustrations of a process that was happening in the press in general. SLOVAKIA 107 was fru strating , and it raised the question where thi s idea came from. It stemmed from the Christian Democratic Movement (Kresfansko De mokraticke Hnutie, KOH) , which, according to Miroslav Kusy , wanted to protect Slovakia from " des tructive liberal and freethinking influences from the Czech Lands." Besides, the stereotype had been used frequently in the interwar period , but the industrialization and urbanization of Slovakia since then had turned the mostly rural soc iety into one where Catholics did not necessarily consider their interests as Catholics to be more important than their economic and cultural conditions. 66 Also, as Petr Prfhod a has stated , the image of the Czechs as atheists was a well-known Czech stereotype of the Slovak view of them ,67 indirectly testifyin g to a Czech stereotype of the Slovaks as ' religiou s. ' 68 The image that eventually turned out to be the most pervasive was one of the Czechs as Czechoslovakist69 colonialists exploiting Slovakia. And as colonialists, they were described as arrogant in wanting to rule over Slovakia, even though they did not know it properly. It should be pointed out that the difficulty in having the stereo- '"' Miroslav Ku sy: ··S lovak Exceptionalism". in Musil (ed.): The End. 147- 149 . See also Martin Butora and Zora Butorova: " Slovakia: The Iden tit y Chal lenges of the Newly Born State". Socia l Research. Vol. 60. No. 4, Winter ( 1993). 7 13-7 14. and Sona Szomol anyi: UParadox kon zervativi zmu na Slovensku .'· Domino Efekt. Vol. 2. No. 15. ( 1993). 4. 67 Petr Prfhoda: '·Mutual Perceptions in Czech -Slovak Relationships•·, in: Musil (ed.) : The End. 134. "" Al so th e nationali sti c Slovak news paper ··s Jovak Nation·• (Slovensky mirod) was checked for the atheist image. but it could not be found even here . This probably reflects the fact that the image was propagated by the KDH . which was a quite unpopu lar part y those days among its non -ad herents. and whic h was often reproached in Slovensky mirod. 69 As a way of legitimising th e new Czechos lovak Republic in 19 18, the doctrine of one Czechoslovak nati on w ith two branche s. a Czech and a Slovak one. was propa gated to comp ly wi th the intention of president Woodrow Wilson to gi ve national self-determinat ion to the nations of Cen tral and Eastern Europe . The doctrine was officia ll y abandoned onl y afler World War II. 108 SLOVAKIA types co nfirmed did not co ncern the Czech newspaper, the se l fimage of the Czechs as 'rational' notwithstanding. 70 The most co mmonl y cited example of the Czech perception of the Slovaks as ungra tefu l yo unger brothers was an article by the writer Lud vfk Vaculfk in Literarnf noviny from 1990 entitled: " Our Slova k Questi on. " 7 1 The first thin g to be noticed about Vaculfk 's article is the co ndescending tone of the titl e: The Slovak questi on is ' our ' ques ti on, that is ' us' meaning the Czechs , not the Slovak s. 72 Vaculfk beg ins his arti cle by definin g himself as being Czech by nation ality, but Czechoslovak as a citi ze n, but he nevertheless repeatedl y speaks in the name of ' us, th e Czec hs,' whi ch substanti all y weakens hi s claim to being a truly Czechoslovak citizen. Throu ghout hi s tex t, Vaculfk uses exampl es from hi story to argue for a separati on from the Slo vaks. First, he bl ames the Slovaks for never having dealt with the fasc ism of their wartime state ( 19391945). They escaped thi s obligation by rejoining the Czechs in Czechos lovakia, and wh en, after a few yea rs, they were forced into a communi st regime, they did not reall y mind , si nce they ga ined a lot more economicall y from co mmuni sm than did the Czechs. There is no inner log ic between these two situati ons other th an th e fac t th at Vaculfk 's description of them makes the Slovaks look as if they have no principl es, going more or less direc tl y from accepting fascism to accepting co mmuni sm. He co ntinues by bl ami ng the Slovaks fo r prey ing on the Czech s' struggle for democracy in 1968, since th e only reform that survived the W arsaw Pac t in vas ion was the federali zation of the state, " When we in I 968 tri ed to free ourse lves from 70 L adis lav Holy : The Lillie Czech and the Gre<I/ Czech Na tion. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 104. 71 72 " Nase slovenska otazka". Litenimf noviny (M ay 3, 1990). I +3 . Yacu l fk's titl e was in spired by the titl e of T.G. Masaryk ·s book ··The Czech Question" (C:eska otazka) from 1895 on the Czech rebirth in the 19th century and it outlined hi s po litica l progra mme for the Czech nati on. But where Masaryk treated his own nation. Yacu lfk by the use of the word ··our" implies th at the Czechs have a ri ght to objectify and defi ne the Slovaks. SLOVAKIA 109 the dictatorship, the Slovaks regarded it as our business and went for autonomy. When we were then puni shed for the rebellion , they , because they had not compromised th emse lves very much with us, received a more gentle puni shment; and that their autonomy, which they gained from our rebellion , for us meant a sharpenin g of the punishment, does not cross their mind s." 73 When Vaculfk describes the Slovak ga in of autonomy as a sharpenin g of the puni shment for the Czechs , this testifies to hi s belief, not only in centralism , but also that the Czechs have the right to control Slovaki a. When employing these im ages he attempts to mobilize the Czech memory of the Slovaks as traitors both in 1938-39, when they ga ined their own state whereas the Czech lands were turned into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and in the Prague Spring of 1968. Later on Vaculfk contradicts his argument of th e Slovak sati sfaction with the communist regime by claiming that they left it to the Czechs to defeat the communists and then again brought up their claims for autonomy: "as if they thought: you brou ght us your communism, now you take it away again, Czechs! " 74 According to Vaculfk, the Slovaks, being objects rather than subjects of hi story, unlike the Czechs have always managed to escape the existential question: Who are we and what do we want? Thi s even counts for the Slovak National Uprising during World War II, which in Vaculfk 's view was too brief and too limited territoriall y to count as proof of Slovak pro-C zec hos lov ak ism. Vaculfk only mention s the anti-fascist element of the upri si ng and neg lects the fact that the leaders of the resistance movement clearly stated a wish to reunite with the Czechs after 73 " Kdyz jsme se v roce 1968 poku sili uvolnit se z diktatury , povazovali to Slovaci za nasi staro st a sli si za autonomif. K dyz my pak byli za vzpouru ztrestan i, oni , j elikoz se s nami moc nezkompromitovali, dostali mfrnejsf trest; a ze jejich autono- mie, kterou z nasf vzpoury vyzfska li , znamenala pro nas zostfenf trestu, to jim nenapada." 74 "jako by si mysleli: Privezli j ste nam sem v,is komuni smus, odvezte si ho zas, Cesi 1" - Many Slovaks after 1989 have pointed ou t that in 1946 40 % of th e Czechs voted com muni st, and only 30 % of the Slovaks, suggesting that comm uni sm was a predomi nantly Czech idea. SLOVAKIA 110 th e wa r,75 whi c h was inco ns iste nt w ith hi s prev io us acc usati o ns aga inst the Slovak s fo r not hav ing co me to te rm s w ith the fasc ism of the ir wartime state . The first time Vaculfk mobili zes the " littl e brothe r" im age he c laims that the Slovak s, s ince they do not have a nybody else against whom to prove the ir adulthood , mi stake nl y tried it o ut on the Czechs. Later on he continues th at, afte r the fa ll of co mmuni sm, th e Sl ovak nation fin a ll y had the cha nce to start looking fo r its ow n happiness, by whi ch it would grow one more leve l. The most c rude exa mple of the im age comes w he n Vac ulfk re plies to Mil an Si mec ka, a Czec h write r li vin g in Slovaki a, who had w ritte n to the Czec hs th at the ir yo un ger brothe r had grow n up a nd now should ha ve hi s ow n bed. Vac ul fk 's repl y was as fo ll ows: "As we know our youn ger brothe r, he w ill want to have hi s bed by the window in the summer and by the ove n in the w inte r. No bed , littl e broth e r, ha ve yo ur o wn littl e ho use!" 76 And finall y, he li sts reaso ns why just now is the ri ght time to get rid of the Slovaks, one of whi c h is th at 70 years ago it wo uld have bee n interpreted as de ny ing he lp to the younger brother. Thus, Vac ulfk mobili zes the Czec h image of the ungrateful younger brother and the coll ective me mory of Slovak betrayal s to make hi s po int th at the Czec hs would be better off without the Slovaks. It is hard not to find Vac ulfk a bit patronizing, but hi s views we re not e xce pti onal a mong the Czec hs. In the articl e " Re lie f with a dec ision," 77 fo urteen intellectu als 78 agreed th at it was bette r to let the Slovaks go, if th at was what they wanted , so th at the Czec hs co uld stand as the true he irs of Czec hos lovaki a and thereby keep the name of the 75 See I.:.ubomir Liptak : S/ovensko v 20. storocf. (Brat islava : K all igram 2000), 25 1- 252. 76 ·'A le j ak mladsfho brat ffc ka zname, bude v lete chtft tu pos tylku u ok na a v zime u pece. Zadnou postylku, bra tfe. domecek mej si 1" 77 " Uleva z rozhodnutf" . L itenim f noviny June 18, 1992, I. 78 The article was signed by Ji ff K olar, K arel Siktanc, K arel Pecka, Lud vfk Yacul fk , V lad im ir K ar ffk , I van Werni sc h, Jan Lopatka, Sergej Mac honi n, Pfemys l Rut. Dusan K arpatsky, Yrati slav Farber, Ji ff Cies lar, Mi ros lav Kl omfnek, M ilan Jungmann, all men of literature. SLOVAKIA 111 state. Se manti ca ll y, Czechoslovaki a w itho ut Slova ki a does not make muc h sense, but to the authors of the arti cle there was c learly anothe r aspect to Czechos lova ki a th an the territori al one. T he ir be li ef that Czechos lovak ia w ithout Slovaki a made sense indi cated that they pe rce ived th e Czech s as be in g in some undefin ed ma nner more trul y Czec hos lova k th an the Slovaks and that they reserved the ri ght to defin e the character of the co mmon state fo r the Czechs. Bes ides, they saw the diffe re nt res ults of the e lection s in June 1992 in the two parts of the country as an exampl e of the Czech desire fo r a free economy and po liti ca l de moc rac y on the o ne hand , and on the oth er of the Slovak longin g fo r a soc iety directed by the state a nd with e le me nts of nati onal soci ali sm. And they furth e rmore inte rpre ted the S lovak res ult as an ex press ion of a Slovak long ing fo r their own indepe nde nt state, in spite of the fac t th at th e onl y Slovak party with inde pe nde nce as part of its e lec ti on prog ramme was the Slova k Nati onal Party (Sl ovenska narodna strana, SNS), whi ch ga ined onl y 9.4 % of the votes in Slovakia.79 The arti cle was writte n in a tone th at sugges ted ne utrality and objecti vity, whil e the co nte nt was in fac t stron gly po le mi ca l. " If it is so that onl y e rectin g one's ow n state is the sign o f adulth ood and se lf-justifi cati on of a nation , we do not have reasons fo r counting it as a fa ilure a nd loss, what we since 19 18 have contributed to Slovaki a in that respect materi all y and mora ll y. The found ation of Czechos lova ki a co mpl eted the Czech nati o nal reawake nin g, and if the Slovaks today c ut the mse lves loose fro m us, it means th at they are still lac kin g somethin g to reac h the same pos iti on and consc iousness, and we do not have the ri ght to keep the m fro m that. " 80 In thi s argu- 79 K aren Henderson: T he Slovak Republic, in : Bogdan Szajkowsk i (ed.): Po litica l Parties of Eastern Europe. Russia & the Successor S tates. (Harlow: Longman In for- mati on and Reference 1994 ). 529. ' 0 ·'Je- li tom u tak, ze teprve ustave nf vlas tn fho statu je znamenfm dospe losti a sveprav nosti naroda, nemame duvod pocftat si za pro hru a ztratu , cfm jsme k tomu Slovensku od rok u 19 18 hmotne i moraine prispeli . Zalozenfm Ceskos lovenske republik y se dov rsilo ceske narodn f obroze nf, a j estli ze se Slovaci dnes od nas odpo- SLOVAKIA 112 ment th e Slovaks are the ones cutting themselves loose because they want to 'g row up ' and become indepe ndent of the Czechs who have helped the m " materially and morally" ever s ince the foundation of the common state. "Let it be obvious that it is the Slovaks who step out of the federation, and that we the n are the successor state , which keeps its ob li gations, treaties and relation s to th e world around us. The Czech kingdom united hi storicall y with Moravia does not need to be confirmed once again by any Rome, Frankfurt or Vienna." 8 1 So, the Czech Lands are a hi storically natural unity , wh ich does not in any way need Slovakia. They cont inue: " Without artificia l nationalizing, all questions can be named and also so lved in a more rational way" 82 - again, they are suggesting that the Slovaks are irrational and nationalistic as opposed to the rational Czechs. The Slovak image of the Czechs was propagated no less directly . In a series of articles in Literarny tyidennfk entitled " If Slovakia wants to be Slovakia ... ,"83 the writer Mi lan Ferko treated severa l subjects concern ing Slovak autonomy or independence. He held that after th e parliamentary e lectio ns in June 1992 when Vl adimfr Meciar 's Movement for a Democratic S lovakia (Hnutie za demokraticke Slovensko, HZDS ) won in Slovakia, the Czechs finally began to understand that the Slovaks really wanted to be inde pendent, and stated, " Some Czech politicians are beg inning to abandon [ ... ] the pos ition of historical arrogance and eco nomic super iorit y." 84 He thereby confirmed the image of the arroga nt Czechs who wanted to jujf. znamena to, ze jim k tem uz stavu a vedomf jeste neco chybf. a my nemame pravo je od toho zdrfovat." 81 "At' se stane zrejmym, ze jsou to Slovaci. kdo vystupujf z federace. a my pak jsme nastupni cky stat. jen z zus tane ve svych zavazcfch , sm lou vach a vztazfch k okolnfmu svetu. Ceske kralovstvf spoj ene hi storick y s Moravou se nepotre buje davat zadnym Rfmem. Frankfurtem ci Vfdnf znovu potvrzovat. " 82 .. Bez 83 " Ak Slovensko chce byt'Slovenskom .. ... 84 " Niektorf cesk f politici zacfnaju opu stat' [ .. . J pozfcie historickej arogancie a ekono- umeleho nacionalizovanf dajf se vsechny otazky pojmenovat i resi t vecneji ." mickej nadradenost i." " Ak Slovensko chce byt' Slovenskom ..." Vil. Literarny dennik June 27. 1992, 12. tyz- SLOVAKIA 113 keep the Slovaks in an inferior position and he continued, " With the help of international financial superpowers , Prague decided about the fate of Slovakia, which has to remain in a vassal relationship to the Czech Lands." 85 According to Ferko, the Slovak government had also become arrogant, and the politicians of Public Again st Violence (Verejnost' proti nasiliu , VPN) had become " slaves of Prague' s neocolonial relationship to Slovakia" 86 and sought " to continue to infiltrate into the Slovak political life ideas of Masaryki sm and cosmopolitani sm in the fra mework of which there is no place for the Slovak nation. " 87 T.G. Masaryk was the first president of Czechos lovakia , and Czech s and Slovaks have very di ss imilar view s of him . To the Czechs he epitomizes democracy , whereas many Slovaks see him as the representative of the state ideology of the First Republic ( 19181938), the Czechoslovakism, according to which Czec hs and Slovaks were two branches of the same Czechoslovak nation . Many Slovaks belie ve that Czechoslovaki sm suppressed their national identity, and their view of the First Republic and of Masaryk is influenced by thi s negative vie w of the state ideology. The Slovak view of Masaryk is also tainted by the fact that in 1918 he signed an agreement with a group of Czech and Slovak emigres in Pittsburgh , according to which Slovakia was promi sed some form of autonomy in the new Czechoslovak state. For variou s reason s thi s promise was never fulfill ed,88 and thi s has left an impression among some Slovaks that Masaryk and the Czechs delibe ratel y broke their promi ses becau se xs -- Pra ha pros tred nfctvom medzin arod nyc h fin ancnych ve l'mocf rozhod la o osude Sl ovenska, ktore ma zostat' vo vaza lskom pomere k Cecham." Ak Slovensko chce byt' Slovenskom ... VI. Literam y tyidennik M ay 23, 1992, 3. 86 " ''otrokmi prazs keho neokolonialisti ckeho vztahu k Slovensku. " Ibid. 7 " d'alej in f iltrovat' do slovenskeho politickeho zivota myslienk y masaryki zmu a kozmopoliti zmu , v ramci ktoryc h niet miesta pre slovensky narod."' Ibid. 88 Part of the reason why Sl ovaki a was not granted autonomy was th at in the new Czechos lovak state there was a Germ an mi nority of the same size as th e Slovak popul ati on. and if the Sl ovaks had gained autonomy it wo uld have been very di fficult to find a va lid argument why the Germ ans should not have autonomy, too. SLOVAKJA 114 th ey wished to maintain the ir control ove r Slovakia. Furthermore, whe n Ferko attacked Masaryk it wen t to the very heart of the Czech se lf-understandin g and co uld serve as proof to the Czec hs that the Slovaks did not rea ll y understand what democracy was a ll about. Anoth er im age from hi story that Ferko mobilizes is the Slovak wartime state , whi c h he presents as hav in g raised ge nera l Slovak se lf-co nsc iou sness, the spirit of e nterpri se, a nd the will to be equa l with the rest of the world . 89 Thi s is a totally different im age of the Slovak State than the one propagated by Vac ul fk who saw it only as a sy mbol of fascism , with which the Slo va ks had still not dealt. To Ferko the fa sc ism of the state was less sig nificant than the fac t th at it was Slovak. According to him , the e lect io ns in Jun e 1992 showed that neo-fasc ist te nde nci es were growing in oth er parts of Czec hoslovak ia, but not in Slovakia - leavi ng o nl y the Czec h land s infected wi th it. 911 He re, Ferko turn s Vaculfk 's accusation of the Slovaks' lac k of se ttleme nt w ith the wart ime fascism aga in st the Czechs - poss ibl y beca use he was aware that hi s arg ume nt was not very solid. In the very last issue of Literarny tyidennfk before the partiti o n, Vladimfr Min ac (one of Slovakia 's lead in g writers) propagated hi s less than pos iti ve im age of the Czec hs: "God save us from learning from the Czec hs the e mpty ideo log ica l rhetoric , the spl e ndid mora1ity, whi ch is limited to word s, the Have l-like e mptiness, which hides in itse lf o nl y a mad dwarf. " 9 1 In ridi c ulin g Vaclav Have l, Min ac insulted anothe r icon of the Czec h se lf-unders tandin g: Have l as the successor to Masaryk as the good philosopher-pres ide nt. And he was co mpl ete ly aware of thi s w he n he mentioned the myth of Masaryk 's '" Ferko: "'Ak Slovensko .. . VII ". ° Ferko 9 wi th out doubt hints at th e amazing elec ti on results or the Czec h Miroslav Sl,1dek ' s neo-fasc ist Republi ca n Party, which gained over 6 % of the votes in the Czech lands (Peter Bugge : The Czech Republi c, in: Szajkowsk i (ed.): Politica l Parties. 158- 159). "' " Bozec hrai\ , aby sme sa naucil i od Cechov prazdnej idologickej retorike. onej skvelej moralke, ktora sa obm edzuje na slova. onej hav lovskej prazdnote. ktora utaj uje v sebe iba zuriveho trpas lfka."' " Odkiar a kam , Slovaci 'I" ("Wherefrom and whereto, Slovaks?") Literamy tyi dennfk Dec. 19, 1992 , 11 . SLOVAKIA 115 model democracy and deemed it " shrieking Bohemian glass in the necklace of the legend" 92 - instead of being real jewels, that is. When dismi ss ing the first Czechoslovak Republic like this, Mimic reflected the views of one-third of the Slovak populace, which did not consider it democratic, but in opposition to the majority of the Czech population, 93 and so he , like Yaculfk, invoked the collective memory in order to create an impression of Czech-Slovak incompatibility. Furthermore, Mimic painted a picture of the First Republic as a time when many Czechs came to Slovakia allegedly to help build it, but when they taught in school s at all level s, they taught Czechos lovak instead of Slovak, and when they founded the Slovak National Theatre , it was in reality one more Czech National Theatre. So the Czechs did not help out of pure brotherly sacrifice, but out of a desire to turn the Slovaks into Czechs. Later, Mimic reproduced the stereotype of the Czechs as being arrogant enough to want to decide over Slovakia without the appropriate understanding: " Again and again they go into political battle with the Slovaks with the same reproaches and with the sa me lack of knowledge of the Slovak world. They still tutor, still look after and protect in the way that every coloniali st has protected hi s colony. " 94 He re , the image of the Czechs as malevolent colonialists was used to create the impress ion that a veritable war was being waged between the evil Czech politicians and the Slovak people-and not onl y this: 9 ' 93 skrfpajuce ces ke skl o v mi hrdelnfku legendy. 37 % of th e Slovaks and 70 % of the Czechs sa w th e First Republi c as a model democracy. whereas anoth er 33 % of th e Slovaks did not think it was democrati c at all. (Marian Timorack y : Yerejna mienka o ce sko-slovenskych vztahoch. in: Fedor Gal (ed. ): One.for krize cesko-slovenskych vztaht1. (Praha: SLON 1992), 8 1-82 . Thi s probabl y refl ec ts th e Sl ovak res istance aga inst M asaryk ·s Czechos lovaki sm. which Ferko attacked, too. "" ·· v zdy znovu a znov u tiahnu do politickeho zapasu so Slo vakmi s tymi istyrni vycitkami a s tou istou neznalostbu slovenskeho sveta. Stale tutorcia, stale opatruju a ochrai\uju tak, ako kazdy kol oni ali sta ochrai\ova l svoju kol 6niu. " '·Odki al' a karn , Slovac i?" Litenirny tyidennlk Dec. 19, 1992, 11. 116 SLOVAKIA betwee n the Czech and Slovak worlds. 95 By portraying Czechs and Slovaks as living in different worlds , Minac made the partition of the common state look natural and desirab le as it enabled the small Slovak nation to fulfil its destiny as an authentic small nation facing the threatening international consumer society. And he concluded, " Behind us stay the o ld enmities and mi sunderstandin gs, a serva nt 's conflicts and rebellion s. Before us is our new di gnity." 96 As thi s ana lysis has shown , the Czech and Slovak collective memories were used to explain the differences between Czechs and Slovaks and to legitimize the break-up. Thi s way of usin g the past was made poss ible by the hu ge soc ietal changes since the Ve lvet Revolution in 1989. When communism fe ll , there was a broadly felt need to rewrite history in order to get rid of the ideolog ica ll y deformed historical interpretation s of the communists and thi s led to two different phenomena. On the one hand , the new situ at ion led to an uncovering of 'wh ite spots ' in the hi story of the Czechs and Slovaks. On the other, thi s rewriting made room for new deformations of history. Silvia Mihalikova has described this phenome non , which was common for the entire post-communi st world, as a use of arguments from the past according to a principle of se lf-service: people simply chose the historical facts, persons, and conceptions that suited their momentary purposes. 97 95 Thi s image of the Czechs and Slovaks li ving in different worlds was shared by at least the Czech political weekly, Respekt, whose front page of the elect ion issue in 1992 read in large red letters 'Two civi li za ti ons" and conti nued in the main comment: "A lone into Europe or toge ther to the Balkans" ( Respekt June 8-14, I 992, I ). See Peter Bugge : The Use of the Middle: Mitteleuropa vs. Strednf Evropa. In : European Review of History , Vol. 6. No. I . 1999, 30-3 1 and Vladimir Macura: Masarykovy boty a jine semi(o) fejetony. (Praha: Prazska imagin ace 1993). 48-49 for a further elaborat ion of the Czech imaging of the Slovaks as belonging to the Balkans . % " Za nami ostavaju stare nepriatel'stva a nedorozumenia, sluhovs ke spory a vzbury . Pred nami je nasa nova d6stojnost'. " " Odkial' a kam . Slovaci ?" Literarny tj idennfk Dec. 19. 1992. 11. 97 Mihalikova: Narodne symboly, 54-56. SLOVAKIA 117 The se lf-serv ice aspec t of the use of hi story was supported by the communist ideo logization of the culture, includin g the schools. The hi story that had been to ld by the regime and taught in sc hool s was perce ived as inh erentl y wrong , and therefore , as Tony Judt has argued, a plurality of memories was created when parents told their children what hi story was ' reall y' like. Every hi story that was told by the reg ime was by implication fa lse, which meant th at every hi story not to ld by the regime mu st by implication be true. 98 This was the reason, not onl y for the very different Czec h and Slovak collective memories, but also for the overa ll low level of knowl edge about and reflection on the nation al hi story. Key period s in Czechoslovak hi story co ncernin g the mutual Czech-Slovak relation ship can be li sted as follows : I) the First Republic 19 I 8- 1938, 2) the destruction of Czechoslovakia and th e creati on of the Slovak State durin g World War II, 3) the Slovak National Uprising against the fascists in 1944, 4) the Prague Spring in 1968, 5) the Normalization 1969-1 989. When lookin g at the articles that we have analysed here, it is c lear that Vaculfk employed al l of them. In hi s interpretation : the First Rep ublic was a time when the Czechs he lped the ir un grateful younger brothers; the Slovak State came into bein g when the Slovaks betrayed the Czechs; the Slovak National Upri sin g was not necessaril y for a renewal of Czechoslovakia; in the Prague Spring the Slovaks preyed on the Czech strugg le for democracy; and durin g Norma li zati on the Slovaks suffered less than the Czec hs. In the same vei n, Mil an Ferko and Vladimfr Mimic invoked the Slovak collective memory of the First Republic as a period of Czechoslovakism th at did not properly ack now ledge the character and needs of the Slovaks, and the Czechs did what they could to turn the Slovaks into Czec hs. The reason why Ferko and Mimic both used thi s period probabl y lay in the fact th at Czechoslovakism was the 'state ideo logy' of the First Rep ublic , which made it easy to attack 9 ' Tony Judt: The Past is Another Cou ntry : Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe , in: Dcedalus. Vol. 21. No. 4, 1992, I OI. SLOVAK IA 118 Czech arrogance towards the Slovaks. As opposed to this , the legacy of all the other significant periods seemed in some way or another too ambiguous to be exp loited from Minac ' s and Ferko ' s points of view. 99 This reflects the fact that Czechs and Slovaks not on ly experienced the events differently at the time, but also that their memories of them today are very different. And this then shows us that the socia li zation of the population ' s memories since 1918 was not successful in providing the two nations with a common co ll ective memory of the past that they shared as parts of the same state. In stead, those who after 1989 wished to do otherwise were ab le, like Vaculfk, Minac , Ferko, and others, to mobilize conflicts from the past and link them together regardless of any inner logic and chrono logy. They painted a picture of a basic Czech-Slovak incompatibility and a common history consisting of conflicts, betrayals, and wrongdoings that made a divorce look c learly preferable to a continued malfunctionin g marriage. 100 In Slovakia, the discu ss ions about the common history of the Czechs and the Slovaks became polarized to the degree that two directly opposite interpretations were propagated. The relevant criterion for arguments became the question whether the common state had been favourable or disadvantageous to the Slovaks. 101 Slovak so99 The Slovak State was fascist: the National Uprising was directed aga in st the inde- pendent Slovak State; resu lting from th e Prague Spring was th e federalism that Ferko and Minac fo ught aga inst but which neverth eless meant progress in th e Czech-Slovak relationship; and Normalization was not see n as too bad a period for th e Slovaks . ' 00 The metaphor of the marriage was also frequently used in the debate, see e.g. Miroslav Ku sy : '·Konfederacnf k lam·• (""Confederation delusion'"). Literarnf no viny Aug. 6. 1992. 1+3. 0 ' ' Mihalikova: Narodne symboly, 58. An ex traordinary feature of th e Slovak contex t was the fact that very ac tive participants in the debate were exi les like Stefan Polakovic or Milan S. Durica. who either had been in ex ile ever since World War II beca use of their ro le in the Slovak State or they came from thi s environment. They saw as their greatest task res torin g Slovak independence from th e Czechs and seemed not to reali ze that Slovak society had changed since their heyday during the SLOVAKIA 119 ciety was to a very large ex tent di vided over interpretations of hi story , the nature of Slovak nation al identity, and wishes for the future, and in fact the Slovaks who engaged in the de bates on the CzechSlovak past spent as much or even more energy blaming eac h other, rather than blaming the Czechs. 102 In contrast to thi s deep divi sion , the Czechs may have disagreed on many thing s, but by and large there was unanimity concerning subjects such as these. In the Czech debate, the efforts to create a separate Czech state grad uall y came to be seen as a way of guardin g Kl aus' rapid economic reform s from the " irrati o nal" Slovaks a nd Czech democracy from the alleged Slovak inclin ation to national soc iali sm and a stron g state, images which were mobili zed by the frequent use of exa mples from the Czech collective me mory. It is furthermore interesting that an opinion poll in October of 1990 showed that more than 50 % of the Czechs believed in the idea of one Czechoslovak nation . 1w While most Czechs and Slovaks perce ived of them se lves as be in g simultaneously Czechoslovaks and e ithe r Czechs or Slovaks, most Czechs, who unconsciously conceived of the two layers of the ir identification as being identical , had never paid much attention to the conce pt of a Czech identification as be in g different from their ide ntific ation as Czechoslovaks. Most Slovaks , on the other hand , were very much aware that there was a difference between their Slovak and their Czechoslovak identification . 104 Whe n the newspaper debates invoked the war. In co ntrast to the hi stori ans who had li ved throu gh the communi st period at home and those who had been in exile becau se of their di sagreements with the co mmuni st regime. thi s group of hi storians saw nothing but disadvantages for the Slovaks in the com mon Czechos lovak Republic. 102 According to Soiia Szomolanyi. different perceptions of key fi gures and events in Slovak history not onl y divided . but outri ght polari zed th e population (Szomo lany i 1994 : 76). '"' Timoracky : Yerejna mienka. 7 1-72. ' 04 Thi s was strengthened by th e asy mmetri ca l conditi ons after 19 I 8. e.g. when in school tex tbooks Czech hi story was made Czechos lovak simply by adding " slovak" to th e adjec ti ve (E li sabeth Bakke: Cechoslovak izmu s v skol skych uceb ni ciach ( 19 18- 1938). Historicky casopis. Vo l. 47. o 2. 1999: 242-243) or when on ly the 120 SLOVAKIA past, it happened in a way that mobili zed images that em phasized the differences rather than the s imil ariti es between th e tw o nation a l groups. In thi s way the Czech and Slovak layers of the Czec hoslovak population 's identifi cat ion were stre ngthened to the detriment of the Czechoslovak layer. And the di scre pancy that was mob ili zed between the Czech and Slovak images of themselves, the other, and the future of the common state is undoubted ly part of the answer to the question why the common Czechoslovak state eventually broke up. Slovaks had their own Communist Party (KSS) whereas the Czechos lovak Communist Party (KSC) served both as the Czech and the all-state party.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Ungrateful Younger Brothers" versus "Arrogant Atheists": Czech-Slovak Stereotypes in a Collective Memory Perspective Description An account of the resource Lone Sarauw Slovakia, Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005 pp. 104-120 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sarauw, Lone Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 name https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/4420b4453e192d09d2d212a901402912.pdf afcd80dcea279c3e678c67cd55f6063e PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 121 Separate Paths: Czech and Slovak Foreign Policies Since 1993 James W. Peterson Introduction Foll owing the 1993 break-up of Czechos lovaki a into the Czech Re public and Slovak ia, the two states needed to attend to chall enging fo re ign po li cy iss ues. Wh ile there were important d iffe rences in the situations of the two states, the broad chall enges th at awaited them were s imil ar. In ge nera l, th eir res ponses to those chall enges put the two co untri es on se parate path s th roug ho ut much of the 1990s. It may be th at the iss ues th at led to the brea k-up o f C zechos lo vakia proved too much to overco me in the earl y years after the split. However, by th e earl y twenty-fi rst ce ntury, the ir separate path s moved closer together and stra ightened out in such a way th at they become parallel. The initi al di ffe rences in the new geopo litica l positi ons of the two states were pro nounced. Whil e th e o ld Czechos lovak state had often served as a long, bridge- like link betwee n East and West, the two new co untri es leaned in di ffe rent direction s. Slovak leaders initi all y and instincti ve ly thought about ties to eastern countri es, as well as to th e Yisegrad organizati o n, in whi ch its future pros pec ts were linked to those o f the Czec h Re public, Po land, and Hun gary. By contra st, the Czec h Re public leadership looked westward s to th e o utstretched, embrac ing arms of we ll -es tabli shed European stru ctures . Th e S lova k path was more uncertain and waverin g th an was th e Czech, for Co ld War organi zati onal structures in the east had broken down. �122 SLOVAKIA In light of their contrasting geopolitical orientations, the two states responded differently to common challenges. First, they confronted common political challenges in different ways. While many of these political pressures were primarily domestic , they all had an impact on future foreign policy choices and potentialities. For examp le, both states sought to establish functioning political party systems that would be capab le of proposing consistent foreign policies. Both were under scrutiny from the outside wor ld on the issue of treatment of important minority groups within the country. Further, in each country cultivation of non-governmental organizations that cou ld extend the roots of foreign policy debates further into the civil society was an important goa l. Different strategies on democratization led the two nations on different political paths regarding foreign policy questions. A second common challenge for the Czechs and Slovaks emerged from the economic sector. Newly elected leaders immediately wrestled with the que stion of converting centrally-planned economies into the principles of the free market. Again , this issue was not exclusively domestic . Success in competing for outside loans was contingent on progress made in privatization of enterprises, in release from fixed price controls, and in the estab li shment of principles of competitiveness . By the middl e of the 1990s, prospects for admission to the European Union (EU) were good. Leadership in the Czech Republic initially put a higher priority both on rapid conversion to capita li sm and on links to the EU than did the Slovaks. Thirdly, location of a dependable national security structure was a common problem in the two nations. The Warsaw Pact, a structure that had ostensibly ass ured the protection of the Czechoslovak state did not long survive the end of the Cold War. Give n Slovakia 's more eastern location , there was a long debate on the question of whe ther it was more desirabl e to preserve what was left of ties to its eastern neighbors or to res pond to overtures from the West. For the Czech Republic it was more obvious that participation in western institution s would be th e next step. The West European Union (WEU), �SLOVAKIA 123 North Atl anti c Treaty Orga ni zati on (NATO), and the EU's Common Fo re ig n a nd Sec urit y Po li cy (C FSP) we re co nte nd e rs fo r th a t linkage. It sho uld be no surpri se that the fo re ig n po li c ies of S lovaki a and the Czec h Re publi c di verged in the earl y years afte r separation but the n reco nnec ted. The ir commo n ex peri e nce in the Czec hos lovak state th ro ug h e ig ht decades bo re th e sa me contras tin g fea tures. C ultural simil ariti es drew the m together, but at times bitter po litica l and eco no mi c ex pe ri e nces pu shed the m apart. Once freed fro m the larger state. th ey made quite di ffe re nt cho ices fo r a number of years. However, reg io na l and s itu a ti o na l fo rces eventu a ll y pu shed th e ir path s in the world together aga in . Political Factors and Foreign Policy of the Two Nation-States The Czech Republic C reati o n of an effec ti ve, po li cy-ori e nted po litica l syste m was a chall enge in the earl y 1990 s. In the C zec h Republic there was initi a lly considera bl e co ntinuity in po liti ca l leadership afte r Janu ary 1993 . Vac lav Have l re ma in ed as Pres id e nt of the small e r state, whil e Vac lav Kl a us co ntinu ed o n as Prim e Mini ster. The do min ant po litica l party of Kl aus was still the C ivic Democratic Party (ODS), an organi zati o n th at had bee n bo rn o ut of the C ivic Forum so ac ti ve durin g the eve nts of 1989. In genera l, the Kl aus governm ent ( 1993-97 ) e nd o rsed a ll the steps co nn ec ted w ith th e re turn to E uro pe. Th e brea k-up of th e Czechos lovak state put th e Ukra ine and Ru ss ia furthe r away geographi ca ll y fro m the C zec h Republic . Thu s, the Czechs as earl y as 1994 jo ined the Partn ership fo r Peace (P4 P) and stressed c loser link s to Po land . 105 A n a na lys is of po liti ca l party pos iti o ns durin g e lec ti o ns in the 1990 s is very revea lin g in te rm s o f the iss ues and de bates that 0 ' ' See Thomas S. Szayna. ··The Czech Republic: A Small Contributor or a ' Free Rider·'l_-· in Andrew A . M ichta. ed .. A merica·s New A llies: Poland. Hungary. and the Czech Republic in NA TO (Sea tt le: Un i versity of Washingto n Press. 1999). pp. 11 2- 148 . �124 SLOVAKIA circulated throughout the Czech Republic. Political party leaders debated the merits of the move to the West but finally endorsed it. The 1998 elections are a useful example . The Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) ended up technically in power, with Milos Zeman as Prime Minister, but the party needed to establish a "Gentlemen ' s Agreement" with the ODS in order to function as a government. For the CSSD there was less emphasis in the e lection campaign on hardheaded defen se of national interests and more of a focus on livin g standards and the rights of citizens within the country . This priority on domestic issues led the CSSD to endorse the idea of a referendum prior to entry into either the EU or NATO. There a lso was a humanitarian component to its view of Czech relations with the outside world. Such a focus led the CSSD to upgrade the importance of North-South relations and the related role of the UN. It concluded that Czechs should have a say whenever human ri ghts were jeopardized in any part of the world . While it endorsed EU membership, it thought of it in terms of stimulating the Czech economy. While it favored NATO entry , it expressed grave concerns about the future location of nuclear weapon s on Czech territory. During the I 998 election the ODS continued to give a " realpolitik" cast to its statements on foreign policy. National interests rather than humanitarian concerns were its top priority. NATO membership cou ld bring increased security for the nation as well as trade and technological benefits. The latter would promote development of the free market, a priority for Klaus since the early 1990s. National economic interests were of paramount importance, whi le crusades connected with globalization and human rights were to be carefu ll y examined. Increased Czech exports through membership in international organizations were the desired outcome. Thus, the party said less than did the CSSD about broader, western-based international organizations that could pull the Czech nation beyond the orbit of its national interests. 106 106 See Jakub Durr, Vo/by '98 (Brno: Pavel Saradin , 2000), pp. 84-97. �SLOVAKIA 125 Attention to th e views of the main political parties enriches understa ndin gs of the Czech point of view on the major foreign and security policy question s of the day. Czech voters in the 2002 elections confirmed the steady march toward s inclu sion in western institution s. Rejection of the ODS was based in part on the negative reaction to the "euroskeptic" views of Klau s on the matter of integration into the EU . Public support for EU membership was confirmed in the results of the June 2003 Referendum. EU support for Czech membership had been offered at the end of 2002. One of the continuing political challenges for the Czech Republic during the 1990s was the iss ue of minority rights, a matter that affected the country's relation ship with the outside world. The criteria for entering both NATO and the EU required a record of fairness toward key groups within the population . One major conflict was the relationship between Czechs and the Roma. A number of well-publicized incidents have raised questions about Czech attitudes and policies. For example, the erection of a wall by Czechs in Ustf nad Labem in 1999 became a foreign policy incident as well as a temporary setback to pursuit of EU membership. It was clear that the wall was intended to prevent Czechs from having to view the Rom a population as well as their Iife-sty le. Attention to such iss ues was necessary in li ght of integration into western institutions. Development of a robust political culture on foreign policy questions remained another challenge to the new state. One s ignificant new factor was the emerge nce of a visible public opinion on foreign policy questions. In genera l, the public was supportive of the new linkages with western institutions. However, there were some differences that were sign ifi ca nt. Public opinion polls over time demonstrated a stabl e level of support for EU entry . However, before 1999 support for entry into NATO was less impressive. 107 Events of 1999 made some difference. In that year the Czech Republic actually en- ' 07 See Caro l Skalnik Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State (Bou lder. Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), p 263. �SLOVAKIA 126 te red NATO , a nd th e Kosovo bo mbin g ca mpa ig n imm edi a te ly occurred . Suc h proximity to th e wars in the Ba lkan s made Czec hs somewhat more like ly to think pos iti ve ly abo ut NATO entry. Th ere were a lso uniqu e e ffo rts to build suppo rt within the po litical culture for certain fore ig n poli cy instituti o ns. One abiding problem was the negative set of Czec h attitudes abo ut the ro le of the military. C zec h resentme nt of the military is unde rstand abl e in li g ht o f the long years of the Sov ie t military prese nce afte r 1968 . Al so , after 1989 th e So vie t military left a catastro phe in many Czec h co mmu niti es. The barracks a nd o the r fac iliti es were in te rribl e co nditi o n, and individu a l Sovi et units had ta ke n anythin g of va lue fro m those locati o ns. One effort to build mo re pos iti ve Czec h attitudes abo ut the military too k pl ace in So uth Bo he mi a. A c iti ze n group ca ll ed S AS was fo rmed in 1997. The a im of the group was to de mon strate th at the Czec h military was a contributin g in strume nt in a de mocra ti c state rather than mere ly an in strume nt o f power. The SAS established link s to sc hoo ls and uni versities with the obj ec tive of c ultiv atin g a mo re pos iti ve attitude abo ut the C zech military. It set up co nfere nces and a lso co nsulted spec ia li sts from o the r nati o ns. In fac t, o ne res ult o f thi s acti vity was the creation of spec ial ti es betwee n the c ity o f Ces ky Kruml o v in the Czec h Republi c and Mi a mi Beac h in the State of Fl o rida, USA . A public e xcha nge of ideas abo ut the rol e of th e military could gene rate more in fo rmed C zech perspec ti ves about the va lue of a strong defense capability to cope w ith new threats. 108 Mo re positive attitudes about th e military wo uld fac ilitate integ rati o n into western o rgani zati o ns such as NATO. Slovakia The creati o n of po liti ca l stability was a greater c ha lle nge for Sl ovaki a than it was fo r the Czec h Republi c . In the C zec h case continuity of leadership from the 1989-93 period to th e post-1989 pe riod ' 08 J. Yondro us. .. Regionaln f dimenze ceskeho atl anti smu.'· M inisterst vo zahranicnfch vecf(2002). h ttp: //wwW .lllZ V.C/. March 2002 . �SLOVAKIA 127 contributed to stability. In the Slovak case continuity of leadership undermined rather than supported stability. Vladimfr Meciar had been the chosen Slovak leader in the two years immediately after the 1989 revolution. His new party, Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS), did very well in the 1992 elections, and this enabled him again to become Prime Minister once Slovakia became an independent state in 1993 . He was reluctant to reform in any comprehensive way the centrally planned economy, and thus privatization was very slow. In addition, his government included " many of the old regime ' s cadres, resources, and xenophobic ideologies intact. " 109 Meciar fell from power in the spring of 1994, and a caretaker government under Jozef Moravcfk managed public affairs until the fall elections. Again, the voters returned a coalition government headed by Meciar and the HZDS to power, and this government lasted through the next elections in 1998. In this period Meciar basically put the brakes both on democratization and on the movement of the economic system towards free market principles. The political experiences of the first half decade of independence had major consequences for foreign policy, as Slovakia made very slow progress on the criteria that both NATO and the EU presented to it. During the I 998-2002 period , a coalition led by the Social Democratic and Christian Union (SDKU) took the leading role in government, after the public rebuffed Meciar for a third time. Mikulas Dzurinda as Prime Minister gradually moved Slovakia back onto the path towards western institutions. He emerged again as Prime Minister after the fall 2002 elections , and so the steady movement toward NATO and the EU remained unchanged. Meciar and the HZDS were still prominent and in fact received in 2002 both the largest share of the popular vote ( 19.5 %) and the highest number of seats in the I 50 seat legislature (36). His rhetoric on foreign policy was more muted in this campaign , but numerous warnings emanated from NATO and ,m Rudolf L. Tokes. " From Visegrad to Krakow: Cooperation, Competition , and Coexi stence in Central Europe," Problems of Communism 40( 1991 ), pp. 100-114. �SLOVAKIA 128 the EU leade rship a bo ut the imp licati o ns of a new governme nt in whic h the HZ DS pl ayed a ny rol e at a ll. In late Septe mber work began o n a coa liti o n th at would in c lude Dzu rinda's S DK U, the C hristi a n De mocrati c Uni o n (KDH), A lli a nce fo r ew C itize ns (A 0), and the Hungari an Coa liti o n (SMK). In earl y October thi s fo ur-party coa litio n fo rged an ag reeme nt abo ut executi ve pos iti o ns, and the new governme nt was in pl ace. A ll of these arra nge me nts were a imed to keep Sl ova ki a o n a stead y trac k in es tabli shin g its new, wes te rn o rgani zatio na l connectio ns in fore ig n poli cy. 11 0 Whil e the Czechs had been press ured by the o utside world o n the matte r of the Ro ma, Slovaks were c riti c ized fo r the ir treatment of the Hun garian mi no rity. Aga in , the Mec iar periods were suspec t in th is regard . Otto Ulc1 11 ex pl a in s thi s situ ati o n by notin g th at afte r 1968 Slova ks were not pro min e nt in the di ss ide nt moveme nt th at e mphasized hum a n ri ghts. Part of the pro bl e m was a lso the lack of ex perie nce of S lova ks in the Czechoslovak dipl o mati c corps. The leaders may have not understood full y the way in whi ch Slova ki a's domesti c record o n mino rity re lati o ns, the e nviro nme nt , a nd autho ritari ani sm in ge ne ra l influe nced fo re ign percepti o ns as we ll as fo re ig n po li cy objecti ve . 11 2 In another respect, the Slovak governme nt d urin g th at peri od was quite ce ntra li st o n the matter o f th e ri g hts of reg io ns within the country. The re is so me iro ny in thi s, fo r th e HZDS had been very ant i-federa li st (a nti -ce ntra list) after its e merge nce in April 199 1. 11 3 In that ea rli er time, the ta rget had bee n the a ll eged centrali st reg ime in Prag ue, s ince the Czec hos lovak state was still intact. Ev ide nce of Mec iar 's centra li st po li c ies li es primaril y in hi s po licy towards the 110 RFE/RL ewsline. Part II. September 24. 2002; October 8, 2002. Archived at http://\\\\w.11°erl.org September. October. 2002. 111 Otto Ulc. " The Bumpy Road ofCzechoslovaki a·s Velvet Revolution ," Problems of Communism 41 ( 1992). pp. 19-3 3 111 See Adrian Hyde Price. The International Politics of East Central Europe (New York: M anchester Uni versity Press, 1996), p. 28. 11 3 Ulc,"The Bumpy Road of Czechoslovakia ' s Ve l vet Revoluti on ." p. 29. �SLOVAKIA 129 eastern part of Slovakia. In the mid- I 990s that region became interested in participating in a large Carpathian Euroregion. Other players in the Euroregion wo uld include Romania , Hungary , Poland , and Ukraine. However, the Slovak Ministry of the Interior was quite critical of that orientation. In 1995 that Ministry abo li shed the Slovak Carpathian Regional Association that had co nsisted of a number of regional and local governments in eastern Slovakia. As a result, in 1996 the Slovak representatives in the Euroregion resigned and Slovakia cancel led its participation. Meciar took these actions because of a double suspicion. First, he was suspic ious that the eastern Slovak metropolis of Kosice would lead eastern Slovakia to develop its own independent foreign policy . Second, he feared that Hungary would use the Euroregion to exp loit the anger of the Slovak Hungarian minority . 114 Such att itudes and policies of the top leadership would not mesh well with the EU and its priority on the rights of regions within countries. However, after the 1998 elections the Slovak leadership reflected more sensitivity toward the political culture. For exam ple, Slovaks were aware after 1998 of the need to incorporate domestic non-governmenta l gro ups (NGO 's) into the increasingly public discussion of foreign policy . Thi s was particularly the case in the efforts to ga in admiss ion to NATO. Younger persons were a special target of efforts at political soc ialization . Teachers in middle schools organized essay contests about the sig nific ance of NATO . Organized debates about NATO themes took pl ace in both middle and upper schools. Further, the government set up twe lve information centers that were aimed at youn ger persons. According to one observer, regional projects abo ut NATO by 2002 had reached 120,000 students. Similar discuss ions were aimed at women's groups . For example, profess ional women in Bratislava as we ll as the Union of Women of S lovakia engaged in discussions on the mea nin g and significance of NATO . The mass "" See A lexander Duleba, 'The Slovak-Ukraini an-Russian Security Tri angle." in M argarita M. Balmaceda, ed ., On the Edge: Ukrainian-Central European-Russian Security Triangle (Budapest: Central European Univers ity, 2000), pp. I 06- I 09. �SLOVAKIA 130 medi a also pl ayed a ro le in thi s process. T wo major national telev ision projects were aimed at promoting di sc uss ion of NATO the mes. Furthe r, additi o na l in fo rm ati on proj ec ts we re bea med at the populati on through thi rty loca l te lev ision stati ons. The re was even an effort to pull ex pe rts and speciali sts into the di scuss ion. 115 The hope was th at these gro up s wo uld communicate pos iti ve attitudes abo ut NATO to the ir peers a nd e ve n in the ir publicat ions. S imil arl y, after the Nice EU Summit at the e nd of 2000 , Slo vaki a establi shed the Nation al Conve nti on. Its mi ssion e ntail ed stimul ati on of a nati o nal di scuss ion on the E U and Slovak nati o nal inte rests. The di scuss ion was to be in c lu s ive in which po liti ca l party me mbe rs, acade mi cs, c hurc hes , interest gro ups, non- governme nta l orga ni zati o ns, trade union s, muni cipalities, and reg ions all pl ayed a ro le. 11 6 Comparison Both co untries confronted major po litica l chall e nges th at affected fore ign po licy prospects. In both cases there was outside scrutin y and suspi c io n througho ut the first decade abo ut the way in whi c h their governme nts treated key minority gro ups. C riteri a fo r admi ssion to wes te rn orga ni zati ons required prog ress in thi s area. Both countri es a lso ex pe ri e nced maj or c ha nges in governme nt. In the Czech case such cha nges d id not affect very much the steady process of integration w ith the West. Slovak governme ntal changes had more of an impact. In addition , the continuin g presence of Vl adimfr Meciar and the HZDS had the net effect of postponin g Slovaki a's integrati on with western institution s until the late 1990s. Finally , cultivation of positive attitudes within the po liti ca l c ulture became a priority once the leadership made the dec ision to look in a westward direction . In th e Czec h case thi s spotli ght on po liti ca l culture was a 115 • Organ izacie a instituc ie, ktorym bola udelena Strieborn a plaketa M inisterstva zahranicnych vecf Slovenskej republ iky di\a 20. juna 2002," M inisterst vo zah ranicnych vecf(2002). http://www.mzv .sk Oc tober 2002. 116 " Narodny ko nvent o Evropskej buducnosti Slovenska," Ministerst vo zahranicnych vecf (2002). http://www.mzv.sk October 2002. �SLOVAKIA 131 constant theme throughout the decade, but in the Slovak case it was only characteristic of the second half of the decade. Economic Factors and Foreign Policy of the Two Nation-States The Czech Republic In the years following th e 1989 revo lution , the Klau s government made eco nomi c restructurin g in Czechoslovakia a major priority. Privati zation and the use of vouchers placed formerly state-controlled industries in private hand s. Job sec urity yie lded to the greater uncertainty connected with the free market. It became more like ly that industries would ri se and fa ll on the ir own merits, while artifi cial control of prices was no longer the norm. 11 7 Thus, major economic changes had deve loped their own momentum at the time the Czechs separated from Slovakia, and they bore the potenti al to have a major impact on foreign policy. For exampl e, ga inin g admission to the EU became a top priority as a result of the new geographic and eco nomi c developments. Very soon Brusse ls presented to the eastern countries its Iist of thirty-one chapters in the "acqui s communautaire" process. Czech leaders began to meet regularl y with EU bureaucrats in order to demonstrate progress toward s meeting the criteria of eac h of the chapters. Usually twice a year the EU represe ntatives came to the Czech Republic to inspect progress made and to iss ue judgments about the relative rank of the nation on the li st of EU prospects from that region. By the end of the 1990s, the Czech Republic ranked near the top of the prospec ti ve li st of new members, and membership appeared like ly by 2004. In fac t, in October of 2002 the EU Commission announced that the Czech Republic would be one of the ten nation s admitted in 2004. 11 8 Czech involvement in the EU 's PHARE and ERBD investment projects was of particular significance. Invo lve ment in the wider EU market would 117 See Bernard Wheaton and Zdenek Ka van , The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslo- vakia 1988- /99 1 (Boulder. Colorado: Westvi ew Press, 1992) , pp. 139-143. 118 Sueddeutsche Zeitung, October 9, 2002. Arch i ved at: http://sueddeutsche .de October 2002. �132 SLOVAKIA multipl y the steps taken by the Czech governme nt in co nvers ion to capitali sm and th ereby open up additional new in vestment opportunities in othe r nations. At the same time , eve ntua l EU membership woul d lead to add ition al western investments, and important ones had come about already in the 1990s. For example , in 1994 th e German automobil e company Volkswagen bought majo rity co ntrol of the o ld Czech mega-compan y Skoda . Whil e the agree ment did guarantee the Germans majority control , it also provided the Czechs with a veto over future policy dec ision s. 11 9 Similarly, Air France took over the Prague Airport Ruzyne and made it into a modern facility. Early in the twenty-first century the A merica n company Motorola began construction of a fac tory in Moravia in the area of the Beskydy Mountains. Much news accompanied the buy -out of severa l well known breweries, including Pil sner Urque ll , by South Africa n enterprises. Certainly , one by- product of this western indu stri a l and financial in vo lvement would be the rapid infusion of western tec hniques and know-how in manag ing an economy on capitali st princi pl es. A ll of thi s would acce lerate the type of domestic economic restructuring that would more qui ck ly meet EU criteria. The outreach of the changing Czech economy was not confined exclusively to its European nei ghborhood. For instance, in the mid l 990s the Czech Re publi c became a member of UNESCO. In th at capac ity it took a particular interest in the plight of the ravaged nations that had e merged from the old Yugoslavia. This ac ti vity led to membership as well in the Organi zat ion for Economic Cooperati on and Developme nt (OECD ). In fact , the Czechs were the first from the Central E uropean region to ga in membership in th at organi zation. Linkages between the Czech Republic and the Internati onal Monetary Fund (IMF) e nh anced their reputation for reliabi lity. In A ugus t 1994, the natio n was the first post-communist state to pay off its 11 9 Leff. The Czech and Slo vak Republics: Nation Vers us State. p. 263. �SLOVAKIA 133 initial IMF loan . 120 Again, involvement with the larger universe of western capitalist economies outside the immediate geographic region paid dividends in terms of domestic economic change. In sum, the revolution of 1989, combined with the loss of Slovakia in 1993, generated a rapid rate of economic change in the Czech Republic. Conversion to capitalist economic principles was inevitable after the 1989 events, but the process received a number of important stimuli. Interest in joining NATO and the drive for EU membership mandated that the nation meet specific criteria in terms of capitalist development. Investments by western firms outside the nation led to collaborative efforts in which Czech managers could more fully see the capitalist system in action. Involvement in the economic projects of a number of global organizations, primarily located in the West, expanded Czech horizon s in a positive way. All of thi s offered a powerful economic antidote to the much more restricted COMECON framework that was characteristic of the Cold War. Slovakia For a number of reasons , Slovakia looked east for economic links rather than west after the 1993 split. This had also been true after the 1989 revolution. Slovak leaders noted that their country was the only Yisegrad member that bordered all of the other three. Such a perception encouraged them to think about a potential Slovak role as the ideal country to be a bridge between East and West. The collapse of COMECON led the Slovaks to hope for a replacement in the form of special ties with Russia and Ukraine. The look eastward made Slovakia "more sensitive to developments in the CIS." 12 1 At the same time, EU import quotas were having a negative impact on certain Slovak industries such as a steel mill in Kosice, and that created some suspicion about the West. 122 120 Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State, p. 258. 12 1 Price, The International Politics of East Central Europe, p. 170. 122 Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State, p. 261. �134 SLOVAKIA One concrete manifestation of thi s economic orie ntatio n to the East was cultivation of a spec ial link to Ru ss ia. A key motive for this outreach was the pli g ht of the Slovak arms industry . At the time of the 1989 revolution , o ne hundred e leven of Czec hoslo va ki a ' s weapon s manufacturing pl a nts were in the Slovak region . As early as 1990, weapo ns sa les from those pl ants had declined from 1988 leve ls from eight billio n dollars to one billion . This situ ation prompted Meciar to trave l to Moscow in 1991 in order to get defe nse co ntracts to make up some of thi s loss. 123 In fact , the sub sequent recess io n became part of the reason that Slovak leaders sought separation from the Czechs. Further, the Slovak military hoped that Ru ss ia might give Slovakia li ce nses to se ll military ha rdw are to third world countries. 12~ Eventu a ll y, Pres ident Bo ri s Yeltsin of Ru ss ia visited Slovaki a in Aug ust 1993, and one res ult was the sig nin g of a bilatera l state treaty. In add iti o n, the two states s ig ned a fi ve-yea r military cooperation agree me nt. The latter would po te nti a ll y assist Slovakia economically, for it would he lp rev ive its arm s industry . One fea ture of the agree me nt was the provis io n that Ru ss ia would suppl y spare parts for th e Slovak milita ry. 125 Other Slovak goa ls in c lud ed development of a Slovak role in tran sporting Ru ss ian natural gas to Western Europe. In part, Mec iar hoped that the flirtation with Ru ss ia mi g ht increase Slovakia ' s econo mi c importance to th e West a nd attract in vestme nts from that direction as well. 126 Cultivation of ties to Ukrai ne a lso became part of thi s new economi c strategy. Early afte r th e revolution Meciar soug ht to build a new railway from Brati slava to Ukraine by utili zing the for mer Soviet ra il network. 127 By the middl e 1990s Slovak leaders began to think in broader terms. Perh aps Ukra ine could act as well as the gate- 12 .1 See Andrew A. Michta. East Central Europe after the Warsaw Pact: Security Dilemmas in the 1990s (New York: Greenwood Press. 1992 ). p. 107. 12 "' Duleba, ·'The Slovak-Ukrainian-Ru ssian Security Tri angle: · p. 20. 125 Price, The International Politics o f East Central Europe. p. 170. 126 Duleba, ''The Slovak-Ukrainian-Ru ssian Security Triangle." pp. 85-8 6. 127 Price. The International Politics of East Central Europe. p. 170. �SLOVAKIA 135 way to the Ru ss ian market. 128 For many Slovaks, Ukraine was in a sense still Ru ss ia, and thu s economic policies toward s the two we re intertw ined. In spite of the eastward look in economic policy, western organi zation s were not totall y ignored. For example, in June 1993 Sl ovaki a was accepted into the Council of Europe. Then in June 1995 , th e M ec iar government submitted a membership appli cati on to the EU . Reliance on in ves tments from western countries rein forced thi s economic policy dimension. K ey economic in vestors in the 1990s included, in rank order , Germ any, A ustri a, and th e Czech Repu bli c. 129 Despite Slovaki a's approach to the East, the W est was in many ways more helpful. Seri ous di sc uss ions w ith the EU rea ll y began in 1997 w ith th e Lu xembourg Summit. A t th at meeting the EU placed Slovaki a in a second ti er of si x nati ons, and so it looked as if Sl ovaki a wo uld have to wa it longer then its Czech co unterpart, w ho ended up in the first ti er of si x. Contacts w ith the EU acce lerated after the defea t of the M ec iar government in 1998. A multilateral screening process by the EU took pl ace between April 1998 and February 1999, and thi s gave way to more signifi ca nt bil ateral screenin g procedu res between M arch of 1999 and Febru ary of 2000. 130 In the 2000-2002 period Slovaki a worked its way th rough most of the thirty-one chapters of th e EU 's aqui s co mmunautaire. For exa mpl e, di sc uss ions about Chapter Four ce ntered on future poss ibilities that fore igners could control Sl ovak land and corresponding poss ibilities fo r Slovak s to purchase land w ithin th e EU. Fo ll ow in g the 1998 elec ti ons th e chances of mee tin g the goa ls of Ch apter Si x we re enhanced, as Slovaki a moved more firml y in the direc ti on of erec tin g a market economy. Chapter Seven on agri cultu re was a criti ca l one for Slovak ia as it was for most of the other nati ons in the region. Sl ovak s 12 " 129 1.'<, Du leba. ··The Slovak-Ukrainian-Russian Security Triangle." p. 97 . Leff. The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State. p. 262. '·Fazy proces u rozs irova ni a EU ," M inisterstvo za hra11ic11yc h vecf (2002) . hllp ://www. 1111. v.,k Oc tober 2002. �SLOVAKIA 136 soug ht promises of an ad mini stra ti ve structure that wou ld e nsure protect ion of the ir agric ultural sys tem . The politica l tran s iti on from the Mec iar governm e nt to th at of Dzurinda made sa ti sfac tion of Chapte r Thirteen more poss ibl e. Th at c hapter in vo lved worker 's ri g hts, ge nde r equ a lity, racia l justi ce, a nd other vita l categori es. Sl ovak ia rece ived spec ia l in stru c tion s within th e framework of Chapter Fifteen. Th e EU requ es ted th a t Slo va ki a acce lera te pri vati za ti o n of ba nk s as we ll as na tural reso urce mo nopoli es. Further, it was ex pected th at Slovakia wo uld build up small and medium s ized firm s w hil e e nco urag in g add iti o na l fo re ig n in vestme nt. 13 1 Comparison The Czec h Republic and Slo vaki a did move on separate paths in terms of the economi c dime nsion of fo re ign policy for a large part of the first decade after separation . In fac t, so me of their sharpe r differences e merged in the fo ur years after the 1989 revo luti on prior to the 1993 breakup. In the post- 1993 atmosphere the Czechs quickl y latched on to western organi zati ons in order to map out their future. S lovaki a, with its differe nt geographi c position and greater nostalgia for the lost economic links to the form er Soviet Union , c ultivated the Ukra ine and Russ ia as part of a ge nera l orientation to the east. Both di sappointme nt with the East and th e ex pe rien ce of th e 1998 elections brought the Slovak path much c loser to that of the Czechs . One sy mbo l of thi s shift was the progress made by both states in th e 1998-2002 pe riod towa rd me mbership in the EU . By September of 2002 the Czech Re public had c losed twe nty-fi ve of the thirty most s ignifi cant c hapters th at led to EU me mbership. Surprising ly, Slovaki a had closed twe nty-seven. Slo vakia 's progress had bee n very rapid, for the Czechs had ac tu all y closed eightee n of the chapters before Slovakia had . An important resu lt was th at Sl ova kia moved 131 " Ka ndid atske krajiny a ic h ak tu alny stav negoc iac if," Ministe,:~tvo w hranicnj ch vecf (2002). http ://www.111zv.~k Jul y 30. 2002. �SLOVAKIA 137 from the second ti er of six pote nti al EU members to the first ti er of ten between 1997 and the autumn of 2002. T he re port of the EU Commiss ion on October 9, 2002, bas ica ll y treated both countri es as if they were at simil ar leve ls of pre paredness for EU entry in earl y 2004. 132 Both co untries ge nera ll y rece ived pos iti ve reports and were firml y in the group o f ten nati ons to be admitted at the sa me time in 2004. National Security Factors and the Foreign Policy of the Two States The Czech Republic Separati on fro m S lovak ia led to an immed iate series of ste ps aimed at underpinnin g the natio nal sec urity of the new, smaller Czech state. T hroughout th e first decade after the separati on, the sec urity spotli ght shi fted from an emph as is on the Wes tern European Unio n (W EU), to the ca mpaign fo r NATO me mbership , and later to cons iderat ion of th e ro le of th e Co mmon Fore ign and Sec urity Po li cy (CFS P) of th e EU. 133 ln additi o n, Czec hs bega n to in vo lve themse lves more full y in international organi zati ons such as the UN, OSCE , and Y isegrad . T hu s th e nati o na l sec urity age nd a was crowded. Czech disc uss ions abo ut defense po licy in the earl y 1990s centered in part on the W EU , an organi zati on that had e merged in 1948 with the Brusse ls Treaty. On the o ne hand , EU pl anners at the begi nning of the 1990s envisioned the WEU in a ce ntra l ro le in ass istin g Europe to take responsibility fo r its ow n sec urity. On the other hand , others hoped that the WEU could he lp create mo re conse nsus with NATO as well as support for NATO mi ss ions. 134 rn RFE/RL News line. Part II. October 10. 2002. Archived at: h1tp ://www.rferl.org October 2002. rn See Dav id S. Mason , Revolution and Transition in East Central Europe. Second Edi tion (Bou lder, Colorado : Westview Press, 1996), pp. 95-98. " 4 K arel Pezl, " Ceska repub li ka a zapadoevropske unie: bezpecnostnf aspek ty, " Mezinarodnf Politika 18( 1994). pp. 25-26. �138 SLOVAKIA By the late 1990s discu ss ions within the Czech Re public about admission to NATO overshadowed conversations about the fading WEU. Admission to NATO in 1999 brought with it a whole set of new obligations. There was a need to prepare defense legislation that would move the Czech defense structure toward the level of NATO standard s. New military pe rso nnel requirements mandated that the Czech defense sector prepare courses for a ll ranks about the changing role of the military. Training in the use of radar was also upgraded. Further, the Czech Republic would need to build a crisis command center that would facilitate the rapid sharing of information between NATO and the Czech Republic. It would also be necessary for the Czechs to build a sys tem of command and control that paralleled the organizations in other NATO countries. 135 Immediately after expansion to include three new members in 1999, NATO had an opportunity to utilize these new national resources during the Kosovo bombing campaign . One lesson of that campaign was increased awareness of th e asymmetry of capabilities within the alliance. 136 America provided eighty per cent of the bombs dropped on Kosovo in the spring of 1999 as well as ninety per cent of the weapons. U. S. airplanes were the only ones that could operate in all weather. Lowered European defen se budgets in the 1990s resulted in a situation in which all European NATO members contributed only two-thirds of the fundin g that the United States did to defen se. The Czech Republic responded to this imbalance by developing a blueprint for change in 2001. That plan called for a rapid upgrade in mane uverability of units, logistical strength, placement of weaponry and pe rsonnel , ability to resist over a lon g period, and information command and control. Further, the Ministry of Defense drew up a li st of four principles that would guide Czech participation rn Antonin Sverak . ··vnej sf a vnitfnf aspekty zac lenovanf resortu obrany CR do NATO," Mezimfrodnf Vztahy 2( 1999). pp. 13-3 1. 136 See Otto Pick, ·· NATO, evropska obrana a poucenf K osova." CR po vstupu do NATO. Uvahy a problemy (Praha: Ceska Atlanticka Komise UMY. 2000), pp. 2532. �SLOVAKIA In 139 NATO. Th ey inc luded co ntinu ed in vo lvement of the two North American powers in the defe nse of Europe, reliance on NATO as the main guarantor of European security , subordination of the CFSP of the EU within the framework of NATO , a nd guara nteed access to NATO capabi lities for all EU defense and sec urity mi ss ion s. 137 Recog nition of the important Czech role in NATO was evident in the dec ision to hold the conference of Nove mber 2002 in Prague. At that meeting seve n additional nati ons joined the military alliance. Finally, durin g th e war in Iraq in 2003, th e Czechs sent an anti-biolog ical , chemical , and nuclear weapon s unit as well as a fi eld hospital. By the early 1990s, the EU began to outline plans for its own defe nse structure, one that would be independent of the North Atlantic nation s th at had for so lon g domin ated NATO. These plans centered on the creation in 1990 of th e Common Forei gn and Security (CFS P) of the EU . In 1993 the Treaty of Europe called for the addition to the CFSP of pe rm ane nt officials from the EU Council Secretariat as well as of fiftee n diplomats from each Fore ign Ministry. 138 In early 2001 the Czech Foreign Mini ster made a persuasive case for the natural harmony between the broad-rang ing objectives of the CFSP and the specific, national inte rests of the Czec h Republic. 139 For him the current spirit of cooperation in Europe was a needed antidote to the suffer in g of the Czechoslovak people during the twe nti e th century. Throu gh the CFSP, the Czech Re public would ga in both assistance in its multi-pronged process of development and also the opportunity to co ntribute to regional probl e m so lvin g. He did not e nvision participation in European and Atlantic structures as a threat to Czech national inte rests. In particul ar, the Dece mber 2000 Nic e Summit ge nerated orga ni zati o na l c han ges in EU institution s 117 Jaromfr Novotny, "' DCI (Defense Capabiliti es Initiative) a Cesk,\ Republika." Mini sterstvo zahranicnfch vecf (2002). http://www.1111v.u March 2002 . 1" See Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler. The European Un ion as a Global Actor (L ondon: Routledge. 1999). pp. 169- 196. iw -''Jan K avan. ·'Ceska zahrani cnf politika na prahu 2 1. stoletf."' Mez inarodnf Politikil 25(200 I ). pp. 4-5. �140 SLOVAKIA that would continue to break down the artificial barriers that divided Europe during the Cold War. Growin g European military stren gth would s imultaneou sly contribute to an increase in Czech capabi lities. 140 Slovakia In spite of the fact that so much of the defense industry had been located in the Slovak areas during the Co ld War and into the immediate post-1989 revolution period, the leadership ex peri ence of Slovaks on defen se matters had been re lative ly slim . For instance, in I 99 1 Slovak so ldiers constituted 34.7 % of the federa l Czechoslovak army. However, the representation of Slovak manage rs within the Ministry of Defense over several years ranged from on ly 5 to 23 %. 141 In the early years after separation , Slovaks were primarily focused on reestabli shing or maintaining ties with the East. Previously mentioned political ties to Ru ss ia, Ukraine, and Yi segrad see med to offer them a non-western prescription for protecting national sec urity. The Slovaks rea ll y only went through the motion s of taking part in so me western sec urity structures. For example, like th e Czech Republic , Slovakia became an Assoc iate Partner in the WEU and reg ul arl y attended its meetings. Although Associate Members he ld no voting power within the organization , they did have the ri ght to plan and execute military operations. 142 Contac ts between Slovakia and NATO were minimal and bas ically centered on only a few reciprocal visits by key personnel during the three years before Meciar fel l from grace. The most impor- 140 Pavel Teli cka, " Aktualni stav jednani o pristoupeni CR k EU ," M ezimirodnf Politika 25(200 I ). 14 1 Michta, East Central Europe after the Warsaw Pact: Security Dilemmas in the 1990s, p. I 10. 142 See Philip H. Gordon, ·The Western European Union and NATO 's ' Europeanisation ," in Philip H. Gordon, ed., NATO 's Transformation : The Changing Shape of the Atlantic Alliance (L ondon : Row man & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. , I 997), p. 26 1. �SLOVAKIA 141 tant visit by a top NATO figure to Slovakia was the 1996 trip of Secretary-General Javier Solana . The most important Slovak trip was that by President Kovac to Brussels in 1996 to meet with top NATO personnel. After the 1998 elections and the establishment of a new government under Mikulas Dzurinda, the pace of contacts picked up. In early 2002, Slovakia hosted visits by the unified NATO European commander General Dieter Stockman ; by General Joseph Ralston, the commander of NATO forces in Europe; and by Deputy NATO Minister Nicholas Burns. In turn, Slovak leaders who made their way to NATO Headquarters included incoming Prime Minister Dzurinda in 1998 and President Schuster in 1999 and again in 2002. 143 Another key component of the post- I 998 , systematic Slovak move toward s NATO involved the Membership Action Plan (MAP) Process. In early 1999 Slovakia presented a five-point plan that included a strategy for political/economic issues, defense/military question s, resources/capabilities, security challenges, and legal matters. In April of 1999, NATO accepted that MAP and the Slovak government followed suit in June of the same year. The National Program for the process of NATO entry was finalized in April of 2000. 144 Finalization of the MAP process led to many meetings over the next few years. Additional activity after 1998 centered on galvanizing public support for entry into the military alliance. Slovakia held a grants competition to enable NGO' s to raise public awareness of the significance of NATO entry. Support for entry came officially from a total of seventy-five Roma organizations. One result of all thi s activity was a rel atively high level of public support for joining the organization . Between the fall of 200 I and the spring of 2002 , support reflected in public opinion poll s rose from 52.2 % to 60.7 %, although it 143 " M edznfky spoluprace SR a NATO," Ministerstvo zahranicnych vec f (2002). http ://www.rnzv.sk October 2002. 144 " Chrono logicky prehl'ad PREN AME," Ministerstvo zahranicnych vecf(2002). http ://www.mzv.,k October 2002. �142 SLOVAKIA declined a bit a few month s later. 145 All of this attention to visits, organizational matters, and public opinion enabled Slovakia to make up for its lack of attention an d interest in NATO during the midI 990s. In addition , during the latter part of the 1990s, Slovakia took part in severa l important peacekeeping missions under NATO leadership. This involvement demonstrated that the nation would possess the level of commitment required of new NATO members. After completion of the Dayton Accord on Bosnia in 1995, Slovakia se nt some military personnel and equipment as part of SFOR to the area of operations. At the end of 1997, it sent three Army engineers and five army specialists in the field of civil-military cooperation. In the fall of 2002 Slovakia made its first Air Force contribution to a NATO mis sion. The capabilities it sent included a helicopte r unit with two helicopte rs and twenty-one assoc iated personnel. Slovakia promised to keep that contingent in Bosnia for the next six months. Involveme nt in KFOR after the Kosovo bombin g campaign in late 1999 was even more extensive. The initial commitment included forty Army engineers , a nd di spatch of an additional four persons at the command level one year later. A major upgrade occurred in early 2002 with the creation of a five hundred person Czech-Slovak rapid reaction battalion . The Slovak role in that force included twenty per cent of the overall membership, and the vast majority of those were doctors, conductors, mechanics, and logi stics specialists. The vital mi ss ions of that battalion centered on sec uring the Serb-Kosovo border, monitoring a range of activities, assuring stable conditions for the return of refugees, policing the civil serv ice, and protecting the Serb minority. 146 Thi s particular operation would provide man y lessons that would assist Slovakia in making important contributions as a full NATO member. Finally , in the sprin g of 2003 , Slovakia dispat145 " Chronologicky prehl'ad PREN AME," Ministerstvo zahranicnych veer (2002). http ://www.mzY.sk October 2002 . 146 " Ucast' SR v operaciach na podporu mieru pod vedenfm NATO," Ministerstvo zahranicnych vecf(2002). h11p ://www.111zv.sk October 2002. �SLOVAKIA 143 ched military personnel to the Pers ian Gulf durin g the co ntro versial war in Iraq. Comparisons Czech pursuit of national sec urity followed a unidirect io nal path during the first decade a fte r se parati o n from Slovakia. Its leade rs thou ght proacti ve ly in eac h part of the decade about a co ntributin g role in the maj or defe nse opti ons ava il ab le at the time. This mea nt that much of the di sc uss ion foc used on activity within the framework of W EU in the first years after the breakup . Once NATO ad mi ss ion became a real possibility , the Czec hs set the ir eyes on th at orga ni zation . F in all y, as EU membership approac hed early in the new century, more of th e di sc uss ion centered o n the CFSP, a progra m that offered a European sec urity cho ice th at was inde pe nde nt of Ameri can leade rship. In the Slovak case the emp hasis on re-stoking ti es with Ukraine and Ru ss ia at first prec luded seri ous discussion about western sec urity o rga ni zati o nal structures . Once the 1998 e lect ions offered the chance for a new policy, Slovak ia ' s outreach to the West in the defe nse area mainl y took the for m of a se ri ous effort to jo in NA TO. Achi eve me nt of that goa l at the e nd of 2002 e nab led Slovakia to adopt the multi -pron ged , western-oriented strategy utili zed by the Czechs fo r an e ntire decade. Conclusion The re is remark ab le cons iste ncy across the ra nge of va ri abl es that, for a time , divided the two nations. Those vari ables inc lude politi cs, economi cs, and nati o nal sec urity. It is clear th at the political va ri abl es were the driving force be hind the othe r two. Elec ti o n outcomes in the Czech Re public a nd Slovakia were quite different between 1992 and 1998. Those results acco unt primaril y for the very diffe rent foreign polic y path s a lon g which the two sets of fore ign policy elites traveled prior to 1998. Throu ghout the e ntire decade Czech po liti ca l leaders looked to the West fo r th eir future organi zati onal home. Politica l parti es debated the pace and nature of the march to the West but not its in ev i- �SLOVAKIA 144 tability. As a result Czech economic connections with the West were forged throughout the entire period , and the Czec hs ke pt their sights set on EU membership consistently after 1993. The des ire to enter western sec urity structures entailed consideration of the WEU at first, then anticipation as well as achievement of NATO membership, and finall y thorough attention to the CFSP of the EU. S lovak leaders were at first ambiva lent and at times negati ve about connections to the West. In the 1992-98 period they attempted to resusc itate the old eco nomic ties with Ukraine and Ru ss ia. At the same time , they maintained a di stance from the states that were pursuing NATO membership at the earliest poss ible moment. Early hopes that the Visegrad alliance cou ld provide a measure of security for Slovakia di sappeared in 1999 when the other three members of that alli ance joined NATO. The election of 1998 changed Slovakia's forei gn policy path in very defi nite ways. It engaged in much more serious di sc ussions with the EU about progress on the thirty-one chapters of the acquis communautaire. A MAP leadin g to NA TO membership was approved by both that organization and the Slovak government. Although the Slovaks wou ld end up joining NATO three and one half years after the Czechs, both nation s would likely enter the EU at the same time. By the fall of 2002, both countries were not walking exactly on the sa me path , but the ir paths were c learly in view of one another. In conclusion, it is important, while acknowledg in g these differences prior to I 998, not to overstate them. For example, Timothy Frye 147 examined political polarization within all of the post-communi st co untri es. Hi s stud y covered the 1989-98 period , and thu s it included the time frame in which these two countries were moving in differe nt direction s. The political polari zation rating for the Czech Republic was 4.4, and for Slovakia it was 4 .9. Despite the sli ghtly higher rate for Slovaki a, he c lassified both countries as non-pol ari - 14 7 Timothy Frye, " The Price of Polarizati on: Economic Performance in the Post- Communist World," World Politics 54(2002). pp. 308-337 . �SLOVAKIA 145 zed. The po lari zed co untri es inc luded Albania, Be laru s, Bul gari a, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Romani a, Ru ss ia, and Ukraine. Thi s is a signifi cant conclusion, for it he lps ex pl ain how two nati ons that seemed to be mov ing in such di ffe rent directi o ns after 1993 were able to adopt parall el paths by the end of the century. Perh aps the findin gs also revea l the wi sdom of those observers who chose to characteri ze the di vorce in 1993 as a "velvet" one. �� SLOVAKIA 121 Separate Paths: Czech and Slovak Foreign Policies Since 1993 James W. Peterson Introduction Foll owing the 1993 break-up of Czechos lovaki a into the Czech Re public and Slovak ia, the two states needed to attend to chall enging fo re ign po li cy iss ues. Wh ile there were important d iffe rences in the situations of the two states, the broad chall enges th at awaited them were s imil ar. In ge nera l, th eir res ponses to those chall enges put the two co untri es on se parate path s th roug ho ut much of the 1990s. It may be th at the iss ues th at led to the brea k-up o f C zechos lo vakia proved too much to overco me in the earl y years after the split. However, by th e earl y twenty-fi rst ce ntury, the ir separate path s moved closer together and stra ightened out in such a way th at they become parallel. The initi al di ffe rences in the new geopo litica l positi ons of the two states were pro nounced. Whil e th e o ld Czechos lovak state had often served as a long, bridge- like link betwee n East and West, the two new co untri es leaned in di ffe rent direction s. Slovak leaders initi all y and instincti ve ly thought about ties to eastern countri es, as well as to th e Yisegrad organizati o n, in whi ch its future pros pec ts were linked to those o f the Czec h Re public, Po land, and Hun gary. By contra st, the Czec h Re public leadership looked westward s to th e o utstretched, embrac ing arms of we ll -es tabli shed European stru ctures . Th e S lova k path was more uncertain and waverin g th an was th e Czech, for Co ld War organi zati onal structures in the east had broken down. �122 SLOVAKIA In light of their contrasting geopolitical orientations, the two states responded differently to common challenges. First, they confronted common political challenges in different ways. While many of these political pressures were primarily domestic , they all had an impact on future foreign policy choices and potentialities. For examp le, both states sought to establish functioning political party systems that would be capab le of proposing consistent foreign policies. Both were under scrutiny from the outside wor ld on the issue of treatment of important minority groups within the country. Further, in each country cultivation of non-governmental organizations that cou ld extend the roots of foreign policy debates further into the civil society was an important goa l. Different strategies on democratization led the two nations on different political paths regarding foreign policy questions. A second common challenge for the Czechs and Slovaks emerged from the economic sector. Newly elected leaders immediately wrestled with the que stion of converting centrally-planned economies into the principles of the free market. Again , this issue was not exclusively domestic . Success in competing for outside loans was contingent on progress made in privatization of enterprises, in release from fixed price controls, and in the estab li shment of principles of competitiveness . By the middl e of the 1990s, prospects for admission to the European Union (EU) were good. Leadership in the Czech Republic initially put a higher priority both on rapid conversion to capita li sm and on links to the EU than did the Slovaks. Thirdly, location of a dependable national security structure was a common problem in the two nations. The Warsaw Pact, a structure that had ostensibly ass ured the protection of the Czechoslovak state did not long survive the end of the Cold War. Give n Slovakia 's more eastern location , there was a long debate on the question of whe ther it was more desirabl e to preserve what was left of ties to its eastern neighbors or to res pond to overtures from the West. For the Czech Republic it was more obvious that participation in western institution s would be th e next step. The West European Union (WEU), �SLOVAKIA 123 North Atl anti c Treaty Orga ni zati on (NATO), and the EU's Common Fo re ig n a nd Sec urit y Po li cy (C FSP) we re co nte nd e rs fo r th a t linkage. It sho uld be no surpri se that the fo re ig n po li c ies of S lovaki a and the Czec h Re publi c di verged in the earl y years afte r separation but the n reco nnec ted. The ir commo n ex peri e nce in the Czec hos lovak state th ro ug h e ig ht decades bo re th e sa me contras tin g fea tures. C ultural simil ariti es drew the m together, but at times bitter po litica l and eco no mi c ex pe ri e nces pu shed the m apart. Once freed fro m the larger state. th ey made quite di ffe re nt cho ices fo r a number of years. However, reg io na l and s itu a ti o na l fo rces eventu a ll y pu shed th e ir path s in the world together aga in . Political Factors and Foreign Policy of the Two Nation-States The Czech Republic C reati o n of an effec ti ve, po li cy-ori e nted po litica l syste m was a chall enge in the earl y 1990 s. In the C zec h Republic there was initi a lly considera bl e co ntinuity in po liti ca l leadership afte r Janu ary 1993 . Vac lav Have l re ma in ed as Pres id e nt of the small e r state, whil e Vac lav Kl a us co ntinu ed o n as Prim e Mini ster. The do min ant po litica l party of Kl aus was still the C ivic Democratic Party (ODS), an organi zati o n th at had bee n bo rn o ut of the C ivic Forum so ac ti ve durin g the eve nts of 1989. In genera l, the Kl aus governm ent ( 1993-97 ) e nd o rsed a ll the steps co nn ec ted w ith th e re turn to E uro pe. Th e brea k-up of th e Czechos lovak state put th e Ukra ine and Ru ss ia furthe r away geographi ca ll y fro m the C zec h Republic . Thu s, the Czechs as earl y as 1994 jo ined the Partn ership fo r Peace (P4 P) and stressed c loser link s to Po land . 105 A n a na lys is of po liti ca l party pos iti o ns durin g e lec ti o ns in the 1990 s is very revea lin g in te rm s o f the iss ues and de bates that 0 ' ' See Thomas S. Szayna. ··The Czech Republic: A Small Contributor or a ' Free Rider·'l_-· in Andrew A . M ichta. ed .. A merica·s New A llies: Poland. Hungary. and the Czech Republic in NA TO (Sea tt le: Un i versity of Washingto n Press. 1999). pp. 11 2- 148 . �124 SLOVAKIA circulated throughout the Czech Republic. Political party leaders debated the merits of the move to the West but finally endorsed it. The 1998 elections are a useful example . The Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) ended up technically in power, with Milos Zeman as Prime Minister, but the party needed to establish a "Gentlemen ' s Agreement" with the ODS in order to function as a government. For the CSSD there was less emphasis in the e lection campaign on hardheaded defen se of national interests and more of a focus on livin g standards and the rights of citizens within the country . This priority on domestic issues led the CSSD to endorse the idea of a referendum prior to entry into either the EU or NATO. There a lso was a humanitarian component to its view of Czech relations with the outside world. Such a focus led the CSSD to upgrade the importance of North-South relations and the related role of the UN. It concluded that Czechs should have a say whenever human ri ghts were jeopardized in any part of the world . While it endorsed EU membership, it thought of it in terms of stimulating the Czech economy. While it favored NATO entry , it expressed grave concerns about the future location of nuclear weapon s on Czech territory. During the I 998 election the ODS continued to give a " realpolitik" cast to its statements on foreign policy. National interests rather than humanitarian concerns were its top priority. NATO membership cou ld bring increased security for the nation as well as trade and technological benefits. The latter would promote development of the free market, a priority for Klaus since the early 1990s. National economic interests were of paramount importance, whi le crusades connected with globalization and human rights were to be carefu ll y examined. Increased Czech exports through membership in international organizations were the desired outcome. Thus, the party said less than did the CSSD about broader, western-based international organizations that could pull the Czech nation beyond the orbit of its national interests. 106 106 See Jakub Durr, Vo/by '98 (Brno: Pavel Saradin , 2000), pp. 84-97. �SLOVAKIA 125 Attention to th e views of the main political parties enriches understa ndin gs of the Czech point of view on the major foreign and security policy question s of the day. Czech voters in the 2002 elections confirmed the steady march toward s inclu sion in western institution s. Rejection of the ODS was based in part on the negative reaction to the "euroskeptic" views of Klau s on the matter of integration into the EU . Public support for EU membership was confirmed in the results of the June 2003 Referendum. EU support for Czech membership had been offered at the end of 2002. One of the continuing political challenges for the Czech Republic during the 1990s was the iss ue of minority rights, a matter that affected the country's relation ship with the outside world. The criteria for entering both NATO and the EU required a record of fairness toward key groups within the population . One major conflict was the relationship between Czechs and the Roma. A number of well-publicized incidents have raised questions about Czech attitudes and policies. For example, the erection of a wall by Czechs in Ustf nad Labem in 1999 became a foreign policy incident as well as a temporary setback to pursuit of EU membership. It was clear that the wall was intended to prevent Czechs from having to view the Rom a population as well as their Iife-sty le. Attention to such iss ues was necessary in li ght of integration into western institutions. Development of a robust political culture on foreign policy questions remained another challenge to the new state. One s ignificant new factor was the emerge nce of a visible public opinion on foreign policy questions. In genera l, the public was supportive of the new linkages with western institutions. However, there were some differences that were sign ifi ca nt. Public opinion polls over time demonstrated a stabl e level of support for EU entry . However, before 1999 support for entry into NATO was less impressive. 107 Events of 1999 made some difference. In that year the Czech Republic actually en- ' 07 See Caro l Skalnik Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State (Bou lder. Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), p 263. �SLOVAKIA 126 te red NATO , a nd th e Kosovo bo mbin g ca mpa ig n imm edi a te ly occurred . Suc h proximity to th e wars in the Ba lkan s made Czec hs somewhat more like ly to think pos iti ve ly abo ut NATO entry. Th ere were a lso uniqu e e ffo rts to build suppo rt within the po litical culture for certain fore ig n poli cy instituti o ns. One abiding problem was the negative set of Czec h attitudes abo ut the ro le of the military. C zec h resentme nt of the military is unde rstand abl e in li g ht o f the long years of the Sov ie t military prese nce afte r 1968 . Al so , after 1989 th e So vie t military left a catastro phe in many Czec h co mmu niti es. The barracks a nd o the r fac iliti es were in te rribl e co nditi o n, and individu a l Sovi et units had ta ke n anythin g of va lue fro m those locati o ns. One effort to build mo re pos iti ve Czec h attitudes abo ut the military too k pl ace in So uth Bo he mi a. A c iti ze n group ca ll ed S AS was fo rmed in 1997. The a im of the group was to de mon strate th at the Czec h military was a contributin g in strume nt in a de mocra ti c state rather than mere ly an in strume nt o f power. The SAS established link s to sc hoo ls and uni versities with the obj ec tive of c ultiv atin g a mo re pos iti ve attitude abo ut the C zech military. It set up co nfere nces and a lso co nsulted spec ia li sts from o the r nati o ns. In fac t, o ne res ult o f thi s acti vity was the creation of spec ial ti es betwee n the c ity o f Ces ky Kruml o v in the Czec h Republi c and Mi a mi Beac h in the State of Fl o rida, USA . A public e xcha nge of ideas abo ut the rol e of th e military could gene rate more in fo rmed C zech perspec ti ves about the va lue of a strong defense capability to cope w ith new threats. 108 Mo re positive attitudes about th e military wo uld fac ilitate integ rati o n into western o rgani zati o ns such as NATO. Slovakia The creati o n of po liti ca l stability was a greater c ha lle nge for Sl ovaki a than it was fo r the Czec h Republi c . In the C zec h case continuity of leadership from the 1989-93 period to th e post-1989 pe riod ' 08 J. Yondro us. .. Regionaln f dimenze ceskeho atl anti smu.'· M inisterst vo zahranicnfch vecf(2002). h ttp: //wwW .lllZ V.C/. March 2002 . �SLOVAKIA 127 contributed to stability. In the Slovak case continuity of leadership undermined rather than supported stability. Vladimfr Meciar had been the chosen Slovak leader in the two years immediately after the 1989 revolution. His new party, Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS), did very well in the 1992 elections, and this enabled him again to become Prime Minister once Slovakia became an independent state in 1993 . He was reluctant to reform in any comprehensive way the centrally planned economy, and thus privatization was very slow. In addition, his government included " many of the old regime ' s cadres, resources, and xenophobic ideologies intact. " 109 Meciar fell from power in the spring of 1994, and a caretaker government under Jozef Moravcfk managed public affairs until the fall elections. Again, the voters returned a coalition government headed by Meciar and the HZDS to power, and this government lasted through the next elections in 1998. In this period Meciar basically put the brakes both on democratization and on the movement of the economic system towards free market principles. The political experiences of the first half decade of independence had major consequences for foreign policy, as Slovakia made very slow progress on the criteria that both NATO and the EU presented to it. During the I 998-2002 period , a coalition led by the Social Democratic and Christian Union (SDKU) took the leading role in government, after the public rebuffed Meciar for a third time. Mikulas Dzurinda as Prime Minister gradually moved Slovakia back onto the path towards western institutions. He emerged again as Prime Minister after the fall 2002 elections , and so the steady movement toward NATO and the EU remained unchanged. Meciar and the HZDS were still prominent and in fact received in 2002 both the largest share of the popular vote ( 19.5 %) and the highest number of seats in the I 50 seat legislature (36). His rhetoric on foreign policy was more muted in this campaign , but numerous warnings emanated from NATO and ,m Rudolf L. Tokes. " From Visegrad to Krakow: Cooperation, Competition , and Coexi stence in Central Europe," Problems of Communism 40( 1991 ), pp. 100-114. �SLOVAKIA 128 the EU leade rship a bo ut the imp licati o ns of a new governme nt in whic h the HZ DS pl ayed a ny rol e at a ll. In late Septe mber work began o n a coa liti o n th at would in c lude Dzu rinda's S DK U, the C hristi a n De mocrati c Uni o n (KDH), A lli a nce fo r ew C itize ns (A 0), and the Hungari an Coa liti o n (SMK). In earl y October thi s fo ur-party coa litio n fo rged an ag reeme nt abo ut executi ve pos iti o ns, and the new governme nt was in pl ace. A ll of these arra nge me nts were a imed to keep Sl ova ki a o n a stead y trac k in es tabli shin g its new, wes te rn o rgani zatio na l connectio ns in fore ig n poli cy. 11 0 Whil e the Czechs had been press ured by the o utside world o n the matte r of the Ro ma, Slovaks were c riti c ized fo r the ir treatment of the Hun garian mi no rity. Aga in , the Mec iar periods were suspec t in th is regard . Otto Ulc1 11 ex pl a in s thi s situ ati o n by notin g th at afte r 1968 Slova ks were not pro min e nt in the di ss ide nt moveme nt th at e mphasized hum a n ri ghts. Part of the pro bl e m was a lso the lack of ex perie nce of S lova ks in the Czechoslovak dipl o mati c corps. The leaders may have not understood full y the way in whi ch Slova ki a's domesti c record o n mino rity re lati o ns, the e nviro nme nt , a nd autho ritari ani sm in ge ne ra l influe nced fo re ign percepti o ns as we ll as fo re ig n po li cy objecti ve . 11 2 In another respect, the Slovak governme nt d urin g th at peri od was quite ce ntra li st o n the matter o f th e ri g hts of reg io ns within the country. The re is so me iro ny in thi s, fo r th e HZDS had been very ant i-federa li st (a nti -ce ntra list) after its e merge nce in April 199 1. 11 3 In that ea rli er time, the ta rget had bee n the a ll eged centrali st reg ime in Prag ue, s ince the Czec hos lovak state was still intact. Ev ide nce of Mec iar 's centra li st po li c ies li es primaril y in hi s po licy towards the 110 RFE/RL ewsline. Part II. September 24. 2002; October 8, 2002. Archived at http://\\\\w.11°erl.org September. October. 2002. 111 Otto Ulc. " The Bumpy Road ofCzechoslovaki a·s Velvet Revolution ," Problems of Communism 41 ( 1992). pp. 19-3 3 111 See Adrian Hyde Price. The International Politics of East Central Europe (New York: M anchester Uni versity Press, 1996), p. 28. 11 3 Ulc,"The Bumpy Road of Czechoslovakia ' s Ve l vet Revoluti on ." p. 29. �SLOVAKIA 129 eastern part of Slovakia. In the mid- I 990s that region became interested in participating in a large Carpathian Euroregion. Other players in the Euroregion wo uld include Romania , Hungary , Poland , and Ukraine. However, the Slovak Ministry of the Interior was quite critical of that orientation. In 1995 that Ministry abo li shed the Slovak Carpathian Regional Association that had co nsisted of a number of regional and local governments in eastern Slovakia. As a result, in 1996 the Slovak representatives in the Euroregion resigned and Slovakia cancel led its participation. Meciar took these actions because of a double suspicion. First, he was suspic ious that the eastern Slovak metropolis of Kosice would lead eastern Slovakia to develop its own independent foreign policy . Second, he feared that Hungary would use the Euroregion to exp loit the anger of the Slovak Hungarian minority . 114 Such att itudes and policies of the top leadership would not mesh well with the EU and its priority on the rights of regions within countries. However, after the 1998 elections the Slovak leadership reflected more sensitivity toward the political culture. For exam ple, Slovaks were aware after 1998 of the need to incorporate domestic non-governmenta l gro ups (NGO 's) into the increasingly public discussion of foreign policy . Thi s was particularly the case in the efforts to ga in admiss ion to NATO. Younger persons were a special target of efforts at political soc ialization . Teachers in middle schools organized essay contests about the sig nific ance of NATO . Organized debates about NATO themes took pl ace in both middle and upper schools. Further, the government set up twe lve information centers that were aimed at youn ger persons. According to one observer, regional projects abo ut NATO by 2002 had reached 120,000 students. Similar discuss ions were aimed at women's groups . For example, profess ional women in Bratislava as we ll as the Union of Women of S lovakia engaged in discussions on the mea nin g and significance of NATO . The mass "" See A lexander Duleba, 'The Slovak-Ukraini an-Russian Security Tri angle." in M argarita M. Balmaceda, ed ., On the Edge: Ukrainian-Central European-Russian Security Triangle (Budapest: Central European Univers ity, 2000), pp. I 06- I 09. �SLOVAKIA 130 medi a also pl ayed a ro le in thi s process. T wo major national telev ision projects were aimed at promoting di sc uss ion of NATO the mes. Furthe r, additi o na l in fo rm ati on proj ec ts we re bea med at the populati on through thi rty loca l te lev ision stati ons. The re was even an effort to pull ex pe rts and speciali sts into the di scuss ion. 115 The hope was th at these gro up s wo uld communicate pos iti ve attitudes abo ut NATO to the ir peers a nd e ve n in the ir publicat ions. S imil arl y, after the Nice EU Summit at the e nd of 2000 , Slo vaki a establi shed the Nation al Conve nti on. Its mi ssion e ntail ed stimul ati on of a nati o nal di scuss ion on the E U and Slovak nati o nal inte rests. The di scuss ion was to be in c lu s ive in which po liti ca l party me mbe rs, acade mi cs, c hurc hes , interest gro ups, non- governme nta l orga ni zati o ns, trade union s, muni cipalities, and reg ions all pl ayed a ro le. 11 6 Comparison Both co untries confronted major po litica l chall e nges th at affected fore ign po licy prospects. In both cases there was outside scrutin y and suspi c io n througho ut the first decade abo ut the way in whi c h their governme nts treated key minority gro ups. C riteri a fo r admi ssion to wes te rn orga ni zati ons required prog ress in thi s area. Both countri es a lso ex pe ri e nced maj or c ha nges in governme nt. In the Czech case such cha nges d id not affect very much the steady process of integration w ith the West. Slovak governme ntal changes had more of an impact. In addition , the continuin g presence of Vl adimfr Meciar and the HZDS had the net effect of postponin g Slovaki a's integrati on with western institution s until the late 1990s. Finally , cultivation of positive attitudes within the po liti ca l c ulture became a priority once the leadership made the dec ision to look in a westward direction . In th e Czec h case thi s spotli ght on po liti ca l culture was a 115 • Organ izacie a instituc ie, ktorym bola udelena Strieborn a plaketa M inisterstva zahranicnych vecf Slovenskej republ iky di\a 20. juna 2002," M inisterst vo zah ranicnych vecf(2002). http://www.mzv .sk Oc tober 2002. 116 " Narodny ko nvent o Evropskej buducnosti Slovenska," Ministerst vo zahranicnych vecf (2002). http://www.mzv.sk October 2002. �SLOVAKIA 131 constant theme throughout the decade, but in the Slovak case it was only characteristic of the second half of the decade. Economic Factors and Foreign Policy of the Two Nation-States The Czech Republic In the years following th e 1989 revo lution , the Klau s government made eco nomi c restructurin g in Czechoslovakia a major priority. Privati zation and the use of vouchers placed formerly state-controlled industries in private hand s. Job sec urity yie lded to the greater uncertainty connected with the free market. It became more like ly that industries would ri se and fa ll on the ir own merits, while artifi cial control of prices was no longer the norm. 11 7 Thus, major economic changes had deve loped their own momentum at the time the Czechs separated from Slovakia, and they bore the potenti al to have a major impact on foreign policy. For exampl e, ga inin g admission to the EU became a top priority as a result of the new geographic and eco nomi c developments. Very soon Brusse ls presented to the eastern countries its Iist of thirty-one chapters in the "acqui s communautaire" process. Czech leaders began to meet regularl y with EU bureaucrats in order to demonstrate progress toward s meeting the criteria of eac h of the chapters. Usually twice a year the EU represe ntatives came to the Czech Republic to inspect progress made and to iss ue judgments about the relative rank of the nation on the li st of EU prospects from that region. By the end of the 1990s, the Czech Republic ranked near the top of the prospec ti ve li st of new members, and membership appeared like ly by 2004. In fac t, in October of 2002 the EU Commission announced that the Czech Republic would be one of the ten nation s admitted in 2004. 11 8 Czech involvement in the EU 's PHARE and ERBD investment projects was of particular significance. Invo lve ment in the wider EU market would 117 See Bernard Wheaton and Zdenek Ka van , The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslo- vakia 1988- /99 1 (Boulder. Colorado: Westvi ew Press, 1992) , pp. 139-143. 118 Sueddeutsche Zeitung, October 9, 2002. Arch i ved at: http://sueddeutsche .de October 2002. �132 SLOVAKIA multipl y the steps taken by the Czech governme nt in co nvers ion to capitali sm and th ereby open up additional new in vestment opportunities in othe r nations. At the same time , eve ntua l EU membership woul d lead to add ition al western investments, and important ones had come about already in the 1990s. For example , in 1994 th e German automobil e company Volkswagen bought majo rity co ntrol of the o ld Czech mega-compan y Skoda . Whil e the agree ment did guarantee the Germans majority control , it also provided the Czechs with a veto over future policy dec ision s. 11 9 Similarly, Air France took over the Prague Airport Ruzyne and made it into a modern facility. Early in the twenty-first century the A merica n company Motorola began construction of a fac tory in Moravia in the area of the Beskydy Mountains. Much news accompanied the buy -out of severa l well known breweries, including Pil sner Urque ll , by South Africa n enterprises. Certainly , one by- product of this western indu stri a l and financial in vo lvement would be the rapid infusion of western tec hniques and know-how in manag ing an economy on capitali st princi pl es. A ll of thi s would acce lerate the type of domestic economic restructuring that would more qui ck ly meet EU criteria. The outreach of the changing Czech economy was not confined exclusively to its European nei ghborhood. For instance, in the mid l 990s the Czech Re publi c became a member of UNESCO. In th at capac ity it took a particular interest in the plight of the ravaged nations that had e merged from the old Yugoslavia. This ac ti vity led to membership as well in the Organi zat ion for Economic Cooperati on and Developme nt (OECD ). In fact , the Czechs were the first from the Central E uropean region to ga in membership in th at organi zation. Linkages between the Czech Republic and the Internati onal Monetary Fund (IMF) e nh anced their reputation for reliabi lity. In A ugus t 1994, the natio n was the first post-communist state to pay off its 11 9 Leff. The Czech and Slo vak Republics: Nation Vers us State. p. 263. �SLOVAKIA 133 initial IMF loan . 120 Again, involvement with the larger universe of western capitalist economies outside the immediate geographic region paid dividends in terms of domestic economic change. In sum, the revolution of 1989, combined with the loss of Slovakia in 1993, generated a rapid rate of economic change in the Czech Republic. Conversion to capitalist economic principles was inevitable after the 1989 events, but the process received a number of important stimuli. Interest in joining NATO and the drive for EU membership mandated that the nation meet specific criteria in terms of capitalist development. Investments by western firms outside the nation led to collaborative efforts in which Czech managers could more fully see the capitalist system in action. Involvement in the economic projects of a number of global organizations, primarily located in the West, expanded Czech horizon s in a positive way. All of thi s offered a powerful economic antidote to the much more restricted COMECON framework that was characteristic of the Cold War. Slovakia For a number of reasons , Slovakia looked east for economic links rather than west after the 1993 split. This had also been true after the 1989 revolution. Slovak leaders noted that their country was the only Yisegrad member that bordered all of the other three. Such a perception encouraged them to think about a potential Slovak role as the ideal country to be a bridge between East and West. The collapse of COMECON led the Slovaks to hope for a replacement in the form of special ties with Russia and Ukraine. The look eastward made Slovakia "more sensitive to developments in the CIS." 12 1 At the same time, EU import quotas were having a negative impact on certain Slovak industries such as a steel mill in Kosice, and that created some suspicion about the West. 122 120 Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State, p. 258. 12 1 Price, The International Politics of East Central Europe, p. 170. 122 Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State, p. 261. �134 SLOVAKIA One concrete manifestation of thi s economic orie ntatio n to the East was cultivation of a spec ial link to Ru ss ia. A key motive for this outreach was the pli g ht of the Slovak arms industry . At the time of the 1989 revolution , o ne hundred e leven of Czec hoslo va ki a ' s weapon s manufacturing pl a nts were in the Slovak region . As early as 1990, weapo ns sa les from those pl ants had declined from 1988 leve ls from eight billio n dollars to one billion . This situ ation prompted Meciar to trave l to Moscow in 1991 in order to get defe nse co ntracts to make up some of thi s loss. 123 In fact , the sub sequent recess io n became part of the reason that Slovak leaders sought separation from the Czechs. Further, the Slovak military hoped that Ru ss ia might give Slovakia li ce nses to se ll military ha rdw are to third world countries. 12~ Eventu a ll y, Pres ident Bo ri s Yeltsin of Ru ss ia visited Slovaki a in Aug ust 1993, and one res ult was the sig nin g of a bilatera l state treaty. In add iti o n, the two states s ig ned a fi ve-yea r military cooperation agree me nt. The latter would po te nti a ll y assist Slovakia economically, for it would he lp rev ive its arm s industry . One fea ture of the agree me nt was the provis io n that Ru ss ia would suppl y spare parts for th e Slovak milita ry. 125 Other Slovak goa ls in c lud ed development of a Slovak role in tran sporting Ru ss ian natural gas to Western Europe. In part, Mec iar hoped that the flirtation with Ru ss ia mi g ht increase Slovakia ' s econo mi c importance to th e West a nd attract in vestme nts from that direction as well. 126 Cultivation of ties to Ukrai ne a lso became part of thi s new economi c strategy. Early afte r th e revolution Meciar soug ht to build a new railway from Brati slava to Ukraine by utili zing the for mer Soviet ra il network. 127 By the middl e 1990s Slovak leaders began to think in broader terms. Perh aps Ukra ine could act as well as the gate- 12 .1 See Andrew A. Michta. East Central Europe after the Warsaw Pact: Security Dilemmas in the 1990s (New York: Greenwood Press. 1992 ). p. 107. 12 "' Duleba, ·'The Slovak-Ukrainian-Ru ssian Security Tri angle: · p. 20. 125 Price, The International Politics o f East Central Europe. p. 170. 126 Duleba, ''The Slovak-Ukrainian-Ru ssian Security Triangle." pp. 85-8 6. 127 Price. The International Politics of East Central Europe. p. 170. �SLOVAKIA 135 way to the Ru ss ian market. 128 For many Slovaks, Ukraine was in a sense still Ru ss ia, and thu s economic policies toward s the two we re intertw ined. In spite of the eastward look in economic policy, western organi zation s were not totall y ignored. For example, in June 1993 Sl ovaki a was accepted into the Council of Europe. Then in June 1995 , th e M ec iar government submitted a membership appli cati on to the EU . Reliance on in ves tments from western countries rein forced thi s economic policy dimension. K ey economic in vestors in the 1990s included, in rank order , Germ any, A ustri a, and th e Czech Repu bli c. 129 Despite Slovaki a's approach to the East, the W est was in many ways more helpful. Seri ous di sc uss ions w ith the EU rea ll y began in 1997 w ith th e Lu xembourg Summit. A t th at meeting the EU placed Slovaki a in a second ti er of si x nati ons, and so it looked as if Sl ovaki a wo uld have to wa it longer then its Czech co unterpart, w ho ended up in the first ti er of si x. Contacts w ith the EU acce lerated after the defea t of the M ec iar government in 1998. A multilateral screening process by the EU took pl ace between April 1998 and February 1999, and thi s gave way to more signifi ca nt bil ateral screenin g procedu res between M arch of 1999 and Febru ary of 2000. 130 In the 2000-2002 period Slovaki a worked its way th rough most of the thirty-one chapters of th e EU 's aqui s co mmunautaire. For exa mpl e, di sc uss ions about Chapter Four ce ntered on future poss ibilities that fore igners could control Sl ovak land and corresponding poss ibilities fo r Slovak s to purchase land w ithin th e EU. Fo ll ow in g the 1998 elec ti ons th e chances of mee tin g the goa ls of Ch apter Si x we re enhanced, as Slovaki a moved more firml y in the direc ti on of erec tin g a market economy. Chapter Seven on agri cultu re was a criti ca l one for Slovak ia as it was for most of the other nati ons in the region. Sl ovak s 12 " 129 1.'<, Du leba. ··The Slovak-Ukrainian-Russian Security Triangle." p. 97 . Leff. The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State. p. 262. '·Fazy proces u rozs irova ni a EU ," M inisterstvo za hra11ic11yc h vecf (2002) . hllp ://www. 1111. v.,k Oc tober 2002. �SLOVAKIA 136 soug ht promises of an ad mini stra ti ve structure that wou ld e nsure protect ion of the ir agric ultural sys tem . The politica l tran s iti on from the Mec iar governm e nt to th at of Dzurinda made sa ti sfac tion of Chapte r Thirteen more poss ibl e. Th at c hapter in vo lved worker 's ri g hts, ge nde r equ a lity, racia l justi ce, a nd other vita l categori es. Sl ovak ia rece ived spec ia l in stru c tion s within th e framework of Chapter Fifteen. Th e EU requ es ted th a t Slo va ki a acce lera te pri vati za ti o n of ba nk s as we ll as na tural reso urce mo nopoli es. Further, it was ex pected th at Slovakia wo uld build up small and medium s ized firm s w hil e e nco urag in g add iti o na l fo re ig n in vestme nt. 13 1 Comparison The Czec h Republic and Slo vaki a did move on separate paths in terms of the economi c dime nsion of fo re ign policy for a large part of the first decade after separation . In fac t, so me of their sharpe r differences e merged in the fo ur years after the 1989 revo luti on prior to the 1993 breakup. In the post- 1993 atmosphere the Czechs quickl y latched on to western organi zati ons in order to map out their future. S lovaki a, with its differe nt geographi c position and greater nostalgia for the lost economic links to the form er Soviet Union , c ultivated the Ukra ine and Russ ia as part of a ge nera l orientation to the east. Both di sappointme nt with the East and th e ex pe rien ce of th e 1998 elections brought the Slovak path much c loser to that of the Czechs . One sy mbo l of thi s shift was the progress made by both states in th e 1998-2002 pe riod towa rd me mbership in the EU . By September of 2002 the Czech Re public had c losed twe nty-fi ve of the thirty most s ignifi cant c hapters th at led to EU me mbership. Surprising ly, Slovaki a had closed twe nty-seven. Slo vakia 's progress had bee n very rapid, for the Czechs had ac tu all y closed eightee n of the chapters before Slovakia had . An important resu lt was th at Sl ova kia moved 131 " Ka ndid atske krajiny a ic h ak tu alny stav negoc iac if," Ministe,:~tvo w hranicnj ch vecf (2002). http ://www.111zv.~k Jul y 30. 2002. �SLOVAKIA 137 from the second ti er of six pote nti al EU members to the first ti er of ten between 1997 and the autumn of 2002. T he re port of the EU Commiss ion on October 9, 2002, bas ica ll y treated both countri es as if they were at simil ar leve ls of pre paredness for EU entry in earl y 2004. 132 Both co untries ge nera ll y rece ived pos iti ve reports and were firml y in the group o f ten nati ons to be admitted at the sa me time in 2004. National Security Factors and the Foreign Policy of the Two States The Czech Republic Separati on fro m S lovak ia led to an immed iate series of ste ps aimed at underpinnin g the natio nal sec urity of the new, smaller Czech state. T hroughout th e first decade after the separati on, the sec urity spotli ght shi fted from an emph as is on the Wes tern European Unio n (W EU), to the ca mpaign fo r NATO me mbership , and later to cons iderat ion of th e ro le of th e Co mmon Fore ign and Sec urity Po li cy (CFS P) of th e EU. 133 ln additi o n, Czec hs bega n to in vo lve themse lves more full y in international organi zati ons such as the UN, OSCE , and Y isegrad . T hu s th e nati o na l sec urity age nd a was crowded. Czech disc uss ions abo ut defense po licy in the earl y 1990s centered in part on the W EU , an organi zati on that had e merged in 1948 with the Brusse ls Treaty. On the o ne hand , EU pl anners at the begi nning of the 1990s envisioned the WEU in a ce ntra l ro le in ass istin g Europe to take responsibility fo r its ow n sec urity. On the other hand , others hoped that the WEU could he lp create mo re conse nsus with NATO as well as support for NATO mi ss ions. 134 rn RFE/RL News line. Part II. October 10. 2002. Archived at: h1tp ://www.rferl.org October 2002. rn See Dav id S. Mason , Revolution and Transition in East Central Europe. Second Edi tion (Bou lder, Colorado : Westview Press, 1996), pp. 95-98. " 4 K arel Pezl, " Ceska repub li ka a zapadoevropske unie: bezpecnostnf aspek ty, " Mezinarodnf Politika 18( 1994). pp. 25-26. �138 SLOVAKIA By the late 1990s discu ss ions within the Czech Re public about admission to NATO overshadowed conversations about the fading WEU. Admission to NATO in 1999 brought with it a whole set of new obligations. There was a need to prepare defense legislation that would move the Czech defense structure toward the level of NATO standard s. New military pe rso nnel requirements mandated that the Czech defense sector prepare courses for a ll ranks about the changing role of the military. Training in the use of radar was also upgraded. Further, the Czech Republic would need to build a crisis command center that would facilitate the rapid sharing of information between NATO and the Czech Republic. It would also be necessary for the Czechs to build a sys tem of command and control that paralleled the organizations in other NATO countries. 135 Immediately after expansion to include three new members in 1999, NATO had an opportunity to utilize these new national resources during the Kosovo bombing campaign . One lesson of that campaign was increased awareness of th e asymmetry of capabilities within the alliance. 136 America provided eighty per cent of the bombs dropped on Kosovo in the spring of 1999 as well as ninety per cent of the weapons. U. S. airplanes were the only ones that could operate in all weather. Lowered European defen se budgets in the 1990s resulted in a situation in which all European NATO members contributed only two-thirds of the fundin g that the United States did to defen se. The Czech Republic responded to this imbalance by developing a blueprint for change in 2001. That plan called for a rapid upgrade in mane uverability of units, logistical strength, placement of weaponry and pe rsonnel , ability to resist over a lon g period, and information command and control. Further, the Ministry of Defense drew up a li st of four principles that would guide Czech participation rn Antonin Sverak . ··vnej sf a vnitfnf aspekty zac lenovanf resortu obrany CR do NATO," Mezimfrodnf Vztahy 2( 1999). pp. 13-3 1. 136 See Otto Pick, ·· NATO, evropska obrana a poucenf K osova." CR po vstupu do NATO. Uvahy a problemy (Praha: Ceska Atlanticka Komise UMY. 2000), pp. 2532. �SLOVAKIA In 139 NATO. Th ey inc luded co ntinu ed in vo lvement of the two North American powers in the defe nse of Europe, reliance on NATO as the main guarantor of European security , subordination of the CFSP of the EU within the framework of NATO , a nd guara nteed access to NATO capabi lities for all EU defense and sec urity mi ss ion s. 137 Recog nition of the important Czech role in NATO was evident in the dec ision to hold the conference of Nove mber 2002 in Prague. At that meeting seve n additional nati ons joined the military alliance. Finally, durin g th e war in Iraq in 2003, th e Czechs sent an anti-biolog ical , chemical , and nuclear weapon s unit as well as a fi eld hospital. By the early 1990s, the EU began to outline plans for its own defe nse structure, one that would be independent of the North Atlantic nation s th at had for so lon g domin ated NATO. These plans centered on the creation in 1990 of th e Common Forei gn and Security (CFS P) of the EU . In 1993 the Treaty of Europe called for the addition to the CFSP of pe rm ane nt officials from the EU Council Secretariat as well as of fiftee n diplomats from each Fore ign Ministry. 138 In early 2001 the Czech Foreign Mini ster made a persuasive case for the natural harmony between the broad-rang ing objectives of the CFSP and the specific, national inte rests of the Czec h Republic. 139 For him the current spirit of cooperation in Europe was a needed antidote to the suffer in g of the Czechoslovak people during the twe nti e th century. Throu gh the CFSP, the Czech Re public would ga in both assistance in its multi-pronged process of development and also the opportunity to co ntribute to regional probl e m so lvin g. He did not e nvision participation in European and Atlantic structures as a threat to Czech national inte rests. In particul ar, the Dece mber 2000 Nic e Summit ge nerated orga ni zati o na l c han ges in EU institution s 117 Jaromfr Novotny, "' DCI (Defense Capabiliti es Initiative) a Cesk,\ Republika." Mini sterstvo zahranicnfch vecf (2002). http://www.1111v.u March 2002 . 1" See Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler. The European Un ion as a Global Actor (L ondon: Routledge. 1999). pp. 169- 196. iw -''Jan K avan. ·'Ceska zahrani cnf politika na prahu 2 1. stoletf."' Mez inarodnf Politikil 25(200 I ). pp. 4-5. �140 SLOVAKIA that would continue to break down the artificial barriers that divided Europe during the Cold War. Growin g European military stren gth would s imultaneou sly contribute to an increase in Czech capabi lities. 140 Slovakia In spite of the fact that so much of the defense industry had been located in the Slovak areas during the Co ld War and into the immediate post-1989 revolution period, the leadership ex peri ence of Slovaks on defen se matters had been re lative ly slim . For instance, in I 99 1 Slovak so ldiers constituted 34.7 % of the federa l Czechoslovak army. However, the representation of Slovak manage rs within the Ministry of Defense over several years ranged from on ly 5 to 23 %. 141 In the early years after separation , Slovaks were primarily focused on reestabli shing or maintaining ties with the East. Previously mentioned political ties to Ru ss ia, Ukraine, and Yi segrad see med to offer them a non-western prescription for protecting national sec urity. The Slovaks rea ll y only went through the motion s of taking part in so me western sec urity structures. For example, like th e Czech Republic , Slovakia became an Assoc iate Partner in the WEU and reg ul arl y attended its meetings. Although Associate Members he ld no voting power within the organization , they did have the ri ght to plan and execute military operations. 142 Contac ts between Slovakia and NATO were minimal and bas ically centered on only a few reciprocal visits by key personnel during the three years before Meciar fel l from grace. The most impor- 140 Pavel Teli cka, " Aktualni stav jednani o pristoupeni CR k EU ," M ezimirodnf Politika 25(200 I ). 14 1 Michta, East Central Europe after the Warsaw Pact: Security Dilemmas in the 1990s, p. I 10. 142 See Philip H. Gordon, ·The Western European Union and NATO 's ' Europeanisation ," in Philip H. Gordon, ed., NATO 's Transformation : The Changing Shape of the Atlantic Alliance (L ondon : Row man & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. , I 997), p. 26 1. �SLOVAKIA 141 tant visit by a top NATO figure to Slovakia was the 1996 trip of Secretary-General Javier Solana . The most important Slovak trip was that by President Kovac to Brussels in 1996 to meet with top NATO personnel. After the 1998 elections and the establishment of a new government under Mikulas Dzurinda, the pace of contacts picked up. In early 2002, Slovakia hosted visits by the unified NATO European commander General Dieter Stockman ; by General Joseph Ralston, the commander of NATO forces in Europe; and by Deputy NATO Minister Nicholas Burns. In turn, Slovak leaders who made their way to NATO Headquarters included incoming Prime Minister Dzurinda in 1998 and President Schuster in 1999 and again in 2002. 143 Another key component of the post- I 998 , systematic Slovak move toward s NATO involved the Membership Action Plan (MAP) Process. In early 1999 Slovakia presented a five-point plan that included a strategy for political/economic issues, defense/military question s, resources/capabilities, security challenges, and legal matters. In April of 1999, NATO accepted that MAP and the Slovak government followed suit in June of the same year. The National Program for the process of NATO entry was finalized in April of 2000. 144 Finalization of the MAP process led to many meetings over the next few years. Additional activity after 1998 centered on galvanizing public support for entry into the military alliance. Slovakia held a grants competition to enable NGO' s to raise public awareness of the significance of NATO entry. Support for entry came officially from a total of seventy-five Roma organizations. One result of all thi s activity was a rel atively high level of public support for joining the organization . Between the fall of 200 I and the spring of 2002 , support reflected in public opinion poll s rose from 52.2 % to 60.7 %, although it 143 " M edznfky spoluprace SR a NATO," Ministerstvo zahranicnych vec f (2002). http ://www.rnzv.sk October 2002. 144 " Chrono logicky prehl'ad PREN AME," Ministerstvo zahranicnych vecf(2002). http ://www.mzv.,k October 2002. �142 SLOVAKIA declined a bit a few month s later. 145 All of this attention to visits, organizational matters, and public opinion enabled Slovakia to make up for its lack of attention an d interest in NATO during the midI 990s. In addition , during the latter part of the 1990s, Slovakia took part in severa l important peacekeeping missions under NATO leadership. This involvement demonstrated that the nation would possess the level of commitment required of new NATO members. After completion of the Dayton Accord on Bosnia in 1995, Slovakia se nt some military personnel and equipment as part of SFOR to the area of operations. At the end of 1997, it sent three Army engineers and five army specialists in the field of civil-military cooperation. In the fall of 2002 Slovakia made its first Air Force contribution to a NATO mis sion. The capabilities it sent included a helicopte r unit with two helicopte rs and twenty-one assoc iated personnel. Slovakia promised to keep that contingent in Bosnia for the next six months. Involveme nt in KFOR after the Kosovo bombin g campaign in late 1999 was even more extensive. The initial commitment included forty Army engineers , a nd di spatch of an additional four persons at the command level one year later. A major upgrade occurred in early 2002 with the creation of a five hundred person Czech-Slovak rapid reaction battalion . The Slovak role in that force included twenty per cent of the overall membership, and the vast majority of those were doctors, conductors, mechanics, and logi stics specialists. The vital mi ss ions of that battalion centered on sec uring the Serb-Kosovo border, monitoring a range of activities, assuring stable conditions for the return of refugees, policing the civil serv ice, and protecting the Serb minority. 146 Thi s particular operation would provide man y lessons that would assist Slovakia in making important contributions as a full NATO member. Finally , in the sprin g of 2003 , Slovakia dispat145 " Chronologicky prehl'ad PREN AME," Ministerstvo zahranicnych veer (2002). http ://www.mzY.sk October 2002 . 146 " Ucast' SR v operaciach na podporu mieru pod vedenfm NATO," Ministerstvo zahranicnych vecf(2002). h11p ://www.111zv.sk October 2002. �SLOVAKIA 143 ched military personnel to the Pers ian Gulf durin g the co ntro versial war in Iraq. Comparisons Czech pursuit of national sec urity followed a unidirect io nal path during the first decade a fte r se parati o n from Slovakia. Its leade rs thou ght proacti ve ly in eac h part of the decade about a co ntributin g role in the maj or defe nse opti ons ava il ab le at the time. This mea nt that much of the di sc uss ion foc used on activity within the framework of W EU in the first years after the breakup . Once NATO ad mi ss ion became a real possibility , the Czec hs set the ir eyes on th at orga ni zation . F in all y, as EU membership approac hed early in the new century, more of th e di sc uss ion centered o n the CFSP, a progra m that offered a European sec urity cho ice th at was inde pe nde nt of Ameri can leade rship. In the Slovak case the emp hasis on re-stoking ti es with Ukraine and Ru ss ia at first prec luded seri ous discussion about western sec urity o rga ni zati o nal structures . Once the 1998 e lect ions offered the chance for a new policy, Slovak ia ' s outreach to the West in the defe nse area mainl y took the for m of a se ri ous effort to jo in NA TO. Achi eve me nt of that goa l at the e nd of 2002 e nab led Slovakia to adopt the multi -pron ged , western-oriented strategy utili zed by the Czechs fo r an e ntire decade. Conclusion The re is remark ab le cons iste ncy across the ra nge of va ri abl es that, for a time , divided the two nations. Those vari ables inc lude politi cs, economi cs, and nati o nal sec urity. It is clear th at the political va ri abl es were the driving force be hind the othe r two. Elec ti o n outcomes in the Czech Re public a nd Slovakia were quite different between 1992 and 1998. Those results acco unt primaril y for the very diffe rent foreign polic y path s a lon g which the two sets of fore ign policy elites traveled prior to 1998. Throu ghout the e ntire decade Czech po liti ca l leaders looked to the West fo r th eir future organi zati onal home. Politica l parti es debated the pace and nature of the march to the West but not its in ev i- �SLOVAKIA 144 tability. As a result Czech economic connections with the West were forged throughout the entire period , and the Czec hs ke pt their sights set on EU membership consistently after 1993. The des ire to enter western sec urity structures entailed consideration of the WEU at first, then anticipation as well as achievement of NATO membership, and finall y thorough attention to the CFSP of the EU. S lovak leaders were at first ambiva lent and at times negati ve about connections to the West. In the 1992-98 period they attempted to resusc itate the old eco nomic ties with Ukraine and Ru ss ia. At the same time , they maintained a di stance from the states that were pursuing NATO membership at the earliest poss ible moment. Early hopes that the Visegrad alliance cou ld provide a measure of security for Slovakia di sappeared in 1999 when the other three members of that alli ance joined NATO. The election of 1998 changed Slovakia's forei gn policy path in very defi nite ways. It engaged in much more serious di sc ussions with the EU about progress on the thirty-one chapters of the acquis communautaire. A MAP leadin g to NA TO membership was approved by both that organization and the Slovak government. Although the Slovaks wou ld end up joining NATO three and one half years after the Czechs, both nation s would likely enter the EU at the same time. By the fall of 2002, both countries were not walking exactly on the sa me path , but the ir paths were c learly in view of one another. In conclusion, it is important, while acknowledg in g these differences prior to I 998, not to overstate them. For example, Timothy Frye 147 examined political polarization within all of the post-communi st co untri es. Hi s stud y covered the 1989-98 period , and thu s it included the time frame in which these two countries were moving in differe nt direction s. The political polari zation rating for the Czech Republic was 4.4, and for Slovakia it was 4 .9. Despite the sli ghtly higher rate for Slovaki a, he c lassified both countries as non-pol ari - 14 7 Timothy Frye, " The Price of Polarizati on: Economic Performance in the Post- Communist World," World Politics 54(2002). pp. 308-337 . �SLOVAKIA 145 zed. The po lari zed co untri es inc luded Albania, Be laru s, Bul gari a, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Romani a, Ru ss ia, and Ukraine. Thi s is a signifi cant conclusion, for it he lps ex pl ain how two nati ons that seemed to be mov ing in such di ffe rent directi o ns after 1993 were able to adopt parall el paths by the end of the century. Perh aps the findin gs also revea l the wi sdom of those observers who chose to characteri ze the di vorce in 1993 as a "velvet" one. �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2005, Vol. 38 Description An account of the resource Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 121 Separate Paths: Czech and Slovak Foreign Policies Since 1993 James W. Peterson Introduction Foll owing the 1993 break-up of Czechos lovaki a into the Czech Re public and Slovak ia, the two states needed to attend to chall enging fo re ign po li cy iss ues. Wh ile there were important d iffe rences in the situations of the two states, the broad chall enges th at awaited them were s imil ar. In ge nera l, th eir res ponses to those chall enges put the two co untri es on se parate path s th roug ho ut much of the 1990s. It may be th at the iss ues th at led to the brea k-up o f C zechos lo vakia proved too much to overco me in the earl y years after the split. However, by th e earl y twenty-fi rst ce ntury, the ir separate path s moved closer together and stra ightened out in such a way th at they become parallel. The initi al di ffe rences in the new geopo litica l positi ons of the two states were pro nounced. Whil e th e o ld Czechos lovak state had often served as a long, bridge- like link betwee n East and West, the two new co untri es leaned in di ffe rent direction s. Slovak leaders initi all y and instincti ve ly thought about ties to eastern countri es, as well as to th e Yisegrad organizati o n, in whi ch its future pros pec ts were linked to those o f the Czec h Re public, Po land, and Hun gary. By contra st, the Czec h Re public leadership looked westward s to th e o utstretched, embrac ing arms of we ll -es tabli shed European stru ctures . Th e S lova k path was more uncertain and waverin g th an was th e Czech, for Co ld War organi zati onal structures in the east had broken down. 122 SLOVAKIA In light of their contrasting geopolitical orientations, the two states responded differently to common challenges. First, they confronted common political challenges in different ways. While many of these political pressures were primarily domestic , they all had an impact on future foreign policy choices and potentialities. For examp le, both states sought to establish functioning political party systems that would be capab le of proposing consistent foreign policies. Both were under scrutiny from the outside wor ld on the issue of treatment of important minority groups within the country. Further, in each country cultivation of non-governmental organizations that cou ld extend the roots of foreign policy debates further into the civil society was an important goa l. Different strategies on democratization led the two nations on different political paths regarding foreign policy questions. A second common challenge for the Czechs and Slovaks emerged from the economic sector. Newly elected leaders immediately wrestled with the que stion of converting centrally-planned economies into the principles of the free market. Again , this issue was not exclusively domestic . Success in competing for outside loans was contingent on progress made in privatization of enterprises, in release from fixed price controls, and in the estab li shment of principles of competitiveness . By the middl e of the 1990s, prospects for admission to the European Union (EU) were good. Leadership in the Czech Republic initially put a higher priority both on rapid conversion to capita li sm and on links to the EU than did the Slovaks. Thirdly, location of a dependable national security structure was a common problem in the two nations. The Warsaw Pact, a structure that had ostensibly ass ured the protection of the Czechoslovak state did not long survive the end of the Cold War. Give n Slovakia 's more eastern location , there was a long debate on the question of whe ther it was more desirabl e to preserve what was left of ties to its eastern neighbors or to res pond to overtures from the West. For the Czech Republic it was more obvious that participation in western institution s would be th e next step. The West European Union (WEU), SLOVAKIA 123 North Atl anti c Treaty Orga ni zati on (NATO), and the EU's Common Fo re ig n a nd Sec urit y Po li cy (C FSP) we re co nte nd e rs fo r th a t linkage. It sho uld be no surpri se that the fo re ig n po li c ies of S lovaki a and the Czec h Re publi c di verged in the earl y years afte r separation but the n reco nnec ted. The ir commo n ex peri e nce in the Czec hos lovak state th ro ug h e ig ht decades bo re th e sa me contras tin g fea tures. C ultural simil ariti es drew the m together, but at times bitter po litica l and eco no mi c ex pe ri e nces pu shed the m apart. Once freed fro m the larger state. th ey made quite di ffe re nt cho ices fo r a number of years. However, reg io na l and s itu a ti o na l fo rces eventu a ll y pu shed th e ir path s in the world together aga in . Political Factors and Foreign Policy of the Two Nation-States The Czech Republic C reati o n of an effec ti ve, po li cy-ori e nted po litica l syste m was a chall enge in the earl y 1990 s. In the C zec h Republic there was initi a lly considera bl e co ntinuity in po liti ca l leadership afte r Janu ary 1993 . Vac lav Have l re ma in ed as Pres id e nt of the small e r state, whil e Vac lav Kl a us co ntinu ed o n as Prim e Mini ster. The do min ant po litica l party of Kl aus was still the C ivic Democratic Party (ODS), an organi zati o n th at had bee n bo rn o ut of the C ivic Forum so ac ti ve durin g the eve nts of 1989. In genera l, the Kl aus governm ent ( 1993-97 ) e nd o rsed a ll the steps co nn ec ted w ith th e re turn to E uro pe. Th e brea k-up of th e Czechos lovak state put th e Ukra ine and Ru ss ia furthe r away geographi ca ll y fro m the C zec h Republic . Thu s, the Czechs as earl y as 1994 jo ined the Partn ership fo r Peace (P4 P) and stressed c loser link s to Po land . 105 A n a na lys is of po liti ca l party pos iti o ns durin g e lec ti o ns in the 1990 s is very revea lin g in te rm s o f the iss ues and de bates that 0 ' ' See Thomas S. Szayna. ··The Czech Republic: A Small Contributor or a ' Free Rider·'l_-· in Andrew A . M ichta. ed .. A merica·s New A llies: Poland. Hungary. and the Czech Republic in NA TO (Sea tt le: Un i versity of Washingto n Press. 1999). pp. 11 2- 148 . 124 SLOVAKIA circulated throughout the Czech Republic. Political party leaders debated the merits of the move to the West but finally endorsed it. The 1998 elections are a useful example . The Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) ended up technically in power, with Milos Zeman as Prime Minister, but the party needed to establish a "Gentlemen ' s Agreement" with the ODS in order to function as a government. For the CSSD there was less emphasis in the e lection campaign on hardheaded defen se of national interests and more of a focus on livin g standards and the rights of citizens within the country . This priority on domestic issues led the CSSD to endorse the idea of a referendum prior to entry into either the EU or NATO. There a lso was a humanitarian component to its view of Czech relations with the outside world. Such a focus led the CSSD to upgrade the importance of North-South relations and the related role of the UN. It concluded that Czechs should have a say whenever human ri ghts were jeopardized in any part of the world . While it endorsed EU membership, it thought of it in terms of stimulating the Czech economy. While it favored NATO entry , it expressed grave concerns about the future location of nuclear weapon s on Czech territory. During the I 998 election the ODS continued to give a " realpolitik" cast to its statements on foreign policy. National interests rather than humanitarian concerns were its top priority. NATO membership cou ld bring increased security for the nation as well as trade and technological benefits. The latter would promote development of the free market, a priority for Klaus since the early 1990s. National economic interests were of paramount importance, whi le crusades connected with globalization and human rights were to be carefu ll y examined. Increased Czech exports through membership in international organizations were the desired outcome. Thus, the party said less than did the CSSD about broader, western-based international organizations that could pull the Czech nation beyond the orbit of its national interests. 106 106 See Jakub Durr, Vo/by '98 (Brno: Pavel Saradin , 2000), pp. 84-97. SLOVAKIA 125 Attention to th e views of the main political parties enriches understa ndin gs of the Czech point of view on the major foreign and security policy question s of the day. Czech voters in the 2002 elections confirmed the steady march toward s inclu sion in western institution s. Rejection of the ODS was based in part on the negative reaction to the "euroskeptic" views of Klau s on the matter of integration into the EU . Public support for EU membership was confirmed in the results of the June 2003 Referendum. EU support for Czech membership had been offered at the end of 2002. One of the continuing political challenges for the Czech Republic during the 1990s was the iss ue of minority rights, a matter that affected the country's relation ship with the outside world. The criteria for entering both NATO and the EU required a record of fairness toward key groups within the population . One major conflict was the relationship between Czechs and the Roma. A number of well-publicized incidents have raised questions about Czech attitudes and policies. For example, the erection of a wall by Czechs in Ustf nad Labem in 1999 became a foreign policy incident as well as a temporary setback to pursuit of EU membership. It was clear that the wall was intended to prevent Czechs from having to view the Rom a population as well as their Iife-sty le. Attention to such iss ues was necessary in li ght of integration into western institutions. Development of a robust political culture on foreign policy questions remained another challenge to the new state. One s ignificant new factor was the emerge nce of a visible public opinion on foreign policy questions. In genera l, the public was supportive of the new linkages with western institutions. However, there were some differences that were sign ifi ca nt. Public opinion polls over time demonstrated a stabl e level of support for EU entry . However, before 1999 support for entry into NATO was less impressive. 107 Events of 1999 made some difference. In that year the Czech Republic actually en- ' 07 See Caro l Skalnik Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State (Bou lder. Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), p 263. SLOVAKIA 126 te red NATO , a nd th e Kosovo bo mbin g ca mpa ig n imm edi a te ly occurred . Suc h proximity to th e wars in the Ba lkan s made Czec hs somewhat more like ly to think pos iti ve ly abo ut NATO entry. Th ere were a lso uniqu e e ffo rts to build suppo rt within the po litical culture for certain fore ig n poli cy instituti o ns. One abiding problem was the negative set of Czec h attitudes abo ut the ro le of the military. C zec h resentme nt of the military is unde rstand abl e in li g ht o f the long years of the Sov ie t military prese nce afte r 1968 . Al so , after 1989 th e So vie t military left a catastro phe in many Czec h co mmu niti es. The barracks a nd o the r fac iliti es were in te rribl e co nditi o n, and individu a l Sovi et units had ta ke n anythin g of va lue fro m those locati o ns. One effort to build mo re pos iti ve Czec h attitudes abo ut the military too k pl ace in So uth Bo he mi a. A c iti ze n group ca ll ed S AS was fo rmed in 1997. The a im of the group was to de mon strate th at the Czec h military was a contributin g in strume nt in a de mocra ti c state rather than mere ly an in strume nt o f power. The SAS established link s to sc hoo ls and uni versities with the obj ec tive of c ultiv atin g a mo re pos iti ve attitude abo ut the C zech military. It set up co nfere nces and a lso co nsulted spec ia li sts from o the r nati o ns. In fac t, o ne res ult o f thi s acti vity was the creation of spec ial ti es betwee n the c ity o f Ces ky Kruml o v in the Czec h Republi c and Mi a mi Beac h in the State of Fl o rida, USA . A public e xcha nge of ideas abo ut the rol e of th e military could gene rate more in fo rmed C zech perspec ti ves about the va lue of a strong defense capability to cope w ith new threats. 108 Mo re positive attitudes about th e military wo uld fac ilitate integ rati o n into western o rgani zati o ns such as NATO. Slovakia The creati o n of po liti ca l stability was a greater c ha lle nge for Sl ovaki a than it was fo r the Czec h Republi c . In the C zec h case continuity of leadership from the 1989-93 period to th e post-1989 pe riod ' 08 J. Yondro us. .. Regionaln f dimenze ceskeho atl anti smu.'· M inisterst vo zahranicnfch vecf(2002). h ttp: //wwW .lllZ V.C/. March 2002 . SLOVAKIA 127 contributed to stability. In the Slovak case continuity of leadership undermined rather than supported stability. Vladimfr Meciar had been the chosen Slovak leader in the two years immediately after the 1989 revolution. His new party, Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS), did very well in the 1992 elections, and this enabled him again to become Prime Minister once Slovakia became an independent state in 1993 . He was reluctant to reform in any comprehensive way the centrally planned economy, and thus privatization was very slow. In addition, his government included " many of the old regime ' s cadres, resources, and xenophobic ideologies intact. " 109 Meciar fell from power in the spring of 1994, and a caretaker government under Jozef Moravcfk managed public affairs until the fall elections. Again, the voters returned a coalition government headed by Meciar and the HZDS to power, and this government lasted through the next elections in 1998. In this period Meciar basically put the brakes both on democratization and on the movement of the economic system towards free market principles. The political experiences of the first half decade of independence had major consequences for foreign policy, as Slovakia made very slow progress on the criteria that both NATO and the EU presented to it. During the I 998-2002 period , a coalition led by the Social Democratic and Christian Union (SDKU) took the leading role in government, after the public rebuffed Meciar for a third time. Mikulas Dzurinda as Prime Minister gradually moved Slovakia back onto the path towards western institutions. He emerged again as Prime Minister after the fall 2002 elections , and so the steady movement toward NATO and the EU remained unchanged. Meciar and the HZDS were still prominent and in fact received in 2002 both the largest share of the popular vote ( 19.5 %) and the highest number of seats in the I 50 seat legislature (36). His rhetoric on foreign policy was more muted in this campaign , but numerous warnings emanated from NATO and ,m Rudolf L. Tokes. " From Visegrad to Krakow: Cooperation, Competition , and Coexi stence in Central Europe," Problems of Communism 40( 1991 ), pp. 100-114. SLOVAKIA 128 the EU leade rship a bo ut the imp licati o ns of a new governme nt in whic h the HZ DS pl ayed a ny rol e at a ll. In late Septe mber work began o n a coa liti o n th at would in c lude Dzu rinda's S DK U, the C hristi a n De mocrati c Uni o n (KDH), A lli a nce fo r ew C itize ns (A 0), and the Hungari an Coa liti o n (SMK). In earl y October thi s fo ur-party coa litio n fo rged an ag reeme nt abo ut executi ve pos iti o ns, and the new governme nt was in pl ace. A ll of these arra nge me nts were a imed to keep Sl ova ki a o n a stead y trac k in es tabli shin g its new, wes te rn o rgani zatio na l connectio ns in fore ig n poli cy. 11 0 Whil e the Czechs had been press ured by the o utside world o n the matte r of the Ro ma, Slovaks were c riti c ized fo r the ir treatment of the Hun garian mi no rity. Aga in , the Mec iar periods were suspec t in th is regard . Otto Ulc1 11 ex pl a in s thi s situ ati o n by notin g th at afte r 1968 Slova ks were not pro min e nt in the di ss ide nt moveme nt th at e mphasized hum a n ri ghts. Part of the pro bl e m was a lso the lack of ex perie nce of S lova ks in the Czechoslovak dipl o mati c corps. The leaders may have not understood full y the way in whi ch Slova ki a's domesti c record o n mino rity re lati o ns, the e nviro nme nt , a nd autho ritari ani sm in ge ne ra l influe nced fo re ign percepti o ns as we ll as fo re ig n po li cy objecti ve . 11 2 In another respect, the Slovak governme nt d urin g th at peri od was quite ce ntra li st o n the matter o f th e ri g hts of reg io ns within the country. The re is so me iro ny in thi s, fo r th e HZDS had been very ant i-federa li st (a nti -ce ntra list) after its e merge nce in April 199 1. 11 3 In that ea rli er time, the ta rget had bee n the a ll eged centrali st reg ime in Prag ue, s ince the Czec hos lovak state was still intact. Ev ide nce of Mec iar 's centra li st po li c ies li es primaril y in hi s po licy towards the 110 RFE/RL ewsline. Part II. September 24. 2002; October 8, 2002. Archived at http://\\\\w.11°erl.org September. October. 2002. 111 Otto Ulc. " The Bumpy Road ofCzechoslovaki a·s Velvet Revolution ," Problems of Communism 41 ( 1992). pp. 19-3 3 111 See Adrian Hyde Price. The International Politics of East Central Europe (New York: M anchester Uni versity Press, 1996), p. 28. 11 3 Ulc,"The Bumpy Road of Czechoslovakia ' s Ve l vet Revoluti on ." p. 29. SLOVAKIA 129 eastern part of Slovakia. In the mid- I 990s that region became interested in participating in a large Carpathian Euroregion. Other players in the Euroregion wo uld include Romania , Hungary , Poland , and Ukraine. However, the Slovak Ministry of the Interior was quite critical of that orientation. In 1995 that Ministry abo li shed the Slovak Carpathian Regional Association that had co nsisted of a number of regional and local governments in eastern Slovakia. As a result, in 1996 the Slovak representatives in the Euroregion resigned and Slovakia cancel led its participation. Meciar took these actions because of a double suspicion. First, he was suspic ious that the eastern Slovak metropolis of Kosice would lead eastern Slovakia to develop its own independent foreign policy . Second, he feared that Hungary would use the Euroregion to exp loit the anger of the Slovak Hungarian minority . 114 Such att itudes and policies of the top leadership would not mesh well with the EU and its priority on the rights of regions within countries. However, after the 1998 elections the Slovak leadership reflected more sensitivity toward the political culture. For exam ple, Slovaks were aware after 1998 of the need to incorporate domestic non-governmenta l gro ups (NGO 's) into the increasingly public discussion of foreign policy . Thi s was particularly the case in the efforts to ga in admiss ion to NATO. Younger persons were a special target of efforts at political soc ialization . Teachers in middle schools organized essay contests about the sig nific ance of NATO . Organized debates about NATO themes took pl ace in both middle and upper schools. Further, the government set up twe lve information centers that were aimed at youn ger persons. According to one observer, regional projects abo ut NATO by 2002 had reached 120,000 students. Similar discuss ions were aimed at women's groups . For example, profess ional women in Bratislava as we ll as the Union of Women of S lovakia engaged in discussions on the mea nin g and significance of NATO . The mass "" See A lexander Duleba, 'The Slovak-Ukraini an-Russian Security Tri angle." in M argarita M. Balmaceda, ed ., On the Edge: Ukrainian-Central European-Russian Security Triangle (Budapest: Central European Univers ity, 2000), pp. I 06- I 09. SLOVAKIA 130 medi a also pl ayed a ro le in thi s process. T wo major national telev ision projects were aimed at promoting di sc uss ion of NATO the mes. Furthe r, additi o na l in fo rm ati on proj ec ts we re bea med at the populati on through thi rty loca l te lev ision stati ons. The re was even an effort to pull ex pe rts and speciali sts into the di scuss ion. 115 The hope was th at these gro up s wo uld communicate pos iti ve attitudes abo ut NATO to the ir peers a nd e ve n in the ir publicat ions. S imil arl y, after the Nice EU Summit at the e nd of 2000 , Slo vaki a establi shed the Nation al Conve nti on. Its mi ssion e ntail ed stimul ati on of a nati o nal di scuss ion on the E U and Slovak nati o nal inte rests. The di scuss ion was to be in c lu s ive in which po liti ca l party me mbe rs, acade mi cs, c hurc hes , interest gro ups, non- governme nta l orga ni zati o ns, trade union s, muni cipalities, and reg ions all pl ayed a ro le. 11 6 Comparison Both co untries confronted major po litica l chall e nges th at affected fore ign po licy prospects. In both cases there was outside scrutin y and suspi c io n througho ut the first decade abo ut the way in whi c h their governme nts treated key minority gro ups. C riteri a fo r admi ssion to wes te rn orga ni zati ons required prog ress in thi s area. Both countri es a lso ex pe ri e nced maj or c ha nges in governme nt. In the Czech case such cha nges d id not affect very much the steady process of integration w ith the West. Slovak governme ntal changes had more of an impact. In addition , the continuin g presence of Vl adimfr Meciar and the HZDS had the net effect of postponin g Slovaki a's integrati on with western institution s until the late 1990s. Finally , cultivation of positive attitudes within the po liti ca l c ulture became a priority once the leadership made the dec ision to look in a westward direction . In th e Czec h case thi s spotli ght on po liti ca l culture was a 115 • Organ izacie a instituc ie, ktorym bola udelena Strieborn a plaketa M inisterstva zahranicnych vecf Slovenskej republ iky di\a 20. juna 2002," M inisterst vo zah ranicnych vecf(2002). http://www.mzv .sk Oc tober 2002. 116 " Narodny ko nvent o Evropskej buducnosti Slovenska," Ministerst vo zahranicnych vecf (2002). http://www.mzv.sk October 2002. SLOVAKIA 131 constant theme throughout the decade, but in the Slovak case it was only characteristic of the second half of the decade. Economic Factors and Foreign Policy of the Two Nation-States The Czech Republic In the years following th e 1989 revo lution , the Klau s government made eco nomi c restructurin g in Czechoslovakia a major priority. Privati zation and the use of vouchers placed formerly state-controlled industries in private hand s. Job sec urity yie lded to the greater uncertainty connected with the free market. It became more like ly that industries would ri se and fa ll on the ir own merits, while artifi cial control of prices was no longer the norm. 11 7 Thus, major economic changes had deve loped their own momentum at the time the Czechs separated from Slovakia, and they bore the potenti al to have a major impact on foreign policy. For exampl e, ga inin g admission to the EU became a top priority as a result of the new geographic and eco nomi c developments. Very soon Brusse ls presented to the eastern countries its Iist of thirty-one chapters in the "acqui s communautaire" process. Czech leaders began to meet regularl y with EU bureaucrats in order to demonstrate progress toward s meeting the criteria of eac h of the chapters. Usually twice a year the EU represe ntatives came to the Czech Republic to inspect progress made and to iss ue judgments about the relative rank of the nation on the li st of EU prospects from that region. By the end of the 1990s, the Czech Republic ranked near the top of the prospec ti ve li st of new members, and membership appeared like ly by 2004. In fac t, in October of 2002 the EU Commission announced that the Czech Republic would be one of the ten nation s admitted in 2004. 11 8 Czech involvement in the EU 's PHARE and ERBD investment projects was of particular significance. Invo lve ment in the wider EU market would 117 See Bernard Wheaton and Zdenek Ka van , The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslo- vakia 1988- /99 1 (Boulder. Colorado: Westvi ew Press, 1992) , pp. 139-143. 118 Sueddeutsche Zeitung, October 9, 2002. Arch i ved at: http://sueddeutsche .de October 2002. 132 SLOVAKIA multipl y the steps taken by the Czech governme nt in co nvers ion to capitali sm and th ereby open up additional new in vestment opportunities in othe r nations. At the same time , eve ntua l EU membership woul d lead to add ition al western investments, and important ones had come about already in the 1990s. For example , in 1994 th e German automobil e company Volkswagen bought majo rity co ntrol of the o ld Czech mega-compan y Skoda . Whil e the agree ment did guarantee the Germans majority control , it also provided the Czechs with a veto over future policy dec ision s. 11 9 Similarly, Air France took over the Prague Airport Ruzyne and made it into a modern facility. Early in the twenty-first century the A merica n company Motorola began construction of a fac tory in Moravia in the area of the Beskydy Mountains. Much news accompanied the buy -out of severa l well known breweries, including Pil sner Urque ll , by South Africa n enterprises. Certainly , one by- product of this western indu stri a l and financial in vo lvement would be the rapid infusion of western tec hniques and know-how in manag ing an economy on capitali st princi pl es. A ll of thi s would acce lerate the type of domestic economic restructuring that would more qui ck ly meet EU criteria. The outreach of the changing Czech economy was not confined exclusively to its European nei ghborhood. For instance, in the mid l 990s the Czech Re publi c became a member of UNESCO. In th at capac ity it took a particular interest in the plight of the ravaged nations that had e merged from the old Yugoslavia. This ac ti vity led to membership as well in the Organi zat ion for Economic Cooperati on and Developme nt (OECD ). In fact , the Czechs were the first from the Central E uropean region to ga in membership in th at organi zation. Linkages between the Czech Republic and the Internati onal Monetary Fund (IMF) e nh anced their reputation for reliabi lity. In A ugus t 1994, the natio n was the first post-communist state to pay off its 11 9 Leff. The Czech and Slo vak Republics: Nation Vers us State. p. 263. SLOVAKIA 133 initial IMF loan . 120 Again, involvement with the larger universe of western capitalist economies outside the immediate geographic region paid dividends in terms of domestic economic change. In sum, the revolution of 1989, combined with the loss of Slovakia in 1993, generated a rapid rate of economic change in the Czech Republic. Conversion to capitalist economic principles was inevitable after the 1989 events, but the process received a number of important stimuli. Interest in joining NATO and the drive for EU membership mandated that the nation meet specific criteria in terms of capitalist development. Investments by western firms outside the nation led to collaborative efforts in which Czech managers could more fully see the capitalist system in action. Involvement in the economic projects of a number of global organizations, primarily located in the West, expanded Czech horizon s in a positive way. All of thi s offered a powerful economic antidote to the much more restricted COMECON framework that was characteristic of the Cold War. Slovakia For a number of reasons , Slovakia looked east for economic links rather than west after the 1993 split. This had also been true after the 1989 revolution. Slovak leaders noted that their country was the only Yisegrad member that bordered all of the other three. Such a perception encouraged them to think about a potential Slovak role as the ideal country to be a bridge between East and West. The collapse of COMECON led the Slovaks to hope for a replacement in the form of special ties with Russia and Ukraine. The look eastward made Slovakia "more sensitive to developments in the CIS." 12 1 At the same time, EU import quotas were having a negative impact on certain Slovak industries such as a steel mill in Kosice, and that created some suspicion about the West. 122 120 Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State, p. 258. 12 1 Price, The International Politics of East Central Europe, p. 170. 122 Leff, The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State, p. 261. 134 SLOVAKIA One concrete manifestation of thi s economic orie ntatio n to the East was cultivation of a spec ial link to Ru ss ia. A key motive for this outreach was the pli g ht of the Slovak arms industry . At the time of the 1989 revolution , o ne hundred e leven of Czec hoslo va ki a ' s weapon s manufacturing pl a nts were in the Slovak region . As early as 1990, weapo ns sa les from those pl ants had declined from 1988 leve ls from eight billio n dollars to one billion . This situ ation prompted Meciar to trave l to Moscow in 1991 in order to get defe nse co ntracts to make up some of thi s loss. 123 In fact , the sub sequent recess io n became part of the reason that Slovak leaders sought separation from the Czechs. Further, the Slovak military hoped that Ru ss ia might give Slovakia li ce nses to se ll military ha rdw are to third world countries. 12~ Eventu a ll y, Pres ident Bo ri s Yeltsin of Ru ss ia visited Slovaki a in Aug ust 1993, and one res ult was the sig nin g of a bilatera l state treaty. In add iti o n, the two states s ig ned a fi ve-yea r military cooperation agree me nt. The latter would po te nti a ll y assist Slovakia economically, for it would he lp rev ive its arm s industry . One fea ture of the agree me nt was the provis io n that Ru ss ia would suppl y spare parts for th e Slovak milita ry. 125 Other Slovak goa ls in c lud ed development of a Slovak role in tran sporting Ru ss ian natural gas to Western Europe. In part, Mec iar hoped that the flirtation with Ru ss ia mi g ht increase Slovakia ' s econo mi c importance to th e West a nd attract in vestme nts from that direction as well. 126 Cultivation of ties to Ukrai ne a lso became part of thi s new economi c strategy. Early afte r th e revolution Meciar soug ht to build a new railway from Brati slava to Ukraine by utili zing the for mer Soviet ra il network. 127 By the middl e 1990s Slovak leaders began to think in broader terms. Perh aps Ukra ine could act as well as the gate- 12 .1 See Andrew A. Michta. East Central Europe after the Warsaw Pact: Security Dilemmas in the 1990s (New York: Greenwood Press. 1992 ). p. 107. 12 "' Duleba, ·'The Slovak-Ukrainian-Ru ssian Security Tri angle: · p. 20. 125 Price, The International Politics o f East Central Europe. p. 170. 126 Duleba, ''The Slovak-Ukrainian-Ru ssian Security Triangle." pp. 85-8 6. 127 Price. The International Politics of East Central Europe. p. 170. SLOVAKIA 135 way to the Ru ss ian market. 128 For many Slovaks, Ukraine was in a sense still Ru ss ia, and thu s economic policies toward s the two we re intertw ined. In spite of the eastward look in economic policy, western organi zation s were not totall y ignored. For example, in June 1993 Sl ovaki a was accepted into the Council of Europe. Then in June 1995 , th e M ec iar government submitted a membership appli cati on to the EU . Reliance on in ves tments from western countries rein forced thi s economic policy dimension. K ey economic in vestors in the 1990s included, in rank order , Germ any, A ustri a, and th e Czech Repu bli c. 129 Despite Slovaki a's approach to the East, the W est was in many ways more helpful. Seri ous di sc uss ions w ith the EU rea ll y began in 1997 w ith th e Lu xembourg Summit. A t th at meeting the EU placed Slovaki a in a second ti er of si x nati ons, and so it looked as if Sl ovaki a wo uld have to wa it longer then its Czech co unterpart, w ho ended up in the first ti er of si x. Contacts w ith the EU acce lerated after the defea t of the M ec iar government in 1998. A multilateral screening process by the EU took pl ace between April 1998 and February 1999, and thi s gave way to more signifi ca nt bil ateral screenin g procedu res between M arch of 1999 and Febru ary of 2000. 130 In the 2000-2002 period Slovaki a worked its way th rough most of the thirty-one chapters of th e EU 's aqui s co mmunautaire. For exa mpl e, di sc uss ions about Chapter Four ce ntered on future poss ibilities that fore igners could control Sl ovak land and corresponding poss ibilities fo r Slovak s to purchase land w ithin th e EU. Fo ll ow in g the 1998 elec ti ons th e chances of mee tin g the goa ls of Ch apter Si x we re enhanced, as Slovaki a moved more firml y in the direc ti on of erec tin g a market economy. Chapter Seven on agri cultu re was a criti ca l one for Slovak ia as it was for most of the other nati ons in the region. Sl ovak s 12 " 129 1.'<, Du leba. ··The Slovak-Ukrainian-Russian Security Triangle." p. 97 . Leff. The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation Versus State. p. 262. '·Fazy proces u rozs irova ni a EU ," M inisterstvo za hra11ic11yc h vecf (2002) . hllp ://www. 1111. v.,k Oc tober 2002. SLOVAKIA 136 soug ht promises of an ad mini stra ti ve structure that wou ld e nsure protect ion of the ir agric ultural sys tem . The politica l tran s iti on from the Mec iar governm e nt to th at of Dzurinda made sa ti sfac tion of Chapte r Thirteen more poss ibl e. Th at c hapter in vo lved worker 's ri g hts, ge nde r equ a lity, racia l justi ce, a nd other vita l categori es. Sl ovak ia rece ived spec ia l in stru c tion s within th e framework of Chapter Fifteen. Th e EU requ es ted th a t Slo va ki a acce lera te pri vati za ti o n of ba nk s as we ll as na tural reso urce mo nopoli es. Further, it was ex pected th at Slovakia wo uld build up small and medium s ized firm s w hil e e nco urag in g add iti o na l fo re ig n in vestme nt. 13 1 Comparison The Czec h Republic and Slo vaki a did move on separate paths in terms of the economi c dime nsion of fo re ign policy for a large part of the first decade after separation . In fac t, so me of their sharpe r differences e merged in the fo ur years after the 1989 revo luti on prior to the 1993 breakup. In the post- 1993 atmosphere the Czechs quickl y latched on to western organi zati ons in order to map out their future. S lovaki a, with its differe nt geographi c position and greater nostalgia for the lost economic links to the form er Soviet Union , c ultivated the Ukra ine and Russ ia as part of a ge nera l orientation to the east. Both di sappointme nt with the East and th e ex pe rien ce of th e 1998 elections brought the Slovak path much c loser to that of the Czechs . One sy mbo l of thi s shift was the progress made by both states in th e 1998-2002 pe riod towa rd me mbership in the EU . By September of 2002 the Czech Re public had c losed twe nty-fi ve of the thirty most s ignifi cant c hapters th at led to EU me mbership. Surprising ly, Slovaki a had closed twe nty-seven. Slo vakia 's progress had bee n very rapid, for the Czechs had ac tu all y closed eightee n of the chapters before Slovakia had . An important resu lt was th at Sl ova kia moved 131 " Ka ndid atske krajiny a ic h ak tu alny stav negoc iac if," Ministe,:~tvo w hranicnj ch vecf (2002). http ://www.111zv.~k Jul y 30. 2002. SLOVAKIA 137 from the second ti er of six pote nti al EU members to the first ti er of ten between 1997 and the autumn of 2002. T he re port of the EU Commiss ion on October 9, 2002, bas ica ll y treated both countri es as if they were at simil ar leve ls of pre paredness for EU entry in earl y 2004. 132 Both co untries ge nera ll y rece ived pos iti ve reports and were firml y in the group o f ten nati ons to be admitted at the sa me time in 2004. National Security Factors and the Foreign Policy of the Two States The Czech Republic Separati on fro m S lovak ia led to an immed iate series of ste ps aimed at underpinnin g the natio nal sec urity of the new, smaller Czech state. T hroughout th e first decade after the separati on, the sec urity spotli ght shi fted from an emph as is on the Wes tern European Unio n (W EU), to the ca mpaign fo r NATO me mbership , and later to cons iderat ion of th e ro le of th e Co mmon Fore ign and Sec urity Po li cy (CFS P) of th e EU. 133 ln additi o n, Czec hs bega n to in vo lve themse lves more full y in international organi zati ons such as the UN, OSCE , and Y isegrad . T hu s th e nati o na l sec urity age nd a was crowded. Czech disc uss ions abo ut defense po licy in the earl y 1990s centered in part on the W EU , an organi zati on that had e merged in 1948 with the Brusse ls Treaty. On the o ne hand , EU pl anners at the begi nning of the 1990s envisioned the WEU in a ce ntra l ro le in ass istin g Europe to take responsibility fo r its ow n sec urity. On the other hand , others hoped that the WEU could he lp create mo re conse nsus with NATO as well as support for NATO mi ss ions. 134 rn RFE/RL News line. Part II. October 10. 2002. Archived at: h1tp ://www.rferl.org October 2002. rn See Dav id S. Mason , Revolution and Transition in East Central Europe. Second Edi tion (Bou lder, Colorado : Westview Press, 1996), pp. 95-98. " 4 K arel Pezl, " Ceska repub li ka a zapadoevropske unie: bezpecnostnf aspek ty, " Mezinarodnf Politika 18( 1994). pp. 25-26. 138 SLOVAKIA By the late 1990s discu ss ions within the Czech Re public about admission to NATO overshadowed conversations about the fading WEU. Admission to NATO in 1999 brought with it a whole set of new obligations. There was a need to prepare defense legislation that would move the Czech defense structure toward the level of NATO standard s. New military pe rso nnel requirements mandated that the Czech defense sector prepare courses for a ll ranks about the changing role of the military. Training in the use of radar was also upgraded. Further, the Czech Republic would need to build a crisis command center that would facilitate the rapid sharing of information between NATO and the Czech Republic. It would also be necessary for the Czechs to build a sys tem of command and control that paralleled the organizations in other NATO countries. 135 Immediately after expansion to include three new members in 1999, NATO had an opportunity to utilize these new national resources during the Kosovo bombing campaign . One lesson of that campaign was increased awareness of th e asymmetry of capabilities within the alliance. 136 America provided eighty per cent of the bombs dropped on Kosovo in the spring of 1999 as well as ninety per cent of the weapons. U. S. airplanes were the only ones that could operate in all weather. Lowered European defen se budgets in the 1990s resulted in a situation in which all European NATO members contributed only two-thirds of the fundin g that the United States did to defen se. The Czech Republic responded to this imbalance by developing a blueprint for change in 2001. That plan called for a rapid upgrade in mane uverability of units, logistical strength, placement of weaponry and pe rsonnel , ability to resist over a lon g period, and information command and control. Further, the Ministry of Defense drew up a li st of four principles that would guide Czech participation rn Antonin Sverak . ··vnej sf a vnitfnf aspekty zac lenovanf resortu obrany CR do NATO," Mezimfrodnf Vztahy 2( 1999). pp. 13-3 1. 136 See Otto Pick, ·· NATO, evropska obrana a poucenf K osova." CR po vstupu do NATO. Uvahy a problemy (Praha: Ceska Atlanticka Komise UMY. 2000), pp. 2532. SLOVAKIA In 139 NATO. Th ey inc luded co ntinu ed in vo lvement of the two North American powers in the defe nse of Europe, reliance on NATO as the main guarantor of European security , subordination of the CFSP of the EU within the framework of NATO , a nd guara nteed access to NATO capabi lities for all EU defense and sec urity mi ss ion s. 137 Recog nition of the important Czech role in NATO was evident in the dec ision to hold the conference of Nove mber 2002 in Prague. At that meeting seve n additional nati ons joined the military alliance. Finally, durin g th e war in Iraq in 2003, th e Czechs sent an anti-biolog ical , chemical , and nuclear weapon s unit as well as a fi eld hospital. By the early 1990s, the EU began to outline plans for its own defe nse structure, one that would be independent of the North Atlantic nation s th at had for so lon g domin ated NATO. These plans centered on the creation in 1990 of th e Common Forei gn and Security (CFS P) of the EU . In 1993 the Treaty of Europe called for the addition to the CFSP of pe rm ane nt officials from the EU Council Secretariat as well as of fiftee n diplomats from each Fore ign Ministry. 138 In early 2001 the Czech Foreign Mini ster made a persuasive case for the natural harmony between the broad-rang ing objectives of the CFSP and the specific, national inte rests of the Czec h Republic. 139 For him the current spirit of cooperation in Europe was a needed antidote to the suffer in g of the Czechoslovak people during the twe nti e th century. Throu gh the CFSP, the Czech Re public would ga in both assistance in its multi-pronged process of development and also the opportunity to co ntribute to regional probl e m so lvin g. He did not e nvision participation in European and Atlantic structures as a threat to Czech national inte rests. In particul ar, the Dece mber 2000 Nic e Summit ge nerated orga ni zati o na l c han ges in EU institution s 117 Jaromfr Novotny, "' DCI (Defense Capabiliti es Initiative) a Cesk,\ Republika." Mini sterstvo zahranicnfch vecf (2002). http://www.1111v.u March 2002 . 1" See Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler. The European Un ion as a Global Actor (L ondon: Routledge. 1999). pp. 169- 196. iw -''Jan K avan. ·'Ceska zahrani cnf politika na prahu 2 1. stoletf."' Mez inarodnf Politikil 25(200 I ). pp. 4-5. 140 SLOVAKIA that would continue to break down the artificial barriers that divided Europe during the Cold War. Growin g European military stren gth would s imultaneou sly contribute to an increase in Czech capabi lities. 140 Slovakia In spite of the fact that so much of the defense industry had been located in the Slovak areas during the Co ld War and into the immediate post-1989 revolution period, the leadership ex peri ence of Slovaks on defen se matters had been re lative ly slim . For instance, in I 99 1 Slovak so ldiers constituted 34.7 % of the federa l Czechoslovak army. However, the representation of Slovak manage rs within the Ministry of Defense over several years ranged from on ly 5 to 23 %. 141 In the early years after separation , Slovaks were primarily focused on reestabli shing or maintaining ties with the East. Previously mentioned political ties to Ru ss ia, Ukraine, and Yi segrad see med to offer them a non-western prescription for protecting national sec urity. The Slovaks rea ll y only went through the motion s of taking part in so me western sec urity structures. For example, like th e Czech Republic , Slovakia became an Assoc iate Partner in the WEU and reg ul arl y attended its meetings. Although Associate Members he ld no voting power within the organization , they did have the ri ght to plan and execute military operations. 142 Contac ts between Slovakia and NATO were minimal and bas ically centered on only a few reciprocal visits by key personnel during the three years before Meciar fel l from grace. The most impor- 140 Pavel Teli cka, " Aktualni stav jednani o pristoupeni CR k EU ," M ezimirodnf Politika 25(200 I ). 14 1 Michta, East Central Europe after the Warsaw Pact: Security Dilemmas in the 1990s, p. I 10. 142 See Philip H. Gordon, ·The Western European Union and NATO 's ' Europeanisation ," in Philip H. Gordon, ed., NATO 's Transformation : The Changing Shape of the Atlantic Alliance (L ondon : Row man & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. , I 997), p. 26 1. SLOVAKIA 141 tant visit by a top NATO figure to Slovakia was the 1996 trip of Secretary-General Javier Solana . The most important Slovak trip was that by President Kovac to Brussels in 1996 to meet with top NATO personnel. After the 1998 elections and the establishment of a new government under Mikulas Dzurinda, the pace of contacts picked up. In early 2002, Slovakia hosted visits by the unified NATO European commander General Dieter Stockman ; by General Joseph Ralston, the commander of NATO forces in Europe; and by Deputy NATO Minister Nicholas Burns. In turn, Slovak leaders who made their way to NATO Headquarters included incoming Prime Minister Dzurinda in 1998 and President Schuster in 1999 and again in 2002. 143 Another key component of the post- I 998 , systematic Slovak move toward s NATO involved the Membership Action Plan (MAP) Process. In early 1999 Slovakia presented a five-point plan that included a strategy for political/economic issues, defense/military question s, resources/capabilities, security challenges, and legal matters. In April of 1999, NATO accepted that MAP and the Slovak government followed suit in June of the same year. The National Program for the process of NATO entry was finalized in April of 2000. 144 Finalization of the MAP process led to many meetings over the next few years. Additional activity after 1998 centered on galvanizing public support for entry into the military alliance. Slovakia held a grants competition to enable NGO' s to raise public awareness of the significance of NATO entry. Support for entry came officially from a total of seventy-five Roma organizations. One result of all thi s activity was a rel atively high level of public support for joining the organization . Between the fall of 200 I and the spring of 2002 , support reflected in public opinion poll s rose from 52.2 % to 60.7 %, although it 143 " M edznfky spoluprace SR a NATO," Ministerstvo zahranicnych vec f (2002). http ://www.rnzv.sk October 2002. 144 " Chrono logicky prehl'ad PREN AME," Ministerstvo zahranicnych vecf(2002). http ://www.mzv.,k October 2002. 142 SLOVAKIA declined a bit a few month s later. 145 All of this attention to visits, organizational matters, and public opinion enabled Slovakia to make up for its lack of attention an d interest in NATO during the midI 990s. In addition , during the latter part of the 1990s, Slovakia took part in severa l important peacekeeping missions under NATO leadership. This involvement demonstrated that the nation would possess the level of commitment required of new NATO members. After completion of the Dayton Accord on Bosnia in 1995, Slovakia se nt some military personnel and equipment as part of SFOR to the area of operations. At the end of 1997, it sent three Army engineers and five army specialists in the field of civil-military cooperation. In the fall of 2002 Slovakia made its first Air Force contribution to a NATO mis sion. The capabilities it sent included a helicopte r unit with two helicopte rs and twenty-one assoc iated personnel. Slovakia promised to keep that contingent in Bosnia for the next six months. Involveme nt in KFOR after the Kosovo bombin g campaign in late 1999 was even more extensive. The initial commitment included forty Army engineers , a nd di spatch of an additional four persons at the command level one year later. A major upgrade occurred in early 2002 with the creation of a five hundred person Czech-Slovak rapid reaction battalion . The Slovak role in that force included twenty per cent of the overall membership, and the vast majority of those were doctors, conductors, mechanics, and logi stics specialists. The vital mi ss ions of that battalion centered on sec uring the Serb-Kosovo border, monitoring a range of activities, assuring stable conditions for the return of refugees, policing the civil serv ice, and protecting the Serb minority. 146 Thi s particular operation would provide man y lessons that would assist Slovakia in making important contributions as a full NATO member. Finally , in the sprin g of 2003 , Slovakia dispat145 " Chronologicky prehl'ad PREN AME," Ministerstvo zahranicnych veer (2002). http ://www.mzY.sk October 2002 . 146 " Ucast' SR v operaciach na podporu mieru pod vedenfm NATO," Ministerstvo zahranicnych vecf(2002). h11p ://www.111zv.sk October 2002. SLOVAKIA 143 ched military personnel to the Pers ian Gulf durin g the co ntro versial war in Iraq. Comparisons Czech pursuit of national sec urity followed a unidirect io nal path during the first decade a fte r se parati o n from Slovakia. Its leade rs thou ght proacti ve ly in eac h part of the decade about a co ntributin g role in the maj or defe nse opti ons ava il ab le at the time. This mea nt that much of the di sc uss ion foc used on activity within the framework of W EU in the first years after the breakup . Once NATO ad mi ss ion became a real possibility , the Czec hs set the ir eyes on th at orga ni zation . F in all y, as EU membership approac hed early in the new century, more of th e di sc uss ion centered o n the CFSP, a progra m that offered a European sec urity cho ice th at was inde pe nde nt of Ameri can leade rship. In the Slovak case the emp hasis on re-stoking ti es with Ukraine and Ru ss ia at first prec luded seri ous discussion about western sec urity o rga ni zati o nal structures . Once the 1998 e lect ions offered the chance for a new policy, Slovak ia ' s outreach to the West in the defe nse area mainl y took the for m of a se ri ous effort to jo in NA TO. Achi eve me nt of that goa l at the e nd of 2002 e nab led Slovakia to adopt the multi -pron ged , western-oriented strategy utili zed by the Czechs fo r an e ntire decade. Conclusion The re is remark ab le cons iste ncy across the ra nge of va ri abl es that, for a time , divided the two nations. Those vari ables inc lude politi cs, economi cs, and nati o nal sec urity. It is clear th at the political va ri abl es were the driving force be hind the othe r two. Elec ti o n outcomes in the Czech Re public a nd Slovakia were quite different between 1992 and 1998. Those results acco unt primaril y for the very diffe rent foreign polic y path s a lon g which the two sets of fore ign policy elites traveled prior to 1998. Throu ghout the e ntire decade Czech po liti ca l leaders looked to the West fo r th eir future organi zati onal home. Politica l parti es debated the pace and nature of the march to the West but not its in ev i- SLOVAKIA 144 tability. As a result Czech economic connections with the West were forged throughout the entire period , and the Czec hs ke pt their sights set on EU membership consistently after 1993. The des ire to enter western sec urity structures entailed consideration of the WEU at first, then anticipation as well as achievement of NATO membership, and finall y thorough attention to the CFSP of the EU. S lovak leaders were at first ambiva lent and at times negati ve about connections to the West. In the 1992-98 period they attempted to resusc itate the old eco nomic ties with Ukraine and Ru ss ia. At the same time , they maintained a di stance from the states that were pursuing NATO membership at the earliest poss ible moment. Early hopes that the Visegrad alliance cou ld provide a measure of security for Slovakia di sappeared in 1999 when the other three members of that alli ance joined NATO. The election of 1998 changed Slovakia's forei gn policy path in very defi nite ways. It engaged in much more serious di sc ussions with the EU about progress on the thirty-one chapters of the acquis communautaire. A MAP leadin g to NA TO membership was approved by both that organization and the Slovak government. Although the Slovaks wou ld end up joining NATO three and one half years after the Czechs, both nation s would likely enter the EU at the same time. By the fall of 2002, both countries were not walking exactly on the sa me path , but the ir paths were c learly in view of one another. In conclusion, it is important, while acknowledg in g these differences prior to I 998, not to overstate them. For example, Timothy Frye 147 examined political polarization within all of the post-communi st co untri es. Hi s stud y covered the 1989-98 period , and thu s it included the time frame in which these two countries were moving in differe nt direction s. The political polari zation rating for the Czech Republic was 4.4, and for Slovakia it was 4 .9. Despite the sli ghtly higher rate for Slovaki a, he c lassified both countries as non-pol ari - 14 7 Timothy Frye, " The Price of Polarizati on: Economic Performance in the Post- Communist World," World Politics 54(2002). pp. 308-337 . SLOVAKIA 145 zed. The po lari zed co untri es inc luded Albania, Be laru s, Bul gari a, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Romani a, Ru ss ia, and Ukraine. Thi s is a signifi cant conclusion, for it he lps ex pl ain how two nati ons that seemed to be mov ing in such di ffe rent directi o ns after 1993 were able to adopt parall el paths by the end of the century. Perh aps the findin gs also revea l the wi sdom of those observers who chose to characteri ze the di vorce in 1993 as a "velvet" one.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Separate Paths: Czech and Slovak Foreign Policies Since 1993 Description An account of the resource James W. Peterson Slovakia, Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005 pp. 121-145 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Peterson, James W. (James Walter), 1945- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/97f290def9af350f5ad4fc7dd03ad4de.pdf c3aa70b314f854d471adec54478ee33d PDF Text Text REVIEWS ��SLOVAKIA 149 Peter Ze nuc h, M edzi vychodom a zapadom: Byzantsko-slovan- ska tradfcia, kultura a j azyk na vychodnom Slovensku. Brati slava: Veda , 2002. 286 pp., notes, bibliograph y, summari es in German and Ru ss ian. ROB ERT A. ORR Uni versity of Ottawa Thi s book provides va luabl e in sig hts, from severa l ang les, into a co mparati ve ly neglected area of Slavic studies: the place of Eastern Slovakia as an area straddling the di v ide between Eastern and Western Slavdom , which has cha nged hands severa l times in the course of its hi story. Although, as Zenuch shows in numerous pl aces (starting from the first page of the introducti o n), Easte rn Slovakia is generall y pl aced firmly o n the W estern side of the divide from lin- •• gui stic , cultural, and hi storical points of view (often being cited as part of Slavia Latina, Slavia Romana), it also saw the development of a homegrow n Church Slavonic tradition, a sort of " Slovak Church Slavonic", w ith a ll that it e ntail s, e.g., poor know ledge of Church Slavonic itse lf ( 127); in stances of hype rcorrection ( 168); and the gradual e merge nce of errors in re nditi o ns of so ngs, mak ing the m g radually less comprehensibl e to the laity over time (237-238). Zenuch 's book beg in s with a detailed tabl e of contents, followed by an introduc tion consisting of di sc uss ion s of approaches to the iss ue from the point of view of literature and hi sto ry, re li g io n and culture, and the hi storica l and lin g ui stic conditions. He then presents hi s major arg ume nts in e ight unnumbe red chapters , dealing roughly with hi storica l and c ultural developments in Eastern Slovakia and the Union of Uzhorod ( 1646), which broug ht the area w ithin the Uni ate C hurc h, under the authority of Rome, in the same way as the Uni o n of Brest ( 1596) did for Wes tern Ukraine; the Cyrillomethodian traditi o n in Eastern Slovakia, and that of St. Demetrius of Sa lonika; �SLOVAKIA 150 the ro le of para litu rg ica l so ng in th e Byza ntin o-S lav ic ri te; the la ng uage of se lected Cy rilli c ma nu sc ript s; th e interpre tat io n of certa in lin g ui sti c phe no me na in se lec ted manu sc ripts, whi ch he treats in co nsiderabl e detail ; and C hurch S lavoni c in Eastern S lovak ia , providing a fa irl y deta il ed ling ui stic ana lys is, es pec ia ll y of the lex icon. So urces are ex te ns ive ly referenced (23 prim ary so urces and 265 bibli ographi ca l ite ms, mostl y in Slova k, Ru ss ia n, a nd Ukra ini an, wi th some ite ms in Eng li sh, Hun gari an, etc.), w hi ch at times becomes rather cumberso me , w ith the foo tn otes (666) takin g up more than ha lf a page in pl aces. S urpris in g ly. in view of its titl e, the book offers o nl y a fa irl y bri ef di sc uss io n of the period before the Uni o n of Uzhorod (the " Byzantsko" in the titl e sound s vague ly a nac hro ni stic), jumping ra pidl y to 1646 (59-60). In view of its impo rtance, perh aps the Uni o n of Uzhorod could have been incorporated into th e actu a l titl e of the boo k (... Vychodne Slovensko po prijatf Uihorodskej unie, pe rhaps?). As me nti oned above, several Sl av ic c ultures are in contact within or c lose to Eas te rn S lova kia , and Zen o uc h di sc usses the lin g ui sti c aspects of such contacts in some deta il. In ma ny instances lang uage and re li g ion were intertw ined, and much of the no menc lature refl ec ts thi s situ ati o n, w ith te rm s suc h as Rusnak . Rusyn, Slovak, Slovj ak, e tc. be in g utili sed to de no te di ffe re nces in lang uage and re li g io n ( 126; as he puts it, e .g ., "every Gree k Ca th o li c was ta ke n fo r a Ru sy n" ( I 32)) . Vag ue aware ness of thi s co mpl ex ity has spread o uts ide the immedi ate area, with the genera ll y kn ow n Latin term Rut- heni ("Ruthe ni an") hav ing both re li g io us and ling ui sti c connotati ons. Eve n the ultim ate ly ephe mera l "s in g le Czec hos lovak" peopl e fig ure in some of the treatments ( 196- 197). Zeno uch c ites exampl es of such interconnecti o ns as , e .g., Sl ovak- U kraini an ( 137) , as we ll as lex ica l ite ms fro m ne ig hbo urin g lang uages, so metimes c itin g the same ite m in severa l la ng uages, e .g ., prikaza iie, etc .. ( 179). He makes sk ilful use of the tex ts of vari o us songs, w ith di sc uss io ns of vari o us types of song, and how to di sting ui sh the m to illustrate hi s po ints (e.g., 11 0 fn . 269), o ne of which ( 0 vyhnanf A dama i Evy z raja; 172-173) is �SLOVAKIA 151 eve n desc ribed as "s love nsko-po l's ko- ru sin sko[m ]" . He provides the Ni cene C reed in both Cy rilli c and Ro man, with stresses marked , to illustrate pro nunc iati o n (223 -224). Ze i\ o uc h deserves co mme nd ati o n fo r severa l passages a nd hi s treatment of sma ll points of deta il , e.g., hi s ex pl anati o n of drevo ( 173 fn . 498). He offe rs an excell e nt o utline of the earl y hi sto ry of Eastern Sl ovaki a (27, pass im), a nd definiti o ns of term s suc h as ca th olicos (33); sluienie (79); akatist (82), etc. On a re lated leve l, he offers useful di sc uss io ns of etymologies, e.g., S lovak Tabor ( 147). The interaction of c ultures and c hang ing borde rs in Easte rn Slovaki a meant , amo ng othe r thin gs, that a large number of la ng uages and orthographi es were used . Ze i\o uc h consiste ntl y c ites a ll mate ri a l in its ori g in a l orthograph y and fo nts, even ex te ndin g to, e.g ., c iting Russ ian refere nces in pre-Revolution orthograph y (e.g ., 59-60 ; 127), and Hun gari an orthograph y ( 196). In a text of suc h compl ex ity it is pe rhaps inev itabl e th at th e re sho uld be so me mi sprints, a lth o ug h tho se have bee n ke pt to a minimum , e.g., Atrni (54); Kovard vnvourro.X1f, ( 154) liturg ig ue (71 fn . 186 ); MaTep111.nb1 (93) sho uld be MaTep111a.nb1 as it is in the bibliograph y (w hy MaTepia.nbl in the footnotes o n pp 95-98?); Ukr. Ye.noBiK ( 169); 111c.neAOBH111e (276). In additi o n to its intrin sic inte rest, the refo re, Easte rn Slovak ia presents an exce lle nt example of an area whe re lang uages, c ultures, and re li g io n show so me degree of overl ap, and as suc h deserves to be better kn own to the scho larl y world at large. It is to be ho ped that thi s book will be translated into Engli sh. The fac t th at the most substanti a l criti c ism in vo lves the ac tua l titl e of the boo k is an indi cati o n of its va lue, both fo r hi sto ri ans and ling ui sts. �152 SLOVAKIA Mari a n Hronsky, The Struggle for Slovakia and the Treaty of Trianon 1918- 1920. Martin Styan, trans lator. Brati slava: Veda, 200 1, 407 pp., illustration s, bibliography, index . GREGORY C. FERENCE Salisbury Univers ity Mari an Hron sky, an hi storian of World War I Slovakia and the early years of the Czecho-Slovak Republic , has written an excellent book . This is a tran slation of hi s 1998 work of the same title , although the Engl ish-language version is more academic. A lthough the Treaty of Trianon dea lt with the dismantlin g of large sections of greater Hungary into its surrounding neighbors after World War One, Hron sky focused on the events leadi ng up to the treaty and their effects upon Slovakia. This detailed study beg ins with an hi storiographic lesson in the Introduction where the author claims that today many people in Slovakia are unaware of the Trianon Treaty despite more attention being paid to it since the fa ll of Communism. A lthough over e ight decades have passed s ince the treaty was signed, Hron sky notes correctly that it still causes intense emotiona l feelings in Hungary and is crucial to understanding Slovak-Hungarian relation s today, especiall y since the treaty left over 700,000 Hun garian s (Magyars ) in Czecho-Slovakia and over 500,000 current ly in S lovakia. With regards to the time frame unde r investigation, the author later stated , also quite correctly, "The Hungarians had never devoted so much attention to Slovakia as in thi s period (p. 11 0)." The treaty naturall y separated Slovakia from Hungary and attached it to the Czech Lands, but for the first time , it also delineated recogni zed boundaries for Slovakia. In the process, the a uthor took notice of so me interesting twists, such as the CzechoSlovak army havin g fought its only real war during World War I, and the Hungarian s having coined the term " Little Entente" for the diplomatic cooperation of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania after �SLOVAKIA 153 the war. The Hun garian s mourned the signin g of the treaty while it was hardly noticed by the average Slovak. Hron sky divided the book into six major sections: l. The End of the Kingdom of Hungary on the Political Scene; II. Power Vacuum in Slovaki a; Ill. The Struggle for Slovakia; IV . The War Between the Czecho-Slovak Republic and the Hun garian Soviet Republic ; V. The Peace Talks; and, VI. The Peace Treaty with Hun gary . In each section , there are numerou s sub-chapters that make the reading of thi s den se, fact-driven volume eas ier to negot iate. Much to hi s credit, Hronsky co nsulted numerou s archives , secondary so urces, and new spapers to present a very complete story. As with most tran slated works, thi s book could have used better proofreadin g. There are occasional subj ect-verb di sagreements, mi sspellings, tran slations of only some titles, wrong description s such as referrin g to Jan Smuts as a Briti sh general, and using a Slovak title to a book written by the Hungarian Oskar Jasz i. One defect, typica l of books published in Central Europe, is an index of perso nal names only, thu s limitin g its usefulness . The numerous photographs (including some very interestin g ones such as the pen used in the signin g of the treaty), drawin gs, and political cartoons are unfortunate ly blurry. They , along with proclamations and other items that should be read , are difficult to view. Another problem concerns maps. Due to the deta il ed leve l of descriptions of various battles and boundary negotiations and delin eat ion s, more and better quality maps should have been included. Perhaps the most bothersome aspect of the book, starting on page 100 and continuing many times over the next thirty pages or so, is that the " Rumanian s" or so me variation of thi s word keep appearing in the middl e of sentences or take the places of other words , makin g reading at times incomprehensi ble, or even absurd. Despite these shortcoming, which are for the most part trivial and annoying , thi s book is required reading for anyone interested in the end of the First World War, the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the ri se of the Czecho-Slovak state, the early post-war period in Central Europe, and the Treaty of Trianon itself. Hronsky has done a great �SLOVAKIA 154 serv ice by all owi ng fo r the translation of hi s book, whi ch otherwi se wo uld have had a very limited readership. Jni o k apitanovi Janovi Nalepkovi. Edited by Jozef Nalepka. Spi sska Nova Yes: Po lygrafia, 2002. 172 pp. , illustrations. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN Tall ahassee, Florida T horo ugh the co urse of military hi story the reader peri odi ca ll y encounters individu als who see med destined to become men of the pen, but who instead became men of the sword. Such was the case of Jan Nale pka. He was a poet by vocati on and a teacher by profess ion, and yet became a co mpetent military comm ander. Called up fo r military service by the Sl ova k Re public durin g World War II, Nalepka fo ught with di stincti on on both sides. Li ke many S lovaks sent to the Eastern Front, he deserted , and then fo ught alongs ide Sov iet parti sans in the Pripet Marches of Belaru s and northern Ukraine . Thi s biographi ca l study, edi ted by hi s brother, includes sampl es of Nalepka ' s wartime correspo nde nce, and the acco unts of peopl e who remembered him - teachers, students, fe ll ow soldi ers and Soviet military comm anders. One influenti a l fig ure d uring Na le pka ' s fo rm ati ve years in primary school in Spi ss ka Nova Yes was hi s teac her Jozef Miko laj, a Czec hos lovak Legionnaire of the First World War rece ntl y returned from long years of travel. He foun d Jan to have a provocat ive sense of humor and a mi sc hiev ious di spos ition, yet he exce ll ed academi ca ll y. Miko laj was parti cul arl y impressed with Jan' s kn ow ledge of the poets of the Slovak Nati onal Rev iva l, and his being inspired by the fo lk songs of hi s mother. Youn g Nalepka re mained precoc ious after enterin g teac her's college in 193 1. A confere nce of young teachers in Ko morna Lehotka (Jul y 1933) was visited by Czec hos lovak pres ide nt T. G. M asaryk. T he pres ide nt viewed the educati o nal system as a means of moul d in g youn g Slovaks in a "Czec hos lovak" �SLOVAKIA 155 spirit. But Nalepka remarked to hi s fri e nd Vladimfr Clementis that Slovak students were capable of c ulti vating the ir ow n sp irit. Na lepka was a nation a li st, but he was a lso a lefti st. In February of 1939 he began organizing c landest ine e le me nts aga in st the governing Slovak People' s Party - one month before the latter ass umed the leadership of a separate Slovak state . Ye t the events of March 1939 included a Hungari a n invas ion in the so utheast. Called up for military serv ice, Nalepka participated willingly in th e brief borde r war. He saw no contradiction between thi s action and hi s own idea ls. Latte r th at year, Slovakia's military alliance with Nazi Germany dictated hi s parti c ipation in the Poli sh ca mpai g n. Na le pk a, by now a lie ute nant, fought with di stinction on the northern s ide of the Carpathi ans. He was decorated by General Fe rdinand Catlos, Slovakia's Mini ster of Nationa l Defence. The war against Soviet Ru ss ia proved problemati ca l. Slovakia had te ritorial g rievances with Hungary and Pol a nd , but none w ith the Ru ss ians. Moreover, Na le pka had already beco me a li e nated by the arrogance of the nati ve Carpatho-Germans in Eastern Slovakia, who had the ir own Nazi organization. Finaly, like many Slovak so ldi ers, he was horified by Na zi atroc iti es in the occupied te rritori es. He clandestinely e ntered into contact with Soviet parti sans and eventually deserted to the m, takin g hi s men with him . Soviet parti san commander (and Red Army ge nera l) A. N. Saburov found Na le pka to be a competent subordin ate, who retained command of the Slovaks. The nature of partisan warfare in the swamps dictated that Na le pka freque ntl y travelled on horseback , carry ing an a utom atic weapon. A photograph of thi s legendary pose later in spired an equestrian sc ulpture of him by Anna Ki sakova. Thi s activity also contributed to hi s demi se. Captain Jan Nalepka was killed in an encounter with a German patrol outside the village of Ovruc o n the ni g ht of Nove mber 17 , 1943. Thi s study contains a weakness commo n to publi caation s about a " hometown boy" . It prese nts certa in fac ts in pass in g, presupposing the audi e nce is already familiar w ith the m. Whil e thi s may work for �SLOV AKIA 156 know ledgeable S lovaks, it leaves fo reigners in the dar k on key parti cul ars. Indeed , its greatest weekness lies not in what is sa id but what is left un said. Na le pk a's surv ivin g co mrades na med the ir parti sa n bri gade afte r him . The Captain Jan Nalepka Bri gade was later parasc huted back into Slovaki a to parti c ipate in the autumn 1944 upri sin g. Compared to other uni ts whi ch the Sov iets ex ported , and whic h large ly e ngaged in loot in g and pill ag in g, the Na lepka Bri gade conducted itse lf in a n exe mpl ary fas hi on. Together w ith the 2 nd Czec hoslovak Paratroo pe rs, it shares c redit fo r the capture of th e strateg ic vill age of Ja ln a in the Hron Ri ver va ll ey on Oc tobe r 10- 12. This acti on was the las t vic tory of the insurge nts in S lovakia dur ing the upris ing. A wartime fe ll ow-officer, Samue l S imonov ic, states that Jan Nalepk a was not a Communi st (p. 111 ). He di ed at a conve ni e nt time , whic h e na bl ed him to beco me a lege nd in the postwar co mmuni st era. Hi s peasant pare nts were rece ived with hono ur in the Sov ie t Union at me mo rial servi ces dedic ated to the captain. Yet one may questi on what fa te would have had in store fo r him had he li ved longer. A " w ise guy" mi ght be given a wide berth by hi s teac hers on the me rit of hi s acade mi c exce ll e nce, but not by a tota litari a n reg im e. His equ all y precoc ious fr ie nd V ladimfr C le me ntis went on to become Czec hos lovak ia's fo reig n mini ste r, but ultim ate ly e nded on the gall ows. In sofa r as the c urre nt Slovak Re public has adopted the Slovak Nati onal Upri sing rathe r than Jozef Ti so ' s Slovaki a as its lodestone, Captain Jan Nalepk a re mains a worthy subject of stud y. Hi s life cuts across the ideo log ica l lines th at later di vided the East and West du ring the Co ld War. Hi s c haracter serves to de bunk a certain stereotype of S lova ks as be in g subservie nt to a uth ority. Thi s book is a positi ve contributi on to wartime Slovak hi story. �SLOVAKIA 157 Zo ltan G . Mes ko, The S ilent Conspiracy: A Communist M odel of Political Cleansing at the Slovak Uni versity in B ratislava after the Second W orld War. Boulder, CO : East Europea n Monographs, 2003, ix- l 42pp., map, illustrati ons, notes, bibliography. L.P. HINTERB UCHNER Rye, New York When I read the orig inal Slova k vers ion "Zaml cane sprisahanie" by Dr. Zo ltan G. Mes ko in 1999, I was moved by the vivid descripti on of the eve nts th at befe ll th e medi ca l co mmunity in Slovaki a during and after World W ar II , th ro ugh the " liberation" by th e Soviets and after the illega l take-over by the Communi sts of Czec hoslovaki a in 1948. I knew many of the principal actors in the ensuin g dram a but I was not full y aware of wh at tran spired at the Medi cal School in Brati slava where I graduated the same year th at D r. Mes ko started hi s studi es. M y opini o n abo ut thi s book the n was th at it represented an important hi stori ca l testimo ny about the insane and destructi ve influence of the communi st regime on the professors and students of two medi ca l sc hool s, one in Brati slava the other in Kos ice. The poorly-trained new ph ys ici ans, who se credenti als had to be primaril y political , in ev itabl y led to inadequ ate and inferi or hea lth care fo r the nation. Th e publication in 2003 of the improved and enh anced Engli sh version of thi s work , "The S il ent Conspi racy," marks a fittin g completi on of the author' s doc umentati o n of th at peri od , based on hi s personal observati ons, interviews of th e principals and of witnesses, and the detailed research of avail able records. I read th e Eng li sh and the Slovak versio ns s ide-by-s ide and reli ved the angui sh th at the parti c ipants of thi s drama must have felt in those times. I was aga in moved by th e author' s personal remini sce nces of the "good o ld days" with hi s fa mil y, before registering to stud y medi c ine. I mu st co nfess that the Eng li sh vers io n he ld my �SLOVAKIA 158 close attention more than the Slovak one. It is a page-turner; and one is reluctant to lay the book down. There is a bri ef but very informative acco unt of the hi storica l background of the Slovak nation by professor Mark Sto larik, an improvement over the Slovak vers ion. The rest of the book is more an inte rpre tation of the Slovak edition than a verbatim tran slat ion . The res ult is th at the E ng li sh is fluent , easy to read a nd de finitely much be tte r than most Slovak publications in Eng li sh, despite occas ion a l ling ui stic errors and inaccuracies, no ne of them s ubsta nti a l. Regrettably , not a ll of the illustrati o ns from the S lovak edition appear in the En g li sh o ne . Dr. Mesko recently in for med me that the first draft was written in Eng li sh. The strength of thi s work is in the detailed acco unt of the persecu ti o n, humili at io n, torture and incarceratio n of those who , because of their re li g ious back ground or personal integrity , did not join in worshiping comm uni sm, the Soviet Union a nd its murdere r-in-chi ef Stalin. Some victim s disappeared without any trace , othe rs perished in the uranium mines of the western Czec h la nd s and many spent years in prison and did hard labor. The a uthor li sts names and dates and provides documented description s of these terrible tran sgres sion s. Dr. Mesko ' s book is an importa nt co ntributi o n to the post-war hi story of the Slovak nat ion . It has the immediacy of an eyew itness report. To those w ho do not read Slovak , it pro vides a window o n events large ly unknown to Eng li sh readers. It provides a hi storic a l g limpse of how eve nts in Slovakia in the 1940 's separated the "good g uys" who would not betray their re li g iou s and mora l principl es, from vac ill ators , weak lin gs, thieve s, torturers a nd murderers, all without any moral scruples. The book a lso describes how politi ca l opportunists stabbed the ir intellectually an d professio na ll y s upe rior colleagues in the back . It demon strates how po liti ca l a nd party affiliations rep laced merit in the grad ing of stude nts and in di spe ns ing the most desired positions and jobs to " politically correct" applicants. It show s how the absence �SLOVAKIA 159 of party affili ati on re nde red outstandin g professors and teac he rs vulnerable a nd subj ec t to chic anery. lt record s the establi shm e nt of a Chair of Marxi s m-Le nini sm a t th e M ed ica l School for th e reeducation of the faculty and of the student body. Dr. Mesko also doc ume nts the large ly unknown attempt of the Communists to meddl e with the curriculum in the Medical School. They recruited a cadre of yo ungsters from workers ' bac kground s who had very littl e education , se nt them to spec ial classes in the Medical School a nd graduated them as " physicians," a di saster waiting to happen. This e ffort apparentl y failed a nd eventu all y faded away. No further information about these "graduates" is avai labl e. Finall y, the book illustrates why the re was friction between Catholics and Lutherans in th e Medical Schoo l, a nd rev is its that old probl e m between Czechs and Slova ks, name ly the di sc redited idea of a " Czechoslovak nation " propagated by Edvard Be nes a nd T .G. Masaryk and their cohorts. Researche rs and seri ous students of the hi story of Central Europe will find a rich resource for their work in this boo k. Readers who are of Slovak origin, but not proficient in that la nguage, will be nefi t from the English version which provides a g limpse of soc ietal forces that shaped the dest in y of Slovakia a nd its evo lution toward s independe nce. Mari a Dziakova- Bi:ihmova, Dusa na dlani: Spomienky od Kosfc do New Yorku. Edited by Michal Kri sko and Be rnarda Jenc fkov a- Fabrici . Presov , Mic hal Vasko, 2004, 151 pp. Illustrati ons M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa This autobiography, compl eted by ' Mari a Dziakova-Bi:imova in August of 1989, just before the collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia, nea tl y summ arizes the tri als and tribul ation s of Slovak �160 SLOVAKIA intellectuals during and after World War II . Born in 1910 in a vill age near Kosice, she was the e ldest of three daughters of a poor peasant family. Nevertheless, her parents recogni zed her extraord in ary intelli gence and they skrimped and saved in order to send her to the " realgy mn as ium" for g irl s a nd then to the Faculty of Medicine at Comenius Uni vers ity in Bratislava. She grad uated with her degree in 1934 and began her practice in Kosice. Between 1938 and 1944 Dr. Bohmova (s he marri ed Dr. Emanuel Bohm in 194 1) li ved in Magyar occ upi ed Kosice and later Budapest, he lpin g her politically-activist hu sband defend the Slovak comm unity agai nst forced Magyarization. Meanwhile, she tried to continue her med ical practice, with vary in g success. As the Second World War drew to a c lose, she and her hu sband managed to return to S lovak ia, survived the pass ing of the Ru ss ian front, and re-established themselves in Bratislava in 1945. While she worked for the State In sti tute for Hea lth , her hu sband became Commi ss ioner of Health for Slovakia and Deputy Speaker of the Federal Assembly in Prague . After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovaki a in 1948 Emanuel Bohm fl ed to the west and she jo ined him in Lo ndo n a littl e later. They spe nt the nex t four years working as manu al laboure rs until the United States allowed them to e nter as immi grants in 195 2. Since Maria had to flee Czechoslovakia without any of her diplomas, a nd they co uld not easi ly be mailed to her during the Stalinist l 950's, she had to start over as an intern in the USA. By 1956 she had passed all of he r medical exa ms and sett led into a career in medic ine at the Kin gsbrook Jewi sh Medical Center in New York, and retired as Assistant Director of Medicine in 1975 . Maria and Emanuel active ly participated in Slovak inte ll ectu al a nd political life in New York for the second half of the twentieth century. She a nd he r hu sband took a leading role in the Slovak-American Cultural Center of New York , the Limbora dancing group , the General Mi Ian Rast is lav Stefanik Award , and the an nu al SlovakAmerican Ball at New York ' s Athletic C lub. They also participated in the founding of the Slovak World Co ngress in 1970, of which her �SLOVAKIA 161 husband became a vice-president. The book is a pleasure to read . Maria had a talent for writing and, at one point, she even recon structed a letter that she wrote on behalf of her illiterate mother in the eastern Slovak dialect to an uncle who had emigrated to the United States before World War I. She used the same di alect, and the same uncle ' s name (who had long since disappeared), when she wrote to her sister in Kosice, imploring her to try to mail the diplomas that she had to leave behind when she fled Communist Czechoslovakia. Thi s subterfuge worked because the Czech postal officials in Prague, who were in charge of censoring the mai l, were apparently confounded by thi s dialect and allowed the letter through. Maria eventually received her diplomas, but only after she had to once again prove her medical acumen by pass ing very rigorous American exams. In spite of her trial s and tribulations, Maria Dziakova-Bohmova did not become bitter. Instead , she was thankful to the United States for having given her the chance to start a new life in the New World. She returned for visits to Czechoslovakia in 1969 and 1978 and noticed how her younger sisters had prematurely aged and how so many of her colleagues from the " realgymnasium" and the university had also either aged or died in thi s "socialist paradise." She and her hu sband visited free Czechoslovakia in 1990; he died at the end of the year and was buried in the national cemetery in Martin . After Maria died in 1999, her remains were interred beside him. Thus, Slovakia recognized the achievements of these two extraordinary indi vi dual s. We should be grateful to Bernharda Jencfkova-Fabrici , executrix of her will, for having gathered together Maria's memoirs, for having persuaded Michal Krisko to edit them, and for havi ng arranged for Michal Vasko to publish them. The book is well-worth reading, both for a glimpse at the evolution of the Slovak inte lli genti a in the first Czechoslovak Republic , and for the harsh consequences that awaited those members who refused to sub mit to the Communist takeover of their homeland and who fled into exi le. �SLOVAKIA 162 Karen Henderson, Slovakia: The Escape from fnvisibihty. London and New York: Routledge, 2002, xviii-140 pp., map, notes, bibliography, index. JURAJ HOCMAN Carleton University A few years ago Slovakia suffered from a rather negative image of radical nationalism, especiall y in the West. One reason was that foreign scholars were rare in the region and Slovak history remained invisible. In 1987 a young scholar from England was given an unexpected opportunity to spend a couple of months in Bratislava, the country's capital. Attracted by both Slovakia 's past and present, Karen Henderson gradua ll y became more in volved in Slovak affairs. The author' s knowledge of the evolution of Slovak society through the centuries enabled her to reach a new perspective. Meanwhile, she also witnessed the country ' s political development after its establishment as a sovereign state on January 1st, 1993, its first appearance on the international scene and its chi ldhood illnesses as well. Henderson ' s book then documents the steps taken by the new Slovak government after the elections of September 1998 that were designed to improve the country's democratic performance, and that eventually led to its significantly changed image abroad. The author of the book , a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Leicester in the U.K. , took a balanced look at the Slovak Republic while concentrati ng on four areas of its evolution . In the first part she focused on the Slovaks in the Kingdom of Hungary and on the pre-war Czechoslovak Republic . She succes sfully demonstrated her familiarity with the main trends that formed and influenced the mentality of Slovak soc iety exposed to the processes of forced " Magyarisation" that took place after the Austro-H un garian Comprom ise of 1867. She also hi ghlighted the processes of "Czechoslovakism" that marked the relation- �SLOVAKIA 163 ship between the Slovaks and Czechs before the Second Wor ld W ar with traces of di stru st o n o ne side and suspi c ion o n the other. In co ntras t to the preva ilin g traditi o na l approaches to Slova ki a that have been influe nced by ste reotypes impl a nted into Sl ovak hi sto ry, the auth or shows a re markabl e e mpathy fo r the way the Slovaks saw the mse lves in the fo rmer states of whi ch they had been a part for ce nturi es (the Hun gari an Kin gdo m), o r fo r decades (Czec hos lo va kia) . He nde rso n attributes the fa ilures shared by Slovaks w ith the ir partners o bj ecti ve ly and fa irl y. Slovaks are seen as the vic tim s in relati o n to the two main determina nts above. O n the other hand , Henderson, who knows the terra in of Ce nt ra l a nd East Euro pe and its non-linear a nd some tim e e ni gmati c h is to ry as we ll , a lso de mo nstrates an ability to ide ntify the mo me nts and events in whi ch Slo vak fa ilures and ruptures happe ned due to the ir indec is ive ness, bi ases , ambi g uiti es, un willin g ness o r pass ivity in copin g w ith e me rg in g situation s (e.g. the Slovak Republi c 1939-1 945). In the second part o f the boo k He nde rson dea ls w ith inde pe ndent Slo vaki a after January I'', 1993 . She foc uses o n the governme nts of Prime Mini sters Vladim fr Mec iar a nd Mikul as Dzurinda, whil e notin g a sharp co ntrast betwee n the two. The parli ame ntary e lection s he ld in Septe mbe r o f 1998 made a substanti a l difference in the eyes of Western governme nts and public audi e nces . A detail ed pi cture of what had preceded the fa ll of Mec iar ' s governme nt may be of interest to those who are not fa mili ar w ith the intern a l deve lo pme nt of Slovak soc iety and who want to better know the reasons fo r the fa ilure o f Mec iar' s po lic ies. For those who know it we ll , it is a re minde r and summ ary of what was prev io usly published and broadcast in the print and e lectroni c medi a. However, the a utho r ' s a im was to foc us o n the shi ft in mode rn Slovak hi story th at a ll owed the state and soc iety to escape its in visibility, and thi s is what undo ubtedl y deserves recogniti o n. The last parts of th e book are dedi cated to Slovak ia ' s re lati o nship with the world fro m 19 18 to the present. In spite of the auth or 's overa ll pe rspec ti ve regardin g Slovaki a after th e pe ri od 1989- 1993, �SLOVAKIA 164 one could agree with her view th at " The Slovak Republic has not been particul arl y stable po liticall y, but as a state it has not been fundamentall y instable either" (p. 129). This may be also be perceived as the bottom level of Slovak statehood and the capability of the Slovak Republic to survive as a modern state that was initi all y questioned both dipl o matica ll y and publicl y at the beg innin g of its ex istence. Neve rtheless, the se nsiti ve reader may also find so me sub-themes and situation s described in the book that require furth er di scuss ion or a better nu anced approach (for example, so me aspects of the iss ues of ethnic minorities, the political culture and so on). Henderson 's footnotes and bibliography illustrate that the author used a wide variety of sources, from skeptical critics to pass ion ate apologists of Slovak hi story. She tried to steer a middle co urse between them and used books and schol arl y articles , as well as documents of Slovak academi c institution s and reports of non-governmental organi zation s as her principal sources . She also used re levant documents and reports iss ued by international or supran ational organization s regardin g Slovaki a ' s developme nt and progress (The World Bank, NATO, The European Union , etc.). O verall , Henderson did a good job. In my opinion Henderson ' s book successfull y refl ec ts a positive shi ft in the perception of Slovakia from the outside, and in bringing a pos itive picture to larger audi ences. In the last fe w decades Slovak society has been portrayed by both academi cs and public ists selecti vely and negati ve ly, large ly due to extern a l factors th at affec ted Slovak hi story. From now on , the question of whether the positi ve image of the country will be sustained will depend upon Slovaki a's willingness and capability to remain on track and avoid any detours from its democratic deve lopment. �SLOVAKIA 165 The Slovak Republic: A Decade of Independence (I 993-2002). Edited by M. Mark Stolarik. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy -Carducci Publi shers, 2004, xiv-168 pp. tables, charts, graphs, notes, map, index. CAROL SKALNIK LEFF University of Illinois, Urbana-Champai gn Durin g the interwar Czechoslovak Re public, several volumes were published employing a format that could be described as " progress reports," in which responsible government officials of the time outlined the state of the field in key iss ue areas. This current volume, desc ribed as Slovakia's " first ' white paper, "' performs much the same function for the first decade of the independent state. In many cases, the " ten years after" vantage point is rather artificial , but in this case it is especially appropriate and the findin gs will have more than transitory value, because this is a decade framed by the successful passage from nascent state to me mbership in the European Union and NATO. Scholars interested in Slovakia' s " rehabilitation" from seco nd tier to new EU member will find thi s decade of continuin g relevance. And if there is an occasional celebratory note in the di scussion, it is understandabl e in the context of the decade ' s achievement of European integration. M . Mark Stolarik, who in his function as Chairholder in Slovak Hi story and Culture at the University of Ottawa, also co-organized the conference on which the published work is based, provides introductory thumbnail sketches of the arguments in eac h of the main contributions, and annotations of the text on politics, to clarify and update the discussion. The core articles that follow, dealing successively with politi cs, economic s, soc ial policy , culture and international relations, are the presentations of Rudolf Schuster, Slovakia' s first elected pres ident, and e ight high-rankin g and quite prominent Slovak government officials, cabinet ministers and state secretaries. Each contribution rece ives a response from the North American side, �SLOVAKIA 166 ei the r from Canadian offic ia ls who have worked o n -and who disc uss--cooperati ve projects with Slovakia, or from a scho lar specia li zi ng in Slovakia. In addition to the detailed po li cy overviews discussed below, I fo und two addit io na l pieces particularly interesting: the exc ha nge o n c ultural po li cy be twee n th e n- Culture Mini ster Mil an Kn azko and Martin Votruba, director of the Slovak Studies program at the University of Pittsburg h and the di sc uss ion of hum an ri ghts and ethni c re lation s by Pa l Csaky, an important Slovak Hun garia n po liti cian and Deputy Prime Minister, and Paul Magocs i of the University of Toronto, whose experti se o n the minoriti es of the reg ion in fo rmed hi s ge nera li zed critique of th e Jacobin-inspired view of state hi story through the prism of the dom in ant nati o na lity in many European countries . The compe ndium is sketchi est on the politics, devoting suffic ient time for orientation but no in-de pth a na lys is, which in thi s case makes sense in severa l ways, not least because the po liti cs of transiti o n has alread y been ex haustive ly ana lyzed in ex istin g sc ho larl y work. The iss ue areas covered are a no ther matter. Muc h less informati o n cover in g po lic y is readily ava il abl e in existing work , so thi s is exceedin g ly useful gro und to cover. Most chapters are e nri c hed with some unex pected inform ation a l treas ures, since the poli cy profil es are de ta il ed and spec ific rathe r th an vag ue or genera li zed , and the re are a multitude of useful tabl es and charts that e ncode co mparati ve and tim e series data on fo re ig n debt a nd in vestme nt , e mpl oy me nt , mino rity ed ucation , li fe expectancy and so o n. While not inte nded as a reference work, the anth o logy the refore atta in s so methin g of th at status; o nce read, it can be sto red to hand for speci fi c refere nce on a range of subjects. Our library doesn ' t have thi s book yet, but it soon wi ll. �SLOVAKIA 167 Thomas J. Shelley , Slovak s on the Hudson: Most Holy Trinity Church , Yonkers, & Th e Slovak Catholics of the Archdiocese of New York, 1894 -2000. Washin gton , D.C. : The Catholic University of America Press, 2002. xv-273pp., maps, illustrati o ns, bibliography , index. DANIEL F. T ANZONE Passaic, New Jersey Slovaks on the Hudson, by the noted church hi storian Thomas J. Shelley, adds an important chapter to the hi story of the American Catholic Church. While the city of Yonkers, New York, with a population of just under 200,000 cannot be compared with the metropoli ses of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland or Pittsburgh, it is, in fact , a microcosm of bi g city Catholicism. The city's nineteen Catholic parishe s, including tho se serving the Slovak s, Italian s, Hun garia ns and most recently the Portugese, along with two of the Byza ntine rite , contributed to the gro wth of Catholic life in the community. Catholics would soo n become major players in the city 's soc ial , educational, cultural and political life. While thi s book tell s the story of Slovak settlement in the river town of Yonke rs startin g in the l 880's, it also presents a picture of the city's political establi shment and its reaction to the grow in g immigrant population. Most of these newcomers hailed from the Catholic nation s of central and southern Europe. Slovaks, along with other Slavic peoples, found work in the city's vast mill structure, and had the opportunity to make a new life for themselves and their families. While the local " Nativi sts" often resented and mi sunderstood these immigrants and their ways, the WASP establishment gradually accepted them into the fabric of c ity life. Indeed , by 1903 a Slovak immigrant was elected to Yonkers city govern ment. Like other immigrant gro ups, the Slovaks clung to their language and faith tradition s. First they esta bli shed loca l fraternal -benefit �168 SLOVAKIA societies, which became affiliated with the national bodies in the 1890's. Yonkers had the first women 's lodge in New York State ( 1892), which became branch 2 of the First Catholic Slovak Ladies ' Association. Its other Slovak fraternals gave birth to Most Holy Trinity Church, which traced its roots to 1891 when laymen petitioned the local bishop for permission to establish a pari sh. The local parish church was very important to the laity, both as a place of worship and as a social gathering place. The parishioners married and raised their children in the shadow of the church steeple in the Hollow section of Yonkers. Most Holy Trinity afforded its people the opportunity to pass on the language, culture and traditions of their ancestral homeland. The clergy and religious, especially the sisters of Cyril and Methodius , who staffed the parish school, taught the children the Slovak language and traditions . Slovaks on the Hudson never forgot the plight of their brethren along the Danube, Yah, Hron and Torysa rivers. Indeed, the clergy and leaders of the Yonkers community played an important ro le in the establishment of Czecho-Slovakia following the col lapse of the Dual Monarchy of A ustria-Hungary . One of the pastors of Most Holy Trinity was actually offered a cabinet post in the newly-established Czecho-Slovakia in 1919. Throughout the long winter of communist domination of their ancestral homeland, the Slovaks of Yonkers never gave up hope of seeing their countrymen freed from this alien ideology and they rejoiced when Slovakia achieved its independence on January I, 1993. Thomas J. Shelley has provided the reader with a wonderful opportunity to view the life of the Slovak immigrant community within the context of big city li fe. It is a fascinating story, warts and all, of the Church in America. It is al so an important contribution to American history because the Slovaks are rapidly assimilating and moving to the suburbs while Yonkers is receiving ever more and newer immigrants. It is a welcome addition to the story of so many American ethnic groups who make up o ur ever-expanding multicultural society. �SLOVAKIA 169 June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism: Slovaks and Other Immigrants in the lnterwar Era. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004, xiv-278 p.p., illustrations, notes, index. M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa The purpose of this book is to explore group-generated activities among Slovak-Americans in the inter-war period of American history and to see if such activities fit into recent "whiteness" studies by professional American historians. Alexander' s theme is that in the 1920's and 1930's both first and second-generation American Slovaks "were haunted by the stigma of inferiority inflicted by American society." (P.12). They sought to overcome this stigma by purchasing Liberty Bonds during the Great War and War Bonds during the Second World War. Meanwhile, they engaged in patriotic marches, carrying both the American and Slovak flags in the two wars, they staged large "S lovak Days" in the I 920's and 1930's in order to show off their ethnicity while stressing their Americanness and they openly supported FDR's New Deal legislation in order to help their pioneers and their fraternal-benefit societies to survive the ravages of the Great Depression. In order to prove her thesis Alexander dug deeply into both archival and printed sources. She studied the records of several large fraternal-benefit societies, the correspondence of their officers, and a wide range of Slovak-American newspapers. She also read widely in American history. Alexander concluded that Slovak-American identity did not arise from their growing "whiteness" in a racist American society, as some American historians had postulated of other ethnic groups, but rather from their nationality (ethnicity). Indeed, she also saw no generational or even class cleavage among American Slovaks, who perceived of themselves as overwhelmingly "working class" and united in their �170 SLOVAKIA efforts to win acceptance as one of the " newcomer" peoples to the United States. Al exander's book will , no doubt, win many acco lades from those profess ional A meri can hi stori ans who write hi story fo r themselves. She is very much a part of the so-call ed "di scourse" school whi ch uses social hi story in order to probe into questi ons of " whiteness," class, identity, celebrations, ass imilati on and so on. These hi stori ans deri ve great pleasure in proving or dispro ving eac h other 's theori es and show in g off their erudition . By so doin g, however, th ey c ut them selves off from the general public , which is hun gry for tradi tional , narrati ve, hi story . As a result, a second group of hi stori ans fill s thi s public hunger, and they are contemptu ously di smi ssed as " popul ar" hi stori ans by the academi cs mention ed above. On the other hand , the " popul ar" hi stori ans sell hundreds of thou sand s of copies of the ir books while the academic histori ans are delighted if they can sell a thou sand. While several hundred uni versity libraries will , no doubt, purchase a copy of thi s book, I have a feeling th at the Slovak-American community will hardl y notice it, whi ch is a pity. � REVIEWS ��SLOVAKIA 149 Peter Ze nuc h, M edzi vychodom a zapadom: Byzantsko-slovan- ska tradfcia, kultura a j azyk na vychodnom Slovensku. Brati slava: Veda , 2002. 286 pp., notes, bibliograph y, summari es in German and Ru ss ian. ROB ERT A. ORR Uni versity of Ottawa Thi s book provides va luabl e in sig hts, from severa l ang les, into a co mparati ve ly neglected area of Slavic studies: the place of Eastern Slovakia as an area straddling the di v ide between Eastern and Western Slavdom , which has cha nged hands severa l times in the course of its hi story. Although, as Zenuch shows in numerous pl aces (starting from the first page of the introducti o n), Easte rn Slovakia is generall y pl aced firmly o n the W estern side of the divide from lin- •• gui stic , cultural, and hi storical points of view (often being cited as part of Slavia Latina, Slavia Romana), it also saw the development of a homegrow n Church Slavonic tradition, a sort of " Slovak Church Slavonic", w ith a ll that it e ntail s, e.g., poor know ledge of Church Slavonic itse lf ( 127); in stances of hype rcorrection ( 168); and the gradual e merge nce of errors in re nditi o ns of so ngs, mak ing the m g radually less comprehensibl e to the laity over time (237-238). Zenuch 's book beg in s with a detailed tabl e of contents, followed by an introduc tion consisting of di sc uss ion s of approaches to the iss ue from the point of view of literature and hi sto ry, re li g io n and culture, and the hi storica l and lin g ui stic conditions. He then presents hi s major arg ume nts in e ight unnumbe red chapters , dealing roughly with hi storica l and c ultural developments in Eastern Slovakia and the Union of Uzhorod ( 1646), which broug ht the area w ithin the Uni ate C hurc h, under the authority of Rome, in the same way as the Uni o n of Brest ( 1596) did for Wes tern Ukraine; the Cyrillomethodian traditi o n in Eastern Slovakia, and that of St. Demetrius of Sa lonika; �SLOVAKIA 150 the ro le of para litu rg ica l so ng in th e Byza ntin o-S lav ic ri te; the la ng uage of se lected Cy rilli c ma nu sc ript s; th e interpre tat io n of certa in lin g ui sti c phe no me na in se lec ted manu sc ripts, whi ch he treats in co nsiderabl e detail ; and C hurch S lavoni c in Eastern S lovak ia , providing a fa irl y deta il ed ling ui stic ana lys is, es pec ia ll y of the lex icon. So urces are ex te ns ive ly referenced (23 prim ary so urces and 265 bibli ographi ca l ite ms, mostl y in Slova k, Ru ss ia n, a nd Ukra ini an, wi th some ite ms in Eng li sh, Hun gari an, etc.), w hi ch at times becomes rather cumberso me , w ith the foo tn otes (666) takin g up more than ha lf a page in pl aces. S urpris in g ly. in view of its titl e, the book offers o nl y a fa irl y bri ef di sc uss io n of the period before the Uni o n of Uzhorod (the " Byzantsko" in the titl e sound s vague ly a nac hro ni stic), jumping ra pidl y to 1646 (59-60). In view of its impo rtance, perh aps the Uni o n of Uzhorod could have been incorporated into th e actu a l titl e of the boo k (... Vychodne Slovensko po prijatf Uihorodskej unie, pe rhaps?). As me nti oned above, several Sl av ic c ultures are in contact within or c lose to Eas te rn S lova kia , and Zen o uc h di sc usses the lin g ui sti c aspects of such contacts in some deta il. In ma ny instances lang uage and re li g ion were intertw ined, and much of the no menc lature refl ec ts thi s situ ati o n, w ith te rm s suc h as Rusnak . Rusyn, Slovak, Slovj ak, e tc. be in g utili sed to de no te di ffe re nces in lang uage and re li g io n ( 126; as he puts it, e .g ., "every Gree k Ca th o li c was ta ke n fo r a Ru sy n" ( I 32)) . Vag ue aware ness of thi s co mpl ex ity has spread o uts ide the immedi ate area, with the genera ll y kn ow n Latin term Rut- heni ("Ruthe ni an") hav ing both re li g io us and ling ui sti c connotati ons. Eve n the ultim ate ly ephe mera l "s in g le Czec hos lovak" peopl e fig ure in some of the treatments ( 196- 197). Zeno uch c ites exampl es of such interconnecti o ns as , e .g., Sl ovak- U kraini an ( 137) , as we ll as lex ica l ite ms fro m ne ig hbo urin g lang uages, so metimes c itin g the same ite m in severa l la ng uages, e .g ., prikaza iie, etc .. ( 179). He makes sk ilful use of the tex ts of vari o us songs, w ith di sc uss io ns of vari o us types of song, and how to di sting ui sh the m to illustrate hi s po ints (e.g., 11 0 fn . 269), o ne of which ( 0 vyhnanf A dama i Evy z raja; 172-173) is �SLOVAKIA 151 eve n desc ribed as "s love nsko-po l's ko- ru sin sko[m ]" . He provides the Ni cene C reed in both Cy rilli c and Ro man, with stresses marked , to illustrate pro nunc iati o n (223 -224). Ze i\ o uc h deserves co mme nd ati o n fo r severa l passages a nd hi s treatment of sma ll points of deta il , e.g., hi s ex pl anati o n of drevo ( 173 fn . 498). He offe rs an excell e nt o utline of the earl y hi sto ry of Eastern Sl ovaki a (27, pass im), a nd definiti o ns of term s suc h as ca th olicos (33); sluienie (79); akatist (82), etc. On a re lated leve l, he offers useful di sc uss io ns of etymologies, e.g., S lovak Tabor ( 147). The interaction of c ultures and c hang ing borde rs in Easte rn Slovaki a meant , amo ng othe r thin gs, that a large number of la ng uages and orthographi es were used . Ze i\o uc h consiste ntl y c ites a ll mate ri a l in its ori g in a l orthograph y and fo nts, even ex te ndin g to, e.g ., c iting Russ ian refere nces in pre-Revolution orthograph y (e.g ., 59-60 ; 127), and Hun gari an orthograph y ( 196). In a text of suc h compl ex ity it is pe rhaps inev itabl e th at th e re sho uld be so me mi sprints, a lth o ug h tho se have bee n ke pt to a minimum , e.g., Atrni (54); Kovard vnvourro.X1f, ( 154) liturg ig ue (71 fn . 186 ); MaTep111.nb1 (93) sho uld be MaTep111a.nb1 as it is in the bibliograph y (w hy MaTepia.nbl in the footnotes o n pp 95-98?); Ukr. Ye.noBiK ( 169); 111c.neAOBH111e (276). In additi o n to its intrin sic inte rest, the refo re, Easte rn Slovak ia presents an exce lle nt example of an area whe re lang uages, c ultures, and re li g io n show so me degree of overl ap, and as suc h deserves to be better kn own to the scho larl y world at large. It is to be ho ped that thi s book will be translated into Engli sh. The fac t th at the most substanti a l criti c ism in vo lves the ac tua l titl e of the boo k is an indi cati o n of its va lue, both fo r hi sto ri ans and ling ui sts. �152 SLOVAKIA Mari a n Hronsky, The Struggle for Slovakia and the Treaty of Trianon 1918- 1920. Martin Styan, trans lator. Brati slava: Veda, 200 1, 407 pp., illustration s, bibliography, index . GREGORY C. FERENCE Salisbury Univers ity Mari an Hron sky, an hi storian of World War I Slovakia and the early years of the Czecho-Slovak Republic , has written an excellent book . This is a tran slation of hi s 1998 work of the same title , although the Engl ish-language version is more academic. A lthough the Treaty of Trianon dea lt with the dismantlin g of large sections of greater Hungary into its surrounding neighbors after World War One, Hron sky focused on the events leadi ng up to the treaty and their effects upon Slovakia. This detailed study beg ins with an hi storiographic lesson in the Introduction where the author claims that today many people in Slovakia are unaware of the Trianon Treaty despite more attention being paid to it since the fa ll of Communism. A lthough over e ight decades have passed s ince the treaty was signed, Hron sky notes correctly that it still causes intense emotiona l feelings in Hungary and is crucial to understanding Slovak-Hungarian relation s today, especiall y since the treaty left over 700,000 Hun garian s (Magyars ) in Czecho-Slovakia and over 500,000 current ly in S lovakia. With regards to the time frame unde r investigation, the author later stated , also quite correctly, "The Hungarians had never devoted so much attention to Slovakia as in thi s period (p. 11 0)." The treaty naturall y separated Slovakia from Hungary and attached it to the Czech Lands, but for the first time , it also delineated recogni zed boundaries for Slovakia. In the process, the a uthor took notice of so me interesting twists, such as the CzechoSlovak army havin g fought its only real war during World War I, and the Hungarian s having coined the term " Little Entente" for the diplomatic cooperation of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania after �SLOVAKIA 153 the war. The Hun garian s mourned the signin g of the treaty while it was hardly noticed by the average Slovak. Hron sky divided the book into six major sections: l. The End of the Kingdom of Hungary on the Political Scene; II. Power Vacuum in Slovaki a; Ill. The Struggle for Slovakia; IV . The War Between the Czecho-Slovak Republic and the Hun garian Soviet Republic ; V. The Peace Talks; and, VI. The Peace Treaty with Hun gary . In each section , there are numerou s sub-chapters that make the reading of thi s den se, fact-driven volume eas ier to negot iate. Much to hi s credit, Hronsky co nsulted numerou s archives , secondary so urces, and new spapers to present a very complete story. As with most tran slated works, thi s book could have used better proofreadin g. There are occasional subj ect-verb di sagreements, mi sspellings, tran slations of only some titles, wrong description s such as referrin g to Jan Smuts as a Briti sh general, and using a Slovak title to a book written by the Hungarian Oskar Jasz i. One defect, typica l of books published in Central Europe, is an index of perso nal names only, thu s limitin g its usefulness . The numerous photographs (including some very interestin g ones such as the pen used in the signin g of the treaty), drawin gs, and political cartoons are unfortunate ly blurry. They , along with proclamations and other items that should be read , are difficult to view. Another problem concerns maps. Due to the deta il ed leve l of descriptions of various battles and boundary negotiations and delin eat ion s, more and better quality maps should have been included. Perhaps the most bothersome aspect of the book, starting on page 100 and continuing many times over the next thirty pages or so, is that the " Rumanian s" or so me variation of thi s word keep appearing in the middl e of sentences or take the places of other words , makin g reading at times incomprehensi ble, or even absurd. Despite these shortcoming, which are for the most part trivial and annoying , thi s book is required reading for anyone interested in the end of the First World War, the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the ri se of the Czecho-Slovak state, the early post-war period in Central Europe, and the Treaty of Trianon itself. Hronsky has done a great �SLOVAKIA 154 serv ice by all owi ng fo r the translation of hi s book, whi ch otherwi se wo uld have had a very limited readership. Jni o k apitanovi Janovi Nalepkovi. Edited by Jozef Nalepka. Spi sska Nova Yes: Po lygrafia, 2002. 172 pp. , illustrations. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN Tall ahassee, Florida T horo ugh the co urse of military hi story the reader peri odi ca ll y encounters individu als who see med destined to become men of the pen, but who instead became men of the sword. Such was the case of Jan Nale pka. He was a poet by vocati on and a teacher by profess ion, and yet became a co mpetent military comm ander. Called up fo r military service by the Sl ova k Re public durin g World War II, Nalepka fo ught with di stincti on on both sides. Li ke many S lovaks sent to the Eastern Front, he deserted , and then fo ught alongs ide Sov iet parti sans in the Pripet Marches of Belaru s and northern Ukraine . Thi s biographi ca l study, edi ted by hi s brother, includes sampl es of Nalepka ' s wartime correspo nde nce, and the acco unts of peopl e who remembered him - teachers, students, fe ll ow soldi ers and Soviet military comm anders. One influenti a l fig ure d uring Na le pka ' s fo rm ati ve years in primary school in Spi ss ka Nova Yes was hi s teac her Jozef Miko laj, a Czec hos lovak Legionnaire of the First World War rece ntl y returned from long years of travel. He foun d Jan to have a provocat ive sense of humor and a mi sc hiev ious di spos ition, yet he exce ll ed academi ca ll y. Miko laj was parti cul arl y impressed with Jan' s kn ow ledge of the poets of the Slovak Nati onal Rev iva l, and his being inspired by the fo lk songs of hi s mother. Youn g Nalepka re mained precoc ious after enterin g teac her's college in 193 1. A confere nce of young teachers in Ko morna Lehotka (Jul y 1933) was visited by Czec hos lovak pres ide nt T. G. M asaryk. T he pres ide nt viewed the educati o nal system as a means of moul d in g youn g Slovaks in a "Czec hos lovak" �SLOVAKIA 155 spirit. But Nalepka remarked to hi s fri e nd Vladimfr Clementis that Slovak students were capable of c ulti vating the ir ow n sp irit. Na lepka was a nation a li st, but he was a lso a lefti st. In February of 1939 he began organizing c landest ine e le me nts aga in st the governing Slovak People' s Party - one month before the latter ass umed the leadership of a separate Slovak state . Ye t the events of March 1939 included a Hungari a n invas ion in the so utheast. Called up for military serv ice, Nalepka participated willingly in th e brief borde r war. He saw no contradiction between thi s action and hi s own idea ls. Latte r th at year, Slovakia's military alliance with Nazi Germany dictated hi s parti c ipation in the Poli sh ca mpai g n. Na le pk a, by now a lie ute nant, fought with di stinction on the northern s ide of the Carpathi ans. He was decorated by General Fe rdinand Catlos, Slovakia's Mini ster of Nationa l Defence. The war against Soviet Ru ss ia proved problemati ca l. Slovakia had te ritorial g rievances with Hungary and Pol a nd , but none w ith the Ru ss ians. Moreover, Na le pka had already beco me a li e nated by the arrogance of the nati ve Carpatho-Germans in Eastern Slovakia, who had the ir own Nazi organization. Finaly, like many Slovak so ldi ers, he was horified by Na zi atroc iti es in the occupied te rritori es. He clandestinely e ntered into contact with Soviet parti sans and eventually deserted to the m, takin g hi s men with him . Soviet parti san commander (and Red Army ge nera l) A. N. Saburov found Na le pka to be a competent subordin ate, who retained command of the Slovaks. The nature of partisan warfare in the swamps dictated that Na le pka freque ntl y travelled on horseback , carry ing an a utom atic weapon. A photograph of thi s legendary pose later in spired an equestrian sc ulpture of him by Anna Ki sakova. Thi s activity also contributed to hi s demi se. Captain Jan Nalepka was killed in an encounter with a German patrol outside the village of Ovruc o n the ni g ht of Nove mber 17 , 1943. Thi s study contains a weakness commo n to publi caation s about a " hometown boy" . It prese nts certa in fac ts in pass in g, presupposing the audi e nce is already familiar w ith the m. Whil e thi s may work for �SLOV AKIA 156 know ledgeable S lovaks, it leaves fo reigners in the dar k on key parti cul ars. Indeed , its greatest weekness lies not in what is sa id but what is left un said. Na le pk a's surv ivin g co mrades na med the ir parti sa n bri gade afte r him . The Captain Jan Nalepka Bri gade was later parasc huted back into Slovaki a to parti c ipate in the autumn 1944 upri sin g. Compared to other uni ts whi ch the Sov iets ex ported , and whic h large ly e ngaged in loot in g and pill ag in g, the Na lepka Bri gade conducted itse lf in a n exe mpl ary fas hi on. Together w ith the 2 nd Czec hoslovak Paratroo pe rs, it shares c redit fo r the capture of th e strateg ic vill age of Ja ln a in the Hron Ri ver va ll ey on Oc tobe r 10- 12. This acti on was the las t vic tory of the insurge nts in S lovakia dur ing the upris ing. A wartime fe ll ow-officer, Samue l S imonov ic, states that Jan Nalepk a was not a Communi st (p. 111 ). He di ed at a conve ni e nt time , whic h e na bl ed him to beco me a lege nd in the postwar co mmuni st era. Hi s peasant pare nts were rece ived with hono ur in the Sov ie t Union at me mo rial servi ces dedic ated to the captain. Yet one may questi on what fa te would have had in store fo r him had he li ved longer. A " w ise guy" mi ght be given a wide berth by hi s teac hers on the me rit of hi s acade mi c exce ll e nce, but not by a tota litari a n reg im e. His equ all y precoc ious fr ie nd V ladimfr C le me ntis went on to become Czec hos lovak ia's fo reig n mini ste r, but ultim ate ly e nded on the gall ows. In sofa r as the c urre nt Slovak Re public has adopted the Slovak Nati onal Upri sing rathe r than Jozef Ti so ' s Slovaki a as its lodestone, Captain Jan Nalepk a re mains a worthy subject of stud y. Hi s life cuts across the ideo log ica l lines th at later di vided the East and West du ring the Co ld War. Hi s c haracter serves to de bunk a certain stereotype of S lova ks as be in g subservie nt to a uth ority. Thi s book is a positi ve contributi on to wartime Slovak hi story. �SLOVAKIA 157 Zo ltan G . Mes ko, The S ilent Conspiracy: A Communist M odel of Political Cleansing at the Slovak Uni versity in B ratislava after the Second W orld War. Boulder, CO : East Europea n Monographs, 2003, ix- l 42pp., map, illustrati ons, notes, bibliography. L.P. HINTERB UCHNER Rye, New York When I read the orig inal Slova k vers ion "Zaml cane sprisahanie" by Dr. Zo ltan G. Mes ko in 1999, I was moved by the vivid descripti on of the eve nts th at befe ll th e medi ca l co mmunity in Slovaki a during and after World W ar II , th ro ugh the " liberation" by th e Soviets and after the illega l take-over by the Communi sts of Czec hoslovaki a in 1948. I knew many of the principal actors in the ensuin g dram a but I was not full y aware of wh at tran spired at the Medi cal School in Brati slava where I graduated the same year th at D r. Mes ko started hi s studi es. M y opini o n abo ut thi s book the n was th at it represented an important hi stori ca l testimo ny about the insane and destructi ve influence of the communi st regime on the professors and students of two medi ca l sc hool s, one in Brati slava the other in Kos ice. The poorly-trained new ph ys ici ans, who se credenti als had to be primaril y political , in ev itabl y led to inadequ ate and inferi or hea lth care fo r the nation. Th e publication in 2003 of the improved and enh anced Engli sh version of thi s work , "The S il ent Conspi racy," marks a fittin g completi on of the author' s doc umentati o n of th at peri od , based on hi s personal observati ons, interviews of th e principals and of witnesses, and the detailed research of avail able records. I read th e Eng li sh and the Slovak versio ns s ide-by-s ide and reli ved the angui sh th at the parti c ipants of thi s drama must have felt in those times. I was aga in moved by th e author' s personal remini sce nces of the "good o ld days" with hi s fa mil y, before registering to stud y medi c ine. I mu st co nfess that the Eng li sh vers io n he ld my �SLOVAKIA 158 close attention more than the Slovak one. It is a page-turner; and one is reluctant to lay the book down. There is a bri ef but very informative acco unt of the hi storica l background of the Slovak nation by professor Mark Sto larik, an improvement over the Slovak vers ion. The rest of the book is more an inte rpre tation of the Slovak edition than a verbatim tran slat ion . The res ult is th at the E ng li sh is fluent , easy to read a nd de finitely much be tte r than most Slovak publications in Eng li sh, despite occas ion a l ling ui stic errors and inaccuracies, no ne of them s ubsta nti a l. Regrettably , not a ll of the illustrati o ns from the S lovak edition appear in the En g li sh o ne . Dr. Mesko recently in for med me that the first draft was written in Eng li sh. The strength of thi s work is in the detailed acco unt of the persecu ti o n, humili at io n, torture and incarceratio n of those who , because of their re li g ious back ground or personal integrity , did not join in worshiping comm uni sm, the Soviet Union a nd its murdere r-in-chi ef Stalin. Some victim s disappeared without any trace , othe rs perished in the uranium mines of the western Czec h la nd s and many spent years in prison and did hard labor. The a uthor li sts names and dates and provides documented description s of these terrible tran sgres sion s. Dr. Mesko ' s book is an importa nt co ntributi o n to the post-war hi story of the Slovak nat ion . It has the immediacy of an eyew itness report. To those w ho do not read Slovak , it pro vides a window o n events large ly unknown to Eng li sh readers. It provides a hi storic a l g limpse of how eve nts in Slovakia in the 1940 's separated the "good g uys" who would not betray their re li g iou s and mora l principl es, from vac ill ators , weak lin gs, thieve s, torturers a nd murderers, all without any moral scruples. The book a lso describes how politi ca l opportunists stabbed the ir intellectually an d professio na ll y s upe rior colleagues in the back . It demon strates how po liti ca l a nd party affiliations rep laced merit in the grad ing of stude nts and in di spe ns ing the most desired positions and jobs to " politically correct" applicants. It show s how the absence �SLOVAKIA 159 of party affili ati on re nde red outstandin g professors and teac he rs vulnerable a nd subj ec t to chic anery. lt record s the establi shm e nt of a Chair of Marxi s m-Le nini sm a t th e M ed ica l School for th e reeducation of the faculty and of the student body. Dr. Mesko also doc ume nts the large ly unknown attempt of the Communists to meddl e with the curriculum in the Medical School. They recruited a cadre of yo ungsters from workers ' bac kground s who had very littl e education , se nt them to spec ial classes in the Medical School a nd graduated them as " physicians," a di saster waiting to happen. This e ffort apparentl y failed a nd eventu all y faded away. No further information about these "graduates" is avai labl e. Finall y, the book illustrates why the re was friction between Catholics and Lutherans in th e Medical Schoo l, a nd rev is its that old probl e m between Czechs and Slova ks, name ly the di sc redited idea of a " Czechoslovak nation " propagated by Edvard Be nes a nd T .G. Masaryk and their cohorts. Researche rs and seri ous students of the hi story of Central Europe will find a rich resource for their work in this boo k. Readers who are of Slovak origin, but not proficient in that la nguage, will be nefi t from the English version which provides a g limpse of soc ietal forces that shaped the dest in y of Slovakia a nd its evo lution toward s independe nce. Mari a Dziakova- Bi:ihmova, Dusa na dlani: Spomienky od Kosfc do New Yorku. Edited by Michal Kri sko and Be rnarda Jenc fkov a- Fabrici . Presov , Mic hal Vasko, 2004, 151 pp. Illustrati ons M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa This autobiography, compl eted by ' Mari a Dziakova-Bi:imova in August of 1989, just before the collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia, nea tl y summ arizes the tri als and tribul ation s of Slovak �160 SLOVAKIA intellectuals during and after World War II . Born in 1910 in a vill age near Kosice, she was the e ldest of three daughters of a poor peasant family. Nevertheless, her parents recogni zed her extraord in ary intelli gence and they skrimped and saved in order to send her to the " realgy mn as ium" for g irl s a nd then to the Faculty of Medicine at Comenius Uni vers ity in Bratislava. She grad uated with her degree in 1934 and began her practice in Kosice. Between 1938 and 1944 Dr. Bohmova (s he marri ed Dr. Emanuel Bohm in 194 1) li ved in Magyar occ upi ed Kosice and later Budapest, he lpin g her politically-activist hu sband defend the Slovak comm unity agai nst forced Magyarization. Meanwhile, she tried to continue her med ical practice, with vary in g success. As the Second World War drew to a c lose, she and her hu sband managed to return to S lovak ia, survived the pass ing of the Ru ss ian front, and re-established themselves in Bratislava in 1945. While she worked for the State In sti tute for Hea lth , her hu sband became Commi ss ioner of Health for Slovakia and Deputy Speaker of the Federal Assembly in Prague . After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovaki a in 1948 Emanuel Bohm fl ed to the west and she jo ined him in Lo ndo n a littl e later. They spe nt the nex t four years working as manu al laboure rs until the United States allowed them to e nter as immi grants in 195 2. Since Maria had to flee Czechoslovakia without any of her diplomas, a nd they co uld not easi ly be mailed to her during the Stalinist l 950's, she had to start over as an intern in the USA. By 1956 she had passed all of he r medical exa ms and sett led into a career in medic ine at the Kin gsbrook Jewi sh Medical Center in New York, and retired as Assistant Director of Medicine in 1975 . Maria and Emanuel active ly participated in Slovak inte ll ectu al a nd political life in New York for the second half of the twentieth century. She a nd he r hu sband took a leading role in the Slovak-American Cultural Center of New York , the Limbora dancing group , the General Mi Ian Rast is lav Stefanik Award , and the an nu al SlovakAmerican Ball at New York ' s Athletic C lub. They also participated in the founding of the Slovak World Co ngress in 1970, of which her �SLOVAKIA 161 husband became a vice-president. The book is a pleasure to read . Maria had a talent for writing and, at one point, she even recon structed a letter that she wrote on behalf of her illiterate mother in the eastern Slovak dialect to an uncle who had emigrated to the United States before World War I. She used the same di alect, and the same uncle ' s name (who had long since disappeared), when she wrote to her sister in Kosice, imploring her to try to mail the diplomas that she had to leave behind when she fled Communist Czechoslovakia. Thi s subterfuge worked because the Czech postal officials in Prague, who were in charge of censoring the mai l, were apparently confounded by thi s dialect and allowed the letter through. Maria eventually received her diplomas, but only after she had to once again prove her medical acumen by pass ing very rigorous American exams. In spite of her trial s and tribulations, Maria Dziakova-Bohmova did not become bitter. Instead , she was thankful to the United States for having given her the chance to start a new life in the New World. She returned for visits to Czechoslovakia in 1969 and 1978 and noticed how her younger sisters had prematurely aged and how so many of her colleagues from the " realgymnasium" and the university had also either aged or died in thi s "socialist paradise." She and her hu sband visited free Czechoslovakia in 1990; he died at the end of the year and was buried in the national cemetery in Martin . After Maria died in 1999, her remains were interred beside him. Thus, Slovakia recognized the achievements of these two extraordinary indi vi dual s. We should be grateful to Bernharda Jencfkova-Fabrici , executrix of her will, for having gathered together Maria's memoirs, for having persuaded Michal Krisko to edit them, and for havi ng arranged for Michal Vasko to publish them. The book is well-worth reading, both for a glimpse at the evolution of the Slovak inte lli genti a in the first Czechoslovak Republic , and for the harsh consequences that awaited those members who refused to sub mit to the Communist takeover of their homeland and who fled into exi le. �SLOVAKIA 162 Karen Henderson, Slovakia: The Escape from fnvisibihty. London and New York: Routledge, 2002, xviii-140 pp., map, notes, bibliography, index. JURAJ HOCMAN Carleton University A few years ago Slovakia suffered from a rather negative image of radical nationalism, especiall y in the West. One reason was that foreign scholars were rare in the region and Slovak history remained invisible. In 1987 a young scholar from England was given an unexpected opportunity to spend a couple of months in Bratislava, the country's capital. Attracted by both Slovakia 's past and present, Karen Henderson gradua ll y became more in volved in Slovak affairs. The author' s knowledge of the evolution of Slovak society through the centuries enabled her to reach a new perspective. Meanwhile, she also witnessed the country ' s political development after its establishment as a sovereign state on January 1st, 1993, its first appearance on the international scene and its chi ldhood illnesses as well. Henderson ' s book then documents the steps taken by the new Slovak government after the elections of September 1998 that were designed to improve the country's democratic performance, and that eventually led to its significantly changed image abroad. The author of the book , a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Leicester in the U.K. , took a balanced look at the Slovak Republic while concentrati ng on four areas of its evolution . In the first part she focused on the Slovaks in the Kingdom of Hungary and on the pre-war Czechoslovak Republic . She succes sfully demonstrated her familiarity with the main trends that formed and influenced the mentality of Slovak soc iety exposed to the processes of forced " Magyarisation" that took place after the Austro-H un garian Comprom ise of 1867. She also hi ghlighted the processes of "Czechoslovakism" that marked the relation- �SLOVAKIA 163 ship between the Slovaks and Czechs before the Second Wor ld W ar with traces of di stru st o n o ne side and suspi c ion o n the other. In co ntras t to the preva ilin g traditi o na l approaches to Slova ki a that have been influe nced by ste reotypes impl a nted into Sl ovak hi sto ry, the auth or shows a re markabl e e mpathy fo r the way the Slovaks saw the mse lves in the fo rmer states of whi ch they had been a part for ce nturi es (the Hun gari an Kin gdo m), o r fo r decades (Czec hos lo va kia) . He nde rso n attributes the fa ilures shared by Slovaks w ith the ir partners o bj ecti ve ly and fa irl y. Slovaks are seen as the vic tim s in relati o n to the two main determina nts above. O n the other hand , Henderson, who knows the terra in of Ce nt ra l a nd East Euro pe and its non-linear a nd some tim e e ni gmati c h is to ry as we ll , a lso de mo nstrates an ability to ide ntify the mo me nts and events in whi ch Slo vak fa ilures and ruptures happe ned due to the ir indec is ive ness, bi ases , ambi g uiti es, un willin g ness o r pass ivity in copin g w ith e me rg in g situation s (e.g. the Slovak Republi c 1939-1 945). In the second part o f the boo k He nde rson dea ls w ith inde pe ndent Slo vaki a after January I'', 1993 . She foc uses o n the governme nts of Prime Mini sters Vladim fr Mec iar a nd Mikul as Dzurinda, whil e notin g a sharp co ntrast betwee n the two. The parli ame ntary e lection s he ld in Septe mbe r o f 1998 made a substanti a l difference in the eyes of Western governme nts and public audi e nces . A detail ed pi cture of what had preceded the fa ll of Mec iar ' s governme nt may be of interest to those who are not fa mili ar w ith the intern a l deve lo pme nt of Slovak soc iety and who want to better know the reasons fo r the fa ilure o f Mec iar' s po lic ies. For those who know it we ll , it is a re minde r and summ ary of what was prev io usly published and broadcast in the print and e lectroni c medi a. However, the a utho r ' s a im was to foc us o n the shi ft in mode rn Slovak hi story th at a ll owed the state and soc iety to escape its in visibility, and thi s is what undo ubtedl y deserves recogniti o n. The last parts of th e book are dedi cated to Slovak ia ' s re lati o nship with the world fro m 19 18 to the present. In spite of the auth or 's overa ll pe rspec ti ve regardin g Slovaki a after th e pe ri od 1989- 1993, �SLOVAKIA 164 one could agree with her view th at " The Slovak Republic has not been particul arl y stable po liticall y, but as a state it has not been fundamentall y instable either" (p. 129). This may be also be perceived as the bottom level of Slovak statehood and the capability of the Slovak Republic to survive as a modern state that was initi all y questioned both dipl o matica ll y and publicl y at the beg innin g of its ex istence. Neve rtheless, the se nsiti ve reader may also find so me sub-themes and situation s described in the book that require furth er di scuss ion or a better nu anced approach (for example, so me aspects of the iss ues of ethnic minorities, the political culture and so on). Henderson 's footnotes and bibliography illustrate that the author used a wide variety of sources, from skeptical critics to pass ion ate apologists of Slovak hi story. She tried to steer a middle co urse between them and used books and schol arl y articles , as well as documents of Slovak academi c institution s and reports of non-governmental organi zation s as her principal sources . She also used re levant documents and reports iss ued by international or supran ational organization s regardin g Slovaki a ' s developme nt and progress (The World Bank, NATO, The European Union , etc.). O verall , Henderson did a good job. In my opinion Henderson ' s book successfull y refl ec ts a positive shi ft in the perception of Slovakia from the outside, and in bringing a pos itive picture to larger audi ences. In the last fe w decades Slovak society has been portrayed by both academi cs and public ists selecti vely and negati ve ly, large ly due to extern a l factors th at affec ted Slovak hi story. From now on , the question of whether the positi ve image of the country will be sustained will depend upon Slovaki a's willingness and capability to remain on track and avoid any detours from its democratic deve lopment. �SLOVAKIA 165 The Slovak Republic: A Decade of Independence (I 993-2002). Edited by M. Mark Stolarik. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy -Carducci Publi shers, 2004, xiv-168 pp. tables, charts, graphs, notes, map, index. CAROL SKALNIK LEFF University of Illinois, Urbana-Champai gn Durin g the interwar Czechoslovak Re public, several volumes were published employing a format that could be described as " progress reports," in which responsible government officials of the time outlined the state of the field in key iss ue areas. This current volume, desc ribed as Slovakia's " first ' white paper, "' performs much the same function for the first decade of the independent state. In many cases, the " ten years after" vantage point is rather artificial , but in this case it is especially appropriate and the findin gs will have more than transitory value, because this is a decade framed by the successful passage from nascent state to me mbership in the European Union and NATO. Scholars interested in Slovakia' s " rehabilitation" from seco nd tier to new EU member will find thi s decade of continuin g relevance. And if there is an occasional celebratory note in the di scussion, it is understandabl e in the context of the decade ' s achievement of European integration. M . Mark Stolarik, who in his function as Chairholder in Slovak Hi story and Culture at the University of Ottawa, also co-organized the conference on which the published work is based, provides introductory thumbnail sketches of the arguments in eac h of the main contributions, and annotations of the text on politics, to clarify and update the discussion. The core articles that follow, dealing successively with politi cs, economic s, soc ial policy , culture and international relations, are the presentations of Rudolf Schuster, Slovakia' s first elected pres ident, and e ight high-rankin g and quite prominent Slovak government officials, cabinet ministers and state secretaries. Each contribution rece ives a response from the North American side, �SLOVAKIA 166 ei the r from Canadian offic ia ls who have worked o n -and who disc uss--cooperati ve projects with Slovakia, or from a scho lar specia li zi ng in Slovakia. In addition to the detailed po li cy overviews discussed below, I fo und two addit io na l pieces particularly interesting: the exc ha nge o n c ultural po li cy be twee n th e n- Culture Mini ster Mil an Kn azko and Martin Votruba, director of the Slovak Studies program at the University of Pittsburg h and the di sc uss ion of hum an ri ghts and ethni c re lation s by Pa l Csaky, an important Slovak Hun garia n po liti cian and Deputy Prime Minister, and Paul Magocs i of the University of Toronto, whose experti se o n the minoriti es of the reg ion in fo rmed hi s ge nera li zed critique of th e Jacobin-inspired view of state hi story through the prism of the dom in ant nati o na lity in many European countries . The compe ndium is sketchi est on the politics, devoting suffic ient time for orientation but no in-de pth a na lys is, which in thi s case makes sense in severa l ways, not least because the po liti cs of transiti o n has alread y been ex haustive ly ana lyzed in ex istin g sc ho larl y work. The iss ue areas covered are a no ther matter. Muc h less informati o n cover in g po lic y is readily ava il abl e in existing work , so thi s is exceedin g ly useful gro und to cover. Most chapters are e nri c hed with some unex pected inform ation a l treas ures, since the poli cy profil es are de ta il ed and spec ific rathe r th an vag ue or genera li zed , and the re are a multitude of useful tabl es and charts that e ncode co mparati ve and tim e series data on fo re ig n debt a nd in vestme nt , e mpl oy me nt , mino rity ed ucation , li fe expectancy and so o n. While not inte nded as a reference work, the anth o logy the refore atta in s so methin g of th at status; o nce read, it can be sto red to hand for speci fi c refere nce on a range of subjects. Our library doesn ' t have thi s book yet, but it soon wi ll. �SLOVAKIA 167 Thomas J. Shelley , Slovak s on the Hudson: Most Holy Trinity Church , Yonkers, & Th e Slovak Catholics of the Archdiocese of New York, 1894 -2000. Washin gton , D.C. : The Catholic University of America Press, 2002. xv-273pp., maps, illustrati o ns, bibliography , index. DANIEL F. T ANZONE Passaic, New Jersey Slovaks on the Hudson, by the noted church hi storian Thomas J. Shelley, adds an important chapter to the hi story of the American Catholic Church. While the city of Yonkers, New York, with a population of just under 200,000 cannot be compared with the metropoli ses of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland or Pittsburgh, it is, in fact , a microcosm of bi g city Catholicism. The city's nineteen Catholic parishe s, including tho se serving the Slovak s, Italian s, Hun garia ns and most recently the Portugese, along with two of the Byza ntine rite , contributed to the gro wth of Catholic life in the community. Catholics would soo n become major players in the city 's soc ial , educational, cultural and political life. While thi s book tell s the story of Slovak settlement in the river town of Yonke rs startin g in the l 880's, it also presents a picture of the city's political establi shment and its reaction to the grow in g immigrant population. Most of these newcomers hailed from the Catholic nation s of central and southern Europe. Slovaks, along with other Slavic peoples, found work in the city's vast mill structure, and had the opportunity to make a new life for themselves and their families. While the local " Nativi sts" often resented and mi sunderstood these immigrants and their ways, the WASP establishment gradually accepted them into the fabric of c ity life. Indeed , by 1903 a Slovak immigrant was elected to Yonkers city govern ment. Like other immigrant gro ups, the Slovaks clung to their language and faith tradition s. First they esta bli shed loca l fraternal -benefit �168 SLOVAKIA societies, which became affiliated with the national bodies in the 1890's. Yonkers had the first women 's lodge in New York State ( 1892), which became branch 2 of the First Catholic Slovak Ladies ' Association. Its other Slovak fraternals gave birth to Most Holy Trinity Church, which traced its roots to 1891 when laymen petitioned the local bishop for permission to establish a pari sh. The local parish church was very important to the laity, both as a place of worship and as a social gathering place. The parishioners married and raised their children in the shadow of the church steeple in the Hollow section of Yonkers. Most Holy Trinity afforded its people the opportunity to pass on the language, culture and traditions of their ancestral homeland. The clergy and religious, especially the sisters of Cyril and Methodius , who staffed the parish school, taught the children the Slovak language and traditions . Slovaks on the Hudson never forgot the plight of their brethren along the Danube, Yah, Hron and Torysa rivers. Indeed, the clergy and leaders of the Yonkers community played an important ro le in the establishment of Czecho-Slovakia following the col lapse of the Dual Monarchy of A ustria-Hungary . One of the pastors of Most Holy Trinity was actually offered a cabinet post in the newly-established Czecho-Slovakia in 1919. Throughout the long winter of communist domination of their ancestral homeland, the Slovaks of Yonkers never gave up hope of seeing their countrymen freed from this alien ideology and they rejoiced when Slovakia achieved its independence on January I, 1993. Thomas J. Shelley has provided the reader with a wonderful opportunity to view the life of the Slovak immigrant community within the context of big city li fe. It is a fascinating story, warts and all, of the Church in America. It is al so an important contribution to American history because the Slovaks are rapidly assimilating and moving to the suburbs while Yonkers is receiving ever more and newer immigrants. It is a welcome addition to the story of so many American ethnic groups who make up o ur ever-expanding multicultural society. �SLOVAKIA 169 June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism: Slovaks and Other Immigrants in the lnterwar Era. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004, xiv-278 p.p., illustrations, notes, index. M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa The purpose of this book is to explore group-generated activities among Slovak-Americans in the inter-war period of American history and to see if such activities fit into recent "whiteness" studies by professional American historians. Alexander' s theme is that in the 1920's and 1930's both first and second-generation American Slovaks "were haunted by the stigma of inferiority inflicted by American society." (P.12). They sought to overcome this stigma by purchasing Liberty Bonds during the Great War and War Bonds during the Second World War. Meanwhile, they engaged in patriotic marches, carrying both the American and Slovak flags in the two wars, they staged large "S lovak Days" in the I 920's and 1930's in order to show off their ethnicity while stressing their Americanness and they openly supported FDR's New Deal legislation in order to help their pioneers and their fraternal-benefit societies to survive the ravages of the Great Depression. In order to prove her thesis Alexander dug deeply into both archival and printed sources. She studied the records of several large fraternal-benefit societies, the correspondence of their officers, and a wide range of Slovak-American newspapers. She also read widely in American history. Alexander concluded that Slovak-American identity did not arise from their growing "whiteness" in a racist American society, as some American historians had postulated of other ethnic groups, but rather from their nationality (ethnicity). Indeed, she also saw no generational or even class cleavage among American Slovaks, who perceived of themselves as overwhelmingly "working class" and united in their �170 SLOVAKIA efforts to win acceptance as one of the " newcomer" peoples to the United States. Al exander's book will , no doubt, win many acco lades from those profess ional A meri can hi stori ans who write hi story fo r themselves. She is very much a part of the so-call ed "di scourse" school whi ch uses social hi story in order to probe into questi ons of " whiteness," class, identity, celebrations, ass imilati on and so on. These hi stori ans deri ve great pleasure in proving or dispro ving eac h other 's theori es and show in g off their erudition . By so doin g, however, th ey c ut them selves off from the general public , which is hun gry for tradi tional , narrati ve, hi story . As a result, a second group of hi stori ans fill s thi s public hunger, and they are contemptu ously di smi ssed as " popul ar" hi stori ans by the academi cs mention ed above. On the other hand , the " popul ar" hi stori ans sell hundreds of thou sand s of copies of the ir books while the academic histori ans are delighted if they can sell a thou sand. While several hundred uni versity libraries will , no doubt, purchase a copy of thi s book, I have a feeling th at the Slovak-American community will hardl y notice it, whi ch is a pity. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2005, Vol. 38 Description An account of the resource Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document REVIEWS SLOVAKIA 149 Peter Ze nuc h, M edzi vychodom a zapadom: Byzantsko-slovan- ska tradfcia, kultura a j azyk na vychodnom Slovensku. Brati slava: Veda , 2002. 286 pp., notes, bibliograph y, summari es in German and Ru ss ian. ROB ERT A. ORR Uni versity of Ottawa Thi s book provides va luabl e in sig hts, from severa l ang les, into a co mparati ve ly neglected area of Slavic studies: the place of Eastern Slovakia as an area straddling the di v ide between Eastern and Western Slavdom , which has cha nged hands severa l times in the course of its hi story. Although, as Zenuch shows in numerous pl aces (starting from the first page of the introducti o n), Easte rn Slovakia is generall y pl aced firmly o n the W estern side of the divide from lin- •• gui stic , cultural, and hi storical points of view (often being cited as part of Slavia Latina, Slavia Romana), it also saw the development of a homegrow n Church Slavonic tradition, a sort of " Slovak Church Slavonic", w ith a ll that it e ntail s, e.g., poor know ledge of Church Slavonic itse lf ( 127); in stances of hype rcorrection ( 168); and the gradual e merge nce of errors in re nditi o ns of so ngs, mak ing the m g radually less comprehensibl e to the laity over time (237-238). Zenuch 's book beg in s with a detailed tabl e of contents, followed by an introduc tion consisting of di sc uss ion s of approaches to the iss ue from the point of view of literature and hi sto ry, re li g io n and culture, and the hi storica l and lin g ui stic conditions. He then presents hi s major arg ume nts in e ight unnumbe red chapters , dealing roughly with hi storica l and c ultural developments in Eastern Slovakia and the Union of Uzhorod ( 1646), which broug ht the area w ithin the Uni ate C hurc h, under the authority of Rome, in the same way as the Uni o n of Brest ( 1596) did for Wes tern Ukraine; the Cyrillomethodian traditi o n in Eastern Slovakia, and that of St. Demetrius of Sa lonika; SLOVAKIA 150 the ro le of para litu rg ica l so ng in th e Byza ntin o-S lav ic ri te; the la ng uage of se lected Cy rilli c ma nu sc ript s; th e interpre tat io n of certa in lin g ui sti c phe no me na in se lec ted manu sc ripts, whi ch he treats in co nsiderabl e detail ; and C hurch S lavoni c in Eastern S lovak ia , providing a fa irl y deta il ed ling ui stic ana lys is, es pec ia ll y of the lex icon. So urces are ex te ns ive ly referenced (23 prim ary so urces and 265 bibli ographi ca l ite ms, mostl y in Slova k, Ru ss ia n, a nd Ukra ini an, wi th some ite ms in Eng li sh, Hun gari an, etc.), w hi ch at times becomes rather cumberso me , w ith the foo tn otes (666) takin g up more than ha lf a page in pl aces. S urpris in g ly. in view of its titl e, the book offers o nl y a fa irl y bri ef di sc uss io n of the period before the Uni o n of Uzhorod (the " Byzantsko" in the titl e sound s vague ly a nac hro ni stic), jumping ra pidl y to 1646 (59-60). In view of its impo rtance, perh aps the Uni o n of Uzhorod could have been incorporated into th e actu a l titl e of the boo k (... Vychodne Slovensko po prijatf Uihorodskej unie, pe rhaps?). As me nti oned above, several Sl av ic c ultures are in contact within or c lose to Eas te rn S lova kia , and Zen o uc h di sc usses the lin g ui sti c aspects of such contacts in some deta il. In ma ny instances lang uage and re li g ion were intertw ined, and much of the no menc lature refl ec ts thi s situ ati o n, w ith te rm s suc h as Rusnak . Rusyn, Slovak, Slovj ak, e tc. be in g utili sed to de no te di ffe re nces in lang uage and re li g io n ( 126; as he puts it, e .g ., "every Gree k Ca th o li c was ta ke n fo r a Ru sy n" ( I 32)) . Vag ue aware ness of thi s co mpl ex ity has spread o uts ide the immedi ate area, with the genera ll y kn ow n Latin term Rut- heni ("Ruthe ni an") hav ing both re li g io us and ling ui sti c connotati ons. Eve n the ultim ate ly ephe mera l "s in g le Czec hos lovak" peopl e fig ure in some of the treatments ( 196- 197). Zeno uch c ites exampl es of such interconnecti o ns as , e .g., Sl ovak- U kraini an ( 137) , as we ll as lex ica l ite ms fro m ne ig hbo urin g lang uages, so metimes c itin g the same ite m in severa l la ng uages, e .g ., prikaza iie, etc .. ( 179). He makes sk ilful use of the tex ts of vari o us songs, w ith di sc uss io ns of vari o us types of song, and how to di sting ui sh the m to illustrate hi s po ints (e.g., 11 0 fn . 269), o ne of which ( 0 vyhnanf A dama i Evy z raja; 172-173) is SLOVAKIA 151 eve n desc ribed as "s love nsko-po l's ko- ru sin sko[m ]" . He provides the Ni cene C reed in both Cy rilli c and Ro man, with stresses marked , to illustrate pro nunc iati o n (223 -224). Ze i\ o uc h deserves co mme nd ati o n fo r severa l passages a nd hi s treatment of sma ll points of deta il , e.g., hi s ex pl anati o n of drevo ( 173 fn . 498). He offe rs an excell e nt o utline of the earl y hi sto ry of Eastern Sl ovaki a (27, pass im), a nd definiti o ns of term s suc h as ca th olicos (33); sluienie (79); akatist (82), etc. On a re lated leve l, he offers useful di sc uss io ns of etymologies, e.g., S lovak Tabor ( 147). The interaction of c ultures and c hang ing borde rs in Easte rn Slovaki a meant , amo ng othe r thin gs, that a large number of la ng uages and orthographi es were used . Ze i\o uc h consiste ntl y c ites a ll mate ri a l in its ori g in a l orthograph y and fo nts, even ex te ndin g to, e.g ., c iting Russ ian refere nces in pre-Revolution orthograph y (e.g ., 59-60 ; 127), and Hun gari an orthograph y ( 196). In a text of suc h compl ex ity it is pe rhaps inev itabl e th at th e re sho uld be so me mi sprints, a lth o ug h tho se have bee n ke pt to a minimum , e.g., Atrni (54); Kovard vnvourro.X1f, ( 154) liturg ig ue (71 fn . 186 ); MaTep111.nb1 (93) sho uld be MaTep111a.nb1 as it is in the bibliograph y (w hy MaTepia.nbl in the footnotes o n pp 95-98?); Ukr. Ye.noBiK ( 169); 111c.neAOBH111e (276). In additi o n to its intrin sic inte rest, the refo re, Easte rn Slovak ia presents an exce lle nt example of an area whe re lang uages, c ultures, and re li g io n show so me degree of overl ap, and as suc h deserves to be better kn own to the scho larl y world at large. It is to be ho ped that thi s book will be translated into Engli sh. The fac t th at the most substanti a l criti c ism in vo lves the ac tua l titl e of the boo k is an indi cati o n of its va lue, both fo r hi sto ri ans and ling ui sts. 152 SLOVAKIA Mari a n Hronsky, The Struggle for Slovakia and the Treaty of Trianon 1918- 1920. Martin Styan, trans lator. Brati slava: Veda, 200 1, 407 pp., illustration s, bibliography, index . GREGORY C. FERENCE Salisbury Univers ity Mari an Hron sky, an hi storian of World War I Slovakia and the early years of the Czecho-Slovak Republic , has written an excellent book . This is a tran slation of hi s 1998 work of the same title , although the Engl ish-language version is more academic. A lthough the Treaty of Trianon dea lt with the dismantlin g of large sections of greater Hungary into its surrounding neighbors after World War One, Hron sky focused on the events leadi ng up to the treaty and their effects upon Slovakia. This detailed study beg ins with an hi storiographic lesson in the Introduction where the author claims that today many people in Slovakia are unaware of the Trianon Treaty despite more attention being paid to it since the fa ll of Communism. A lthough over e ight decades have passed s ince the treaty was signed, Hron sky notes correctly that it still causes intense emotiona l feelings in Hungary and is crucial to understanding Slovak-Hungarian relation s today, especiall y since the treaty left over 700,000 Hun garian s (Magyars ) in Czecho-Slovakia and over 500,000 current ly in S lovakia. With regards to the time frame unde r investigation, the author later stated , also quite correctly, "The Hungarians had never devoted so much attention to Slovakia as in thi s period (p. 11 0)." The treaty naturall y separated Slovakia from Hungary and attached it to the Czech Lands, but for the first time , it also delineated recogni zed boundaries for Slovakia. In the process, the a uthor took notice of so me interesting twists, such as the CzechoSlovak army havin g fought its only real war during World War I, and the Hungarian s having coined the term " Little Entente" for the diplomatic cooperation of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania after SLOVAKIA 153 the war. The Hun garian s mourned the signin g of the treaty while it was hardly noticed by the average Slovak. Hron sky divided the book into six major sections: l. The End of the Kingdom of Hungary on the Political Scene; II. Power Vacuum in Slovaki a; Ill. The Struggle for Slovakia; IV . The War Between the Czecho-Slovak Republic and the Hun garian Soviet Republic ; V. The Peace Talks; and, VI. The Peace Treaty with Hun gary . In each section , there are numerou s sub-chapters that make the reading of thi s den se, fact-driven volume eas ier to negot iate. Much to hi s credit, Hronsky co nsulted numerou s archives , secondary so urces, and new spapers to present a very complete story. As with most tran slated works, thi s book could have used better proofreadin g. There are occasional subj ect-verb di sagreements, mi sspellings, tran slations of only some titles, wrong description s such as referrin g to Jan Smuts as a Briti sh general, and using a Slovak title to a book written by the Hungarian Oskar Jasz i. One defect, typica l of books published in Central Europe, is an index of perso nal names only, thu s limitin g its usefulness . The numerous photographs (including some very interestin g ones such as the pen used in the signin g of the treaty), drawin gs, and political cartoons are unfortunate ly blurry. They , along with proclamations and other items that should be read , are difficult to view. Another problem concerns maps. Due to the deta il ed leve l of descriptions of various battles and boundary negotiations and delin eat ion s, more and better quality maps should have been included. Perhaps the most bothersome aspect of the book, starting on page 100 and continuing many times over the next thirty pages or so, is that the " Rumanian s" or so me variation of thi s word keep appearing in the middl e of sentences or take the places of other words , makin g reading at times incomprehensi ble, or even absurd. Despite these shortcoming, which are for the most part trivial and annoying , thi s book is required reading for anyone interested in the end of the First World War, the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the ri se of the Czecho-Slovak state, the early post-war period in Central Europe, and the Treaty of Trianon itself. Hronsky has done a great SLOVAKIA 154 serv ice by all owi ng fo r the translation of hi s book, whi ch otherwi se wo uld have had a very limited readership. Jni o k apitanovi Janovi Nalepkovi. Edited by Jozef Nalepka. Spi sska Nova Yes: Po lygrafia, 2002. 172 pp. , illustrations. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN Tall ahassee, Florida T horo ugh the co urse of military hi story the reader peri odi ca ll y encounters individu als who see med destined to become men of the pen, but who instead became men of the sword. Such was the case of Jan Nale pka. He was a poet by vocati on and a teacher by profess ion, and yet became a co mpetent military comm ander. Called up fo r military service by the Sl ova k Re public durin g World War II, Nalepka fo ught with di stincti on on both sides. Li ke many S lovaks sent to the Eastern Front, he deserted , and then fo ught alongs ide Sov iet parti sans in the Pripet Marches of Belaru s and northern Ukraine . Thi s biographi ca l study, edi ted by hi s brother, includes sampl es of Nalepka ' s wartime correspo nde nce, and the acco unts of peopl e who remembered him - teachers, students, fe ll ow soldi ers and Soviet military comm anders. One influenti a l fig ure d uring Na le pka ' s fo rm ati ve years in primary school in Spi ss ka Nova Yes was hi s teac her Jozef Miko laj, a Czec hos lovak Legionnaire of the First World War rece ntl y returned from long years of travel. He foun d Jan to have a provocat ive sense of humor and a mi sc hiev ious di spos ition, yet he exce ll ed academi ca ll y. Miko laj was parti cul arl y impressed with Jan' s kn ow ledge of the poets of the Slovak Nati onal Rev iva l, and his being inspired by the fo lk songs of hi s mother. Youn g Nalepka re mained precoc ious after enterin g teac her's college in 193 1. A confere nce of young teachers in Ko morna Lehotka (Jul y 1933) was visited by Czec hos lovak pres ide nt T. G. M asaryk. T he pres ide nt viewed the educati o nal system as a means of moul d in g youn g Slovaks in a "Czec hos lovak" SLOVAKIA 155 spirit. But Nalepka remarked to hi s fri e nd Vladimfr Clementis that Slovak students were capable of c ulti vating the ir ow n sp irit. Na lepka was a nation a li st, but he was a lso a lefti st. In February of 1939 he began organizing c landest ine e le me nts aga in st the governing Slovak People' s Party - one month before the latter ass umed the leadership of a separate Slovak state . Ye t the events of March 1939 included a Hungari a n invas ion in the so utheast. Called up for military serv ice, Nalepka participated willingly in th e brief borde r war. He saw no contradiction between thi s action and hi s own idea ls. Latte r th at year, Slovakia's military alliance with Nazi Germany dictated hi s parti c ipation in the Poli sh ca mpai g n. Na le pk a, by now a lie ute nant, fought with di stinction on the northern s ide of the Carpathi ans. He was decorated by General Fe rdinand Catlos, Slovakia's Mini ster of Nationa l Defence. The war against Soviet Ru ss ia proved problemati ca l. Slovakia had te ritorial g rievances with Hungary and Pol a nd , but none w ith the Ru ss ians. Moreover, Na le pka had already beco me a li e nated by the arrogance of the nati ve Carpatho-Germans in Eastern Slovakia, who had the ir own Nazi organization. Finaly, like many Slovak so ldi ers, he was horified by Na zi atroc iti es in the occupied te rritori es. He clandestinely e ntered into contact with Soviet parti sans and eventually deserted to the m, takin g hi s men with him . Soviet parti san commander (and Red Army ge nera l) A. N. Saburov found Na le pka to be a competent subordin ate, who retained command of the Slovaks. The nature of partisan warfare in the swamps dictated that Na le pka freque ntl y travelled on horseback , carry ing an a utom atic weapon. A photograph of thi s legendary pose later in spired an equestrian sc ulpture of him by Anna Ki sakova. Thi s activity also contributed to hi s demi se. Captain Jan Nalepka was killed in an encounter with a German patrol outside the village of Ovruc o n the ni g ht of Nove mber 17 , 1943. Thi s study contains a weakness commo n to publi caation s about a " hometown boy" . It prese nts certa in fac ts in pass in g, presupposing the audi e nce is already familiar w ith the m. Whil e thi s may work for SLOV AKIA 156 know ledgeable S lovaks, it leaves fo reigners in the dar k on key parti cul ars. Indeed , its greatest weekness lies not in what is sa id but what is left un said. Na le pk a's surv ivin g co mrades na med the ir parti sa n bri gade afte r him . The Captain Jan Nalepka Bri gade was later parasc huted back into Slovaki a to parti c ipate in the autumn 1944 upri sin g. Compared to other uni ts whi ch the Sov iets ex ported , and whic h large ly e ngaged in loot in g and pill ag in g, the Na lepka Bri gade conducted itse lf in a n exe mpl ary fas hi on. Together w ith the 2 nd Czec hoslovak Paratroo pe rs, it shares c redit fo r the capture of th e strateg ic vill age of Ja ln a in the Hron Ri ver va ll ey on Oc tobe r 10- 12. This acti on was the las t vic tory of the insurge nts in S lovakia dur ing the upris ing. A wartime fe ll ow-officer, Samue l S imonov ic, states that Jan Nalepk a was not a Communi st (p. 111 ). He di ed at a conve ni e nt time , whic h e na bl ed him to beco me a lege nd in the postwar co mmuni st era. Hi s peasant pare nts were rece ived with hono ur in the Sov ie t Union at me mo rial servi ces dedic ated to the captain. Yet one may questi on what fa te would have had in store fo r him had he li ved longer. A " w ise guy" mi ght be given a wide berth by hi s teac hers on the me rit of hi s acade mi c exce ll e nce, but not by a tota litari a n reg im e. His equ all y precoc ious fr ie nd V ladimfr C le me ntis went on to become Czec hos lovak ia's fo reig n mini ste r, but ultim ate ly e nded on the gall ows. In sofa r as the c urre nt Slovak Re public has adopted the Slovak Nati onal Upri sing rathe r than Jozef Ti so ' s Slovaki a as its lodestone, Captain Jan Nalepk a re mains a worthy subject of stud y. Hi s life cuts across the ideo log ica l lines th at later di vided the East and West du ring the Co ld War. Hi s c haracter serves to de bunk a certain stereotype of S lova ks as be in g subservie nt to a uth ority. Thi s book is a positi ve contributi on to wartime Slovak hi story. SLOVAKIA 157 Zo ltan G . Mes ko, The S ilent Conspiracy: A Communist M odel of Political Cleansing at the Slovak Uni versity in B ratislava after the Second W orld War. Boulder, CO : East Europea n Monographs, 2003, ix- l 42pp., map, illustrati ons, notes, bibliography. L.P. HINTERB UCHNER Rye, New York When I read the orig inal Slova k vers ion "Zaml cane sprisahanie" by Dr. Zo ltan G. Mes ko in 1999, I was moved by the vivid descripti on of the eve nts th at befe ll th e medi ca l co mmunity in Slovaki a during and after World W ar II , th ro ugh the " liberation" by th e Soviets and after the illega l take-over by the Communi sts of Czec hoslovaki a in 1948. I knew many of the principal actors in the ensuin g dram a but I was not full y aware of wh at tran spired at the Medi cal School in Brati slava where I graduated the same year th at D r. Mes ko started hi s studi es. M y opini o n abo ut thi s book the n was th at it represented an important hi stori ca l testimo ny about the insane and destructi ve influence of the communi st regime on the professors and students of two medi ca l sc hool s, one in Brati slava the other in Kos ice. The poorly-trained new ph ys ici ans, who se credenti als had to be primaril y political , in ev itabl y led to inadequ ate and inferi or hea lth care fo r the nation. Th e publication in 2003 of the improved and enh anced Engli sh version of thi s work , "The S il ent Conspi racy," marks a fittin g completi on of the author' s doc umentati o n of th at peri od , based on hi s personal observati ons, interviews of th e principals and of witnesses, and the detailed research of avail able records. I read th e Eng li sh and the Slovak versio ns s ide-by-s ide and reli ved the angui sh th at the parti c ipants of thi s drama must have felt in those times. I was aga in moved by th e author' s personal remini sce nces of the "good o ld days" with hi s fa mil y, before registering to stud y medi c ine. I mu st co nfess that the Eng li sh vers io n he ld my SLOVAKIA 158 close attention more than the Slovak one. It is a page-turner; and one is reluctant to lay the book down. There is a bri ef but very informative acco unt of the hi storica l background of the Slovak nation by professor Mark Sto larik, an improvement over the Slovak vers ion. The rest of the book is more an inte rpre tation of the Slovak edition than a verbatim tran slat ion . The res ult is th at the E ng li sh is fluent , easy to read a nd de finitely much be tte r than most Slovak publications in Eng li sh, despite occas ion a l ling ui stic errors and inaccuracies, no ne of them s ubsta nti a l. Regrettably , not a ll of the illustrati o ns from the S lovak edition appear in the En g li sh o ne . Dr. Mesko recently in for med me that the first draft was written in Eng li sh. The strength of thi s work is in the detailed acco unt of the persecu ti o n, humili at io n, torture and incarceratio n of those who , because of their re li g ious back ground or personal integrity , did not join in worshiping comm uni sm, the Soviet Union a nd its murdere r-in-chi ef Stalin. Some victim s disappeared without any trace , othe rs perished in the uranium mines of the western Czec h la nd s and many spent years in prison and did hard labor. The a uthor li sts names and dates and provides documented description s of these terrible tran sgres sion s. Dr. Mesko ' s book is an importa nt co ntributi o n to the post-war hi story of the Slovak nat ion . It has the immediacy of an eyew itness report. To those w ho do not read Slovak , it pro vides a window o n events large ly unknown to Eng li sh readers. It provides a hi storic a l g limpse of how eve nts in Slovakia in the 1940 's separated the "good g uys" who would not betray their re li g iou s and mora l principl es, from vac ill ators , weak lin gs, thieve s, torturers a nd murderers, all without any moral scruples. The book a lso describes how politi ca l opportunists stabbed the ir intellectually an d professio na ll y s upe rior colleagues in the back . It demon strates how po liti ca l a nd party affiliations rep laced merit in the grad ing of stude nts and in di spe ns ing the most desired positions and jobs to " politically correct" applicants. It show s how the absence SLOVAKIA 159 of party affili ati on re nde red outstandin g professors and teac he rs vulnerable a nd subj ec t to chic anery. lt record s the establi shm e nt of a Chair of Marxi s m-Le nini sm a t th e M ed ica l School for th e reeducation of the faculty and of the student body. Dr. Mesko also doc ume nts the large ly unknown attempt of the Communists to meddl e with the curriculum in the Medical School. They recruited a cadre of yo ungsters from workers ' bac kground s who had very littl e education , se nt them to spec ial classes in the Medical School a nd graduated them as " physicians," a di saster waiting to happen. This e ffort apparentl y failed a nd eventu all y faded away. No further information about these "graduates" is avai labl e. Finall y, the book illustrates why the re was friction between Catholics and Lutherans in th e Medical Schoo l, a nd rev is its that old probl e m between Czechs and Slova ks, name ly the di sc redited idea of a " Czechoslovak nation " propagated by Edvard Be nes a nd T .G. Masaryk and their cohorts. Researche rs and seri ous students of the hi story of Central Europe will find a rich resource for their work in this boo k. Readers who are of Slovak origin, but not proficient in that la nguage, will be nefi t from the English version which provides a g limpse of soc ietal forces that shaped the dest in y of Slovakia a nd its evo lution toward s independe nce. Mari a Dziakova- Bi:ihmova, Dusa na dlani: Spomienky od Kosfc do New Yorku. Edited by Michal Kri sko and Be rnarda Jenc fkov a- Fabrici . Presov , Mic hal Vasko, 2004, 151 pp. Illustrati ons M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa This autobiography, compl eted by ' Mari a Dziakova-Bi:imova in August of 1989, just before the collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia, nea tl y summ arizes the tri als and tribul ation s of Slovak 160 SLOVAKIA intellectuals during and after World War II . Born in 1910 in a vill age near Kosice, she was the e ldest of three daughters of a poor peasant family. Nevertheless, her parents recogni zed her extraord in ary intelli gence and they skrimped and saved in order to send her to the " realgy mn as ium" for g irl s a nd then to the Faculty of Medicine at Comenius Uni vers ity in Bratislava. She grad uated with her degree in 1934 and began her practice in Kosice. Between 1938 and 1944 Dr. Bohmova (s he marri ed Dr. Emanuel Bohm in 194 1) li ved in Magyar occ upi ed Kosice and later Budapest, he lpin g her politically-activist hu sband defend the Slovak comm unity agai nst forced Magyarization. Meanwhile, she tried to continue her med ical practice, with vary in g success. As the Second World War drew to a c lose, she and her hu sband managed to return to S lovak ia, survived the pass ing of the Ru ss ian front, and re-established themselves in Bratislava in 1945. While she worked for the State In sti tute for Hea lth , her hu sband became Commi ss ioner of Health for Slovakia and Deputy Speaker of the Federal Assembly in Prague . After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovaki a in 1948 Emanuel Bohm fl ed to the west and she jo ined him in Lo ndo n a littl e later. They spe nt the nex t four years working as manu al laboure rs until the United States allowed them to e nter as immi grants in 195 2. Since Maria had to flee Czechoslovakia without any of her diplomas, a nd they co uld not easi ly be mailed to her during the Stalinist l 950's, she had to start over as an intern in the USA. By 1956 she had passed all of he r medical exa ms and sett led into a career in medic ine at the Kin gsbrook Jewi sh Medical Center in New York, and retired as Assistant Director of Medicine in 1975 . Maria and Emanuel active ly participated in Slovak inte ll ectu al a nd political life in New York for the second half of the twentieth century. She a nd he r hu sband took a leading role in the Slovak-American Cultural Center of New York , the Limbora dancing group , the General Mi Ian Rast is lav Stefanik Award , and the an nu al SlovakAmerican Ball at New York ' s Athletic C lub. They also participated in the founding of the Slovak World Co ngress in 1970, of which her SLOVAKIA 161 husband became a vice-president. The book is a pleasure to read . Maria had a talent for writing and, at one point, she even recon structed a letter that she wrote on behalf of her illiterate mother in the eastern Slovak dialect to an uncle who had emigrated to the United States before World War I. She used the same di alect, and the same uncle ' s name (who had long since disappeared), when she wrote to her sister in Kosice, imploring her to try to mail the diplomas that she had to leave behind when she fled Communist Czechoslovakia. Thi s subterfuge worked because the Czech postal officials in Prague, who were in charge of censoring the mai l, were apparently confounded by thi s dialect and allowed the letter through. Maria eventually received her diplomas, but only after she had to once again prove her medical acumen by pass ing very rigorous American exams. In spite of her trial s and tribulations, Maria Dziakova-Bohmova did not become bitter. Instead , she was thankful to the United States for having given her the chance to start a new life in the New World. She returned for visits to Czechoslovakia in 1969 and 1978 and noticed how her younger sisters had prematurely aged and how so many of her colleagues from the " realgymnasium" and the university had also either aged or died in thi s "socialist paradise." She and her hu sband visited free Czechoslovakia in 1990; he died at the end of the year and was buried in the national cemetery in Martin . After Maria died in 1999, her remains were interred beside him. Thus, Slovakia recognized the achievements of these two extraordinary indi vi dual s. We should be grateful to Bernharda Jencfkova-Fabrici , executrix of her will, for having gathered together Maria's memoirs, for having persuaded Michal Krisko to edit them, and for havi ng arranged for Michal Vasko to publish them. The book is well-worth reading, both for a glimpse at the evolution of the Slovak inte lli genti a in the first Czechoslovak Republic , and for the harsh consequences that awaited those members who refused to sub mit to the Communist takeover of their homeland and who fled into exi le. SLOVAKIA 162 Karen Henderson, Slovakia: The Escape from fnvisibihty. London and New York: Routledge, 2002, xviii-140 pp., map, notes, bibliography, index. JURAJ HOCMAN Carleton University A few years ago Slovakia suffered from a rather negative image of radical nationalism, especiall y in the West. One reason was that foreign scholars were rare in the region and Slovak history remained invisible. In 1987 a young scholar from England was given an unexpected opportunity to spend a couple of months in Bratislava, the country's capital. Attracted by both Slovakia 's past and present, Karen Henderson gradua ll y became more in volved in Slovak affairs. The author' s knowledge of the evolution of Slovak society through the centuries enabled her to reach a new perspective. Meanwhile, she also witnessed the country ' s political development after its establishment as a sovereign state on January 1st, 1993, its first appearance on the international scene and its chi ldhood illnesses as well. Henderson ' s book then documents the steps taken by the new Slovak government after the elections of September 1998 that were designed to improve the country's democratic performance, and that eventually led to its significantly changed image abroad. The author of the book , a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Leicester in the U.K. , took a balanced look at the Slovak Republic while concentrati ng on four areas of its evolution . In the first part she focused on the Slovaks in the Kingdom of Hungary and on the pre-war Czechoslovak Republic . She succes sfully demonstrated her familiarity with the main trends that formed and influenced the mentality of Slovak soc iety exposed to the processes of forced " Magyarisation" that took place after the Austro-H un garian Comprom ise of 1867. She also hi ghlighted the processes of "Czechoslovakism" that marked the relation- SLOVAKIA 163 ship between the Slovaks and Czechs before the Second Wor ld W ar with traces of di stru st o n o ne side and suspi c ion o n the other. In co ntras t to the preva ilin g traditi o na l approaches to Slova ki a that have been influe nced by ste reotypes impl a nted into Sl ovak hi sto ry, the auth or shows a re markabl e e mpathy fo r the way the Slovaks saw the mse lves in the fo rmer states of whi ch they had been a part for ce nturi es (the Hun gari an Kin gdo m), o r fo r decades (Czec hos lo va kia) . He nde rso n attributes the fa ilures shared by Slovaks w ith the ir partners o bj ecti ve ly and fa irl y. Slovaks are seen as the vic tim s in relati o n to the two main determina nts above. O n the other hand , Henderson, who knows the terra in of Ce nt ra l a nd East Euro pe and its non-linear a nd some tim e e ni gmati c h is to ry as we ll , a lso de mo nstrates an ability to ide ntify the mo me nts and events in whi ch Slo vak fa ilures and ruptures happe ned due to the ir indec is ive ness, bi ases , ambi g uiti es, un willin g ness o r pass ivity in copin g w ith e me rg in g situation s (e.g. the Slovak Republi c 1939-1 945). In the second part o f the boo k He nde rson dea ls w ith inde pe ndent Slo vaki a after January I'', 1993 . She foc uses o n the governme nts of Prime Mini sters Vladim fr Mec iar a nd Mikul as Dzurinda, whil e notin g a sharp co ntrast betwee n the two. The parli ame ntary e lection s he ld in Septe mbe r o f 1998 made a substanti a l difference in the eyes of Western governme nts and public audi e nces . A detail ed pi cture of what had preceded the fa ll of Mec iar ' s governme nt may be of interest to those who are not fa mili ar w ith the intern a l deve lo pme nt of Slovak soc iety and who want to better know the reasons fo r the fa ilure o f Mec iar' s po lic ies. For those who know it we ll , it is a re minde r and summ ary of what was prev io usly published and broadcast in the print and e lectroni c medi a. However, the a utho r ' s a im was to foc us o n the shi ft in mode rn Slovak hi story th at a ll owed the state and soc iety to escape its in visibility, and thi s is what undo ubtedl y deserves recogniti o n. The last parts of th e book are dedi cated to Slovak ia ' s re lati o nship with the world fro m 19 18 to the present. In spite of the auth or 's overa ll pe rspec ti ve regardin g Slovaki a after th e pe ri od 1989- 1993, SLOVAKIA 164 one could agree with her view th at " The Slovak Republic has not been particul arl y stable po liticall y, but as a state it has not been fundamentall y instable either" (p. 129). This may be also be perceived as the bottom level of Slovak statehood and the capability of the Slovak Republic to survive as a modern state that was initi all y questioned both dipl o matica ll y and publicl y at the beg innin g of its ex istence. Neve rtheless, the se nsiti ve reader may also find so me sub-themes and situation s described in the book that require furth er di scuss ion or a better nu anced approach (for example, so me aspects of the iss ues of ethnic minorities, the political culture and so on). Henderson 's footnotes and bibliography illustrate that the author used a wide variety of sources, from skeptical critics to pass ion ate apologists of Slovak hi story. She tried to steer a middle co urse between them and used books and schol arl y articles , as well as documents of Slovak academi c institution s and reports of non-governmental organi zation s as her principal sources . She also used re levant documents and reports iss ued by international or supran ational organization s regardin g Slovaki a ' s developme nt and progress (The World Bank, NATO, The European Union , etc.). O verall , Henderson did a good job. In my opinion Henderson ' s book successfull y refl ec ts a positive shi ft in the perception of Slovakia from the outside, and in bringing a pos itive picture to larger audi ences. In the last fe w decades Slovak society has been portrayed by both academi cs and public ists selecti vely and negati ve ly, large ly due to extern a l factors th at affec ted Slovak hi story. From now on , the question of whether the positi ve image of the country will be sustained will depend upon Slovaki a's willingness and capability to remain on track and avoid any detours from its democratic deve lopment. SLOVAKIA 165 The Slovak Republic: A Decade of Independence (I 993-2002). Edited by M. Mark Stolarik. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy -Carducci Publi shers, 2004, xiv-168 pp. tables, charts, graphs, notes, map, index. CAROL SKALNIK LEFF University of Illinois, Urbana-Champai gn Durin g the interwar Czechoslovak Re public, several volumes were published employing a format that could be described as " progress reports," in which responsible government officials of the time outlined the state of the field in key iss ue areas. This current volume, desc ribed as Slovakia's " first ' white paper, "' performs much the same function for the first decade of the independent state. In many cases, the " ten years after" vantage point is rather artificial , but in this case it is especially appropriate and the findin gs will have more than transitory value, because this is a decade framed by the successful passage from nascent state to me mbership in the European Union and NATO. Scholars interested in Slovakia' s " rehabilitation" from seco nd tier to new EU member will find thi s decade of continuin g relevance. And if there is an occasional celebratory note in the di scussion, it is understandabl e in the context of the decade ' s achievement of European integration. M . Mark Stolarik, who in his function as Chairholder in Slovak Hi story and Culture at the University of Ottawa, also co-organized the conference on which the published work is based, provides introductory thumbnail sketches of the arguments in eac h of the main contributions, and annotations of the text on politics, to clarify and update the discussion. The core articles that follow, dealing successively with politi cs, economic s, soc ial policy , culture and international relations, are the presentations of Rudolf Schuster, Slovakia' s first elected pres ident, and e ight high-rankin g and quite prominent Slovak government officials, cabinet ministers and state secretaries. Each contribution rece ives a response from the North American side, SLOVAKIA 166 ei the r from Canadian offic ia ls who have worked o n -and who disc uss--cooperati ve projects with Slovakia, or from a scho lar specia li zi ng in Slovakia. In addition to the detailed po li cy overviews discussed below, I fo und two addit io na l pieces particularly interesting: the exc ha nge o n c ultural po li cy be twee n th e n- Culture Mini ster Mil an Kn azko and Martin Votruba, director of the Slovak Studies program at the University of Pittsburg h and the di sc uss ion of hum an ri ghts and ethni c re lation s by Pa l Csaky, an important Slovak Hun garia n po liti cian and Deputy Prime Minister, and Paul Magocs i of the University of Toronto, whose experti se o n the minoriti es of the reg ion in fo rmed hi s ge nera li zed critique of th e Jacobin-inspired view of state hi story through the prism of the dom in ant nati o na lity in many European countries . The compe ndium is sketchi est on the politics, devoting suffic ient time for orientation but no in-de pth a na lys is, which in thi s case makes sense in severa l ways, not least because the po liti cs of transiti o n has alread y been ex haustive ly ana lyzed in ex istin g sc ho larl y work. The iss ue areas covered are a no ther matter. Muc h less informati o n cover in g po lic y is readily ava il abl e in existing work , so thi s is exceedin g ly useful gro und to cover. Most chapters are e nri c hed with some unex pected inform ation a l treas ures, since the poli cy profil es are de ta il ed and spec ific rathe r th an vag ue or genera li zed , and the re are a multitude of useful tabl es and charts that e ncode co mparati ve and tim e series data on fo re ig n debt a nd in vestme nt , e mpl oy me nt , mino rity ed ucation , li fe expectancy and so o n. While not inte nded as a reference work, the anth o logy the refore atta in s so methin g of th at status; o nce read, it can be sto red to hand for speci fi c refere nce on a range of subjects. Our library doesn ' t have thi s book yet, but it soon wi ll. SLOVAKIA 167 Thomas J. Shelley , Slovak s on the Hudson: Most Holy Trinity Church , Yonkers, & Th e Slovak Catholics of the Archdiocese of New York, 1894 -2000. Washin gton , D.C. : The Catholic University of America Press, 2002. xv-273pp., maps, illustrati o ns, bibliography , index. DANIEL F. T ANZONE Passaic, New Jersey Slovaks on the Hudson, by the noted church hi storian Thomas J. Shelley, adds an important chapter to the hi story of the American Catholic Church. While the city of Yonkers, New York, with a population of just under 200,000 cannot be compared with the metropoli ses of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland or Pittsburgh, it is, in fact , a microcosm of bi g city Catholicism. The city's nineteen Catholic parishe s, including tho se serving the Slovak s, Italian s, Hun garia ns and most recently the Portugese, along with two of the Byza ntine rite , contributed to the gro wth of Catholic life in the community. Catholics would soo n become major players in the city 's soc ial , educational, cultural and political life. While thi s book tell s the story of Slovak settlement in the river town of Yonke rs startin g in the l 880's, it also presents a picture of the city's political establi shment and its reaction to the grow in g immigrant population. Most of these newcomers hailed from the Catholic nation s of central and southern Europe. Slovaks, along with other Slavic peoples, found work in the city's vast mill structure, and had the opportunity to make a new life for themselves and their families. While the local " Nativi sts" often resented and mi sunderstood these immigrants and their ways, the WASP establishment gradually accepted them into the fabric of c ity life. Indeed , by 1903 a Slovak immigrant was elected to Yonkers city govern ment. Like other immigrant gro ups, the Slovaks clung to their language and faith tradition s. First they esta bli shed loca l fraternal -benefit 168 SLOVAKIA societies, which became affiliated with the national bodies in the 1890's. Yonkers had the first women 's lodge in New York State ( 1892), which became branch 2 of the First Catholic Slovak Ladies ' Association. Its other Slovak fraternals gave birth to Most Holy Trinity Church, which traced its roots to 1891 when laymen petitioned the local bishop for permission to establish a pari sh. The local parish church was very important to the laity, both as a place of worship and as a social gathering place. The parishioners married and raised their children in the shadow of the church steeple in the Hollow section of Yonkers. Most Holy Trinity afforded its people the opportunity to pass on the language, culture and traditions of their ancestral homeland. The clergy and religious, especially the sisters of Cyril and Methodius , who staffed the parish school, taught the children the Slovak language and traditions . Slovaks on the Hudson never forgot the plight of their brethren along the Danube, Yah, Hron and Torysa rivers. Indeed, the clergy and leaders of the Yonkers community played an important ro le in the establishment of Czecho-Slovakia following the col lapse of the Dual Monarchy of A ustria-Hungary . One of the pastors of Most Holy Trinity was actually offered a cabinet post in the newly-established Czecho-Slovakia in 1919. Throughout the long winter of communist domination of their ancestral homeland, the Slovaks of Yonkers never gave up hope of seeing their countrymen freed from this alien ideology and they rejoiced when Slovakia achieved its independence on January I, 1993. Thomas J. Shelley has provided the reader with a wonderful opportunity to view the life of the Slovak immigrant community within the context of big city li fe. It is a fascinating story, warts and all, of the Church in America. It is al so an important contribution to American history because the Slovaks are rapidly assimilating and moving to the suburbs while Yonkers is receiving ever more and newer immigrants. It is a welcome addition to the story of so many American ethnic groups who make up o ur ever-expanding multicultural society. SLOVAKIA 169 June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism: Slovaks and Other Immigrants in the lnterwar Era. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004, xiv-278 p.p., illustrations, notes, index. M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa The purpose of this book is to explore group-generated activities among Slovak-Americans in the inter-war period of American history and to see if such activities fit into recent "whiteness" studies by professional American historians. Alexander' s theme is that in the 1920's and 1930's both first and second-generation American Slovaks "were haunted by the stigma of inferiority inflicted by American society." (P.12). They sought to overcome this stigma by purchasing Liberty Bonds during the Great War and War Bonds during the Second World War. Meanwhile, they engaged in patriotic marches, carrying both the American and Slovak flags in the two wars, they staged large "S lovak Days" in the I 920's and 1930's in order to show off their ethnicity while stressing their Americanness and they openly supported FDR's New Deal legislation in order to help their pioneers and their fraternal-benefit societies to survive the ravages of the Great Depression. In order to prove her thesis Alexander dug deeply into both archival and printed sources. She studied the records of several large fraternal-benefit societies, the correspondence of their officers, and a wide range of Slovak-American newspapers. She also read widely in American history. Alexander concluded that Slovak-American identity did not arise from their growing "whiteness" in a racist American society, as some American historians had postulated of other ethnic groups, but rather from their nationality (ethnicity). Indeed, she also saw no generational or even class cleavage among American Slovaks, who perceived of themselves as overwhelmingly "working class" and united in their 170 SLOVAKIA efforts to win acceptance as one of the " newcomer" peoples to the United States. Al exander's book will , no doubt, win many acco lades from those profess ional A meri can hi stori ans who write hi story fo r themselves. She is very much a part of the so-call ed "di scourse" school whi ch uses social hi story in order to probe into questi ons of " whiteness," class, identity, celebrations, ass imilati on and so on. These hi stori ans deri ve great pleasure in proving or dispro ving eac h other 's theori es and show in g off their erudition . By so doin g, however, th ey c ut them selves off from the general public , which is hun gry for tradi tional , narrati ve, hi story . As a result, a second group of hi stori ans fill s thi s public hunger, and they are contemptu ously di smi ssed as " popul ar" hi stori ans by the academi cs mention ed above. On the other hand , the " popul ar" hi stori ans sell hundreds of thou sand s of copies of the ir books while the academic histori ans are delighted if they can sell a thou sand. While several hundred uni versity libraries will , no doubt, purchase a copy of thi s book, I have a feeling th at the Slovak-American community will hardl y notice it, whi ch is a pity.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Book Reviews, Slovakia, Vol. 38 (No. 70-71) Description An account of the resource includes:<br /><ul><li>Peter Žeňuch, Medzi východom a západom: Byzantsko-slovanská tradícia, kultúra a jazyk na východnom Slovensku (Robert A. Orr), p. 149</li> <li>Marián Kronský, The Struggle for Slovakia and the Treaty of Trianon 1918-1920 (Gregory C. Ference), p. 152</li> <li>Jozef Nálepka, ed., Ini o kapitánovi Jánovi Nálepkovi (Vladimír Baumgarten), p. 154</li> <li>Zoltan G. Meško, The Silent Conspiracy: A Communist Model of Political Cleansing at the Slovak University in Bratislava after the Second World War (L.P. Hinterbuchner), p. 157</li> <li>Mária Dziaková-Böhmová, Michal Kriško and Bernarda Jenčíková-Fabrici, eds., Duša na dlani: Spomienky od Košíc do New Yorku (M. Mark Stolarik), p. 159</li> <li>Karen Hendrson, Slovakia: The Escape from Invisibility (Juraj Hocman), p. 162</li> <li>M. Mark Stolarik, ed., The Slovak Republic: A Decade of Independence (1993-2002) (Carol Skalnik Leff), p. 165</li> <li>Thomas J. Shelley, Slovaks on the Hudson: Most Holy Trinity Church, Yonkers, &amp; The Slovak Catholics of the Archdiocese of New York, 1894-2000 (Daniel F. Tanzone), p. 167</li> <li>June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism: Slovaks and Other Immigrants in the Interwar Era (M. Mark Stolarik), p. 169</li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Baumgarten, R. Vladimir Ference, Gregory Curtis, 1957- Hinterbuchner, L. P., 1922-2009 Hocman, Juraj Leff, Carol Skalnik, 1947- Orr, Robert, 1957- Stolarik, M. Mark, 1943- Tanzone, Daniel F. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 LCNAF name https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/d9eb9389ef2312723a33acdc8b4e013e.pdf 0f8601081a9f36ecd9e39e74568a7055 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 171 CONTRIBUTORS ELISABETH BAKKE is c urre ntl y e mp loyed as a Post-Doctoral Resea rch Fe ll ow in the Department of Politica l Scie nce, Univers ity of Oslo. She successfully de fe nded her thes is " Doomed To Failure? The C zec hoslovak Nation Project and the Slovak Autonom ist Reaction , 1918- 1938" in Jun e of 1999. She teac hes " Nation ali sm and Centra l European Politi cs" at the postgrad uate leve l. Bakke has publi shed severa l arti c les on Czechoslovak, Czech and Slovak question s, a nd ha s rece ntl y ed ited a book in Norwegian o n co nte mporary Central European and Ba lti c politics (2002). JAMES FELAK is Associate Professor of Hi story at th e University of Was hin gton . He is the author of ' A t the Price of the R epublic': Hlinka "s Slovak People's Party, I 929-1938, winner of the 1996 Book Pri ze of the S lovak Studies Assoc iation and the Book Prize for Czech and S lovak Studies. He has contributed artic les to Nation alities Papers. East Centra l Europe and East European Quarterly. PAAL SIGURD HILDE rece ived hi s Ph .D . from the Univers ity of O xford in 2003 . Hi s di sse rtation dea lt with the e me rge nce of nationa li sm in Slovakia betwee n 1989 a nd 1992. He has publi shed severa l arti c les o n thi s subject in leadin g sc hol arl y journa ls. He is c urrentl y e mpl oyed by the Norwegian Mini stry of Defe nse. KONSTANTIN V . LIFANOV is Professor of Slovak Linguistics at the Lo monosov Univers ity of Moscow. He specia li zes in the hi story of Slovak , in c luding the Slovak lang uage in the USA , and mode rn Slovak. He is the author of S lovak M orphology (Moscow, 1999) [in Ru ss ian l, Th e Language of Spiritual Literature of S lovak Catholics from the I 6 th to the 18th Cen twy and B ernolak 's Codification (Moscow , 2000) [in Ru ss ian], Genesis of the S lovak Litera1y L anguage �172 SLOVAKIA (Munich, 2001) [in Russian] and The Language of Eastern Slo vak Publications in the USA from the End of the I <Jh to the Beginning of the 2(/h Century (M unich, 2005) [in Russian]. JAMES W. PETERSON is Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. His publications and conference papers center on Czec h and Slovak politics, NATO, and the common foreign and security policy of the EU. He is also editor of The Czech and Slovak History Newsletter. LONE SARAUW rece ived her Ph .D from the University of Aarhus (Denmark) in 2004. Her di ssertation was entitled "Together We Part. Collective Memory , Political Culture and the Breakup of Czechoslovakia." She is now raising two daughters. �SLOVAKIA 173 GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manu sc ripts for poss ible publication should be sent to the editor. Articles should not normally exceed twenty-five pages in length , should be submitted in duplicate and typed double-spaced, with generous marg ins fo r copy-editin g. Footnotes should be numbered consec uti ve ly and pl aced at the bottom of each page. A copy of the paper sho uld also be submitted on a floppy di sc, either in WordPerfect or MicrosoftWord format. Tex t and format should ad here to the "Chicago Manual of Sty le". Proper orthography and diacritical marks mu st be suppli ed for a ll foreign words. Manu scripts will not be returned unl ess spec ifically requested and postage is provided. Books fo r rev iew are to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book rev iews are not enco uraged. Individual s who wi sh to rev iew books should request them from the editor. �����THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA Organized in 1907 Dr. LUDWIG J. PAVLO President W. NINA HOLY Secretary-Treasurer Vice-presidents: MIKULAS BENO ANNE Z. SAROSY JUSTINE WESNAK Executive Board: Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, W. Nina Holy, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner, Daniel F. Tanzone, Dr. John Karch , John A. Holy, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., Thomas M. Hricik, Sue Ann M. Seich , Theresa M. Kluchinski, David G. Balzek, John Yuhas Milan Cuba, Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE US AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida ©SLOVAKIA $ 10.00 per issue � SLOVAKIA 171 CONTRIBUTORS ELISABETH BAKKE is c urre ntl y e mp loyed as a Post-Doctoral Resea rch Fe ll ow in the Department of Politica l Scie nce, Univers ity of Oslo. She successfully de fe nded her thes is " Doomed To Failure? The C zec hoslovak Nation Project and the Slovak Autonom ist Reaction , 1918- 1938" in Jun e of 1999. She teac hes " Nation ali sm and Centra l European Politi cs" at the postgrad uate leve l. Bakke has publi shed severa l arti c les on Czechoslovak, Czech and Slovak question s, a nd ha s rece ntl y ed ited a book in Norwegian o n co nte mporary Central European and Ba lti c politics (2002). JAMES FELAK is Associate Professor of Hi story at th e University of Was hin gton . He is the author of ' A t the Price of the R epublic': Hlinka "s Slovak People's Party, I 929-1938, winner of the 1996 Book Pri ze of the S lovak Studies Assoc iation and the Book Prize for Czech and S lovak Studies. He has contributed artic les to Nation alities Papers. East Centra l Europe and East European Quarterly. PAAL SIGURD HILDE rece ived hi s Ph .D . from the Univers ity of O xford in 2003 . Hi s di sse rtation dea lt with the e me rge nce of nationa li sm in Slovakia betwee n 1989 a nd 1992. He has publi shed severa l arti c les o n thi s subject in leadin g sc hol arl y journa ls. He is c urrentl y e mpl oyed by the Norwegian Mini stry of Defe nse. KONSTANTIN V . LIFANOV is Professor of Slovak Linguistics at the Lo monosov Univers ity of Moscow. He specia li zes in the hi story of Slovak , in c luding the Slovak lang uage in the USA , and mode rn Slovak. He is the author of S lovak M orphology (Moscow, 1999) [in Ru ss ian l, Th e Language of Spiritual Literature of S lovak Catholics from the I 6 th to the 18th Cen twy and B ernolak 's Codification (Moscow , 2000) [in Ru ss ian], Genesis of the S lovak Litera1y L anguage �172 SLOVAKIA (Munich, 2001) [in Russian] and The Language of Eastern Slo vak Publications in the USA from the End of the I <Jh to the Beginning of the 2(/h Century (M unich, 2005) [in Russian]. JAMES W. PETERSON is Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. His publications and conference papers center on Czec h and Slovak politics, NATO, and the common foreign and security policy of the EU. He is also editor of The Czech and Slovak History Newsletter. LONE SARAUW rece ived her Ph .D from the University of Aarhus (Denmark) in 2004. Her di ssertation was entitled "Together We Part. Collective Memory , Political Culture and the Breakup of Czechoslovakia." She is now raising two daughters. �SLOVAKIA 173 GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manu sc ripts for poss ible publication should be sent to the editor. Articles should not normally exceed twenty-five pages in length , should be submitted in duplicate and typed double-spaced, with generous marg ins fo r copy-editin g. Footnotes should be numbered consec uti ve ly and pl aced at the bottom of each page. A copy of the paper sho uld also be submitted on a floppy di sc, either in WordPerfect or MicrosoftWord format. Tex t and format should ad here to the "Chicago Manual of Sty le". Proper orthography and diacritical marks mu st be suppli ed for a ll foreign words. Manu scripts will not be returned unl ess spec ifically requested and postage is provided. Books fo r rev iew are to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book rev iews are not enco uraged. Individual s who wi sh to rev iew books should request them from the editor. �����THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA Organized in 1907 Dr. LUDWIG J. PAVLO President W. NINA HOLY Secretary-Treasurer Vice-presidents: MIKULAS BENO ANNE Z. SAROSY JUSTINE WESNAK Executive Board: Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, W. Nina Holy, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner, Daniel F. Tanzone, Dr. John Karch , John A. Holy, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., Thomas M. Hricik, Sue Ann M. Seich , Theresa M. Kluchinski, David G. Balzek, John Yuhas Milan Cuba, Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE US AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida ©SLOVAKIA $ 10.00 per issue � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2005, Vol. 38 Description An account of the resource Vol. 38 (No. 70-71), 2005. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 171 CONTRIBUTORS ELISABETH BAKKE is c urre ntl y e mp loyed as a Post-Doctoral Resea rch Fe ll ow in the Department of Politica l Scie nce, Univers ity of Oslo. She successfully de fe nded her thes is " Doomed To Failure? The C zec hoslovak Nation Project and the Slovak Autonom ist Reaction , 1918- 1938" in Jun e of 1999. She teac hes " Nation ali sm and Centra l European Politi cs" at the postgrad uate leve l. Bakke has publi shed severa l arti c les on Czechoslovak, Czech and Slovak question s, a nd ha s rece ntl y ed ited a book in Norwegian o n co nte mporary Central European and Ba lti c politics (2002). JAMES FELAK is Associate Professor of Hi story at th e University of Was hin gton . He is the author of ' A t the Price of the R epublic': Hlinka "s Slovak People's Party, I 929-1938, winner of the 1996 Book Pri ze of the S lovak Studies Assoc iation and the Book Prize for Czech and S lovak Studies. He has contributed artic les to Nation alities Papers. East Centra l Europe and East European Quarterly. PAAL SIGURD HILDE rece ived hi s Ph .D . from the Univers ity of O xford in 2003 . Hi s di sse rtation dea lt with the e me rge nce of nationa li sm in Slovakia betwee n 1989 a nd 1992. He has publi shed severa l arti c les o n thi s subject in leadin g sc hol arl y journa ls. He is c urrentl y e mpl oyed by the Norwegian Mini stry of Defe nse. KONSTANTIN V . LIFANOV is Professor of Slovak Linguistics at the Lo monosov Univers ity of Moscow. He specia li zes in the hi story of Slovak , in c luding the Slovak lang uage in the USA , and mode rn Slovak. He is the author of S lovak M orphology (Moscow, 1999) [in Ru ss ian l, Th e Language of Spiritual Literature of S lovak Catholics from the I 6 th to the 18th Cen twy and B ernolak 's Codification (Moscow , 2000) [in Ru ss ian], Genesis of the S lovak Litera1y L anguage 172 SLOVAKIA (Munich, 2001) [in Russian] and The Language of Eastern Slo vak Publications in the USA from the End of the I <Jh to the Beginning of the 2(/h Century (M unich, 2005) [in Russian]. JAMES W. PETERSON is Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. His publications and conference papers center on Czec h and Slovak politics, NATO, and the common foreign and security policy of the EU. He is also editor of The Czech and Slovak History Newsletter. LONE SARAUW rece ived her Ph .D from the University of Aarhus (Denmark) in 2004. Her di ssertation was entitled "Together We Part. Collective Memory , Political Culture and the Breakup of Czechoslovakia." She is now raising two daughters. SLOVAKIA 173 GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manu sc ripts for poss ible publication should be sent to the editor. Articles should not normally exceed twenty-five pages in length , should be submitted in duplicate and typed double-spaced, with generous marg ins fo r copy-editin g. Footnotes should be numbered consec uti ve ly and pl aced at the bottom of each page. A copy of the paper sho uld also be submitted on a floppy di sc, either in WordPerfect or MicrosoftWord format. Tex t and format should ad here to the "Chicago Manual of Sty le". Proper orthography and diacritical marks mu st be suppli ed for a ll foreign words. Manu scripts will not be returned unl ess spec ifically requested and postage is provided. Books fo r rev iew are to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book rev iews are not enco uraged. Individual s who wi sh to rev iew books should request them from the editor. THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA Organized in 1907 Dr. LUDWIG J. PAVLO President W. NINA HOLY Secretary-Treasurer Vice-presidents: MIKULAS BENO ANNE Z. SAROSY JUSTINE WESNAK Executive Board: Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, W. Nina Holy, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner, Daniel F. Tanzone, Dr. John Karch , John A. Holy, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., Thomas M. Hricik, Sue Ann M. Seich , Theresa M. Kluchinski, David G. Balzek, John Yuhas Milan Cuba, Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE US AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida ©SLOVAKIA $ 10.00 per issue  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Back Matter, Slovakia, Vol. 38 (No. 70-71) Description An account of the resource includes Contributors; Guidelines for Manuscripts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/90f56c4ca7321a1486c0a713952b72ee.pdf 54df99dee04ce3534055921e37d4af78 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA ��SLOVAKIA VOLUME 2003 XXXVII NUMBERS 68-69 A scholarly annual devoted to the history, literature, and culture of the Slovaks the world over. Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Editorial Board ROBERT K. EV ANSON University of Missouri MICHAEL NOV AK American Enterprise Institute JAMES R. FELAK University of Washington PETER PETRO University of British Columbia LOUISE B. HAMMER Indiana University NORMA L. RUDINSKY Oregon State University Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Madison Str. Passaic, NJ 07055, USA Inquiries regarding subscriptions should be sent to the above address. The cost of a single issue is U.S. $10.00 Manuscripts for possible spublication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia, 22 Bren- Maur Road, Nepean, Ontario, Canada K2J 3Z7. ��Table of Contents ARTICLES The Slovak Question in the lnterwar (1918-1938) and Post-War ( 1945-1948) Czechoslovak Republics James R . Pelak.... ... ..... .. ... ... ...... ......... ........................... .... ... ... .... . 7 Slovak som a Slovak budem: Explaining Nationalism in PostCommunist Slovakia Paa/ Sigurd Hilde .................. ........... .............. ... ..... ........ ... ........ 2 8 Reversing the Trend : Central Europe from Dictatorship to Democracy Jan Carnogursky .... ........ .. ....... ....... ... .. ...... ........... ....... ... ........... 5 7 Trends in 20th Century Slovak Filmmaking Martin Votruba ........ ....... ....... ... .. ....... ................... ..... .... .. ......... 71 DOCUMENTATION Sketches from a Slovak Catholic Parish in Pittston , PA [ 1900) Mattis Jankola ..... .... ...... ..... ...... .. ... ......... ..... .............. ..... ... ...... IO I Konstantfn Culen 's Long Journey from Italy to Canada as Illustrated by His Correspondence with Juraj Rondos Susumu Nagayo ... ...... ..... .. .......... .... ....... ............. .................. .. 112 The Political , Economic, and Cultural Situation in the Slovak Republic (As of May, 1995) M. Mark Stolarik .. ...... ............ .............. ...... ......... ..... ......... ...... l 72 �4 SLOVAKIA REVIEWS Stephen L. Crane, Survivor from an Unknown War: The Life of Isakjan Narzikul Vladimir Baumgarten ............ ............ ....... .... ..... ... .... ... .. .. .... .... 20 l Konstantin V. Lifanov, Jazyk duchovnoj literatury slovackich katolikov 16-18 vv. i kodifikacija A. Bemo/aka. Martin Votruba ... .. .. .. ...... .... .. .. ........ ..... .. ..... ....... ... .... ......... ..... 204 Contributors .......... ...... .... .... ........ .. .. .............. ... ..... ............. .... ..... .. 208 Guidelines for Manuscripts .......... ........ ................. ................. ..... ... 2 l 0 �ARTICLES �� SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA ��SLOVAKIA VOLUME 2003 XXXVII NUMBERS 68-69 A scholarly annual devoted to the history, literature, and culture of the Slovaks the world over. Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Editorial Board ROBERT K. EV ANSON University of Missouri MICHAEL NOV AK American Enterprise Institute JAMES R. FELAK University of Washington PETER PETRO University of British Columbia LOUISE B. HAMMER Indiana University NORMA L. RUDINSKY Oregon State University Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Madison Str. Passaic, NJ 07055, USA Inquiries regarding subscriptions should be sent to the above address. The cost of a single issue is U.S. $10.00 Manuscripts for possible spublication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia, 22 Bren- Maur Road, Nepean, Ontario, Canada K2J 3Z7. ��Table of Contents ARTICLES The Slovak Question in the lnterwar (1918-1938) and Post-War ( 1945-1948) Czechoslovak Republics James R . Pelak.... ... ..... .. ... ... ...... ......... ........................... .... ... ... .... . 7 Slovak som a Slovak budem: Explaining Nationalism in PostCommunist Slovakia Paa/ Sigurd Hilde .................. ........... .............. ... ..... ........ ... ........ 2 8 Reversing the Trend : Central Europe from Dictatorship to Democracy Jan Carnogursky .... ........ .. ....... ....... ... .. ...... ........... ....... ... ........... 5 7 Trends in 20th Century Slovak Filmmaking Martin Votruba ........ ....... ....... ... .. ....... ................... ..... .... .. ......... 71 DOCUMENTATION Sketches from a Slovak Catholic Parish in Pittston , PA [ 1900) Mattis Jankola ..... .... ...... ..... ...... .. ... ......... ..... .............. ..... ... ...... IO I Konstantfn Culen 's Long Journey from Italy to Canada as Illustrated by His Correspondence with Juraj Rondos Susumu Nagayo ... ...... ..... .. .......... .... ....... ............. .................. .. 112 The Political , Economic, and Cultural Situation in the Slovak Republic (As of May, 1995) M. Mark Stolarik .. ...... ............ .............. ...... ......... ..... ......... ...... l 72 �4 SLOVAKIA REVIEWS Stephen L. Crane, Survivor from an Unknown War: The Life of Isakjan Narzikul Vladimir Baumgarten ............ ............ ....... .... ..... ... .... ... .. .. .... .... 20 l Konstantin V. Lifanov, Jazyk duchovnoj literatury slovackich katolikov 16-18 vv. i kodifikacija A. Bemo/aka. Martin Votruba ... .. .. .. ...... .... .. .. ........ ..... .. ..... ....... ... .... ......... ..... 204 Contributors .......... ...... .... .... ........ .. .. .............. ... ..... ............. .... ..... .. 208 Guidelines for Manuscripts .......... ........ ................. ................. ..... ... 2 l 0 �ARTICLES �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2003, Vol. 37 Description An account of the resource Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA SLOVAKIA VOLUME 2003 XXXVII NUMBERS 68-69 A scholarly annual devoted to the history, literature, and culture of the Slovaks the world over. Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Editorial Board ROBERT K. EV ANSON University of Missouri MICHAEL NOV AK American Enterprise Institute JAMES R. FELAK University of Washington PETER PETRO University of British Columbia LOUISE B. HAMMER Indiana University NORMA L. RUDINSKY Oregon State University Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Madison Str. Passaic, NJ 07055, USA Inquiries regarding subscriptions should be sent to the above address. The cost of a single issue is U.S. $10.00 Manuscripts for possible spublication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia, 22 Bren- Maur Road, Nepean, Ontario, Canada K2J 3Z7. Table of Contents ARTICLES The Slovak Question in the lnterwar (1918-1938) and Post-War ( 1945-1948) Czechoslovak Republics James R . Pelak.... ... ..... .. ... ... ...... ......... ........................... .... ... ... .... . 7 Slovak som a Slovak budem: Explaining Nationalism in PostCommunist Slovakia Paa/ Sigurd Hilde .................. ........... .............. ... ..... ........ ... ........ 2 8 Reversing the Trend : Central Europe from Dictatorship to Democracy Jan Carnogursky .... ........ .. ....... ....... ... .. ...... ........... ....... ... ........... 5 7 Trends in 20th Century Slovak Filmmaking Martin Votruba ........ ....... ....... ... .. ....... ................... ..... .... .. ......... 71 DOCUMENTATION Sketches from a Slovak Catholic Parish in Pittston , PA [ 1900) Mattis Jankola ..... .... ...... ..... ...... .. ... ......... ..... .............. ..... ... ...... IO I Konstantfn Culen 's Long Journey from Italy to Canada as Illustrated by His Correspondence with Juraj Rondos Susumu Nagayo ... ...... ..... .. .......... .... ....... ............. .................. .. 112 The Political , Economic, and Cultural Situation in the Slovak Republic (As of May, 1995) M. Mark Stolarik .. ...... ............ .............. ...... ......... ..... ......... ...... l 72 4 SLOVAKIA REVIEWS Stephen L. Crane, Survivor from an Unknown War: The Life of Isakjan Narzikul Vladimir Baumgarten ............ ............ ....... .... ..... ... .... ... .. .. .... .... 20 l Konstantin V. Lifanov, Jazyk duchovnoj literatury slovackich katolikov 16-18 vv. i kodifikacija A. Bemo/aka. Martin Votruba ... .. .. .. ...... .... .. .. ........ ..... .. ..... ....... ... .... ......... ..... 204 Contributors .......... ...... .... .... ........ .. .. .............. ... ..... ............. .... ..... .. 208 Guidelines for Manuscripts .......... ........ ................. ................. ..... ... 2 l 0 ARTICLES  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Front Matter, Slovakia, Vol. 37 (No. 68-69) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/375a17065561ca0734c57eedcc9369fa.pdf dd43b677299f0b58fc78d8aab55eaa58 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 7 The Slovak Question in the Interwar (1918-1938) and Post-War (1945-1948) Czechoslovak Republics James R. Felak A key element of the aura of tragedy that surrounds Czechoslovakia's history in the eyes of many of its students, observers, and sympathizers is that state's experience in having its liberal, Western-oriented, parliamentary democratic, pluralistic political system destroyed by a powerful, aggressive, neighboring totalitarian empire twice in this century. In the early fall of 1938, threatened by Hitler's Germany, abandoned by their allies, and facing pressure from discontented ethnic minorities at home, Czechoslovakia's leaders succumbed to the Munich Agreement and dismantled their parliamentary democratic regime, the last one remaining in East Central Europe, and replaced it with a quasiauthoritarian alternative. In February 1948, a restored multi-party democracy in Czechoslovakia once again met its end, this time through the machinations of a pro-Soviet Communist minority that was able to seize power and thereafter transform Czechoslovakia into a carbon-copy of the Stalinist "people's democracies" that had been imposed over the previous years on most of the countries of the region. In the periods that concluded with the demise of both of these experiments in liberal democracy, the relations, and particularly the tensions between Slovaks and Czechs �8 SLOVAKIA played an important role. This paper will examine the state of Slovak-Czech relations in both the inter-war, and post-war Republics, arguing that the obstacles to a mutually satisfactory solution to the Slovak question were formidable in both situations. It will also draw comparisons between the two cases, identifying elements of continuity and change. The events of autumn 1918, with the collapse of the AustroHungarian empire and proclamation of an independent Czechoslovak Republic, brought Czechs and Slovaks together in a single state. Slovak discontent became apparent from very early on. It was inevitable that Czechs would dominate the new Republic. Czechs outnumbered Slovaks by more than two-to-one, and the Czech lands were much more highly developed economically than Slovakia. Czechs had large middle and working classes, and had acquired considerable political and administrative experience in the Austrian half of the Empire. By 1900, they were a well-organized, well-educated, confident nation with a strong sense of national identity. This was in stark contrast to relatively poor, largely rural Slovakia, where discriminatory Hungarian policies had kept Slovaks from acquiring much political or administrative experience or educating themselves in a Slovak national spirit. As the twentieth century dawned on Slovakia, Slovak nationalists were only just beginning to build a mass national movement. The new regime, both in its structure and its justification, carried the seeds of Slovak discontent. First, Czechoslovakia was based on the idea that a Czechoslovak nation existed, which served as the so-called constituent nation (statotvomy narocf) upon which the Republic was based. 1 This notion was anchored in ' See Ladislav Lipscher, Verfassung und politische Verwaltung in der Tschechos/owakei 1918-1939 (Munich, 1979), pp. 41 -42 for a discussion of the statotvornyconcept . �SLOVAKJA 9 the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920, along with the belief that a Czechoslovak language existed and would serve as the Republic 's official language.2 These stipulations, while freeing the Slovaks from Magyarization, denied them one of the major goals of the Slovak national movement since its inception at the time of Cudovft Stur in the 1830s and 40-the recognition that a distinct Slovak nation in fact existed. In hand with the Czechoslovak idea went a centralistic administrative structure for the new state, with decision-making powers concentrated in the central government in Prague, which was situated in the heart of the Czech lands . Aside from being a corollary to the idea that the state was based on a single Czechoslovak nation, it reflected fears among Czechs and a number of Czech-oriented Slovaks that autonomy for Slovakia would set a precedent for similar demands by the German and Hungarian minorities and aid Hungary's efforts to ultimately detach Slovakia from Czechoslovakia and return it to Budapest 's control. As Czechoslovakia's then Foreign Minister Edvard Benes said in 1932, greater autonomy for Slovakia would "mean for this state the slogan Slovakia to the Slovaks, German regions to the Germans, Magyar regions to the Magyars." 3 There was also a strong anti-Catholic sentiment among Czech elites and some of their Slovak collaborators, manifested in a fear that if ' The Constitution opens with the words, "We, the Czechoslovak nation," and goes on to stipulate that "The Czechoslovak language shall be the state, official language of the Republic." For an English translation of the Constitution, see Howard Lee McBain and Lindsay Rogers, Eds., The New Constitutions of Europe(New York, 1922), pp. 307-342. ' Quoted in Carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia; The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987 (Princeton, NJ, 1988), p. 137. �10 SLOVAKIA Slovaks governed themselves, they would choose a government that was too reactionary and clerical for the progressive tastes shared by most of Czechoslovakia's founding fathers. Finally, there was a widespread belief that, blighted by Magyarization, Slovaks were not yet capable of self-government. Two further issues that served to fuel Slovak discontent were the economy and religion. Along with the damage done by the First World War, Slovaks now had to cope with a new international boundary that, among other things, cut them off from the traditional markets, resources, and outlets for surplus labor that they had enjoyed in the larger Austro-Hungarian economic unit. Furthermore, the industry that Slovakia did have, lost the subsidies that the Hungarian government had been providing and had to compete with the more efficient and more heavily capitalized industry of the Czech lands. The result was an economic depression and, in effect, a de-industrialization of Slovakia during the early l 920s. The tax rate was also higher in Slovakia than in the Czech lands during the l 920s. 4 Religion proved to be a major irritant in Slovak-Czech relations. Many Czech nationalists, drawing inspiration from the Hussite tradition and regarding Catholicism as a reactionary historical force identified with German-Austrian hegemony over the Czech lands, viewed the Roman Catholic Church with suspicion and even outright hostility. This was dramatically demonstrated shortly after Czechoslovakia achieved her independence, when a Czech 4 See C. A. Macartney , Hungary and Her Successors, The Treaty of Trianon and Its Consequences 1919-1937(London, 1937), pp. 127- 131 and R. W. SetonWatson, Slovakia Then and Now: A Political Survey(London, 1931), pp. 36-37, for contemporary discussions of Slovakia's economic problems. Despite their divergent interpretations of the Slovak question, Macartney's and SetonWatson's characterizations of Slovakia's economic plight are quite similar. �SLOVAKIA 11 mob smashed to pieces the statue of the Virgin Mary on Old Town Square in Prague. Reports of this renunciation of a part of the Bohemian past did not play well in Slovakia, where among Slovaks such hostility toward the Church was considerably weaker, if operative at all. The forced removal of crucifixes from the walls of schools, disruption of religions services and desecration of sacred places and objects, and state seizure of Catholic schools and church lands helped foster in Slovakia the image of the Czech as an enemy of Christianity, especially as traditionally understood in Slovakia. 5 Also contributing to religious tensions was the fact that Czech political elites had, already before 1918, developed their closest relations with members of Slovakia's Protestant (Lutheran) minority. Slovak Protestants had traditional links with Czech culture, and were more likely than Slovak Catholics to share the modernist world view that was standard among Czechoslovakia' s founders. By way of example, of the fifty-seven Slovaks appointed to the Provisional National Assembly that was established to draw up Czechoslovakia's constitution, twenty-eight were Protestants. This in a land that was approximately 79 per cent Catholic. 6 Such an outcome could hardly fail to appear discriminatory and unrepresentative to many Slovaks. One final irritant in Slovak-Czech relations is worth discussing at some length, as it shows just how complicated this relationship could be. This is the question of the migration of Czech administrators , teachers, and other professionals and government emplo5 Jozef Spirko, Cirkevne dejiny s osobitnym zretefom na vyvin cirkevnych de- Jin Slovenska, sv. IV (Bratislava, 1993), p. 466; see E L. Woodward and Rohan Butler, Eds., Documents on British Foreign Policy 19 I 9-1939, First Series, Vol. IV, 1919 (London, 1956), p. 3, for a reference co anti-Catholic actions in Slovakia in a report by the British Charge d' affaires in Prague . 6 Ladislav Lipscher, "Klub slovenskych poslancov v rokoch 1918-1920," Historicky casopis, XVI, 2 ( 1968), pp. 140- 141 . �12 SLOVAKIA yees to Slovakia after 1918. Slovakia lacked qualified professionals and administrators who were untainted by affiliation with the former Hungarian regime and its education system, given the fact that Slovaks before 1918 could rarely advance socially and professionally except by becoming "Magyarized." For this reason, tens of thousands of Czechs moved to Slovakia in the 1920s. 7 Though many of them were needed, their presence in Slovakia proved to be a major cause of Slovak discontent. First, they represented a cultural intrusion of modern-thinking, largely urban progressive types into a traditional, rural society, and as such offended many Slovaks with paternalism and tactlessness. Second , they received considerable salary supplements since Slovakia was regarded as a hardship post. 8 This income disparity between imported Czechs and native Slovak employees was also a sore point. Third, there was a perception among Slovaks that their native land was being used by Czechs as a dumping ground for officials who were second-rate. Finally, Slovak resentment was especially acute over the fact that among the Czechs who received employment in Slovakia were not only professionals and high-level administrators , but railway porters, postmen, doormen, messengers , and janitors, positions for which there were plenty of capable Slo- vaks at hand .9 This situation can be explained at least in part by the nature of Czechoslovakia's political system. In Czechoslovakia's coalition ' See Jan Rychlfk, Cesi a Slovaci ve 20.stoletf; cesko-slo venske vztahy J 9 J41945 (Bratislava, 1997), pp. 86-87 for statistics on the number of Czechs employed in Slovakia during the interwar period . ' Natasa Krajcovicova, "K otazke personalneho obsadzovania organov statnej a verejnej spravy na Slovensku v prvych rokoch po vzniku CSR", Historickf casopis, XLIV , 4, 1996, pp. 619-620. 9 Jozef Lettrich, History of Modem Slovakia (New York, 1955), pp. 61 -62; Seton-Watson, Slovakia, p. 34. �SLOVAKIA 13 governments, certain parties tended to retain particular ministries over the long-term. Thus, it was not unusual for a political party, whose support came almost exclusively from the Czech lands, to control a substantial number of state administrative positions in Slovakia which it would allot to its Czech adherents as patronage. Such was the case, for example, with the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party and the railroads. Compounding the problem of Czech employment in Slovakia was the fact that Prague, with the help of these migrants, was so successful in developing a Czechoslovak education system in Slovakia that by the end of the 1920s, Slovakia was producing for the first time a native intelligentsia fully trained in Czechoslovak high schools and colleges. Unfortunately, precisely at the time that these cohorts of educated Slovaks were coming onto the job market, Czechoslovakia was hit by the Great Depression. These young Slovaks, many of whom could not find appropriate employment, came to resent the fact that Czechs were working in Slovakia in positions that they coveted. Many of these Czechs meanwhile had struck roots in Slovakia and, even if they wished, had little to return to in Depressionstricken Bohemia and Moravia. Many of these members of the young Slovak intelligentsia inclined toward radical politics of the left and right; among the latter, calls for Czechs to go home became standard fare at political rallies. Though, as one scholar recently pointed out, the personnel question was an extremely complicated issue that cannot be understood from a purely ethnic standpoint, the fact that Czechs were working in Slovakia while Slovaks were unemployed provided grist for Slovak nationalist mills and made this issue a constant irritant for Slovak-Czech relations. 10 ' 0 Krajcovicova, "K otazke", pp. 627, 628 . �14 SLOVAKIA Politically, Slovaks responded to this growing discontent in a number of ways. The antidote to Czechoslovak centralism was Slovak autonomy, a call that was embraced by the Slovak party with the greatest popularity, the Slovak People's Party (SPP). Led by the populist priest Andrej Hlinka, it sought to mobilize Slovak religious, economic, political and cultural discontent into a broadbased movement for autonomy and national recognition. It staunchly supported an autonomous Slovakia right up to the end of the First Republic. Two other groups also called for autonomy for Slovakia, at least in their rhetoric-the Communists and the parties of the Hungarian minority. This meant that in the parliamentary elections of 1925, 1929, and 1935, over 50% of voters in Slovakia opted for parties that rejected Czechoslovak centralism. 11 While about half of ethnic Slovaks voted for the SPP, most other Slovaks voted for the Slovak affiliates of Czechoslovak-wide parties. These parties supported the idea of a Czechoslovak nation and the centralist system. Because they were always or nearly always in the government, they could provide supporters with certain material advantages that the SPP could not, so it was quite likely that considerably more Slovaks supported autonomy than voted for the autonomist SPP. The most significant of such parties was the Agrarians, which alone among the government parties had a strong Slovak wing, led by Milan Hodza. Though officially accepting the Czechoslovak idea and opposing autonomy for Slovakia, the Agrarians tried in the 1930s to develop an alternative to both Prague centralism and SPP autonomism - the socalled regionalist option. This involved promoting cooperation of Slovaks on behalf of Slovak interests on regional rather than national grounds. In theory, regionalism gave the Slovak Agra- 11 For electoral statistics, see Leff, National Conflict, p. 52. �SLOVAKIA 15 rians the possibility to champion Slovak interests without the sort of nationalism that could upset Prague and the Czechoslovak constitutional order. 12 Despite considerable support for autonomy in Slovakia throughout the inter-war period, the cards were stacked against success in this regard for a number of reasons. Some of these have been discussed above and need little further elaboration- the Czech numerical preponderance over Slovaks, and superiority in terms of modem economic, cultural, and political development; the constitutional stipulation that a Czechoslovak nation, rather than separate Czech and Slovak nations, existed and was the basis of the state; the distaste for traditional Catholicism among the Republic's ruling elites; the fears that autonomy for Slovakia would play into the hands of Hungarian and German nationalists and make it harder for Prague to resist their autonomist demands; the belief that Slovaks were not capable of governing themselves; and the difficulties, owing to problems of political patronage and economic stagnation, of finding appropriate employment for the university-educated Slovaks the system was producing by the late 1920s and their consequent tum towards radicalism. Other factors were at play as well. It should be kept in mind that both of Czechoslovakia's presidents during the inter-war period, Tomas G. Masaryk and Edvard Benes, were staunch champions of the Czechoslovak idea and opponents of autonomy for Slovakia. Furthermore, the autonomist forces in Slovakia were not united, and in fact were fundamentally divided over their conceptions of just what sort of autonomous Slovakia they wanted. The Hungarian parties regarded Slovaks and Hungarians as minorities with an equal claim to self-government in Slovakia, 12 M. Kropilak, ed., Dejiny S/ovenska, V ( 1918-1945) (Bratislava, 1985), p. 195. �16 SLOVAKlA with hopes that someday that territory would return to a restored Kingdom of Hungary. The SPP, on the other hand, believed in "Slovakia for the Slovaks," as one of its most cherished slogans rang out, and saw Slovaks as the statotvomy narod in Slovakia, with Hungarians as merely a minority. The Communists , for their part, were open to autonomy for Slovakia only if it were to come in conjunction with the establishment of a Communist dictatorship of the proletariat, something that repelled the other pro-autonomy parties. The nature of the Czechoslovak political system was particularly crucial in making it highly unlikely that the SPP, barring some sort of exceptional circumstances, would be able to realize its autonomist goals via normal political channels. While winning the votes of around half of the ethnic Slovaks, the SPP 's support statewide was only around 7%. This meant that it would have to find allies if it wished to establish influence in or increase pressure on the government. Such alliance-seeking was problematic, however. Several leading Czechoslovak parties were outright hostile to Slovak nationalism and the idea of autonomy, for example the Social Democratic Party, National Socialist Party, and, after 1921 , the Czechoslovak People 's Party. Taken together, these three parties represented a considerable proportion of the governing majority. 13 Among the opposition parties were a few that were open to cooperation with the SPP, such as the Hungarian nationalists, Czech fascists, and the Slovak National Party (a Protestant autonomist party), but they were either insignificant in numbers and influence, or holding fundamentally different ultimate goals from the SPP. The Slovak wing of the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party, the second strongest electoral draw in Slovakia, could theoreti13 For example, of the government 's 206 seats in Parliament after the 1929 elections, these three parties held 96 seats. �SLOVAKJA 17 cally have formed a powerful bloc had its regionalist program developed into a genuine political collaboration with the SPP. However, two factors-the Agrarians' fear that the SPP would dominate an autonomous Slovakia, and the fact that the Agrarian Party 's leadership in Prague was unwilling to abandon centralism-kept such collaboration at a minimum. As with many national conflicts, it was probably the vicious circle of fear that accounted most for the failure to solve the Slovak question satisfactorily. In the 1920s, Czechoslovak centralists feared that an autonomous Slovakia would be easy prey for Hungarians eager to revise the post-War peace treaties and detach Slovakia from the Czech lands and return it to Hungary. The close collaboration after 1918 between SPP leader Hlinka and two notorious Hungarian sympathizers, Frantisek Jehlicka and Vojtech Tuka, only heightened Prague's apprehensions. 14 By the mid1930s, the Germans had replaced the Hungarians as the chief fear of Czechoslovak centralists with respect to Slovakia. After Konrad Henlein 's strong showing in the 1935 parliamentary elections, Prague worried that autonomy for Slovakia would make it harder to resist similar demands by Czechoslovakia's Sudeten German minority. The SPP, at the same time, had a great fear that Czechs would solve the Sudeten German question by granting autonomy to the predominately and historically German lands, while ignoring similar demands from Slovaks. This fear, combined with the 1 • Jehlicka was a Slovak priest of pro-Hungarian sympathy who accompanied Hlinka on a trip to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where they sought to present the Slovak national case to the Great Powers . After the trip, which proved to be a fiasco, Hlinka was imprisoned by the Czechoslovak government while Jehlicka went into exile; Tuka was a pro-Hungarian university professor who lost his job after 1918 and found a new career in the SPP as an editor, parliamentarian, and advisor to Hlinka. He was inv o lved in various intrigues against the Czechoslovak Republic in the 1920s. �18 SLOVAKJA SPP's inability to realize its demands via normal channels, led that party, or at least certain factions within it, to seek support repeatedly from abroad. And since the Western democracies tended to support the post-War status quo, the SPP sometimes looked to those neighbors of Czechoslovakia who were seeking change and, hence, were seen by the Republic's rulers as a threat. Hlinka and his party consistently cultivated good relations with official and unofficial circles in Poland, while SPP radicals sought closer ties with Germany and Czechoslovakia's pro-Nazi Sudeten Germans . 15 This in turn frightened Czechs and made it even less likely that autonomy for Slovakia would be agreed to by the power brokers in Prague. Throughout 1938, fears on both sides increased as German pressure, both from within and without Czechoslovakia, intensified, as did Slovak demands for autonomy. Once the Czechoslovak government elected to accept the Munich Agreement and hand over large tracts of its territory to Nazi Germany, the SPP pressed its claims and got a demoralized Czechoslovak government not only to acquiesce in its autonomist demands but also to accept the existence of a distinct Slovak nation. Scarcely a week after the Munich Agreement, Prague and the SPP agreed that Czechoslovakia would be restructured as Czecho-Slovakia, with an autonomous Slovakia run by the SPP. When Hitler opted to destroy Czecho-Slovakia m March of 1939, this autonomous Slovakia became the independent Slovak Republic, closely allied with Nazi Germany as one of its satellites, while the Czech lands were incorporated wholly into the Third Reich as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia 15 See, for example, James Ramon Felak, "At the Price of the Republic": Hlinka 's Slovak People 's Party 1929- 1938 (Pittsburgh , PA, 1994), pp. 171 -175, for a discussion of SPP flirtations with Polish and German nationalists. �SLOVAKIA 19 survived the war as an authoritarian, one-party state, led by the Roman Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, who succeeded Hlinka in the summer of 1938 as head of the SPP. Both Roman Catholics and their Church were privileged in this period. At the same time, a resistance movement emerged composed of an uneasy alliance of Communists and democrats, which erupted in the Slovak National Uprising of August-September 1944. Both the Slovak Republic and the Uprising would have major impacts on the post-War situation in Slovakia. First, by having their own state, Slovaks gained the confidence and experience necessary for self-government. By 1945, the idea of returning to a Czechoslovak nation and state run from Prague was repellent across the political spectrum in Slovakia. Second, the very fact of this state which, like the autonomous Slovakia of October 1938, came into existence on the coattails of Hitler's march into Central Europe, tainted Slovak accomplishments, as many Czechs regarded Slovaks, especially those in the SPP, as collaborators with the Czechs' mortal enemy, Nazi Germany. Thus, Czechs often saw manifestations of Slovak nationalism as fascist in nature and threatening to the Republic. Third, despite the susceptibility of Slovaks to charges of collaboration, at the same time, thanks to the Slovak National Uprising, Slovaks could point to the fact that their own homegrown resistance to Nazism far exceeded Czech efforts in numbers and intensity. It also created a politically influential association of partisan veterans who could potentially throw their weight around in the postWar situation. With Germany's defeat, Czechoslovakia was restored. This time, however, there would be no Czechoslovak idea. Slovaks were recognized as a distinct nation, and allowed to retain the Slovak national organs that they had set up during the Uprising. �20 SLOVAKJA Czech Communist leader Klement Gottwald, Czechoslovakia's most powerful politician at war's end, proclaimed that "the Slovaks are to be the masters in their own Slovak land." 16 A whole host of problems emerged however, some almost at once, to foil what was a hopeful beginning for advocates of Slovak autonomy. First, the set-up was an asymmetrical one. Slovak national organs, such as the Slovak National Council and Board of Commissioners, were established, but with no parallel Czech organs, only federal organs with competence for the entire state. This led to conflicts over where the competence of the central organs ended and that of the Slovak ones began. The "Slovak question" returned in a new form. Second, the cultural differences that plagued SlovakCzech relations during the First Republic continued. Czech suspicion of Slovak Catholicism was, if anything, even more intense after the experience of the Second World War, when the pro-Nazi Slovak state was led by a Catholic priest under whom the Church enjoyed far more privilege and influence than it had under the First Republic or could hope to after 1945. Third, Czech numerical dominance remained, and if Czech parties could be united on the issue, they would be able to scale back Slovak self-government with little resistance. It also became clear, especially after Czechoslovakia's first post-war parliamentary elections in May of 1946, that Slovakia was far less friendly politically to the Left than were the Czech lands. While Czechs chose left-wing parties in percentages that rank among all-time highs for Europe (the Communists, Social Democrats, and National Socialists together received over 79% of the vote in the Czech lands, with the Communists leading the way with 40% ), Slovaks rejected the Com16 Joseph A. Mikus, ed., Slovakia, A Political and Constitutional History, Acta Academica Slovaca 48 (Bratislava, 1995), p. 242; this work contains an English translation of the text of the Kosice Agreement of April 5, 1945, pp. 242-243. �SLOVAKIA 21 munists in favor of the Democrats by a slightly more than two-to• one margm . 17 These above factors combined to complicate post-war Czechoslovak politics and to pose formidable impediments to the realization of the promised program of autonomy for Slovakia. The political landscape in Slovakia after the War was occupied by three main groups, politically speaking. On the Left were the Communists, belonging to the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS), separate from, yet ultimately under the control of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSC) in Prague. The KSS was divided between those Slovak Communists who were willing to assert what they regarded as Slovak interests, and those who were more closely under the thumb of Prague. By August 1945 the latter, on Prague 's intervention, were given the upper hand in the KSS. 18 The only significant party besides the Communists was the Slovak Democratic Party (DP), founded by non-Communist veterans of the Slovak National Uprising, attracting above all those Slovak Protestants who had been alienated by the SPP's assertive Catholicism but at the same time suspicious of Prague 's centralism. The third group was the Catholics themselves, most of whom were unorganized politically with the outlawing of the SPP at war 's end. Thus, the party that traditionally drew about half the Slovak vote no longer existed, and a land that was 80% Catholic was offered only parties dominated by atheists or Protestants. This large bloc of voters without a party home would, as both the Communists and the Democrats realized, be decisive in the parlia- 17 Robert Letz, S/ovensko v rokoch 1945-1948 na ceste ku komunistickej tota/ite(Bratislava, 1994), p. 39. " l.'.ubomir Liptak, ed., Politicke strany na Slovensku, 1860-1989 (Bratislava, 1992), pp. 267-268; and Yeshayahu Jelinek, The Lust for Power: Nationalism. Slovakia, and the Communists, 19 I 8-1948 (Boulder, CO, 1983), p. 86. �22 SLOVAKJA mentary elections. Thus, the KSS began to woo Slovak Catholics, hoping to create a separate Slovak Catholic party that would keep Catholic voters away from the DP and thereby keep Slovakia's non-Communist population divided. 19 Just as it appeared that Communist intrigues would succeed, the DP delivered an olive branch to disgruntled Slovak Catholics. It was called the April Agreement, and involved the DP and leading Slovak Catholics. This Agreement specified that the ratio of Catholics to Protestants in all DP organs and institutions was to be seven-to-three, with Catholics to be allotted two-thirds of the party's seats in Parliament. In addition, Catholics were to get their own DP daily, the Demokraticke hlasy. 20 As a result of the April Agreement, Catholics moved into leading positions in the DP's presidium and general secretariat. Nevertheless, this Catholic-Protestant reconciliation was a Pyrrhic victory for Slovakia's non-Communist forces. It did enable the DP to win the May 1946 parliamentary elections in a resounding manner, and made it clear that Slovakia was overwhelmingly anti-Communist. At the same time, however, the Communists were able to exploit the April Agreement successfully for their own ends. With an influx of Catholics into the DP, the same Catholics that Communists had been wooing up to that point, the KSS now sought to portray the DP as riddled with fascist traitors loyal to former leader Tiso, and dangerous to the integrity and democracy of the Czechoslovak state. 21 Thus began a determined , 19 Letz, Slovensko, pp. 28-29 ; Michal Bamovsky, Na ceste k monopolu moci; Mocenskopoliticke zapasy na S/ovensku v rokoch 1945-1948 (Bratislava, 1993), p. 73 . 20 Bamovsky, Na ceste, p. 80; Letz, S/ovensko, p. 36. 21 See United States Department of State, Decimal Files, 860f.00/6- l 346, no. 985 ; (hereafter referred to as DOS). �SLOVAKIA 23 sustained, and aggressive effort by Communist propaganda to slander the DP. Furthermore, the election results made it clear to the Communists that autonomy for Slovakia would be a disaster for Communist interests. Consequently, the Communists began to push aggressively for a scaling back of the competence of Slovak national organs in favor of federal ones. At the same time, Communists sought to use the alarm they could generate over a "fascist restoration" in Slovakia to frighten Czech non-Communists into keeping the DP at a distance. With the acquiescence, and at times the support of the Czech democratic parties, the Communists succeeded in reasserting Prague's control over Slovakia and largely isolating the DP. As U.S. Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt wrote in May, 1947: For the Czech non-Communist parties and their leaders , including Benes, as a result of their experiences in 1938-1939 when Slovak aspirations contributed materially to the dissolution of the Czechoslovak State, feel with a deep intensity that Slovak autonomy, while acceptable in theory, must have definite limitations in practice. These leaders are therefore all too likely to side with the Communists on any issues to which the latter are able to give a Czech versus Slovak or autonomy versus centralism complexion. As a result the Democrats are very frequently left to face the Communist onslaught alone. 22 Although, strictly speaking, Czechoslovakia was a democracy, with free elections and multiple political parties with their own periodicals, one is struck by just how circumscribed the system in fact was. A number of political parties were banned, including the most popular Czech and Slovak parties of the inter-war years, the Agrarians and SPP, respectively. New parties were prohibited 22 DOS, 5-2947, no. 2477. �24 SLOVAKIA without the consent of the existing parties. Nor could one set up an individual periodical without their permission. Government intervention in and influence over the media was considerable, and publication of anything critical of the Soviet Union was taboo. The regime was also established to accord the Communists more influence than electoral results would warrant. 23 This was particularly the case in Slovakia, where despite losing by nearly a two-to-one margin in the parliamentary elections, the Communists retained the chairmanship of the Board of CoJilIIlissioners, which acted as the executive branch in Slovakia, and kept the Democrats from holding the crucial post of Commissioner of the Interior, which went to the non-partisan Mikulas Ferjencfk.24 Without much support from the Czech non-Communist parties and facing a Communist-influenced political police, the DP was an easy prey for the most concentrated Communist attack yet. In June of 1947, the security police in Slovakia uncovered an alleged "anti-state conspiracy", which the Communists used to blackmail and intimidate the DP.25 Using their influence in and control over state security organs and employing 'agents provocateurs', the Communists were able, reminiscent of their assault on the Smallholders Party in Hungary, to charge leading Slovak Democrats with complicity in the conspiracy. Though the Czech democratic parties were by this time wise to Communist intrigues and took some steps in defense of the DP, they never quite lost their suspicions that, just possibly, Communist charges against the 23 For a discussion of Czechoslovakia's "people's democratic" system, see Karel Kaplan, The Short March; The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia, 19451948 (London, 1987), pp. 33-54. 24 Bamovsky, Na ceste, pp. 116- I I 7. 25 lbid., pp. 140-141 ; Letz, Slovensko, pp. 54-55. �SLOVAKIA 25 DP might be accurate.26 With the Czech democrats thereby paralyzed, the Communists, with the police in their pockets, and the trade union and partisan organizations that they dominated mobilized on their behalf, felt that the correlation of forces were such in Slovakia that they attempted a 'putsch' in November of 194 7. This involved a KSS attempt to force a reconstitution of the Slovak Board of Commissioners through a political crisis caused by the planned and coordinated resignation of its Communist members. Though only partly successful, and though the DP and Czech non-Marxist parties stuck together from this point on, this cooperation proved to be too little, too late. The attempted coup in Slovakia was followed by a successful one in Prague in February 1948; in the latter case, it was the Czechoslovak Social Democrats who broke ranks with Czec hoslovakia's democratic parties and allowed the Communists' divide and rule tactics to bring Czec hoslovak democracy to an end . In contrasting the inter-war period and the post-war period , one finds much continuity in the Slovak-Czech relationship. The Czech bias against traditional Slovak Catholicism impeded relations both after 1918 and, reinforced by the events of 1938-1945, maintained itself into the post-war era. Czech fears of Slovaks as disloyal also continued, again reinforced by the events of the inter-war period and especially of 1938- 1939, and made evident in the ease with which the Communists could find Czech support for their efforts to undo 'de facto' the results of the elections in Slovakia. Both situations, though in quite different ways, presented insurmountable obstacles to the realization of Slovak autonomist desires, with Slovaks themselves divided over the iss ue, unable to bring sufficient pressure to bear on their behalf. Finally, in both 26 DOS, 10-647, no. 1342; see also Hu bert Ripka, Czechoslovakia Enslaved: The Story of the Communist Coup d'Etat (London, 1950), p. 113. �26 SLOVAKIA situations, external developments were crucial - in one case Nazi Germany's pressure against Czechoslovakia, in the other the intensifying Cold War, which made Czechoslovakia 's hopes of being a bridge between East and West futile and even dangerous. Along with important similarities, the Slovak question in the inter-war period and post-war period shows significant differences. After World War II, the Czechoslovak idea was abandoned and the existence of a Slovak nation was officially recognized. Furthermore, Prague came to believe that the best way to ease Slovak discontent was via the economic development of Slovakia. There were also important differences in the political structure of the two cases. In the inter-war period, the Government was composed of parties committed to the maintenance of Czechoslovak democracy, with Communists and fascists in the opposition along with Slovak nationalists. After the War, an opposition technically ceased to exist, Communists held key positions within the system they sought to destroy, and Slovak nationalists, albeit a new breed more moderate than the former SPP, sat in the Government. A final crucial difference lies in the relationship between the Slovak question and the health and survival of the democratic order in Czechoslovakia. In the inter-war period, Slovak nationalists had at best an ambivalent attitude toward Czechoslovakia's system. While a fascist element within the SPP viewed it with hostility, most Slovak nationalists accepted the system or were indifferent toward it. When Czechoslovakia faced potentially fatal threats in 1938, the SPP's primary concern was not "How can we defend Czechoslovak democracy at this critical time?" but rather the more parochial "What's in it for the Slovaks?" For all their failure to address satisfactorily the Slovak question in the 1920s and 1930s, most Czech political elites had a better grasp of just what was at stake as Nazism intensified its pressure on the First �SLOVAKIA 27 Republic from within and without. After the war, however, autonomy-minded Slovaks, now represented in the DP, had a very clear notion of just what was at stake, and arguably a better grasp of the situation than the Czechoslovak democrats, who well into 1947 seemed to fear an SPP-revival in Slovakia more than they feared the Communists . For national tensions to ease, both sides of a conflict need to relinquish, or at least moderate, their fears of the other. This the Czechs never really succeeded in doing, as the idea that Slovakia was disloyal and separatist was always in the back, and often in the front, of the minds of many of them. Slovak actions, whether it was Hlinka's consorting with Hungarian sympathizers in the 1920s, the SPP radical wing's flirting with fascism in the 19 30s, or the SPP's demand for autonomy and eventual secession from Czecho-Slovakia in conjunction with Hitler's penetration of East Central Europe, only reaffirmed or deepened Czech fears. When one takes into account these mutual suspicions, the psychological baggage both sides brought into their relationship, the structure of Czechoslovakia's regimes during this century, the persistent bias of Czech elites against Slovak Catholicism, the disparities between Slovak and Czech economic development, the presence of hostile neighbors hoping to exploit Slovak-Czech tensions, and the trauma that this part of Europe experienced from 1914 to 1989, it is not surprising that the Slovak question remained a running sore on Czechoslovakia's body politic throughout the twentieth century. � SLOVAKIA 7 The Slovak Question in the Interwar (1918-1938) and Post-War (1945-1948) Czechoslovak Republics James R. Felak A key element of the aura of tragedy that surrounds Czechoslovakia's history in the eyes of many of its students, observers, and sympathizers is that state's experience in having its liberal, Western-oriented, parliamentary democratic, pluralistic political system destroyed by a powerful, aggressive, neighboring totalitarian empire twice in this century. In the early fall of 1938, threatened by Hitler's Germany, abandoned by their allies, and facing pressure from discontented ethnic minorities at home, Czechoslovakia's leaders succumbed to the Munich Agreement and dismantled their parliamentary democratic regime, the last one remaining in East Central Europe, and replaced it with a quasiauthoritarian alternative. In February 1948, a restored multi-party democracy in Czechoslovakia once again met its end, this time through the machinations of a pro-Soviet Communist minority that was able to seize power and thereafter transform Czechoslovakia into a carbon-copy of the Stalinist "people's democracies" that had been imposed over the previous years on most of the countries of the region. In the periods that concluded with the demise of both of these experiments in liberal democracy, the relations, and particularly the tensions between Slovaks and Czechs �8 SLOVAKIA played an important role. This paper will examine the state of Slovak-Czech relations in both the inter-war, and post-war Republics, arguing that the obstacles to a mutually satisfactory solution to the Slovak question were formidable in both situations. It will also draw comparisons between the two cases, identifying elements of continuity and change. The events of autumn 1918, with the collapse of the AustroHungarian empire and proclamation of an independent Czechoslovak Republic, brought Czechs and Slovaks together in a single state. Slovak discontent became apparent from very early on. It was inevitable that Czechs would dominate the new Republic. Czechs outnumbered Slovaks by more than two-to-one, and the Czech lands were much more highly developed economically than Slovakia. Czechs had large middle and working classes, and had acquired considerable political and administrative experience in the Austrian half of the Empire. By 1900, they were a well-organized, well-educated, confident nation with a strong sense of national identity. This was in stark contrast to relatively poor, largely rural Slovakia, where discriminatory Hungarian policies had kept Slovaks from acquiring much political or administrative experience or educating themselves in a Slovak national spirit. As the twentieth century dawned on Slovakia, Slovak nationalists were only just beginning to build a mass national movement. The new regime, both in its structure and its justification, carried the seeds of Slovak discontent. First, Czechoslovakia was based on the idea that a Czechoslovak nation existed, which served as the so-called constituent nation (statotvomy narocf) upon which the Republic was based. 1 This notion was anchored in ' See Ladislav Lipscher, Verfassung und politische Verwaltung in der Tschechos/owakei 1918-1939 (Munich, 1979), pp. 41 -42 for a discussion of the statotvornyconcept . �SLOVAKJA 9 the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920, along with the belief that a Czechoslovak language existed and would serve as the Republic 's official language.2 These stipulations, while freeing the Slovaks from Magyarization, denied them one of the major goals of the Slovak national movement since its inception at the time of Cudovft Stur in the 1830s and 40-the recognition that a distinct Slovak nation in fact existed. In hand with the Czechoslovak idea went a centralistic administrative structure for the new state, with decision-making powers concentrated in the central government in Prague, which was situated in the heart of the Czech lands . Aside from being a corollary to the idea that the state was based on a single Czechoslovak nation, it reflected fears among Czechs and a number of Czech-oriented Slovaks that autonomy for Slovakia would set a precedent for similar demands by the German and Hungarian minorities and aid Hungary's efforts to ultimately detach Slovakia from Czechoslovakia and return it to Budapest 's control. As Czechoslovakia's then Foreign Minister Edvard Benes said in 1932, greater autonomy for Slovakia would "mean for this state the slogan Slovakia to the Slovaks, German regions to the Germans, Magyar regions to the Magyars." 3 There was also a strong anti-Catholic sentiment among Czech elites and some of their Slovak collaborators, manifested in a fear that if ' The Constitution opens with the words, "We, the Czechoslovak nation," and goes on to stipulate that "The Czechoslovak language shall be the state, official language of the Republic." For an English translation of the Constitution, see Howard Lee McBain and Lindsay Rogers, Eds., The New Constitutions of Europe(New York, 1922), pp. 307-342. ' Quoted in Carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia; The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987 (Princeton, NJ, 1988), p. 137. �10 SLOVAKIA Slovaks governed themselves, they would choose a government that was too reactionary and clerical for the progressive tastes shared by most of Czechoslovakia's founding fathers. Finally, there was a widespread belief that, blighted by Magyarization, Slovaks were not yet capable of self-government. Two further issues that served to fuel Slovak discontent were the economy and religion. Along with the damage done by the First World War, Slovaks now had to cope with a new international boundary that, among other things, cut them off from the traditional markets, resources, and outlets for surplus labor that they had enjoyed in the larger Austro-Hungarian economic unit. Furthermore, the industry that Slovakia did have, lost the subsidies that the Hungarian government had been providing and had to compete with the more efficient and more heavily capitalized industry of the Czech lands. The result was an economic depression and, in effect, a de-industrialization of Slovakia during the early l 920s. The tax rate was also higher in Slovakia than in the Czech lands during the l 920s. 4 Religion proved to be a major irritant in Slovak-Czech relations. Many Czech nationalists, drawing inspiration from the Hussite tradition and regarding Catholicism as a reactionary historical force identified with German-Austrian hegemony over the Czech lands, viewed the Roman Catholic Church with suspicion and even outright hostility. This was dramatically demonstrated shortly after Czechoslovakia achieved her independence, when a Czech 4 See C. A. Macartney , Hungary and Her Successors, The Treaty of Trianon and Its Consequences 1919-1937(London, 1937), pp. 127- 131 and R. W. SetonWatson, Slovakia Then and Now: A Political Survey(London, 1931), pp. 36-37, for contemporary discussions of Slovakia's economic problems. Despite their divergent interpretations of the Slovak question, Macartney's and SetonWatson's characterizations of Slovakia's economic plight are quite similar. �SLOVAKIA 11 mob smashed to pieces the statue of the Virgin Mary on Old Town Square in Prague. Reports of this renunciation of a part of the Bohemian past did not play well in Slovakia, where among Slovaks such hostility toward the Church was considerably weaker, if operative at all. The forced removal of crucifixes from the walls of schools, disruption of religions services and desecration of sacred places and objects, and state seizure of Catholic schools and church lands helped foster in Slovakia the image of the Czech as an enemy of Christianity, especially as traditionally understood in Slovakia. 5 Also contributing to religious tensions was the fact that Czech political elites had, already before 1918, developed their closest relations with members of Slovakia's Protestant (Lutheran) minority. Slovak Protestants had traditional links with Czech culture, and were more likely than Slovak Catholics to share the modernist world view that was standard among Czechoslovakia' s founders. By way of example, of the fifty-seven Slovaks appointed to the Provisional National Assembly that was established to draw up Czechoslovakia's constitution, twenty-eight were Protestants. This in a land that was approximately 79 per cent Catholic. 6 Such an outcome could hardly fail to appear discriminatory and unrepresentative to many Slovaks. One final irritant in Slovak-Czech relations is worth discussing at some length, as it shows just how complicated this relationship could be. This is the question of the migration of Czech administrators , teachers, and other professionals and government emplo5 Jozef Spirko, Cirkevne dejiny s osobitnym zretefom na vyvin cirkevnych de- Jin Slovenska, sv. IV (Bratislava, 1993), p. 466; see E L. Woodward and Rohan Butler, Eds., Documents on British Foreign Policy 19 I 9-1939, First Series, Vol. IV, 1919 (London, 1956), p. 3, for a reference co anti-Catholic actions in Slovakia in a report by the British Charge d' affaires in Prague . 6 Ladislav Lipscher, "Klub slovenskych poslancov v rokoch 1918-1920," Historicky casopis, XVI, 2 ( 1968), pp. 140- 141 . �12 SLOVAKIA yees to Slovakia after 1918. Slovakia lacked qualified professionals and administrators who were untainted by affiliation with the former Hungarian regime and its education system, given the fact that Slovaks before 1918 could rarely advance socially and professionally except by becoming "Magyarized." For this reason, tens of thousands of Czechs moved to Slovakia in the 1920s. 7 Though many of them were needed, their presence in Slovakia proved to be a major cause of Slovak discontent. First, they represented a cultural intrusion of modern-thinking, largely urban progressive types into a traditional, rural society, and as such offended many Slovaks with paternalism and tactlessness. Second , they received considerable salary supplements since Slovakia was regarded as a hardship post. 8 This income disparity between imported Czechs and native Slovak employees was also a sore point. Third, there was a perception among Slovaks that their native land was being used by Czechs as a dumping ground for officials who were second-rate. Finally, Slovak resentment was especially acute over the fact that among the Czechs who received employment in Slovakia were not only professionals and high-level administrators , but railway porters, postmen, doormen, messengers , and janitors, positions for which there were plenty of capable Slo- vaks at hand .9 This situation can be explained at least in part by the nature of Czechoslovakia's political system. In Czechoslovakia's coalition ' See Jan Rychlfk, Cesi a Slovaci ve 20.stoletf; cesko-slo venske vztahy J 9 J41945 (Bratislava, 1997), pp. 86-87 for statistics on the number of Czechs employed in Slovakia during the interwar period . ' Natasa Krajcovicova, "K otazke personalneho obsadzovania organov statnej a verejnej spravy na Slovensku v prvych rokoch po vzniku CSR", Historickf casopis, XLIV , 4, 1996, pp. 619-620. 9 Jozef Lettrich, History of Modem Slovakia (New York, 1955), pp. 61 -62; Seton-Watson, Slovakia, p. 34. �SLOVAKIA 13 governments, certain parties tended to retain particular ministries over the long-term. Thus, it was not unusual for a political party, whose support came almost exclusively from the Czech lands, to control a substantial number of state administrative positions in Slovakia which it would allot to its Czech adherents as patronage. Such was the case, for example, with the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party and the railroads. Compounding the problem of Czech employment in Slovakia was the fact that Prague, with the help of these migrants, was so successful in developing a Czechoslovak education system in Slovakia that by the end of the 1920s, Slovakia was producing for the first time a native intelligentsia fully trained in Czechoslovak high schools and colleges. Unfortunately, precisely at the time that these cohorts of educated Slovaks were coming onto the job market, Czechoslovakia was hit by the Great Depression. These young Slovaks, many of whom could not find appropriate employment, came to resent the fact that Czechs were working in Slovakia in positions that they coveted. Many of these Czechs meanwhile had struck roots in Slovakia and, even if they wished, had little to return to in Depressionstricken Bohemia and Moravia. Many of these members of the young Slovak intelligentsia inclined toward radical politics of the left and right; among the latter, calls for Czechs to go home became standard fare at political rallies. Though, as one scholar recently pointed out, the personnel question was an extremely complicated issue that cannot be understood from a purely ethnic standpoint, the fact that Czechs were working in Slovakia while Slovaks were unemployed provided grist for Slovak nationalist mills and made this issue a constant irritant for Slovak-Czech relations. 10 ' 0 Krajcovicova, "K otazke", pp. 627, 628 . �14 SLOVAKIA Politically, Slovaks responded to this growing discontent in a number of ways. The antidote to Czechoslovak centralism was Slovak autonomy, a call that was embraced by the Slovak party with the greatest popularity, the Slovak People's Party (SPP). Led by the populist priest Andrej Hlinka, it sought to mobilize Slovak religious, economic, political and cultural discontent into a broadbased movement for autonomy and national recognition. It staunchly supported an autonomous Slovakia right up to the end of the First Republic. Two other groups also called for autonomy for Slovakia, at least in their rhetoric-the Communists and the parties of the Hungarian minority. This meant that in the parliamentary elections of 1925, 1929, and 1935, over 50% of voters in Slovakia opted for parties that rejected Czechoslovak centralism. 11 While about half of ethnic Slovaks voted for the SPP, most other Slovaks voted for the Slovak affiliates of Czechoslovak-wide parties. These parties supported the idea of a Czechoslovak nation and the centralist system. Because they were always or nearly always in the government, they could provide supporters with certain material advantages that the SPP could not, so it was quite likely that considerably more Slovaks supported autonomy than voted for the autonomist SPP. The most significant of such parties was the Agrarians, which alone among the government parties had a strong Slovak wing, led by Milan Hodza. Though officially accepting the Czechoslovak idea and opposing autonomy for Slovakia, the Agrarians tried in the 1930s to develop an alternative to both Prague centralism and SPP autonomism - the socalled regionalist option. This involved promoting cooperation of Slovaks on behalf of Slovak interests on regional rather than national grounds. In theory, regionalism gave the Slovak Agra- 11 For electoral statistics, see Leff, National Conflict, p. 52. �SLOVAKIA 15 rians the possibility to champion Slovak interests without the sort of nationalism that could upset Prague and the Czechoslovak constitutional order. 12 Despite considerable support for autonomy in Slovakia throughout the inter-war period, the cards were stacked against success in this regard for a number of reasons. Some of these have been discussed above and need little further elaboration- the Czech numerical preponderance over Slovaks, and superiority in terms of modem economic, cultural, and political development; the constitutional stipulation that a Czechoslovak nation, rather than separate Czech and Slovak nations, existed and was the basis of the state; the distaste for traditional Catholicism among the Republic's ruling elites; the fears that autonomy for Slovakia would play into the hands of Hungarian and German nationalists and make it harder for Prague to resist their autonomist demands; the belief that Slovaks were not capable of governing themselves; and the difficulties, owing to problems of political patronage and economic stagnation, of finding appropriate employment for the university-educated Slovaks the system was producing by the late 1920s and their consequent tum towards radicalism. Other factors were at play as well. It should be kept in mind that both of Czechoslovakia's presidents during the inter-war period, Tomas G. Masaryk and Edvard Benes, were staunch champions of the Czechoslovak idea and opponents of autonomy for Slovakia. Furthermore, the autonomist forces in Slovakia were not united, and in fact were fundamentally divided over their conceptions of just what sort of autonomous Slovakia they wanted. The Hungarian parties regarded Slovaks and Hungarians as minorities with an equal claim to self-government in Slovakia, 12 M. Kropilak, ed., Dejiny S/ovenska, V ( 1918-1945) (Bratislava, 1985), p. 195. �16 SLOVAKlA with hopes that someday that territory would return to a restored Kingdom of Hungary. The SPP, on the other hand, believed in "Slovakia for the Slovaks," as one of its most cherished slogans rang out, and saw Slovaks as the statotvomy narod in Slovakia, with Hungarians as merely a minority. The Communists , for their part, were open to autonomy for Slovakia only if it were to come in conjunction with the establishment of a Communist dictatorship of the proletariat, something that repelled the other pro-autonomy parties. The nature of the Czechoslovak political system was particularly crucial in making it highly unlikely that the SPP, barring some sort of exceptional circumstances, would be able to realize its autonomist goals via normal political channels. While winning the votes of around half of the ethnic Slovaks, the SPP 's support statewide was only around 7%. This meant that it would have to find allies if it wished to establish influence in or increase pressure on the government. Such alliance-seeking was problematic, however. Several leading Czechoslovak parties were outright hostile to Slovak nationalism and the idea of autonomy, for example the Social Democratic Party, National Socialist Party, and, after 1921 , the Czechoslovak People 's Party. Taken together, these three parties represented a considerable proportion of the governing majority. 13 Among the opposition parties were a few that were open to cooperation with the SPP, such as the Hungarian nationalists, Czech fascists, and the Slovak National Party (a Protestant autonomist party), but they were either insignificant in numbers and influence, or holding fundamentally different ultimate goals from the SPP. The Slovak wing of the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party, the second strongest electoral draw in Slovakia, could theoreti13 For example, of the government 's 206 seats in Parliament after the 1929 elections, these three parties held 96 seats. �SLOVAKJA 17 cally have formed a powerful bloc had its regionalist program developed into a genuine political collaboration with the SPP. However, two factors-the Agrarians' fear that the SPP would dominate an autonomous Slovakia, and the fact that the Agrarian Party 's leadership in Prague was unwilling to abandon centralism-kept such collaboration at a minimum. As with many national conflicts, it was probably the vicious circle of fear that accounted most for the failure to solve the Slovak question satisfactorily. In the 1920s, Czechoslovak centralists feared that an autonomous Slovakia would be easy prey for Hungarians eager to revise the post-War peace treaties and detach Slovakia from the Czech lands and return it to Hungary. The close collaboration after 1918 between SPP leader Hlinka and two notorious Hungarian sympathizers, Frantisek Jehlicka and Vojtech Tuka, only heightened Prague's apprehensions. 14 By the mid1930s, the Germans had replaced the Hungarians as the chief fear of Czechoslovak centralists with respect to Slovakia. After Konrad Henlein 's strong showing in the 1935 parliamentary elections, Prague worried that autonomy for Slovakia would make it harder to resist similar demands by Czechoslovakia's Sudeten German minority. The SPP, at the same time, had a great fear that Czechs would solve the Sudeten German question by granting autonomy to the predominately and historically German lands, while ignoring similar demands from Slovaks. This fear, combined with the 1 • Jehlicka was a Slovak priest of pro-Hungarian sympathy who accompanied Hlinka on a trip to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where they sought to present the Slovak national case to the Great Powers . After the trip, which proved to be a fiasco, Hlinka was imprisoned by the Czechoslovak government while Jehlicka went into exile; Tuka was a pro-Hungarian university professor who lost his job after 1918 and found a new career in the SPP as an editor, parliamentarian, and advisor to Hlinka. He was inv o lved in various intrigues against the Czechoslovak Republic in the 1920s. �18 SLOVAKJA SPP's inability to realize its demands via normal channels, led that party, or at least certain factions within it, to seek support repeatedly from abroad. And since the Western democracies tended to support the post-War status quo, the SPP sometimes looked to those neighbors of Czechoslovakia who were seeking change and, hence, were seen by the Republic's rulers as a threat. Hlinka and his party consistently cultivated good relations with official and unofficial circles in Poland, while SPP radicals sought closer ties with Germany and Czechoslovakia's pro-Nazi Sudeten Germans . 15 This in turn frightened Czechs and made it even less likely that autonomy for Slovakia would be agreed to by the power brokers in Prague. Throughout 1938, fears on both sides increased as German pressure, both from within and without Czechoslovakia, intensified, as did Slovak demands for autonomy. Once the Czechoslovak government elected to accept the Munich Agreement and hand over large tracts of its territory to Nazi Germany, the SPP pressed its claims and got a demoralized Czechoslovak government not only to acquiesce in its autonomist demands but also to accept the existence of a distinct Slovak nation. Scarcely a week after the Munich Agreement, Prague and the SPP agreed that Czechoslovakia would be restructured as Czecho-Slovakia, with an autonomous Slovakia run by the SPP. When Hitler opted to destroy Czecho-Slovakia m March of 1939, this autonomous Slovakia became the independent Slovak Republic, closely allied with Nazi Germany as one of its satellites, while the Czech lands were incorporated wholly into the Third Reich as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia 15 See, for example, James Ramon Felak, "At the Price of the Republic": Hlinka 's Slovak People 's Party 1929- 1938 (Pittsburgh , PA, 1994), pp. 171 -175, for a discussion of SPP flirtations with Polish and German nationalists. �SLOVAKIA 19 survived the war as an authoritarian, one-party state, led by the Roman Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, who succeeded Hlinka in the summer of 1938 as head of the SPP. Both Roman Catholics and their Church were privileged in this period. At the same time, a resistance movement emerged composed of an uneasy alliance of Communists and democrats, which erupted in the Slovak National Uprising of August-September 1944. Both the Slovak Republic and the Uprising would have major impacts on the post-War situation in Slovakia. First, by having their own state, Slovaks gained the confidence and experience necessary for self-government. By 1945, the idea of returning to a Czechoslovak nation and state run from Prague was repellent across the political spectrum in Slovakia. Second, the very fact of this state which, like the autonomous Slovakia of October 1938, came into existence on the coattails of Hitler's march into Central Europe, tainted Slovak accomplishments, as many Czechs regarded Slovaks, especially those in the SPP, as collaborators with the Czechs' mortal enemy, Nazi Germany. Thus, Czechs often saw manifestations of Slovak nationalism as fascist in nature and threatening to the Republic. Third, despite the susceptibility of Slovaks to charges of collaboration, at the same time, thanks to the Slovak National Uprising, Slovaks could point to the fact that their own homegrown resistance to Nazism far exceeded Czech efforts in numbers and intensity. It also created a politically influential association of partisan veterans who could potentially throw their weight around in the postWar situation. With Germany's defeat, Czechoslovakia was restored. This time, however, there would be no Czechoslovak idea. Slovaks were recognized as a distinct nation, and allowed to retain the Slovak national organs that they had set up during the Uprising. �20 SLOVAKJA Czech Communist leader Klement Gottwald, Czechoslovakia's most powerful politician at war's end, proclaimed that "the Slovaks are to be the masters in their own Slovak land." 16 A whole host of problems emerged however, some almost at once, to foil what was a hopeful beginning for advocates of Slovak autonomy. First, the set-up was an asymmetrical one. Slovak national organs, such as the Slovak National Council and Board of Commissioners, were established, but with no parallel Czech organs, only federal organs with competence for the entire state. This led to conflicts over where the competence of the central organs ended and that of the Slovak ones began. The "Slovak question" returned in a new form. Second, the cultural differences that plagued SlovakCzech relations during the First Republic continued. Czech suspicion of Slovak Catholicism was, if anything, even more intense after the experience of the Second World War, when the pro-Nazi Slovak state was led by a Catholic priest under whom the Church enjoyed far more privilege and influence than it had under the First Republic or could hope to after 1945. Third, Czech numerical dominance remained, and if Czech parties could be united on the issue, they would be able to scale back Slovak self-government with little resistance. It also became clear, especially after Czechoslovakia's first post-war parliamentary elections in May of 1946, that Slovakia was far less friendly politically to the Left than were the Czech lands. While Czechs chose left-wing parties in percentages that rank among all-time highs for Europe (the Communists, Social Democrats, and National Socialists together received over 79% of the vote in the Czech lands, with the Communists leading the way with 40% ), Slovaks rejected the Com16 Joseph A. Mikus, ed., Slovakia, A Political and Constitutional History, Acta Academica Slovaca 48 (Bratislava, 1995), p. 242; this work contains an English translation of the text of the Kosice Agreement of April 5, 1945, pp. 242-243. �SLOVAKIA 21 munists in favor of the Democrats by a slightly more than two-to• one margm . 17 These above factors combined to complicate post-war Czechoslovak politics and to pose formidable impediments to the realization of the promised program of autonomy for Slovakia. The political landscape in Slovakia after the War was occupied by three main groups, politically speaking. On the Left were the Communists, belonging to the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS), separate from, yet ultimately under the control of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSC) in Prague. The KSS was divided between those Slovak Communists who were willing to assert what they regarded as Slovak interests, and those who were more closely under the thumb of Prague. By August 1945 the latter, on Prague 's intervention, were given the upper hand in the KSS. 18 The only significant party besides the Communists was the Slovak Democratic Party (DP), founded by non-Communist veterans of the Slovak National Uprising, attracting above all those Slovak Protestants who had been alienated by the SPP's assertive Catholicism but at the same time suspicious of Prague 's centralism. The third group was the Catholics themselves, most of whom were unorganized politically with the outlawing of the SPP at war 's end. Thus, the party that traditionally drew about half the Slovak vote no longer existed, and a land that was 80% Catholic was offered only parties dominated by atheists or Protestants. This large bloc of voters without a party home would, as both the Communists and the Democrats realized, be decisive in the parlia- 17 Robert Letz, S/ovensko v rokoch 1945-1948 na ceste ku komunistickej tota/ite(Bratislava, 1994), p. 39. " l.'.ubomir Liptak, ed., Politicke strany na Slovensku, 1860-1989 (Bratislava, 1992), pp. 267-268; and Yeshayahu Jelinek, The Lust for Power: Nationalism. Slovakia, and the Communists, 19 I 8-1948 (Boulder, CO, 1983), p. 86. �22 SLOVAKJA mentary elections. Thus, the KSS began to woo Slovak Catholics, hoping to create a separate Slovak Catholic party that would keep Catholic voters away from the DP and thereby keep Slovakia's non-Communist population divided. 19 Just as it appeared that Communist intrigues would succeed, the DP delivered an olive branch to disgruntled Slovak Catholics. It was called the April Agreement, and involved the DP and leading Slovak Catholics. This Agreement specified that the ratio of Catholics to Protestants in all DP organs and institutions was to be seven-to-three, with Catholics to be allotted two-thirds of the party's seats in Parliament. In addition, Catholics were to get their own DP daily, the Demokraticke hlasy. 20 As a result of the April Agreement, Catholics moved into leading positions in the DP's presidium and general secretariat. Nevertheless, this Catholic-Protestant reconciliation was a Pyrrhic victory for Slovakia's non-Communist forces. It did enable the DP to win the May 1946 parliamentary elections in a resounding manner, and made it clear that Slovakia was overwhelmingly anti-Communist. At the same time, however, the Communists were able to exploit the April Agreement successfully for their own ends. With an influx of Catholics into the DP, the same Catholics that Communists had been wooing up to that point, the KSS now sought to portray the DP as riddled with fascist traitors loyal to former leader Tiso, and dangerous to the integrity and democracy of the Czechoslovak state. 21 Thus began a determined , 19 Letz, Slovensko, pp. 28-29 ; Michal Bamovsky, Na ceste k monopolu moci; Mocenskopoliticke zapasy na S/ovensku v rokoch 1945-1948 (Bratislava, 1993), p. 73 . 20 Bamovsky, Na ceste, p. 80; Letz, S/ovensko, p. 36. 21 See United States Department of State, Decimal Files, 860f.00/6- l 346, no. 985 ; (hereafter referred to as DOS). �SLOVAKIA 23 sustained, and aggressive effort by Communist propaganda to slander the DP. Furthermore, the election results made it clear to the Communists that autonomy for Slovakia would be a disaster for Communist interests. Consequently, the Communists began to push aggressively for a scaling back of the competence of Slovak national organs in favor of federal ones. At the same time, Communists sought to use the alarm they could generate over a "fascist restoration" in Slovakia to frighten Czech non-Communists into keeping the DP at a distance. With the acquiescence, and at times the support of the Czech democratic parties, the Communists succeeded in reasserting Prague's control over Slovakia and largely isolating the DP. As U.S. Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt wrote in May, 1947: For the Czech non-Communist parties and their leaders , including Benes, as a result of their experiences in 1938-1939 when Slovak aspirations contributed materially to the dissolution of the Czechoslovak State, feel with a deep intensity that Slovak autonomy, while acceptable in theory, must have definite limitations in practice. These leaders are therefore all too likely to side with the Communists on any issues to which the latter are able to give a Czech versus Slovak or autonomy versus centralism complexion. As a result the Democrats are very frequently left to face the Communist onslaught alone. 22 Although, strictly speaking, Czechoslovakia was a democracy, with free elections and multiple political parties with their own periodicals, one is struck by just how circumscribed the system in fact was. A number of political parties were banned, including the most popular Czech and Slovak parties of the inter-war years, the Agrarians and SPP, respectively. New parties were prohibited 22 DOS, 5-2947, no. 2477. �24 SLOVAKIA without the consent of the existing parties. Nor could one set up an individual periodical without their permission. Government intervention in and influence over the media was considerable, and publication of anything critical of the Soviet Union was taboo. The regime was also established to accord the Communists more influence than electoral results would warrant. 23 This was particularly the case in Slovakia, where despite losing by nearly a two-to-one margin in the parliamentary elections, the Communists retained the chairmanship of the Board of CoJilIIlissioners, which acted as the executive branch in Slovakia, and kept the Democrats from holding the crucial post of Commissioner of the Interior, which went to the non-partisan Mikulas Ferjencfk.24 Without much support from the Czech non-Communist parties and facing a Communist-influenced political police, the DP was an easy prey for the most concentrated Communist attack yet. In June of 1947, the security police in Slovakia uncovered an alleged "anti-state conspiracy", which the Communists used to blackmail and intimidate the DP.25 Using their influence in and control over state security organs and employing 'agents provocateurs', the Communists were able, reminiscent of their assault on the Smallholders Party in Hungary, to charge leading Slovak Democrats with complicity in the conspiracy. Though the Czech democratic parties were by this time wise to Communist intrigues and took some steps in defense of the DP, they never quite lost their suspicions that, just possibly, Communist charges against the 23 For a discussion of Czechoslovakia's "people's democratic" system, see Karel Kaplan, The Short March; The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia, 19451948 (London, 1987), pp. 33-54. 24 Bamovsky, Na ceste, pp. 116- I I 7. 25 lbid., pp. 140-141 ; Letz, Slovensko, pp. 54-55. �SLOVAKIA 25 DP might be accurate.26 With the Czech democrats thereby paralyzed, the Communists, with the police in their pockets, and the trade union and partisan organizations that they dominated mobilized on their behalf, felt that the correlation of forces were such in Slovakia that they attempted a 'putsch' in November of 194 7. This involved a KSS attempt to force a reconstitution of the Slovak Board of Commissioners through a political crisis caused by the planned and coordinated resignation of its Communist members. Though only partly successful, and though the DP and Czech non-Marxist parties stuck together from this point on, this cooperation proved to be too little, too late. The attempted coup in Slovakia was followed by a successful one in Prague in February 1948; in the latter case, it was the Czechoslovak Social Democrats who broke ranks with Czec hoslovakia's democratic parties and allowed the Communists' divide and rule tactics to bring Czec hoslovak democracy to an end . In contrasting the inter-war period and the post-war period , one finds much continuity in the Slovak-Czech relationship. The Czech bias against traditional Slovak Catholicism impeded relations both after 1918 and, reinforced by the events of 1938-1945, maintained itself into the post-war era. Czech fears of Slovaks as disloyal also continued, again reinforced by the events of the inter-war period and especially of 1938- 1939, and made evident in the ease with which the Communists could find Czech support for their efforts to undo 'de facto' the results of the elections in Slovakia. Both situations, though in quite different ways, presented insurmountable obstacles to the realization of Slovak autonomist desires, with Slovaks themselves divided over the iss ue, unable to bring sufficient pressure to bear on their behalf. Finally, in both 26 DOS, 10-647, no. 1342; see also Hu bert Ripka, Czechoslovakia Enslaved: The Story of the Communist Coup d'Etat (London, 1950), p. 113. �26 SLOVAKIA situations, external developments were crucial - in one case Nazi Germany's pressure against Czechoslovakia, in the other the intensifying Cold War, which made Czechoslovakia 's hopes of being a bridge between East and West futile and even dangerous. Along with important similarities, the Slovak question in the inter-war period and post-war period shows significant differences. After World War II, the Czechoslovak idea was abandoned and the existence of a Slovak nation was officially recognized. Furthermore, Prague came to believe that the best way to ease Slovak discontent was via the economic development of Slovakia. There were also important differences in the political structure of the two cases. In the inter-war period, the Government was composed of parties committed to the maintenance of Czechoslovak democracy, with Communists and fascists in the opposition along with Slovak nationalists. After the War, an opposition technically ceased to exist, Communists held key positions within the system they sought to destroy, and Slovak nationalists, albeit a new breed more moderate than the former SPP, sat in the Government. A final crucial difference lies in the relationship between the Slovak question and the health and survival of the democratic order in Czechoslovakia. In the inter-war period, Slovak nationalists had at best an ambivalent attitude toward Czechoslovakia's system. While a fascist element within the SPP viewed it with hostility, most Slovak nationalists accepted the system or were indifferent toward it. When Czechoslovakia faced potentially fatal threats in 1938, the SPP's primary concern was not "How can we defend Czechoslovak democracy at this critical time?" but rather the more parochial "What's in it for the Slovaks?" For all their failure to address satisfactorily the Slovak question in the 1920s and 1930s, most Czech political elites had a better grasp of just what was at stake as Nazism intensified its pressure on the First �SLOVAKIA 27 Republic from within and without. After the war, however, autonomy-minded Slovaks, now represented in the DP, had a very clear notion of just what was at stake, and arguably a better grasp of the situation than the Czechoslovak democrats, who well into 1947 seemed to fear an SPP-revival in Slovakia more than they feared the Communists . For national tensions to ease, both sides of a conflict need to relinquish, or at least moderate, their fears of the other. This the Czechs never really succeeded in doing, as the idea that Slovakia was disloyal and separatist was always in the back, and often in the front, of the minds of many of them. Slovak actions, whether it was Hlinka's consorting with Hungarian sympathizers in the 1920s, the SPP radical wing's flirting with fascism in the 19 30s, or the SPP's demand for autonomy and eventual secession from Czecho-Slovakia in conjunction with Hitler's penetration of East Central Europe, only reaffirmed or deepened Czech fears. When one takes into account these mutual suspicions, the psychological baggage both sides brought into their relationship, the structure of Czechoslovakia's regimes during this century, the persistent bias of Czech elites against Slovak Catholicism, the disparities between Slovak and Czech economic development, the presence of hostile neighbors hoping to exploit Slovak-Czech tensions, and the trauma that this part of Europe experienced from 1914 to 1989, it is not surprising that the Slovak question remained a running sore on Czechoslovakia's body politic throughout the twentieth century. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2003, Vol. 37 Description An account of the resource Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 7 The Slovak Question in the Interwar (1918-1938) and Post-War (1945-1948) Czechoslovak Republics James R. Felak A key element of the aura of tragedy that surrounds Czechoslovakia's history in the eyes of many of its students, observers, and sympathizers is that state's experience in having its liberal, Western-oriented, parliamentary democratic, pluralistic political system destroyed by a powerful, aggressive, neighboring totalitarian empire twice in this century. In the early fall of 1938, threatened by Hitler's Germany, abandoned by their allies, and facing pressure from discontented ethnic minorities at home, Czechoslovakia's leaders succumbed to the Munich Agreement and dismantled their parliamentary democratic regime, the last one remaining in East Central Europe, and replaced it with a quasiauthoritarian alternative. In February 1948, a restored multi-party democracy in Czechoslovakia once again met its end, this time through the machinations of a pro-Soviet Communist minority that was able to seize power and thereafter transform Czechoslovakia into a carbon-copy of the Stalinist "people's democracies" that had been imposed over the previous years on most of the countries of the region. In the periods that concluded with the demise of both of these experiments in liberal democracy, the relations, and particularly the tensions between Slovaks and Czechs 8 SLOVAKIA played an important role. This paper will examine the state of Slovak-Czech relations in both the inter-war, and post-war Republics, arguing that the obstacles to a mutually satisfactory solution to the Slovak question were formidable in both situations. It will also draw comparisons between the two cases, identifying elements of continuity and change. The events of autumn 1918, with the collapse of the AustroHungarian empire and proclamation of an independent Czechoslovak Republic, brought Czechs and Slovaks together in a single state. Slovak discontent became apparent from very early on. It was inevitable that Czechs would dominate the new Republic. Czechs outnumbered Slovaks by more than two-to-one, and the Czech lands were much more highly developed economically than Slovakia. Czechs had large middle and working classes, and had acquired considerable political and administrative experience in the Austrian half of the Empire. By 1900, they were a well-organized, well-educated, confident nation with a strong sense of national identity. This was in stark contrast to relatively poor, largely rural Slovakia, where discriminatory Hungarian policies had kept Slovaks from acquiring much political or administrative experience or educating themselves in a Slovak national spirit. As the twentieth century dawned on Slovakia, Slovak nationalists were only just beginning to build a mass national movement. The new regime, both in its structure and its justification, carried the seeds of Slovak discontent. First, Czechoslovakia was based on the idea that a Czechoslovak nation existed, which served as the so-called constituent nation (statotvomy narocf) upon which the Republic was based. 1 This notion was anchored in ' See Ladislav Lipscher, Verfassung und politische Verwaltung in der Tschechos/owakei 1918-1939 (Munich, 1979), pp. 41 -42 for a discussion of the statotvornyconcept . SLOVAKJA 9 the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920, along with the belief that a Czechoslovak language existed and would serve as the Republic 's official language.2 These stipulations, while freeing the Slovaks from Magyarization, denied them one of the major goals of the Slovak national movement since its inception at the time of Cudovft Stur in the 1830s and 40-the recognition that a distinct Slovak nation in fact existed. In hand with the Czechoslovak idea went a centralistic administrative structure for the new state, with decision-making powers concentrated in the central government in Prague, which was situated in the heart of the Czech lands . Aside from being a corollary to the idea that the state was based on a single Czechoslovak nation, it reflected fears among Czechs and a number of Czech-oriented Slovaks that autonomy for Slovakia would set a precedent for similar demands by the German and Hungarian minorities and aid Hungary's efforts to ultimately detach Slovakia from Czechoslovakia and return it to Budapest 's control. As Czechoslovakia's then Foreign Minister Edvard Benes said in 1932, greater autonomy for Slovakia would "mean for this state the slogan Slovakia to the Slovaks, German regions to the Germans, Magyar regions to the Magyars." 3 There was also a strong anti-Catholic sentiment among Czech elites and some of their Slovak collaborators, manifested in a fear that if ' The Constitution opens with the words, "We, the Czechoslovak nation," and goes on to stipulate that "The Czechoslovak language shall be the state, official language of the Republic." For an English translation of the Constitution, see Howard Lee McBain and Lindsay Rogers, Eds., The New Constitutions of Europe(New York, 1922), pp. 307-342. ' Quoted in Carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia; The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987 (Princeton, NJ, 1988), p. 137. 10 SLOVAKIA Slovaks governed themselves, they would choose a government that was too reactionary and clerical for the progressive tastes shared by most of Czechoslovakia's founding fathers. Finally, there was a widespread belief that, blighted by Magyarization, Slovaks were not yet capable of self-government. Two further issues that served to fuel Slovak discontent were the economy and religion. Along with the damage done by the First World War, Slovaks now had to cope with a new international boundary that, among other things, cut them off from the traditional markets, resources, and outlets for surplus labor that they had enjoyed in the larger Austro-Hungarian economic unit. Furthermore, the industry that Slovakia did have, lost the subsidies that the Hungarian government had been providing and had to compete with the more efficient and more heavily capitalized industry of the Czech lands. The result was an economic depression and, in effect, a de-industrialization of Slovakia during the early l 920s. The tax rate was also higher in Slovakia than in the Czech lands during the l 920s. 4 Religion proved to be a major irritant in Slovak-Czech relations. Many Czech nationalists, drawing inspiration from the Hussite tradition and regarding Catholicism as a reactionary historical force identified with German-Austrian hegemony over the Czech lands, viewed the Roman Catholic Church with suspicion and even outright hostility. This was dramatically demonstrated shortly after Czechoslovakia achieved her independence, when a Czech 4 See C. A. Macartney , Hungary and Her Successors, The Treaty of Trianon and Its Consequences 1919-1937(London, 1937), pp. 127- 131 and R. W. SetonWatson, Slovakia Then and Now: A Political Survey(London, 1931), pp. 36-37, for contemporary discussions of Slovakia's economic problems. Despite their divergent interpretations of the Slovak question, Macartney's and SetonWatson's characterizations of Slovakia's economic plight are quite similar. SLOVAKIA 11 mob smashed to pieces the statue of the Virgin Mary on Old Town Square in Prague. Reports of this renunciation of a part of the Bohemian past did not play well in Slovakia, where among Slovaks such hostility toward the Church was considerably weaker, if operative at all. The forced removal of crucifixes from the walls of schools, disruption of religions services and desecration of sacred places and objects, and state seizure of Catholic schools and church lands helped foster in Slovakia the image of the Czech as an enemy of Christianity, especially as traditionally understood in Slovakia. 5 Also contributing to religious tensions was the fact that Czech political elites had, already before 1918, developed their closest relations with members of Slovakia's Protestant (Lutheran) minority. Slovak Protestants had traditional links with Czech culture, and were more likely than Slovak Catholics to share the modernist world view that was standard among Czechoslovakia' s founders. By way of example, of the fifty-seven Slovaks appointed to the Provisional National Assembly that was established to draw up Czechoslovakia's constitution, twenty-eight were Protestants. This in a land that was approximately 79 per cent Catholic. 6 Such an outcome could hardly fail to appear discriminatory and unrepresentative to many Slovaks. One final irritant in Slovak-Czech relations is worth discussing at some length, as it shows just how complicated this relationship could be. This is the question of the migration of Czech administrators , teachers, and other professionals and government emplo5 Jozef Spirko, Cirkevne dejiny s osobitnym zretefom na vyvin cirkevnych de- Jin Slovenska, sv. IV (Bratislava, 1993), p. 466; see E L. Woodward and Rohan Butler, Eds., Documents on British Foreign Policy 19 I 9-1939, First Series, Vol. IV, 1919 (London, 1956), p. 3, for a reference co anti-Catholic actions in Slovakia in a report by the British Charge d' affaires in Prague . 6 Ladislav Lipscher, "Klub slovenskych poslancov v rokoch 1918-1920," Historicky casopis, XVI, 2 ( 1968), pp. 140- 141 . 12 SLOVAKIA yees to Slovakia after 1918. Slovakia lacked qualified professionals and administrators who were untainted by affiliation with the former Hungarian regime and its education system, given the fact that Slovaks before 1918 could rarely advance socially and professionally except by becoming "Magyarized." For this reason, tens of thousands of Czechs moved to Slovakia in the 1920s. 7 Though many of them were needed, their presence in Slovakia proved to be a major cause of Slovak discontent. First, they represented a cultural intrusion of modern-thinking, largely urban progressive types into a traditional, rural society, and as such offended many Slovaks with paternalism and tactlessness. Second , they received considerable salary supplements since Slovakia was regarded as a hardship post. 8 This income disparity between imported Czechs and native Slovak employees was also a sore point. Third, there was a perception among Slovaks that their native land was being used by Czechs as a dumping ground for officials who were second-rate. Finally, Slovak resentment was especially acute over the fact that among the Czechs who received employment in Slovakia were not only professionals and high-level administrators , but railway porters, postmen, doormen, messengers , and janitors, positions for which there were plenty of capable Slo- vaks at hand .9 This situation can be explained at least in part by the nature of Czechoslovakia's political system. In Czechoslovakia's coalition ' See Jan Rychlfk, Cesi a Slovaci ve 20.stoletf; cesko-slo venske vztahy J 9 J41945 (Bratislava, 1997), pp. 86-87 for statistics on the number of Czechs employed in Slovakia during the interwar period . ' Natasa Krajcovicova, "K otazke personalneho obsadzovania organov statnej a verejnej spravy na Slovensku v prvych rokoch po vzniku CSR", Historickf casopis, XLIV , 4, 1996, pp. 619-620. 9 Jozef Lettrich, History of Modem Slovakia (New York, 1955), pp. 61 -62; Seton-Watson, Slovakia, p. 34. SLOVAKIA 13 governments, certain parties tended to retain particular ministries over the long-term. Thus, it was not unusual for a political party, whose support came almost exclusively from the Czech lands, to control a substantial number of state administrative positions in Slovakia which it would allot to its Czech adherents as patronage. Such was the case, for example, with the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party and the railroads. Compounding the problem of Czech employment in Slovakia was the fact that Prague, with the help of these migrants, was so successful in developing a Czechoslovak education system in Slovakia that by the end of the 1920s, Slovakia was producing for the first time a native intelligentsia fully trained in Czechoslovak high schools and colleges. Unfortunately, precisely at the time that these cohorts of educated Slovaks were coming onto the job market, Czechoslovakia was hit by the Great Depression. These young Slovaks, many of whom could not find appropriate employment, came to resent the fact that Czechs were working in Slovakia in positions that they coveted. Many of these Czechs meanwhile had struck roots in Slovakia and, even if they wished, had little to return to in Depressionstricken Bohemia and Moravia. Many of these members of the young Slovak intelligentsia inclined toward radical politics of the left and right; among the latter, calls for Czechs to go home became standard fare at political rallies. Though, as one scholar recently pointed out, the personnel question was an extremely complicated issue that cannot be understood from a purely ethnic standpoint, the fact that Czechs were working in Slovakia while Slovaks were unemployed provided grist for Slovak nationalist mills and made this issue a constant irritant for Slovak-Czech relations. 10 ' 0 Krajcovicova, "K otazke", pp. 627, 628 . 14 SLOVAKIA Politically, Slovaks responded to this growing discontent in a number of ways. The antidote to Czechoslovak centralism was Slovak autonomy, a call that was embraced by the Slovak party with the greatest popularity, the Slovak People's Party (SPP). Led by the populist priest Andrej Hlinka, it sought to mobilize Slovak religious, economic, political and cultural discontent into a broadbased movement for autonomy and national recognition. It staunchly supported an autonomous Slovakia right up to the end of the First Republic. Two other groups also called for autonomy for Slovakia, at least in their rhetoric-the Communists and the parties of the Hungarian minority. This meant that in the parliamentary elections of 1925, 1929, and 1935, over 50% of voters in Slovakia opted for parties that rejected Czechoslovak centralism. 11 While about half of ethnic Slovaks voted for the SPP, most other Slovaks voted for the Slovak affiliates of Czechoslovak-wide parties. These parties supported the idea of a Czechoslovak nation and the centralist system. Because they were always or nearly always in the government, they could provide supporters with certain material advantages that the SPP could not, so it was quite likely that considerably more Slovaks supported autonomy than voted for the autonomist SPP. The most significant of such parties was the Agrarians, which alone among the government parties had a strong Slovak wing, led by Milan Hodza. Though officially accepting the Czechoslovak idea and opposing autonomy for Slovakia, the Agrarians tried in the 1930s to develop an alternative to both Prague centralism and SPP autonomism - the socalled regionalist option. This involved promoting cooperation of Slovaks on behalf of Slovak interests on regional rather than national grounds. In theory, regionalism gave the Slovak Agra- 11 For electoral statistics, see Leff, National Conflict, p. 52. SLOVAKIA 15 rians the possibility to champion Slovak interests without the sort of nationalism that could upset Prague and the Czechoslovak constitutional order. 12 Despite considerable support for autonomy in Slovakia throughout the inter-war period, the cards were stacked against success in this regard for a number of reasons. Some of these have been discussed above and need little further elaboration- the Czech numerical preponderance over Slovaks, and superiority in terms of modem economic, cultural, and political development; the constitutional stipulation that a Czechoslovak nation, rather than separate Czech and Slovak nations, existed and was the basis of the state; the distaste for traditional Catholicism among the Republic's ruling elites; the fears that autonomy for Slovakia would play into the hands of Hungarian and German nationalists and make it harder for Prague to resist their autonomist demands; the belief that Slovaks were not capable of governing themselves; and the difficulties, owing to problems of political patronage and economic stagnation, of finding appropriate employment for the university-educated Slovaks the system was producing by the late 1920s and their consequent tum towards radicalism. Other factors were at play as well. It should be kept in mind that both of Czechoslovakia's presidents during the inter-war period, Tomas G. Masaryk and Edvard Benes, were staunch champions of the Czechoslovak idea and opponents of autonomy for Slovakia. Furthermore, the autonomist forces in Slovakia were not united, and in fact were fundamentally divided over their conceptions of just what sort of autonomous Slovakia they wanted. The Hungarian parties regarded Slovaks and Hungarians as minorities with an equal claim to self-government in Slovakia, 12 M. Kropilak, ed., Dejiny S/ovenska, V ( 1918-1945) (Bratislava, 1985), p. 195. 16 SLOVAKlA with hopes that someday that territory would return to a restored Kingdom of Hungary. The SPP, on the other hand, believed in "Slovakia for the Slovaks," as one of its most cherished slogans rang out, and saw Slovaks as the statotvomy narod in Slovakia, with Hungarians as merely a minority. The Communists , for their part, were open to autonomy for Slovakia only if it were to come in conjunction with the establishment of a Communist dictatorship of the proletariat, something that repelled the other pro-autonomy parties. The nature of the Czechoslovak political system was particularly crucial in making it highly unlikely that the SPP, barring some sort of exceptional circumstances, would be able to realize its autonomist goals via normal political channels. While winning the votes of around half of the ethnic Slovaks, the SPP 's support statewide was only around 7%. This meant that it would have to find allies if it wished to establish influence in or increase pressure on the government. Such alliance-seeking was problematic, however. Several leading Czechoslovak parties were outright hostile to Slovak nationalism and the idea of autonomy, for example the Social Democratic Party, National Socialist Party, and, after 1921 , the Czechoslovak People 's Party. Taken together, these three parties represented a considerable proportion of the governing majority. 13 Among the opposition parties were a few that were open to cooperation with the SPP, such as the Hungarian nationalists, Czech fascists, and the Slovak National Party (a Protestant autonomist party), but they were either insignificant in numbers and influence, or holding fundamentally different ultimate goals from the SPP. The Slovak wing of the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party, the second strongest electoral draw in Slovakia, could theoreti13 For example, of the government 's 206 seats in Parliament after the 1929 elections, these three parties held 96 seats. SLOVAKJA 17 cally have formed a powerful bloc had its regionalist program developed into a genuine political collaboration with the SPP. However, two factors-the Agrarians' fear that the SPP would dominate an autonomous Slovakia, and the fact that the Agrarian Party 's leadership in Prague was unwilling to abandon centralism-kept such collaboration at a minimum. As with many national conflicts, it was probably the vicious circle of fear that accounted most for the failure to solve the Slovak question satisfactorily. In the 1920s, Czechoslovak centralists feared that an autonomous Slovakia would be easy prey for Hungarians eager to revise the post-War peace treaties and detach Slovakia from the Czech lands and return it to Hungary. The close collaboration after 1918 between SPP leader Hlinka and two notorious Hungarian sympathizers, Frantisek Jehlicka and Vojtech Tuka, only heightened Prague's apprehensions. 14 By the mid1930s, the Germans had replaced the Hungarians as the chief fear of Czechoslovak centralists with respect to Slovakia. After Konrad Henlein 's strong showing in the 1935 parliamentary elections, Prague worried that autonomy for Slovakia would make it harder to resist similar demands by Czechoslovakia's Sudeten German minority. The SPP, at the same time, had a great fear that Czechs would solve the Sudeten German question by granting autonomy to the predominately and historically German lands, while ignoring similar demands from Slovaks. This fear, combined with the 1 • Jehlicka was a Slovak priest of pro-Hungarian sympathy who accompanied Hlinka on a trip to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where they sought to present the Slovak national case to the Great Powers . After the trip, which proved to be a fiasco, Hlinka was imprisoned by the Czechoslovak government while Jehlicka went into exile; Tuka was a pro-Hungarian university professor who lost his job after 1918 and found a new career in the SPP as an editor, parliamentarian, and advisor to Hlinka. He was inv o lved in various intrigues against the Czechoslovak Republic in the 1920s. 18 SLOVAKJA SPP's inability to realize its demands via normal channels, led that party, or at least certain factions within it, to seek support repeatedly from abroad. And since the Western democracies tended to support the post-War status quo, the SPP sometimes looked to those neighbors of Czechoslovakia who were seeking change and, hence, were seen by the Republic's rulers as a threat. Hlinka and his party consistently cultivated good relations with official and unofficial circles in Poland, while SPP radicals sought closer ties with Germany and Czechoslovakia's pro-Nazi Sudeten Germans . 15 This in turn frightened Czechs and made it even less likely that autonomy for Slovakia would be agreed to by the power brokers in Prague. Throughout 1938, fears on both sides increased as German pressure, both from within and without Czechoslovakia, intensified, as did Slovak demands for autonomy. Once the Czechoslovak government elected to accept the Munich Agreement and hand over large tracts of its territory to Nazi Germany, the SPP pressed its claims and got a demoralized Czechoslovak government not only to acquiesce in its autonomist demands but also to accept the existence of a distinct Slovak nation. Scarcely a week after the Munich Agreement, Prague and the SPP agreed that Czechoslovakia would be restructured as Czecho-Slovakia, with an autonomous Slovakia run by the SPP. When Hitler opted to destroy Czecho-Slovakia m March of 1939, this autonomous Slovakia became the independent Slovak Republic, closely allied with Nazi Germany as one of its satellites, while the Czech lands were incorporated wholly into the Third Reich as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia 15 See, for example, James Ramon Felak, "At the Price of the Republic": Hlinka 's Slovak People 's Party 1929- 1938 (Pittsburgh , PA, 1994), pp. 171 -175, for a discussion of SPP flirtations with Polish and German nationalists. SLOVAKIA 19 survived the war as an authoritarian, one-party state, led by the Roman Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, who succeeded Hlinka in the summer of 1938 as head of the SPP. Both Roman Catholics and their Church were privileged in this period. At the same time, a resistance movement emerged composed of an uneasy alliance of Communists and democrats, which erupted in the Slovak National Uprising of August-September 1944. Both the Slovak Republic and the Uprising would have major impacts on the post-War situation in Slovakia. First, by having their own state, Slovaks gained the confidence and experience necessary for self-government. By 1945, the idea of returning to a Czechoslovak nation and state run from Prague was repellent across the political spectrum in Slovakia. Second, the very fact of this state which, like the autonomous Slovakia of October 1938, came into existence on the coattails of Hitler's march into Central Europe, tainted Slovak accomplishments, as many Czechs regarded Slovaks, especially those in the SPP, as collaborators with the Czechs' mortal enemy, Nazi Germany. Thus, Czechs often saw manifestations of Slovak nationalism as fascist in nature and threatening to the Republic. Third, despite the susceptibility of Slovaks to charges of collaboration, at the same time, thanks to the Slovak National Uprising, Slovaks could point to the fact that their own homegrown resistance to Nazism far exceeded Czech efforts in numbers and intensity. It also created a politically influential association of partisan veterans who could potentially throw their weight around in the postWar situation. With Germany's defeat, Czechoslovakia was restored. This time, however, there would be no Czechoslovak idea. Slovaks were recognized as a distinct nation, and allowed to retain the Slovak national organs that they had set up during the Uprising. 20 SLOVAKJA Czech Communist leader Klement Gottwald, Czechoslovakia's most powerful politician at war's end, proclaimed that "the Slovaks are to be the masters in their own Slovak land." 16 A whole host of problems emerged however, some almost at once, to foil what was a hopeful beginning for advocates of Slovak autonomy. First, the set-up was an asymmetrical one. Slovak national organs, such as the Slovak National Council and Board of Commissioners, were established, but with no parallel Czech organs, only federal organs with competence for the entire state. This led to conflicts over where the competence of the central organs ended and that of the Slovak ones began. The "Slovak question" returned in a new form. Second, the cultural differences that plagued SlovakCzech relations during the First Republic continued. Czech suspicion of Slovak Catholicism was, if anything, even more intense after the experience of the Second World War, when the pro-Nazi Slovak state was led by a Catholic priest under whom the Church enjoyed far more privilege and influence than it had under the First Republic or could hope to after 1945. Third, Czech numerical dominance remained, and if Czech parties could be united on the issue, they would be able to scale back Slovak self-government with little resistance. It also became clear, especially after Czechoslovakia's first post-war parliamentary elections in May of 1946, that Slovakia was far less friendly politically to the Left than were the Czech lands. While Czechs chose left-wing parties in percentages that rank among all-time highs for Europe (the Communists, Social Democrats, and National Socialists together received over 79% of the vote in the Czech lands, with the Communists leading the way with 40% ), Slovaks rejected the Com16 Joseph A. Mikus, ed., Slovakia, A Political and Constitutional History, Acta Academica Slovaca 48 (Bratislava, 1995), p. 242; this work contains an English translation of the text of the Kosice Agreement of April 5, 1945, pp. 242-243. SLOVAKIA 21 munists in favor of the Democrats by a slightly more than two-to• one margm . 17 These above factors combined to complicate post-war Czechoslovak politics and to pose formidable impediments to the realization of the promised program of autonomy for Slovakia. The political landscape in Slovakia after the War was occupied by three main groups, politically speaking. On the Left were the Communists, belonging to the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS), separate from, yet ultimately under the control of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSC) in Prague. The KSS was divided between those Slovak Communists who were willing to assert what they regarded as Slovak interests, and those who were more closely under the thumb of Prague. By August 1945 the latter, on Prague 's intervention, were given the upper hand in the KSS. 18 The only significant party besides the Communists was the Slovak Democratic Party (DP), founded by non-Communist veterans of the Slovak National Uprising, attracting above all those Slovak Protestants who had been alienated by the SPP's assertive Catholicism but at the same time suspicious of Prague 's centralism. The third group was the Catholics themselves, most of whom were unorganized politically with the outlawing of the SPP at war 's end. Thus, the party that traditionally drew about half the Slovak vote no longer existed, and a land that was 80% Catholic was offered only parties dominated by atheists or Protestants. This large bloc of voters without a party home would, as both the Communists and the Democrats realized, be decisive in the parlia- 17 Robert Letz, S/ovensko v rokoch 1945-1948 na ceste ku komunistickej tota/ite(Bratislava, 1994), p. 39. " l.'.ubomir Liptak, ed., Politicke strany na Slovensku, 1860-1989 (Bratislava, 1992), pp. 267-268; and Yeshayahu Jelinek, The Lust for Power: Nationalism. Slovakia, and the Communists, 19 I 8-1948 (Boulder, CO, 1983), p. 86. 22 SLOVAKJA mentary elections. Thus, the KSS began to woo Slovak Catholics, hoping to create a separate Slovak Catholic party that would keep Catholic voters away from the DP and thereby keep Slovakia's non-Communist population divided. 19 Just as it appeared that Communist intrigues would succeed, the DP delivered an olive branch to disgruntled Slovak Catholics. It was called the April Agreement, and involved the DP and leading Slovak Catholics. This Agreement specified that the ratio of Catholics to Protestants in all DP organs and institutions was to be seven-to-three, with Catholics to be allotted two-thirds of the party's seats in Parliament. In addition, Catholics were to get their own DP daily, the Demokraticke hlasy. 20 As a result of the April Agreement, Catholics moved into leading positions in the DP's presidium and general secretariat. Nevertheless, this Catholic-Protestant reconciliation was a Pyrrhic victory for Slovakia's non-Communist forces. It did enable the DP to win the May 1946 parliamentary elections in a resounding manner, and made it clear that Slovakia was overwhelmingly anti-Communist. At the same time, however, the Communists were able to exploit the April Agreement successfully for their own ends. With an influx of Catholics into the DP, the same Catholics that Communists had been wooing up to that point, the KSS now sought to portray the DP as riddled with fascist traitors loyal to former leader Tiso, and dangerous to the integrity and democracy of the Czechoslovak state. 21 Thus began a determined , 19 Letz, Slovensko, pp. 28-29 ; Michal Bamovsky, Na ceste k monopolu moci; Mocenskopoliticke zapasy na S/ovensku v rokoch 1945-1948 (Bratislava, 1993), p. 73 . 20 Bamovsky, Na ceste, p. 80; Letz, S/ovensko, p. 36. 21 See United States Department of State, Decimal Files, 860f.00/6- l 346, no. 985 ; (hereafter referred to as DOS). SLOVAKIA 23 sustained, and aggressive effort by Communist propaganda to slander the DP. Furthermore, the election results made it clear to the Communists that autonomy for Slovakia would be a disaster for Communist interests. Consequently, the Communists began to push aggressively for a scaling back of the competence of Slovak national organs in favor of federal ones. At the same time, Communists sought to use the alarm they could generate over a "fascist restoration" in Slovakia to frighten Czech non-Communists into keeping the DP at a distance. With the acquiescence, and at times the support of the Czech democratic parties, the Communists succeeded in reasserting Prague's control over Slovakia and largely isolating the DP. As U.S. Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt wrote in May, 1947: For the Czech non-Communist parties and their leaders , including Benes, as a result of their experiences in 1938-1939 when Slovak aspirations contributed materially to the dissolution of the Czechoslovak State, feel with a deep intensity that Slovak autonomy, while acceptable in theory, must have definite limitations in practice. These leaders are therefore all too likely to side with the Communists on any issues to which the latter are able to give a Czech versus Slovak or autonomy versus centralism complexion. As a result the Democrats are very frequently left to face the Communist onslaught alone. 22 Although, strictly speaking, Czechoslovakia was a democracy, with free elections and multiple political parties with their own periodicals, one is struck by just how circumscribed the system in fact was. A number of political parties were banned, including the most popular Czech and Slovak parties of the inter-war years, the Agrarians and SPP, respectively. New parties were prohibited 22 DOS, 5-2947, no. 2477. 24 SLOVAKIA without the consent of the existing parties. Nor could one set up an individual periodical without their permission. Government intervention in and influence over the media was considerable, and publication of anything critical of the Soviet Union was taboo. The regime was also established to accord the Communists more influence than electoral results would warrant. 23 This was particularly the case in Slovakia, where despite losing by nearly a two-to-one margin in the parliamentary elections, the Communists retained the chairmanship of the Board of CoJilIIlissioners, which acted as the executive branch in Slovakia, and kept the Democrats from holding the crucial post of Commissioner of the Interior, which went to the non-partisan Mikulas Ferjencfk.24 Without much support from the Czech non-Communist parties and facing a Communist-influenced political police, the DP was an easy prey for the most concentrated Communist attack yet. In June of 1947, the security police in Slovakia uncovered an alleged "anti-state conspiracy", which the Communists used to blackmail and intimidate the DP.25 Using their influence in and control over state security organs and employing 'agents provocateurs', the Communists were able, reminiscent of their assault on the Smallholders Party in Hungary, to charge leading Slovak Democrats with complicity in the conspiracy. Though the Czech democratic parties were by this time wise to Communist intrigues and took some steps in defense of the DP, they never quite lost their suspicions that, just possibly, Communist charges against the 23 For a discussion of Czechoslovakia's "people's democratic" system, see Karel Kaplan, The Short March; The Communist Takeover in Czechoslovakia, 19451948 (London, 1987), pp. 33-54. 24 Bamovsky, Na ceste, pp. 116- I I 7. 25 lbid., pp. 140-141 ; Letz, Slovensko, pp. 54-55. SLOVAKIA 25 DP might be accurate.26 With the Czech democrats thereby paralyzed, the Communists, with the police in their pockets, and the trade union and partisan organizations that they dominated mobilized on their behalf, felt that the correlation of forces were such in Slovakia that they attempted a 'putsch' in November of 194 7. This involved a KSS attempt to force a reconstitution of the Slovak Board of Commissioners through a political crisis caused by the planned and coordinated resignation of its Communist members. Though only partly successful, and though the DP and Czech non-Marxist parties stuck together from this point on, this cooperation proved to be too little, too late. The attempted coup in Slovakia was followed by a successful one in Prague in February 1948; in the latter case, it was the Czechoslovak Social Democrats who broke ranks with Czec hoslovakia's democratic parties and allowed the Communists' divide and rule tactics to bring Czec hoslovak democracy to an end . In contrasting the inter-war period and the post-war period , one finds much continuity in the Slovak-Czech relationship. The Czech bias against traditional Slovak Catholicism impeded relations both after 1918 and, reinforced by the events of 1938-1945, maintained itself into the post-war era. Czech fears of Slovaks as disloyal also continued, again reinforced by the events of the inter-war period and especially of 1938- 1939, and made evident in the ease with which the Communists could find Czech support for their efforts to undo 'de facto' the results of the elections in Slovakia. Both situations, though in quite different ways, presented insurmountable obstacles to the realization of Slovak autonomist desires, with Slovaks themselves divided over the iss ue, unable to bring sufficient pressure to bear on their behalf. Finally, in both 26 DOS, 10-647, no. 1342; see also Hu bert Ripka, Czechoslovakia Enslaved: The Story of the Communist Coup d'Etat (London, 1950), p. 113. 26 SLOVAKIA situations, external developments were crucial - in one case Nazi Germany's pressure against Czechoslovakia, in the other the intensifying Cold War, which made Czechoslovakia 's hopes of being a bridge between East and West futile and even dangerous. Along with important similarities, the Slovak question in the inter-war period and post-war period shows significant differences. After World War II, the Czechoslovak idea was abandoned and the existence of a Slovak nation was officially recognized. Furthermore, Prague came to believe that the best way to ease Slovak discontent was via the economic development of Slovakia. There were also important differences in the political structure of the two cases. In the inter-war period, the Government was composed of parties committed to the maintenance of Czechoslovak democracy, with Communists and fascists in the opposition along with Slovak nationalists. After the War, an opposition technically ceased to exist, Communists held key positions within the system they sought to destroy, and Slovak nationalists, albeit a new breed more moderate than the former SPP, sat in the Government. A final crucial difference lies in the relationship between the Slovak question and the health and survival of the democratic order in Czechoslovakia. In the inter-war period, Slovak nationalists had at best an ambivalent attitude toward Czechoslovakia's system. While a fascist element within the SPP viewed it with hostility, most Slovak nationalists accepted the system or were indifferent toward it. When Czechoslovakia faced potentially fatal threats in 1938, the SPP's primary concern was not "How can we defend Czechoslovak democracy at this critical time?" but rather the more parochial "What's in it for the Slovaks?" For all their failure to address satisfactorily the Slovak question in the 1920s and 1930s, most Czech political elites had a better grasp of just what was at stake as Nazism intensified its pressure on the First SLOVAKIA 27 Republic from within and without. After the war, however, autonomy-minded Slovaks, now represented in the DP, had a very clear notion of just what was at stake, and arguably a better grasp of the situation than the Czechoslovak democrats, who well into 1947 seemed to fear an SPP-revival in Slovakia more than they feared the Communists . For national tensions to ease, both sides of a conflict need to relinquish, or at least moderate, their fears of the other. This the Czechs never really succeeded in doing, as the idea that Slovakia was disloyal and separatist was always in the back, and often in the front, of the minds of many of them. Slovak actions, whether it was Hlinka's consorting with Hungarian sympathizers in the 1920s, the SPP radical wing's flirting with fascism in the 19 30s, or the SPP's demand for autonomy and eventual secession from Czecho-Slovakia in conjunction with Hitler's penetration of East Central Europe, only reaffirmed or deepened Czech fears. When one takes into account these mutual suspicions, the psychological baggage both sides brought into their relationship, the structure of Czechoslovakia's regimes during this century, the persistent bias of Czech elites against Slovak Catholicism, the disparities between Slovak and Czech economic development, the presence of hostile neighbors hoping to exploit Slovak-Czech tensions, and the trauma that this part of Europe experienced from 1914 to 1989, it is not surprising that the Slovak question remained a running sore on Czechoslovakia's body politic throughout the twentieth century.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Slovak Question in the lnterwar (1918-1938) and Post-War (1945-1948) Czechoslovak Republics Description An account of the resource James R. Felak Slovakia, Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003 pp. 7-27 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Felak, James Ramon, 1957- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/5820cfa6b5d526b8e40d1774450f18f1.pdf 95fb31338013ee80a4c4852b0b160e6d PDF Text Text 28 SLOVAKJA 'Slovak som a Slovak budem ... 'l Explaining Nationalism in Post-Communist Slovakia Paal Sigurd Hilde The question of the position of Slovakia within the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (CSFR), the official name as of April 1990, was among the most divisive issues in Slovak and Czech politics in the post-communist era. As is well known, the conflict over the future basis and structure of the federation eventually led to the division of the state on 1 January 1993. Despite the impression given by many press reports at the time, the break-up was not the result of Slovak secession. With the exception of the Slovak National Party (SNS), representing about 10 per cent of the votes in Slovakia, all Slovak political parties successful in the decisive June 1992 elections were in favor of some kind of common state with the Czechs. This included the winner, Vladimir Meciar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS). There were, however, near irreconcilable policy differences between the left-populist HZDS and the right wing coalition victorious in the Czech Republic. Given the minority veto in the Federal assembly, whereby a minority of representatives from either Republic could block important legislation in the House of Nations, only a carefully crafted compromise could save the Federation from political deadlock. Rather than seeking a compromise, however, the Czech 1 The title is taken from Miroslav Kusfs 1981 samizdat essay. Reprinted in Miroslav Kusy: Eseje (Bratislava: Archa, 1991 ), pp. 88 -96 . �SLOVAKlA 29 right wing coalition led by Vaclav Klaus of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) pushed for the division of the state if a 'functional federation' was not possible. Unwilling and politically unable to accept Klaus 's vision of a strong federal government, Meciar reluctantly followed the Czech Prime Minister's lead towards a break-up. 2 The political phenomenon generally referred to as Slovak nationalisn was thus not the decisive force behind the break-up of the CSFR. 3 It was, however, Slovak nationalism that after the collapse of communism started the process that eventuallly led to the rejection of the common state by right-wing Czech parties. As all nationalisms, Slovak post-communist nationalism was a complex phenomenon. It came in moderate and more radical forms, focus sing on several political issues. In its most basic expression, it held that Slovakia and the Slovaks deserved a more equal and visible position within a state seen as unfairly dominated by the Czech part. 4 Basically all Slovak political parties, including the 2 On the process preceding the break-up see Eric Stein : Czecho/Slovakia: Ethnic Conflict, Constitutional Fiss ure, Negotiated Breakup (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 3 Nationalism is fo r the purpose of th is study defined as a world view, which holds that the pop ulation of the world is divided into nations. A nation, claim nationalists, consists of a grou p of people identifiable and identifying according to cultural, religious, historical and/or territorial criteria. Nationalists see nations as constituting natural social units and seek to promote the po litical, cultural, economic or other kind of status, in symbolical or more material terms, of the nation they claim to represent. The nationalist discourse, common to a ll forms of nationalism, is used thro ughout the world, most often to oppose or defe nd existing political units. See Craig Calhoun: Nationalism (Buckin gham : Open University Press, 1997). •Foran examination of mainstream Slovak national ism see Paal Sigurd Hil de: 'Slovak Nationalism and the Break-Up of Czechoslovakia', Europe-Asia Stu die s, vol. 51 (1999), no. 4, pp. 64 7-665. �30 SLOVAKIA most pro-federal, shared this demand. More radical expressions called not only for more radical solutions to the question of the Federation, but focussed also negatively on the position of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia and the perceived threat from Hungarian irredentism. In its exteme, which was promoted only by small, popular unrepresentative groups, Slovak · nationalism promoted radically anti-Czech, anti-Hungarian and sometimes also anti-Semitic views. This article will analyse another complexity of nationalism in post-communist Slovakia. 5 As with all nationalisms, the popular success of the Slovak form can be seen as a result of several, intricate causes. These include historical, political, social and econ omic determinants. The aim of this study is not to reach a final decision on what caused the apperance and success of post-communist nationalism. Rather, the article offers an overview of a range of possible explanations and the strengths and weaknesses of these. This might be a combination of all, some, just one or none . Ultimately, it was Slovak6 politicians and other political actors that gave nationalism the political significance it had after the collapse of communism. Without nationalists, there is no nationalism. Focusing merely on the role of actors, however, leaves many unanswered questions. The most important of these is why the demands and rhetoric of the nationalists gained such a favourable response from the population. Certain political factors in the postcommunist period can be seen to have facilitated the success of the nationalist agenda among Slovaks. One such factor was the 5 For the sake of simplifying the analysis the multi-issue complexity of Slovak nationalism will be not discussed in detail. • The word Slovak will in this article denote a person of Slovak culture and identity. Similarly, a Czechoslovak is a person of Czech or Slovak ethnicity with a Czechoslovak identity . �SLOVAK1A 31 institutional legacy of the socialist federation (more on this below). A second factor was the changing international environment after the Cold War, with the secession of the Baltic states, Slovenia and Croatia as examples of the new stress on national self-determination. Interaction with the two major 'others', the Hungarians and Czechs, was also important. The upsurge of post-communist nationalism in the Hungarian speaking minority in Slovakia and in Hungary, and the increasingly hostile attacks on Slovak nationalism, particularly in the Czech press, both served to spur Slovak nationalists into action. 7 Even more important in increasing support for nationalist de mands in post-communist Slovakia was the issue of economic reform. The generally harder impact of the Federal economic programme on the Slovak than on the Czech economy was by many taken as a sign of the disadvantaged position of Slovaks within the common state.8 The call for a greater Slovak control over economic policy thus became the one of the most important and substantial claims of Slovak nationalists . Yet, even given the activities of nationalists and the political factors conducive to the appeal of the nationalist discourse, to understand post-communist nationalism one must understand the historical developments that formed the basis for the appeal of the ethnic nationalism in Slovakia. Several historical precondition s can be identified . These are the topic of this study . 7 For examples of this see (H ungarian) Andrej Ferko: Stredna Europa - Eseje (Bratislava: VSSS, 1998) and (Czech) Dusan Sl obodnfk: Proti sedemhlavemu drakovi : Z dejin zapasu za Sia vensko (Bratislava: VSSS, 1998 ). ' In a January 1992 poll , for example. 53 % of respondents in Slovakia antici pated that the Czech economy wou ld grow at the expense of the Slovak. Cen trum pre social nu analyzu: Aktualne problemy Cesko-S/ovensk a, januar 1992 (Bratislava: CSA, 1992), p. 29. �32 SLOVAKIA Preconditions for the Success of Post-Communist Nationalism. To clarify the analysis of the historical preconditions of postcommunist nationalism, it is useful to divide the examination into two stages. The first stage focuses on the generally different impact nationalist ideas have had in the Eastern and Western parts of Europe. Whereas the civic, territorial version of nationalism became dominant in the West, ethnic, especially linguistically centred nationalism prevailed in Central and Eastern Europe (hereafter CEE)9. In the twentieth century, this ethnic nationalism be came the underlying ideal for the political reorganisations of CEE in two world wars. The first half of the twentieth century thus served to establish ethnic nationalism as a dominant political ideology and ethnic ties as primary lines of political identification. An example of the causes of the success of ethnic nationalism thus forms what one might call the 'deep ' historic background for understanding post-communist nationalism. The second stage in the analysis focuses on the impact of the socialist era. For the majority of the population of post-commu nist Slovakia, the just over forty years of communist indoctrination through education, mass media and other means, had formed their primary so urce of fo rmal socialisation. Moreover, Soviet Communism brought one of the most dramatic periods of social and economic change in Slovak history. The analysis below outlines the different assessments scholars have made of the impact the social, economic and political devel opments of the las t halfcentury before 1989 had on the strength of nationalism in Slovakia. • Central and Eastern Europe will in this article denote roughly the area of the fonner Habsburg Empire as well as the European parts of the Romanov and Ottoman em pires. �SLOVAKIA 33 The Success of Ethnic Nationalism. In his celebrated 1882 lecture, Ernest Rennan started by making a distinction 'between the fusion of "races" in the nations of Western Europe, and the retention of ethnic distinctiveness in Eastern Europe .' 10 In 1944, Hans Kohn developed this theme when he introduced the concepts of 'Western' and 'Eastern' nationalisms. 11 While challenged by several authors, this typology has survived the test of time and is used in various forms by scholars today. As most nationalisms contain both civic (Western) and ethnic (Eastern) elements, the distinction is, as Anthony D. Smith points out, analytical and not normative. 12 Czechoslovak nationalism in the interwar years, for example, was clearly ethnic m relations with Germans and Hungarians, but civic m its merger of Slovaks and Czechs into one nation. On the whole, scholars agree on the basic causes why civic nationalism was more successful in Western Europe and ethnic nationalism in the Eastern part of the continent. The main factors are generally identified as the socio-economic and, partly linked, cultural differences between the two regions at the time of the dissemination of nationalist ideas. 13 From about the fifteenth century, Western Europe saw the beginning of the development of the modem state. The new economy saw the abolition of serfdom , the weakening of the feudal-agricultural economy and the strengthening of trade and manufacture centred in cities. The develop0 Anthony D. Smith: Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 9 ' '' Hans Kohn : The Idea of Nationalism (New York : Collier, 1967), pp. 329-331. 12 Smith: Nationalism and Modernism, p. 126 '-' For a good analysis of East-West historical differences see Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries: A Hi/story of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (Lo ndon, Routledge, I 998), pp. 15-25. �34 SLOVAKlA ment of centralised, strong states, yet with an increasingly urbanised and literate population capable of challenging the authority of the ruler, had important social, economic and political effects. Western, civic nationalism grew gradually out of the socio-economic developments and changes in political thought of pre-nineteenth century Europe. 14 This nationalism was state centred and focused on gaining the loyality of and homogenising the population of a territory. Crucially, nationalist ideas were promoted in societies whose elites, if not populations, were already quite homogenous culturally. This was particularly the case in Protestant, North-Western Europe. In important respects, Central and Eastern Europe was relatively 'backward' when nationalist ideas spread through the intellectual life of the region in the early nineteenth century. 15 The relative backwardness had both external and internal causes. The centuries of warfare with the Ottomans had weakened the states in the region and led to their inclusion into large empires. Hungary, which then included today's Slovakia, came under Habsburg rule after the battle of Mohacs in 1526. At the eve of the French Revolution, the Ottoman, Habsburg and Romanov empires dominated Central and Eastern Europe. Compared with rapidly developing Western states, the three Eastern empires remained despotic. As the feudal-agricultural economic structure retained its dominance, no strong middle class developed . In Slovakia, or Felvidek (Upper Hungary) as the Hungarian rulers called it, the development of mining in Eastern Slovakia, for instance, led to the growth of some smaller towns. Generally, these were dominated by ethnic 14 See Liah Greenfeld: Nationalism : Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1992 ) ,s The concept of Central and East European 'backwardness' is obviously very general and simplifying, also given the large differences within the region . �SLOVAKJA 35 Germans or Jews. The majority of the population of Slovakia remained rural and often illiterate. The socio-econonic conditions for cultural homogenisation were, therefore, not present. The ethnically very heterogeneous dynasties of Central and Eastern Europe were initially not interested in trying to turn their empires into nation-states on the Western model. 16 Only in the final decades of the nineteenth century did Tsarist Russia attempt to Russify the Western Borderlands and the Hungarian leadership promote its policy of Magyarisation (Hungarianisation). 17 Given its lack of an ethnic nobility and being an integral part of Hungary proper, the Slav population of Felvidek was particularly exposed. Yet even here the Hungarian nation-bulding project did not succeed. History was soon to take a surprising turn. Ultimately more successful than the civic nation builders in CEE were elites opposed to central rule and integration. State centred, civic nationalism had no advantages for such elites. When they adopted nationalist discourse as a political tool , they were inspired by German romanticism rather than Western liberalism . Nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe looked not to Locke and Stuart Mill, but to Herder and Fichte. In German romantic thought, it was not political boundaries that determined the extent of a nation , but culture and particularly language. In the ethnically diverse empires of CEE such ideas were to have a dramatic impact. It was no coincidence that two leading Slovak (Pan-Slav) nationalists, Jan Kollar and Pavo) Jozef Safarik, both studied at "' Charles Ingrao: ' Forum: Understanding Ethnic Conflict in Central Europe: An Historical Perspective', Nationalities Papers, vol. 27 ( 1999), no. 2, p. 293 . 17 See Edward C. Thaden (ed.): Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Fin land, J855 - 19 14 (Princenton: Princenton University Press, 198 I ) and Tibor Frank: 'Hungary and the Dual Monarchy, 1867- 1890' , in Peter F. Sugar, Peter Hanak and Tibor Frank (eds.): A History of Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). �36 SLOVAKJA the University of Jena in the early nineteenth century. 18 The 'father of Slovak nationalism', Cudovit Stur, like Kollar and Safarik, a Protestant, also studied in Germany, in Halle. 19 By the outbreak of World War One, ethnic nationalism had emerged as one of the leading political ideologies in Central and Eastern Europe. In Austria-Hungary, leaders claiming to represent various ethnically defined nations, such as Slovak nationalists in the Slovak National Party, promoted their rights within the Empire. World War I was to bring victory to such nationalist programmes. Towards the end of the war, when the Entente Powers started supporting the programmes of Central and Eastern Europe (mainly exile) nationalists , their support was limited to the de mand for an administrative reorganisation of Austria-Hungary . By 1918, however, the right to self-determination had come to mean the right for independence. Allied victory in World War I thus resulted in a reorganisation of the Central European region according to the principle of the 'self-determination of nations', that is, the self-determination of ethnically defined nations. This right was by no means allowed for all , particularly not for the 'defeated nations'. All the new and old, expanded states of the region contained sizeable ethnic minority groups . While political life in Austria-Hungary had increasingly taken the form of a struggle between the central authorities and nationalist leaders, inter-war Central and Eastern Europe took this to a new level. In the new Czechoslovak Republic as well, ethnic belonging became the main dividing line in politics. Ethnic Ger- "Victor S. Mamatey : 'The Establishment of the Republic' . in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomir Luz.a (eds.): A History of the Czechoslovak Republic: l 9 l 81948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 6. 19 Peter Petro: A History of Slovak Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), p. 65 . �SLOVAKIA 37 mans and Hungarians (Magyars) voted overwhelmingly for ethnically based parties . The Slovaks, according to official ideology part of the Czechoslovak nation, were divided. As in the late Habsburg period, one part of the Slovak political elite was Czechoslovak nationalist, another, strongly connected to the Catholic clergy, was more sceptical to the Czechoslovak idea. Loyal to the Czechoslovak state until pushed into declaring independence inl939, the Slovak nationalist movement promoted Slovak, as opposed to Czechoslovak, national awareness and nationalism throughout the inter-war period . While it is impossible to get an accurate picture of the popular support for Slovak nationalism after World War II, it seems safe to agree with Carol Skalnik Leff's claim that when taking power in 1948, the communists faced a 'full-blown' Slovak nationalism. 20 If the creation of a Slovak education system, the flowering of Slovak culture and promotion of Slovak nationalism in politics was not sufficient to cement the importance of ethnic belonging and nationalism in people's thinking in the inter-war years, the Second War War was .2 1 With the rise towards authoritarian rule by the Slovak People ' s Party from the autumn of 1938, ethnic nationalism became a central part of official ideology. In the region as a whole, ethnicity became a supreme organizing principle increasing or limiting chances for employment, economic prosperity and even survival. Supported by the Catholic clergy, the Slovak state sought to educate the Slovaks into becoming good nationalists. Nationalism was promoted in schools, the mass media and 10 Carol Skalnik Leff: National Conflict in Czech oslovakia (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press. 1987), p. 281. 11 On national identity in the inter-war period see Owen V. Johnson: Slovakia 191 8- 1938: Education and the Making of a Nati on (Boulder: Co lumbia Uni versity Press, 1985). �38 SLOVAKIA official and religious life in general. 22 For many groups among ethnic Slovaks, the war-time state was a positive experience. The relative economic prosperity, the ease of employment (especially for the young intelligentsia) and the elevated position of the Catholic faith and church were aspects of the state that for some Slovaks compared favourably with pre-war Czechoslovakia. Obviously, for parts of the population, the experience had been clearly negative. For Jews and Romanies it was one of inhuman crimes. Yet, despite the horrors and injustices, the experience of independence under German influence strengthened the position of nationalism in Slovak society. While the leaders of the 1944 Slovak National Uprising had called for the reestablishment of Czechoslovakia, they did not want to return to the centralist system of the First Republic (1918-1938). The extent to which Slovakia had been changed by the war became evident in the 1946 election. Whereas the Slovak political scene had been split on the issue of Slovakia's position within the common state before the war, all parties standing in 1946 supported Slovak self-rule within Czechoslovakia in their programmes. 23 The Impact of the Socialist Period. In the intersection between empirical studies that directly or indirectly offer an explanation for the success of nationalism in post-communist Slovakia and general theoretical works on nationalism, it is possible to identify three main approaches to the question of the impact of the communist era. The first focuses 22 See e.g. Yeshayahu Jelinek : The Parish Republic: H/inka 's Slovak People's Party 1939- 1945 (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1976). lJ Jan Ryc hlik : Cesi a Slovaci ve 20.stoleti: Cesko-slovenske vztahy 19451992 (Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press, 1998), pp.40-42. �SLOVAKIA 39 mainly on the way in which nationalism survived despite the forty years of communism. Given the strength of Slovak nationalism before Communism and the resilience of ethnic and cultural ties, nationalism would, according to this approach, have survived whatever policy the Communist Party had chosen. Scholars taking this approach would put the greatest emphasis on the 'deep' historic background outlined above. The second approach, where scholars stress the continuation of nationalism through the socialist period, could be considered the mainstream historical view . This approach focuses on the way Slovak national identity and support for nationalism survived the socialist era not only because of their pre-1948 strength, but also due to certain policies during Communism that served to strenghten their basis of support. According to the final approach, the success of post-communist nationalism was mainly due to the policies adopted by the Communist Party. Putting much less emphasis on the strength of precommunist national identity and nationalism (and thus the •deep' historical explanation), the 'due to' approach takes two main forms . One focuses on the effects of the socio-economic development of Slovakia during Communism, the other on the impact of the construction of nationally based institutional structures. These three analytical categories form a continuum rather than three clearly identifiable positions. Differences between studies falling into the different categories are generally one of focus or degree. Few scholars argue the extreme positions: that postcommunist nationalism was purely a revival of suppressed nationalism, or that it was a result of developments in the communist period only. Most would note the continued expressions of Slovak nationalism during the communist era, and then stress the degree to which the socialist period suppressed , maintained or actually strengthened the appeal of nationalism. �40 SLOVAKIA Nationalism Despite Communism. Particulary in the first years after the collapse of Communism, the 'retum-of-history'argument was commonly used to explain the success of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. Precommunist nationalism, merely suppressed by the communist regimes, re-emerged to become the political factor it had been forty years earlier. As one historian put it: Communism may have temporarily relieved Central Europe's ethnic tensions for nearly half a century. But if religion was the opiate of the people, Communism proved no more effective than methadone (sic) in suspending their craving for ethnically whole nation states, without providing a cure. 24 In the literature on nationalism in Slovakia, Jacques Rupnik supported this view when he argued that Slovak nationalism had been in the 'communist refrigerator' for most of the period after 1948. 25 Of the monographs in English discussing Slovak nationalism, Stanislav Kirschaum's A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival is, arguably, one of those that leans most toward the 'despite ' approach. 26 While describing in detail the persistence of nationalism during Communism and the radical changes Slovak society went through, Kirschbaum notes no positive effect of the communist regime on the strength of Slovak national identity and nationalism. Rather, he highlights the attempts the communist lea- 1 ' Ingrano: 'Forum ... ' , p. 307 . 15 Jaques Rupnik, quoted in Martin Butora and Zora Butorova: 'Slovakia after the Split ' ,Joumal o[Democracy,vol. 4(1993), no. 2,p. 75 . 16 Stanislav Kirschbaum : A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival (London : Macmillian, 1995). �SLOVAKIA 41 dership made at suppressing national identity.27 If Slovak nationalism gained strength during the communist period , it was more a reaction to the 'Czechoslovakism' favoured by the regime .2 8 The primordialist theories of nationalism would be the most obvious theoretical basis for the works in this approach. Stressing the ' ineffable, and at times overpowering' strength of the ' cultural givens' in a society, Clifford Geertz, for example, points to how ethnic ties in some societies come to be seen as a 'natural some would say spiritual affinity' .29 Given the strong emphasis put on cultural belonging in Slovak history, at least since the late nineteeth century, one could argue that ethnicity had gained a primordial character in Slovak society by the end of World War II. Consequently, the communist regime would not have been able to suppress Slovak identity, and therefore neither the potential for Slovak nationalism. While not going as far as the primordialist in stressing the naturalness of central ties, the so-called ethno-sym- bolist theories of nationalism could also be interpreted as lending support to the 'despite' approach. According to Anthony D. Smith, post-communist nationalism confirms the resilience and strength of ehnic myths, symbols and popular memory. He writes:' Though the timing of the current ethnic revival is a function of social and geopolitical changes, their contents and intensities are largely determined resources,' by pre-existing ethno-sy mbolic 30 27 Note e.g. ibid., pp. 228, 245, 252. Kirschbaum ta.lees a very favo urable view of Slovak nationalism and a more negative one of the common Czech and Slovak state . " Ibid., p. 24 7. 19 Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures (London : Fontana, 1973). pp . 259-260 . 0 ' Anthony D. Smith : 'LSE Centennial Lecture: The Resurgence of Nationalism ? Myth and memory in the renewal of nations ', British Journal of Sociology, vo l. �42 SLOVAKIA Empirical support for the 'despite' argument can be found in post-communist Slovakia. In a study of regional patterns of political culture, a group of Slovak sociologists found strong similarities between the inter-war and post-communist era. 31 In both periods, nationalist and populist parties gained most support in northwest and central Slovakia. The persistence of this regional pattern seems to suggest that at least elements of pre-communist political culture had been preserved. Moreover, studies from other post-communist countries show that national minorities that were actively discouraged from maintaining their separate identity and culture, still emerged to voice nationalist demands after Communism. In Poland, this was the case with the German minority .32 While counter-factual history necessarily amounts to speculation, it does seem likely that regardless of what the policy the Communists had adopted, also the separate Slovak identity, in both its cultural and political expression, would have survived. The relatively short period of communist rule would clearly have facilitated this. As can be seen from the above, focusing on links to pre-communist nationalism and the preservation of popular myths and memory has some advantages. Firstly, it points to the strength of ethnic nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. The conviction that ethnically defined nations formed natural bases for political legitimacy, be it in a separate state or as 47 (1996), no. 4, p. 573. Elsewhere, Smith does stress the role of communi st policies in preserving these myths and memories. See e.g. Smith: Nationalism and Modernism, 237, endnote 9. 31 Vladimir Krivy , Viera Fialova and Daniel Balko: Slovensko a jeho regi6ny: sociokultume suvislosti volebneho spravania (Bratislava: Nadacia Media, 1996). 12 Janusz Mucha: 'Democratisation and Cultural Minorities: The Polish Case of the 1980s/90s', East European Quarterly, vol. 25 (1992), no. 4. �SLOVAKIA 43 an autonomous region within a larger entity, had by 1948 been deeply ingrained in CEE. This was not only the case with most of the Slovak political elite, but also, many historians would agree, large parts of the population. Secondly, stressing the preservation of political culture is perhaps the only way to explain the continued regional pattern of support for nationalism. In its pure form, the 'despite' argument rejects any important effect of the socialist period on national identity and the popular view of nationalism. If one accepts that national identity is a social construct, that nations are not some kind of natural social unit, this jump across forty years of history is difficult to defend. As shall be discussed in more detail below, 1948-1989 was probably the most dramatic period of social and economic change in Slovak history. It was also a period of an intense policy of officially managed, public socialisation. Given the impact this period had on people' s lives, it seems difficult to assume that popular views on national identity and nationalism would not also change. One example that it had is that before 1948 Slovakia was a deeply religious society and mainstream nationalism was strongly connected to the Catholic Church. In the post-communist period, however, the leading nationalists parties HZDS and SNS were both secular. Catholic nationalism, as represented by the Christian Democratic Party (KDH), was much less successful. Explanations focusing more on the way the communist period served to change Slovak national identity and thereby the bases for nationalism during that period, thus seemingly provide a more convincing explanation for the widespread appeal of nationalism in the postcommunist era. Finallly, the 'despite' argument cannot explain the emergence of 'new' nationalisms in the post-communist period . Some groups without a history of common national identity and nationalism formed nationalist parties after 1989. Most im- �44 SLOVAKIA portantly, this included the Roma community. Also the emergence of a relatively strong nationalism in Moravia and Silesia was a sign of the increased importance of cultural identity. 33 Traditionally a regional identity and before Communism never a major political issue, the Moravian-Silesian autonomy party became the largest party in the Czech National Council in 1990. Nationalism Through the Communist Era. The 'through' approach makes up the middle ground between stressing the resilience of pre-communist nationalism and the strengthening of national identity during the communist period. Studies falling into this category would seek to explain the perpetuation of national conflict due to the persistence of support for nationalism built up before the communist period and to certain factors that served to strengthen Slovak national identity during the 1948-1989 era. Most historical studies tend to be in this category. Carol Skalnik Leff' s 1987 seminal book on national conflict in Czechoslovakia is probably the best study in English in this category. 34 In Leff's analysis, the deep social, economic and cultural differences between the Czech Lands and Slovakia were politicised during the inter-was republic. A triangular pattern of support and opposition was created, whereby the central leadership in Prague relied on the pro-Czechoslovak section of the Slovak political elite to help neutralise the demands of Slovak nationalists. In the communist period , this pattern persisted until it was displaced JJ Jaroslav Krejci and Pavel Machonin: Czechoslovakia 1918- 1992: A Laboratory for Social Change (Oxford: Macmill an and St. Anthony ' s, 1996), p. 51 . 14 Leff: National Conflict. Ryc hlik: Cesi a Slovaci .. . 1945-1992 is a later, eve n more detailed work of this approcah. �SLOVAKIA 45 with the ascent of Gustav Husak to power in 1969. Both the interwar and the socialist regimes failed in their attempts to modernize away the problem of Slovak nationalism (culturally and educationaly in the inter-war period, economically during socialism). These failures, combined with the unwillingness of both regimes to adequately accommodate the Slovak nationalist's demands, led to a growing sense of antagonism (mutual antagonism, as Czechs resented that Slovaks used times of international crisis to force through their demands). Leff concludes: 'Given the persistence of Slovak national feeling, on the one hand, and Czech power, on the other, the result has been persistent national conflict'. 35 While Leff notes that Slovak nationalism was strong in the post-war period, much due to the experience of statehood during the war, she also identifies several factors during the communist era that served to strengthen its basis. The existence of separate Slovak political institutions, for instance, was important. Leff writes: 'Week as the KSS (Slovak Communist Party) and the SNR (Slovak National Council) were in the years following 1948, both would retain the capacity to serve as nationalist time bombs. ' 36 One important reason for this was that the system of separate Slovak institutions created a Slovak elite separate from Prague-based Czechoslovak one. 37 Also other aspects of the regime 's policy proved counter-productive to its official aim of promoting the 'coming together' (zblfienie) of Czechs and Slovaks. The mass media, for instance, was 'segmented and not adapted to the integrative intentions of the policy-making elite. 38 Thus , by the late 1980, 'the Slovak question ' had become 'deeply, perhaps 35 Leff: National Conflict, p. 282. Ibid ., p. 112 . 37 Ibid ., p.294 . " Ibid., p. 297 . 36 �46 SLOVAKlA irreversibly, woven into the fabric of Czechoslovak politics as usual'. This statement carries with it the implication that the Slovak question wi1l continue to assert itself as a political force in the future .39 Three years after Leff published her study, her prediction came true . Theoretically, the 'through' approach occupies the middle ground between the primoridalists emphasis on the strength of cultural ties and the stress put on social processes by the modernist and institutional views outlined below. With more emphasis on the way myths, symbols, values and memories are preserved in societies, ethno-symbolist theories would come closest to forming a theoretical basis for this approach. From the ethno-symbolist perspective, the communists ' attempt to defuse nationalism in Slovakia by flagging symbols of self-determination could only serve to strengthen the feeling of national identity. The reason for this was that the only symbols that would evoke a positive response from the population would be symbols that had a basis in popular tradition . For example, while the communists did try to reframe the historical image of r.udovft Stur as a social revolutionary, they could not eradicate the view of Stur as a champion of Slovak rights so strongly ingrained in popular tradition and myths . As Smith writes : "Ethno-history is no sweetshop in which nationalists may ' pick and mix'; it sets limits to any appropriation by providing a distinctive context and patterns of events, personages and ,, 4 0 processes ... . The most obvious strength of the 'through' approach is that by stressing both the strong social basis of pre-communist nationalism and the way it was maintained and changed during the 1948-1989 period , it can account more or less convincingly for 39 ' 0 Ibid. , pp. 281 -282 . Smith: Nationalism and Modernism, p. 45 �SLOVAKIA 47 nationalism in both periods. It points to the continuity of not only political conflict over the status of Slovakia, but also that of popular symbols and myths. Noting how the communist period maintained and strengthened preexisting national identity and traditions also allows for an explanation of the persistent regional differences in support for nationalism. Despite these important strengths, however, the 'through' approach does have some weak points. Some will argue that the most important of these is that it does not go far enough in emphasising how dramatically the communist period changed Slovak society. As with the 'despite' approach, the focus on the continuation of national conflict through the communist period also faces problems in explaining the 'new' nationalisms of the post-communist era. The political organisation and activism of the Romany community after 1989, for example, is difficult to explain without stressing the way the communist period served to strengthen the importance of ethnic belonging. Nationalism Due to Communism. Studies focusing on the way the communist period . served to strengthen national identity and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe are generally more theoretically grounded than the two approaches above. The presentation of these will therefore have to be a bit different. Two main theoretical starting points can be identified. 41 The first, based on modernisation theories of 41 Shari Cohen supposes a third, unconventional, approach in her Politics without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism (Lon- don: Duke University Press, 1999). It was not the strength of national identity in Slovakia that formed the basis for the success of post-communist nationalism, Cohen claims, but rather the lack of a clear historical consciousness. By �48 SLOVAKJA nationalism, focus on the massive socio-economic changes in the CEE countries during the fourty years of communist rule. As many other countries and areas of the region, Slovakia underwent a rapid transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society. Such a process of social modernization, scholars such as Ernest Gellner claim, is the basis for the strength of post-communist nationalism. The second starting point is based on the so called 'new institutionalism' in social science. According to its proponents, the communist regimes honoured their Leninist commitment to national self-determination by building nationally defined institutions and stressing national identities. Rather than, as intended, weakening the social basis for nationalism, however, their policy served to strengthen it. Put otherwise: the Soviet type nationality policy was to be 'nationalist in form, socialist in content ' . When the socialist content disappeared, only the nationalist form remained . Modernisation. It is the erosion of traditional society and its values with urbanisation and the growth of the state that, in Gellner's view, is responsible for the emergence of nationalism.42 In an agricultural society, where mobility is low and socialisation within the family and local community is sufficient, a person's language and culture is of little consequence. Urban life, particularly in the industrial age, exercises different pressures on the population. Industrial society, requiring formal socialisation through an education preventing the emergence of a collective memory of World War II, the communist regime made Slovak society susceptible to elite manipulation after the collapse of communism. 42 Ernest Gellner: Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). �SLOVAKIA 49 system, thus makes an individual's culture and especially language important. Particularly when cultural differences overlapped with an actual or perceived pattern of social and economic discrimination, nationalism is a likely outcome. In socialist societies, as they suppressed civil society, class identities and other social lines of identification , the importance of cultural identities became particularly strong. When the regimes collapsed, there existed no 'serious rival ideology ' or any 'serious rival institutions' capable of providing alternatives to identification along national lines. 43 In the resulting 'double vacuum', nationalism, the 'culture of industrialism ', was 'the most plausible and easily available candidate for filling this emptiness. ' 44 After the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Slovakia entered its most important period of socio-economic development. Over a period of seventeen years, the share of agricultural workers in the total workforce more than halved: from 62.2% in 1948 to30.1% in 1965. 4 5 By 1989 it has reached 14.5%. Similarly, the percentage of the population living in cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants increased from 11.5% in 1950 to 40.8% in 1991 .46 In the space of a few decades, Slovakia was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial society. That the industrial structure of Slovakia was accordingly based on the socialist idealisation of heavy industry, matters little in this context. Territorial and social mobility increased, as did the general level of education. The steadily increasing availability and reach 43 Ernest Gellner: ' Nationalism in the Vacuum', in Alexander J. Motyl (ed .): Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities: History and Comparison in the Study of the USSR(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 250. 44 Ernest Gellner: 'Homeland of the Unrevolution' , Daedalus, vol. 122 (1993) , no. 3, p. 152. 45 See Krejci and Machonin : Czechoslovakia, p. 120. 46 Ibid., p. 126. �50 SLOVAKIA of mass communication, such as radio and television, also served to promote a standardised ('high') culture. Combined, these factors served to increase cultural homogeneity in the Slovak population and put focus on the differences between the Slovaks and other cultural groups in society. An individual's cultural-cumnational identity was therefore highlighted . The main strength of the modernist approach is that it brings our attention to the massive social and economic changes in the region during Communism. Slovak society was fundamentally changed through industrialisation and urbanisation . Most theories of nationalism hold that modernisation (towards a Western type society) is at least conducive to the formation of national consciousness and emergence of nationalism. If one accepts this , the socialist period is likely to have strengthened the appeal of nationalism in Slovakia. Furthemore, the modernisation approach offers an explanation for why new ethnic conflicts arose once Communism released its grip. Even the communities without the history of nationalism can be seen to have been mobilised as a result of industrialisation. There are, however, several weaknesses with this modernist view. First, in its pure form it is very functional and does not accredit much importance to ideas. This is problematic particularly because the massive transformation and uprooting of Slovak society took place under heavy pressure from socialist socialisation. Second, if urbanisation and industrialisation were the main causes of post-communist nationalism, then one should expect to find the strongest nationalism where the effects of these processes was strongest. Before 1948 eastern Slovakia was the most 'backward' and multi-cultural region of Slovakia. Consequently, it was one of the regions that went through the most dramatic socio-economic development during Communism. Despite this , after 1989, sup- �SLOVAKIA 51 port for nationalist parties in the region was well below the Slovak average. 47 Indeed, inhabitants of Kosice, the 'capital' of eastern Slovakia and the second largest city in the country, were among those most vocally opposed to the break-up of the CSFR in the autumn of 1992.48 The Institutional Approach. The institutional approach places the cause of the strength of post-communist nationalism in the policies and structure, the institutions, of the communist regimes. The stress Leninism put on the right of national self-determination led most Soviet-style socialist regimes to not only promote national self-identification, but also build institutional frameworks along national lines. This served to institutionalise national identity as the key identity and thus create the nationalist bias of politics after the collapse of Communism. In its most basic form , the institutional approach stresses the way in which members of political institutions tend to promote the interests of their institutions in competition with others . Throughout the socialist period, Slovakia had cultural, academic , administrative and political institutions separate from the all-Czechoslovak ones. Due to the policy of stressing the Slovakness of these institutions, recruitment was conducted almost exclusively in Slovakia, and sometimes among Slovaks only. The separate poli tical institutions consisted most importantly of a branch of the Communist Party (KSS), a parliamentary assembly (SNR), and 47 See Krivy, Fialova and Balko: Slovensko ajeho regi6ny, pp.29 1-342 . •• For a more humorous expression of this see Peter Holub: 'At' uz to nestes tf piijde: Kosice se branf mirodnfmu sjednocenf', Respect, 24-30, August 1992, pp. 5-6. �52 SLOVAKIA ( except for the period 1960-69) an executive branch. While limited in their political importance during Communism, these institutions gained a dramatically different role with democratisation . Not long after the collapse of Communism, the Slovak government and legislature started calling for an increase in their competencies. Using nationalist rhetoric to mobilise the population was an obvious way to gain support for strengthening the authority and power of the Slovak institutions at the expense of federal ones. On a more complex level, the institutional approach examines the wider impact institutional structures had on creating certain attitudes and beliefs in the population. One leading institutional theoretician , Rogers Brubaker, explained the strength of postcommunist nationalism in the Soviet Union as a result of the ' dual institutionalisation ' of what he termed ' territorial nationhood ' and 'ethnic nationality ' .49 Territorial nationhood refers to the linkin g of a specific territory to national identity through the admi nistrative division of the country according to nationality. As with most administrative components in the Soviet Union, Slovakia was a clearly defined territorial unit interpreted as the homeland of the Slovaks. While this was made explicit after the federalisation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was implicit already from the end of World War IL The principle of equality (rovny s rovnym) introduced during the war and maintained in the 1948 Constitution •• Rogers Brubaker: Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp 23-54. The nationality and, particularly after 1969, the institutional stru cture of socialist Czechoslovakia was almost identical to that of the Soviet Unio n. �SLOVAKIA 53 was clearly interpreted as a principle of equality of nations. 50 Hungarians, Ruthenes, Romanies and other national groups in Slovakia were national minorities; the Slovaks were the statotvorny (literally: state forming) nation. Along with officially pronouncing Czechoslovakia a country of two nations, the regime built institutions to create the appearance of national self-determination. While Czechoslovakia did not go as far as the Soviet Union in awarding the constituent republics symbols of statehood, the Czech and Slovak Socialist Republics were in the 1968 Law on Federalisation declared to have the status of independent legal subjects that surrendered part of their sovereignty to the Federation. The Republics were also awarded the 'inalienable right of self-determination even to the point of separation'. 51 The Law on Federalization thus 'rehabilitated and restored the idea of a national state as an attribute of a fully developed nation'. 52 The effect of this policy was to encourage Slovaks to think of themselves as a separate nation with wide-ranging political rights. The second aspect of Brubaker's institutional approach focuses on the way the communist regime made ethnic identification compulsory. In common English usage, the concepts of 'nationality' and 'citizenship' are synonymous. In the socialist federations, however, the distinction was important. All who held Czechoslovak passports were Czechoslovak citizens. Their nationality, however, would be Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Ruthene, Romany, Polish, Ukrainian or some other. A person's nationality 5 ° Katarina Zavacka: "Metamorf6zy statopravneho postavenia Slovenska v Ceskoslovensku v rokoch 1948-1967" in Vladimir Gonec (ed. ): Cesko-s/oven ska historicka rocenka I 998 (Brno: Masarykova Universita, 1998), pp. 17-29. 51 See ' Ustavnf zakon 143/ 1968 Sb.' at http://www.psp. czldocs/textslconstitution. 1968.html. 52 Kusy: Eseje,p. 69 . �54 SLOVAKIA was ascertained at birth according to that of her of his parents and could generally not be changed. As in inter-war Czechoslovakia, the communist regime did promote a Czechoslovak political identity. Avoiding the word narod, nation, which has clear ethnic connotations, the communists called for the creation of a 'Czec hoslovak working people ' (ceskoslovensky pracujlici J'ud). The identity was not, even in relation to the Czechs and Slovaks, intended as a Czechoslovak cultural identity. On the contrary, the Communist Party put great stress on promoting the cultures of the various national groups, particularly the Slovak. Generous reso urces were devoted to building cultural institutions and supporting the cultural life of all official nationalities. 53 For most children primary and sometimes secondary and higher education was available in their mother tongue. While all culture was to be socialist, the art forms favored by the regime, those that were seen to form the basis of national culture (s uch as folk dancing and traditional artisan-and craftsmanship), were not particularly affected . The Centre for the Production of Folk Art (UI:UV) and the folk-dancing and folk-mu sic group the Slovak People' s Artistic Collective (SI:UK) were presented as the best of centuries-old , traditional Slovak culture, thus reminding all of not only the cultural , but also historical separateness of the Slovaks. Combined, these two processes of institutionalisation made nations and nationality into basic units of people' s world-view. When the communist regime collapsed and democratisation started, nationally based institutions and their elites became centres of 51 See Elena Londakova: ' Slovcnske predjarie: Myty a realita slovenskej inte li gcncic v Ceskoslovensku pred rokom 1956 (a po iiom)', in Vladimir Gonec (ed .): Cesko-s/ovensk;i historick;i rocenka I 998 (Brno: Masarykova Universita, 1998), p. 2 10 and Dusan Kovac: Dejiny Slovenska (Prague: NLN, 1998), pp. 275-276 . �SLOVAKIA 55 political activity. 54 National identity became the basic organising. principle in politics. The nationally defined elites in the separate national institutions could gain popular support among a population identified and identifying according to their nationality by claiming to defend the interest of that nation. The system of compulsory national identification thus became the basis for new political constituencies. The main strength of the institutional approach is that it offers a very powerfull explanation of the near universal succes of national identity and nationalism as political principles after Communism. It does so by placing the cause of this succes in the very world-view engendered by the communist regime. As Brubaker writes: the communist nationality policy 'created a political field supremely conductive to nationalism' .55 The 'new' nationalism of the post-communist period can therefore be explained. Due to its explanatory strength, the institutional approach has emerged as one of the most popular among scholars trying to explain postcommunist nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. However, the institutional approach, like the other presented above, has its shortcomings. Like the modernist approach it cannot alone explain the regionalised support for nationalism in Slovakia, nor does it account for the impact of pre-communist nationalism. 54 This was also the case for minorities that did not have explicitly political institutions. For example, the Slovak Hungarian cultural organization CSEMADOK became the centre of Hungarian political activity in the first period after 1989. ss Brubaker: Nationalism Reframed, p. I 7 �56 SLOVAKIA Conclusion While the process thc1· 1ed to the break-up of the common Czech and Slovak stat:· after communissm has received a fair amount of attention, few scholars have attempted to comprehensively explain why nationalism had such succes in postcommunist Slovakia.56 The above is only an overview of the possible explanations for the success of post-communist nationalism that would meet with the most support among scholars today. In fact, it is doubtful there will ever be single generally accepted explanation, be it theoretical or historical. As Katherine Verdery noted, nationalism in the post-communist region 'has many causes, ranging from the macro-social to matters of personal identity. It is, in other words, overdetermined, and the relevant causes vary from one county to another. 5 7 What is needed to approach a consensus on what factors were most important in the Slovak case, is a series of studies that evaluate the explanatory power of various approaches, such as those above. If this article serves to encourage someone to write such a study, it has served its purpose. ,. To this author's knowledge, the only monograph that explicitly does so is Cohen: Politics without a Past. 57 Katherine Verdery: 'Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-socialist Romania' , Slavic Review, vol. 52 (1993), no. 2, p. 180. � 28 SLOVAKJA 'Slovak som a Slovak budem ... 'l Explaining Nationalism in Post-Communist Slovakia Paal Sigurd Hilde The question of the position of Slovakia within the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (CSFR), the official name as of April 1990, was among the most divisive issues in Slovak and Czech politics in the post-communist era. As is well known, the conflict over the future basis and structure of the federation eventually led to the division of the state on 1 January 1993. Despite the impression given by many press reports at the time, the break-up was not the result of Slovak secession. With the exception of the Slovak National Party (SNS), representing about 10 per cent of the votes in Slovakia, all Slovak political parties successful in the decisive June 1992 elections were in favor of some kind of common state with the Czechs. This included the winner, Vladimir Meciar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS). There were, however, near irreconcilable policy differences between the left-populist HZDS and the right wing coalition victorious in the Czech Republic. Given the minority veto in the Federal assembly, whereby a minority of representatives from either Republic could block important legislation in the House of Nations, only a carefully crafted compromise could save the Federation from political deadlock. Rather than seeking a compromise, however, the Czech 1 The title is taken from Miroslav Kusfs 1981 samizdat essay. Reprinted in Miroslav Kusy: Eseje (Bratislava: Archa, 1991 ), pp. 88 -96 . �SLOVAKlA 29 right wing coalition led by Vaclav Klaus of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) pushed for the division of the state if a 'functional federation' was not possible. Unwilling and politically unable to accept Klaus 's vision of a strong federal government, Meciar reluctantly followed the Czech Prime Minister's lead towards a break-up. 2 The political phenomenon generally referred to as Slovak nationalisn was thus not the decisive force behind the break-up of the CSFR. 3 It was, however, Slovak nationalism that after the collapse of communism started the process that eventuallly led to the rejection of the common state by right-wing Czech parties. As all nationalisms, Slovak post-communist nationalism was a complex phenomenon. It came in moderate and more radical forms, focus sing on several political issues. In its most basic expression, it held that Slovakia and the Slovaks deserved a more equal and visible position within a state seen as unfairly dominated by the Czech part. 4 Basically all Slovak political parties, including the 2 On the process preceding the break-up see Eric Stein : Czecho/Slovakia: Ethnic Conflict, Constitutional Fiss ure, Negotiated Breakup (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 3 Nationalism is fo r the purpose of th is study defined as a world view, which holds that the pop ulation of the world is divided into nations. A nation, claim nationalists, consists of a grou p of people identifiable and identifying according to cultural, religious, historical and/or territorial criteria. Nationalists see nations as constituting natural social units and seek to promote the po litical, cultural, economic or other kind of status, in symbolical or more material terms, of the nation they claim to represent. The nationalist discourse, common to a ll forms of nationalism, is used thro ughout the world, most often to oppose or defe nd existing political units. See Craig Calhoun: Nationalism (Buckin gham : Open University Press, 1997). •Foran examination of mainstream Slovak national ism see Paal Sigurd Hil de: 'Slovak Nationalism and the Break-Up of Czechoslovakia', Europe-Asia Stu die s, vol. 51 (1999), no. 4, pp. 64 7-665. �30 SLOVAKIA most pro-federal, shared this demand. More radical expressions called not only for more radical solutions to the question of the Federation, but focussed also negatively on the position of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia and the perceived threat from Hungarian irredentism. In its exteme, which was promoted only by small, popular unrepresentative groups, Slovak · nationalism promoted radically anti-Czech, anti-Hungarian and sometimes also anti-Semitic views. This article will analyse another complexity of nationalism in post-communist Slovakia. 5 As with all nationalisms, the popular success of the Slovak form can be seen as a result of several, intricate causes. These include historical, political, social and econ omic determinants. The aim of this study is not to reach a final decision on what caused the apperance and success of post-communist nationalism. Rather, the article offers an overview of a range of possible explanations and the strengths and weaknesses of these. This might be a combination of all, some, just one or none . Ultimately, it was Slovak6 politicians and other political actors that gave nationalism the political significance it had after the collapse of communism. Without nationalists, there is no nationalism. Focusing merely on the role of actors, however, leaves many unanswered questions. The most important of these is why the demands and rhetoric of the nationalists gained such a favourable response from the population. Certain political factors in the postcommunist period can be seen to have facilitated the success of the nationalist agenda among Slovaks. One such factor was the 5 For the sake of simplifying the analysis the multi-issue complexity of Slovak nationalism will be not discussed in detail. • The word Slovak will in this article denote a person of Slovak culture and identity. Similarly, a Czechoslovak is a person of Czech or Slovak ethnicity with a Czechoslovak identity . �SLOVAK1A 31 institutional legacy of the socialist federation (more on this below). A second factor was the changing international environment after the Cold War, with the secession of the Baltic states, Slovenia and Croatia as examples of the new stress on national self-determination. Interaction with the two major 'others', the Hungarians and Czechs, was also important. The upsurge of post-communist nationalism in the Hungarian speaking minority in Slovakia and in Hungary, and the increasingly hostile attacks on Slovak nationalism, particularly in the Czech press, both served to spur Slovak nationalists into action. 7 Even more important in increasing support for nationalist de mands in post-communist Slovakia was the issue of economic reform. The generally harder impact of the Federal economic programme on the Slovak than on the Czech economy was by many taken as a sign of the disadvantaged position of Slovaks within the common state.8 The call for a greater Slovak control over economic policy thus became the one of the most important and substantial claims of Slovak nationalists . Yet, even given the activities of nationalists and the political factors conducive to the appeal of the nationalist discourse, to understand post-communist nationalism one must understand the historical developments that formed the basis for the appeal of the ethnic nationalism in Slovakia. Several historical precondition s can be identified . These are the topic of this study . 7 For examples of this see (H ungarian) Andrej Ferko: Stredna Europa - Eseje (Bratislava: VSSS, 1998) and (Czech) Dusan Sl obodnfk: Proti sedemhlavemu drakovi : Z dejin zapasu za Sia vensko (Bratislava: VSSS, 1998 ). ' In a January 1992 poll , for example. 53 % of respondents in Slovakia antici pated that the Czech economy wou ld grow at the expense of the Slovak. Cen trum pre social nu analyzu: Aktualne problemy Cesko-S/ovensk a, januar 1992 (Bratislava: CSA, 1992), p. 29. �32 SLOVAKIA Preconditions for the Success of Post-Communist Nationalism. To clarify the analysis of the historical preconditions of postcommunist nationalism, it is useful to divide the examination into two stages. The first stage focuses on the generally different impact nationalist ideas have had in the Eastern and Western parts of Europe. Whereas the civic, territorial version of nationalism became dominant in the West, ethnic, especially linguistically centred nationalism prevailed in Central and Eastern Europe (hereafter CEE)9. In the twentieth century, this ethnic nationalism be came the underlying ideal for the political reorganisations of CEE in two world wars. The first half of the twentieth century thus served to establish ethnic nationalism as a dominant political ideology and ethnic ties as primary lines of political identification. An example of the causes of the success of ethnic nationalism thus forms what one might call the 'deep ' historic background for understanding post-communist nationalism. The second stage in the analysis focuses on the impact of the socialist era. For the majority of the population of post-commu nist Slovakia, the just over forty years of communist indoctrination through education, mass media and other means, had formed their primary so urce of fo rmal socialisation. Moreover, Soviet Communism brought one of the most dramatic periods of social and economic change in Slovak history. The analysis below outlines the different assessments scholars have made of the impact the social, economic and political devel opments of the las t halfcentury before 1989 had on the strength of nationalism in Slovakia. • Central and Eastern Europe will in this article denote roughly the area of the fonner Habsburg Empire as well as the European parts of the Romanov and Ottoman em pires. �SLOVAKIA 33 The Success of Ethnic Nationalism. In his celebrated 1882 lecture, Ernest Rennan started by making a distinction 'between the fusion of "races" in the nations of Western Europe, and the retention of ethnic distinctiveness in Eastern Europe .' 10 In 1944, Hans Kohn developed this theme when he introduced the concepts of 'Western' and 'Eastern' nationalisms. 11 While challenged by several authors, this typology has survived the test of time and is used in various forms by scholars today. As most nationalisms contain both civic (Western) and ethnic (Eastern) elements, the distinction is, as Anthony D. Smith points out, analytical and not normative. 12 Czechoslovak nationalism in the interwar years, for example, was clearly ethnic m relations with Germans and Hungarians, but civic m its merger of Slovaks and Czechs into one nation. On the whole, scholars agree on the basic causes why civic nationalism was more successful in Western Europe and ethnic nationalism in the Eastern part of the continent. The main factors are generally identified as the socio-economic and, partly linked, cultural differences between the two regions at the time of the dissemination of nationalist ideas. 13 From about the fifteenth century, Western Europe saw the beginning of the development of the modem state. The new economy saw the abolition of serfdom , the weakening of the feudal-agricultural economy and the strengthening of trade and manufacture centred in cities. The develop0 Anthony D. Smith: Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 9 ' '' Hans Kohn : The Idea of Nationalism (New York : Collier, 1967), pp. 329-331. 12 Smith: Nationalism and Modernism, p. 126 '-' For a good analysis of East-West historical differences see Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries: A Hi/story of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (Lo ndon, Routledge, I 998), pp. 15-25. �34 SLOVAKlA ment of centralised, strong states, yet with an increasingly urbanised and literate population capable of challenging the authority of the ruler, had important social, economic and political effects. Western, civic nationalism grew gradually out of the socio-economic developments and changes in political thought of pre-nineteenth century Europe. 14 This nationalism was state centred and focused on gaining the loyality of and homogenising the population of a territory. Crucially, nationalist ideas were promoted in societies whose elites, if not populations, were already quite homogenous culturally. This was particularly the case in Protestant, North-Western Europe. In important respects, Central and Eastern Europe was relatively 'backward' when nationalist ideas spread through the intellectual life of the region in the early nineteenth century. 15 The relative backwardness had both external and internal causes. The centuries of warfare with the Ottomans had weakened the states in the region and led to their inclusion into large empires. Hungary, which then included today's Slovakia, came under Habsburg rule after the battle of Mohacs in 1526. At the eve of the French Revolution, the Ottoman, Habsburg and Romanov empires dominated Central and Eastern Europe. Compared with rapidly developing Western states, the three Eastern empires remained despotic. As the feudal-agricultural economic structure retained its dominance, no strong middle class developed . In Slovakia, or Felvidek (Upper Hungary) as the Hungarian rulers called it, the development of mining in Eastern Slovakia, for instance, led to the growth of some smaller towns. Generally, these were dominated by ethnic 14 See Liah Greenfeld: Nationalism : Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1992 ) ,s The concept of Central and East European 'backwardness' is obviously very general and simplifying, also given the large differences within the region . �SLOVAKJA 35 Germans or Jews. The majority of the population of Slovakia remained rural and often illiterate. The socio-econonic conditions for cultural homogenisation were, therefore, not present. The ethnically very heterogeneous dynasties of Central and Eastern Europe were initially not interested in trying to turn their empires into nation-states on the Western model. 16 Only in the final decades of the nineteenth century did Tsarist Russia attempt to Russify the Western Borderlands and the Hungarian leadership promote its policy of Magyarisation (Hungarianisation). 17 Given its lack of an ethnic nobility and being an integral part of Hungary proper, the Slav population of Felvidek was particularly exposed. Yet even here the Hungarian nation-bulding project did not succeed. History was soon to take a surprising turn. Ultimately more successful than the civic nation builders in CEE were elites opposed to central rule and integration. State centred, civic nationalism had no advantages for such elites. When they adopted nationalist discourse as a political tool , they were inspired by German romanticism rather than Western liberalism . Nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe looked not to Locke and Stuart Mill, but to Herder and Fichte. In German romantic thought, it was not political boundaries that determined the extent of a nation , but culture and particularly language. In the ethnically diverse empires of CEE such ideas were to have a dramatic impact. It was no coincidence that two leading Slovak (Pan-Slav) nationalists, Jan Kollar and Pavo) Jozef Safarik, both studied at "' Charles Ingrao: ' Forum: Understanding Ethnic Conflict in Central Europe: An Historical Perspective', Nationalities Papers, vol. 27 ( 1999), no. 2, p. 293 . 17 See Edward C. Thaden (ed.): Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Fin land, J855 - 19 14 (Princenton: Princenton University Press, 198 I ) and Tibor Frank: 'Hungary and the Dual Monarchy, 1867- 1890' , in Peter F. Sugar, Peter Hanak and Tibor Frank (eds.): A History of Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). �36 SLOVAKJA the University of Jena in the early nineteenth century. 18 The 'father of Slovak nationalism', Cudovit Stur, like Kollar and Safarik, a Protestant, also studied in Germany, in Halle. 19 By the outbreak of World War One, ethnic nationalism had emerged as one of the leading political ideologies in Central and Eastern Europe. In Austria-Hungary, leaders claiming to represent various ethnically defined nations, such as Slovak nationalists in the Slovak National Party, promoted their rights within the Empire. World War I was to bring victory to such nationalist programmes. Towards the end of the war, when the Entente Powers started supporting the programmes of Central and Eastern Europe (mainly exile) nationalists , their support was limited to the de mand for an administrative reorganisation of Austria-Hungary . By 1918, however, the right to self-determination had come to mean the right for independence. Allied victory in World War I thus resulted in a reorganisation of the Central European region according to the principle of the 'self-determination of nations', that is, the self-determination of ethnically defined nations. This right was by no means allowed for all , particularly not for the 'defeated nations'. All the new and old, expanded states of the region contained sizeable ethnic minority groups . While political life in Austria-Hungary had increasingly taken the form of a struggle between the central authorities and nationalist leaders, inter-war Central and Eastern Europe took this to a new level. In the new Czechoslovak Republic as well, ethnic belonging became the main dividing line in politics. Ethnic Ger- "Victor S. Mamatey : 'The Establishment of the Republic' . in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomir Luz.a (eds.): A History of the Czechoslovak Republic: l 9 l 81948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 6. 19 Peter Petro: A History of Slovak Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), p. 65 . �SLOVAKIA 37 mans and Hungarians (Magyars) voted overwhelmingly for ethnically based parties . The Slovaks, according to official ideology part of the Czechoslovak nation, were divided. As in the late Habsburg period, one part of the Slovak political elite was Czechoslovak nationalist, another, strongly connected to the Catholic clergy, was more sceptical to the Czechoslovak idea. Loyal to the Czechoslovak state until pushed into declaring independence inl939, the Slovak nationalist movement promoted Slovak, as opposed to Czechoslovak, national awareness and nationalism throughout the inter-war period . While it is impossible to get an accurate picture of the popular support for Slovak nationalism after World War II, it seems safe to agree with Carol Skalnik Leff's claim that when taking power in 1948, the communists faced a 'full-blown' Slovak nationalism. 20 If the creation of a Slovak education system, the flowering of Slovak culture and promotion of Slovak nationalism in politics was not sufficient to cement the importance of ethnic belonging and nationalism in people's thinking in the inter-war years, the Second War War was .2 1 With the rise towards authoritarian rule by the Slovak People ' s Party from the autumn of 1938, ethnic nationalism became a central part of official ideology. In the region as a whole, ethnicity became a supreme organizing principle increasing or limiting chances for employment, economic prosperity and even survival. Supported by the Catholic clergy, the Slovak state sought to educate the Slovaks into becoming good nationalists. Nationalism was promoted in schools, the mass media and 10 Carol Skalnik Leff: National Conflict in Czech oslovakia (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press. 1987), p. 281. 11 On national identity in the inter-war period see Owen V. Johnson: Slovakia 191 8- 1938: Education and the Making of a Nati on (Boulder: Co lumbia Uni versity Press, 1985). �38 SLOVAKIA official and religious life in general. 22 For many groups among ethnic Slovaks, the war-time state was a positive experience. The relative economic prosperity, the ease of employment (especially for the young intelligentsia) and the elevated position of the Catholic faith and church were aspects of the state that for some Slovaks compared favourably with pre-war Czechoslovakia. Obviously, for parts of the population, the experience had been clearly negative. For Jews and Romanies it was one of inhuman crimes. Yet, despite the horrors and injustices, the experience of independence under German influence strengthened the position of nationalism in Slovak society. While the leaders of the 1944 Slovak National Uprising had called for the reestablishment of Czechoslovakia, they did not want to return to the centralist system of the First Republic (1918-1938). The extent to which Slovakia had been changed by the war became evident in the 1946 election. Whereas the Slovak political scene had been split on the issue of Slovakia's position within the common state before the war, all parties standing in 1946 supported Slovak self-rule within Czechoslovakia in their programmes. 23 The Impact of the Socialist Period. In the intersection between empirical studies that directly or indirectly offer an explanation for the success of nationalism in post-communist Slovakia and general theoretical works on nationalism, it is possible to identify three main approaches to the question of the impact of the communist era. The first focuses 22 See e.g. Yeshayahu Jelinek : The Parish Republic: H/inka 's Slovak People's Party 1939- 1945 (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1976). lJ Jan Ryc hlik : Cesi a Slovaci ve 20.stoleti: Cesko-slovenske vztahy 19451992 (Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press, 1998), pp.40-42. �SLOVAKIA 39 mainly on the way in which nationalism survived despite the forty years of communism. Given the strength of Slovak nationalism before Communism and the resilience of ethnic and cultural ties, nationalism would, according to this approach, have survived whatever policy the Communist Party had chosen. Scholars taking this approach would put the greatest emphasis on the 'deep' historic background outlined above. The second approach, where scholars stress the continuation of nationalism through the socialist period, could be considered the mainstream historical view . This approach focuses on the way Slovak national identity and support for nationalism survived the socialist era not only because of their pre-1948 strength, but also due to certain policies during Communism that served to strenghten their basis of support. According to the final approach, the success of post-communist nationalism was mainly due to the policies adopted by the Communist Party. Putting much less emphasis on the strength of precommunist national identity and nationalism (and thus the •deep' historical explanation), the 'due to' approach takes two main forms . One focuses on the effects of the socio-economic development of Slovakia during Communism, the other on the impact of the construction of nationally based institutional structures. These three analytical categories form a continuum rather than three clearly identifiable positions. Differences between studies falling into the different categories are generally one of focus or degree. Few scholars argue the extreme positions: that postcommunist nationalism was purely a revival of suppressed nationalism, or that it was a result of developments in the communist period only. Most would note the continued expressions of Slovak nationalism during the communist era, and then stress the degree to which the socialist period suppressed , maintained or actually strengthened the appeal of nationalism. �40 SLOVAKIA Nationalism Despite Communism. Particulary in the first years after the collapse of Communism, the 'retum-of-history'argument was commonly used to explain the success of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. Precommunist nationalism, merely suppressed by the communist regimes, re-emerged to become the political factor it had been forty years earlier. As one historian put it: Communism may have temporarily relieved Central Europe's ethnic tensions for nearly half a century. But if religion was the opiate of the people, Communism proved no more effective than methadone (sic) in suspending their craving for ethnically whole nation states, without providing a cure. 24 In the literature on nationalism in Slovakia, Jacques Rupnik supported this view when he argued that Slovak nationalism had been in the 'communist refrigerator' for most of the period after 1948. 25 Of the monographs in English discussing Slovak nationalism, Stanislav Kirschaum's A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival is, arguably, one of those that leans most toward the 'despite ' approach. 26 While describing in detail the persistence of nationalism during Communism and the radical changes Slovak society went through, Kirschbaum notes no positive effect of the communist regime on the strength of Slovak national identity and nationalism. Rather, he highlights the attempts the communist lea- 1 ' Ingrano: 'Forum ... ' , p. 307 . 15 Jaques Rupnik, quoted in Martin Butora and Zora Butorova: 'Slovakia after the Split ' ,Joumal o[Democracy,vol. 4(1993), no. 2,p. 75 . 16 Stanislav Kirschbaum : A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival (London : Macmillian, 1995). �SLOVAKIA 41 dership made at suppressing national identity.27 If Slovak nationalism gained strength during the communist period , it was more a reaction to the 'Czechoslovakism' favoured by the regime .2 8 The primordialist theories of nationalism would be the most obvious theoretical basis for the works in this approach. Stressing the ' ineffable, and at times overpowering' strength of the ' cultural givens' in a society, Clifford Geertz, for example, points to how ethnic ties in some societies come to be seen as a 'natural some would say spiritual affinity' .29 Given the strong emphasis put on cultural belonging in Slovak history, at least since the late nineteeth century, one could argue that ethnicity had gained a primordial character in Slovak society by the end of World War II. Consequently, the communist regime would not have been able to suppress Slovak identity, and therefore neither the potential for Slovak nationalism. While not going as far as the primordialist in stressing the naturalness of central ties, the so-called ethno-sym- bolist theories of nationalism could also be interpreted as lending support to the 'despite' approach. According to Anthony D. Smith, post-communist nationalism confirms the resilience and strength of ehnic myths, symbols and popular memory. He writes:' Though the timing of the current ethnic revival is a function of social and geopolitical changes, their contents and intensities are largely determined resources,' by pre-existing ethno-sy mbolic 30 27 Note e.g. ibid., pp. 228, 245, 252. Kirschbaum ta.lees a very favo urable view of Slovak nationalism and a more negative one of the common Czech and Slovak state . " Ibid., p. 24 7. 19 Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures (London : Fontana, 1973). pp . 259-260 . 0 ' Anthony D. Smith : 'LSE Centennial Lecture: The Resurgence of Nationalism ? Myth and memory in the renewal of nations ', British Journal of Sociology, vo l. �42 SLOVAKIA Empirical support for the 'despite' argument can be found in post-communist Slovakia. In a study of regional patterns of political culture, a group of Slovak sociologists found strong similarities between the inter-war and post-communist era. 31 In both periods, nationalist and populist parties gained most support in northwest and central Slovakia. The persistence of this regional pattern seems to suggest that at least elements of pre-communist political culture had been preserved. Moreover, studies from other post-communist countries show that national minorities that were actively discouraged from maintaining their separate identity and culture, still emerged to voice nationalist demands after Communism. In Poland, this was the case with the German minority .32 While counter-factual history necessarily amounts to speculation, it does seem likely that regardless of what the policy the Communists had adopted, also the separate Slovak identity, in both its cultural and political expression, would have survived. The relatively short period of communist rule would clearly have facilitated this. As can be seen from the above, focusing on links to pre-communist nationalism and the preservation of popular myths and memory has some advantages. Firstly, it points to the strength of ethnic nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. The conviction that ethnically defined nations formed natural bases for political legitimacy, be it in a separate state or as 47 (1996), no. 4, p. 573. Elsewhere, Smith does stress the role of communi st policies in preserving these myths and memories. See e.g. Smith: Nationalism and Modernism, 237, endnote 9. 31 Vladimir Krivy , Viera Fialova and Daniel Balko: Slovensko a jeho regi6ny: sociokultume suvislosti volebneho spravania (Bratislava: Nadacia Media, 1996). 12 Janusz Mucha: 'Democratisation and Cultural Minorities: The Polish Case of the 1980s/90s', East European Quarterly, vol. 25 (1992), no. 4. �SLOVAKIA 43 an autonomous region within a larger entity, had by 1948 been deeply ingrained in CEE. This was not only the case with most of the Slovak political elite, but also, many historians would agree, large parts of the population. Secondly, stressing the preservation of political culture is perhaps the only way to explain the continued regional pattern of support for nationalism. In its pure form, the 'despite' argument rejects any important effect of the socialist period on national identity and the popular view of nationalism. If one accepts that national identity is a social construct, that nations are not some kind of natural social unit, this jump across forty years of history is difficult to defend. As shall be discussed in more detail below, 1948-1989 was probably the most dramatic period of social and economic change in Slovak history. It was also a period of an intense policy of officially managed, public socialisation. Given the impact this period had on people' s lives, it seems difficult to assume that popular views on national identity and nationalism would not also change. One example that it had is that before 1948 Slovakia was a deeply religious society and mainstream nationalism was strongly connected to the Catholic Church. In the post-communist period, however, the leading nationalists parties HZDS and SNS were both secular. Catholic nationalism, as represented by the Christian Democratic Party (KDH), was much less successful. Explanations focusing more on the way the communist period served to change Slovak national identity and thereby the bases for nationalism during that period, thus seemingly provide a more convincing explanation for the widespread appeal of nationalism in the postcommunist era. Finallly, the 'despite' argument cannot explain the emergence of 'new' nationalisms in the post-communist period . Some groups without a history of common national identity and nationalism formed nationalist parties after 1989. Most im- �44 SLOVAKIA portantly, this included the Roma community. Also the emergence of a relatively strong nationalism in Moravia and Silesia was a sign of the increased importance of cultural identity. 33 Traditionally a regional identity and before Communism never a major political issue, the Moravian-Silesian autonomy party became the largest party in the Czech National Council in 1990. Nationalism Through the Communist Era. The 'through' approach makes up the middle ground between stressing the resilience of pre-communist nationalism and the strengthening of national identity during the communist period. Studies falling into this category would seek to explain the perpetuation of national conflict due to the persistence of support for nationalism built up before the communist period and to certain factors that served to strengthen Slovak national identity during the 1948-1989 era. Most historical studies tend to be in this category. Carol Skalnik Leff' s 1987 seminal book on national conflict in Czechoslovakia is probably the best study in English in this category. 34 In Leff's analysis, the deep social, economic and cultural differences between the Czech Lands and Slovakia were politicised during the inter-was republic. A triangular pattern of support and opposition was created, whereby the central leadership in Prague relied on the pro-Czechoslovak section of the Slovak political elite to help neutralise the demands of Slovak nationalists. In the communist period , this pattern persisted until it was displaced JJ Jaroslav Krejci and Pavel Machonin: Czechoslovakia 1918- 1992: A Laboratory for Social Change (Oxford: Macmill an and St. Anthony ' s, 1996), p. 51 . 14 Leff: National Conflict. Ryc hlik: Cesi a Slovaci .. . 1945-1992 is a later, eve n more detailed work of this approcah. �SLOVAKIA 45 with the ascent of Gustav Husak to power in 1969. Both the interwar and the socialist regimes failed in their attempts to modernize away the problem of Slovak nationalism (culturally and educationaly in the inter-war period, economically during socialism). These failures, combined with the unwillingness of both regimes to adequately accommodate the Slovak nationalist's demands, led to a growing sense of antagonism (mutual antagonism, as Czechs resented that Slovaks used times of international crisis to force through their demands). Leff concludes: 'Given the persistence of Slovak national feeling, on the one hand, and Czech power, on the other, the result has been persistent national conflict'. 35 While Leff notes that Slovak nationalism was strong in the post-war period, much due to the experience of statehood during the war, she also identifies several factors during the communist era that served to strengthen its basis. The existence of separate Slovak political institutions, for instance, was important. Leff writes: 'Week as the KSS (Slovak Communist Party) and the SNR (Slovak National Council) were in the years following 1948, both would retain the capacity to serve as nationalist time bombs. ' 36 One important reason for this was that the system of separate Slovak institutions created a Slovak elite separate from Prague-based Czechoslovak one. 37 Also other aspects of the regime 's policy proved counter-productive to its official aim of promoting the 'coming together' (zblfienie) of Czechs and Slovaks. The mass media, for instance, was 'segmented and not adapted to the integrative intentions of the policy-making elite. 38 Thus , by the late 1980, 'the Slovak question ' had become 'deeply, perhaps 35 Leff: National Conflict, p. 282. Ibid ., p. 112 . 37 Ibid ., p.294 . " Ibid., p. 297 . 36 �46 SLOVAKlA irreversibly, woven into the fabric of Czechoslovak politics as usual'. This statement carries with it the implication that the Slovak question wi1l continue to assert itself as a political force in the future .39 Three years after Leff published her study, her prediction came true . Theoretically, the 'through' approach occupies the middle ground between the primoridalists emphasis on the strength of cultural ties and the stress put on social processes by the modernist and institutional views outlined below. With more emphasis on the way myths, symbols, values and memories are preserved in societies, ethno-symbolist theories would come closest to forming a theoretical basis for this approach. From the ethno-symbolist perspective, the communists ' attempt to defuse nationalism in Slovakia by flagging symbols of self-determination could only serve to strengthen the feeling of national identity. The reason for this was that the only symbols that would evoke a positive response from the population would be symbols that had a basis in popular tradition . For example, while the communists did try to reframe the historical image of r.udovft Stur as a social revolutionary, they could not eradicate the view of Stur as a champion of Slovak rights so strongly ingrained in popular tradition and myths . As Smith writes : "Ethno-history is no sweetshop in which nationalists may ' pick and mix'; it sets limits to any appropriation by providing a distinctive context and patterns of events, personages and ,, 4 0 processes ... . The most obvious strength of the 'through' approach is that by stressing both the strong social basis of pre-communist nationalism and the way it was maintained and changed during the 1948-1989 period , it can account more or less convincingly for 39 ' 0 Ibid. , pp. 281 -282 . Smith: Nationalism and Modernism, p. 45 �SLOVAKIA 47 nationalism in both periods. It points to the continuity of not only political conflict over the status of Slovakia, but also that of popular symbols and myths. Noting how the communist period maintained and strengthened preexisting national identity and traditions also allows for an explanation of the persistent regional differences in support for nationalism. Despite these important strengths, however, the 'through' approach does have some weak points. Some will argue that the most important of these is that it does not go far enough in emphasising how dramatically the communist period changed Slovak society. As with the 'despite' approach, the focus on the continuation of national conflict through the communist period also faces problems in explaining the 'new' nationalisms of the post-communist era. The political organisation and activism of the Romany community after 1989, for example, is difficult to explain without stressing the way the communist period served to strengthen the importance of ethnic belonging. Nationalism Due to Communism. Studies focusing on the way the communist period . served to strengthen national identity and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe are generally more theoretically grounded than the two approaches above. The presentation of these will therefore have to be a bit different. Two main theoretical starting points can be identified. 41 The first, based on modernisation theories of 41 Shari Cohen supposes a third, unconventional, approach in her Politics without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism (Lon- don: Duke University Press, 1999). It was not the strength of national identity in Slovakia that formed the basis for the success of post-communist nationalism, Cohen claims, but rather the lack of a clear historical consciousness. By �48 SLOVAKJA nationalism, focus on the massive socio-economic changes in the CEE countries during the fourty years of communist rule. As many other countries and areas of the region, Slovakia underwent a rapid transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society. Such a process of social modernization, scholars such as Ernest Gellner claim, is the basis for the strength of post-communist nationalism. The second starting point is based on the so called 'new institutionalism' in social science. According to its proponents, the communist regimes honoured their Leninist commitment to national self-determination by building nationally defined institutions and stressing national identities. Rather than, as intended, weakening the social basis for nationalism, however, their policy served to strengthen it. Put otherwise: the Soviet type nationality policy was to be 'nationalist in form, socialist in content ' . When the socialist content disappeared, only the nationalist form remained . Modernisation. It is the erosion of traditional society and its values with urbanisation and the growth of the state that, in Gellner's view, is responsible for the emergence of nationalism.42 In an agricultural society, where mobility is low and socialisation within the family and local community is sufficient, a person's language and culture is of little consequence. Urban life, particularly in the industrial age, exercises different pressures on the population. Industrial society, requiring formal socialisation through an education preventing the emergence of a collective memory of World War II, the communist regime made Slovak society susceptible to elite manipulation after the collapse of communism. 42 Ernest Gellner: Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). �SLOVAKIA 49 system, thus makes an individual's culture and especially language important. Particularly when cultural differences overlapped with an actual or perceived pattern of social and economic discrimination, nationalism is a likely outcome. In socialist societies, as they suppressed civil society, class identities and other social lines of identification , the importance of cultural identities became particularly strong. When the regimes collapsed, there existed no 'serious rival ideology ' or any 'serious rival institutions' capable of providing alternatives to identification along national lines. 43 In the resulting 'double vacuum', nationalism, the 'culture of industrialism ', was 'the most plausible and easily available candidate for filling this emptiness. ' 44 After the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Slovakia entered its most important period of socio-economic development. Over a period of seventeen years, the share of agricultural workers in the total workforce more than halved: from 62.2% in 1948 to30.1% in 1965. 4 5 By 1989 it has reached 14.5%. Similarly, the percentage of the population living in cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants increased from 11.5% in 1950 to 40.8% in 1991 .46 In the space of a few decades, Slovakia was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial society. That the industrial structure of Slovakia was accordingly based on the socialist idealisation of heavy industry, matters little in this context. Territorial and social mobility increased, as did the general level of education. The steadily increasing availability and reach 43 Ernest Gellner: ' Nationalism in the Vacuum', in Alexander J. Motyl (ed .): Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities: History and Comparison in the Study of the USSR(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 250. 44 Ernest Gellner: 'Homeland of the Unrevolution' , Daedalus, vol. 122 (1993) , no. 3, p. 152. 45 See Krejci and Machonin : Czechoslovakia, p. 120. 46 Ibid., p. 126. �50 SLOVAKIA of mass communication, such as radio and television, also served to promote a standardised ('high') culture. Combined, these factors served to increase cultural homogeneity in the Slovak population and put focus on the differences between the Slovaks and other cultural groups in society. An individual's cultural-cumnational identity was therefore highlighted . The main strength of the modernist approach is that it brings our attention to the massive social and economic changes in the region during Communism. Slovak society was fundamentally changed through industrialisation and urbanisation . Most theories of nationalism hold that modernisation (towards a Western type society) is at least conducive to the formation of national consciousness and emergence of nationalism. If one accepts this , the socialist period is likely to have strengthened the appeal of nationalism in Slovakia. Furthemore, the modernisation approach offers an explanation for why new ethnic conflicts arose once Communism released its grip. Even the communities without the history of nationalism can be seen to have been mobilised as a result of industrialisation. There are, however, several weaknesses with this modernist view. First, in its pure form it is very functional and does not accredit much importance to ideas. This is problematic particularly because the massive transformation and uprooting of Slovak society took place under heavy pressure from socialist socialisation. Second, if urbanisation and industrialisation were the main causes of post-communist nationalism, then one should expect to find the strongest nationalism where the effects of these processes was strongest. Before 1948 eastern Slovakia was the most 'backward' and multi-cultural region of Slovakia. Consequently, it was one of the regions that went through the most dramatic socio-economic development during Communism. Despite this , after 1989, sup- �SLOVAKIA 51 port for nationalist parties in the region was well below the Slovak average. 47 Indeed, inhabitants of Kosice, the 'capital' of eastern Slovakia and the second largest city in the country, were among those most vocally opposed to the break-up of the CSFR in the autumn of 1992.48 The Institutional Approach. The institutional approach places the cause of the strength of post-communist nationalism in the policies and structure, the institutions, of the communist regimes. The stress Leninism put on the right of national self-determination led most Soviet-style socialist regimes to not only promote national self-identification, but also build institutional frameworks along national lines. This served to institutionalise national identity as the key identity and thus create the nationalist bias of politics after the collapse of Communism. In its most basic form , the institutional approach stresses the way in which members of political institutions tend to promote the interests of their institutions in competition with others . Throughout the socialist period, Slovakia had cultural, academic , administrative and political institutions separate from the all-Czechoslovak ones. Due to the policy of stressing the Slovakness of these institutions, recruitment was conducted almost exclusively in Slovakia, and sometimes among Slovaks only. The separate poli tical institutions consisted most importantly of a branch of the Communist Party (KSS), a parliamentary assembly (SNR), and 47 See Krivy, Fialova and Balko: Slovensko ajeho regi6ny, pp.29 1-342 . •• For a more humorous expression of this see Peter Holub: 'At' uz to nestes tf piijde: Kosice se branf mirodnfmu sjednocenf', Respect, 24-30, August 1992, pp. 5-6. �52 SLOVAKIA ( except for the period 1960-69) an executive branch. While limited in their political importance during Communism, these institutions gained a dramatically different role with democratisation . Not long after the collapse of Communism, the Slovak government and legislature started calling for an increase in their competencies. Using nationalist rhetoric to mobilise the population was an obvious way to gain support for strengthening the authority and power of the Slovak institutions at the expense of federal ones. On a more complex level, the institutional approach examines the wider impact institutional structures had on creating certain attitudes and beliefs in the population. One leading institutional theoretician , Rogers Brubaker, explained the strength of postcommunist nationalism in the Soviet Union as a result of the ' dual institutionalisation ' of what he termed ' territorial nationhood ' and 'ethnic nationality ' .49 Territorial nationhood refers to the linkin g of a specific territory to national identity through the admi nistrative division of the country according to nationality. As with most administrative components in the Soviet Union, Slovakia was a clearly defined territorial unit interpreted as the homeland of the Slovaks. While this was made explicit after the federalisation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was implicit already from the end of World War IL The principle of equality (rovny s rovnym) introduced during the war and maintained in the 1948 Constitution •• Rogers Brubaker: Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp 23-54. The nationality and, particularly after 1969, the institutional stru cture of socialist Czechoslovakia was almost identical to that of the Soviet Unio n. �SLOVAKIA 53 was clearly interpreted as a principle of equality of nations. 50 Hungarians, Ruthenes, Romanies and other national groups in Slovakia were national minorities; the Slovaks were the statotvorny (literally: state forming) nation. Along with officially pronouncing Czechoslovakia a country of two nations, the regime built institutions to create the appearance of national self-determination. While Czechoslovakia did not go as far as the Soviet Union in awarding the constituent republics symbols of statehood, the Czech and Slovak Socialist Republics were in the 1968 Law on Federalisation declared to have the status of independent legal subjects that surrendered part of their sovereignty to the Federation. The Republics were also awarded the 'inalienable right of self-determination even to the point of separation'. 51 The Law on Federalization thus 'rehabilitated and restored the idea of a national state as an attribute of a fully developed nation'. 52 The effect of this policy was to encourage Slovaks to think of themselves as a separate nation with wide-ranging political rights. The second aspect of Brubaker's institutional approach focuses on the way the communist regime made ethnic identification compulsory. In common English usage, the concepts of 'nationality' and 'citizenship' are synonymous. In the socialist federations, however, the distinction was important. All who held Czechoslovak passports were Czechoslovak citizens. Their nationality, however, would be Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Ruthene, Romany, Polish, Ukrainian or some other. A person's nationality 5 ° Katarina Zavacka: "Metamorf6zy statopravneho postavenia Slovenska v Ceskoslovensku v rokoch 1948-1967" in Vladimir Gonec (ed. ): Cesko-s/oven ska historicka rocenka I 998 (Brno: Masarykova Universita, 1998), pp. 17-29. 51 See ' Ustavnf zakon 143/ 1968 Sb.' at http://www.psp. czldocs/textslconstitution. 1968.html. 52 Kusy: Eseje,p. 69 . �54 SLOVAKIA was ascertained at birth according to that of her of his parents and could generally not be changed. As in inter-war Czechoslovakia, the communist regime did promote a Czechoslovak political identity. Avoiding the word narod, nation, which has clear ethnic connotations, the communists called for the creation of a 'Czec hoslovak working people ' (ceskoslovensky pracujlici J'ud). The identity was not, even in relation to the Czechs and Slovaks, intended as a Czechoslovak cultural identity. On the contrary, the Communist Party put great stress on promoting the cultures of the various national groups, particularly the Slovak. Generous reso urces were devoted to building cultural institutions and supporting the cultural life of all official nationalities. 53 For most children primary and sometimes secondary and higher education was available in their mother tongue. While all culture was to be socialist, the art forms favored by the regime, those that were seen to form the basis of national culture (s uch as folk dancing and traditional artisan-and craftsmanship), were not particularly affected . The Centre for the Production of Folk Art (UI:UV) and the folk-dancing and folk-mu sic group the Slovak People' s Artistic Collective (SI:UK) were presented as the best of centuries-old , traditional Slovak culture, thus reminding all of not only the cultural , but also historical separateness of the Slovaks. Combined, these two processes of institutionalisation made nations and nationality into basic units of people' s world-view. When the communist regime collapsed and democratisation started, nationally based institutions and their elites became centres of 51 See Elena Londakova: ' Slovcnske predjarie: Myty a realita slovenskej inte li gcncic v Ceskoslovensku pred rokom 1956 (a po iiom)', in Vladimir Gonec (ed .): Cesko-s/ovensk;i historick;i rocenka I 998 (Brno: Masarykova Universita, 1998), p. 2 10 and Dusan Kovac: Dejiny Slovenska (Prague: NLN, 1998), pp. 275-276 . �SLOVAKIA 55 political activity. 54 National identity became the basic organising. principle in politics. The nationally defined elites in the separate national institutions could gain popular support among a population identified and identifying according to their nationality by claiming to defend the interest of that nation. The system of compulsory national identification thus became the basis for new political constituencies. The main strength of the institutional approach is that it offers a very powerfull explanation of the near universal succes of national identity and nationalism as political principles after Communism. It does so by placing the cause of this succes in the very world-view engendered by the communist regime. As Brubaker writes: the communist nationality policy 'created a political field supremely conductive to nationalism' .55 The 'new' nationalism of the post-communist period can therefore be explained. Due to its explanatory strength, the institutional approach has emerged as one of the most popular among scholars trying to explain postcommunist nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. However, the institutional approach, like the other presented above, has its shortcomings. Like the modernist approach it cannot alone explain the regionalised support for nationalism in Slovakia, nor does it account for the impact of pre-communist nationalism. 54 This was also the case for minorities that did not have explicitly political institutions. For example, the Slovak Hungarian cultural organization CSEMADOK became the centre of Hungarian political activity in the first period after 1989. ss Brubaker: Nationalism Reframed, p. I 7 �56 SLOVAKIA Conclusion While the process thc1· 1ed to the break-up of the common Czech and Slovak stat:· after communissm has received a fair amount of attention, few scholars have attempted to comprehensively explain why nationalism had such succes in postcommunist Slovakia.56 The above is only an overview of the possible explanations for the success of post-communist nationalism that would meet with the most support among scholars today. In fact, it is doubtful there will ever be single generally accepted explanation, be it theoretical or historical. As Katherine Verdery noted, nationalism in the post-communist region 'has many causes, ranging from the macro-social to matters of personal identity. It is, in other words, overdetermined, and the relevant causes vary from one county to another. 5 7 What is needed to approach a consensus on what factors were most important in the Slovak case, is a series of studies that evaluate the explanatory power of various approaches, such as those above. If this article serves to encourage someone to write such a study, it has served its purpose. ,. To this author's knowledge, the only monograph that explicitly does so is Cohen: Politics without a Past. 57 Katherine Verdery: 'Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-socialist Romania' , Slavic Review, vol. 52 (1993), no. 2, p. 180. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2003, Vol. 37 Description An account of the resource Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 28 SLOVAKJA 'Slovak som a Slovak budem ... 'l Explaining Nationalism in Post-Communist Slovakia Paal Sigurd Hilde The question of the position of Slovakia within the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (CSFR), the official name as of April 1990, was among the most divisive issues in Slovak and Czech politics in the post-communist era. As is well known, the conflict over the future basis and structure of the federation eventually led to the division of the state on 1 January 1993. Despite the impression given by many press reports at the time, the break-up was not the result of Slovak secession. With the exception of the Slovak National Party (SNS), representing about 10 per cent of the votes in Slovakia, all Slovak political parties successful in the decisive June 1992 elections were in favor of some kind of common state with the Czechs. This included the winner, Vladimir Meciar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS). There were, however, near irreconcilable policy differences between the left-populist HZDS and the right wing coalition victorious in the Czech Republic. Given the minority veto in the Federal assembly, whereby a minority of representatives from either Republic could block important legislation in the House of Nations, only a carefully crafted compromise could save the Federation from political deadlock. Rather than seeking a compromise, however, the Czech 1 The title is taken from Miroslav Kusfs 1981 samizdat essay. Reprinted in Miroslav Kusy: Eseje (Bratislava: Archa, 1991 ), pp. 88 -96 . SLOVAKlA 29 right wing coalition led by Vaclav Klaus of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) pushed for the division of the state if a 'functional federation' was not possible. Unwilling and politically unable to accept Klaus 's vision of a strong federal government, Meciar reluctantly followed the Czech Prime Minister's lead towards a break-up. 2 The political phenomenon generally referred to as Slovak nationalisn was thus not the decisive force behind the break-up of the CSFR. 3 It was, however, Slovak nationalism that after the collapse of communism started the process that eventuallly led to the rejection of the common state by right-wing Czech parties. As all nationalisms, Slovak post-communist nationalism was a complex phenomenon. It came in moderate and more radical forms, focus sing on several political issues. In its most basic expression, it held that Slovakia and the Slovaks deserved a more equal and visible position within a state seen as unfairly dominated by the Czech part. 4 Basically all Slovak political parties, including the 2 On the process preceding the break-up see Eric Stein : Czecho/Slovakia: Ethnic Conflict, Constitutional Fiss ure, Negotiated Breakup (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 3 Nationalism is fo r the purpose of th is study defined as a world view, which holds that the pop ulation of the world is divided into nations. A nation, claim nationalists, consists of a grou p of people identifiable and identifying according to cultural, religious, historical and/or territorial criteria. Nationalists see nations as constituting natural social units and seek to promote the po litical, cultural, economic or other kind of status, in symbolical or more material terms, of the nation they claim to represent. The nationalist discourse, common to a ll forms of nationalism, is used thro ughout the world, most often to oppose or defe nd existing political units. See Craig Calhoun: Nationalism (Buckin gham : Open University Press, 1997). •Foran examination of mainstream Slovak national ism see Paal Sigurd Hil de: 'Slovak Nationalism and the Break-Up of Czechoslovakia', Europe-Asia Stu die s, vol. 51 (1999), no. 4, pp. 64 7-665. 30 SLOVAKIA most pro-federal, shared this demand. More radical expressions called not only for more radical solutions to the question of the Federation, but focussed also negatively on the position of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia and the perceived threat from Hungarian irredentism. In its exteme, which was promoted only by small, popular unrepresentative groups, Slovak · nationalism promoted radically anti-Czech, anti-Hungarian and sometimes also anti-Semitic views. This article will analyse another complexity of nationalism in post-communist Slovakia. 5 As with all nationalisms, the popular success of the Slovak form can be seen as a result of several, intricate causes. These include historical, political, social and econ omic determinants. The aim of this study is not to reach a final decision on what caused the apperance and success of post-communist nationalism. Rather, the article offers an overview of a range of possible explanations and the strengths and weaknesses of these. This might be a combination of all, some, just one or none . Ultimately, it was Slovak6 politicians and other political actors that gave nationalism the political significance it had after the collapse of communism. Without nationalists, there is no nationalism. Focusing merely on the role of actors, however, leaves many unanswered questions. The most important of these is why the demands and rhetoric of the nationalists gained such a favourable response from the population. Certain political factors in the postcommunist period can be seen to have facilitated the success of the nationalist agenda among Slovaks. One such factor was the 5 For the sake of simplifying the analysis the multi-issue complexity of Slovak nationalism will be not discussed in detail. • The word Slovak will in this article denote a person of Slovak culture and identity. Similarly, a Czechoslovak is a person of Czech or Slovak ethnicity with a Czechoslovak identity . SLOVAK1A 31 institutional legacy of the socialist federation (more on this below). A second factor was the changing international environment after the Cold War, with the secession of the Baltic states, Slovenia and Croatia as examples of the new stress on national self-determination. Interaction with the two major 'others', the Hungarians and Czechs, was also important. The upsurge of post-communist nationalism in the Hungarian speaking minority in Slovakia and in Hungary, and the increasingly hostile attacks on Slovak nationalism, particularly in the Czech press, both served to spur Slovak nationalists into action. 7 Even more important in increasing support for nationalist de mands in post-communist Slovakia was the issue of economic reform. The generally harder impact of the Federal economic programme on the Slovak than on the Czech economy was by many taken as a sign of the disadvantaged position of Slovaks within the common state.8 The call for a greater Slovak control over economic policy thus became the one of the most important and substantial claims of Slovak nationalists . Yet, even given the activities of nationalists and the political factors conducive to the appeal of the nationalist discourse, to understand post-communist nationalism one must understand the historical developments that formed the basis for the appeal of the ethnic nationalism in Slovakia. Several historical precondition s can be identified . These are the topic of this study . 7 For examples of this see (H ungarian) Andrej Ferko: Stredna Europa - Eseje (Bratislava: VSSS, 1998) and (Czech) Dusan Sl obodnfk: Proti sedemhlavemu drakovi : Z dejin zapasu za Sia vensko (Bratislava: VSSS, 1998 ). ' In a January 1992 poll , for example. 53 % of respondents in Slovakia antici pated that the Czech economy wou ld grow at the expense of the Slovak. Cen trum pre social nu analyzu: Aktualne problemy Cesko-S/ovensk a, januar 1992 (Bratislava: CSA, 1992), p. 29. 32 SLOVAKIA Preconditions for the Success of Post-Communist Nationalism. To clarify the analysis of the historical preconditions of postcommunist nationalism, it is useful to divide the examination into two stages. The first stage focuses on the generally different impact nationalist ideas have had in the Eastern and Western parts of Europe. Whereas the civic, territorial version of nationalism became dominant in the West, ethnic, especially linguistically centred nationalism prevailed in Central and Eastern Europe (hereafter CEE)9. In the twentieth century, this ethnic nationalism be came the underlying ideal for the political reorganisations of CEE in two world wars. The first half of the twentieth century thus served to establish ethnic nationalism as a dominant political ideology and ethnic ties as primary lines of political identification. An example of the causes of the success of ethnic nationalism thus forms what one might call the 'deep ' historic background for understanding post-communist nationalism. The second stage in the analysis focuses on the impact of the socialist era. For the majority of the population of post-commu nist Slovakia, the just over forty years of communist indoctrination through education, mass media and other means, had formed their primary so urce of fo rmal socialisation. Moreover, Soviet Communism brought one of the most dramatic periods of social and economic change in Slovak history. The analysis below outlines the different assessments scholars have made of the impact the social, economic and political devel opments of the las t halfcentury before 1989 had on the strength of nationalism in Slovakia. • Central and Eastern Europe will in this article denote roughly the area of the fonner Habsburg Empire as well as the European parts of the Romanov and Ottoman em pires. SLOVAKIA 33 The Success of Ethnic Nationalism. In his celebrated 1882 lecture, Ernest Rennan started by making a distinction 'between the fusion of "races" in the nations of Western Europe, and the retention of ethnic distinctiveness in Eastern Europe .' 10 In 1944, Hans Kohn developed this theme when he introduced the concepts of 'Western' and 'Eastern' nationalisms. 11 While challenged by several authors, this typology has survived the test of time and is used in various forms by scholars today. As most nationalisms contain both civic (Western) and ethnic (Eastern) elements, the distinction is, as Anthony D. Smith points out, analytical and not normative. 12 Czechoslovak nationalism in the interwar years, for example, was clearly ethnic m relations with Germans and Hungarians, but civic m its merger of Slovaks and Czechs into one nation. On the whole, scholars agree on the basic causes why civic nationalism was more successful in Western Europe and ethnic nationalism in the Eastern part of the continent. The main factors are generally identified as the socio-economic and, partly linked, cultural differences between the two regions at the time of the dissemination of nationalist ideas. 13 From about the fifteenth century, Western Europe saw the beginning of the development of the modem state. The new economy saw the abolition of serfdom , the weakening of the feudal-agricultural economy and the strengthening of trade and manufacture centred in cities. The develop0 Anthony D. Smith: Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 9 ' '' Hans Kohn : The Idea of Nationalism (New York : Collier, 1967), pp. 329-331. 12 Smith: Nationalism and Modernism, p. 126 '-' For a good analysis of East-West historical differences see Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries: A Hi/story of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (Lo ndon, Routledge, I 998), pp. 15-25. 34 SLOVAKlA ment of centralised, strong states, yet with an increasingly urbanised and literate population capable of challenging the authority of the ruler, had important social, economic and political effects. Western, civic nationalism grew gradually out of the socio-economic developments and changes in political thought of pre-nineteenth century Europe. 14 This nationalism was state centred and focused on gaining the loyality of and homogenising the population of a territory. Crucially, nationalist ideas were promoted in societies whose elites, if not populations, were already quite homogenous culturally. This was particularly the case in Protestant, North-Western Europe. In important respects, Central and Eastern Europe was relatively 'backward' when nationalist ideas spread through the intellectual life of the region in the early nineteenth century. 15 The relative backwardness had both external and internal causes. The centuries of warfare with the Ottomans had weakened the states in the region and led to their inclusion into large empires. Hungary, which then included today's Slovakia, came under Habsburg rule after the battle of Mohacs in 1526. At the eve of the French Revolution, the Ottoman, Habsburg and Romanov empires dominated Central and Eastern Europe. Compared with rapidly developing Western states, the three Eastern empires remained despotic. As the feudal-agricultural economic structure retained its dominance, no strong middle class developed . In Slovakia, or Felvidek (Upper Hungary) as the Hungarian rulers called it, the development of mining in Eastern Slovakia, for instance, led to the growth of some smaller towns. Generally, these were dominated by ethnic 14 See Liah Greenfeld: Nationalism : Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1992 ) ,s The concept of Central and East European 'backwardness' is obviously very general and simplifying, also given the large differences within the region . SLOVAKJA 35 Germans or Jews. The majority of the population of Slovakia remained rural and often illiterate. The socio-econonic conditions for cultural homogenisation were, therefore, not present. The ethnically very heterogeneous dynasties of Central and Eastern Europe were initially not interested in trying to turn their empires into nation-states on the Western model. 16 Only in the final decades of the nineteenth century did Tsarist Russia attempt to Russify the Western Borderlands and the Hungarian leadership promote its policy of Magyarisation (Hungarianisation). 17 Given its lack of an ethnic nobility and being an integral part of Hungary proper, the Slav population of Felvidek was particularly exposed. Yet even here the Hungarian nation-bulding project did not succeed. History was soon to take a surprising turn. Ultimately more successful than the civic nation builders in CEE were elites opposed to central rule and integration. State centred, civic nationalism had no advantages for such elites. When they adopted nationalist discourse as a political tool , they were inspired by German romanticism rather than Western liberalism . Nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe looked not to Locke and Stuart Mill, but to Herder and Fichte. In German romantic thought, it was not political boundaries that determined the extent of a nation , but culture and particularly language. In the ethnically diverse empires of CEE such ideas were to have a dramatic impact. It was no coincidence that two leading Slovak (Pan-Slav) nationalists, Jan Kollar and Pavo) Jozef Safarik, both studied at "' Charles Ingrao: ' Forum: Understanding Ethnic Conflict in Central Europe: An Historical Perspective', Nationalities Papers, vol. 27 ( 1999), no. 2, p. 293 . 17 See Edward C. Thaden (ed.): Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Fin land, J855 - 19 14 (Princenton: Princenton University Press, 198 I ) and Tibor Frank: 'Hungary and the Dual Monarchy, 1867- 1890' , in Peter F. Sugar, Peter Hanak and Tibor Frank (eds.): A History of Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 36 SLOVAKJA the University of Jena in the early nineteenth century. 18 The 'father of Slovak nationalism', Cudovit Stur, like Kollar and Safarik, a Protestant, also studied in Germany, in Halle. 19 By the outbreak of World War One, ethnic nationalism had emerged as one of the leading political ideologies in Central and Eastern Europe. In Austria-Hungary, leaders claiming to represent various ethnically defined nations, such as Slovak nationalists in the Slovak National Party, promoted their rights within the Empire. World War I was to bring victory to such nationalist programmes. Towards the end of the war, when the Entente Powers started supporting the programmes of Central and Eastern Europe (mainly exile) nationalists , their support was limited to the de mand for an administrative reorganisation of Austria-Hungary . By 1918, however, the right to self-determination had come to mean the right for independence. Allied victory in World War I thus resulted in a reorganisation of the Central European region according to the principle of the 'self-determination of nations', that is, the self-determination of ethnically defined nations. This right was by no means allowed for all , particularly not for the 'defeated nations'. All the new and old, expanded states of the region contained sizeable ethnic minority groups . While political life in Austria-Hungary had increasingly taken the form of a struggle between the central authorities and nationalist leaders, inter-war Central and Eastern Europe took this to a new level. In the new Czechoslovak Republic as well, ethnic belonging became the main dividing line in politics. Ethnic Ger- "Victor S. Mamatey : 'The Establishment of the Republic' . in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomir Luz.a (eds.): A History of the Czechoslovak Republic: l 9 l 81948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 6. 19 Peter Petro: A History of Slovak Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), p. 65 . SLOVAKIA 37 mans and Hungarians (Magyars) voted overwhelmingly for ethnically based parties . The Slovaks, according to official ideology part of the Czechoslovak nation, were divided. As in the late Habsburg period, one part of the Slovak political elite was Czechoslovak nationalist, another, strongly connected to the Catholic clergy, was more sceptical to the Czechoslovak idea. Loyal to the Czechoslovak state until pushed into declaring independence inl939, the Slovak nationalist movement promoted Slovak, as opposed to Czechoslovak, national awareness and nationalism throughout the inter-war period . While it is impossible to get an accurate picture of the popular support for Slovak nationalism after World War II, it seems safe to agree with Carol Skalnik Leff's claim that when taking power in 1948, the communists faced a 'full-blown' Slovak nationalism. 20 If the creation of a Slovak education system, the flowering of Slovak culture and promotion of Slovak nationalism in politics was not sufficient to cement the importance of ethnic belonging and nationalism in people's thinking in the inter-war years, the Second War War was .2 1 With the rise towards authoritarian rule by the Slovak People ' s Party from the autumn of 1938, ethnic nationalism became a central part of official ideology. In the region as a whole, ethnicity became a supreme organizing principle increasing or limiting chances for employment, economic prosperity and even survival. Supported by the Catholic clergy, the Slovak state sought to educate the Slovaks into becoming good nationalists. Nationalism was promoted in schools, the mass media and 10 Carol Skalnik Leff: National Conflict in Czech oslovakia (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press. 1987), p. 281. 11 On national identity in the inter-war period see Owen V. Johnson: Slovakia 191 8- 1938: Education and the Making of a Nati on (Boulder: Co lumbia Uni versity Press, 1985). 38 SLOVAKIA official and religious life in general. 22 For many groups among ethnic Slovaks, the war-time state was a positive experience. The relative economic prosperity, the ease of employment (especially for the young intelligentsia) and the elevated position of the Catholic faith and church were aspects of the state that for some Slovaks compared favourably with pre-war Czechoslovakia. Obviously, for parts of the population, the experience had been clearly negative. For Jews and Romanies it was one of inhuman crimes. Yet, despite the horrors and injustices, the experience of independence under German influence strengthened the position of nationalism in Slovak society. While the leaders of the 1944 Slovak National Uprising had called for the reestablishment of Czechoslovakia, they did not want to return to the centralist system of the First Republic (1918-1938). The extent to which Slovakia had been changed by the war became evident in the 1946 election. Whereas the Slovak political scene had been split on the issue of Slovakia's position within the common state before the war, all parties standing in 1946 supported Slovak self-rule within Czechoslovakia in their programmes. 23 The Impact of the Socialist Period. In the intersection between empirical studies that directly or indirectly offer an explanation for the success of nationalism in post-communist Slovakia and general theoretical works on nationalism, it is possible to identify three main approaches to the question of the impact of the communist era. The first focuses 22 See e.g. Yeshayahu Jelinek : The Parish Republic: H/inka 's Slovak People's Party 1939- 1945 (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1976). lJ Jan Ryc hlik : Cesi a Slovaci ve 20.stoleti: Cesko-slovenske vztahy 19451992 (Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press, 1998), pp.40-42. SLOVAKIA 39 mainly on the way in which nationalism survived despite the forty years of communism. Given the strength of Slovak nationalism before Communism and the resilience of ethnic and cultural ties, nationalism would, according to this approach, have survived whatever policy the Communist Party had chosen. Scholars taking this approach would put the greatest emphasis on the 'deep' historic background outlined above. The second approach, where scholars stress the continuation of nationalism through the socialist period, could be considered the mainstream historical view . This approach focuses on the way Slovak national identity and support for nationalism survived the socialist era not only because of their pre-1948 strength, but also due to certain policies during Communism that served to strenghten their basis of support. According to the final approach, the success of post-communist nationalism was mainly due to the policies adopted by the Communist Party. Putting much less emphasis on the strength of precommunist national identity and nationalism (and thus the •deep' historical explanation), the 'due to' approach takes two main forms . One focuses on the effects of the socio-economic development of Slovakia during Communism, the other on the impact of the construction of nationally based institutional structures. These three analytical categories form a continuum rather than three clearly identifiable positions. Differences between studies falling into the different categories are generally one of focus or degree. Few scholars argue the extreme positions: that postcommunist nationalism was purely a revival of suppressed nationalism, or that it was a result of developments in the communist period only. Most would note the continued expressions of Slovak nationalism during the communist era, and then stress the degree to which the socialist period suppressed , maintained or actually strengthened the appeal of nationalism. 40 SLOVAKIA Nationalism Despite Communism. Particulary in the first years after the collapse of Communism, the 'retum-of-history'argument was commonly used to explain the success of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. Precommunist nationalism, merely suppressed by the communist regimes, re-emerged to become the political factor it had been forty years earlier. As one historian put it: Communism may have temporarily relieved Central Europe's ethnic tensions for nearly half a century. But if religion was the opiate of the people, Communism proved no more effective than methadone (sic) in suspending their craving for ethnically whole nation states, without providing a cure. 24 In the literature on nationalism in Slovakia, Jacques Rupnik supported this view when he argued that Slovak nationalism had been in the 'communist refrigerator' for most of the period after 1948. 25 Of the monographs in English discussing Slovak nationalism, Stanislav Kirschaum's A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival is, arguably, one of those that leans most toward the 'despite ' approach. 26 While describing in detail the persistence of nationalism during Communism and the radical changes Slovak society went through, Kirschbaum notes no positive effect of the communist regime on the strength of Slovak national identity and nationalism. Rather, he highlights the attempts the communist lea- 1 ' Ingrano: 'Forum ... ' , p. 307 . 15 Jaques Rupnik, quoted in Martin Butora and Zora Butorova: 'Slovakia after the Split ' ,Joumal o[Democracy,vol. 4(1993), no. 2,p. 75 . 16 Stanislav Kirschbaum : A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival (London : Macmillian, 1995). SLOVAKIA 41 dership made at suppressing national identity.27 If Slovak nationalism gained strength during the communist period , it was more a reaction to the 'Czechoslovakism' favoured by the regime .2 8 The primordialist theories of nationalism would be the most obvious theoretical basis for the works in this approach. Stressing the ' ineffable, and at times overpowering' strength of the ' cultural givens' in a society, Clifford Geertz, for example, points to how ethnic ties in some societies come to be seen as a 'natural some would say spiritual affinity' .29 Given the strong emphasis put on cultural belonging in Slovak history, at least since the late nineteeth century, one could argue that ethnicity had gained a primordial character in Slovak society by the end of World War II. Consequently, the communist regime would not have been able to suppress Slovak identity, and therefore neither the potential for Slovak nationalism. While not going as far as the primordialist in stressing the naturalness of central ties, the so-called ethno-sym- bolist theories of nationalism could also be interpreted as lending support to the 'despite' approach. According to Anthony D. Smith, post-communist nationalism confirms the resilience and strength of ehnic myths, symbols and popular memory. He writes:' Though the timing of the current ethnic revival is a function of social and geopolitical changes, their contents and intensities are largely determined resources,' by pre-existing ethno-sy mbolic 30 27 Note e.g. ibid., pp. 228, 245, 252. Kirschbaum ta.lees a very favo urable view of Slovak nationalism and a more negative one of the common Czech and Slovak state . " Ibid., p. 24 7. 19 Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures (London : Fontana, 1973). pp . 259-260 . 0 ' Anthony D. Smith : 'LSE Centennial Lecture: The Resurgence of Nationalism ? Myth and memory in the renewal of nations ', British Journal of Sociology, vo l. 42 SLOVAKIA Empirical support for the 'despite' argument can be found in post-communist Slovakia. In a study of regional patterns of political culture, a group of Slovak sociologists found strong similarities between the inter-war and post-communist era. 31 In both periods, nationalist and populist parties gained most support in northwest and central Slovakia. The persistence of this regional pattern seems to suggest that at least elements of pre-communist political culture had been preserved. Moreover, studies from other post-communist countries show that national minorities that were actively discouraged from maintaining their separate identity and culture, still emerged to voice nationalist demands after Communism. In Poland, this was the case with the German minority .32 While counter-factual history necessarily amounts to speculation, it does seem likely that regardless of what the policy the Communists had adopted, also the separate Slovak identity, in both its cultural and political expression, would have survived. The relatively short period of communist rule would clearly have facilitated this. As can be seen from the above, focusing on links to pre-communist nationalism and the preservation of popular myths and memory has some advantages. Firstly, it points to the strength of ethnic nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. The conviction that ethnically defined nations formed natural bases for political legitimacy, be it in a separate state or as 47 (1996), no. 4, p. 573. Elsewhere, Smith does stress the role of communi st policies in preserving these myths and memories. See e.g. Smith: Nationalism and Modernism, 237, endnote 9. 31 Vladimir Krivy , Viera Fialova and Daniel Balko: Slovensko a jeho regi6ny: sociokultume suvislosti volebneho spravania (Bratislava: Nadacia Media, 1996). 12 Janusz Mucha: 'Democratisation and Cultural Minorities: The Polish Case of the 1980s/90s', East European Quarterly, vol. 25 (1992), no. 4. SLOVAKIA 43 an autonomous region within a larger entity, had by 1948 been deeply ingrained in CEE. This was not only the case with most of the Slovak political elite, but also, many historians would agree, large parts of the population. Secondly, stressing the preservation of political culture is perhaps the only way to explain the continued regional pattern of support for nationalism. In its pure form, the 'despite' argument rejects any important effect of the socialist period on national identity and the popular view of nationalism. If one accepts that national identity is a social construct, that nations are not some kind of natural social unit, this jump across forty years of history is difficult to defend. As shall be discussed in more detail below, 1948-1989 was probably the most dramatic period of social and economic change in Slovak history. It was also a period of an intense policy of officially managed, public socialisation. Given the impact this period had on people' s lives, it seems difficult to assume that popular views on national identity and nationalism would not also change. One example that it had is that before 1948 Slovakia was a deeply religious society and mainstream nationalism was strongly connected to the Catholic Church. In the post-communist period, however, the leading nationalists parties HZDS and SNS were both secular. Catholic nationalism, as represented by the Christian Democratic Party (KDH), was much less successful. Explanations focusing more on the way the communist period served to change Slovak national identity and thereby the bases for nationalism during that period, thus seemingly provide a more convincing explanation for the widespread appeal of nationalism in the postcommunist era. Finallly, the 'despite' argument cannot explain the emergence of 'new' nationalisms in the post-communist period . Some groups without a history of common national identity and nationalism formed nationalist parties after 1989. Most im- 44 SLOVAKIA portantly, this included the Roma community. Also the emergence of a relatively strong nationalism in Moravia and Silesia was a sign of the increased importance of cultural identity. 33 Traditionally a regional identity and before Communism never a major political issue, the Moravian-Silesian autonomy party became the largest party in the Czech National Council in 1990. Nationalism Through the Communist Era. The 'through' approach makes up the middle ground between stressing the resilience of pre-communist nationalism and the strengthening of national identity during the communist period. Studies falling into this category would seek to explain the perpetuation of national conflict due to the persistence of support for nationalism built up before the communist period and to certain factors that served to strengthen Slovak national identity during the 1948-1989 era. Most historical studies tend to be in this category. Carol Skalnik Leff' s 1987 seminal book on national conflict in Czechoslovakia is probably the best study in English in this category. 34 In Leff's analysis, the deep social, economic and cultural differences between the Czech Lands and Slovakia were politicised during the inter-was republic. A triangular pattern of support and opposition was created, whereby the central leadership in Prague relied on the pro-Czechoslovak section of the Slovak political elite to help neutralise the demands of Slovak nationalists. In the communist period , this pattern persisted until it was displaced JJ Jaroslav Krejci and Pavel Machonin: Czechoslovakia 1918- 1992: A Laboratory for Social Change (Oxford: Macmill an and St. Anthony ' s, 1996), p. 51 . 14 Leff: National Conflict. Ryc hlik: Cesi a Slovaci .. . 1945-1992 is a later, eve n more detailed work of this approcah. SLOVAKIA 45 with the ascent of Gustav Husak to power in 1969. Both the interwar and the socialist regimes failed in their attempts to modernize away the problem of Slovak nationalism (culturally and educationaly in the inter-war period, economically during socialism). These failures, combined with the unwillingness of both regimes to adequately accommodate the Slovak nationalist's demands, led to a growing sense of antagonism (mutual antagonism, as Czechs resented that Slovaks used times of international crisis to force through their demands). Leff concludes: 'Given the persistence of Slovak national feeling, on the one hand, and Czech power, on the other, the result has been persistent national conflict'. 35 While Leff notes that Slovak nationalism was strong in the post-war period, much due to the experience of statehood during the war, she also identifies several factors during the communist era that served to strengthen its basis. The existence of separate Slovak political institutions, for instance, was important. Leff writes: 'Week as the KSS (Slovak Communist Party) and the SNR (Slovak National Council) were in the years following 1948, both would retain the capacity to serve as nationalist time bombs. ' 36 One important reason for this was that the system of separate Slovak institutions created a Slovak elite separate from Prague-based Czechoslovak one. 37 Also other aspects of the regime 's policy proved counter-productive to its official aim of promoting the 'coming together' (zblfienie) of Czechs and Slovaks. The mass media, for instance, was 'segmented and not adapted to the integrative intentions of the policy-making elite. 38 Thus , by the late 1980, 'the Slovak question ' had become 'deeply, perhaps 35 Leff: National Conflict, p. 282. Ibid ., p. 112 . 37 Ibid ., p.294 . " Ibid., p. 297 . 36 46 SLOVAKlA irreversibly, woven into the fabric of Czechoslovak politics as usual'. This statement carries with it the implication that the Slovak question wi1l continue to assert itself as a political force in the future .39 Three years after Leff published her study, her prediction came true . Theoretically, the 'through' approach occupies the middle ground between the primoridalists emphasis on the strength of cultural ties and the stress put on social processes by the modernist and institutional views outlined below. With more emphasis on the way myths, symbols, values and memories are preserved in societies, ethno-symbolist theories would come closest to forming a theoretical basis for this approach. From the ethno-symbolist perspective, the communists ' attempt to defuse nationalism in Slovakia by flagging symbols of self-determination could only serve to strengthen the feeling of national identity. The reason for this was that the only symbols that would evoke a positive response from the population would be symbols that had a basis in popular tradition . For example, while the communists did try to reframe the historical image of r.udovft Stur as a social revolutionary, they could not eradicate the view of Stur as a champion of Slovak rights so strongly ingrained in popular tradition and myths . As Smith writes : "Ethno-history is no sweetshop in which nationalists may ' pick and mix'; it sets limits to any appropriation by providing a distinctive context and patterns of events, personages and ,, 4 0 processes ... . The most obvious strength of the 'through' approach is that by stressing both the strong social basis of pre-communist nationalism and the way it was maintained and changed during the 1948-1989 period , it can account more or less convincingly for 39 ' 0 Ibid. , pp. 281 -282 . Smith: Nationalism and Modernism, p. 45 SLOVAKIA 47 nationalism in both periods. It points to the continuity of not only political conflict over the status of Slovakia, but also that of popular symbols and myths. Noting how the communist period maintained and strengthened preexisting national identity and traditions also allows for an explanation of the persistent regional differences in support for nationalism. Despite these important strengths, however, the 'through' approach does have some weak points. Some will argue that the most important of these is that it does not go far enough in emphasising how dramatically the communist period changed Slovak society. As with the 'despite' approach, the focus on the continuation of national conflict through the communist period also faces problems in explaining the 'new' nationalisms of the post-communist era. The political organisation and activism of the Romany community after 1989, for example, is difficult to explain without stressing the way the communist period served to strengthen the importance of ethnic belonging. Nationalism Due to Communism. Studies focusing on the way the communist period . served to strengthen national identity and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe are generally more theoretically grounded than the two approaches above. The presentation of these will therefore have to be a bit different. Two main theoretical starting points can be identified. 41 The first, based on modernisation theories of 41 Shari Cohen supposes a third, unconventional, approach in her Politics without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism (Lon- don: Duke University Press, 1999). It was not the strength of national identity in Slovakia that formed the basis for the success of post-communist nationalism, Cohen claims, but rather the lack of a clear historical consciousness. By 48 SLOVAKJA nationalism, focus on the massive socio-economic changes in the CEE countries during the fourty years of communist rule. As many other countries and areas of the region, Slovakia underwent a rapid transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society. Such a process of social modernization, scholars such as Ernest Gellner claim, is the basis for the strength of post-communist nationalism. The second starting point is based on the so called 'new institutionalism' in social science. According to its proponents, the communist regimes honoured their Leninist commitment to national self-determination by building nationally defined institutions and stressing national identities. Rather than, as intended, weakening the social basis for nationalism, however, their policy served to strengthen it. Put otherwise: the Soviet type nationality policy was to be 'nationalist in form, socialist in content ' . When the socialist content disappeared, only the nationalist form remained . Modernisation. It is the erosion of traditional society and its values with urbanisation and the growth of the state that, in Gellner's view, is responsible for the emergence of nationalism.42 In an agricultural society, where mobility is low and socialisation within the family and local community is sufficient, a person's language and culture is of little consequence. Urban life, particularly in the industrial age, exercises different pressures on the population. Industrial society, requiring formal socialisation through an education preventing the emergence of a collective memory of World War II, the communist regime made Slovak society susceptible to elite manipulation after the collapse of communism. 42 Ernest Gellner: Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). SLOVAKIA 49 system, thus makes an individual's culture and especially language important. Particularly when cultural differences overlapped with an actual or perceived pattern of social and economic discrimination, nationalism is a likely outcome. In socialist societies, as they suppressed civil society, class identities and other social lines of identification , the importance of cultural identities became particularly strong. When the regimes collapsed, there existed no 'serious rival ideology ' or any 'serious rival institutions' capable of providing alternatives to identification along national lines. 43 In the resulting 'double vacuum', nationalism, the 'culture of industrialism ', was 'the most plausible and easily available candidate for filling this emptiness. ' 44 After the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Slovakia entered its most important period of socio-economic development. Over a period of seventeen years, the share of agricultural workers in the total workforce more than halved: from 62.2% in 1948 to30.1% in 1965. 4 5 By 1989 it has reached 14.5%. Similarly, the percentage of the population living in cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants increased from 11.5% in 1950 to 40.8% in 1991 .46 In the space of a few decades, Slovakia was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial society. That the industrial structure of Slovakia was accordingly based on the socialist idealisation of heavy industry, matters little in this context. Territorial and social mobility increased, as did the general level of education. The steadily increasing availability and reach 43 Ernest Gellner: ' Nationalism in the Vacuum', in Alexander J. Motyl (ed .): Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities: History and Comparison in the Study of the USSR(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 250. 44 Ernest Gellner: 'Homeland of the Unrevolution' , Daedalus, vol. 122 (1993) , no. 3, p. 152. 45 See Krejci and Machonin : Czechoslovakia, p. 120. 46 Ibid., p. 126. 50 SLOVAKIA of mass communication, such as radio and television, also served to promote a standardised ('high') culture. Combined, these factors served to increase cultural homogeneity in the Slovak population and put focus on the differences between the Slovaks and other cultural groups in society. An individual's cultural-cumnational identity was therefore highlighted . The main strength of the modernist approach is that it brings our attention to the massive social and economic changes in the region during Communism. Slovak society was fundamentally changed through industrialisation and urbanisation . Most theories of nationalism hold that modernisation (towards a Western type society) is at least conducive to the formation of national consciousness and emergence of nationalism. If one accepts this , the socialist period is likely to have strengthened the appeal of nationalism in Slovakia. Furthemore, the modernisation approach offers an explanation for why new ethnic conflicts arose once Communism released its grip. Even the communities without the history of nationalism can be seen to have been mobilised as a result of industrialisation. There are, however, several weaknesses with this modernist view. First, in its pure form it is very functional and does not accredit much importance to ideas. This is problematic particularly because the massive transformation and uprooting of Slovak society took place under heavy pressure from socialist socialisation. Second, if urbanisation and industrialisation were the main causes of post-communist nationalism, then one should expect to find the strongest nationalism where the effects of these processes was strongest. Before 1948 eastern Slovakia was the most 'backward' and multi-cultural region of Slovakia. Consequently, it was one of the regions that went through the most dramatic socio-economic development during Communism. Despite this , after 1989, sup- SLOVAKIA 51 port for nationalist parties in the region was well below the Slovak average. 47 Indeed, inhabitants of Kosice, the 'capital' of eastern Slovakia and the second largest city in the country, were among those most vocally opposed to the break-up of the CSFR in the autumn of 1992.48 The Institutional Approach. The institutional approach places the cause of the strength of post-communist nationalism in the policies and structure, the institutions, of the communist regimes. The stress Leninism put on the right of national self-determination led most Soviet-style socialist regimes to not only promote national self-identification, but also build institutional frameworks along national lines. This served to institutionalise national identity as the key identity and thus create the nationalist bias of politics after the collapse of Communism. In its most basic form , the institutional approach stresses the way in which members of political institutions tend to promote the interests of their institutions in competition with others . Throughout the socialist period, Slovakia had cultural, academic , administrative and political institutions separate from the all-Czechoslovak ones. Due to the policy of stressing the Slovakness of these institutions, recruitment was conducted almost exclusively in Slovakia, and sometimes among Slovaks only. The separate poli tical institutions consisted most importantly of a branch of the Communist Party (KSS), a parliamentary assembly (SNR), and 47 See Krivy, Fialova and Balko: Slovensko ajeho regi6ny, pp.29 1-342 . •• For a more humorous expression of this see Peter Holub: 'At' uz to nestes tf piijde: Kosice se branf mirodnfmu sjednocenf', Respect, 24-30, August 1992, pp. 5-6. 52 SLOVAKIA ( except for the period 1960-69) an executive branch. While limited in their political importance during Communism, these institutions gained a dramatically different role with democratisation . Not long after the collapse of Communism, the Slovak government and legislature started calling for an increase in their competencies. Using nationalist rhetoric to mobilise the population was an obvious way to gain support for strengthening the authority and power of the Slovak institutions at the expense of federal ones. On a more complex level, the institutional approach examines the wider impact institutional structures had on creating certain attitudes and beliefs in the population. One leading institutional theoretician , Rogers Brubaker, explained the strength of postcommunist nationalism in the Soviet Union as a result of the ' dual institutionalisation ' of what he termed ' territorial nationhood ' and 'ethnic nationality ' .49 Territorial nationhood refers to the linkin g of a specific territory to national identity through the admi nistrative division of the country according to nationality. As with most administrative components in the Soviet Union, Slovakia was a clearly defined territorial unit interpreted as the homeland of the Slovaks. While this was made explicit after the federalisation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was implicit already from the end of World War IL The principle of equality (rovny s rovnym) introduced during the war and maintained in the 1948 Constitution •• Rogers Brubaker: Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp 23-54. The nationality and, particularly after 1969, the institutional stru cture of socialist Czechoslovakia was almost identical to that of the Soviet Unio n. SLOVAKIA 53 was clearly interpreted as a principle of equality of nations. 50 Hungarians, Ruthenes, Romanies and other national groups in Slovakia were national minorities; the Slovaks were the statotvorny (literally: state forming) nation. Along with officially pronouncing Czechoslovakia a country of two nations, the regime built institutions to create the appearance of national self-determination. While Czechoslovakia did not go as far as the Soviet Union in awarding the constituent republics symbols of statehood, the Czech and Slovak Socialist Republics were in the 1968 Law on Federalisation declared to have the status of independent legal subjects that surrendered part of their sovereignty to the Federation. The Republics were also awarded the 'inalienable right of self-determination even to the point of separation'. 51 The Law on Federalization thus 'rehabilitated and restored the idea of a national state as an attribute of a fully developed nation'. 52 The effect of this policy was to encourage Slovaks to think of themselves as a separate nation with wide-ranging political rights. The second aspect of Brubaker's institutional approach focuses on the way the communist regime made ethnic identification compulsory. In common English usage, the concepts of 'nationality' and 'citizenship' are synonymous. In the socialist federations, however, the distinction was important. All who held Czechoslovak passports were Czechoslovak citizens. Their nationality, however, would be Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Ruthene, Romany, Polish, Ukrainian or some other. A person's nationality 5 ° Katarina Zavacka: "Metamorf6zy statopravneho postavenia Slovenska v Ceskoslovensku v rokoch 1948-1967" in Vladimir Gonec (ed. ): Cesko-s/oven ska historicka rocenka I 998 (Brno: Masarykova Universita, 1998), pp. 17-29. 51 See ' Ustavnf zakon 143/ 1968 Sb.' at http://www.psp. czldocs/textslconstitution. 1968.html. 52 Kusy: Eseje,p. 69 . 54 SLOVAKIA was ascertained at birth according to that of her of his parents and could generally not be changed. As in inter-war Czechoslovakia, the communist regime did promote a Czechoslovak political identity. Avoiding the word narod, nation, which has clear ethnic connotations, the communists called for the creation of a 'Czec hoslovak working people ' (ceskoslovensky pracujlici J'ud). The identity was not, even in relation to the Czechs and Slovaks, intended as a Czechoslovak cultural identity. On the contrary, the Communist Party put great stress on promoting the cultures of the various national groups, particularly the Slovak. Generous reso urces were devoted to building cultural institutions and supporting the cultural life of all official nationalities. 53 For most children primary and sometimes secondary and higher education was available in their mother tongue. While all culture was to be socialist, the art forms favored by the regime, those that were seen to form the basis of national culture (s uch as folk dancing and traditional artisan-and craftsmanship), were not particularly affected . The Centre for the Production of Folk Art (UI:UV) and the folk-dancing and folk-mu sic group the Slovak People' s Artistic Collective (SI:UK) were presented as the best of centuries-old , traditional Slovak culture, thus reminding all of not only the cultural , but also historical separateness of the Slovaks. Combined, these two processes of institutionalisation made nations and nationality into basic units of people' s world-view. When the communist regime collapsed and democratisation started, nationally based institutions and their elites became centres of 51 See Elena Londakova: ' Slovcnske predjarie: Myty a realita slovenskej inte li gcncic v Ceskoslovensku pred rokom 1956 (a po iiom)', in Vladimir Gonec (ed .): Cesko-s/ovensk;i historick;i rocenka I 998 (Brno: Masarykova Universita, 1998), p. 2 10 and Dusan Kovac: Dejiny Slovenska (Prague: NLN, 1998), pp. 275-276 . SLOVAKIA 55 political activity. 54 National identity became the basic organising. principle in politics. The nationally defined elites in the separate national institutions could gain popular support among a population identified and identifying according to their nationality by claiming to defend the interest of that nation. The system of compulsory national identification thus became the basis for new political constituencies. The main strength of the institutional approach is that it offers a very powerfull explanation of the near universal succes of national identity and nationalism as political principles after Communism. It does so by placing the cause of this succes in the very world-view engendered by the communist regime. As Brubaker writes: the communist nationality policy 'created a political field supremely conductive to nationalism' .55 The 'new' nationalism of the post-communist period can therefore be explained. Due to its explanatory strength, the institutional approach has emerged as one of the most popular among scholars trying to explain postcommunist nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. However, the institutional approach, like the other presented above, has its shortcomings. Like the modernist approach it cannot alone explain the regionalised support for nationalism in Slovakia, nor does it account for the impact of pre-communist nationalism. 54 This was also the case for minorities that did not have explicitly political institutions. For example, the Slovak Hungarian cultural organization CSEMADOK became the centre of Hungarian political activity in the first period after 1989. ss Brubaker: Nationalism Reframed, p. I 7 56 SLOVAKIA Conclusion While the process thc1· 1ed to the break-up of the common Czech and Slovak stat:· after communissm has received a fair amount of attention, few scholars have attempted to comprehensively explain why nationalism had such succes in postcommunist Slovakia.56 The above is only an overview of the possible explanations for the success of post-communist nationalism that would meet with the most support among scholars today. In fact, it is doubtful there will ever be single generally accepted explanation, be it theoretical or historical. As Katherine Verdery noted, nationalism in the post-communist region 'has many causes, ranging from the macro-social to matters of personal identity. It is, in other words, overdetermined, and the relevant causes vary from one county to another. 5 7 What is needed to approach a consensus on what factors were most important in the Slovak case, is a series of studies that evaluate the explanatory power of various approaches, such as those above. If this article serves to encourage someone to write such a study, it has served its purpose. ,. To this author's knowledge, the only monograph that explicitly does so is Cohen: Politics without a Past. 57 Katherine Verdery: 'Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-socialist Romania' , Slavic Review, vol. 52 (1993), no. 2, p. 180.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Slovák som a Slovák budem...': Explaining Nationalism in Post-Communist Slovakia Description An account of the resource Paal Sigurd Hilde Slovakia, Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003 pp. 28-56 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hilde, Paal Sigurd, 1970- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/133e31d958f4c4c61a8df5f47b1294cd.pdf d9357180613847a11ba6af10909217da PDF Text Text 57 SLOVAKJA Reversing the Trend: Central Europe from Dictatorship to Democracy 1 Jan Camogursky A currently-popular political term is "globalization." Seen from a North American perspective, it is very real. When one reads American or Canadian newspapers, magazines or books, the globe seems to be a tiny button. Planes and boats filled with goods dash from one continent to the next. Billions of dollars are transferred via computers and satellites. Television viewers can instantly discover if it is hot or cold in distant parts of the world on the Weather Channel. Its pictures show continents without state borders, and the sky above them is either sunny and clear or cloudy and raining. Some observers praise globalization, some protest against it, but it probably cannot be stopped. Central Europe has given the world many scientific, economic and cultural stimuli from which globalization evolved. The territory between Ukraine and Germany, Scandinavia and the Balkans, is only about 1/10 the size of Canada, but it has six times as many inhabitants. A multitude of nations exist here, sometimes at peace, and sometimes at war. In the 20th century the Slavs and Germans clashed in two World Wars, into which Canada and the United States were drawn. American and Canadian military cemeteries in Europe speak dramatically about Central Europe's signi1 A public lecture presented at the University of Ottawa on Ferbruary 29, 2000. �58 SLOVAKIA ficance to these two countries. On the other hand, Central Europe also produced Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig Von Beethoven, Antonin Dvorak, Albert Einstein and John Paul II . Central Europe has been a problem for the Great Powers in the last two centuries , and after World War II it became especially acute. The victorious Allies solved the problem by erasing it. They divided Central Europe between them and for four decades it disappeared from the political map. Ironically enough, Central Europe at this time groaned under the highest concentration of soldiers and weapons in the history of mankind. Even though it was divided, Central Europe continued to exist. One Austrian publicist commented that Central Europe is everywhere where cafes serve soda water with black coffee. Such coffee and soda continued to be served in Warsaw, Munich, Vienna, Budapest and Bratislava. Central Europe also had a foreign social system forced upon it. This foreign system provoked isolated explosions against it: in East Berlin in 1953; in Poznan and Budapest in 1956; in Prague and Bratislava in 1968; and in Gdansk in 1980. All were suppressed by external forces (or the threat of such force) and all evoked a feeling of solidarity among the nations of Central Europe. Before World War II every Central European country , except Switzerland, had disputes with its neighbours. Repeated interventions by the Soviet Union led Central Europeans to a new awareness of their common suffering. Eventually, Central European dissidents started to cooperate. In the 1960's opponents of the various communist regimes, who had been imprisoned in the I 950's, were released. It became possible, though with much difficulty, for people to travel between Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The level of freedom in these countries varied. In 1968 Czechoslovakia was the most free, �SLOVAKIA 59 and Polish and Hungarian political emigres in the West were able to bring forbidden books, magazines and photocopying machines to their respective countries via Czechoslovakia. In the l 970's and l 980's more liberal conditions prevailed in Hungary and Poland, and forbidden materials could be smuggled into Czechoslovakia from those countries. After the establishment of the Charter'77 movement in Czechoslovakia, dissidents in Hungary and Poland helped out. In the second half of the l 980's I twice met with Czech and Polish dissidents on the border. The first meeting was carefully planned. A few people on each side agreed on a place and time in northern Moravia. There the border runs through deep forests . Even though dissidents on both sides of the border had had their passports confiscated, they could approach the border in groups of two or three, ostensibly to pick mushrooms. After about an hour's walk, we arrived at the agreed-upon rendezvous and in the next three or four hours planned our future activities. The most prominent participant from the Czechoslovak side at the first meeting was Vaclav Havel. All the leading Polish dissidents, except Lech Walesa (who was interned by General Jaruzelski), were there. The second meeting took place in the early summer of 1989, when a free election had already been scheduled in Poland . Many of the participants were subsequently elected to the Polish Parliament. As MP's they had diplomatic passports, and they used them to visit us in August. The end of communism in 1989 was full of paradoxes. When Tadeusz Mazowiecki won the elections in Poland and came to power, I was in a Bratislava jail. Vaclav Havel then wrote to Mazowiecki and asked him to intervene with the Czechoslovak authorities on my behalf. Mazowiecki sent his reply to Havel via the-then communist Polish Ambassador in Prague! �60 SLOVAKIA Religious activists in Slovakia and Poland were very close. Religious oppression in Slovakia was much stronger than in Poland. The Slovak underground church sent its followers to summer camps in Poland and Polish bishops ordained Slovak priests who had secretly studied theology in Slovakia. Also, many thousands of religious books, printed by Slovaks in the West, were smuggled into Slovakia via the Polish Catholic church. Thus far I have spoken about solidarity between dissidents in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The solidarity of the noncommunist Central European countries, Germany and Austria, was reflected in their political and moral support for dissidents in communist countries and their acceptance of refugees from those countries. Some refugees escaped in a spectacular manner. At the beginning of the l 980's a Slovak flew across the border to Austria in a balloon which he had made by sewing together a bunch of raincoats. Another built himself a cart, which he then suspended from a high-voltage power line that went to Austria and he pulled himself across the border on the suspended cart! Twenty years ago NATO's decision to install medium-range missiles in Germany provoked a heated debate. The Eastern bloc responded with threats of military countermeasures. Pershing missiles were eventually placed in Germany. We dissidents supported this move. We knew that the Communists only understood the use of force, and it was ultimately the demonstrated strength of the West, and the internal dissent in Central Europe, that led to the fall of Communism. Central Europe resurrected itself after the fall of Communism. Austria abolished its visa requirements for us as early as December, 1989. As a result, huge crowds of people moved across the breached Iron Curtain. I was among them. Even though my home �SLOVAKIA 61 town of Bratislava borders on Austria, I was 46 years old before I could cross this border! Democratic revolutions in 1989 brought people who shared the same values of a civic society to power. The time had come to demonstrate that these common values really counted for us . We faced the challenge of completing the reverse trend and bringing cooperation to Central Europe, and even a new integration. It was necessary first to remove certain remnants of Communism. In July, 1991 the Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved. At the same time, the Council for Economic Assistance (COMECON) was abolished. This decision was controversial because for four decades the economies of the states of East Central Europe had focussed on eastern markets, and these were suddenly gone. COMECON's member states now traded with each other only on the basis of market demands. Prices were also allowed to reflect market forces. At the same time, Russia started to sell these countries raw materials at world prices and for world currencies. At the fall of Communism two slogans common to all Central European countries suddenly rang out. They were "Free Elections," and "Back to Europe." Free elections did take place in all these countries during 1990. However, joining the European Union was another matter. Brussels was far away and the roads leading to it were fraught with difficulties. It would first be necessary to bring post-communist Central European countries back together. The initiative came from President Vaclav Havel. In February of 1990 Havel invited the Prime Ministers of Poland and Hungary to a meeting with their Czechoslovak counterpart in Bratislava. The plan was to get these three states to cooperate in the future. At their second meeting in Visegrad, Hungary, in 1991, this coalition acquired its name from this historic locality where, in the 14th �62 SLOVAKIA century the Kings of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary had agreed upon peace and mutual trade. In its short history, the Visegrad Group has been through a period of growth and decline. The geographical location, common history, interconnected economy and identical external interests of these countries pushed them into close cooperation. However, Vaclav Klaus's government in Prague did not place much importance on cooperation in the Visegrad Group. Similarly, Vladimir Meciar's government in Bratislava looked for other ways to achieve its goals. With a change in government in 1998 in both Prague and Bratislava, the situation improved and the Visegrad Group caught its second wind. Slovakia's membership is important for the Visegrad Group, which has no formal standing. Slovakia lies in its centre and is the only country to border all three of the others. Without Slovakia's active participation, the Visegrad Group would lose many of its advantages. Membership in the Visegrad Group does not remove all of the disputes between its members, but it does make resolving them easier. One such dispute was the completion of the joint Czechoslovak-Hungarian Gabcikovo waterworks on the Danube River. After the collapse of Communism, Hungary opposed the completion of these waterworks. Following a mutual agreement in 1992, both countries requested a ruling from the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Five years later the Court ruled that Slovakia was almost entirely in the right. The Gabcikovo waterwt>rks stopped attracting media attention and now reliably supply the grid with electricity, regulate the flow of the Danube, and have become a recreation area. The dispute between Hungary and Slovakia is over, although the technical and financial issues �SLOVAKIA 63 surrounding the Gabcikovo waterworks are still being discussed by experts from both countries. While Europe was divided ( 1945-1989), we m the East followed the grad ual formation of today's European Union with interest, envy and admiration. We did not understand all of the problems which occurred while the original six states unified; we smiled at how fishing, the production of butter, the sale of wine and the like could be problems for the member countries. Despite this, the attractiveness of the unifying Western Europe grew . After the fall of Communism all of the countries of Central Europe expressed an interest in joining the European Union . Talks of the accession of these countries to the European Union started very quickly and were completed at the beginning of the l 990's through the conclusion of European agreements on association. The European Union's entry and expansion into Central Europe is important from many perspectives. Henry Kissinger stated that when a power vacuum had formed in Central Europe in the past, Russia and Germany were pulled into and clashed over it. A power vacuum formed in Central Europe after the fall of Communism, but the European Union has filled it in . The agreements on association opened up the European market to the former communist countries. Union ' s On the other hand, the markets of post-communist countries are only gradually opening up. The European Union later established four so-called "Copenhagen criteria" for those interested in joining the Union. They are a developed market economy, the ability to cope with competition in the European Union, a stabilized democracy with guarantees for the functioning of constitutional institutions and the protection of minorities, the adoption of �SLOVAKJA 64 the European acquis communotaire and an institutional structure comparable to the European Union's . At the same time, the European Union developed a number of financial assistance programmes for post-communist countries . The European Union's political and economic criteria speeded up reforms in post-communist countries, while at the same time isolating sources of political extremism. In 1997 the European Union invited Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia to negotiate their future membership. In 1999 it also invited Slovakia, Lithuania and Latvia, as well as Romania and Bulgaria. These countries ' membership in the European Union has wide support from the population everywhere. It seems as if membership in the Union has turned into a speed trial for the governments of Central European countries . Slovakia fell out of the first group in 1997 because of the European Union's political reservations about Slovak politics at the time. The current Slovak government is trying to catch up with its neighbours and enter the European Union at roughly the same time, around 2004 . In expanding to the East, the European Union is approaching half a billion inhabitants. It will expand its territory and strengthen its position on the world playing field . At the same time, it will reach the eastern border of Western Christianity. Expansion further east will mean crossing the borders of a civilization. In fact, Greece's current membership and Bulgaria's and Romania ' s future memberships are preparing the European union for just such a step. Another western organization that has expanded its presence into Central Europe since the fall of Communism is NATO. For a while after the Warsaw Pact was abolished, the armies of its former members felt aimless. However, in 1991 the military units from former communist Central European countries took part in �SLOVAKIA operation 65 Desert Storm. Soon thereafter war broke out m Yugoslavia and again all the states contributed at least small units to UNPROFOR. In 1993 I visited a Slovak UNPROFOR corps of engineers in Croatia. They were under the command of a Canadian colonel named Harris, who was very satisfied with their performance. It was a new experience for Slovak soldiers and officers, and certainly also for Czechs and Poles and others, when they started to use NA TO terminology and operational rules. The Partnership for Peace programme enabled former enemies to come closer together and gradually unify at least their communication technology. All the ex-communist Central European countries showed an interest in joining NATO. At NATO 's Madrid Summit in 1997 , Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were invited to join . They have since become members. Slovakia was excluded at that time. The Slovak army is now increasing its cooperation with NATO. It has liaison officers at the Brussels headquarters and membership in NATO is part of the current Slovak government's agenda. But, according to opinion polls, the majority of the Slovak population does not, as yet, support Slovakia's membership in NA TO. Germany has long been the most important country in Central Europe. From the end of the Napoleonic wars to the end of the Second World War German nationalism was a source of tension in Europe. After the defeat of Hitler, Germany turned itself around. Mostly under Christian Democratic governments, Germany achieved an economic miracle and rebuilt itself in record time. It then became a driving force for European integration, and still is today. In the 45 years since the war, Germany earned such trust from the East that there were no reservations in Central Europe about Germany' s reunification. Fran1yois Mitterand's �66 SLOVAKIA France and Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain placed greater obstacles to Germany's reunification than did Poland, Czechoslovakia or Russia. Germany acknowledged the permanence of its border with Poland and reconfirmed the invalidity of the Munich Agreement. Germany contributes the most to the European Union's treasury. British historian Paul Johnson called Germany of the l 920's a leading intellectual power. I do not intend to discuss the intellectual level of today's Germany, but politically Germany plays a very constructive role in Central Europe. Of the Central European countries, Poland is trying to present itself as a regional counterbalance to Germany. In Poland's case there is also a counterbalance to Johnson's statement on German intellect. Polish author Stan isl av Stomma wrote that Poland's intellectual potential has always exceeded its material possibilities. Unfortunately, Poland's material possibilities will probably hold back its intellectual potential for some time. Post-communist Central European countries also look to Germany with another question. Germany will have an important voice in the European Union's institutional reforms . The reforms will determine if and when the European Union will be able to accept new members. Under the current rule!>, the European Union does not have the resources to finance the development of new members from Central Europe to enable them to attain the level of the Union's current members. The countries that receive more money from the Union than they put into it do not want to share income with new members . The countries that contribute more than they take out, especially Germany, are not preparedjustifiably so-to pay more. German politicians freely answer the question of how to solve this quandary by saying that the European Union has always developed by a crisis coming along and then moving towards half-compromise. We shall see. �SLOVAKIA 67 The new Austrian government has posed a challenge for its eastern neighbours. In the Second World War, every country east of Germany, with the exception of Hungary, fought against Germany sooner or later. Some of them suffered exceptionally heavy losses. For example, Poland lost 20% of its population . Proud reminders of the Nazi regime from a politically relevant personality in Austria (forg Haider) are, therefore, unimaginable and incomprehensible in these countries. On the contrary, 40 years of denial of democracy under Communism fostered a tendency in these countries to trust democratic rules regardless of their content. Central European ex-communist countries were only able to give a constrained reaction to the new government in Austria; even more so as the harshness of the reaction from the European Union and some other countries was surprising. The division of Czechoslovakia in 1993 may seem to be at odds with the new integration of Central Europe. However, I would like to point out that in Central Europe the concept of a nation is understood in an ethnic, not in a political sense. Nations that see themselves as ethnically unique may live in one state. Two nations-Slovaks and Czechs-lived separate lives in Czechoslovakia. There was practically no common Czechoslovak culture, only Czech and Slovak cultures. The Slovak and Czech languages are similar, but they are also different. Under the communist dictatorship it was possible to silence national aspirations, but after the restoration of freedom the different political conceptions of the Czechs and Slovaks grew. The 1992 elections (the first free ones since 1946) brought very different political parties into power in Slovakia and in the Czech Lands, and these parties agreed to divide the country, and the Czechoslovak Federal Parliament then adopted the Constitutional Law on the Division of Czechoslovakia. �68 SLOVAKIA Happily, the story does not end there. After the breakup, Slovakia and the Czech Republic maintained fair or even friendly relations . When there were politically different governments in Prague and Bratislava, relations between the Republics were fair; when there are similar political parties in power in Prague and Bratislava, relations are friendly. The people of Slovakia and the Czech Republic have remained on friendly terms. According to public opinion surveys in Slovakia, the Czechs are the Slovaks ' favourite nation , and vice-versa. Slovak and Czech delegations generally support each other at international conferences. In the last few weeks the governments and parliaments of both countries have approved an agreement on the property settlement of the division of the former Czec hoslovakia. Both cooperate within the Visegrad group and their foreign policies are equally oriented towards western integration and security groups. On the other hand, the division of Czechoslovakia is final and there is no desire to resurrect it. Only one political party in 1994 ran on a pro-Czec hoslovak platform and it received a paltry one per cent of the vote. If we compare political developments in the two Republics since the "velvet divorce," Slovakia 's history has probably been more colourful. First, the Slovaks removed certain doubts about the viability of their state. Slovakia ' s economy also did fairly well despite a rather odd dispute between Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar and President Michal Kovac . The dispute did not escalate into a shooting war, but did result in the abduction of the president 's son to Austria. In 1999 the Slovak Parliament revoked the immunity of Ivan Lexa, the previous head of the secret service, who was suspected of having masterminded the abduction. In the seven years of Slovakia's independence there were three changes of government between political groups so opposed to each other that they were able to abduct or tolerate the abduc- �69 SLOVAKJA tion of one of their sons. Despite this, all the political changes took place democratically, within the parameters of the Constitution and on the basis of freely-held elections . In September of 1998, 84% of the electorate turned out to vote in the parliamentary elections. After 40 years of communism democracy works in strange ways. I often mention such figures as proof of the strength of democracy in Slovakia. I admit that it is sometimes necessary to make more of an effort for democracy to function in Slovakia than in other countries. But, it has always worked out. The sometimes strange workings of democracy in post- communist countries directly relate to their communist heritage. Communism ended in a sudden collapse but it soon became apparent that the Communists quickly found their way in the new social order. The Communist Parties changed their names and became Socialist Parties and former Communists appeared in other parties as well. After a short period of anti-communist enthusiasm in 1990 came the realization that economics, culture and politics are more complicated. It is not possible to replace people en masse because there are simply not enough experts to go around and certain stages of development cannot be omitted. In one country after another the former Communists were so successful in elections and constitutional cohabitation that even France was amazed . But the market economy was not disrupted and democracy survived . This is testimony to the strength of western democratic and political institutions which have come to the East. Just to complete the picture, I will mention that the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFT A) has existed since 1993. Originally it was between the Visegrad Group, but later it was joined by Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. The Agreement liberalized trade between the participating countries and, except for agricultural products, it works well. �70 SLOYAKlA Another attempt at cooperation between Central and Eastern European countries is the Central European Initiative. It was established in 1989 as an association of four states (Italy, Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia) at Italy's initiative. Today it includes sixteen states. Its aim is, not only economic cooperation, but also cultural and political, especially assistance in associating its members with the European Union. The Central European Initiative, on the other hand, is stagnating . Every generation has the tendency to talk about a change of paradigm brought about by its own efforts. Who would not want to change the world, even if we cannot explain it? Why should we give up this ambition? All the more so because the paradigm has changed. For centuries European history was marked by conflicts between Gennany and France. It seems that these conflicts are over. In the twentieth century two World Wars started in Central Europe. I do not see a source of tension here that could lead to another such conflict. Now the most serious dispute in Western and Central Europe is the " Beef War" between France and Great Britain. As long as we do not ask the poor cows for their opinion , we can really talk about a change of paradigm. If in future decades we manage to expand the zone of peace further cast, and even to the Balkans , then Isaiah 's words might come to apply to Europe: "He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation , neither shall they learn war any more ." � 57 SLOVAKJA Reversing the Trend: Central Europe from Dictatorship to Democracy 1 Jan Camogursky A currently-popular political term is "globalization." Seen from a North American perspective, it is very real. When one reads American or Canadian newspapers, magazines or books, the globe seems to be a tiny button. Planes and boats filled with goods dash from one continent to the next. Billions of dollars are transferred via computers and satellites. Television viewers can instantly discover if it is hot or cold in distant parts of the world on the Weather Channel. Its pictures show continents without state borders, and the sky above them is either sunny and clear or cloudy and raining. Some observers praise globalization, some protest against it, but it probably cannot be stopped. Central Europe has given the world many scientific, economic and cultural stimuli from which globalization evolved. The territory between Ukraine and Germany, Scandinavia and the Balkans, is only about 1/10 the size of Canada, but it has six times as many inhabitants. A multitude of nations exist here, sometimes at peace, and sometimes at war. In the 20th century the Slavs and Germans clashed in two World Wars, into which Canada and the United States were drawn. American and Canadian military cemeteries in Europe speak dramatically about Central Europe's signi1 A public lecture presented at the University of Ottawa on Ferbruary 29, 2000. �58 SLOVAKIA ficance to these two countries. On the other hand, Central Europe also produced Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig Von Beethoven, Antonin Dvorak, Albert Einstein and John Paul II . Central Europe has been a problem for the Great Powers in the last two centuries , and after World War II it became especially acute. The victorious Allies solved the problem by erasing it. They divided Central Europe between them and for four decades it disappeared from the political map. Ironically enough, Central Europe at this time groaned under the highest concentration of soldiers and weapons in the history of mankind. Even though it was divided, Central Europe continued to exist. One Austrian publicist commented that Central Europe is everywhere where cafes serve soda water with black coffee. Such coffee and soda continued to be served in Warsaw, Munich, Vienna, Budapest and Bratislava. Central Europe also had a foreign social system forced upon it. This foreign system provoked isolated explosions against it: in East Berlin in 1953; in Poznan and Budapest in 1956; in Prague and Bratislava in 1968; and in Gdansk in 1980. All were suppressed by external forces (or the threat of such force) and all evoked a feeling of solidarity among the nations of Central Europe. Before World War II every Central European country , except Switzerland, had disputes with its neighbours. Repeated interventions by the Soviet Union led Central Europeans to a new awareness of their common suffering. Eventually, Central European dissidents started to cooperate. In the 1960's opponents of the various communist regimes, who had been imprisoned in the I 950's, were released. It became possible, though with much difficulty, for people to travel between Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The level of freedom in these countries varied. In 1968 Czechoslovakia was the most free, �SLOVAKIA 59 and Polish and Hungarian political emigres in the West were able to bring forbidden books, magazines and photocopying machines to their respective countries via Czechoslovakia. In the l 970's and l 980's more liberal conditions prevailed in Hungary and Poland, and forbidden materials could be smuggled into Czechoslovakia from those countries. After the establishment of the Charter'77 movement in Czechoslovakia, dissidents in Hungary and Poland helped out. In the second half of the l 980's I twice met with Czech and Polish dissidents on the border. The first meeting was carefully planned. A few people on each side agreed on a place and time in northern Moravia. There the border runs through deep forests . Even though dissidents on both sides of the border had had their passports confiscated, they could approach the border in groups of two or three, ostensibly to pick mushrooms. After about an hour's walk, we arrived at the agreed-upon rendezvous and in the next three or four hours planned our future activities. The most prominent participant from the Czechoslovak side at the first meeting was Vaclav Havel. All the leading Polish dissidents, except Lech Walesa (who was interned by General Jaruzelski), were there. The second meeting took place in the early summer of 1989, when a free election had already been scheduled in Poland . Many of the participants were subsequently elected to the Polish Parliament. As MP's they had diplomatic passports, and they used them to visit us in August. The end of communism in 1989 was full of paradoxes. When Tadeusz Mazowiecki won the elections in Poland and came to power, I was in a Bratislava jail. Vaclav Havel then wrote to Mazowiecki and asked him to intervene with the Czechoslovak authorities on my behalf. Mazowiecki sent his reply to Havel via the-then communist Polish Ambassador in Prague! �60 SLOVAKIA Religious activists in Slovakia and Poland were very close. Religious oppression in Slovakia was much stronger than in Poland. The Slovak underground church sent its followers to summer camps in Poland and Polish bishops ordained Slovak priests who had secretly studied theology in Slovakia. Also, many thousands of religious books, printed by Slovaks in the West, were smuggled into Slovakia via the Polish Catholic church. Thus far I have spoken about solidarity between dissidents in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The solidarity of the noncommunist Central European countries, Germany and Austria, was reflected in their political and moral support for dissidents in communist countries and their acceptance of refugees from those countries. Some refugees escaped in a spectacular manner. At the beginning of the l 980's a Slovak flew across the border to Austria in a balloon which he had made by sewing together a bunch of raincoats. Another built himself a cart, which he then suspended from a high-voltage power line that went to Austria and he pulled himself across the border on the suspended cart! Twenty years ago NATO's decision to install medium-range missiles in Germany provoked a heated debate. The Eastern bloc responded with threats of military countermeasures. Pershing missiles were eventually placed in Germany. We dissidents supported this move. We knew that the Communists only understood the use of force, and it was ultimately the demonstrated strength of the West, and the internal dissent in Central Europe, that led to the fall of Communism. Central Europe resurrected itself after the fall of Communism. Austria abolished its visa requirements for us as early as December, 1989. As a result, huge crowds of people moved across the breached Iron Curtain. I was among them. Even though my home �SLOVAKIA 61 town of Bratislava borders on Austria, I was 46 years old before I could cross this border! Democratic revolutions in 1989 brought people who shared the same values of a civic society to power. The time had come to demonstrate that these common values really counted for us . We faced the challenge of completing the reverse trend and bringing cooperation to Central Europe, and even a new integration. It was necessary first to remove certain remnants of Communism. In July, 1991 the Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved. At the same time, the Council for Economic Assistance (COMECON) was abolished. This decision was controversial because for four decades the economies of the states of East Central Europe had focussed on eastern markets, and these were suddenly gone. COMECON's member states now traded with each other only on the basis of market demands. Prices were also allowed to reflect market forces. At the same time, Russia started to sell these countries raw materials at world prices and for world currencies. At the fall of Communism two slogans common to all Central European countries suddenly rang out. They were "Free Elections," and "Back to Europe." Free elections did take place in all these countries during 1990. However, joining the European Union was another matter. Brussels was far away and the roads leading to it were fraught with difficulties. It would first be necessary to bring post-communist Central European countries back together. The initiative came from President Vaclav Havel. In February of 1990 Havel invited the Prime Ministers of Poland and Hungary to a meeting with their Czechoslovak counterpart in Bratislava. The plan was to get these three states to cooperate in the future. At their second meeting in Visegrad, Hungary, in 1991, this coalition acquired its name from this historic locality where, in the 14th �62 SLOVAKIA century the Kings of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary had agreed upon peace and mutual trade. In its short history, the Visegrad Group has been through a period of growth and decline. The geographical location, common history, interconnected economy and identical external interests of these countries pushed them into close cooperation. However, Vaclav Klaus's government in Prague did not place much importance on cooperation in the Visegrad Group. Similarly, Vladimir Meciar's government in Bratislava looked for other ways to achieve its goals. With a change in government in 1998 in both Prague and Bratislava, the situation improved and the Visegrad Group caught its second wind. Slovakia's membership is important for the Visegrad Group, which has no formal standing. Slovakia lies in its centre and is the only country to border all three of the others. Without Slovakia's active participation, the Visegrad Group would lose many of its advantages. Membership in the Visegrad Group does not remove all of the disputes between its members, but it does make resolving them easier. One such dispute was the completion of the joint Czechoslovak-Hungarian Gabcikovo waterworks on the Danube River. After the collapse of Communism, Hungary opposed the completion of these waterworks. Following a mutual agreement in 1992, both countries requested a ruling from the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Five years later the Court ruled that Slovakia was almost entirely in the right. The Gabcikovo waterwt>rks stopped attracting media attention and now reliably supply the grid with electricity, regulate the flow of the Danube, and have become a recreation area. The dispute between Hungary and Slovakia is over, although the technical and financial issues �SLOVAKIA 63 surrounding the Gabcikovo waterworks are still being discussed by experts from both countries. While Europe was divided ( 1945-1989), we m the East followed the grad ual formation of today's European Union with interest, envy and admiration. We did not understand all of the problems which occurred while the original six states unified; we smiled at how fishing, the production of butter, the sale of wine and the like could be problems for the member countries. Despite this, the attractiveness of the unifying Western Europe grew . After the fall of Communism all of the countries of Central Europe expressed an interest in joining the European Union . Talks of the accession of these countries to the European Union started very quickly and were completed at the beginning of the l 990's through the conclusion of European agreements on association. The European Union's entry and expansion into Central Europe is important from many perspectives. Henry Kissinger stated that when a power vacuum had formed in Central Europe in the past, Russia and Germany were pulled into and clashed over it. A power vacuum formed in Central Europe after the fall of Communism, but the European Union has filled it in . The agreements on association opened up the European market to the former communist countries. Union ' s On the other hand, the markets of post-communist countries are only gradually opening up. The European Union later established four so-called "Copenhagen criteria" for those interested in joining the Union. They are a developed market economy, the ability to cope with competition in the European Union, a stabilized democracy with guarantees for the functioning of constitutional institutions and the protection of minorities, the adoption of �SLOVAKJA 64 the European acquis communotaire and an institutional structure comparable to the European Union's . At the same time, the European Union developed a number of financial assistance programmes for post-communist countries . The European Union's political and economic criteria speeded up reforms in post-communist countries, while at the same time isolating sources of political extremism. In 1997 the European Union invited Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia to negotiate their future membership. In 1999 it also invited Slovakia, Lithuania and Latvia, as well as Romania and Bulgaria. These countries ' membership in the European Union has wide support from the population everywhere. It seems as if membership in the Union has turned into a speed trial for the governments of Central European countries . Slovakia fell out of the first group in 1997 because of the European Union's political reservations about Slovak politics at the time. The current Slovak government is trying to catch up with its neighbours and enter the European Union at roughly the same time, around 2004 . In expanding to the East, the European Union is approaching half a billion inhabitants. It will expand its territory and strengthen its position on the world playing field . At the same time, it will reach the eastern border of Western Christianity. Expansion further east will mean crossing the borders of a civilization. In fact, Greece's current membership and Bulgaria's and Romania ' s future memberships are preparing the European union for just such a step. Another western organization that has expanded its presence into Central Europe since the fall of Communism is NATO. For a while after the Warsaw Pact was abolished, the armies of its former members felt aimless. However, in 1991 the military units from former communist Central European countries took part in �SLOVAKIA operation 65 Desert Storm. Soon thereafter war broke out m Yugoslavia and again all the states contributed at least small units to UNPROFOR. In 1993 I visited a Slovak UNPROFOR corps of engineers in Croatia. They were under the command of a Canadian colonel named Harris, who was very satisfied with their performance. It was a new experience for Slovak soldiers and officers, and certainly also for Czechs and Poles and others, when they started to use NA TO terminology and operational rules. The Partnership for Peace programme enabled former enemies to come closer together and gradually unify at least their communication technology. All the ex-communist Central European countries showed an interest in joining NATO. At NATO 's Madrid Summit in 1997 , Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were invited to join . They have since become members. Slovakia was excluded at that time. The Slovak army is now increasing its cooperation with NATO. It has liaison officers at the Brussels headquarters and membership in NATO is part of the current Slovak government's agenda. But, according to opinion polls, the majority of the Slovak population does not, as yet, support Slovakia's membership in NA TO. Germany has long been the most important country in Central Europe. From the end of the Napoleonic wars to the end of the Second World War German nationalism was a source of tension in Europe. After the defeat of Hitler, Germany turned itself around. Mostly under Christian Democratic governments, Germany achieved an economic miracle and rebuilt itself in record time. It then became a driving force for European integration, and still is today. In the 45 years since the war, Germany earned such trust from the East that there were no reservations in Central Europe about Germany' s reunification. Fran1yois Mitterand's �66 SLOVAKIA France and Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain placed greater obstacles to Germany's reunification than did Poland, Czechoslovakia or Russia. Germany acknowledged the permanence of its border with Poland and reconfirmed the invalidity of the Munich Agreement. Germany contributes the most to the European Union's treasury. British historian Paul Johnson called Germany of the l 920's a leading intellectual power. I do not intend to discuss the intellectual level of today's Germany, but politically Germany plays a very constructive role in Central Europe. Of the Central European countries, Poland is trying to present itself as a regional counterbalance to Germany. In Poland's case there is also a counterbalance to Johnson's statement on German intellect. Polish author Stan isl av Stomma wrote that Poland's intellectual potential has always exceeded its material possibilities. Unfortunately, Poland's material possibilities will probably hold back its intellectual potential for some time. Post-communist Central European countries also look to Germany with another question. Germany will have an important voice in the European Union's institutional reforms . The reforms will determine if and when the European Union will be able to accept new members. Under the current rule!>, the European Union does not have the resources to finance the development of new members from Central Europe to enable them to attain the level of the Union's current members. The countries that receive more money from the Union than they put into it do not want to share income with new members . The countries that contribute more than they take out, especially Germany, are not preparedjustifiably so-to pay more. German politicians freely answer the question of how to solve this quandary by saying that the European Union has always developed by a crisis coming along and then moving towards half-compromise. We shall see. �SLOVAKIA 67 The new Austrian government has posed a challenge for its eastern neighbours. In the Second World War, every country east of Germany, with the exception of Hungary, fought against Germany sooner or later. Some of them suffered exceptionally heavy losses. For example, Poland lost 20% of its population . Proud reminders of the Nazi regime from a politically relevant personality in Austria (forg Haider) are, therefore, unimaginable and incomprehensible in these countries. On the contrary, 40 years of denial of democracy under Communism fostered a tendency in these countries to trust democratic rules regardless of their content. Central European ex-communist countries were only able to give a constrained reaction to the new government in Austria; even more so as the harshness of the reaction from the European Union and some other countries was surprising. The division of Czechoslovakia in 1993 may seem to be at odds with the new integration of Central Europe. However, I would like to point out that in Central Europe the concept of a nation is understood in an ethnic, not in a political sense. Nations that see themselves as ethnically unique may live in one state. Two nations-Slovaks and Czechs-lived separate lives in Czechoslovakia. There was practically no common Czechoslovak culture, only Czech and Slovak cultures. The Slovak and Czech languages are similar, but they are also different. Under the communist dictatorship it was possible to silence national aspirations, but after the restoration of freedom the different political conceptions of the Czechs and Slovaks grew. The 1992 elections (the first free ones since 1946) brought very different political parties into power in Slovakia and in the Czech Lands, and these parties agreed to divide the country, and the Czechoslovak Federal Parliament then adopted the Constitutional Law on the Division of Czechoslovakia. �68 SLOVAKIA Happily, the story does not end there. After the breakup, Slovakia and the Czech Republic maintained fair or even friendly relations . When there were politically different governments in Prague and Bratislava, relations between the Republics were fair; when there are similar political parties in power in Prague and Bratislava, relations are friendly. The people of Slovakia and the Czech Republic have remained on friendly terms. According to public opinion surveys in Slovakia, the Czechs are the Slovaks ' favourite nation , and vice-versa. Slovak and Czech delegations generally support each other at international conferences. In the last few weeks the governments and parliaments of both countries have approved an agreement on the property settlement of the division of the former Czec hoslovakia. Both cooperate within the Visegrad group and their foreign policies are equally oriented towards western integration and security groups. On the other hand, the division of Czechoslovakia is final and there is no desire to resurrect it. Only one political party in 1994 ran on a pro-Czec hoslovak platform and it received a paltry one per cent of the vote. If we compare political developments in the two Republics since the "velvet divorce," Slovakia 's history has probably been more colourful. First, the Slovaks removed certain doubts about the viability of their state. Slovakia ' s economy also did fairly well despite a rather odd dispute between Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar and President Michal Kovac . The dispute did not escalate into a shooting war, but did result in the abduction of the president 's son to Austria. In 1999 the Slovak Parliament revoked the immunity of Ivan Lexa, the previous head of the secret service, who was suspected of having masterminded the abduction. In the seven years of Slovakia's independence there were three changes of government between political groups so opposed to each other that they were able to abduct or tolerate the abduc- �69 SLOVAKJA tion of one of their sons. Despite this, all the political changes took place democratically, within the parameters of the Constitution and on the basis of freely-held elections . In September of 1998, 84% of the electorate turned out to vote in the parliamentary elections. After 40 years of communism democracy works in strange ways. I often mention such figures as proof of the strength of democracy in Slovakia. I admit that it is sometimes necessary to make more of an effort for democracy to function in Slovakia than in other countries. But, it has always worked out. The sometimes strange workings of democracy in post- communist countries directly relate to their communist heritage. Communism ended in a sudden collapse but it soon became apparent that the Communists quickly found their way in the new social order. The Communist Parties changed their names and became Socialist Parties and former Communists appeared in other parties as well. After a short period of anti-communist enthusiasm in 1990 came the realization that economics, culture and politics are more complicated. It is not possible to replace people en masse because there are simply not enough experts to go around and certain stages of development cannot be omitted. In one country after another the former Communists were so successful in elections and constitutional cohabitation that even France was amazed . But the market economy was not disrupted and democracy survived . This is testimony to the strength of western democratic and political institutions which have come to the East. Just to complete the picture, I will mention that the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFT A) has existed since 1993. Originally it was between the Visegrad Group, but later it was joined by Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. The Agreement liberalized trade between the participating countries and, except for agricultural products, it works well. �70 SLOYAKlA Another attempt at cooperation between Central and Eastern European countries is the Central European Initiative. It was established in 1989 as an association of four states (Italy, Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia) at Italy's initiative. Today it includes sixteen states. Its aim is, not only economic cooperation, but also cultural and political, especially assistance in associating its members with the European Union. The Central European Initiative, on the other hand, is stagnating . Every generation has the tendency to talk about a change of paradigm brought about by its own efforts. Who would not want to change the world, even if we cannot explain it? Why should we give up this ambition? All the more so because the paradigm has changed. For centuries European history was marked by conflicts between Gennany and France. It seems that these conflicts are over. In the twentieth century two World Wars started in Central Europe. I do not see a source of tension here that could lead to another such conflict. Now the most serious dispute in Western and Central Europe is the " Beef War" between France and Great Britain. As long as we do not ask the poor cows for their opinion , we can really talk about a change of paradigm. If in future decades we manage to expand the zone of peace further cast, and even to the Balkans , then Isaiah 's words might come to apply to Europe: "He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation , neither shall they learn war any more ." � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2003, Vol. 37 Description An account of the resource Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 57 SLOVAKJA Reversing the Trend: Central Europe from Dictatorship to Democracy 1 Jan Camogursky A currently-popular political term is "globalization." Seen from a North American perspective, it is very real. When one reads American or Canadian newspapers, magazines or books, the globe seems to be a tiny button. Planes and boats filled with goods dash from one continent to the next. Billions of dollars are transferred via computers and satellites. Television viewers can instantly discover if it is hot or cold in distant parts of the world on the Weather Channel. Its pictures show continents without state borders, and the sky above them is either sunny and clear or cloudy and raining. Some observers praise globalization, some protest against it, but it probably cannot be stopped. Central Europe has given the world many scientific, economic and cultural stimuli from which globalization evolved. The territory between Ukraine and Germany, Scandinavia and the Balkans, is only about 1/10 the size of Canada, but it has six times as many inhabitants. A multitude of nations exist here, sometimes at peace, and sometimes at war. In the 20th century the Slavs and Germans clashed in two World Wars, into which Canada and the United States were drawn. American and Canadian military cemeteries in Europe speak dramatically about Central Europe's signi1 A public lecture presented at the University of Ottawa on Ferbruary 29, 2000. 58 SLOVAKIA ficance to these two countries. On the other hand, Central Europe also produced Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig Von Beethoven, Antonin Dvorak, Albert Einstein and John Paul II . Central Europe has been a problem for the Great Powers in the last two centuries , and after World War II it became especially acute. The victorious Allies solved the problem by erasing it. They divided Central Europe between them and for four decades it disappeared from the political map. Ironically enough, Central Europe at this time groaned under the highest concentration of soldiers and weapons in the history of mankind. Even though it was divided, Central Europe continued to exist. One Austrian publicist commented that Central Europe is everywhere where cafes serve soda water with black coffee. Such coffee and soda continued to be served in Warsaw, Munich, Vienna, Budapest and Bratislava. Central Europe also had a foreign social system forced upon it. This foreign system provoked isolated explosions against it: in East Berlin in 1953; in Poznan and Budapest in 1956; in Prague and Bratislava in 1968; and in Gdansk in 1980. All were suppressed by external forces (or the threat of such force) and all evoked a feeling of solidarity among the nations of Central Europe. Before World War II every Central European country , except Switzerland, had disputes with its neighbours. Repeated interventions by the Soviet Union led Central Europeans to a new awareness of their common suffering. Eventually, Central European dissidents started to cooperate. In the 1960's opponents of the various communist regimes, who had been imprisoned in the I 950's, were released. It became possible, though with much difficulty, for people to travel between Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The level of freedom in these countries varied. In 1968 Czechoslovakia was the most free, SLOVAKIA 59 and Polish and Hungarian political emigres in the West were able to bring forbidden books, magazines and photocopying machines to their respective countries via Czechoslovakia. In the l 970's and l 980's more liberal conditions prevailed in Hungary and Poland, and forbidden materials could be smuggled into Czechoslovakia from those countries. After the establishment of the Charter'77 movement in Czechoslovakia, dissidents in Hungary and Poland helped out. In the second half of the l 980's I twice met with Czech and Polish dissidents on the border. The first meeting was carefully planned. A few people on each side agreed on a place and time in northern Moravia. There the border runs through deep forests . Even though dissidents on both sides of the border had had their passports confiscated, they could approach the border in groups of two or three, ostensibly to pick mushrooms. After about an hour's walk, we arrived at the agreed-upon rendezvous and in the next three or four hours planned our future activities. The most prominent participant from the Czechoslovak side at the first meeting was Vaclav Havel. All the leading Polish dissidents, except Lech Walesa (who was interned by General Jaruzelski), were there. The second meeting took place in the early summer of 1989, when a free election had already been scheduled in Poland . Many of the participants were subsequently elected to the Polish Parliament. As MP's they had diplomatic passports, and they used them to visit us in August. The end of communism in 1989 was full of paradoxes. When Tadeusz Mazowiecki won the elections in Poland and came to power, I was in a Bratislava jail. Vaclav Havel then wrote to Mazowiecki and asked him to intervene with the Czechoslovak authorities on my behalf. Mazowiecki sent his reply to Havel via the-then communist Polish Ambassador in Prague! 60 SLOVAKIA Religious activists in Slovakia and Poland were very close. Religious oppression in Slovakia was much stronger than in Poland. The Slovak underground church sent its followers to summer camps in Poland and Polish bishops ordained Slovak priests who had secretly studied theology in Slovakia. Also, many thousands of religious books, printed by Slovaks in the West, were smuggled into Slovakia via the Polish Catholic church. Thus far I have spoken about solidarity between dissidents in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The solidarity of the noncommunist Central European countries, Germany and Austria, was reflected in their political and moral support for dissidents in communist countries and their acceptance of refugees from those countries. Some refugees escaped in a spectacular manner. At the beginning of the l 980's a Slovak flew across the border to Austria in a balloon which he had made by sewing together a bunch of raincoats. Another built himself a cart, which he then suspended from a high-voltage power line that went to Austria and he pulled himself across the border on the suspended cart! Twenty years ago NATO's decision to install medium-range missiles in Germany provoked a heated debate. The Eastern bloc responded with threats of military countermeasures. Pershing missiles were eventually placed in Germany. We dissidents supported this move. We knew that the Communists only understood the use of force, and it was ultimately the demonstrated strength of the West, and the internal dissent in Central Europe, that led to the fall of Communism. Central Europe resurrected itself after the fall of Communism. Austria abolished its visa requirements for us as early as December, 1989. As a result, huge crowds of people moved across the breached Iron Curtain. I was among them. Even though my home SLOVAKIA 61 town of Bratislava borders on Austria, I was 46 years old before I could cross this border! Democratic revolutions in 1989 brought people who shared the same values of a civic society to power. The time had come to demonstrate that these common values really counted for us . We faced the challenge of completing the reverse trend and bringing cooperation to Central Europe, and even a new integration. It was necessary first to remove certain remnants of Communism. In July, 1991 the Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved. At the same time, the Council for Economic Assistance (COMECON) was abolished. This decision was controversial because for four decades the economies of the states of East Central Europe had focussed on eastern markets, and these were suddenly gone. COMECON's member states now traded with each other only on the basis of market demands. Prices were also allowed to reflect market forces. At the same time, Russia started to sell these countries raw materials at world prices and for world currencies. At the fall of Communism two slogans common to all Central European countries suddenly rang out. They were "Free Elections," and "Back to Europe." Free elections did take place in all these countries during 1990. However, joining the European Union was another matter. Brussels was far away and the roads leading to it were fraught with difficulties. It would first be necessary to bring post-communist Central European countries back together. The initiative came from President Vaclav Havel. In February of 1990 Havel invited the Prime Ministers of Poland and Hungary to a meeting with their Czechoslovak counterpart in Bratislava. The plan was to get these three states to cooperate in the future. At their second meeting in Visegrad, Hungary, in 1991, this coalition acquired its name from this historic locality where, in the 14th 62 SLOVAKIA century the Kings of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary had agreed upon peace and mutual trade. In its short history, the Visegrad Group has been through a period of growth and decline. The geographical location, common history, interconnected economy and identical external interests of these countries pushed them into close cooperation. However, Vaclav Klaus's government in Prague did not place much importance on cooperation in the Visegrad Group. Similarly, Vladimir Meciar's government in Bratislava looked for other ways to achieve its goals. With a change in government in 1998 in both Prague and Bratislava, the situation improved and the Visegrad Group caught its second wind. Slovakia's membership is important for the Visegrad Group, which has no formal standing. Slovakia lies in its centre and is the only country to border all three of the others. Without Slovakia's active participation, the Visegrad Group would lose many of its advantages. Membership in the Visegrad Group does not remove all of the disputes between its members, but it does make resolving them easier. One such dispute was the completion of the joint Czechoslovak-Hungarian Gabcikovo waterworks on the Danube River. After the collapse of Communism, Hungary opposed the completion of these waterworks. Following a mutual agreement in 1992, both countries requested a ruling from the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Five years later the Court ruled that Slovakia was almost entirely in the right. The Gabcikovo waterwt>rks stopped attracting media attention and now reliably supply the grid with electricity, regulate the flow of the Danube, and have become a recreation area. The dispute between Hungary and Slovakia is over, although the technical and financial issues SLOVAKIA 63 surrounding the Gabcikovo waterworks are still being discussed by experts from both countries. While Europe was divided ( 1945-1989), we m the East followed the grad ual formation of today's European Union with interest, envy and admiration. We did not understand all of the problems which occurred while the original six states unified; we smiled at how fishing, the production of butter, the sale of wine and the like could be problems for the member countries. Despite this, the attractiveness of the unifying Western Europe grew . After the fall of Communism all of the countries of Central Europe expressed an interest in joining the European Union . Talks of the accession of these countries to the European Union started very quickly and were completed at the beginning of the l 990's through the conclusion of European agreements on association. The European Union's entry and expansion into Central Europe is important from many perspectives. Henry Kissinger stated that when a power vacuum had formed in Central Europe in the past, Russia and Germany were pulled into and clashed over it. A power vacuum formed in Central Europe after the fall of Communism, but the European Union has filled it in . The agreements on association opened up the European market to the former communist countries. Union ' s On the other hand, the markets of post-communist countries are only gradually opening up. The European Union later established four so-called "Copenhagen criteria" for those interested in joining the Union. They are a developed market economy, the ability to cope with competition in the European Union, a stabilized democracy with guarantees for the functioning of constitutional institutions and the protection of minorities, the adoption of SLOVAKJA 64 the European acquis communotaire and an institutional structure comparable to the European Union's . At the same time, the European Union developed a number of financial assistance programmes for post-communist countries . The European Union's political and economic criteria speeded up reforms in post-communist countries, while at the same time isolating sources of political extremism. In 1997 the European Union invited Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia to negotiate their future membership. In 1999 it also invited Slovakia, Lithuania and Latvia, as well as Romania and Bulgaria. These countries ' membership in the European Union has wide support from the population everywhere. It seems as if membership in the Union has turned into a speed trial for the governments of Central European countries . Slovakia fell out of the first group in 1997 because of the European Union's political reservations about Slovak politics at the time. The current Slovak government is trying to catch up with its neighbours and enter the European Union at roughly the same time, around 2004 . In expanding to the East, the European Union is approaching half a billion inhabitants. It will expand its territory and strengthen its position on the world playing field . At the same time, it will reach the eastern border of Western Christianity. Expansion further east will mean crossing the borders of a civilization. In fact, Greece's current membership and Bulgaria's and Romania ' s future memberships are preparing the European union for just such a step. Another western organization that has expanded its presence into Central Europe since the fall of Communism is NATO. For a while after the Warsaw Pact was abolished, the armies of its former members felt aimless. However, in 1991 the military units from former communist Central European countries took part in SLOVAKIA operation 65 Desert Storm. Soon thereafter war broke out m Yugoslavia and again all the states contributed at least small units to UNPROFOR. In 1993 I visited a Slovak UNPROFOR corps of engineers in Croatia. They were under the command of a Canadian colonel named Harris, who was very satisfied with their performance. It was a new experience for Slovak soldiers and officers, and certainly also for Czechs and Poles and others, when they started to use NA TO terminology and operational rules. The Partnership for Peace programme enabled former enemies to come closer together and gradually unify at least their communication technology. All the ex-communist Central European countries showed an interest in joining NATO. At NATO 's Madrid Summit in 1997 , Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were invited to join . They have since become members. Slovakia was excluded at that time. The Slovak army is now increasing its cooperation with NATO. It has liaison officers at the Brussels headquarters and membership in NATO is part of the current Slovak government's agenda. But, according to opinion polls, the majority of the Slovak population does not, as yet, support Slovakia's membership in NA TO. Germany has long been the most important country in Central Europe. From the end of the Napoleonic wars to the end of the Second World War German nationalism was a source of tension in Europe. After the defeat of Hitler, Germany turned itself around. Mostly under Christian Democratic governments, Germany achieved an economic miracle and rebuilt itself in record time. It then became a driving force for European integration, and still is today. In the 45 years since the war, Germany earned such trust from the East that there were no reservations in Central Europe about Germany' s reunification. Fran1yois Mitterand's 66 SLOVAKIA France and Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain placed greater obstacles to Germany's reunification than did Poland, Czechoslovakia or Russia. Germany acknowledged the permanence of its border with Poland and reconfirmed the invalidity of the Munich Agreement. Germany contributes the most to the European Union's treasury. British historian Paul Johnson called Germany of the l 920's a leading intellectual power. I do not intend to discuss the intellectual level of today's Germany, but politically Germany plays a very constructive role in Central Europe. Of the Central European countries, Poland is trying to present itself as a regional counterbalance to Germany. In Poland's case there is also a counterbalance to Johnson's statement on German intellect. Polish author Stan isl av Stomma wrote that Poland's intellectual potential has always exceeded its material possibilities. Unfortunately, Poland's material possibilities will probably hold back its intellectual potential for some time. Post-communist Central European countries also look to Germany with another question. Germany will have an important voice in the European Union's institutional reforms . The reforms will determine if and when the European Union will be able to accept new members. Under the current rule!>, the European Union does not have the resources to finance the development of new members from Central Europe to enable them to attain the level of the Union's current members. The countries that receive more money from the Union than they put into it do not want to share income with new members . The countries that contribute more than they take out, especially Germany, are not preparedjustifiably so-to pay more. German politicians freely answer the question of how to solve this quandary by saying that the European Union has always developed by a crisis coming along and then moving towards half-compromise. We shall see. SLOVAKIA 67 The new Austrian government has posed a challenge for its eastern neighbours. In the Second World War, every country east of Germany, with the exception of Hungary, fought against Germany sooner or later. Some of them suffered exceptionally heavy losses. For example, Poland lost 20% of its population . Proud reminders of the Nazi regime from a politically relevant personality in Austria (forg Haider) are, therefore, unimaginable and incomprehensible in these countries. On the contrary, 40 years of denial of democracy under Communism fostered a tendency in these countries to trust democratic rules regardless of their content. Central European ex-communist countries were only able to give a constrained reaction to the new government in Austria; even more so as the harshness of the reaction from the European Union and some other countries was surprising. The division of Czechoslovakia in 1993 may seem to be at odds with the new integration of Central Europe. However, I would like to point out that in Central Europe the concept of a nation is understood in an ethnic, not in a political sense. Nations that see themselves as ethnically unique may live in one state. Two nations-Slovaks and Czechs-lived separate lives in Czechoslovakia. There was practically no common Czechoslovak culture, only Czech and Slovak cultures. The Slovak and Czech languages are similar, but they are also different. Under the communist dictatorship it was possible to silence national aspirations, but after the restoration of freedom the different political conceptions of the Czechs and Slovaks grew. The 1992 elections (the first free ones since 1946) brought very different political parties into power in Slovakia and in the Czech Lands, and these parties agreed to divide the country, and the Czechoslovak Federal Parliament then adopted the Constitutional Law on the Division of Czechoslovakia. 68 SLOVAKIA Happily, the story does not end there. After the breakup, Slovakia and the Czech Republic maintained fair or even friendly relations . When there were politically different governments in Prague and Bratislava, relations between the Republics were fair; when there are similar political parties in power in Prague and Bratislava, relations are friendly. The people of Slovakia and the Czech Republic have remained on friendly terms. According to public opinion surveys in Slovakia, the Czechs are the Slovaks ' favourite nation , and vice-versa. Slovak and Czech delegations generally support each other at international conferences. In the last few weeks the governments and parliaments of both countries have approved an agreement on the property settlement of the division of the former Czec hoslovakia. Both cooperate within the Visegrad group and their foreign policies are equally oriented towards western integration and security groups. On the other hand, the division of Czechoslovakia is final and there is no desire to resurrect it. Only one political party in 1994 ran on a pro-Czec hoslovak platform and it received a paltry one per cent of the vote. If we compare political developments in the two Republics since the "velvet divorce," Slovakia 's history has probably been more colourful. First, the Slovaks removed certain doubts about the viability of their state. Slovakia ' s economy also did fairly well despite a rather odd dispute between Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar and President Michal Kovac . The dispute did not escalate into a shooting war, but did result in the abduction of the president 's son to Austria. In 1999 the Slovak Parliament revoked the immunity of Ivan Lexa, the previous head of the secret service, who was suspected of having masterminded the abduction. In the seven years of Slovakia's independence there were three changes of government between political groups so opposed to each other that they were able to abduct or tolerate the abduc- 69 SLOVAKJA tion of one of their sons. Despite this, all the political changes took place democratically, within the parameters of the Constitution and on the basis of freely-held elections . In September of 1998, 84% of the electorate turned out to vote in the parliamentary elections. After 40 years of communism democracy works in strange ways. I often mention such figures as proof of the strength of democracy in Slovakia. I admit that it is sometimes necessary to make more of an effort for democracy to function in Slovakia than in other countries. But, it has always worked out. The sometimes strange workings of democracy in post- communist countries directly relate to their communist heritage. Communism ended in a sudden collapse but it soon became apparent that the Communists quickly found their way in the new social order. The Communist Parties changed their names and became Socialist Parties and former Communists appeared in other parties as well. After a short period of anti-communist enthusiasm in 1990 came the realization that economics, culture and politics are more complicated. It is not possible to replace people en masse because there are simply not enough experts to go around and certain stages of development cannot be omitted. In one country after another the former Communists were so successful in elections and constitutional cohabitation that even France was amazed . But the market economy was not disrupted and democracy survived . This is testimony to the strength of western democratic and political institutions which have come to the East. Just to complete the picture, I will mention that the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFT A) has existed since 1993. Originally it was between the Visegrad Group, but later it was joined by Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. The Agreement liberalized trade between the participating countries and, except for agricultural products, it works well. 70 SLOYAKlA Another attempt at cooperation between Central and Eastern European countries is the Central European Initiative. It was established in 1989 as an association of four states (Italy, Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia) at Italy's initiative. Today it includes sixteen states. Its aim is, not only economic cooperation, but also cultural and political, especially assistance in associating its members with the European Union. The Central European Initiative, on the other hand, is stagnating . Every generation has the tendency to talk about a change of paradigm brought about by its own efforts. Who would not want to change the world, even if we cannot explain it? Why should we give up this ambition? All the more so because the paradigm has changed. For centuries European history was marked by conflicts between Gennany and France. It seems that these conflicts are over. In the twentieth century two World Wars started in Central Europe. I do not see a source of tension here that could lead to another such conflict. Now the most serious dispute in Western and Central Europe is the " Beef War" between France and Great Britain. As long as we do not ask the poor cows for their opinion , we can really talk about a change of paradigm. If in future decades we manage to expand the zone of peace further cast, and even to the Balkans , then Isaiah 's words might come to apply to Europe: "He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation , neither shall they learn war any more ."  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reversing the Trend: Central Europe from Dictatorship to Democracy Description An account of the resource Ján Čarnogurský Slovakia, Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003 pp. 57-70 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Čarnogurský, Ján, 1944- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 SNK https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/4ed4d7dcdf0a45d96faf6421fb49f590.pdf 0329af3b400ed22655aa5339538259ca PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 71 Trends in 20th Century Slovak Filmmaking Martin Votruba The transition from the rule of censorship to the rule of the free market after the collapse of Communism thirteen years ago has been more painful for Slovak filmmakers than for other artists. Filmmaking requires a substantially higher initial investment than other performing and fine arts. People are ready to pay much less for a movie ticket or rental than to buy a book or painting. This puts small countries like Slovakia at a great disadvantage. In a world where feature films in a language other than English have difficulty finding an audience outside their own language areas, even if they are in French, German or Spanish, the same-language audience for films in Slovak is the size of a single frame. A film in the Slovak language costs as much as a comparable film in any other language, but the chances that it will recoup its costs are minimal. Yet, several dedicated filmmakers have managed to find institutional and private support, perhaps resigned to the fact that profits will remain elusive, while hoping to make a statement, push the envelope, create Art. Filmmaking began in Slovakia while it was still part of Hungary in the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. According to film historians, the first motion picture shows in the Slovak counties took place in Kosice in December, 1896 and a few days later in Bratislava (then called Presporok by the Slovaks, Pressburg by the Germans). That was only a year after . the Lumiere brothers' first-ever public picture show in Paris and just six months after a similar showing in New York. The early shows were organized by �SLOVAKIA 72 traveling entrepreneurs, often in cafes or similar venues, but also under tents. People's visual perceptions of the world were being changed forever and those making and showing the films knew it. A show in Nitra in 1903 still touted the advent of the modern world, when it was advertised as "Hungary's 1st Scientific Electrical Theater Modeled on the Grand American Bioscope Awarded the Grand Prix at the World Fair in Paris." At that time, a linguistic barrier was not crucial to the films' distribution in the multinational Kingdom of Hungary. Silent movies were largely self-explanatory and most people would have been able to understand the few captions in Magyar or German, the two dominant languages in the Kingdom, or have them translated by other viewers. The shows consisted of several separate films, some colorized by hand, each of which were about two minutes long. For example, the first show in Kosice was a series of twelve such very, very brief films with titles like "The Arrival of a Train," "The Czar Arrives in Paris," "The Training of the French Infantry," "Four Ladies Dancing the French Cancan" and "An Interrupted Date." Clearly, foreign films dominated Central Europe from the start. The first title was the kind of film intended to create a spectacle - similar to some of the uses of special effects today: the engine would rush towards the camera, scaring an audience not accustomed to viewing images of moving trains at that angle and at such close quarters. The next two titles played a role similar to later newsreels shown before the main feature , or to contemporary world news and documentaries on, say, CNN or the Discovery Chanel. The last two titles were of the kind that - the filmmakers found - attracted the largest number of viewers: entertainment, fun and a rudimentary story. The proportion of such shorts quickly grew. �SLOVAKIA 73 The first permanent movie theater in Bratislava, Elektro Bioskop, was opened in a remodeled fencing hall in September, 1905. It had about 200 seats. The site is still in business. After a hiatus, an arts movie theater was opened in the same hall in the 1970s and is still in operation, now called Mladost' ("Youth"), on Hviezdoslav Square opposite the US Embassy. Theaters, hotel halls, storage buildings and other premises were remodeled in other towns, to become permanent movie theaters. In the absence of hi-fi sound and hi-tech projection systems, the competition often relied on interior decoration. An advertisement for the Bratislava movie theatre Fidelio (later Urania and now Hviezda) lured the audience thus: "427 upholstered seats in 3 colors , Alhambrastyle walls decorated with Oriental landscapes, live and man-made flowers." The fact that the theater showed two new releases a week was relegated to the bottom of the page. Attendance at traditional theater performances dropped after the introduction of motion pictures. Theater directors appealed to the authorities to disallow movie shows during the time of regular plays. In 1901 , the Ministry of the Interior (in charge of police and local government in Central Europe) issued a decree meeting their demands . The Viscount of Nitra went so far as to ban movie shows during the whole theater season , but the local movie-theater operators successfully appealed his decision. For a time, film producers thought they could benefit from a symbiosis of film and theater in "cinema-sketches." Actors would play on the stage, then the story would be picked up on the screen with the same actors and the conclusion would be played by live actors again. One such cinema-sketch from 1909 depicted night life in Kosice "The Kosice Promenade on the Screen." Walking on Main Street in one's Sunday best was a common pastime before the advent of TV and mass entertainment. It was among the few early �SLOVAKIA 74 motion pictures linked with Slovak territory. The limited production of cinema-sketches did not survive World War I and did not continue after the creation of Czecho-Slovakia (later renamed Czechoslovakia) in l 9 l 8 . Rather than cinema-sketches or story-based films , most of the early films linked to Slovakia were travel specials with titles like "The High Tatras," "Skiing in Tatranska Lomnica," "Traveling through the Vah Valley," or "The Kosice Institute of Corrections for Children," "Testing the Police Dogs in Bratislava," and news . Movies proved successful. The number of movie theaters in Slovakia reached about 100 by the end of World War I and two schools - the Mining Academy in Banska Stiavnica and a high school in Lucenec - had already used film as a teaching tool. When movies were still shown by traveling entrepreneurs, a copy of the film was bought and owned by them. With the establishment of permanent movie theaters, film distributors appeared, as well as a kind of 'film exchange' where copies of film were traded as on the stock market. The advent of copyright problems and foreign competition was heralded in 1913, in the first published complaint about illegal importation of foreign films , especially from France. As elsewhere in Central Europe, French films dominated the market. Legal power to regulate what movies were screened in Hungary was invested in the hands of the local authorities by a law from l 90 l , which required the traveling movie entrepreneurs to obtain permits for their shows . On the whole, a license was issued to anyone who applied for it. Local bans and complaints surfaced for a variety of reasons, including some familiar today. A city councilor in Kosice worried that worthless caper movies had a bad influence on boys, while dramas about sex ruined girls, be cause such movies extinguished their sense of morality and made �SLOVAKIA 75 them vulnerable to unconscionable seducers. In 1912, a priest and principal of a Roman Catholic boys' school in Nitra threatened his students with a bad grade in behavior if they went to the movies, even if accompanied by their parents. His ban extended to traditional theater performances as well. Censorship was also exercised by the authorities in Budapest, the capital of the Kingdom, who were able to ban individual titles from being shown all over Hungary , including the Slovak counties. In line with the traditions of Central European monarchies, politics was among the reasons for censorship. Among the banned titles were "King Ludwig II," depicting a story too similar to the life and mysterious death of Ludwig II of Bavaria and a film offensive to the prime minister of Hungary. However, the Kingdom did not follow suit when the rest of the Habsburg monarchy introduced formal film censorship in 1912. Among other things, it required that a license to open a movie theater be issued to individuals and institutions that would secure a respectable use of the profits. Its intent was to support charities and various associations. Budapest adopted the law in Apri l of 1918, half a year be fore the defeat and collapse of Austria-Hungary and the founding of Czec ho-Slovakia. The law empowered the censors to ban films offending patriotic interests, public order and morality. Children under sixteen were allowed to see only movies designated as suitable for them and only when accompanied by an adult. Despite a variety of problems , Czecho-S lovakia proved to be more democratic than the former Kingdom of Hungary and the whole Habsburg monarchy. But the new freedom , which benefited other forms of Slovak culture, proved even more difficult for Slovak film than the post-communist period after 1989. The film industry developed in Prague, which had been an important German-Czech cultural center, a university town and capital of the �76 SLOVAKIA Holy Roman Empire's Kingdom of Bohemia for centuries, attracting business and artistic talent. By comparison, Slovakia's new capital and largest city, Bratislava, was much smaller; moreover, it was only forty miles from the former Habsburg monarchy's large, vibrant and influential capital of Vienna. Given that artists and entrepreneurs flocked to it from all over the monarchy, Vienna must have created a degree of artistic brain-drain in its immediate vicinity. As with the Pittsburgh Agreement of 1918, which was a key document in the separation of the Slovak counties from the Habsburg monarchy, Slovak-Americans had an impact on Slovakia's nascent film industry. Andrej Sustek from Chicago founded the Selig Company with the intent to make historical films in Slovakia. It was subsequently incorporated in the new Slovak-American Tatra Film Corporation with a capital of about $30,000 from US investors . Their first and only film was Janosfk. It captured the legend of an 18th-century highwayman from Terchova in the northern Slovak County of Orava who gave rise to Carpathian legends comparable to those about Robin Hood in England. In 1919 Tatra Film's Daniel and Jaroslav Siakel' arrived in Slovakia to start filming in their native village of Blatnica near Martin in Central Slovakia, where they also built sets, and in the castle of Stiavnicka near Ruzomberok. The leading role was given to popular Theodor Pistek, who starred in nine other films that year. Maria Fabryova, an amateur actress from Martin, played Anka, Janosfk's girlfriend. The film was finished in the A-B studios in Prague . The screenplay by Jozef Zak-Marusiak was to be based on a novel by Slovak-American author and editor of the popular Amerikansko-Slovcnske Noviny "(American-Slovak News)", Gustav Marsall-Petrovsky (1862-1916). But it was much closer to the ac- �SLOVAKIA 77 tual local legends , which also inspired Slovak Romantic poets in the 19th century. Moreover, the play Janosfk - premiered in Brno in 1910 and written by Moravian playwright, poet and journalist Jiri Mahen - was well known by the l 920s and may have been a major source for the film's story . Janosfk was shown to the filmmakers' team in November 1921 in the city of Vrutky . It opened a few days later in Zilina and in December 1921 in Chicago - to be more specific , in Cicero, IL, then with a large Slovak-American population , at the Atlantic movie theater, now replaced by the Atlantic Mall at W. 26th St. and S. Pulaski Rd . The screenplay relied on the folk motif of ' taking from the rich and giving to the poor,' and greatly reinforced the hints present in 19th-century Slovak Romantic poems about Janosfk : the film fused feudal exploitation in the more distant past with the drive by the Magyar-speaking government in Budapest in the 19th century to suppress the Kingdom' s other languages and cultures . The latter became particularly forceful during the last decades of the Kingdom's existence and ultimately contributed to its demise. Unlike feudalism , that experience was still very fresh in people's memories and was among the reasons why Slovaks immigrated to the United States. By comparison to Czech films preserved from the early Czecho-Slovak period, Janosfk showed the authors' experience with American movies : in camera work, in the use of parallel narratives, as well as in shots inspired by Westerns . It had two directors of photography with two cameras: Oldrich Benes with a European camera and Daniel Siakel', who used a camera made by Andrej Sustek's company in Chicago. In effect, the two cameramen shot two parallel films - scenes were acted separately for each camera and the difference between the "Slovak" and "American" versions increased after separate editing. But the film's handling of the eth- �78 SLOVAKIA nic motif may have been too didactic, or the issue too recent to be successfully mythologized as entertainment on the silver screen. Janosik did not recover its costs and remained Tatra Film's only product, as well as Slovakia' s first preserved silent movie. It was thought to have been lost, but in 1975 it was discovered and restored from both versions by Ivan Rumanovsky in Bratislava. Until after World War II, attempts to set up film companies, occasionally with Slovak-American involvement, followed the same path. One film would be made and then the company folded, because the film was not profitable and the company lacked sufficient capital to sustain it through a few flops. The situation did not change after the emergence of sound in the movies. While about 30-50 sound films were made each year in Czechoslovakia between 1933 - 1938, fewer than one a year was in Slovak. Czech films occasionally featured Slovak actors. Among them, with eleven musicals to his credit, was Frantisek Kristof Vesely, who reached the level of stardom in Czechoslovakia. Documentaries fared better: partly because the costs were lower and partly thanks to occasional government funding for shorts featuring its officials. For example, Kvetna nedela vo Vajnoroch (Palm Sunday in Yajnory) recorded a folkloristic celebration of the holiday attended by Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia, Vavro Srobar. A potentially steady source of funding opened up in 1935 when Prague decided that each newsreel commonly shown before the main feature had to devote at least 20% of its length to items about Czechoslovakia. But this so urce remained untapped by Slovak filmmakers : most of the reports came from Bohemia and Moravia. However, government or institutional funding and fascination with village life proved to be a mix that worked for filmmakers in Slovakia on more than one occasion, right through the present. �SLOVAKIA 79 The first Slovak film to reach international acclaim relied on both. The potential of the Slovak countryside as a backdrop had already been discovered by non-native filmmakers and at least two of their films have become classics of world cinema. The early German horror Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu the Vampire) directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was filmed at Orava Castle and in the High Tatras in 1922, and Czech director Gustav Machaty chose Slovakia as a location for his daring exploration of sexuality Extase (Ecstasy) in 1932. The second one propelled the career of Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiester), who became one of the most successful Hollywood stars. The Matica slovenska (by that time an eminent, mostly government-sponsored cultural, academic and archival institution) employed Karel Plicka (1894-1987) as its ethnographer, who was able to make documentary shorts from about 1926. He obtained funding from the President's Office in 1928 to produce an hourlong documentary about village life Po horach, po dolach (Through Mountains and Valleys). It was awarded a Gold Medal at the International Exposition of Photographic Art in Florence and received an Honorable Mention at the International Venice Film Festival in 1932. The favorable reception of his production, along with more funding from both the Matica slovenska and the President's Office, enabled Plicka to make Zem spieva (The Earth Sings) in 1933, a romanticized semi-documentary panorama of selected folk customs through the four seasons. Unlike Slovak feature movies of that period, Zem spieva struck a chord with the audience and topped it with another award at the International Venice Film Festival as part of a collection of films from Czechoslovakia that included Extase, mentioned above. But after this success, the Matica s/ovcnska was unable to raise sufficient funding and Plicka's hopes that he was laying the foundations of �80 SLOVAKIA Slovakia' s film industry were thwarted. He went on to make a documentary in the United States Za Slovakmi od New Yorku po Mississippi (Tracing Slovaks from New York to the Mississippi) in 1937 and then became a professor in the first Department of Film in Czechoslovakia and the third such department in Europe, at the School of Artistic Crafts in Bratislava in 1938. But the Department's potential for Slovak cinema was lost when the College was closed after Slovakia became a separate country in 19 39 . Plicka then resettled permanently in Prague, Bohemia, which was incorporated into the Third Reich during World War II. Czechoslovakia's only other Slovak-language blockbuster before World War II was a new Janosfk in 1935, funded from Prague and directed by the Czech Martin Frie (1902-1968). It was indicative of the volume of Czech film production that Frie finished three other films during the same year, having previously directed 23. Frie and Plicka were two of the authors of the screenplay based on the same play by Mahen, mentioned earlier, on which the first Janosfk may have been based. Plicka also found a policeman and amateur actor, Pal'o Bielik (1910-1983), in the village of Senica for the leading role. The film combined idealized images of villagers with action scenes to show their and Jan osik ' s resistance against Hungarian landlords. In spite of Budapest's protestations, it was screened at the International Venice Film Festival and was successfully released in Germany . During the existence of the Slovak Republic ( 1939-1945), movie theaters grew by more than 60% but no feature films were made. The government sponsored the film company Nastup (Line-up), which produced short films and weekly newsreels . The authorities, who described their own rule as "authoritarian and totalitarian," mandated that a newsreel be shown before every feature film and tightened censorship and ideological supervision of �SLOVAKIA 81 their production. The newsreel was customarily followed by a short film, a pattern that was picked up by the communist authorities after the war and survived through the collapse of Communism. The government's alliance with Germany meant that it became Slovakia's main source of films even before the war changed world trade patterns. At the same time, the number of imports dropped from about 400 a year in the former CzechoSlovakia (whose original hyphenated name was restored in 1938) to less than 150 after independence. In 1940, Slovakia still imported 15 "cultural-educational" films from the U.S., and a few more from countries other than Germany, but then German feature films were supplemented by just about a dozen films from Italy and Romania, and several Czech "oldies" from before the war. The film company Nastup was conscientious about training its employees, among whom was Pal'o Bielik, and sent them regularly to several studios in Germany as interns - including to neighboring Vienna and formerly Czechoslovak Prague, which were now ruled from Berlin. After World War II, Slovakia was re-joined with the Czechspeaking lands and Czech director Martin Frie returned to make Vanij. .. ! (Beware ... !) with folkloristic highlights similar to his successful Janosfk from 1935. The film was based on Ivan Stodola' s popular play Bacova iena (The Shepherd's Wife) and Palo Bielik played the leading role again . Things changed dramatically after Czechoslovakia became communist in 1948. The government nationalized all but the tiniest companies, including the film studios. It saw film as an important medium to indoctrinate the population and ideological control - under strict financed film production in the Slovak, as well as in the Czech part of the country. Directors, screenwriters, actors and other people connected with film production became �SLOVAKIA 82 state employees as everyone else, with a regular salary regardless of how many films were produced and whether they earned any profits or not - a concept born out of communist accounting. Although the authorities paid the salaried filmmakers more money for the films they made - separate contracts were signed for each one - from the American perspective, this was closer to bonuses than anything known in Hollywood today. The "bonuses" were higher for films considered particularly effective in showing the communist rule as benefiting the population and had nothing to do with ticket sales. The authorities mandated that the method used in all art be socialist realism. In general, its goal was to educate people to the benefits of communism and, before it was reached , socialism, which was what they called their existing political system. This was strictly enforced, especially in fiction and film, because these mediums reached the widest audience. The topics were to emphasize the need to work for the good of the 'collective,' i.e., communist society. Topics focusing on the individual and on personal feelings and concerns were deemed harmful, as was depicting anything negative about society. Love was considered such a topic: not only because it was personal and, therefore, did not educate the audience about the benefits of working on behalf of the collective, but also because it may have brought sex into the story, a definite 'no' in socialist realism. The official support of socialist-realist art and the transformation of filmmakers into salaried employees meant that a steady stream of feature films began to appear in the newly-established studios in Bratislava. Pal'o Bielik, the former star of Janosfk, who expanded his moviemaking experience in the newsreel studios during World War II, directed Vicic dicry (Wolves' Lairs), one of the first two films made after the communist takeover in 1948. It �SLOVAKIA 83 was the beginning of a succession of films about the 1944 antiGerman uprising in Slovakia, but because it was made so early during the Communist Party ' s drive to establish ideological dominance, the film still managed to include 'negative,' as well as 'positive' characters among both the Slovak insurgents and the German soldiers suppressing the uprising - something that did not get past the censors again for more than a decade. Bielik, as director, leaned away from the folkloristic style of the films in which he starred: the style of V/cie diery was inspired by early Italian neo-realism. After two feature films in 1948 and another two in 1949, the yearly output grew to 3-6 per year in the 1950s. 'Negative' characters could not be central in the plots, and the story had to prove them wrong. Central characters had to be 'positive' from the start or be seen discovering Marxist-Leninist solutions to any problems they encountered. Such problems had to be few and marginal, the general view of society had to be happy. If the central characters were not Communists from the start, a 'tutor' and Communist Party member would often be present, who helped them find the Marxist-Leninist way. Topics commonly dealt with World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany, or with the imposition of Communism - the 'collectivization' of farms, i.e., the abolition of private ownership of most land larger than the immediate surroundings of one's house and garden. Farmers were to be shown as opening their eyes to the fact that this was actually good for them. The Communists proclaimed a classless society, which meant that everyone would eventually become a 'worker.' The three recognized social groups were the laborers, the farmers, and the intelligentsia, i.e., white-collar workers and college-educated people, but the Communist Party officials, although working in offices, classified themselves as laborers. The bourgeoisie, �84 SLOVAKIA i.e. , the private entrepreneurs, disappeared by virtue of their property being 'nationalized,' i.e., taken over by the government, but the - now former - bourgeoisie were persecuted never- theless . The intelligentsia was often suspected of harboring bourgeois ideas and persecuted, too . Since the bourgeoisie were often described as incapable of shedding their reactionary, i.e. anti-Communist skins, films about contemporary life generally focused on the villages and farmers. Marxism-Leninism saw in them the ' next best class' after the laborers, on their way to becoming agricultural laborers . Their initial qualms about any benefits of collectivization provided some meager source of conflict for the plots. The films about the past often returned to the uprising in Slovakia during World War II, which was depicted as organized by the Communists and aided by the Soviet Union. Plots that concerned the communist period had to end on an optimistic note. Since a former entrepreneur always remained at least suspect, their joyful transformation into a group auxiliary to the working class was essentially unacceptable as a topic, which - in effect - also kept town s and cities away from most of the scripts. Even socialist-realist authors felt that a ccnflict drives a story, but avoided settings that did not provide for politically acceptable conflicts . Socialist realism was strongly enforced during the first 10-15 years of communism . Unlike neighboring Poland and Hungary, communist Czechoslovakia saw little of the ideological thaw triggered by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism in February of l 956. The thaw did not reach Czechoslovakia until the early l 960s, during which time Bratislava produced 6- l O feature film s per year, and the first manifestations of the thaw in literature and film came from Slovakia. After more than a decade of socialist- �85 SLOVAKIA realist filmmaking, Sinko v sieti (The Sun in a Net) directed by Stefan Uher (1930-1993) in 1962 became a milestone in both Slovak and Czech filmmaking. It inspired a whole generation of students at the Film Academy in Prague, who soon followed with a series of films which attained international recognition as the "Czech New Wave." Sinko v sieti was Stefan Uher's second film . His first was about the life of a group of fifteen year-old students and their school My z deviate) A (We from Grade 9, Study Group A; 1961). The screenwriter, Alfonz Bednar (1914-1989), was a successful writer who published mildly non-conformist fiction somewhat earlier than most other authors. The film is based on his three short stories Fajolov prfspevok (Fajolo's Contribution), Pon- t6novy deii (Pontoon Day) and Zlata brana (Golden Gate). Uher's film depicted a number of hitherto unacceptable social and political themes : distant - perhaps uncaring - parents, a philandering husband, teenagers changing partners, an attempt at suicide, a poorly-run collectivized farm , and the requirement that a child attend summer 'voluntary work camps ' to make up for his parents belonging to the intelligentsia. Moreover, none of these issues were resolved in a 'positive' manner. The ending was rather somber, if not depressing, with the barest hint of optimism found only in the last sentence and possibly on the film's symbolic level, which was handled rather unevenly. It attempted a complex interplay of sun and clouds, vision and blindness, truth and lies, centered around a solar eclipse (Central Europe actually experienced a 95% solar eclipse on the morning of February 15, 196 l ). Contemporary critics found the symbolism difficult to decipher, and much of it was probably lost on the viewers. But the core story line - the ups and downs in the relationship of two teenagers - the realism and novelty of its urban setting, and the �86 SLOVAKIA hints at some social and political taboos were not lost on the audience and cannot have been lost on the censors. Sinko v sieti not only pushed the envelope, but also established for other artists and showed to the Slovaks and Czechs at large what the authorities could now be pushed to permit. According to Uher, Karol Bacflek, the head of the Communist Party in Slovakia at that time, attacked the film, saying it contained coded messages that conspirators were able to decipher precisely. For example, Bacflek thought the solar eclipse . was to indicate the twilight of communism and the pontoon on the dried-up riverbed stood for the state of communist rule in Czechoslovakia at that time. Communist officials believed that the blind mother was supposed to symbolize the blindness of their Party, which did not see the realities of life under communism. Because a political thaw had begun in Slovakia, other communist officials with enough influence dared to differ and the film was released. Besides Stefan Uher's efforts to get past the strict requirements of socialist realism, the director was inspired by some of the trends current in Western European cinema and culture in the 1950s. Among them was his focus on the symbolism of light and darkness, adherence to a low-key style, a hint of fashi0nablc quasi-existentialism in Fajolo's dialogues with Bela, and an attempt at serious cinema-verite: in the beer-drinking scenes in .1 tavern, the background soundtrack includes taped unscripted conversations of real villagers. Uher mostly chose inexperienced actors or nonactors. Only one of them, I.:,ubo Roman in a supporting role (b . 1944, then a student of acting), became a successful actor, theater administrator, and ultimately a politician - Member of Parlia- ment, Minister of Culture, and since 2001, County Chief of Bratislava. Actual music in the film included Western rock played on �SLOVAKIA 87 the radio. The film's score was by llja Zeljenka, an avant-garde composer of 'concrete music.' While Slnko v sieti became a prologue to the first minimalist, quasi-realist, and eventually more experimental Czechoslovak New Wave made by film students in Prague, in Slovakia the film was followed by several increasingly critical social commentaries by established filmmakers , by more films about contemporary urban life, and by increasingly intellectual and abstract films seen as Art. The most daring among the films that replaced socialist realism with social criticism was Peter Solan's Prfpad Barnabas Kos (The Case of Barnabas Kos; 1964), which removed the veil from arbitrary decision-making in communist society. Among contemporary topics, a potential for an approachable and successful film was lost with Nylonovy mesiac (Nylon Moon; 1965) directed by Eduard Greener. Its story, as well as the title came from a novel by Jaroslava Blazkova published in 1960, the first best-seller about contemporary life since the communist takeover. But there was entertainment in film , too, none more popular than Janosik II directed in 1963 by Pal'o Bielik, the star in the previous version of the story. In spite of its title, it was not a sequel: the film re-told the centuries-old legend. The theme of the brigand hero retains its attraction through the present day. Slovakia 's most successful producer, Rudolf Bierman, is currently producing The True Story al Janosfk and Uhorcfk, directed by the success[ul Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland and her daughter Kasia Adamik with an estimated budget of $2.4 million, $800,000 of which came from the Slovak Parliament and the Ministry of Culture. The first film to earn an Oscar for Czechoslovakia was Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street; 1965; Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1966; Special Mention for Acting �88 SLOVAKIA Performance, Cannes Film Festival 1965; New York Film Critics Circle A ward for Best Foreign Film in 1966). It was co-directed by Slovak Jan Kadar and Czech Elmar Klos , who had directed films together since the 1950s. Their earlier film was the groundbreaking Smrt' sa vola Engelchen (Death is Called Engelchen, 1963) based on a novel by Ladislav Mnacko, which diverted from the communist interpretation of the 1944 uprising in Slovakia as infallibly glorious and showed some aspects that brought about human tragedy. Along similar lines, Obchod na korze placed the politics of World War II in the background and focused on the dead-end street faced by many in Central Europe during the deportations of the Jews to German concentration camps . After the introduction of anti-Jewish laws in Slovakia, a simple carpenter named Tona is made the owner of a tiny haberdashery, until then owned by an old, almost deaf Jewish woman named Rozalia who has no comprehension of the contemporary political developments. After a crisis, the local Jewish community begins to pay Tono not to surrender his ownership, to prevent Rozalia 's store from being passed on to a ruthless Aryanizer. A tender friendship develops between Tono and Rozalia: she keeps selling buttons without realizing Tana's legal status, and he becomes her man about the house. When deportations begin, Roz.ilia remains oblivious of real life, and Tona is faced with the choice between sending her off, or probably facing his own and his wife ' s death, if he were discovered trying to hide a person incapable of understanding why she should live in hiding. The film starred Slovak Jozef Kroner ( 1924-1998) and Polish Ida Kaminska ( 1899-1980) with a Slovak cast and was shot on location in the town of Trebisov, Eastern Slovakia, and in the Prague studios. The film presents its captivating, morally complex story in a straightforward style, with a sprinkling of symbolism and dream �SLOVAKIA 89 sequences. It was an indication of changes in the political climate that Obchod na korze was able to get away without the mandated focus on criticism of the Slovak authorities during World War II , previously an inevitable feature of socialist realist work about that period, as well as without highlighting a central, resolute procommunist character. It has remained the most awarded and internationally successful Slovak film to the present day . The late l 960s reflected the direction filmmaking may take with little censorship and steady funding . An increasing number of - especially younger - filmmakers took advantage of the situation to experiment without concern about a need to target a specific audience or about how large their audience was going to be. They enjoyed the same creative luxury as the writers or painters convinced of the significance of their work, who manage to earn their living elsewhere. In a democratic society, this is rarely the case in cinema because of the extraordinary amounts of money even a low-budget film requires. But during the occasional relaxation of control in communist countries while the principles of the system remained in place, filmmakers were given substantial fund s to make films relatively free from prescription , as well as of a need to bring in profit. An early nonconformist film seen mostly by students in art theaters was Stefan Uher's Panna zazracnica (The Miraculous Virgin, 1966), soon followed by Juraj Jakubisko's (b. 1938) Kristove roky ("Christ's Years" or "Crucial Years," 1967), Elo Havetta's Slavnost' v botanickej zahrade (A Celebration in the Botanical Garden, 1969), and Dusan Hanak's 322 (the number identifying cancer in medical statistics of diseases, l 969). During this period (however brief) of almost total collapse of communist control, the Koliba Film Studio in Bratislava co-produced films with avantgarde filmmakers from abroad. Jerzy Skolimowski from Poland, �90 SLOVAKIA whose government was then significantly more repressive than Czechoslovakia, directed one story in Dialog 20-40-60, along with Czech Zbynek Brynych and Slovak Peter Solan in 1968 . Frenchman Alain Robbe-Grillet directed two films, including Mui, ktory Jute (The Man Who Lies, L 'homme qui ment; codirected with Martin Holly in 1968) with a Slovak and French cast. And 1969 saw the release of Juraj Jakubisko's Vtackovia, siroty a blazni (Birds, Orphans and Fools), considered by most Slovaks to be the best Slovak film. Jakubisko's preferences bounce between experiment, abstraction and ambitious intellectualism, as in this film , and less numerous popular crowd-pleasers. "Birds, Orphans and Fools" had the briefest of theater run s, not because of the audience, but because of the authorities. Conceived when communist control was at its weakest in Czechoslovakia, it was completed well after the Soviet-led invasion in August of 1968, by which time many of the mechanisms of authoritarian rule were at work again. Vtackovia, siroty a blazni takes place in an apparent historical vacuum in a desolate world with war raging somewhere outside the camera's field of vision and the director's focus. The two male and one female central characters , not unlike some of the hippies in the U.S.A. <1.t that time, live in a decrepit apartment, go through a series of bizarre encounters, sexual experiences and discuss a range of topics. When their lives begin to appear closer to normalcy, one of them murders the girl and commits suicide. The film is deliberately ex perimental in its style: it varies screen sizes, shots are taken at awkward angles with a hand-held or agitated camera, distortion lenses alter screen images, filmmakers ' equipment remains in the frame, characters talk to the camera. The adjectives surrealist and post-apocalyptic are perhaps representative of the filmmakers' intent. �SLOVAKIA The 1970s witnessed a re-introduction 91 of strict communist control in Czechoslovakia, called normalization . People were demoted at work or fired, if they had expressly supported the relaxation in the late 1960s or denounced the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, and their children often suffered, too. In an effort to a void repercussions, many repudiated their past views. Although persecution was somewhat milder in Slovakia than in the Czech-speaking areas, it had a stifling effect on art. Gone were the efforts of the 1960s to push the envelope of what was allowed. The population at large had learned its lesson : with the help of the Soviet Union, the Communists were able to pull the whole country back from unprecedented freedom of expression and the brink of a multi-party system in 1968 to a situation more reminiscent of the late 1950s, and those who resisted were punished. This repression lasted at least through the late 1970s, and Czechoslovakia remained more politically backward , although with a better standard of living, than Communist Poland or Hungary until the collapse of communism in 1989 . Cinema was affected like the rest of society, while the number of film releases grew. Slovakia produced 8-12 films per year throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Jakubisko still managed to finish Dovidenia v pek/e, priatelia (See You in Hell, Friends) in 1970, but hardly anyone saw it. The film was banned and Jakubisko was not allowed to make another feature film until 1979 . Although the early 1970s are sometimes compared to the 1950s, the authorities did not demand that Slovak filmmakers make socialist-realist films critical of the period of relaxation - the way films in the 1950s tried to discredit private enterprise and democracy which were abolished in 1948. Only one film was made about 1968, Honicka (Fever) directed by Martin Holly, Jr. (b. 1931) and based on a novel by Jozef Kot. In a country with �92 SLOVAKIA freedom of expression, the film could have been perceived as just focusing on a relatively plausible plot from 1968 and pushing a particular point of view - there indeed were people who did not support the pro-democratic reforms, or saw many flaws among the reformers. But under totalitarian control, which did not allow opposing points of view, it was impossible to distinguish the touting of the official view in film from just propaganda. Regardless, Honicka shared the destiny of the overwhelming majority of Slovak and Czech films produced during the forty years of Communism: after a couple of weeks in mostly empty theaters, it was not seen again . While the 1960s witnessed a desire to bring contemporary and urban themes to film, the 1970s began to solidify an inclination among a segment of the Slovak critics and filmmakers to emulate the centuries-old urban fashion in Europe of the 'return to nature:' well educated intellectuals living in Bratislava make and admire films with images of the countryside and villagers whose lives appear to be somehow more authentic than in towns. The trend-setter was the still admired hour-long documentary Obrazy stareho sveta (Pictures of the Old World, 1972) directed by Dusan Hanak who, suspicious to the authorities because of his films from the 1960s, found an early refuge in a topic sufficiently removed from big politics to survive in the margins of official production and yet, sufficiently non-conforn1ist and enamored with village life to please especially the chic audiences. Part of its additional attraction within the context of Communist Czechoslovakia rested in the fact that it offered snapshots from the lives of several highlanders, whose very existence belied the official claims of equal wealth for everyone. But Obrazy stareho sveta has a much more universal appeal and has received critical acclaim from Slovakia, Switzerland and France to Toronto and Los Angeles. �SLOVAKIA 93 A singular exception among about 90 domestic feature films that briefly flickered in Slovak theaters in the 1970s was Dusan Hanak's Ruto ve sny (Rosy Dreams, 1976). Although its style was poetic, it may have been the first film in the communist bloc with a de-romanticized portrayal of the Roma (Gypsies). It dove into the cultural barriers between them and the non-Romany population - an issue that, twenty years later, proved to be one of the key problems of post-communist societies in Central Europe. Two teenagers - a young Slovak postman and a Romany girl - fall in love. The film tells the viewers that it will not work due to different cultural expectations each of the two have of their budding relationship. Its imaginative filmmaking and affecting, slightly sentimental story might have been easy to understand and appreciate by a wider audience, but Rutove sny was shown only in limited release at the order of the authorities. The most popular film in that decade was yet another variation on the legend about a heroic highwayman Pacho, hybskf z bojnfk (Pacho, the Highwayman of Hybe; 1975) directed by Martin Tapak. In 1980, the authorities shelved fa milujem, ty milujes (I Love, You Love) directed by Dusan Hanak because of its focus on marginal social groups and eroticism. When it was released shortly before the collapse of communism, it received the highest international recognition for a Slovak film since The Shop on Main Street, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. However, the strict Communist control typical of the 1970s began to relax slowly, and the early 1980s brought two domestic blockbusters whose role in Slovak culture finally matched that of some of the films in the l 960s. In 1982 Stefan Uher directed Pas/a kone na bet6ne ("She. Grazed Horses on Concrete," or "A Ticket to Heaven"). The title used the first few words from an irreverent tune with just a few verses depicting impossible acti- �94 SLOVAKIA vities - the song continues " ... she bathed in razor blades." The story is about a single mother fending for herself in an East Slovak village, determined not to allow her teenaged daughter to follow in her footsteps . Partly a comedy and partly a candid portrayal of contemporary village life, it oscillates between humorous depictions of social customs and ceremonies, and the more serious issues of a woman's capacity to hold her own in a small community, and of abortion. Although co-written and directed by Uher, the film is largely the work of Milka Zirnkova, an author and actress, who wrote the original story, worked with Uher on the script, and starred in the leading role. Among the novelties in Slovak moviemaking was an extensive use of the East Slovak dialect in the film. Although Slovak has several highly recognizable regional accents, filmmakers - before and after this film - have the actors speak the standard, neutral variety of Slovak common in the news media, regardless of where in Slovakia the story of their film takes place. A success comparable to the handful of foreign blockbusters permitted by the authorities each year was Juraj Jakubisko's Tisfcrocna vce/a (A Thousand-Year Old Bee;l983). It is a 162-minute long saga of the life of a farmer's family covering three generations from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. It picked up on and reinforced a myth recurrent in Slovak cinema for several decades, in films from both popular and artsy filmmakers . Villagers are mostly good, while those who live in or move to town (perhaps the screenwriters and directors bowed to communist authorities) become entrepreneurial and tum out to be cold and corrupt. It was the first Slovak film with a comprehensive narrative that a large number of viewers were ready to perceive as their national, as well as local and family past, because it echoed themes they had encountered in literature and history classes at school. �SLOVAKIA 95 Moreover, it was a comforting past. The title was a parable, overplayed in the film with brief expensive special effects with a gigantic honey-bee created in the Bavarian Film Studios in Munich . Those sequences hammered in the symbolic thread in the storyline. They could have been be richer and more content, the film gave the viewers to understand, were it not for the cumulative effects of past injustice: the fruits of their hard-working ancestors' labor was periodically taken away from them for a thousand years, like honey from the bees. But as long as they stayed in the villages, they were an honest, sometimes whimsical bunch doing as well as they could . It helped that several popular actors starred in the film, including Jozef Kr6ner (Tona in The Shop on Main Street). Tisicrosmi vce/a received a Gold Phoenix for art and cinematography from the Cultural Center of the City of Venice awarded in tandem with the prestigious International Venice Film Festival. After decades of government-funded and censored production, Bratislava still produced twelve films in 1990, the year after the collapse of Communism. With no censorship, but also hardly any funding, the number of feature films ranged between one and three for most of the 1990s. Slovakia's theaters are now flooded with foreign , especially American, films and while the population might be ready for a domestic production addressing them specifically, perhaps along the lines of A Thousand-Year Old Bee, there is not enough money for a film on that scale, and perhaps even less interest on the part of the filmmakers . With one exception, the films made in the 1990s generally follow one of two thematic lines . The most successful film was Fontana pre Zuzanu 2 (A Fountain for Susan 2; 1993) directed by Dusan Rapos as a sequel to his more sedate Fontana pre Zuzanu from 1985, still limited by communist censorship. He released Fontana pre Zuza- �96 SLOVAKIA nu 3 in 1999. Both fall in the group of films with contemporary themes and are obviously interested in generating ticket sales. They rely on sex and crime to achieve that. Although it remained behind major foreign blockbusters , Fontana pre Zuzanu 2 sold 380,000 tickets in a country with 5.4 million inhabitants, which is comparable to a film that brings in over $130 million in the U.S.A. Titanic sold about 550,000 tickets in Slovakia and The Matrix 130,000. Another film with a contemporary theme is indicative of how times have changed since the collapse of communism. Rivers of Babylon (the tile is in English) directed by Vladimir Balco in 1998 was based on the first post-communist bestseller in l 990 by Peter Pistanek. Sequels of the novel had lower sales, because the novelty of the topic - Bratislava's underworld - and expressive presentation wore off, and because they had to compete with a growing number of translated foreign bestsellers. However, the filmmakers picked up on a particular aspect of the sequels vitriolic political commentary . The story of the rise of a skillful stoker and wheeler-dealer to political power was seen as a parable of the government in Bratislava at that time. Only about eight years earlier, a release of such a strongly critical film would have been either unthinkable, or a major event attracting huge crowds . Yet, Rivers of Babylon sold only 50,000 tickets and met with a lukewarm reception abroad. The other thematic line in contemporary Slovak cinema is the 'return to nature. ' Its main protagonist is director Martin Sulfk (b . 1962) whose films generally attract fewer viewers at home than Rivers of Babylon, but are favored by critics and have attained a degree of viewers' acclaim at film festivals organized by European cities. His most successful Zahrada (Garden; l 995), the earlier Neha (Tenderness ; 199 l ), as well as the more recent Orbis �SLOVAKIA 97 Pictus (Latin title, 1997) and Krajinka ("Landscape" or "A Small piece of the Country," 2000) are intellectualized continuations of the theme of the desirability of a return to, journey through, or life in a rural setting. Krajinka is the most accessible of Sulfk ' s films . Although it may be based on memories, as the opening sequence suggests, the discrete stories are not made to gel into a cohesive sequence for the audience. But each is readable on its own. Zahrada, the first Slovak film since the collapse of communism to be released abroad , and especially Orbis Pictus, break with traditional story-telling and show the main characters - a rather passive adult man living with his parents in Zahrada and a young girl released from a boarding school , perhaps for abandoned teenagers, in Orbis Pictus - find education in nature and disappointment in urban settings . With surreal scenes, philosophizing scripts, and a dedication to the filmmaker's expressive whim, Sulfk 's films re-package the theme of national rural bliss, recurrent in Slovak culture and education , in a form palatable for trendy audiences. The theme has had an incessant, powerful attraction for a segment of directors since the beginnings of filmmaking in Slovakia, whether they have leaned towards the popular and mythologizing approach from The Earth Sings 1933, through the decades of films about Janosik and similar productions, to The Thousand-Year Old Bee - or whether they take the approach aimed at art theaters, traceable to Organ directed by Stefan Uher in 1964. Due to the general drop in film production and to Martin Sulik ' s capacity to attract funding, films for art theatres have become more prevalent in the 1990s than in the earlier decades . �SLOVAKIA 98 Bibliography Author's interview with film producer Marian Urban, July 12, 2000. "Bandit pie to shoot." Daily Variety, March 7, 2002, p. 48. Bartosek, L.: Nas film - Kapitoly z dejin (1896-1945). Praha: Mlada fronta, 1985. Grega, A. : Prfspevok k dejinam slovenskej kinematografie, M.A. thesis at the FAMU in Prague,1968 . Havelka, J.: Kronika naseho filmu. Praha: Filmovy ustav, 1967. Macek, V.: Stefan Uher 1930-1993. Bratislava: Slovensky filmovy ustav, 1994. Macek, V. and J. Pastekova: Dejiny slovenskej kinematografie. Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Osveta, 1997. Mihalik, P. : Vznik slovenskej narodnej kinematografie 1896- 1948. Bratislava: Kabinet divadla a filmu SA V, 1994 . Rumanovsky, I.: "Z najstar.sfch dejfn kinematografie na Slovensku. " Panorama, #3, 1977. Janosik 21 a filmove podnikanie na Slovensku. Kinema, #3, 1982 . Slivka, M.: Karol Plicka - basnik obrazu. Martin: Vydavatel'stvo Osveta, 1982. Smatlakova, Renata: Katal6g slovenskych celovecemych filmov 1921-1999. Bratislava: Slovensky filmovy ustav, l 999. Young, C.: The films of Hedy Lamarr. Secaucus, N.J. : Citadel Press, 1978. �DOCUMENTATION �� SLOVAKIA 71 Trends in 20th Century Slovak Filmmaking Martin Votruba The transition from the rule of censorship to the rule of the free market after the collapse of Communism thirteen years ago has been more painful for Slovak filmmakers than for other artists. Filmmaking requires a substantially higher initial investment than other performing and fine arts. People are ready to pay much less for a movie ticket or rental than to buy a book or painting. This puts small countries like Slovakia at a great disadvantage. In a world where feature films in a language other than English have difficulty finding an audience outside their own language areas, even if they are in French, German or Spanish, the same-language audience for films in Slovak is the size of a single frame. A film in the Slovak language costs as much as a comparable film in any other language, but the chances that it will recoup its costs are minimal. Yet, several dedicated filmmakers have managed to find institutional and private support, perhaps resigned to the fact that profits will remain elusive, while hoping to make a statement, push the envelope, create Art. Filmmaking began in Slovakia while it was still part of Hungary in the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. According to film historians, the first motion picture shows in the Slovak counties took place in Kosice in December, 1896 and a few days later in Bratislava (then called Presporok by the Slovaks, Pressburg by the Germans). That was only a year after . the Lumiere brothers' first-ever public picture show in Paris and just six months after a similar showing in New York. The early shows were organized by �SLOVAKIA 72 traveling entrepreneurs, often in cafes or similar venues, but also under tents. People's visual perceptions of the world were being changed forever and those making and showing the films knew it. A show in Nitra in 1903 still touted the advent of the modern world, when it was advertised as "Hungary's 1st Scientific Electrical Theater Modeled on the Grand American Bioscope Awarded the Grand Prix at the World Fair in Paris." At that time, a linguistic barrier was not crucial to the films' distribution in the multinational Kingdom of Hungary. Silent movies were largely self-explanatory and most people would have been able to understand the few captions in Magyar or German, the two dominant languages in the Kingdom, or have them translated by other viewers. The shows consisted of several separate films, some colorized by hand, each of which were about two minutes long. For example, the first show in Kosice was a series of twelve such very, very brief films with titles like "The Arrival of a Train," "The Czar Arrives in Paris," "The Training of the French Infantry," "Four Ladies Dancing the French Cancan" and "An Interrupted Date." Clearly, foreign films dominated Central Europe from the start. The first title was the kind of film intended to create a spectacle - similar to some of the uses of special effects today: the engine would rush towards the camera, scaring an audience not accustomed to viewing images of moving trains at that angle and at such close quarters. The next two titles played a role similar to later newsreels shown before the main feature , or to contemporary world news and documentaries on, say, CNN or the Discovery Chanel. The last two titles were of the kind that - the filmmakers found - attracted the largest number of viewers: entertainment, fun and a rudimentary story. The proportion of such shorts quickly grew. �SLOVAKIA 73 The first permanent movie theater in Bratislava, Elektro Bioskop, was opened in a remodeled fencing hall in September, 1905. It had about 200 seats. The site is still in business. After a hiatus, an arts movie theater was opened in the same hall in the 1970s and is still in operation, now called Mladost' ("Youth"), on Hviezdoslav Square opposite the US Embassy. Theaters, hotel halls, storage buildings and other premises were remodeled in other towns, to become permanent movie theaters. In the absence of hi-fi sound and hi-tech projection systems, the competition often relied on interior decoration. An advertisement for the Bratislava movie theatre Fidelio (later Urania and now Hviezda) lured the audience thus: "427 upholstered seats in 3 colors , Alhambrastyle walls decorated with Oriental landscapes, live and man-made flowers." The fact that the theater showed two new releases a week was relegated to the bottom of the page. Attendance at traditional theater performances dropped after the introduction of motion pictures. Theater directors appealed to the authorities to disallow movie shows during the time of regular plays. In 1901 , the Ministry of the Interior (in charge of police and local government in Central Europe) issued a decree meeting their demands . The Viscount of Nitra went so far as to ban movie shows during the whole theater season , but the local movie-theater operators successfully appealed his decision. For a time, film producers thought they could benefit from a symbiosis of film and theater in "cinema-sketches." Actors would play on the stage, then the story would be picked up on the screen with the same actors and the conclusion would be played by live actors again. One such cinema-sketch from 1909 depicted night life in Kosice "The Kosice Promenade on the Screen." Walking on Main Street in one's Sunday best was a common pastime before the advent of TV and mass entertainment. It was among the few early �SLOVAKIA 74 motion pictures linked with Slovak territory. The limited production of cinema-sketches did not survive World War I and did not continue after the creation of Czecho-Slovakia (later renamed Czechoslovakia) in l 9 l 8 . Rather than cinema-sketches or story-based films , most of the early films linked to Slovakia were travel specials with titles like "The High Tatras," "Skiing in Tatranska Lomnica," "Traveling through the Vah Valley," or "The Kosice Institute of Corrections for Children," "Testing the Police Dogs in Bratislava," and news . Movies proved successful. The number of movie theaters in Slovakia reached about 100 by the end of World War I and two schools - the Mining Academy in Banska Stiavnica and a high school in Lucenec - had already used film as a teaching tool. When movies were still shown by traveling entrepreneurs, a copy of the film was bought and owned by them. With the establishment of permanent movie theaters, film distributors appeared, as well as a kind of 'film exchange' where copies of film were traded as on the stock market. The advent of copyright problems and foreign competition was heralded in 1913, in the first published complaint about illegal importation of foreign films , especially from France. As elsewhere in Central Europe, French films dominated the market. Legal power to regulate what movies were screened in Hungary was invested in the hands of the local authorities by a law from l 90 l , which required the traveling movie entrepreneurs to obtain permits for their shows . On the whole, a license was issued to anyone who applied for it. Local bans and complaints surfaced for a variety of reasons, including some familiar today. A city councilor in Kosice worried that worthless caper movies had a bad influence on boys, while dramas about sex ruined girls, be cause such movies extinguished their sense of morality and made �SLOVAKIA 75 them vulnerable to unconscionable seducers. In 1912, a priest and principal of a Roman Catholic boys' school in Nitra threatened his students with a bad grade in behavior if they went to the movies, even if accompanied by their parents. His ban extended to traditional theater performances as well. Censorship was also exercised by the authorities in Budapest, the capital of the Kingdom, who were able to ban individual titles from being shown all over Hungary , including the Slovak counties. In line with the traditions of Central European monarchies, politics was among the reasons for censorship. Among the banned titles were "King Ludwig II," depicting a story too similar to the life and mysterious death of Ludwig II of Bavaria and a film offensive to the prime minister of Hungary. However, the Kingdom did not follow suit when the rest of the Habsburg monarchy introduced formal film censorship in 1912. Among other things, it required that a license to open a movie theater be issued to individuals and institutions that would secure a respectable use of the profits. Its intent was to support charities and various associations. Budapest adopted the law in Apri l of 1918, half a year be fore the defeat and collapse of Austria-Hungary and the founding of Czec ho-Slovakia. The law empowered the censors to ban films offending patriotic interests, public order and morality. Children under sixteen were allowed to see only movies designated as suitable for them and only when accompanied by an adult. Despite a variety of problems , Czecho-S lovakia proved to be more democratic than the former Kingdom of Hungary and the whole Habsburg monarchy. But the new freedom , which benefited other forms of Slovak culture, proved even more difficult for Slovak film than the post-communist period after 1989. The film industry developed in Prague, which had been an important German-Czech cultural center, a university town and capital of the �76 SLOVAKIA Holy Roman Empire's Kingdom of Bohemia for centuries, attracting business and artistic talent. By comparison, Slovakia's new capital and largest city, Bratislava, was much smaller; moreover, it was only forty miles from the former Habsburg monarchy's large, vibrant and influential capital of Vienna. Given that artists and entrepreneurs flocked to it from all over the monarchy, Vienna must have created a degree of artistic brain-drain in its immediate vicinity. As with the Pittsburgh Agreement of 1918, which was a key document in the separation of the Slovak counties from the Habsburg monarchy, Slovak-Americans had an impact on Slovakia's nascent film industry. Andrej Sustek from Chicago founded the Selig Company with the intent to make historical films in Slovakia. It was subsequently incorporated in the new Slovak-American Tatra Film Corporation with a capital of about $30,000 from US investors . Their first and only film was Janosfk. It captured the legend of an 18th-century highwayman from Terchova in the northern Slovak County of Orava who gave rise to Carpathian legends comparable to those about Robin Hood in England. In 1919 Tatra Film's Daniel and Jaroslav Siakel' arrived in Slovakia to start filming in their native village of Blatnica near Martin in Central Slovakia, where they also built sets, and in the castle of Stiavnicka near Ruzomberok. The leading role was given to popular Theodor Pistek, who starred in nine other films that year. Maria Fabryova, an amateur actress from Martin, played Anka, Janosfk's girlfriend. The film was finished in the A-B studios in Prague . The screenplay by Jozef Zak-Marusiak was to be based on a novel by Slovak-American author and editor of the popular Amerikansko-Slovcnske Noviny "(American-Slovak News)", Gustav Marsall-Petrovsky (1862-1916). But it was much closer to the ac- �SLOVAKIA 77 tual local legends , which also inspired Slovak Romantic poets in the 19th century. Moreover, the play Janosfk - premiered in Brno in 1910 and written by Moravian playwright, poet and journalist Jiri Mahen - was well known by the l 920s and may have been a major source for the film's story . Janosfk was shown to the filmmakers' team in November 1921 in the city of Vrutky . It opened a few days later in Zilina and in December 1921 in Chicago - to be more specific , in Cicero, IL, then with a large Slovak-American population , at the Atlantic movie theater, now replaced by the Atlantic Mall at W. 26th St. and S. Pulaski Rd . The screenplay relied on the folk motif of ' taking from the rich and giving to the poor,' and greatly reinforced the hints present in 19th-century Slovak Romantic poems about Janosfk : the film fused feudal exploitation in the more distant past with the drive by the Magyar-speaking government in Budapest in the 19th century to suppress the Kingdom' s other languages and cultures . The latter became particularly forceful during the last decades of the Kingdom's existence and ultimately contributed to its demise. Unlike feudalism , that experience was still very fresh in people's memories and was among the reasons why Slovaks immigrated to the United States. By comparison to Czech films preserved from the early Czecho-Slovak period, Janosfk showed the authors' experience with American movies : in camera work, in the use of parallel narratives, as well as in shots inspired by Westerns . It had two directors of photography with two cameras: Oldrich Benes with a European camera and Daniel Siakel', who used a camera made by Andrej Sustek's company in Chicago. In effect, the two cameramen shot two parallel films - scenes were acted separately for each camera and the difference between the "Slovak" and "American" versions increased after separate editing. But the film's handling of the eth- �78 SLOVAKIA nic motif may have been too didactic, or the issue too recent to be successfully mythologized as entertainment on the silver screen. Janosik did not recover its costs and remained Tatra Film's only product, as well as Slovakia' s first preserved silent movie. It was thought to have been lost, but in 1975 it was discovered and restored from both versions by Ivan Rumanovsky in Bratislava. Until after World War II, attempts to set up film companies, occasionally with Slovak-American involvement, followed the same path. One film would be made and then the company folded, because the film was not profitable and the company lacked sufficient capital to sustain it through a few flops. The situation did not change after the emergence of sound in the movies. While about 30-50 sound films were made each year in Czechoslovakia between 1933 - 1938, fewer than one a year was in Slovak. Czech films occasionally featured Slovak actors. Among them, with eleven musicals to his credit, was Frantisek Kristof Vesely, who reached the level of stardom in Czechoslovakia. Documentaries fared better: partly because the costs were lower and partly thanks to occasional government funding for shorts featuring its officials. For example, Kvetna nedela vo Vajnoroch (Palm Sunday in Yajnory) recorded a folkloristic celebration of the holiday attended by Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia, Vavro Srobar. A potentially steady source of funding opened up in 1935 when Prague decided that each newsreel commonly shown before the main feature had to devote at least 20% of its length to items about Czechoslovakia. But this so urce remained untapped by Slovak filmmakers : most of the reports came from Bohemia and Moravia. However, government or institutional funding and fascination with village life proved to be a mix that worked for filmmakers in Slovakia on more than one occasion, right through the present. �SLOVAKIA 79 The first Slovak film to reach international acclaim relied on both. The potential of the Slovak countryside as a backdrop had already been discovered by non-native filmmakers and at least two of their films have become classics of world cinema. The early German horror Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu the Vampire) directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was filmed at Orava Castle and in the High Tatras in 1922, and Czech director Gustav Machaty chose Slovakia as a location for his daring exploration of sexuality Extase (Ecstasy) in 1932. The second one propelled the career of Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiester), who became one of the most successful Hollywood stars. The Matica slovenska (by that time an eminent, mostly government-sponsored cultural, academic and archival institution) employed Karel Plicka (1894-1987) as its ethnographer, who was able to make documentary shorts from about 1926. He obtained funding from the President's Office in 1928 to produce an hourlong documentary about village life Po horach, po dolach (Through Mountains and Valleys). It was awarded a Gold Medal at the International Exposition of Photographic Art in Florence and received an Honorable Mention at the International Venice Film Festival in 1932. The favorable reception of his production, along with more funding from both the Matica slovenska and the President's Office, enabled Plicka to make Zem spieva (The Earth Sings) in 1933, a romanticized semi-documentary panorama of selected folk customs through the four seasons. Unlike Slovak feature movies of that period, Zem spieva struck a chord with the audience and topped it with another award at the International Venice Film Festival as part of a collection of films from Czechoslovakia that included Extase, mentioned above. But after this success, the Matica s/ovcnska was unable to raise sufficient funding and Plicka's hopes that he was laying the foundations of �80 SLOVAKIA Slovakia' s film industry were thwarted. He went on to make a documentary in the United States Za Slovakmi od New Yorku po Mississippi (Tracing Slovaks from New York to the Mississippi) in 1937 and then became a professor in the first Department of Film in Czechoslovakia and the third such department in Europe, at the School of Artistic Crafts in Bratislava in 1938. But the Department's potential for Slovak cinema was lost when the College was closed after Slovakia became a separate country in 19 39 . Plicka then resettled permanently in Prague, Bohemia, which was incorporated into the Third Reich during World War II. Czechoslovakia's only other Slovak-language blockbuster before World War II was a new Janosfk in 1935, funded from Prague and directed by the Czech Martin Frie (1902-1968). It was indicative of the volume of Czech film production that Frie finished three other films during the same year, having previously directed 23. Frie and Plicka were two of the authors of the screenplay based on the same play by Mahen, mentioned earlier, on which the first Janosfk may have been based. Plicka also found a policeman and amateur actor, Pal'o Bielik (1910-1983), in the village of Senica for the leading role. The film combined idealized images of villagers with action scenes to show their and Jan osik ' s resistance against Hungarian landlords. In spite of Budapest's protestations, it was screened at the International Venice Film Festival and was successfully released in Germany . During the existence of the Slovak Republic ( 1939-1945), movie theaters grew by more than 60% but no feature films were made. The government sponsored the film company Nastup (Line-up), which produced short films and weekly newsreels . The authorities, who described their own rule as "authoritarian and totalitarian," mandated that a newsreel be shown before every feature film and tightened censorship and ideological supervision of �SLOVAKIA 81 their production. The newsreel was customarily followed by a short film, a pattern that was picked up by the communist authorities after the war and survived through the collapse of Communism. The government's alliance with Germany meant that it became Slovakia's main source of films even before the war changed world trade patterns. At the same time, the number of imports dropped from about 400 a year in the former CzechoSlovakia (whose original hyphenated name was restored in 1938) to less than 150 after independence. In 1940, Slovakia still imported 15 "cultural-educational" films from the U.S., and a few more from countries other than Germany, but then German feature films were supplemented by just about a dozen films from Italy and Romania, and several Czech "oldies" from before the war. The film company Nastup was conscientious about training its employees, among whom was Pal'o Bielik, and sent them regularly to several studios in Germany as interns - including to neighboring Vienna and formerly Czechoslovak Prague, which were now ruled from Berlin. After World War II, Slovakia was re-joined with the Czechspeaking lands and Czech director Martin Frie returned to make Vanij. .. ! (Beware ... !) with folkloristic highlights similar to his successful Janosfk from 1935. The film was based on Ivan Stodola' s popular play Bacova iena (The Shepherd's Wife) and Palo Bielik played the leading role again . Things changed dramatically after Czechoslovakia became communist in 1948. The government nationalized all but the tiniest companies, including the film studios. It saw film as an important medium to indoctrinate the population and ideological control - under strict financed film production in the Slovak, as well as in the Czech part of the country. Directors, screenwriters, actors and other people connected with film production became �SLOVAKIA 82 state employees as everyone else, with a regular salary regardless of how many films were produced and whether they earned any profits or not - a concept born out of communist accounting. Although the authorities paid the salaried filmmakers more money for the films they made - separate contracts were signed for each one - from the American perspective, this was closer to bonuses than anything known in Hollywood today. The "bonuses" were higher for films considered particularly effective in showing the communist rule as benefiting the population and had nothing to do with ticket sales. The authorities mandated that the method used in all art be socialist realism. In general, its goal was to educate people to the benefits of communism and, before it was reached , socialism, which was what they called their existing political system. This was strictly enforced, especially in fiction and film, because these mediums reached the widest audience. The topics were to emphasize the need to work for the good of the 'collective,' i.e., communist society. Topics focusing on the individual and on personal feelings and concerns were deemed harmful, as was depicting anything negative about society. Love was considered such a topic: not only because it was personal and, therefore, did not educate the audience about the benefits of working on behalf of the collective, but also because it may have brought sex into the story, a definite 'no' in socialist realism. The official support of socialist-realist art and the transformation of filmmakers into salaried employees meant that a steady stream of feature films began to appear in the newly-established studios in Bratislava. Pal'o Bielik, the former star of Janosfk, who expanded his moviemaking experience in the newsreel studios during World War II, directed Vicic dicry (Wolves' Lairs), one of the first two films made after the communist takeover in 1948. It �SLOVAKIA 83 was the beginning of a succession of films about the 1944 antiGerman uprising in Slovakia, but because it was made so early during the Communist Party ' s drive to establish ideological dominance, the film still managed to include 'negative,' as well as 'positive' characters among both the Slovak insurgents and the German soldiers suppressing the uprising - something that did not get past the censors again for more than a decade. Bielik, as director, leaned away from the folkloristic style of the films in which he starred: the style of V/cie diery was inspired by early Italian neo-realism. After two feature films in 1948 and another two in 1949, the yearly output grew to 3-6 per year in the 1950s. 'Negative' characters could not be central in the plots, and the story had to prove them wrong. Central characters had to be 'positive' from the start or be seen discovering Marxist-Leninist solutions to any problems they encountered. Such problems had to be few and marginal, the general view of society had to be happy. If the central characters were not Communists from the start, a 'tutor' and Communist Party member would often be present, who helped them find the Marxist-Leninist way. Topics commonly dealt with World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany, or with the imposition of Communism - the 'collectivization' of farms, i.e., the abolition of private ownership of most land larger than the immediate surroundings of one's house and garden. Farmers were to be shown as opening their eyes to the fact that this was actually good for them. The Communists proclaimed a classless society, which meant that everyone would eventually become a 'worker.' The three recognized social groups were the laborers, the farmers, and the intelligentsia, i.e., white-collar workers and college-educated people, but the Communist Party officials, although working in offices, classified themselves as laborers. The bourgeoisie, �84 SLOVAKIA i.e. , the private entrepreneurs, disappeared by virtue of their property being 'nationalized,' i.e., taken over by the government, but the - now former - bourgeoisie were persecuted never- theless . The intelligentsia was often suspected of harboring bourgeois ideas and persecuted, too . Since the bourgeoisie were often described as incapable of shedding their reactionary, i.e. anti-Communist skins, films about contemporary life generally focused on the villages and farmers. Marxism-Leninism saw in them the ' next best class' after the laborers, on their way to becoming agricultural laborers . Their initial qualms about any benefits of collectivization provided some meager source of conflict for the plots. The films about the past often returned to the uprising in Slovakia during World War II, which was depicted as organized by the Communists and aided by the Soviet Union. Plots that concerned the communist period had to end on an optimistic note. Since a former entrepreneur always remained at least suspect, their joyful transformation into a group auxiliary to the working class was essentially unacceptable as a topic, which - in effect - also kept town s and cities away from most of the scripts. Even socialist-realist authors felt that a ccnflict drives a story, but avoided settings that did not provide for politically acceptable conflicts . Socialist realism was strongly enforced during the first 10-15 years of communism . Unlike neighboring Poland and Hungary, communist Czechoslovakia saw little of the ideological thaw triggered by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism in February of l 956. The thaw did not reach Czechoslovakia until the early l 960s, during which time Bratislava produced 6- l O feature film s per year, and the first manifestations of the thaw in literature and film came from Slovakia. After more than a decade of socialist- �85 SLOVAKIA realist filmmaking, Sinko v sieti (The Sun in a Net) directed by Stefan Uher (1930-1993) in 1962 became a milestone in both Slovak and Czech filmmaking. It inspired a whole generation of students at the Film Academy in Prague, who soon followed with a series of films which attained international recognition as the "Czech New Wave." Sinko v sieti was Stefan Uher's second film . His first was about the life of a group of fifteen year-old students and their school My z deviate) A (We from Grade 9, Study Group A; 1961). The screenwriter, Alfonz Bednar (1914-1989), was a successful writer who published mildly non-conformist fiction somewhat earlier than most other authors. The film is based on his three short stories Fajolov prfspevok (Fajolo's Contribution), Pon- t6novy deii (Pontoon Day) and Zlata brana (Golden Gate). Uher's film depicted a number of hitherto unacceptable social and political themes : distant - perhaps uncaring - parents, a philandering husband, teenagers changing partners, an attempt at suicide, a poorly-run collectivized farm , and the requirement that a child attend summer 'voluntary work camps ' to make up for his parents belonging to the intelligentsia. Moreover, none of these issues were resolved in a 'positive' manner. The ending was rather somber, if not depressing, with the barest hint of optimism found only in the last sentence and possibly on the film's symbolic level, which was handled rather unevenly. It attempted a complex interplay of sun and clouds, vision and blindness, truth and lies, centered around a solar eclipse (Central Europe actually experienced a 95% solar eclipse on the morning of February 15, 196 l ). Contemporary critics found the symbolism difficult to decipher, and much of it was probably lost on the viewers. But the core story line - the ups and downs in the relationship of two teenagers - the realism and novelty of its urban setting, and the �86 SLOVAKIA hints at some social and political taboos were not lost on the audience and cannot have been lost on the censors. Sinko v sieti not only pushed the envelope, but also established for other artists and showed to the Slovaks and Czechs at large what the authorities could now be pushed to permit. According to Uher, Karol Bacflek, the head of the Communist Party in Slovakia at that time, attacked the film, saying it contained coded messages that conspirators were able to decipher precisely. For example, Bacflek thought the solar eclipse . was to indicate the twilight of communism and the pontoon on the dried-up riverbed stood for the state of communist rule in Czechoslovakia at that time. Communist officials believed that the blind mother was supposed to symbolize the blindness of their Party, which did not see the realities of life under communism. Because a political thaw had begun in Slovakia, other communist officials with enough influence dared to differ and the film was released. Besides Stefan Uher's efforts to get past the strict requirements of socialist realism, the director was inspired by some of the trends current in Western European cinema and culture in the 1950s. Among them was his focus on the symbolism of light and darkness, adherence to a low-key style, a hint of fashi0nablc quasi-existentialism in Fajolo's dialogues with Bela, and an attempt at serious cinema-verite: in the beer-drinking scenes in .1 tavern, the background soundtrack includes taped unscripted conversations of real villagers. Uher mostly chose inexperienced actors or nonactors. Only one of them, I.:,ubo Roman in a supporting role (b . 1944, then a student of acting), became a successful actor, theater administrator, and ultimately a politician - Member of Parlia- ment, Minister of Culture, and since 2001, County Chief of Bratislava. Actual music in the film included Western rock played on �SLOVAKIA 87 the radio. The film's score was by llja Zeljenka, an avant-garde composer of 'concrete music.' While Slnko v sieti became a prologue to the first minimalist, quasi-realist, and eventually more experimental Czechoslovak New Wave made by film students in Prague, in Slovakia the film was followed by several increasingly critical social commentaries by established filmmakers , by more films about contemporary urban life, and by increasingly intellectual and abstract films seen as Art. The most daring among the films that replaced socialist realism with social criticism was Peter Solan's Prfpad Barnabas Kos (The Case of Barnabas Kos; 1964), which removed the veil from arbitrary decision-making in communist society. Among contemporary topics, a potential for an approachable and successful film was lost with Nylonovy mesiac (Nylon Moon; 1965) directed by Eduard Greener. Its story, as well as the title came from a novel by Jaroslava Blazkova published in 1960, the first best-seller about contemporary life since the communist takeover. But there was entertainment in film , too, none more popular than Janosik II directed in 1963 by Pal'o Bielik, the star in the previous version of the story. In spite of its title, it was not a sequel: the film re-told the centuries-old legend. The theme of the brigand hero retains its attraction through the present day. Slovakia 's most successful producer, Rudolf Bierman, is currently producing The True Story al Janosfk and Uhorcfk, directed by the success[ul Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland and her daughter Kasia Adamik with an estimated budget of $2.4 million, $800,000 of which came from the Slovak Parliament and the Ministry of Culture. The first film to earn an Oscar for Czechoslovakia was Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street; 1965; Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1966; Special Mention for Acting �88 SLOVAKIA Performance, Cannes Film Festival 1965; New York Film Critics Circle A ward for Best Foreign Film in 1966). It was co-directed by Slovak Jan Kadar and Czech Elmar Klos , who had directed films together since the 1950s. Their earlier film was the groundbreaking Smrt' sa vola Engelchen (Death is Called Engelchen, 1963) based on a novel by Ladislav Mnacko, which diverted from the communist interpretation of the 1944 uprising in Slovakia as infallibly glorious and showed some aspects that brought about human tragedy. Along similar lines, Obchod na korze placed the politics of World War II in the background and focused on the dead-end street faced by many in Central Europe during the deportations of the Jews to German concentration camps . After the introduction of anti-Jewish laws in Slovakia, a simple carpenter named Tona is made the owner of a tiny haberdashery, until then owned by an old, almost deaf Jewish woman named Rozalia who has no comprehension of the contemporary political developments. After a crisis, the local Jewish community begins to pay Tono not to surrender his ownership, to prevent Rozalia 's store from being passed on to a ruthless Aryanizer. A tender friendship develops between Tono and Rozalia: she keeps selling buttons without realizing Tana's legal status, and he becomes her man about the house. When deportations begin, Roz.ilia remains oblivious of real life, and Tona is faced with the choice between sending her off, or probably facing his own and his wife ' s death, if he were discovered trying to hide a person incapable of understanding why she should live in hiding. The film starred Slovak Jozef Kroner ( 1924-1998) and Polish Ida Kaminska ( 1899-1980) with a Slovak cast and was shot on location in the town of Trebisov, Eastern Slovakia, and in the Prague studios. The film presents its captivating, morally complex story in a straightforward style, with a sprinkling of symbolism and dream �SLOVAKIA 89 sequences. It was an indication of changes in the political climate that Obchod na korze was able to get away without the mandated focus on criticism of the Slovak authorities during World War II , previously an inevitable feature of socialist realist work about that period, as well as without highlighting a central, resolute procommunist character. It has remained the most awarded and internationally successful Slovak film to the present day . The late l 960s reflected the direction filmmaking may take with little censorship and steady funding . An increasing number of - especially younger - filmmakers took advantage of the situation to experiment without concern about a need to target a specific audience or about how large their audience was going to be. They enjoyed the same creative luxury as the writers or painters convinced of the significance of their work, who manage to earn their living elsewhere. In a democratic society, this is rarely the case in cinema because of the extraordinary amounts of money even a low-budget film requires. But during the occasional relaxation of control in communist countries while the principles of the system remained in place, filmmakers were given substantial fund s to make films relatively free from prescription , as well as of a need to bring in profit. An early nonconformist film seen mostly by students in art theaters was Stefan Uher's Panna zazracnica (The Miraculous Virgin, 1966), soon followed by Juraj Jakubisko's (b. 1938) Kristove roky ("Christ's Years" or "Crucial Years," 1967), Elo Havetta's Slavnost' v botanickej zahrade (A Celebration in the Botanical Garden, 1969), and Dusan Hanak's 322 (the number identifying cancer in medical statistics of diseases, l 969). During this period (however brief) of almost total collapse of communist control, the Koliba Film Studio in Bratislava co-produced films with avantgarde filmmakers from abroad. Jerzy Skolimowski from Poland, �90 SLOVAKIA whose government was then significantly more repressive than Czechoslovakia, directed one story in Dialog 20-40-60, along with Czech Zbynek Brynych and Slovak Peter Solan in 1968 . Frenchman Alain Robbe-Grillet directed two films, including Mui, ktory Jute (The Man Who Lies, L 'homme qui ment; codirected with Martin Holly in 1968) with a Slovak and French cast. And 1969 saw the release of Juraj Jakubisko's Vtackovia, siroty a blazni (Birds, Orphans and Fools), considered by most Slovaks to be the best Slovak film. Jakubisko's preferences bounce between experiment, abstraction and ambitious intellectualism, as in this film , and less numerous popular crowd-pleasers. "Birds, Orphans and Fools" had the briefest of theater run s, not because of the audience, but because of the authorities. Conceived when communist control was at its weakest in Czechoslovakia, it was completed well after the Soviet-led invasion in August of 1968, by which time many of the mechanisms of authoritarian rule were at work again. Vtackovia, siroty a blazni takes place in an apparent historical vacuum in a desolate world with war raging somewhere outside the camera's field of vision and the director's focus. The two male and one female central characters , not unlike some of the hippies in the U.S.A. <1.t that time, live in a decrepit apartment, go through a series of bizarre encounters, sexual experiences and discuss a range of topics. When their lives begin to appear closer to normalcy, one of them murders the girl and commits suicide. The film is deliberately ex perimental in its style: it varies screen sizes, shots are taken at awkward angles with a hand-held or agitated camera, distortion lenses alter screen images, filmmakers ' equipment remains in the frame, characters talk to the camera. The adjectives surrealist and post-apocalyptic are perhaps representative of the filmmakers' intent. �SLOVAKIA The 1970s witnessed a re-introduction 91 of strict communist control in Czechoslovakia, called normalization . People were demoted at work or fired, if they had expressly supported the relaxation in the late 1960s or denounced the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, and their children often suffered, too. In an effort to a void repercussions, many repudiated their past views. Although persecution was somewhat milder in Slovakia than in the Czech-speaking areas, it had a stifling effect on art. Gone were the efforts of the 1960s to push the envelope of what was allowed. The population at large had learned its lesson : with the help of the Soviet Union, the Communists were able to pull the whole country back from unprecedented freedom of expression and the brink of a multi-party system in 1968 to a situation more reminiscent of the late 1950s, and those who resisted were punished. This repression lasted at least through the late 1970s, and Czechoslovakia remained more politically backward , although with a better standard of living, than Communist Poland or Hungary until the collapse of communism in 1989 . Cinema was affected like the rest of society, while the number of film releases grew. Slovakia produced 8-12 films per year throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Jakubisko still managed to finish Dovidenia v pek/e, priatelia (See You in Hell, Friends) in 1970, but hardly anyone saw it. The film was banned and Jakubisko was not allowed to make another feature film until 1979 . Although the early 1970s are sometimes compared to the 1950s, the authorities did not demand that Slovak filmmakers make socialist-realist films critical of the period of relaxation - the way films in the 1950s tried to discredit private enterprise and democracy which were abolished in 1948. Only one film was made about 1968, Honicka (Fever) directed by Martin Holly, Jr. (b. 1931) and based on a novel by Jozef Kot. In a country with �92 SLOVAKIA freedom of expression, the film could have been perceived as just focusing on a relatively plausible plot from 1968 and pushing a particular point of view - there indeed were people who did not support the pro-democratic reforms, or saw many flaws among the reformers. But under totalitarian control, which did not allow opposing points of view, it was impossible to distinguish the touting of the official view in film from just propaganda. Regardless, Honicka shared the destiny of the overwhelming majority of Slovak and Czech films produced during the forty years of Communism: after a couple of weeks in mostly empty theaters, it was not seen again . While the 1960s witnessed a desire to bring contemporary and urban themes to film, the 1970s began to solidify an inclination among a segment of the Slovak critics and filmmakers to emulate the centuries-old urban fashion in Europe of the 'return to nature:' well educated intellectuals living in Bratislava make and admire films with images of the countryside and villagers whose lives appear to be somehow more authentic than in towns. The trend-setter was the still admired hour-long documentary Obrazy stareho sveta (Pictures of the Old World, 1972) directed by Dusan Hanak who, suspicious to the authorities because of his films from the 1960s, found an early refuge in a topic sufficiently removed from big politics to survive in the margins of official production and yet, sufficiently non-conforn1ist and enamored with village life to please especially the chic audiences. Part of its additional attraction within the context of Communist Czechoslovakia rested in the fact that it offered snapshots from the lives of several highlanders, whose very existence belied the official claims of equal wealth for everyone. But Obrazy stareho sveta has a much more universal appeal and has received critical acclaim from Slovakia, Switzerland and France to Toronto and Los Angeles. �SLOVAKIA 93 A singular exception among about 90 domestic feature films that briefly flickered in Slovak theaters in the 1970s was Dusan Hanak's Ruto ve sny (Rosy Dreams, 1976). Although its style was poetic, it may have been the first film in the communist bloc with a de-romanticized portrayal of the Roma (Gypsies). It dove into the cultural barriers between them and the non-Romany population - an issue that, twenty years later, proved to be one of the key problems of post-communist societies in Central Europe. Two teenagers - a young Slovak postman and a Romany girl - fall in love. The film tells the viewers that it will not work due to different cultural expectations each of the two have of their budding relationship. Its imaginative filmmaking and affecting, slightly sentimental story might have been easy to understand and appreciate by a wider audience, but Rutove sny was shown only in limited release at the order of the authorities. The most popular film in that decade was yet another variation on the legend about a heroic highwayman Pacho, hybskf z bojnfk (Pacho, the Highwayman of Hybe; 1975) directed by Martin Tapak. In 1980, the authorities shelved fa milujem, ty milujes (I Love, You Love) directed by Dusan Hanak because of its focus on marginal social groups and eroticism. When it was released shortly before the collapse of communism, it received the highest international recognition for a Slovak film since The Shop on Main Street, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. However, the strict Communist control typical of the 1970s began to relax slowly, and the early 1980s brought two domestic blockbusters whose role in Slovak culture finally matched that of some of the films in the l 960s. In 1982 Stefan Uher directed Pas/a kone na bet6ne ("She. Grazed Horses on Concrete," or "A Ticket to Heaven"). The title used the first few words from an irreverent tune with just a few verses depicting impossible acti- �94 SLOVAKIA vities - the song continues " ... she bathed in razor blades." The story is about a single mother fending for herself in an East Slovak village, determined not to allow her teenaged daughter to follow in her footsteps . Partly a comedy and partly a candid portrayal of contemporary village life, it oscillates between humorous depictions of social customs and ceremonies, and the more serious issues of a woman's capacity to hold her own in a small community, and of abortion. Although co-written and directed by Uher, the film is largely the work of Milka Zirnkova, an author and actress, who wrote the original story, worked with Uher on the script, and starred in the leading role. Among the novelties in Slovak moviemaking was an extensive use of the East Slovak dialect in the film. Although Slovak has several highly recognizable regional accents, filmmakers - before and after this film - have the actors speak the standard, neutral variety of Slovak common in the news media, regardless of where in Slovakia the story of their film takes place. A success comparable to the handful of foreign blockbusters permitted by the authorities each year was Juraj Jakubisko's Tisfcrocna vce/a (A Thousand-Year Old Bee;l983). It is a 162-minute long saga of the life of a farmer's family covering three generations from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. It picked up on and reinforced a myth recurrent in Slovak cinema for several decades, in films from both popular and artsy filmmakers . Villagers are mostly good, while those who live in or move to town (perhaps the screenwriters and directors bowed to communist authorities) become entrepreneurial and tum out to be cold and corrupt. It was the first Slovak film with a comprehensive narrative that a large number of viewers were ready to perceive as their national, as well as local and family past, because it echoed themes they had encountered in literature and history classes at school. �SLOVAKIA 95 Moreover, it was a comforting past. The title was a parable, overplayed in the film with brief expensive special effects with a gigantic honey-bee created in the Bavarian Film Studios in Munich . Those sequences hammered in the symbolic thread in the storyline. They could have been be richer and more content, the film gave the viewers to understand, were it not for the cumulative effects of past injustice: the fruits of their hard-working ancestors' labor was periodically taken away from them for a thousand years, like honey from the bees. But as long as they stayed in the villages, they were an honest, sometimes whimsical bunch doing as well as they could . It helped that several popular actors starred in the film, including Jozef Kr6ner (Tona in The Shop on Main Street). Tisicrosmi vce/a received a Gold Phoenix for art and cinematography from the Cultural Center of the City of Venice awarded in tandem with the prestigious International Venice Film Festival. After decades of government-funded and censored production, Bratislava still produced twelve films in 1990, the year after the collapse of Communism. With no censorship, but also hardly any funding, the number of feature films ranged between one and three for most of the 1990s. Slovakia's theaters are now flooded with foreign , especially American, films and while the population might be ready for a domestic production addressing them specifically, perhaps along the lines of A Thousand-Year Old Bee, there is not enough money for a film on that scale, and perhaps even less interest on the part of the filmmakers . With one exception, the films made in the 1990s generally follow one of two thematic lines . The most successful film was Fontana pre Zuzanu 2 (A Fountain for Susan 2; 1993) directed by Dusan Rapos as a sequel to his more sedate Fontana pre Zuzanu from 1985, still limited by communist censorship. He released Fontana pre Zuza- �96 SLOVAKIA nu 3 in 1999. Both fall in the group of films with contemporary themes and are obviously interested in generating ticket sales. They rely on sex and crime to achieve that. Although it remained behind major foreign blockbusters , Fontana pre Zuzanu 2 sold 380,000 tickets in a country with 5.4 million inhabitants, which is comparable to a film that brings in over $130 million in the U.S.A. Titanic sold about 550,000 tickets in Slovakia and The Matrix 130,000. Another film with a contemporary theme is indicative of how times have changed since the collapse of communism. Rivers of Babylon (the tile is in English) directed by Vladimir Balco in 1998 was based on the first post-communist bestseller in l 990 by Peter Pistanek. Sequels of the novel had lower sales, because the novelty of the topic - Bratislava's underworld - and expressive presentation wore off, and because they had to compete with a growing number of translated foreign bestsellers. However, the filmmakers picked up on a particular aspect of the sequels vitriolic political commentary . The story of the rise of a skillful stoker and wheeler-dealer to political power was seen as a parable of the government in Bratislava at that time. Only about eight years earlier, a release of such a strongly critical film would have been either unthinkable, or a major event attracting huge crowds . Yet, Rivers of Babylon sold only 50,000 tickets and met with a lukewarm reception abroad. The other thematic line in contemporary Slovak cinema is the 'return to nature. ' Its main protagonist is director Martin Sulfk (b . 1962) whose films generally attract fewer viewers at home than Rivers of Babylon, but are favored by critics and have attained a degree of viewers' acclaim at film festivals organized by European cities. His most successful Zahrada (Garden; l 995), the earlier Neha (Tenderness ; 199 l ), as well as the more recent Orbis �SLOVAKIA 97 Pictus (Latin title, 1997) and Krajinka ("Landscape" or "A Small piece of the Country," 2000) are intellectualized continuations of the theme of the desirability of a return to, journey through, or life in a rural setting. Krajinka is the most accessible of Sulfk ' s films . Although it may be based on memories, as the opening sequence suggests, the discrete stories are not made to gel into a cohesive sequence for the audience. But each is readable on its own. Zahrada, the first Slovak film since the collapse of communism to be released abroad , and especially Orbis Pictus, break with traditional story-telling and show the main characters - a rather passive adult man living with his parents in Zahrada and a young girl released from a boarding school , perhaps for abandoned teenagers, in Orbis Pictus - find education in nature and disappointment in urban settings . With surreal scenes, philosophizing scripts, and a dedication to the filmmaker's expressive whim, Sulfk 's films re-package the theme of national rural bliss, recurrent in Slovak culture and education , in a form palatable for trendy audiences. The theme has had an incessant, powerful attraction for a segment of directors since the beginnings of filmmaking in Slovakia, whether they have leaned towards the popular and mythologizing approach from The Earth Sings 1933, through the decades of films about Janosik and similar productions, to The Thousand-Year Old Bee - or whether they take the approach aimed at art theaters, traceable to Organ directed by Stefan Uher in 1964. Due to the general drop in film production and to Martin Sulik ' s capacity to attract funding, films for art theatres have become more prevalent in the 1990s than in the earlier decades . �SLOVAKIA 98 Bibliography Author's interview with film producer Marian Urban, July 12, 2000. "Bandit pie to shoot." Daily Variety, March 7, 2002, p. 48. Bartosek, L.: Nas film - Kapitoly z dejin (1896-1945). Praha: Mlada fronta, 1985. Grega, A. : Prfspevok k dejinam slovenskej kinematografie, M.A. thesis at the FAMU in Prague,1968 . Havelka, J.: Kronika naseho filmu. Praha: Filmovy ustav, 1967. Macek, V.: Stefan Uher 1930-1993. Bratislava: Slovensky filmovy ustav, 1994. Macek, V. and J. Pastekova: Dejiny slovenskej kinematografie. Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Osveta, 1997. Mihalik, P. : Vznik slovenskej narodnej kinematografie 1896- 1948. Bratislava: Kabinet divadla a filmu SA V, 1994 . Rumanovsky, I.: "Z najstar.sfch dejfn kinematografie na Slovensku. " Panorama, #3, 1977. Janosik 21 a filmove podnikanie na Slovensku. Kinema, #3, 1982 . Slivka, M.: Karol Plicka - basnik obrazu. Martin: Vydavatel'stvo Osveta, 1982. Smatlakova, Renata: Katal6g slovenskych celovecemych filmov 1921-1999. Bratislava: Slovensky filmovy ustav, l 999. Young, C.: The films of Hedy Lamarr. Secaucus, N.J. : Citadel Press, 1978. �DOCUMENTATION �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2003, Vol. 37 Description An account of the resource Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 71 Trends in 20th Century Slovak Filmmaking Martin Votruba The transition from the rule of censorship to the rule of the free market after the collapse of Communism thirteen years ago has been more painful for Slovak filmmakers than for other artists. Filmmaking requires a substantially higher initial investment than other performing and fine arts. People are ready to pay much less for a movie ticket or rental than to buy a book or painting. This puts small countries like Slovakia at a great disadvantage. In a world where feature films in a language other than English have difficulty finding an audience outside their own language areas, even if they are in French, German or Spanish, the same-language audience for films in Slovak is the size of a single frame. A film in the Slovak language costs as much as a comparable film in any other language, but the chances that it will recoup its costs are minimal. Yet, several dedicated filmmakers have managed to find institutional and private support, perhaps resigned to the fact that profits will remain elusive, while hoping to make a statement, push the envelope, create Art. Filmmaking began in Slovakia while it was still part of Hungary in the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. According to film historians, the first motion picture shows in the Slovak counties took place in Kosice in December, 1896 and a few days later in Bratislava (then called Presporok by the Slovaks, Pressburg by the Germans). That was only a year after . the Lumiere brothers' first-ever public picture show in Paris and just six months after a similar showing in New York. The early shows were organized by SLOVAKIA 72 traveling entrepreneurs, often in cafes or similar venues, but also under tents. People's visual perceptions of the world were being changed forever and those making and showing the films knew it. A show in Nitra in 1903 still touted the advent of the modern world, when it was advertised as "Hungary's 1st Scientific Electrical Theater Modeled on the Grand American Bioscope Awarded the Grand Prix at the World Fair in Paris." At that time, a linguistic barrier was not crucial to the films' distribution in the multinational Kingdom of Hungary. Silent movies were largely self-explanatory and most people would have been able to understand the few captions in Magyar or German, the two dominant languages in the Kingdom, or have them translated by other viewers. The shows consisted of several separate films, some colorized by hand, each of which were about two minutes long. For example, the first show in Kosice was a series of twelve such very, very brief films with titles like "The Arrival of a Train," "The Czar Arrives in Paris," "The Training of the French Infantry," "Four Ladies Dancing the French Cancan" and "An Interrupted Date." Clearly, foreign films dominated Central Europe from the start. The first title was the kind of film intended to create a spectacle - similar to some of the uses of special effects today: the engine would rush towards the camera, scaring an audience not accustomed to viewing images of moving trains at that angle and at such close quarters. The next two titles played a role similar to later newsreels shown before the main feature , or to contemporary world news and documentaries on, say, CNN or the Discovery Chanel. The last two titles were of the kind that - the filmmakers found - attracted the largest number of viewers: entertainment, fun and a rudimentary story. The proportion of such shorts quickly grew. SLOVAKIA 73 The first permanent movie theater in Bratislava, Elektro Bioskop, was opened in a remodeled fencing hall in September, 1905. It had about 200 seats. The site is still in business. After a hiatus, an arts movie theater was opened in the same hall in the 1970s and is still in operation, now called Mladost' ("Youth"), on Hviezdoslav Square opposite the US Embassy. Theaters, hotel halls, storage buildings and other premises were remodeled in other towns, to become permanent movie theaters. In the absence of hi-fi sound and hi-tech projection systems, the competition often relied on interior decoration. An advertisement for the Bratislava movie theatre Fidelio (later Urania and now Hviezda) lured the audience thus: "427 upholstered seats in 3 colors , Alhambrastyle walls decorated with Oriental landscapes, live and man-made flowers." The fact that the theater showed two new releases a week was relegated to the bottom of the page. Attendance at traditional theater performances dropped after the introduction of motion pictures. Theater directors appealed to the authorities to disallow movie shows during the time of regular plays. In 1901 , the Ministry of the Interior (in charge of police and local government in Central Europe) issued a decree meeting their demands . The Viscount of Nitra went so far as to ban movie shows during the whole theater season , but the local movie-theater operators successfully appealed his decision. For a time, film producers thought they could benefit from a symbiosis of film and theater in "cinema-sketches." Actors would play on the stage, then the story would be picked up on the screen with the same actors and the conclusion would be played by live actors again. One such cinema-sketch from 1909 depicted night life in Kosice "The Kosice Promenade on the Screen." Walking on Main Street in one's Sunday best was a common pastime before the advent of TV and mass entertainment. It was among the few early SLOVAKIA 74 motion pictures linked with Slovak territory. The limited production of cinema-sketches did not survive World War I and did not continue after the creation of Czecho-Slovakia (later renamed Czechoslovakia) in l 9 l 8 . Rather than cinema-sketches or story-based films , most of the early films linked to Slovakia were travel specials with titles like "The High Tatras," "Skiing in Tatranska Lomnica," "Traveling through the Vah Valley," or "The Kosice Institute of Corrections for Children," "Testing the Police Dogs in Bratislava," and news . Movies proved successful. The number of movie theaters in Slovakia reached about 100 by the end of World War I and two schools - the Mining Academy in Banska Stiavnica and a high school in Lucenec - had already used film as a teaching tool. When movies were still shown by traveling entrepreneurs, a copy of the film was bought and owned by them. With the establishment of permanent movie theaters, film distributors appeared, as well as a kind of 'film exchange' where copies of film were traded as on the stock market. The advent of copyright problems and foreign competition was heralded in 1913, in the first published complaint about illegal importation of foreign films , especially from France. As elsewhere in Central Europe, French films dominated the market. Legal power to regulate what movies were screened in Hungary was invested in the hands of the local authorities by a law from l 90 l , which required the traveling movie entrepreneurs to obtain permits for their shows . On the whole, a license was issued to anyone who applied for it. Local bans and complaints surfaced for a variety of reasons, including some familiar today. A city councilor in Kosice worried that worthless caper movies had a bad influence on boys, while dramas about sex ruined girls, be cause such movies extinguished their sense of morality and made SLOVAKIA 75 them vulnerable to unconscionable seducers. In 1912, a priest and principal of a Roman Catholic boys' school in Nitra threatened his students with a bad grade in behavior if they went to the movies, even if accompanied by their parents. His ban extended to traditional theater performances as well. Censorship was also exercised by the authorities in Budapest, the capital of the Kingdom, who were able to ban individual titles from being shown all over Hungary , including the Slovak counties. In line with the traditions of Central European monarchies, politics was among the reasons for censorship. Among the banned titles were "King Ludwig II," depicting a story too similar to the life and mysterious death of Ludwig II of Bavaria and a film offensive to the prime minister of Hungary. However, the Kingdom did not follow suit when the rest of the Habsburg monarchy introduced formal film censorship in 1912. Among other things, it required that a license to open a movie theater be issued to individuals and institutions that would secure a respectable use of the profits. Its intent was to support charities and various associations. Budapest adopted the law in Apri l of 1918, half a year be fore the defeat and collapse of Austria-Hungary and the founding of Czec ho-Slovakia. The law empowered the censors to ban films offending patriotic interests, public order and morality. Children under sixteen were allowed to see only movies designated as suitable for them and only when accompanied by an adult. Despite a variety of problems , Czecho-S lovakia proved to be more democratic than the former Kingdom of Hungary and the whole Habsburg monarchy. But the new freedom , which benefited other forms of Slovak culture, proved even more difficult for Slovak film than the post-communist period after 1989. The film industry developed in Prague, which had been an important German-Czech cultural center, a university town and capital of the 76 SLOVAKIA Holy Roman Empire's Kingdom of Bohemia for centuries, attracting business and artistic talent. By comparison, Slovakia's new capital and largest city, Bratislava, was much smaller; moreover, it was only forty miles from the former Habsburg monarchy's large, vibrant and influential capital of Vienna. Given that artists and entrepreneurs flocked to it from all over the monarchy, Vienna must have created a degree of artistic brain-drain in its immediate vicinity. As with the Pittsburgh Agreement of 1918, which was a key document in the separation of the Slovak counties from the Habsburg monarchy, Slovak-Americans had an impact on Slovakia's nascent film industry. Andrej Sustek from Chicago founded the Selig Company with the intent to make historical films in Slovakia. It was subsequently incorporated in the new Slovak-American Tatra Film Corporation with a capital of about $30,000 from US investors . Their first and only film was Janosfk. It captured the legend of an 18th-century highwayman from Terchova in the northern Slovak County of Orava who gave rise to Carpathian legends comparable to those about Robin Hood in England. In 1919 Tatra Film's Daniel and Jaroslav Siakel' arrived in Slovakia to start filming in their native village of Blatnica near Martin in Central Slovakia, where they also built sets, and in the castle of Stiavnicka near Ruzomberok. The leading role was given to popular Theodor Pistek, who starred in nine other films that year. Maria Fabryova, an amateur actress from Martin, played Anka, Janosfk's girlfriend. The film was finished in the A-B studios in Prague . The screenplay by Jozef Zak-Marusiak was to be based on a novel by Slovak-American author and editor of the popular Amerikansko-Slovcnske Noviny "(American-Slovak News)", Gustav Marsall-Petrovsky (1862-1916). But it was much closer to the ac- SLOVAKIA 77 tual local legends , which also inspired Slovak Romantic poets in the 19th century. Moreover, the play Janosfk - premiered in Brno in 1910 and written by Moravian playwright, poet and journalist Jiri Mahen - was well known by the l 920s and may have been a major source for the film's story . Janosfk was shown to the filmmakers' team in November 1921 in the city of Vrutky . It opened a few days later in Zilina and in December 1921 in Chicago - to be more specific , in Cicero, IL, then with a large Slovak-American population , at the Atlantic movie theater, now replaced by the Atlantic Mall at W. 26th St. and S. Pulaski Rd . The screenplay relied on the folk motif of ' taking from the rich and giving to the poor,' and greatly reinforced the hints present in 19th-century Slovak Romantic poems about Janosfk : the film fused feudal exploitation in the more distant past with the drive by the Magyar-speaking government in Budapest in the 19th century to suppress the Kingdom' s other languages and cultures . The latter became particularly forceful during the last decades of the Kingdom's existence and ultimately contributed to its demise. Unlike feudalism , that experience was still very fresh in people's memories and was among the reasons why Slovaks immigrated to the United States. By comparison to Czech films preserved from the early Czecho-Slovak period, Janosfk showed the authors' experience with American movies : in camera work, in the use of parallel narratives, as well as in shots inspired by Westerns . It had two directors of photography with two cameras: Oldrich Benes with a European camera and Daniel Siakel', who used a camera made by Andrej Sustek's company in Chicago. In effect, the two cameramen shot two parallel films - scenes were acted separately for each camera and the difference between the "Slovak" and "American" versions increased after separate editing. But the film's handling of the eth- 78 SLOVAKIA nic motif may have been too didactic, or the issue too recent to be successfully mythologized as entertainment on the silver screen. Janosik did not recover its costs and remained Tatra Film's only product, as well as Slovakia' s first preserved silent movie. It was thought to have been lost, but in 1975 it was discovered and restored from both versions by Ivan Rumanovsky in Bratislava. Until after World War II, attempts to set up film companies, occasionally with Slovak-American involvement, followed the same path. One film would be made and then the company folded, because the film was not profitable and the company lacked sufficient capital to sustain it through a few flops. The situation did not change after the emergence of sound in the movies. While about 30-50 sound films were made each year in Czechoslovakia between 1933 - 1938, fewer than one a year was in Slovak. Czech films occasionally featured Slovak actors. Among them, with eleven musicals to his credit, was Frantisek Kristof Vesely, who reached the level of stardom in Czechoslovakia. Documentaries fared better: partly because the costs were lower and partly thanks to occasional government funding for shorts featuring its officials. For example, Kvetna nedela vo Vajnoroch (Palm Sunday in Yajnory) recorded a folkloristic celebration of the holiday attended by Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia, Vavro Srobar. A potentially steady source of funding opened up in 1935 when Prague decided that each newsreel commonly shown before the main feature had to devote at least 20% of its length to items about Czechoslovakia. But this so urce remained untapped by Slovak filmmakers : most of the reports came from Bohemia and Moravia. However, government or institutional funding and fascination with village life proved to be a mix that worked for filmmakers in Slovakia on more than one occasion, right through the present. SLOVAKIA 79 The first Slovak film to reach international acclaim relied on both. The potential of the Slovak countryside as a backdrop had already been discovered by non-native filmmakers and at least two of their films have become classics of world cinema. The early German horror Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu the Vampire) directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was filmed at Orava Castle and in the High Tatras in 1922, and Czech director Gustav Machaty chose Slovakia as a location for his daring exploration of sexuality Extase (Ecstasy) in 1932. The second one propelled the career of Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiester), who became one of the most successful Hollywood stars. The Matica slovenska (by that time an eminent, mostly government-sponsored cultural, academic and archival institution) employed Karel Plicka (1894-1987) as its ethnographer, who was able to make documentary shorts from about 1926. He obtained funding from the President's Office in 1928 to produce an hourlong documentary about village life Po horach, po dolach (Through Mountains and Valleys). It was awarded a Gold Medal at the International Exposition of Photographic Art in Florence and received an Honorable Mention at the International Venice Film Festival in 1932. The favorable reception of his production, along with more funding from both the Matica slovenska and the President's Office, enabled Plicka to make Zem spieva (The Earth Sings) in 1933, a romanticized semi-documentary panorama of selected folk customs through the four seasons. Unlike Slovak feature movies of that period, Zem spieva struck a chord with the audience and topped it with another award at the International Venice Film Festival as part of a collection of films from Czechoslovakia that included Extase, mentioned above. But after this success, the Matica s/ovcnska was unable to raise sufficient funding and Plicka's hopes that he was laying the foundations of 80 SLOVAKIA Slovakia' s film industry were thwarted. He went on to make a documentary in the United States Za Slovakmi od New Yorku po Mississippi (Tracing Slovaks from New York to the Mississippi) in 1937 and then became a professor in the first Department of Film in Czechoslovakia and the third such department in Europe, at the School of Artistic Crafts in Bratislava in 1938. But the Department's potential for Slovak cinema was lost when the College was closed after Slovakia became a separate country in 19 39 . Plicka then resettled permanently in Prague, Bohemia, which was incorporated into the Third Reich during World War II. Czechoslovakia's only other Slovak-language blockbuster before World War II was a new Janosfk in 1935, funded from Prague and directed by the Czech Martin Frie (1902-1968). It was indicative of the volume of Czech film production that Frie finished three other films during the same year, having previously directed 23. Frie and Plicka were two of the authors of the screenplay based on the same play by Mahen, mentioned earlier, on which the first Janosfk may have been based. Plicka also found a policeman and amateur actor, Pal'o Bielik (1910-1983), in the village of Senica for the leading role. The film combined idealized images of villagers with action scenes to show their and Jan osik ' s resistance against Hungarian landlords. In spite of Budapest's protestations, it was screened at the International Venice Film Festival and was successfully released in Germany . During the existence of the Slovak Republic ( 1939-1945), movie theaters grew by more than 60% but no feature films were made. The government sponsored the film company Nastup (Line-up), which produced short films and weekly newsreels . The authorities, who described their own rule as "authoritarian and totalitarian," mandated that a newsreel be shown before every feature film and tightened censorship and ideological supervision of SLOVAKIA 81 their production. The newsreel was customarily followed by a short film, a pattern that was picked up by the communist authorities after the war and survived through the collapse of Communism. The government's alliance with Germany meant that it became Slovakia's main source of films even before the war changed world trade patterns. At the same time, the number of imports dropped from about 400 a year in the former CzechoSlovakia (whose original hyphenated name was restored in 1938) to less than 150 after independence. In 1940, Slovakia still imported 15 "cultural-educational" films from the U.S., and a few more from countries other than Germany, but then German feature films were supplemented by just about a dozen films from Italy and Romania, and several Czech "oldies" from before the war. The film company Nastup was conscientious about training its employees, among whom was Pal'o Bielik, and sent them regularly to several studios in Germany as interns - including to neighboring Vienna and formerly Czechoslovak Prague, which were now ruled from Berlin. After World War II, Slovakia was re-joined with the Czechspeaking lands and Czech director Martin Frie returned to make Vanij. .. ! (Beware ... !) with folkloristic highlights similar to his successful Janosfk from 1935. The film was based on Ivan Stodola' s popular play Bacova iena (The Shepherd's Wife) and Palo Bielik played the leading role again . Things changed dramatically after Czechoslovakia became communist in 1948. The government nationalized all but the tiniest companies, including the film studios. It saw film as an important medium to indoctrinate the population and ideological control - under strict financed film production in the Slovak, as well as in the Czech part of the country. Directors, screenwriters, actors and other people connected with film production became SLOVAKIA 82 state employees as everyone else, with a regular salary regardless of how many films were produced and whether they earned any profits or not - a concept born out of communist accounting. Although the authorities paid the salaried filmmakers more money for the films they made - separate contracts were signed for each one - from the American perspective, this was closer to bonuses than anything known in Hollywood today. The "bonuses" were higher for films considered particularly effective in showing the communist rule as benefiting the population and had nothing to do with ticket sales. The authorities mandated that the method used in all art be socialist realism. In general, its goal was to educate people to the benefits of communism and, before it was reached , socialism, which was what they called their existing political system. This was strictly enforced, especially in fiction and film, because these mediums reached the widest audience. The topics were to emphasize the need to work for the good of the 'collective,' i.e., communist society. Topics focusing on the individual and on personal feelings and concerns were deemed harmful, as was depicting anything negative about society. Love was considered such a topic: not only because it was personal and, therefore, did not educate the audience about the benefits of working on behalf of the collective, but also because it may have brought sex into the story, a definite 'no' in socialist realism. The official support of socialist-realist art and the transformation of filmmakers into salaried employees meant that a steady stream of feature films began to appear in the newly-established studios in Bratislava. Pal'o Bielik, the former star of Janosfk, who expanded his moviemaking experience in the newsreel studios during World War II, directed Vicic dicry (Wolves' Lairs), one of the first two films made after the communist takeover in 1948. It SLOVAKIA 83 was the beginning of a succession of films about the 1944 antiGerman uprising in Slovakia, but because it was made so early during the Communist Party ' s drive to establish ideological dominance, the film still managed to include 'negative,' as well as 'positive' characters among both the Slovak insurgents and the German soldiers suppressing the uprising - something that did not get past the censors again for more than a decade. Bielik, as director, leaned away from the folkloristic style of the films in which he starred: the style of V/cie diery was inspired by early Italian neo-realism. After two feature films in 1948 and another two in 1949, the yearly output grew to 3-6 per year in the 1950s. 'Negative' characters could not be central in the plots, and the story had to prove them wrong. Central characters had to be 'positive' from the start or be seen discovering Marxist-Leninist solutions to any problems they encountered. Such problems had to be few and marginal, the general view of society had to be happy. If the central characters were not Communists from the start, a 'tutor' and Communist Party member would often be present, who helped them find the Marxist-Leninist way. Topics commonly dealt with World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany, or with the imposition of Communism - the 'collectivization' of farms, i.e., the abolition of private ownership of most land larger than the immediate surroundings of one's house and garden. Farmers were to be shown as opening their eyes to the fact that this was actually good for them. The Communists proclaimed a classless society, which meant that everyone would eventually become a 'worker.' The three recognized social groups were the laborers, the farmers, and the intelligentsia, i.e., white-collar workers and college-educated people, but the Communist Party officials, although working in offices, classified themselves as laborers. The bourgeoisie, 84 SLOVAKIA i.e. , the private entrepreneurs, disappeared by virtue of their property being 'nationalized,' i.e., taken over by the government, but the - now former - bourgeoisie were persecuted never- theless . The intelligentsia was often suspected of harboring bourgeois ideas and persecuted, too . Since the bourgeoisie were often described as incapable of shedding their reactionary, i.e. anti-Communist skins, films about contemporary life generally focused on the villages and farmers. Marxism-Leninism saw in them the ' next best class' after the laborers, on their way to becoming agricultural laborers . Their initial qualms about any benefits of collectivization provided some meager source of conflict for the plots. The films about the past often returned to the uprising in Slovakia during World War II, which was depicted as organized by the Communists and aided by the Soviet Union. Plots that concerned the communist period had to end on an optimistic note. Since a former entrepreneur always remained at least suspect, their joyful transformation into a group auxiliary to the working class was essentially unacceptable as a topic, which - in effect - also kept town s and cities away from most of the scripts. Even socialist-realist authors felt that a ccnflict drives a story, but avoided settings that did not provide for politically acceptable conflicts . Socialist realism was strongly enforced during the first 10-15 years of communism . Unlike neighboring Poland and Hungary, communist Czechoslovakia saw little of the ideological thaw triggered by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism in February of l 956. The thaw did not reach Czechoslovakia until the early l 960s, during which time Bratislava produced 6- l O feature film s per year, and the first manifestations of the thaw in literature and film came from Slovakia. After more than a decade of socialist- 85 SLOVAKIA realist filmmaking, Sinko v sieti (The Sun in a Net) directed by Stefan Uher (1930-1993) in 1962 became a milestone in both Slovak and Czech filmmaking. It inspired a whole generation of students at the Film Academy in Prague, who soon followed with a series of films which attained international recognition as the "Czech New Wave." Sinko v sieti was Stefan Uher's second film . His first was about the life of a group of fifteen year-old students and their school My z deviate) A (We from Grade 9, Study Group A; 1961). The screenwriter, Alfonz Bednar (1914-1989), was a successful writer who published mildly non-conformist fiction somewhat earlier than most other authors. The film is based on his three short stories Fajolov prfspevok (Fajolo's Contribution), Pon- t6novy deii (Pontoon Day) and Zlata brana (Golden Gate). Uher's film depicted a number of hitherto unacceptable social and political themes : distant - perhaps uncaring - parents, a philandering husband, teenagers changing partners, an attempt at suicide, a poorly-run collectivized farm , and the requirement that a child attend summer 'voluntary work camps ' to make up for his parents belonging to the intelligentsia. Moreover, none of these issues were resolved in a 'positive' manner. The ending was rather somber, if not depressing, with the barest hint of optimism found only in the last sentence and possibly on the film's symbolic level, which was handled rather unevenly. It attempted a complex interplay of sun and clouds, vision and blindness, truth and lies, centered around a solar eclipse (Central Europe actually experienced a 95% solar eclipse on the morning of February 15, 196 l ). Contemporary critics found the symbolism difficult to decipher, and much of it was probably lost on the viewers. But the core story line - the ups and downs in the relationship of two teenagers - the realism and novelty of its urban setting, and the 86 SLOVAKIA hints at some social and political taboos were not lost on the audience and cannot have been lost on the censors. Sinko v sieti not only pushed the envelope, but also established for other artists and showed to the Slovaks and Czechs at large what the authorities could now be pushed to permit. According to Uher, Karol Bacflek, the head of the Communist Party in Slovakia at that time, attacked the film, saying it contained coded messages that conspirators were able to decipher precisely. For example, Bacflek thought the solar eclipse . was to indicate the twilight of communism and the pontoon on the dried-up riverbed stood for the state of communist rule in Czechoslovakia at that time. Communist officials believed that the blind mother was supposed to symbolize the blindness of their Party, which did not see the realities of life under communism. Because a political thaw had begun in Slovakia, other communist officials with enough influence dared to differ and the film was released. Besides Stefan Uher's efforts to get past the strict requirements of socialist realism, the director was inspired by some of the trends current in Western European cinema and culture in the 1950s. Among them was his focus on the symbolism of light and darkness, adherence to a low-key style, a hint of fashi0nablc quasi-existentialism in Fajolo's dialogues with Bela, and an attempt at serious cinema-verite: in the beer-drinking scenes in .1 tavern, the background soundtrack includes taped unscripted conversations of real villagers. Uher mostly chose inexperienced actors or nonactors. Only one of them, I.:,ubo Roman in a supporting role (b . 1944, then a student of acting), became a successful actor, theater administrator, and ultimately a politician - Member of Parlia- ment, Minister of Culture, and since 2001, County Chief of Bratislava. Actual music in the film included Western rock played on SLOVAKIA 87 the radio. The film's score was by llja Zeljenka, an avant-garde composer of 'concrete music.' While Slnko v sieti became a prologue to the first minimalist, quasi-realist, and eventually more experimental Czechoslovak New Wave made by film students in Prague, in Slovakia the film was followed by several increasingly critical social commentaries by established filmmakers , by more films about contemporary urban life, and by increasingly intellectual and abstract films seen as Art. The most daring among the films that replaced socialist realism with social criticism was Peter Solan's Prfpad Barnabas Kos (The Case of Barnabas Kos; 1964), which removed the veil from arbitrary decision-making in communist society. Among contemporary topics, a potential for an approachable and successful film was lost with Nylonovy mesiac (Nylon Moon; 1965) directed by Eduard Greener. Its story, as well as the title came from a novel by Jaroslava Blazkova published in 1960, the first best-seller about contemporary life since the communist takeover. But there was entertainment in film , too, none more popular than Janosik II directed in 1963 by Pal'o Bielik, the star in the previous version of the story. In spite of its title, it was not a sequel: the film re-told the centuries-old legend. The theme of the brigand hero retains its attraction through the present day. Slovakia 's most successful producer, Rudolf Bierman, is currently producing The True Story al Janosfk and Uhorcfk, directed by the success[ul Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland and her daughter Kasia Adamik with an estimated budget of $2.4 million, $800,000 of which came from the Slovak Parliament and the Ministry of Culture. The first film to earn an Oscar for Czechoslovakia was Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street; 1965; Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1966; Special Mention for Acting 88 SLOVAKIA Performance, Cannes Film Festival 1965; New York Film Critics Circle A ward for Best Foreign Film in 1966). It was co-directed by Slovak Jan Kadar and Czech Elmar Klos , who had directed films together since the 1950s. Their earlier film was the groundbreaking Smrt' sa vola Engelchen (Death is Called Engelchen, 1963) based on a novel by Ladislav Mnacko, which diverted from the communist interpretation of the 1944 uprising in Slovakia as infallibly glorious and showed some aspects that brought about human tragedy. Along similar lines, Obchod na korze placed the politics of World War II in the background and focused on the dead-end street faced by many in Central Europe during the deportations of the Jews to German concentration camps . After the introduction of anti-Jewish laws in Slovakia, a simple carpenter named Tona is made the owner of a tiny haberdashery, until then owned by an old, almost deaf Jewish woman named Rozalia who has no comprehension of the contemporary political developments. After a crisis, the local Jewish community begins to pay Tono not to surrender his ownership, to prevent Rozalia 's store from being passed on to a ruthless Aryanizer. A tender friendship develops between Tono and Rozalia: she keeps selling buttons without realizing Tana's legal status, and he becomes her man about the house. When deportations begin, Roz.ilia remains oblivious of real life, and Tona is faced with the choice between sending her off, or probably facing his own and his wife ' s death, if he were discovered trying to hide a person incapable of understanding why she should live in hiding. The film starred Slovak Jozef Kroner ( 1924-1998) and Polish Ida Kaminska ( 1899-1980) with a Slovak cast and was shot on location in the town of Trebisov, Eastern Slovakia, and in the Prague studios. The film presents its captivating, morally complex story in a straightforward style, with a sprinkling of symbolism and dream SLOVAKIA 89 sequences. It was an indication of changes in the political climate that Obchod na korze was able to get away without the mandated focus on criticism of the Slovak authorities during World War II , previously an inevitable feature of socialist realist work about that period, as well as without highlighting a central, resolute procommunist character. It has remained the most awarded and internationally successful Slovak film to the present day . The late l 960s reflected the direction filmmaking may take with little censorship and steady funding . An increasing number of - especially younger - filmmakers took advantage of the situation to experiment without concern about a need to target a specific audience or about how large their audience was going to be. They enjoyed the same creative luxury as the writers or painters convinced of the significance of their work, who manage to earn their living elsewhere. In a democratic society, this is rarely the case in cinema because of the extraordinary amounts of money even a low-budget film requires. But during the occasional relaxation of control in communist countries while the principles of the system remained in place, filmmakers were given substantial fund s to make films relatively free from prescription , as well as of a need to bring in profit. An early nonconformist film seen mostly by students in art theaters was Stefan Uher's Panna zazracnica (The Miraculous Virgin, 1966), soon followed by Juraj Jakubisko's (b. 1938) Kristove roky ("Christ's Years" or "Crucial Years," 1967), Elo Havetta's Slavnost' v botanickej zahrade (A Celebration in the Botanical Garden, 1969), and Dusan Hanak's 322 (the number identifying cancer in medical statistics of diseases, l 969). During this period (however brief) of almost total collapse of communist control, the Koliba Film Studio in Bratislava co-produced films with avantgarde filmmakers from abroad. Jerzy Skolimowski from Poland, 90 SLOVAKIA whose government was then significantly more repressive than Czechoslovakia, directed one story in Dialog 20-40-60, along with Czech Zbynek Brynych and Slovak Peter Solan in 1968 . Frenchman Alain Robbe-Grillet directed two films, including Mui, ktory Jute (The Man Who Lies, L 'homme qui ment; codirected with Martin Holly in 1968) with a Slovak and French cast. And 1969 saw the release of Juraj Jakubisko's Vtackovia, siroty a blazni (Birds, Orphans and Fools), considered by most Slovaks to be the best Slovak film. Jakubisko's preferences bounce between experiment, abstraction and ambitious intellectualism, as in this film , and less numerous popular crowd-pleasers. "Birds, Orphans and Fools" had the briefest of theater run s, not because of the audience, but because of the authorities. Conceived when communist control was at its weakest in Czechoslovakia, it was completed well after the Soviet-led invasion in August of 1968, by which time many of the mechanisms of authoritarian rule were at work again. Vtackovia, siroty a blazni takes place in an apparent historical vacuum in a desolate world with war raging somewhere outside the camera's field of vision and the director's focus. The two male and one female central characters , not unlike some of the hippies in the U.S.A. <1.t that time, live in a decrepit apartment, go through a series of bizarre encounters, sexual experiences and discuss a range of topics. When their lives begin to appear closer to normalcy, one of them murders the girl and commits suicide. The film is deliberately ex perimental in its style: it varies screen sizes, shots are taken at awkward angles with a hand-held or agitated camera, distortion lenses alter screen images, filmmakers ' equipment remains in the frame, characters talk to the camera. The adjectives surrealist and post-apocalyptic are perhaps representative of the filmmakers' intent. SLOVAKIA The 1970s witnessed a re-introduction 91 of strict communist control in Czechoslovakia, called normalization . People were demoted at work or fired, if they had expressly supported the relaxation in the late 1960s or denounced the Soviet-led invasion in 1968, and their children often suffered, too. In an effort to a void repercussions, many repudiated their past views. Although persecution was somewhat milder in Slovakia than in the Czech-speaking areas, it had a stifling effect on art. Gone were the efforts of the 1960s to push the envelope of what was allowed. The population at large had learned its lesson : with the help of the Soviet Union, the Communists were able to pull the whole country back from unprecedented freedom of expression and the brink of a multi-party system in 1968 to a situation more reminiscent of the late 1950s, and those who resisted were punished. This repression lasted at least through the late 1970s, and Czechoslovakia remained more politically backward , although with a better standard of living, than Communist Poland or Hungary until the collapse of communism in 1989 . Cinema was affected like the rest of society, while the number of film releases grew. Slovakia produced 8-12 films per year throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Jakubisko still managed to finish Dovidenia v pek/e, priatelia (See You in Hell, Friends) in 1970, but hardly anyone saw it. The film was banned and Jakubisko was not allowed to make another feature film until 1979 . Although the early 1970s are sometimes compared to the 1950s, the authorities did not demand that Slovak filmmakers make socialist-realist films critical of the period of relaxation - the way films in the 1950s tried to discredit private enterprise and democracy which were abolished in 1948. Only one film was made about 1968, Honicka (Fever) directed by Martin Holly, Jr. (b. 1931) and based on a novel by Jozef Kot. In a country with 92 SLOVAKIA freedom of expression, the film could have been perceived as just focusing on a relatively plausible plot from 1968 and pushing a particular point of view - there indeed were people who did not support the pro-democratic reforms, or saw many flaws among the reformers. But under totalitarian control, which did not allow opposing points of view, it was impossible to distinguish the touting of the official view in film from just propaganda. Regardless, Honicka shared the destiny of the overwhelming majority of Slovak and Czech films produced during the forty years of Communism: after a couple of weeks in mostly empty theaters, it was not seen again . While the 1960s witnessed a desire to bring contemporary and urban themes to film, the 1970s began to solidify an inclination among a segment of the Slovak critics and filmmakers to emulate the centuries-old urban fashion in Europe of the 'return to nature:' well educated intellectuals living in Bratislava make and admire films with images of the countryside and villagers whose lives appear to be somehow more authentic than in towns. The trend-setter was the still admired hour-long documentary Obrazy stareho sveta (Pictures of the Old World, 1972) directed by Dusan Hanak who, suspicious to the authorities because of his films from the 1960s, found an early refuge in a topic sufficiently removed from big politics to survive in the margins of official production and yet, sufficiently non-conforn1ist and enamored with village life to please especially the chic audiences. Part of its additional attraction within the context of Communist Czechoslovakia rested in the fact that it offered snapshots from the lives of several highlanders, whose very existence belied the official claims of equal wealth for everyone. But Obrazy stareho sveta has a much more universal appeal and has received critical acclaim from Slovakia, Switzerland and France to Toronto and Los Angeles. SLOVAKIA 93 A singular exception among about 90 domestic feature films that briefly flickered in Slovak theaters in the 1970s was Dusan Hanak's Ruto ve sny (Rosy Dreams, 1976). Although its style was poetic, it may have been the first film in the communist bloc with a de-romanticized portrayal of the Roma (Gypsies). It dove into the cultural barriers between them and the non-Romany population - an issue that, twenty years later, proved to be one of the key problems of post-communist societies in Central Europe. Two teenagers - a young Slovak postman and a Romany girl - fall in love. The film tells the viewers that it will not work due to different cultural expectations each of the two have of their budding relationship. Its imaginative filmmaking and affecting, slightly sentimental story might have been easy to understand and appreciate by a wider audience, but Rutove sny was shown only in limited release at the order of the authorities. The most popular film in that decade was yet another variation on the legend about a heroic highwayman Pacho, hybskf z bojnfk (Pacho, the Highwayman of Hybe; 1975) directed by Martin Tapak. In 1980, the authorities shelved fa milujem, ty milujes (I Love, You Love) directed by Dusan Hanak because of its focus on marginal social groups and eroticism. When it was released shortly before the collapse of communism, it received the highest international recognition for a Slovak film since The Shop on Main Street, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. However, the strict Communist control typical of the 1970s began to relax slowly, and the early 1980s brought two domestic blockbusters whose role in Slovak culture finally matched that of some of the films in the l 960s. In 1982 Stefan Uher directed Pas/a kone na bet6ne ("She. Grazed Horses on Concrete," or "A Ticket to Heaven"). The title used the first few words from an irreverent tune with just a few verses depicting impossible acti- 94 SLOVAKIA vities - the song continues " ... she bathed in razor blades." The story is about a single mother fending for herself in an East Slovak village, determined not to allow her teenaged daughter to follow in her footsteps . Partly a comedy and partly a candid portrayal of contemporary village life, it oscillates between humorous depictions of social customs and ceremonies, and the more serious issues of a woman's capacity to hold her own in a small community, and of abortion. Although co-written and directed by Uher, the film is largely the work of Milka Zirnkova, an author and actress, who wrote the original story, worked with Uher on the script, and starred in the leading role. Among the novelties in Slovak moviemaking was an extensive use of the East Slovak dialect in the film. Although Slovak has several highly recognizable regional accents, filmmakers - before and after this film - have the actors speak the standard, neutral variety of Slovak common in the news media, regardless of where in Slovakia the story of their film takes place. A success comparable to the handful of foreign blockbusters permitted by the authorities each year was Juraj Jakubisko's Tisfcrocna vce/a (A Thousand-Year Old Bee;l983). It is a 162-minute long saga of the life of a farmer's family covering three generations from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. It picked up on and reinforced a myth recurrent in Slovak cinema for several decades, in films from both popular and artsy filmmakers . Villagers are mostly good, while those who live in or move to town (perhaps the screenwriters and directors bowed to communist authorities) become entrepreneurial and tum out to be cold and corrupt. It was the first Slovak film with a comprehensive narrative that a large number of viewers were ready to perceive as their national, as well as local and family past, because it echoed themes they had encountered in literature and history classes at school. SLOVAKIA 95 Moreover, it was a comforting past. The title was a parable, overplayed in the film with brief expensive special effects with a gigantic honey-bee created in the Bavarian Film Studios in Munich . Those sequences hammered in the symbolic thread in the storyline. They could have been be richer and more content, the film gave the viewers to understand, were it not for the cumulative effects of past injustice: the fruits of their hard-working ancestors' labor was periodically taken away from them for a thousand years, like honey from the bees. But as long as they stayed in the villages, they were an honest, sometimes whimsical bunch doing as well as they could . It helped that several popular actors starred in the film, including Jozef Kr6ner (Tona in The Shop on Main Street). Tisicrosmi vce/a received a Gold Phoenix for art and cinematography from the Cultural Center of the City of Venice awarded in tandem with the prestigious International Venice Film Festival. After decades of government-funded and censored production, Bratislava still produced twelve films in 1990, the year after the collapse of Communism. With no censorship, but also hardly any funding, the number of feature films ranged between one and three for most of the 1990s. Slovakia's theaters are now flooded with foreign , especially American, films and while the population might be ready for a domestic production addressing them specifically, perhaps along the lines of A Thousand-Year Old Bee, there is not enough money for a film on that scale, and perhaps even less interest on the part of the filmmakers . With one exception, the films made in the 1990s generally follow one of two thematic lines . The most successful film was Fontana pre Zuzanu 2 (A Fountain for Susan 2; 1993) directed by Dusan Rapos as a sequel to his more sedate Fontana pre Zuzanu from 1985, still limited by communist censorship. He released Fontana pre Zuza- 96 SLOVAKIA nu 3 in 1999. Both fall in the group of films with contemporary themes and are obviously interested in generating ticket sales. They rely on sex and crime to achieve that. Although it remained behind major foreign blockbusters , Fontana pre Zuzanu 2 sold 380,000 tickets in a country with 5.4 million inhabitants, which is comparable to a film that brings in over $130 million in the U.S.A. Titanic sold about 550,000 tickets in Slovakia and The Matrix 130,000. Another film with a contemporary theme is indicative of how times have changed since the collapse of communism. Rivers of Babylon (the tile is in English) directed by Vladimir Balco in 1998 was based on the first post-communist bestseller in l 990 by Peter Pistanek. Sequels of the novel had lower sales, because the novelty of the topic - Bratislava's underworld - and expressive presentation wore off, and because they had to compete with a growing number of translated foreign bestsellers. However, the filmmakers picked up on a particular aspect of the sequels vitriolic political commentary . The story of the rise of a skillful stoker and wheeler-dealer to political power was seen as a parable of the government in Bratislava at that time. Only about eight years earlier, a release of such a strongly critical film would have been either unthinkable, or a major event attracting huge crowds . Yet, Rivers of Babylon sold only 50,000 tickets and met with a lukewarm reception abroad. The other thematic line in contemporary Slovak cinema is the 'return to nature. ' Its main protagonist is director Martin Sulfk (b . 1962) whose films generally attract fewer viewers at home than Rivers of Babylon, but are favored by critics and have attained a degree of viewers' acclaim at film festivals organized by European cities. His most successful Zahrada (Garden; l 995), the earlier Neha (Tenderness ; 199 l ), as well as the more recent Orbis SLOVAKIA 97 Pictus (Latin title, 1997) and Krajinka ("Landscape" or "A Small piece of the Country," 2000) are intellectualized continuations of the theme of the desirability of a return to, journey through, or life in a rural setting. Krajinka is the most accessible of Sulfk ' s films . Although it may be based on memories, as the opening sequence suggests, the discrete stories are not made to gel into a cohesive sequence for the audience. But each is readable on its own. Zahrada, the first Slovak film since the collapse of communism to be released abroad , and especially Orbis Pictus, break with traditional story-telling and show the main characters - a rather passive adult man living with his parents in Zahrada and a young girl released from a boarding school , perhaps for abandoned teenagers, in Orbis Pictus - find education in nature and disappointment in urban settings . With surreal scenes, philosophizing scripts, and a dedication to the filmmaker's expressive whim, Sulfk 's films re-package the theme of national rural bliss, recurrent in Slovak culture and education , in a form palatable for trendy audiences. The theme has had an incessant, powerful attraction for a segment of directors since the beginnings of filmmaking in Slovakia, whether they have leaned towards the popular and mythologizing approach from The Earth Sings 1933, through the decades of films about Janosik and similar productions, to The Thousand-Year Old Bee - or whether they take the approach aimed at art theaters, traceable to Organ directed by Stefan Uher in 1964. Due to the general drop in film production and to Martin Sulik ' s capacity to attract funding, films for art theatres have become more prevalent in the 1990s than in the earlier decades . SLOVAKIA 98 Bibliography Author's interview with film producer Marian Urban, July 12, 2000. "Bandit pie to shoot." Daily Variety, March 7, 2002, p. 48. Bartosek, L.: Nas film - Kapitoly z dejin (1896-1945). Praha: Mlada fronta, 1985. Grega, A. : Prfspevok k dejinam slovenskej kinematografie, M.A. thesis at the FAMU in Prague,1968 . Havelka, J.: Kronika naseho filmu. Praha: Filmovy ustav, 1967. Macek, V.: Stefan Uher 1930-1993. Bratislava: Slovensky filmovy ustav, 1994. Macek, V. and J. Pastekova: Dejiny slovenskej kinematografie. Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Osveta, 1997. Mihalik, P. : Vznik slovenskej narodnej kinematografie 1896- 1948. Bratislava: Kabinet divadla a filmu SA V, 1994 . Rumanovsky, I.: "Z najstar.sfch dejfn kinematografie na Slovensku. " Panorama, #3, 1977. Janosik 21 a filmove podnikanie na Slovensku. Kinema, #3, 1982 . Slivka, M.: Karol Plicka - basnik obrazu. Martin: Vydavatel'stvo Osveta, 1982. Smatlakova, Renata: Katal6g slovenskych celovecemych filmov 1921-1999. Bratislava: Slovensky filmovy ustav, l 999. Young, C.: The films of Hedy Lamarr. Secaucus, N.J. : Citadel Press, 1978. DOCUMENTATION  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Trends in 20th Century Slovak Filmmaking Description An account of the resource Martin Votruba Slovakia, Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003 pp. 71-98 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Votruba, Martin Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 name https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/0226d0dbb8be61341c5316e246bbf441.pdf 2c82293e937a7c62570f891dc067525c PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA IOI DOCUMENTATION: Sketches from a Slovak Catholic Parish in Pittston, PA [1900] by Matus Jankola (Translated by M. Mark Stolarik) 1 A nice, transparent picture is what you wish, I know. 2 However, that will be impossible. It is very difficult to write something short and interesting about our life here. I would, indeed, like to present you with something short, but our American conditions 'The Rev. Matus Jankola (1872, Budapest - 1916. Bridgeport, CT) was one of the most important leaders of Slovak Catholics in America. He emigrated to the USA with his family in 1893 and was consecrated a priest in 1895. He then served his people in Slovak parishes in Pittston. Wilkes-Barre and. from 1907 to his death in Bridgeport. Connecticut. A strong Slonk nationalist. Jankola served for a while as president of the First Catholic Slovak Union. he founded the Society of Slovak Priests in the USA. and. most important of all. the teaching order of the Sisters of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Danville, PA. When World War I broke out Jankola supported the destruction of Austria-Hungary and the creation of a federal Czccho-Slovak Republic. I have translated into English and reprinted his article on ··crty z katolfckcj slovcnskcj farnosti v Pit tston , PA", Tovary.{stvo. III (Rufombcrok. Slovakia. 1900). 301-05 for the benefit of our readers because it contains very valuable observations and insights into the early life of Slovak-Americans. For more on Jankola's life sec Jozef Pauco, Matiis Janka/a. kifoz a n.iroclovec (Danville. PA. 1959). ' Jankola wrote this article in response to a request from the Rev. Frantisek Richard Osvald. publisher and editor of Tovary.sstvo. �SLOVAKIA 102 could fill the entire issue of Tovary(stvo; nevertheless I will leave space for people more important than me. I would also like to reassure our nervous Lords I in Hungary I that they will find nothing "American" in my article which should cause them to worry. The Immense Size of the United States. With your permission I will begin with Adam and Eve, because I cannot do otherwise. The United States are truly strange with its people, customs, with its climate and untold wealth, and immense size. It is as far from New York to San Francisco as it is across the Atlantic Ocean-three days by train . If we were to compare this huge republic with Hungary , the former would be like a large, fat cat, and the latter like a mouse. For instance, Johnson 's Universal Encyclopedia gives the following statistics: the United States (including Alaska) covers 3,595 ,000 square miles whereas Hungary covers only 125,000 square miles. The state of Texas is composed of 265,780 square miles , while Austria-Hungary comprises only 264,204 square miles . Thus, the United States is 28 1/2 times larger than Hungary. Approximately a quarter of a million Slovaks live all over this huge country, and my parish is but a tiny dot. Slovak oases. One can find Slovaks all over the United States, especially in commercial and industrial cities. Our colonies resemble oases in the Sahara. They arc especially noticeable in the coal regions of Pennsylvania. The vast majority of our people work in the soft and hard coal mines. So, for instance, one will find Slovaks in the 150-milc stretch from Carbondale all the way to Shamokin , in the finest hard-coal region of the world. Some of the scams of coal arc up to twenty-five feet thick! This area is full of breakers sitting on mine shafts . It is the "Eldorado" of coal , and it employs upwards of 80,000 workers. Fifteen years ago you could count the number of Slovaks here on your fingers, today �SLOVAKIA 103 there are thousands. They are well-organized into 200 branches of fraternal-benefit societies, twelve Roman Catholic parishes, an equal number of Greek Catholic ones, and four Lutheran parishes. The Diocese of Scranton. It is the most "Slovak" of all dioceses in America, with JO Slovak parishes served by eight Roman Catholic priests, and an equal number of Greek Catholics . We Roman Catholics also have our own schools, but not everywhere. The Greek Catholic priests , on the other hand , do not care about having their own schools. We have Roman Catholic parishes in the following towns and cities: in Oliphant (founded in 1889) under the patronage of the Holy Ghost, with a filial parish in Jessup (founded in I 896) under the patronage of St. Michael; in Scranton (founded in 1895) under the patronage of the Holy Family; in Plymouth (founded in 1886) under the patronage of St. Stephen the King; in Wilkes-Barre (founded in 1895) under the patronage of the Sacred Heart of Jesus; in Freeland (founded in 1893) under the patronage of St. John Ncpomuccnc; in Nanticoke (founded in I 888) under the patronage of St. Joseph; in Hazleton (founded in I 883) under the patronage of St. Joseph; in Pittston (founded in 1894) under the patronage of St. John the Baptist, with a filial parish in Maltby (founded in 1895) under the patronage of the Holy Trinity. At the moment we arc building a church dedicated to Sts. Cyril and Mcthodius as a filial of Plymouth. The author of this article organized the parishes in WilkesBarre and Maltby . Pittston and Other Matters. In the northern portion of Luzerne County (each county has a court house which can impose the death penalty) is a beautiful valley drained by the Susquehanna River, which resembles the Yah river at Koma.mo . The valley is approximately 20 miles long and two miles wide. It �SLOVAKIA 104 contains the best coal, and boasts 40 breakers ; The breakers and the mines below them are owned by small and large corporations . Various nationalities work here: Slovaks, Poles , Lithuanians, Italians; the Irish , Scots and Welsh are regarded as Americans, since they speak English, and our people do not. This "Wyoming Valley" has 130,000 inhabitants. Its most important cities arc Wilkes-Barre, with 60,000 people , Pittston with 15 ,000 , Nanticoke and Plymouth with 12,000. We Slovaks number more than 8,000. Surrounding these cities, as chicks s urround their mother hens, arc scattered the various villages and "places" where most of our countrymen live, because the housing is cheaper there. The houses that they rent arc of clapboard construction and consist of 3-4 rooms, with a kitchen, and give them some freedom. The entire population depends upon the coal industry , be cause there is no other. When coal is in demand . there is plenty of work and good times. and the miner can earn up to $80.00 per month, or more. It all depends upon how many wagons of coal he can fill ; at other times earnings arc skimpy: $10.00 to $20.00 per month. or less. In hard times. people work only 2-3 days a week. and goof oil the rest of the time . Even Vienna has beggars! The miner requires $4.00 to $8.00 a month to clothe and feed himself, his wife and children, and during hard times he often falls into debt. When winter comes the mines usually come alive. and the miner can pay off his debts . That's when the butcher. the grocer and saloonkeeper arc paid off. The Jewish saloonkeeper is like a white raven m America . Herc a Slovak can open his own business with a few hundred dollars in capital , become a businessman , and move up to a hig her class, just like in Hungary , when one becomes an aristocrat. Our �SLOVAKIA 105 brothers like to drink in America as well , so there are lots of saloons . Our comrades in the "wet" districts like to run up a tab, and promise to pay up on pay day. However, all saloonkcepers complain that they are owed more than they care to mention . It is impossible to collect on such a debt because state laws do not recognize it. Our saloonkccpers sell not only beer but also whiskey. Slovaks drink only the cheapest brand , which costs $ 1.25 a gallon and is pure poison! A gall on of good whiskey costs $4.00 to $6.00, but our people avoid it because it is not "strong" enough! Our Shortcomings. The most important day in the entire month is payday. Other industries pay twice a month . Here, it comes only once a month. On payday evening there is happiness and good cheer, and the saloonkeepers have their harvest, as does the devil. The "places" and "patches" are the mos t lively. because they have no police constables. Many houses arc full of noise , laughter and singing, because Slovaks love to sing, but this merrymaking often ends in sadness. The "finale" is usually a fi ght , jail , a fine , and judgment. The largest beneficiaries arc the squires and lawyers . These squabbles have often ended with the death penalty or life impri sonment. The day after one often finds in front of homes, or saloons. empty SO-litre kegs, drained of their beer and resembling cannons in Lad ys mith . In recent times , however, things have gotten better - people do not have much money, they arc more careful, and all nationalities arc organized into fratern al-benefit societies and parishes. We shouldn't be surprised by such be haviour, because the hungry do not know moderation. they stuff themselves until they get sick. Not all Slovaks behave like animals on payday. Usually it is only the bachelors, who live as boarders. Some Slovak homes contain as many as 12 boarders who pay $2.00 to $3 .00 per month for room and board . The poor owner of the hou se has to suffer much abuse because , if he �106 SLOVAKIA becomes too strict, the boarders will go elsewhere. The morality of these boarders is rapidly deteriorating (only a minority is upright). Many are married, but while their wives arc enjoying themselves in Slovakia, their husbands are having a good time in America. Some drink too much, and do not go to work until they arc penniless . They won 't hear of going to church or to confes- sion , with the excuse that their church is in the Old Country, as is their pastor, and they will go to him when they return. How many of them have already died in sin! The mines are very dangerous . Death comes as easily here as pears falling from a shaking tree. Every day one hears about someone being burned by coal gas, being crushed by coal or rocks, and killed . The hospitals in Wilkes-Barre and Pittston are full of such patients . It is fairly common to see people on the street who arc missing hands, legs or who arc crippled in some way. In America it is appalling to see so much human tragedy ; life here is worth nothing. Another failing of our people is that they arc very argumentative and sue each other. In parishes they claim that, because they financially support the church, they arc free to criticize the priest, his behaviour. his sermons , his orders and his general handling of matters (especially financial ones). The Poles arc "masters" at this game, they are leaving the Church and have even established a large number of national. independent parishes free from Irish bishops. Our Slovaks arc a more humble, they will grumble , criticize, but then give way. If other nationalities <lid not set a bad example for them, our Slovaks would be quiet. Herc, too. the proverb "The sheep arc like the shepherd," holds true. These arc the faults of our Slovaks. However, the Slovaks also have a lot of �SLOVAKIA 107 good qualities, but I don't need to list them, because they are obvious to all who see. My parish. Twenty years ago there wasn't a single Slovak soul here. No Slovaks, except me, live in the city of Pittston itself. The nearest Slovaks have to walk about twenty minutes to get to church. For this reason, I have one of the worst parishes in America. Whenever it is cold, or it rains, I always fear that few people will show up in church. My parishioners live in seven "places" around Pittston. These are: West Pittston, with seven families; Sturmerville, with about 40 families; Wyoming, with ten families; in Port Griffith, with about 40 families; Smithville, with 24 families; Duryea, with about 16 families; and Pittston Junction with 14 families. About 30 of them own their homes. Three or four parishioners own 3-4 homes . The majority of my parishioners hail from Spis County in Slovakia. For instance, Port Griffith houses Slovaks predominantly from the northern Spis region of "pod Magura" (from the villages of Nedeca, Trips , Yysny and Nizny Laps, Kacvin, Cierna Hora and so on.). 3 Others come from Abauj, Zemplfn, Saris and Uzhorod counties. Only a few originate in Grava or Trencfn counties. These statistics cover only parishioners, that is, those who regularly support the church. About 200 boarders, plus 60 families support my parish. Another 200-300 boarders never set foot in the church, and are not parishioners. In America there are three kinds of Catholics. The majority are good, they fulfil their Christian duty, live as Christians , support their parish and priest, the organist and so on. Then you have the lukewarm Catholics, who hem and haw; and finally, the boarders, who don't give a hoot, live a carefree life, pay no ·' This region was ceded by Czecho-Slovakia to Poland after World War I in spi te of the fact that the majority of its inhabitants identified themselves as Slovaks. �SLOVAKIA 108 attention to their souls, and plan to live a Christian life only in the Old Country! To this group also belong the "enlightened ones" and various other individuals. You might be surprised that I can give you only an estimate of the number of my parishioners. That's because our people are always looking for better work, and always on the move, like the Jews. In my Annual Spiritual Report for the Bishop I estimated 800 "souls." The Slovaks care about their religion in spite of the fact that they are abroad and have to fend for themselves in a land which proclaims "liberty of conscience" and has many temptations. We have no patrons, no foundations, no church property , and the state does not support us. The people have to take the initiative, build their churches, and support their priests and bishops by themselves. Priests are paid between $600 and $1 ,000 yearly and the parishes have to pay a church tax to the bishop of between $25 and $200 per month (my poor parish pays only $50 per month). In America we have a sixth Commandment: support your parishes. How do Slovaks support their churches and parishes in America'? In various ways. Where there is no debt or where there are a lot of parishioners, they contribute in small amounts. In some places parishioners pay up to $ 1.00 monthly, in other places 7 5 or 50 cents or only 25 cents (as for instance. in Freeland). With me families generally pay 75 cents and individuals 50 cents, for a total of about $6 .00 per year. In addition , because this year we will be building a church (our present church was purchased from the Germans and is too small and ugly), families arc supposed to contribute an additional $ I0.00 and individuals $5.00 more per year. In some parishes these monthly contributions are gathered by "collectors" , in others, such as in Irish churches , the people �SLOVAKIA 109 bring the money directly to the parish. We have two "collectors" at each location and, as soon as payday arrives, they visit every Slovak home and collect their dues. I went out collecting for the new church myself on two occasions. That's how it is in America! All gifts go into the parish treasury and all expenses are paid out of it: the building, the priest, the organist, the churchwarden, and the church and rectory decorations. The American priest, who is really a missionary, owns onl y his vestments and his books. He simpl y cannot afford to own any furniture or other material that he would have to transport from parish to parish. Ownership-the role of the priest. All churches, sc hools, cemeteries and so on arc church property and arc registered in the name of the bishop in trust. In our parish the property is registered in the land registry office as fo llows : St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Congregation in Pittston, PA , in trust of the Rt. Rev. M.J. Hoban, Bishop of Scranton , PA. In other places the property is registered directly in the name of the bishop, or in the name of the bishop and the parish council; that depends on diocesan laws and state laws. The bishop does not concern himself with parish finances unless a problem appears in the annual report. In my case I control everything. The parish finances are in my name and I write the checks. Once a year I call a meeting of the parish collectors, who are also the trustees, and I show them the books. After that I announce these figures in church: what was our income, expenses, and how much of our debt we have retired . Other pries ts post these figures on the ch urch doors; still others publish them and hand them out to their parishioners. Those church finan ces! They have caused many uprisings rn 4 American parishes . In some places the priest has no control over ' I have desc ribed some of these " uprisings" in my '·Lay Initiative in American Slovak Pari shes. 1880- 1930" in Records of the American Catholic Hi storical �SLOVAKIA 110 the finances, he receives his pay, and that is it. But these are exceptions (among Slovaks they rarely arise), and very bad ones, and such priests are to be pitied. If the people see that their pastor is devoted, active, a good administrator, pays his debts (especially this, or he will be warned), is not arrogant (with some people you have to be very tactful), rude, cheap, demanding, snobbish and lazy, and does not shirk his duties on Sunday after Mass, then the people will support him. The Slovaks are very good in this regard. However, if one's predecessor ruined everything, then it is very difficult to regain the people's trust. From this you musn 't conclude that the priest here is a servant of the people and has no authority. We all know that in Hungary, if the priest sides with the nobles, he will triumph, but what do the people think of him? I know that people value good priests more in America than they do in Hungary. We live in a land of 40 million Protestants and atheists but it is unheard of that someone would insult a Roman Catholic priest, as often happened in Hungary. We don 't normally wear vestments in public, but we do wear Roman collars, and even without it people recognize us and address us as "Father." Here, as in the old country, people do complain to the bishops about us, and especially here where there are so many trains and streetcars, and most often about that miserable treasury, and mostly it is by the smartalecks and loudmouths who wish to control the parish. We do not have great formalities here, we address the bishop simply as "Bishop" (and usually he also serves as his own secretary) and, if he so wishes, he simply tells you that he is removing you from the parish. You are now on vacation Society of Philadelphia, 83, 3-4 (September-December. 1972). 151 -8: as has Raymond J. Kupke in ..The Slovak National Catholic Church. Passaic. New Jersey. and the Jeczusko Affair," in Slovakia, 33, 60-61 (1987-88). 63 -86. �SLOVAKIA 111 and can travel wherever you want (provided you have the finances). However, since America is a "free country" you can appeal to the Apostolic Delegate in Washington , or even to Rome itself! Here you can do it. The spiritual life. If we did not have those dissolute "boarders" among us, I could safely say that our people would be the best, the most moral and religious of all. Those who were raised in a religious way in the old country are good Catholics here as well. The work of priests in Slovakia is evident here. My Spis Slovaks are the best of all those in Pittston-they attend services the most, they s upport the parish the most, and they obey and respect their pastor. Forty children attend the parochial sc hool and if they lived closer, over 100 would attend. The people go to confession 2-3 times a year. We have a Rosary Society of the Sacred Heart and a Living Rosary Society; both have many members . Thirty of them subscribe to the religious magazine Po.sol. In the last year my parishioners raised almost $4,000 for the support of their church. This is how we live in distant America, torn from our motherland, but very few of us wish to return. It must really be better here for the poor working person. Indeed , it is! � SLOVAKIA IOI DOCUMENTATION: Sketches from a Slovak Catholic Parish in Pittston, PA [1900] by Matus Jankola (Translated by M. Mark Stolarik) 1 A nice, transparent picture is what you wish, I know. 2 However, that will be impossible. It is very difficult to write something short and interesting about our life here. I would, indeed, like to present you with something short, but our American conditions 'The Rev. Matus Jankola (1872, Budapest - 1916. Bridgeport, CT) was one of the most important leaders of Slovak Catholics in America. He emigrated to the USA with his family in 1893 and was consecrated a priest in 1895. He then served his people in Slovak parishes in Pittston. Wilkes-Barre and. from 1907 to his death in Bridgeport. Connecticut. A strong Slonk nationalist. Jankola served for a while as president of the First Catholic Slovak Union. he founded the Society of Slovak Priests in the USA. and. most important of all. the teaching order of the Sisters of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Danville, PA. When World War I broke out Jankola supported the destruction of Austria-Hungary and the creation of a federal Czccho-Slovak Republic. I have translated into English and reprinted his article on ··crty z katolfckcj slovcnskcj farnosti v Pit tston , PA", Tovary.{stvo. III (Rufombcrok. Slovakia. 1900). 301-05 for the benefit of our readers because it contains very valuable observations and insights into the early life of Slovak-Americans. For more on Jankola's life sec Jozef Pauco, Matiis Janka/a. kifoz a n.iroclovec (Danville. PA. 1959). ' Jankola wrote this article in response to a request from the Rev. Frantisek Richard Osvald. publisher and editor of Tovary.sstvo. �SLOVAKIA 102 could fill the entire issue of Tovary(stvo; nevertheless I will leave space for people more important than me. I would also like to reassure our nervous Lords I in Hungary I that they will find nothing "American" in my article which should cause them to worry. The Immense Size of the United States. With your permission I will begin with Adam and Eve, because I cannot do otherwise. The United States are truly strange with its people, customs, with its climate and untold wealth, and immense size. It is as far from New York to San Francisco as it is across the Atlantic Ocean-three days by train . If we were to compare this huge republic with Hungary , the former would be like a large, fat cat, and the latter like a mouse. For instance, Johnson 's Universal Encyclopedia gives the following statistics: the United States (including Alaska) covers 3,595 ,000 square miles whereas Hungary covers only 125,000 square miles. The state of Texas is composed of 265,780 square miles , while Austria-Hungary comprises only 264,204 square miles . Thus, the United States is 28 1/2 times larger than Hungary. Approximately a quarter of a million Slovaks live all over this huge country, and my parish is but a tiny dot. Slovak oases. One can find Slovaks all over the United States, especially in commercial and industrial cities. Our colonies resemble oases in the Sahara. They arc especially noticeable in the coal regions of Pennsylvania. The vast majority of our people work in the soft and hard coal mines. So, for instance, one will find Slovaks in the 150-milc stretch from Carbondale all the way to Shamokin , in the finest hard-coal region of the world. Some of the scams of coal arc up to twenty-five feet thick! This area is full of breakers sitting on mine shafts . It is the "Eldorado" of coal , and it employs upwards of 80,000 workers. Fifteen years ago you could count the number of Slovaks here on your fingers, today �SLOVAKIA 103 there are thousands. They are well-organized into 200 branches of fraternal-benefit societies, twelve Roman Catholic parishes, an equal number of Greek Catholic ones, and four Lutheran parishes. The Diocese of Scranton. It is the most "Slovak" of all dioceses in America, with JO Slovak parishes served by eight Roman Catholic priests, and an equal number of Greek Catholics . We Roman Catholics also have our own schools, but not everywhere. The Greek Catholic priests , on the other hand , do not care about having their own schools. We have Roman Catholic parishes in the following towns and cities: in Oliphant (founded in 1889) under the patronage of the Holy Ghost, with a filial parish in Jessup (founded in I 896) under the patronage of St. Michael; in Scranton (founded in 1895) under the patronage of the Holy Family; in Plymouth (founded in 1886) under the patronage of St. Stephen the King; in Wilkes-Barre (founded in 1895) under the patronage of the Sacred Heart of Jesus; in Freeland (founded in 1893) under the patronage of St. John Ncpomuccnc; in Nanticoke (founded in I 888) under the patronage of St. Joseph; in Hazleton (founded in I 883) under the patronage of St. Joseph; in Pittston (founded in 1894) under the patronage of St. John the Baptist, with a filial parish in Maltby (founded in 1895) under the patronage of the Holy Trinity. At the moment we arc building a church dedicated to Sts. Cyril and Mcthodius as a filial of Plymouth. The author of this article organized the parishes in WilkesBarre and Maltby . Pittston and Other Matters. In the northern portion of Luzerne County (each county has a court house which can impose the death penalty) is a beautiful valley drained by the Susquehanna River, which resembles the Yah river at Koma.mo . The valley is approximately 20 miles long and two miles wide. It �SLOVAKIA 104 contains the best coal, and boasts 40 breakers ; The breakers and the mines below them are owned by small and large corporations . Various nationalities work here: Slovaks, Poles , Lithuanians, Italians; the Irish , Scots and Welsh are regarded as Americans, since they speak English, and our people do not. This "Wyoming Valley" has 130,000 inhabitants. Its most important cities arc Wilkes-Barre, with 60,000 people , Pittston with 15 ,000 , Nanticoke and Plymouth with 12,000. We Slovaks number more than 8,000. Surrounding these cities, as chicks s urround their mother hens, arc scattered the various villages and "places" where most of our countrymen live, because the housing is cheaper there. The houses that they rent arc of clapboard construction and consist of 3-4 rooms, with a kitchen, and give them some freedom. The entire population depends upon the coal industry , be cause there is no other. When coal is in demand . there is plenty of work and good times. and the miner can earn up to $80.00 per month, or more. It all depends upon how many wagons of coal he can fill ; at other times earnings arc skimpy: $10.00 to $20.00 per month. or less. In hard times. people work only 2-3 days a week. and goof oil the rest of the time . Even Vienna has beggars! The miner requires $4.00 to $8.00 a month to clothe and feed himself, his wife and children, and during hard times he often falls into debt. When winter comes the mines usually come alive. and the miner can pay off his debts . That's when the butcher. the grocer and saloonkeeper arc paid off. The Jewish saloonkeeper is like a white raven m America . Herc a Slovak can open his own business with a few hundred dollars in capital , become a businessman , and move up to a hig her class, just like in Hungary , when one becomes an aristocrat. Our �SLOVAKIA 105 brothers like to drink in America as well , so there are lots of saloons . Our comrades in the "wet" districts like to run up a tab, and promise to pay up on pay day. However, all saloonkcepers complain that they are owed more than they care to mention . It is impossible to collect on such a debt because state laws do not recognize it. Our saloonkccpers sell not only beer but also whiskey. Slovaks drink only the cheapest brand , which costs $ 1.25 a gallon and is pure poison! A gall on of good whiskey costs $4.00 to $6.00, but our people avoid it because it is not "strong" enough! Our Shortcomings. The most important day in the entire month is payday. Other industries pay twice a month . Here, it comes only once a month. On payday evening there is happiness and good cheer, and the saloonkeepers have their harvest, as does the devil. The "places" and "patches" are the mos t lively. because they have no police constables. Many houses arc full of noise , laughter and singing, because Slovaks love to sing, but this merrymaking often ends in sadness. The "finale" is usually a fi ght , jail , a fine , and judgment. The largest beneficiaries arc the squires and lawyers . These squabbles have often ended with the death penalty or life impri sonment. The day after one often finds in front of homes, or saloons. empty SO-litre kegs, drained of their beer and resembling cannons in Lad ys mith . In recent times , however, things have gotten better - people do not have much money, they arc more careful, and all nationalities arc organized into fratern al-benefit societies and parishes. We shouldn't be surprised by such be haviour, because the hungry do not know moderation. they stuff themselves until they get sick. Not all Slovaks behave like animals on payday. Usually it is only the bachelors, who live as boarders. Some Slovak homes contain as many as 12 boarders who pay $2.00 to $3 .00 per month for room and board . The poor owner of the hou se has to suffer much abuse because , if he �106 SLOVAKIA becomes too strict, the boarders will go elsewhere. The morality of these boarders is rapidly deteriorating (only a minority is upright). Many are married, but while their wives arc enjoying themselves in Slovakia, their husbands are having a good time in America. Some drink too much, and do not go to work until they arc penniless . They won 't hear of going to church or to confes- sion , with the excuse that their church is in the Old Country, as is their pastor, and they will go to him when they return. How many of them have already died in sin! The mines are very dangerous . Death comes as easily here as pears falling from a shaking tree. Every day one hears about someone being burned by coal gas, being crushed by coal or rocks, and killed . The hospitals in Wilkes-Barre and Pittston are full of such patients . It is fairly common to see people on the street who arc missing hands, legs or who arc crippled in some way. In America it is appalling to see so much human tragedy ; life here is worth nothing. Another failing of our people is that they arc very argumentative and sue each other. In parishes they claim that, because they financially support the church, they arc free to criticize the priest, his behaviour. his sermons , his orders and his general handling of matters (especially financial ones). The Poles arc "masters" at this game, they are leaving the Church and have even established a large number of national. independent parishes free from Irish bishops. Our Slovaks arc a more humble, they will grumble , criticize, but then give way. If other nationalities <lid not set a bad example for them, our Slovaks would be quiet. Herc, too. the proverb "The sheep arc like the shepherd," holds true. These arc the faults of our Slovaks. However, the Slovaks also have a lot of �SLOVAKIA 107 good qualities, but I don't need to list them, because they are obvious to all who see. My parish. Twenty years ago there wasn't a single Slovak soul here. No Slovaks, except me, live in the city of Pittston itself. The nearest Slovaks have to walk about twenty minutes to get to church. For this reason, I have one of the worst parishes in America. Whenever it is cold, or it rains, I always fear that few people will show up in church. My parishioners live in seven "places" around Pittston. These are: West Pittston, with seven families; Sturmerville, with about 40 families; Wyoming, with ten families; in Port Griffith, with about 40 families; Smithville, with 24 families; Duryea, with about 16 families; and Pittston Junction with 14 families. About 30 of them own their homes. Three or four parishioners own 3-4 homes . The majority of my parishioners hail from Spis County in Slovakia. For instance, Port Griffith houses Slovaks predominantly from the northern Spis region of "pod Magura" (from the villages of Nedeca, Trips , Yysny and Nizny Laps, Kacvin, Cierna Hora and so on.). 3 Others come from Abauj, Zemplfn, Saris and Uzhorod counties. Only a few originate in Grava or Trencfn counties. These statistics cover only parishioners, that is, those who regularly support the church. About 200 boarders, plus 60 families support my parish. Another 200-300 boarders never set foot in the church, and are not parishioners. In America there are three kinds of Catholics. The majority are good, they fulfil their Christian duty, live as Christians , support their parish and priest, the organist and so on. Then you have the lukewarm Catholics, who hem and haw; and finally, the boarders, who don't give a hoot, live a carefree life, pay no ·' This region was ceded by Czecho-Slovakia to Poland after World War I in spi te of the fact that the majority of its inhabitants identified themselves as Slovaks. �SLOVAKIA 108 attention to their souls, and plan to live a Christian life only in the Old Country! To this group also belong the "enlightened ones" and various other individuals. You might be surprised that I can give you only an estimate of the number of my parishioners. That's because our people are always looking for better work, and always on the move, like the Jews. In my Annual Spiritual Report for the Bishop I estimated 800 "souls." The Slovaks care about their religion in spite of the fact that they are abroad and have to fend for themselves in a land which proclaims "liberty of conscience" and has many temptations. We have no patrons, no foundations, no church property , and the state does not support us. The people have to take the initiative, build their churches, and support their priests and bishops by themselves. Priests are paid between $600 and $1 ,000 yearly and the parishes have to pay a church tax to the bishop of between $25 and $200 per month (my poor parish pays only $50 per month). In America we have a sixth Commandment: support your parishes. How do Slovaks support their churches and parishes in America'? In various ways. Where there is no debt or where there are a lot of parishioners, they contribute in small amounts. In some places parishioners pay up to $ 1.00 monthly, in other places 7 5 or 50 cents or only 25 cents (as for instance. in Freeland). With me families generally pay 75 cents and individuals 50 cents, for a total of about $6 .00 per year. In addition , because this year we will be building a church (our present church was purchased from the Germans and is too small and ugly), families arc supposed to contribute an additional $ I0.00 and individuals $5.00 more per year. In some parishes these monthly contributions are gathered by "collectors" , in others, such as in Irish churches , the people �SLOVAKIA 109 bring the money directly to the parish. We have two "collectors" at each location and, as soon as payday arrives, they visit every Slovak home and collect their dues. I went out collecting for the new church myself on two occasions. That's how it is in America! All gifts go into the parish treasury and all expenses are paid out of it: the building, the priest, the organist, the churchwarden, and the church and rectory decorations. The American priest, who is really a missionary, owns onl y his vestments and his books. He simpl y cannot afford to own any furniture or other material that he would have to transport from parish to parish. Ownership-the role of the priest. All churches, sc hools, cemeteries and so on arc church property and arc registered in the name of the bishop in trust. In our parish the property is registered in the land registry office as fo llows : St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Congregation in Pittston, PA , in trust of the Rt. Rev. M.J. Hoban, Bishop of Scranton , PA. In other places the property is registered directly in the name of the bishop, or in the name of the bishop and the parish council; that depends on diocesan laws and state laws. The bishop does not concern himself with parish finances unless a problem appears in the annual report. In my case I control everything. The parish finances are in my name and I write the checks. Once a year I call a meeting of the parish collectors, who are also the trustees, and I show them the books. After that I announce these figures in church: what was our income, expenses, and how much of our debt we have retired . Other pries ts post these figures on the ch urch doors; still others publish them and hand them out to their parishioners. Those church finan ces! They have caused many uprisings rn 4 American parishes . In some places the priest has no control over ' I have desc ribed some of these " uprisings" in my '·Lay Initiative in American Slovak Pari shes. 1880- 1930" in Records of the American Catholic Hi storical �SLOVAKIA 110 the finances, he receives his pay, and that is it. But these are exceptions (among Slovaks they rarely arise), and very bad ones, and such priests are to be pitied. If the people see that their pastor is devoted, active, a good administrator, pays his debts (especially this, or he will be warned), is not arrogant (with some people you have to be very tactful), rude, cheap, demanding, snobbish and lazy, and does not shirk his duties on Sunday after Mass, then the people will support him. The Slovaks are very good in this regard. However, if one's predecessor ruined everything, then it is very difficult to regain the people's trust. From this you musn 't conclude that the priest here is a servant of the people and has no authority. We all know that in Hungary, if the priest sides with the nobles, he will triumph, but what do the people think of him? I know that people value good priests more in America than they do in Hungary. We live in a land of 40 million Protestants and atheists but it is unheard of that someone would insult a Roman Catholic priest, as often happened in Hungary. We don 't normally wear vestments in public, but we do wear Roman collars, and even without it people recognize us and address us as "Father." Here, as in the old country, people do complain to the bishops about us, and especially here where there are so many trains and streetcars, and most often about that miserable treasury, and mostly it is by the smartalecks and loudmouths who wish to control the parish. We do not have great formalities here, we address the bishop simply as "Bishop" (and usually he also serves as his own secretary) and, if he so wishes, he simply tells you that he is removing you from the parish. You are now on vacation Society of Philadelphia, 83, 3-4 (September-December. 1972). 151 -8: as has Raymond J. Kupke in ..The Slovak National Catholic Church. Passaic. New Jersey. and the Jeczusko Affair," in Slovakia, 33, 60-61 (1987-88). 63 -86. �SLOVAKIA 111 and can travel wherever you want (provided you have the finances). However, since America is a "free country" you can appeal to the Apostolic Delegate in Washington , or even to Rome itself! Here you can do it. The spiritual life. If we did not have those dissolute "boarders" among us, I could safely say that our people would be the best, the most moral and religious of all. Those who were raised in a religious way in the old country are good Catholics here as well. The work of priests in Slovakia is evident here. My Spis Slovaks are the best of all those in Pittston-they attend services the most, they s upport the parish the most, and they obey and respect their pastor. Forty children attend the parochial sc hool and if they lived closer, over 100 would attend. The people go to confession 2-3 times a year. We have a Rosary Society of the Sacred Heart and a Living Rosary Society; both have many members . Thirty of them subscribe to the religious magazine Po.sol. In the last year my parishioners raised almost $4,000 for the support of their church. This is how we live in distant America, torn from our motherland, but very few of us wish to return. It must really be better here for the poor working person. Indeed , it is! � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2003, Vol. 37 Description An account of the resource Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA IOI DOCUMENTATION: Sketches from a Slovak Catholic Parish in Pittston, PA [1900] by Matus Jankola (Translated by M. Mark Stolarik) 1 A nice, transparent picture is what you wish, I know. 2 However, that will be impossible. It is very difficult to write something short and interesting about our life here. I would, indeed, like to present you with something short, but our American conditions 'The Rev. Matus Jankola (1872, Budapest - 1916. Bridgeport, CT) was one of the most important leaders of Slovak Catholics in America. He emigrated to the USA with his family in 1893 and was consecrated a priest in 1895. He then served his people in Slovak parishes in Pittston. Wilkes-Barre and. from 1907 to his death in Bridgeport. Connecticut. A strong Slonk nationalist. Jankola served for a while as president of the First Catholic Slovak Union. he founded the Society of Slovak Priests in the USA. and. most important of all. the teaching order of the Sisters of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Danville, PA. When World War I broke out Jankola supported the destruction of Austria-Hungary and the creation of a federal Czccho-Slovak Republic. I have translated into English and reprinted his article on ··crty z katolfckcj slovcnskcj farnosti v Pit tston , PA", Tovary.{stvo. III (Rufombcrok. Slovakia. 1900). 301-05 for the benefit of our readers because it contains very valuable observations and insights into the early life of Slovak-Americans. For more on Jankola's life sec Jozef Pauco, Matiis Janka/a. kifoz a n.iroclovec (Danville. PA. 1959). ' Jankola wrote this article in response to a request from the Rev. Frantisek Richard Osvald. publisher and editor of Tovary.sstvo. SLOVAKIA 102 could fill the entire issue of Tovary(stvo; nevertheless I will leave space for people more important than me. I would also like to reassure our nervous Lords I in Hungary I that they will find nothing "American" in my article which should cause them to worry. The Immense Size of the United States. With your permission I will begin with Adam and Eve, because I cannot do otherwise. The United States are truly strange with its people, customs, with its climate and untold wealth, and immense size. It is as far from New York to San Francisco as it is across the Atlantic Ocean-three days by train . If we were to compare this huge republic with Hungary , the former would be like a large, fat cat, and the latter like a mouse. For instance, Johnson 's Universal Encyclopedia gives the following statistics: the United States (including Alaska) covers 3,595 ,000 square miles whereas Hungary covers only 125,000 square miles. The state of Texas is composed of 265,780 square miles , while Austria-Hungary comprises only 264,204 square miles . Thus, the United States is 28 1/2 times larger than Hungary. Approximately a quarter of a million Slovaks live all over this huge country, and my parish is but a tiny dot. Slovak oases. One can find Slovaks all over the United States, especially in commercial and industrial cities. Our colonies resemble oases in the Sahara. They arc especially noticeable in the coal regions of Pennsylvania. The vast majority of our people work in the soft and hard coal mines. So, for instance, one will find Slovaks in the 150-milc stretch from Carbondale all the way to Shamokin , in the finest hard-coal region of the world. Some of the scams of coal arc up to twenty-five feet thick! This area is full of breakers sitting on mine shafts . It is the "Eldorado" of coal , and it employs upwards of 80,000 workers. Fifteen years ago you could count the number of Slovaks here on your fingers, today SLOVAKIA 103 there are thousands. They are well-organized into 200 branches of fraternal-benefit societies, twelve Roman Catholic parishes, an equal number of Greek Catholic ones, and four Lutheran parishes. The Diocese of Scranton. It is the most "Slovak" of all dioceses in America, with JO Slovak parishes served by eight Roman Catholic priests, and an equal number of Greek Catholics . We Roman Catholics also have our own schools, but not everywhere. The Greek Catholic priests , on the other hand , do not care about having their own schools. We have Roman Catholic parishes in the following towns and cities: in Oliphant (founded in 1889) under the patronage of the Holy Ghost, with a filial parish in Jessup (founded in I 896) under the patronage of St. Michael; in Scranton (founded in 1895) under the patronage of the Holy Family; in Plymouth (founded in 1886) under the patronage of St. Stephen the King; in Wilkes-Barre (founded in 1895) under the patronage of the Sacred Heart of Jesus; in Freeland (founded in 1893) under the patronage of St. John Ncpomuccnc; in Nanticoke (founded in I 888) under the patronage of St. Joseph; in Hazleton (founded in I 883) under the patronage of St. Joseph; in Pittston (founded in 1894) under the patronage of St. John the Baptist, with a filial parish in Maltby (founded in 1895) under the patronage of the Holy Trinity. At the moment we arc building a church dedicated to Sts. Cyril and Mcthodius as a filial of Plymouth. The author of this article organized the parishes in WilkesBarre and Maltby . Pittston and Other Matters. In the northern portion of Luzerne County (each county has a court house which can impose the death penalty) is a beautiful valley drained by the Susquehanna River, which resembles the Yah river at Koma.mo . The valley is approximately 20 miles long and two miles wide. It SLOVAKIA 104 contains the best coal, and boasts 40 breakers ; The breakers and the mines below them are owned by small and large corporations . Various nationalities work here: Slovaks, Poles , Lithuanians, Italians; the Irish , Scots and Welsh are regarded as Americans, since they speak English, and our people do not. This "Wyoming Valley" has 130,000 inhabitants. Its most important cities arc Wilkes-Barre, with 60,000 people , Pittston with 15 ,000 , Nanticoke and Plymouth with 12,000. We Slovaks number more than 8,000. Surrounding these cities, as chicks s urround their mother hens, arc scattered the various villages and "places" where most of our countrymen live, because the housing is cheaper there. The houses that they rent arc of clapboard construction and consist of 3-4 rooms, with a kitchen, and give them some freedom. The entire population depends upon the coal industry , be cause there is no other. When coal is in demand . there is plenty of work and good times. and the miner can earn up to $80.00 per month, or more. It all depends upon how many wagons of coal he can fill ; at other times earnings arc skimpy: $10.00 to $20.00 per month. or less. In hard times. people work only 2-3 days a week. and goof oil the rest of the time . Even Vienna has beggars! The miner requires $4.00 to $8.00 a month to clothe and feed himself, his wife and children, and during hard times he often falls into debt. When winter comes the mines usually come alive. and the miner can pay off his debts . That's when the butcher. the grocer and saloonkeeper arc paid off. The Jewish saloonkeeper is like a white raven m America . Herc a Slovak can open his own business with a few hundred dollars in capital , become a businessman , and move up to a hig her class, just like in Hungary , when one becomes an aristocrat. Our SLOVAKIA 105 brothers like to drink in America as well , so there are lots of saloons . Our comrades in the "wet" districts like to run up a tab, and promise to pay up on pay day. However, all saloonkcepers complain that they are owed more than they care to mention . It is impossible to collect on such a debt because state laws do not recognize it. Our saloonkccpers sell not only beer but also whiskey. Slovaks drink only the cheapest brand , which costs $ 1.25 a gallon and is pure poison! A gall on of good whiskey costs $4.00 to $6.00, but our people avoid it because it is not "strong" enough! Our Shortcomings. The most important day in the entire month is payday. Other industries pay twice a month . Here, it comes only once a month. On payday evening there is happiness and good cheer, and the saloonkeepers have their harvest, as does the devil. The "places" and "patches" are the mos t lively. because they have no police constables. Many houses arc full of noise , laughter and singing, because Slovaks love to sing, but this merrymaking often ends in sadness. The "finale" is usually a fi ght , jail , a fine , and judgment. The largest beneficiaries arc the squires and lawyers . These squabbles have often ended with the death penalty or life impri sonment. The day after one often finds in front of homes, or saloons. empty SO-litre kegs, drained of their beer and resembling cannons in Lad ys mith . In recent times , however, things have gotten better - people do not have much money, they arc more careful, and all nationalities arc organized into fratern al-benefit societies and parishes. We shouldn't be surprised by such be haviour, because the hungry do not know moderation. they stuff themselves until they get sick. Not all Slovaks behave like animals on payday. Usually it is only the bachelors, who live as boarders. Some Slovak homes contain as many as 12 boarders who pay $2.00 to $3 .00 per month for room and board . The poor owner of the hou se has to suffer much abuse because , if he 106 SLOVAKIA becomes too strict, the boarders will go elsewhere. The morality of these boarders is rapidly deteriorating (only a minority is upright). Many are married, but while their wives arc enjoying themselves in Slovakia, their husbands are having a good time in America. Some drink too much, and do not go to work until they arc penniless . They won 't hear of going to church or to confes- sion , with the excuse that their church is in the Old Country, as is their pastor, and they will go to him when they return. How many of them have already died in sin! The mines are very dangerous . Death comes as easily here as pears falling from a shaking tree. Every day one hears about someone being burned by coal gas, being crushed by coal or rocks, and killed . The hospitals in Wilkes-Barre and Pittston are full of such patients . It is fairly common to see people on the street who arc missing hands, legs or who arc crippled in some way. In America it is appalling to see so much human tragedy ; life here is worth nothing. Another failing of our people is that they arc very argumentative and sue each other. In parishes they claim that, because they financially support the church, they arc free to criticize the priest, his behaviour. his sermons , his orders and his general handling of matters (especially financial ones). The Poles arc "masters" at this game, they are leaving the Church and have even established a large number of national. independent parishes free from Irish bishops. Our Slovaks arc a more humble, they will grumble , criticize, but then give way. If other nationalities <lid not set a bad example for them, our Slovaks would be quiet. Herc, too. the proverb "The sheep arc like the shepherd," holds true. These arc the faults of our Slovaks. However, the Slovaks also have a lot of SLOVAKIA 107 good qualities, but I don't need to list them, because they are obvious to all who see. My parish. Twenty years ago there wasn't a single Slovak soul here. No Slovaks, except me, live in the city of Pittston itself. The nearest Slovaks have to walk about twenty minutes to get to church. For this reason, I have one of the worst parishes in America. Whenever it is cold, or it rains, I always fear that few people will show up in church. My parishioners live in seven "places" around Pittston. These are: West Pittston, with seven families; Sturmerville, with about 40 families; Wyoming, with ten families; in Port Griffith, with about 40 families; Smithville, with 24 families; Duryea, with about 16 families; and Pittston Junction with 14 families. About 30 of them own their homes. Three or four parishioners own 3-4 homes . The majority of my parishioners hail from Spis County in Slovakia. For instance, Port Griffith houses Slovaks predominantly from the northern Spis region of "pod Magura" (from the villages of Nedeca, Trips , Yysny and Nizny Laps, Kacvin, Cierna Hora and so on.). 3 Others come from Abauj, Zemplfn, Saris and Uzhorod counties. Only a few originate in Grava or Trencfn counties. These statistics cover only parishioners, that is, those who regularly support the church. About 200 boarders, plus 60 families support my parish. Another 200-300 boarders never set foot in the church, and are not parishioners. In America there are three kinds of Catholics. The majority are good, they fulfil their Christian duty, live as Christians , support their parish and priest, the organist and so on. Then you have the lukewarm Catholics, who hem and haw; and finally, the boarders, who don't give a hoot, live a carefree life, pay no ·' This region was ceded by Czecho-Slovakia to Poland after World War I in spi te of the fact that the majority of its inhabitants identified themselves as Slovaks. SLOVAKIA 108 attention to their souls, and plan to live a Christian life only in the Old Country! To this group also belong the "enlightened ones" and various other individuals. You might be surprised that I can give you only an estimate of the number of my parishioners. That's because our people are always looking for better work, and always on the move, like the Jews. In my Annual Spiritual Report for the Bishop I estimated 800 "souls." The Slovaks care about their religion in spite of the fact that they are abroad and have to fend for themselves in a land which proclaims "liberty of conscience" and has many temptations. We have no patrons, no foundations, no church property , and the state does not support us. The people have to take the initiative, build their churches, and support their priests and bishops by themselves. Priests are paid between $600 and $1 ,000 yearly and the parishes have to pay a church tax to the bishop of between $25 and $200 per month (my poor parish pays only $50 per month). In America we have a sixth Commandment: support your parishes. How do Slovaks support their churches and parishes in America'? In various ways. Where there is no debt or where there are a lot of parishioners, they contribute in small amounts. In some places parishioners pay up to $ 1.00 monthly, in other places 7 5 or 50 cents or only 25 cents (as for instance. in Freeland). With me families generally pay 75 cents and individuals 50 cents, for a total of about $6 .00 per year. In addition , because this year we will be building a church (our present church was purchased from the Germans and is too small and ugly), families arc supposed to contribute an additional $ I0.00 and individuals $5.00 more per year. In some parishes these monthly contributions are gathered by "collectors" , in others, such as in Irish churches , the people SLOVAKIA 109 bring the money directly to the parish. We have two "collectors" at each location and, as soon as payday arrives, they visit every Slovak home and collect their dues. I went out collecting for the new church myself on two occasions. That's how it is in America! All gifts go into the parish treasury and all expenses are paid out of it: the building, the priest, the organist, the churchwarden, and the church and rectory decorations. The American priest, who is really a missionary, owns onl y his vestments and his books. He simpl y cannot afford to own any furniture or other material that he would have to transport from parish to parish. Ownership-the role of the priest. All churches, sc hools, cemeteries and so on arc church property and arc registered in the name of the bishop in trust. In our parish the property is registered in the land registry office as fo llows : St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Congregation in Pittston, PA , in trust of the Rt. Rev. M.J. Hoban, Bishop of Scranton , PA. In other places the property is registered directly in the name of the bishop, or in the name of the bishop and the parish council; that depends on diocesan laws and state laws. The bishop does not concern himself with parish finances unless a problem appears in the annual report. In my case I control everything. The parish finances are in my name and I write the checks. Once a year I call a meeting of the parish collectors, who are also the trustees, and I show them the books. After that I announce these figures in church: what was our income, expenses, and how much of our debt we have retired . Other pries ts post these figures on the ch urch doors; still others publish them and hand them out to their parishioners. Those church finan ces! They have caused many uprisings rn 4 American parishes . In some places the priest has no control over ' I have desc ribed some of these " uprisings" in my '·Lay Initiative in American Slovak Pari shes. 1880- 1930" in Records of the American Catholic Hi storical SLOVAKIA 110 the finances, he receives his pay, and that is it. But these are exceptions (among Slovaks they rarely arise), and very bad ones, and such priests are to be pitied. If the people see that their pastor is devoted, active, a good administrator, pays his debts (especially this, or he will be warned), is not arrogant (with some people you have to be very tactful), rude, cheap, demanding, snobbish and lazy, and does not shirk his duties on Sunday after Mass, then the people will support him. The Slovaks are very good in this regard. However, if one's predecessor ruined everything, then it is very difficult to regain the people's trust. From this you musn 't conclude that the priest here is a servant of the people and has no authority. We all know that in Hungary, if the priest sides with the nobles, he will triumph, but what do the people think of him? I know that people value good priests more in America than they do in Hungary. We live in a land of 40 million Protestants and atheists but it is unheard of that someone would insult a Roman Catholic priest, as often happened in Hungary. We don 't normally wear vestments in public, but we do wear Roman collars, and even without it people recognize us and address us as "Father." Here, as in the old country, people do complain to the bishops about us, and especially here where there are so many trains and streetcars, and most often about that miserable treasury, and mostly it is by the smartalecks and loudmouths who wish to control the parish. We do not have great formalities here, we address the bishop simply as "Bishop" (and usually he also serves as his own secretary) and, if he so wishes, he simply tells you that he is removing you from the parish. You are now on vacation Society of Philadelphia, 83, 3-4 (September-December. 1972). 151 -8: as has Raymond J. Kupke in ..The Slovak National Catholic Church. Passaic. New Jersey. and the Jeczusko Affair," in Slovakia, 33, 60-61 (1987-88). 63 -86. SLOVAKIA 111 and can travel wherever you want (provided you have the finances). However, since America is a "free country" you can appeal to the Apostolic Delegate in Washington , or even to Rome itself! Here you can do it. The spiritual life. If we did not have those dissolute "boarders" among us, I could safely say that our people would be the best, the most moral and religious of all. Those who were raised in a religious way in the old country are good Catholics here as well. The work of priests in Slovakia is evident here. My Spis Slovaks are the best of all those in Pittston-they attend services the most, they s upport the parish the most, and they obey and respect their pastor. Forty children attend the parochial sc hool and if they lived closer, over 100 would attend. The people go to confession 2-3 times a year. We have a Rosary Society of the Sacred Heart and a Living Rosary Society; both have many members . Thirty of them subscribe to the religious magazine Po.sol. In the last year my parishioners raised almost $4,000 for the support of their church. This is how we live in distant America, torn from our motherland, but very few of us wish to return. It must really be better here for the poor working person. Indeed , it is!  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sketches from a Slovak Catholic Parish in Pittston, PA [1900] by Matúš Jankola Description An account of the resource trans. by M. Mark Stolarik Slovakia, Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003 pp. 101-111 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jankola, Matúš, 1872-1916 Stolarik, M. Mark, 1943- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 LCNAF SNK https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/56bacb841e7207956374c07341cd4331.pdf 981e19dce89d5c113176023f9f6f41ac PDF Text Text 112 SLOVAKJA DOCUMENTATION: V Konstantin Culen' s Long Journey from Italy to Canada As Illustrated by his Correspondence with Juraj Rondos 1 Susumu Nagayo The emigration of post-World War II political emigres from Europe to North America was a long and complicated process. Both the United States and Canada had passed legislation severely restricting immigration to their respective countries in the l 920's and l 930's and this legislation made it virtually impossible for post-war refugees to gain easy access into either country. T o illustrate this difficulty I will focu s upon one such refugee - the 2 nationalist Slovak writer Konstantin Culen . This article is based ' I would like to thank the staff of the Archives and Special Collec tio ns of Mori sset Library at the Uni versity of Ottawa fo r their kind supp011 of my work. I also deeply th ank Professor M. M. Stolarik fo r his critical comme nts and English correcti o ns. 2 On Konstantin C\ilen ' s life see the fo llowing works and arti cles: Franti sek Vnuk, Zivotopis Konstantina Culena [Biograph y of Konstantin Cul en]. C le veland , the Sl ovak Institute, 1984; S/ovensk f biografick f s/ovnik (od roku 833 do roku 1990) I [Slovak Biographical Dictionary (from 833 to 1990)]. I. Martin. Matica slovenska, 1986, pp.433-434; "Kalend ari um zivota a d iela [Chro nicle of his life and work s]". · In Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Konstantin Cu/en (1904 Brodsk e - 1964 New York ). Z bomik vydanf na pocest' nedoiitfch deviit'desiatych naro- �113 SLOVAKJA on the unpublished correspondence between Konstantin Culen and Juraj Rondos, which is in the Slovak Archives of Morisset Library at the University of Ottawa. 3 We will reconstruct Culen 's case by extensively quoting from his correspondence, which was written in Slovak. dcnfn historika a novinara [Konstantfn Culen. Almanac Published in Ho nor of the Ninetieth Birthday of the Historian and Journalist]. Martin , Mati ca slove nska. 1995, pp.66-68: Augustfn Mat'ovcfk and others, Reprezentacny biografic- ky Jexik6n 5/ovenska [Representative Biographical Lexicon of Slovakia] Martin, Matica slovenska. 1999, pp.59-60. During his life Culen wrote many boo k s and articles. We still do not have his complete bibliography. Meanwhile see the following articles : Jozef Kirschbaum, "Bibliografia literarnych prac K. C ul e na [Bibliography of Literary Works of K. Culen]", Slovak v Amerike, Jul y 29 th. 1964: Frantisek Vnuk, :Zvotopis Konstantfna C ulena. pp.225-227; 5/ovensky biograficky s/ovmk. I, p. 434; Jozef Pauco, "Predstavitelia slovenskej kulturnej tvorby [Representati ves of Slovak Cultural Creation]. Konstantfn C ulen ", Jcdnota, September 19th , 1990; "Bibliografia literarncj tvorby [Bibliography of Literary Creation] ". in Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Konstantfn Culen , pp .55 -63. Among the above-mentioned bibliographies. the last has the most information . ' The correspondence between Konstantin Culen and Juraj Rond os is located in the Slovak Archives of the Archives and Special Co llecti ons. It belongs to th e Imrich Stolarik Fonds (ARCS 98 -1). which co nsists of 38 boxes. The material s were donated to the Uni ve rsity at the end of 1998 by the fo nner President of th e Canadian Slovak League, Inu·ich Stolarik ( 1909-2000). They consist mainly of the organi zational papers of the League . but also contai n personal materials of the founders of the League. such as Gabriel Kurdel, Andrej Kucera, and Juraj Rondos. At prese nt (November of 200 1). the Imric h Stolarik Fonds is still being processed. A Preliminary Guide to the Imrich Stolarik Fo nds is available in the reading room of the Archives . The corresponde nce of Juraj Rondos is in fo ur boxes (575-578). It co nsists of his official and personal documents and co ntains thousands of items. Among them are interestin g materials relating t o Rondos ·s mediation on behalf of Slovak refu gees seeking to enter Canada after World War II. The file of correspondence between Cul en and Ro ndos is fo und in box 577. This fi le co ntain s 165 letters (6 1 from C ul e n to Rondos, 42 from Rondos to Culen. and other letters) from 1947 to 1952. �SLOVAKIA 114 * * * By the end of March, 1945, as World War II in Europe was coming to an end, a group of people evacuated from Slovakia to escape capture by the Red Army and possible retribution in postwar Czechoslovakia. They were representatives of the independent Slovak State which was allied with Nazi Germany. These refugees briefly stayed in Holic and Skalica in Western Slovakia and , at the beginning of April, they entered Austrian territory. Finally, they settled in Kremsmiinster, a small city to the south of Linz. Among them was Konstantfn Culen with his wife and daughter. On May 8th, 1945, representatives of the Slovak government capitulated in Kremsmiinster to the American Army. At the beginning they were treated politely. However, on May 19th the former Prime Minister Stefan Tiso and three other former Cabinet Ministers were arrested by the United States Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) . On June 7th fifteen more people, including Culen, were arrested as " Nazi collaborators". They were detained in American Army camps in Peuerbach (until September of 1945) and then in Glasenbach. In March of 1946 Culen was released from the camp due to the intervention of his wife. The family met again in Ried im Innkreis in Upper Austria. At the end of April, avoiding "war criminal" hunters of the Czechoslovak authorities, Culen moved to Munich. But even here he did not feel secure, so at the end of August he returned to Austria. On September 20th, with the help of a friend in the CIC, he illegally crossed the border into Italy, hiding in the trunk of his friend's car. The next day he arrived in Rome, where he was reunited with his family. In Rome, under the protection of Karol Sidor, the former Slovak Minister to the Vatican, Culen started to work again as a �115 SLOVAKIA journalist. Utilizing newspapers and magazines from Slovakia as sources, he began to contribute articles to Slovak nationalist newspapers in the United States and Canada. At the same time, through connections with Slovak organizations abroad, Culen began to seek entry into Canada. The story begins with a letter dated June 6th, 1947, which Culen sent to Juraj Rondos4 in Winnipeg. Rondos was one of the leading members of the nationalist fraternal organization, the Canadian Slovak League. At that time he was president of its ' Juraj (George) Rondos ( 1900- 1985) was born in May 1900. the so n of a fam1er in the village of Vinne (Michalovce district, Zemplfn County ) in eastern Sl ovakia. In March 1926. he came to Canada looking for work. After engaging in various jobs, in October 1928, he opened in Winnipeg (Manitoba) a restaurant with a boarding house. In 1930 he became a member of the Winnipeg branch of the Slovenska liga v Amerike [the Slovak League of Ame1ica]. In 1932 he established, together with his friend s Andrej Kucera and Pavo! Sabo. the fraternal organization Slovenska liga v Kanade [the Slovak League in Canada] which was renamed in 1934 the Kanadska slovenska liga [the Canadian Sl ovak Leag ue]. At the beginning of the 1930's he received hi s Canadian ci ti ze ns hip. In 1936- 1938 he parti cipated in the organization of colonization of Slovak agricultural immigrants to Rosewood (Manitoba). In 1938 he brought hi s wife and children to Canada. After World War II. as an official of the Canadian Slo vak Leag ue. he helped many Slovak refugees (Displaced Persons) to emigrate t o Canada. Cule n' s case, which I reconstructed in this article. was one of them. After holding various important posts of the League. Rondos died in Winnipeg in March of 1985 at the age of 84. For Rondos's life see: Anonym (Ko nstant in Culen), "Ujo Rondos [Uncle Rondos]". Kalendar Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy [Almanac of the Canadian Slovak Leag ue ], 1953, pp.209-212; Juraj Ro ndos. "V lete sli spat' na breh rieky [In the Summer They Slept on the Ri verbank] ". In lmrich Stolarik, ed .. Spomienky pionierov [Memories of Pio neers], Toro nto, Canadian Slovak Leag ue. 1978, pp.207-220: Juraj Rondos. "Moje rozpomie nky na zasle easy [My memories of lo ng-ago days] ", Jubilejnf kalendar Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy [Jubilee Almanac of the Canadian Slovak League] , 1982. pp.51 55: Anton Hacko, "Posledne Zbohom Ju rajovi Ro ndosovi [Last Farewell to Juraj Rondos]". Kalend ar KanadskeJ slovenskej /igy.1 985- 1986. pp.1 27- 129. �116 SLOVAKIA Colonization Committee. 5 In this letter Culen informed Rondos, with whom he had never met, of his desire to immigrate to Canada. Culen introduced himself as follows: As you know, in 1945, with many others I emigrated on my own initiative. After much pain and suffering, I settled here (in Rome). Since Czech and Bolshevik agents will not leave me alone and there is still the danger of being arrested , we would like to find us a place where we could begin a new life and work and live in safety. I have many friends and relatives in America, but it is still hard to go there. They promise us much, but quotas are small, so perhaps we would have to wait for decades. To go to South America seems perhaps more easy, but, even so, it requires 5 In the Minutes of the 7th Convention of the Canadian Slovak League, which was held in October of 1946, we read the following passages: "News from the Colonization Committee - Brother Rondos, the chairperson of the Colonization Committee, made an oral report and added that he has close contacts with members of the Colonization Office of the Canadian National Railways, who offered him the necessary information regarding immigration to Canada. es pecially with regard to Slovaks. Other ethnic groups also exert pressure on the Canadian government with respect to immigration of Displaced Persons. demanding revision of the Canadian Immigration Act. ( ... ) Brother Rondos. based on their explanation about the settlement of immigrants on Canadian farn1s. assured the delegates that the Canadian government would admit Slovaks to Canada if the provincial offices would give them permission . Brother Rond os strongly appealed for sponsors for Slovak refugees and to help them to enter Canada. (. .. ) At the end Brother Rondos clarified who can immigrate to Canada and also referred to difficulties, such as temporary passports. the voyage across the Atlantic, and the lack of ships etc. At the same time he displayed so me application forms which he received from the Colonization Office." Zapisnica zo VII. kongresu Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy vydriiavancho v diioch 28-29-30 a 31. okt6bra 1946 vo Windsoru, Ontario [Minutes of the 7th Convention of th e Canadian Slovak League. held on October 28th - 31st, 1946, in Windsor, On tario]. pp.9- 10. �117 SLOVAKJA time. So, I thought, what about Canada? I wrote a letter about this to Father Sprinc [Mikulas Sprinc], who in turn sent a letter to president [of the Canadian Slovak League] Kucera ([Andrej Kucera]. And he told us to send to you the necessary information . I have a brother in America [Stefan Culen in Chicago] who is also trying every possible means to get me nearer, so I want to try this as well . I would like to ask you the following : 1. Can we enter [Canada] ? There are three of us. 2. What do we need to do in order to enter? 3. How can you help us? Culen then provided his and his family's life histories. I was born on February 26th, 1904, in the village Brodske, District of Skalica, Slovakia. My occupation is engineer (do not worry about it; it is so registered in my passport. It is exact, because I studied engineering in high school.). Since April of 1945 I am in exile. The reason why I do not want to go back and cannot do so is an antipathy towards the domestic Bol shevik rule. I have a Red Cross passport iss ued in Rome . Alzbeta Culen, born on December 19th, 1906, m Bratislava, is my wife. She has a Red Cross passport too. Elena Eva Culen , born in January 22nd, 1929, m Bratislava, a student, is my daughter. She too has a Red Cross pass port. We are all stateless. As we can guess from Culen's defensive tone, this life history is not entirely accurate. Culen was no engineer. According to his biography, Culen was a middle-aged Slovak nationalist journalist. �SLOVAKIA 118 Although he did not have a university education, he had been a brilliant journalist even as a youth. At the time of political crisis in Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Culen participated in the activities of the Hlinka Slovak People's Party for Slovak autonomy. After March of 1939, when the independent Slovak State was declared, he became its strong supporter. He was a Member of Parliament (December, 1938 - March, 1939, the Slovak Autonomy Parliament, then March, 1939 - spring of 1945, the Parliament of the independent Slovak State) and he served as a cultural attache at the Czecho-Slovak Legation in Washington (January - March , 1939). Although he was prevented from participating in political activities by his political rivals from the summer of 1940 on, he continued to be active in the field of culture and journalism until the end of the war. In his letter to Rondos, Culen explained the reason for his emigration as "an antipathy towards the domestic Bolshevik rule" . He told only half of the story. In June of 1947, when the letter was written, the Communist Party already held the leading pos ition and had great influence in Czec hoslovakia, but political pluralism still existed. The Communists did not seize power until February of 1948. More likely, Culen was afraid of "war criminal" hunters and the so-called "people's courts" of the Czec hos lo6 vak authorities . • "Being condemned a ·war criminal' by London [the Czechoslovak government in exile], Moscow [the Czechos lovak Communist group in exile], and Banska Bystrica [the headquarters of the Slovak National Uprising in 1944]. he [Culen] had to go into exile to escape the gallows." Frantisek Vnuk. Z i votopis K onstantfna Culen a. p. l 02. - "To my question why he [Cu len] fled abroad at the end of war, he answered that he had been afraid of Bencs 's revenge." Imrich Krnzliak, "Spomienky na Kon stantfna Culena [Memories of Konstantin Cu len]", in Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Konstantin Cu/en. p.48 . - "When the front [of the Red Anny] approached, Culen. who opposed. as a Member of the Parli ame nt �SLOVAKIA 119 Culen shifted the whole responsibility of his emigration onto the "Bolsheviks", because he knew that the independent Slovak State, which he had strongly supported during World War II, had been allied with Nazi Germany and Canada had fought the war on the side of the Allies. He was also counting on the emerging Cold War, which was shaping Canada's relations with Western countries . However, as we may guess from the tone of his reply, Rondos already understood Culen's delicate situation . It was common knowledge, not only in Slovakia, but also in the Slovak immigrant communities in North America, that Culen had a "s plendid past record" as a Slovak nationalist. Without hesitation , Rondos answered Culen's request with a skillful and kind reply dated June 23rd. I understood well your letter, and your wish to enter Canada with your family. You asked me to answer the three following question s: 1. Whether can you enter Canada with your family ? You can enter Canada as a farm worker. I have close friend s who occupy high positions in the Canadian Immigration Office. I had a long conversation with them. I explained briefl y your situation . I simply told them as a friend that you arc highly educated and the reason why you were expelled abroad. I also told them what are you thinking of doing if you enter Canada. They assured me that, after arriving in Canada, you will be free here, according to your ability. But if you want to and representative politician of the first Slovak Republic. Bo ls hevism and especiall y Benes ' s Czechos lovak politics. which did not even recognize the ex istence of the Slovak nat ion. had to evacuate from Slovaki a by government decree ." Dusan M. Janota. "Spomienk a [Memories]", in Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Ibid. p.52 . �SLOVAKJA 120 enter Canada as soon as possible, you have to be registered together with your family as farm workers. Please forget other worries. Canada needs people like you. Here everybody is free and everybody is responsible for their own future . 2. What do you need to do for that? You have to do nothing. I will find for you a good Slovak farmer who will submit an application to the Canadian Immigration Office. He will petition to admit you and your family to Canada and declare that he has work and lodging on his farm for all of you . 3. What could I do fo r you ? I could do what I ex plained to you in 1. and 2. I will begin the work with your permission and by Divine protection. And I hope that our work will be successful according to the information which I provided for you and your family . A responsible person (at the Immigration Office) told me that it will take you three to six months at most to enter Canada. It was a smooth beginning. Culen was very pleased with the reply. As promised, Rondos quickly fo und a sponsor for the Culen family and so informed him of it in a letter dated Jul y 9th: Your fe llow-countryman from Tmava named Jozef Vo lek submitted an application that he needs you and your fam il y for work on the farm. He also submitted an application to th e Canadian Immigration Office, a copy of which I am enclos ing with this letter. Please do not worry. Either a Canadian Immigration Officer there will personally visit you or they will inform you by letter as to where you should present yourself. In the correspondence between Culen and Rondos we fo und drafts of an application entitled "This form has been prepared by �121 SLOVAKIA the Immigration Branch, Department of Mines and Resources, for the use of persons applying for the admission to Canada of immigrants". There are two copies of the same form, for Konstantin Culen and his wife Alzbeta Culen, and for their daughter Elena Eva Culen. Both copies indicate at the end: "Dated at Rosewood Man. (Manitoba) this 4 day of July A.D.1947. Volek" Signed Jozef 7 In this application there are some misleading statements. In the space for "relationship to applicant" they filled out as "friend" (needless to say, neither Culen nor his wife had ever met Volek) and in the space for "citizenship" as "C.S.R. [the Czechoslovak Republic]" (in his first letter to Rondoas Culen wrote that they were "stateless"). To the question "occupation in own county" they filled out as "fam1er" (not "engineer" as Culen had written before) and to the question "intended occupation in Canada", they answered: "to work on a farm". The most serious falsehood was the answer to the question "Has Immigrant ever lived in Canada or the United States? If so, between what dates and what address?" They simply answered "No", which was not true. Culen had actually lived in the United States three times. The first time (1905-1909) it was as a child with his parents, who were migrant workers; the second time 7 Jozef Volek ( 1903- ?) was one of the Slovak fam1ers who lived in Rosewood (Manitoba). He was born in 1903 in Trnava (Western Slovakia), came to Canada in 1927 and later obtained his Canadian citizenship. He acted as the financial secretary of the Branch 19 (Rosewood) of the Canadian Slovak League (the head of the Branch was Juraj Rondos). Volek wrote in the application , which was sent to the Immigration Office of the Ministry of Mines and Re sources in Ju Iy of 1947: ··1 have clear title to 560 acres( ... ) Financial resurses (sic) $ 25.000.oo. Anaal (sic) income about $ 7.000.oo ." Culen wrote in his letter of August 1st, 1947, to Rondos that Volek was a friend of the famous Slovak historian exile. Frantisek Hrusovsky. in �SLOVAKIA 122 (December, 1935 - July, 1936) as one of members of the delegation sent by Matica slovenska (Slovak national cultural organization) to visit fellow-countrymen in the United State; the third time (January - December, 1939), as indicated above, as a cultural attache at the Czecho-Slovak Legation in Washington and then, after March, as an editor of the official organ of the Slovak League in America, Slovenska obrana [The Slovak Defence]. Certainly the purpose of the last two stays was not as a fam1er. His third stay in 1939 was especially significant and controversial. At that time Culen openly supported Slovak autonomy and, ultimately, independence. Even though Volek filled in the application, he probably only took dictation from Rondos. Rondos must have known about Culen's career in the United States. However, as reported in his letter dated June 23rd, he already had prior consultations with high-ranking officials in the Immigration Office in Winnipeg, so he probably considered this application as just a formality. Furthermore, Volek filled out after the sentence that "I have made the following arrangements for a home and employment for the above named immigrants," as "We will recive (sic) them on aur (sic) Farm and guarantee full maintenance and farm Employment at going Wages. " To the question "Is transportation to be prepaid?" he answered that "I will pay transportation," even though Volek must have known from the beginning that the Culen family had no intention of working on a farm. On July 15th Culen received Rondos's letter dated July 9th . Enclosed were copies of the application which Volek had submitted to the Immigration Office. In his reply dated August l st, Culen complained as follows: �SLOVAKIA 123 Well, now I would only ask you to take up this matter with the proper authorities, because there are several Slovaks here who have papers like this and have been waiting for a long time, but nothing is happening. The worst thing is that they write much about our difficulties and thousands of people live by talking about the necessity of doing something to solve the refugee problem, and make as if they have done and deliberated . Meanwhile, emigrants are perishing physically and morally, while the gentlemen are having a good time. America in particular pays much attention to the matter, but not even one refugee is admitted. The bill, which should have been passed, was pigeonholed . Congress went into recess for a vacation. It will be reconvened again only in January ( of next year) and undoubtedly the bill will not be touched until the summer of 1948. If it is passed, migration can be started in 1949 or 1950. However, who can bear it? [In reality the DP (Displaced Persons) Act was passed in Congress in the spring of I 948 and the migration started in October of that year.] Why don ' t they speak less, write less and act more? Of course, what can we, small and simple people, do against the roguery of gentlemen's politics ? In reply to Culen's complaint (the letter was not dated, but according to its contents it was perhaps written in the middle of August), Rondos reported as follows: You asked me to expedite the matter. Well , I will tell you what is happening. Mr. Volek was summoned to the Immigration Office where he was asked [to provide evidence regarding the following l: I. Evidence from the district office that he [Volek] is really the owner of 520 acres of land [according �SLOVAKIA 124 to the application which Volek submitted to the Immigration office, it was 560 acres of land] . He proved it by showing a private letter from the district office and also doc ume nts which proved that he has no debt. 2. Evide nce from a bank regarding his savings. We could prove that easil y enough. But after that they asked the third question. We were asked to explain how Mr. Vo lek came to know yo u. We answered that he went to school together with you and he remembers yo u as a farmer's son who was also trained in bl ac ksmithing. Thu s, when Mr. Volek left fo r Canada twe nty years ago, you [C ulen] remained at home working as a village bl acksmith a nd also as the cultivator of a small estate. We were asked wh y you lived in ex ile. Did you run away as a civilian or as a soldier? To this we answered that you were not a soldier and that you ran away as a civilian from communist terror. In his repl y, dated A ugust 28th , Culen humorously promised to "tell the same story": Thank yo u for the in formation about the examin ation by the Canadian office. Well , arri ving there , I will prese nt myse lf as the blac ksmith . It is not such a big lie, because my fa th er was a blacksmith , and, fro m childhood I was in his shop. If necessary, I pumped the bellows and helped with the bi g hammer, so th is is not a craft which I co uld not ac kn ow ledge . I coul d, perhaps, pass the examinatio n. By the end o f September the Canadian bureaucracy fin all y replied. Culen's sponsor, Jozef Volek, received the fo llowing pos iti ve notice dated Septem ber 29th from R.N. Mun roe , the �125 SLOVAKlA District Superintendent of the Immigration Branch of the fro [sic-for] the Department of Mines and Resources in Winnipeg: In connection with your application admission to Canada of your friends, Konstantin Culen, his wife, Alzbeta and their daughter, Elena Eva, of c/o Karel (sicKarol) Sidor, Citta del Vaticano, Italy, this is to advise that the settlement arrangements have been found satisfactory, and the necessary steps are being taken to have the proposed immigrants examined overseas. It will , of course, take some little time to complete these arrangements . A copy of this notice was immediately sent by Rondos to Culen who wrote about the news in his reply dated October 20th. These were the most delightful letters which I received during almost three years of exile. And especially, as I see, it is serious and we can judge according to the letter which you received [the above-mentioned letter by Munroe] that in fact the matter has already been arranged . Now it is only a question of time, according to the letter. Culen concluded optimistically: I am ending this letter with thanks for all which you have done for now. I caused you much concern, but I really had nobody else to ask. After all kinds of promises and assurances which I received, what you have done is most real and most clear. Well , once again sincere thanks and if that "some little time" in office is prolonged (I do not know how the bureaucrats function in Canada, but in Slovakia they say that a short �SLOVAKIA 126 time lasts one year), please expedite it again. In any case, I hope that by Christmas I will be with you. While awaiting a reply from the Canadian bureaucrats , Rondos reported to Culen in a letter dated November 3rd that he had already arranged for Culen's tickets: "I am informing you that today I purchased for you and your family the steamship tickets . It means the following: You have your fare paid from Southampton , England, to New York by ship and from New York to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, by train ." As we shall see later, Rondos paid the fare out of his own pocket. However, on November 18th, Rondos received a notice dated November 17th from the Cunard White Star Line, where he had booked the tickets. In the notice a certain Patterson , the person in charge, wrote: You will recall our conversation, in which I advised you that we are not permitted to sell Prepaid for non-Canadians resident in Italy, for the reason that the Canadian Government has not an Examining Office for immigrants in that country. Our Head Office Iin England] is moct lsic-mostl anxious to assist us , but point out very plainly that they cannot take the responsibility of bringing the family forward to Paris for examination by the Canadian Civil and Medical Authorities , on the chance that they might be turned down . Therefore, I give you the suggestion, for what it is worth, that if these people can legitimately leave Italy and establish themselves in Paris, and you will confirm to us the Paris address at which they are resident, we could then make _representations to have the Permit transferred to Paris and the examination take place there . �127 SLOVAKIA Rondos at once wrote a letter (dated November 18th) to Culen. I have very close contacts with the company regarding your matter. Just now I received a letter from them in which they say that they cannot start with your matter and that you have to go to Paris with your family by yourself and that in Italy they cannot arrange a medical examination. In order not to explain much, I enclose you with this letter a copy of the notice. I hope you will choose a trip to Paris. And please present yourself at their company. [... ] And show them the copy of the notice which I am _sending you and either they or you announce yourself as soon as probable to the main office in England where they already have all the best information about you and the registered ship tickets are waiting for you. The same day Rondos sent a letter to Stefan Culen 8 , Kon stan- tin's younger brother, who lived in Chicago: " [... ] I dared to pay for the steamship tickets of your brother and his family from England to New York and I also paid for train tickets from New York to Winnipeg out of my own pocket $636.42 [ .. . ] I did not want to tell this even to my friends , in order not to confuse somebody about my work." Rondos also enclosed as evidence the copy of the notice from the ship company of November 17th and continued: "From your letter I understood that you are willing to pay your brother's fare, in order to get him here as soon as possible. I dared to pay it out of my own pocket. I hope that I am cooperating with good peo' Sefan Culen ( 1909- ?), third of five brothers of Konstantin Culen , was born in Pennsy lvania (USA), and worked in Chicago as a manual laborer. �SLOVAKIA 128 pie and that my money will not be wasted." Rondos here suggested that, since he paid Culen's travelling expenses, Stefan Culen should reimburse him. Referring to "your letter, Rondos had in mind Stefan Culen's letter (stamped October 15th) in which Stefan wrote from Chicago that, "As soon as they [his brother's family] get visas, I would like immediately to send them plane tickets. If I could somehow help, please write me." Stefan Culen, after receiving Rondos 's letter of November 18th, answered on November 21st, and informed him of his intention to reimburse Rondos, as requested .9 Meanwhile, around November 22nd, Kon stantin Culen visited the Canadian Legation to Italy in Rome accompanied by an Italian friend, General Armando Mola. The Legation was newlyestablished and the Minister to Italy, Jean Desy' 0 had just been appointed on October 13th of that year. In a letter dated November 24th, Culen reported to Rondos the result of his visit: A while ago I returned from the Canadian Embassy. I went there with our friend, the general , who knows the Ambassador well. They received us warmly. We explained to them how our matter is going. We gave them an English tran- 9 Because of the complication in getting Culen ' s entrance visa to Canada. Ro n- dos cancelled in June 1948. the reserved tickets. See the notice of the Cunard Donaldson Limited Company of June 17th. 1948 . '" Jean Desy (1893-1960), Canadian diplomat. was born in Montreal (Q uebec) to a French Canadian family. In 1925 he entered the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. He was one of the earliest Francophone diplomats in Canada. In I 941-1947 he was the Minister to Brazil (in 1943 promoted to Ambassador) . On October 13th, 1947, he was appoi nted Minister to Italy and on June 26th. 1948, was promoted to Ambassador and served in this position until 1952. In 1954-1958 he was the Ambassador to France and he died in Paris in 1960. �SLOVAKJA 129 slation of your last letter (of November 3rd) in which you wrote that travel expenses had been paid. We also gave them the letter (notice, dated September 29th) which the Immigration Office had sent to you. The Ambassador said that everything was O.K. He said that we do not even need to go to Paris and that he will arrange the matter himself, including a medical examination and visa. The only things you will need are the following: l. Confirmation from the (ship) company that travel expenses have been paid . 2. Confirmation from Ottawa (the Canadian government) that entry to Canada is permitted . We asked him (the Ambassador) to request the matter telegraphically on condition that we will pay the expense connected with it. He promised to arrange it in this way. We had already asked the agency of the Cunard Company here to obtain confirmation concerning the payment of travel expenses. It would be good, if you could call their attention to this matter as soon as possible. Because he [the Ambassador] said that, if he will have it [the Confirmation] in his hand , he may issue the visa, so we could depart about the middle of December. Well , we would truly like to do so. We would fly away from here to London and then we would await there the next ship and we would depart. Really, we are growing impatient, like children before Christmas , and already we would like to be on the road. We will rest only when our ship moves in your direction . Culen's optimism grew after he received two letters from Rondos (dated November I 8th and November 20th) and a copy of the notice from the ship company (dated November 17th). �130 SLOVAKIA Culen wrote in his letter dated November 27th as follows: "If the matter moves faster, we will be there (in Canada) even in December, if slower, we will be there in January. Anyway, our hope was never so clear, as it is now. We feel as if we have everything within reach." However, "Confirmation from Ottawa that entry to Canada is permitted," which they had asked the Legation to obtain did not come. As Culen reminded Rondos in his letter of December 3rd, "The Legation here is waiting for information from Ottawa that they may issue us visas. I think that he [the Ambassador] already requested it telegraphically. If you have an o pportunity , please ask them to send it here as soon as possible. Because, as long as we do not have a Canadian visa, we cannot take the next step." Feeling uneasy about the delay, Culen sent to Rondos the letter of General Mola written in English (dated December 13th). On behalf of Culen General Mola explained his situation as follows: I saw again this morning, Mr. [T.L.] CARTER, [Second] Secretary at the Canadian Legation , acting for the Ambassador Mr.[Jean] DESY, so as to facilitate matters in every possible way. 1) Everything is all right as regards prepaid tickets. since the Legation is satisfied with the written declaration given CULEN by the CUNARD Office (Mr. BROOKS). 2) Mr. CARTER took note of what you wrote about the permit to enter Canada having already been sent to Rome . Nothing, however, reached the Canadian Legation yet , though the latter wrote Ottawa about it Nov. 22nd already . 3) By same letter, the authorisation was asked of the Canadian Government for the Legation actually applying the �131 SLOVAKJA visas on the three passports, even though the immigration Officials, to whom such a task is usually entrusted, are still to arrive. In the opinion of the Legation, such an exception might be granted since all documents were checked and found all right, and since the Legation have already their own Doctor who'll be able to submit the CULENS to the required medical examination. Were the authorisation not granted, Mr. CARTER says there seems to be no hope for the proper office to be ready for work here before two months or so! It would seem therefore most advisable that you should kindly complete the extraordinary work you and Mr. VOLEK have already done in favour of our friends by personally going to the proper Department in OTTAW A and - making precise reference to the Legation's letter of Nov. 22nd insisting that it should be answered favourably, possibly by cable: mind, not for the permit only, but also for the power to be granted the Legation. This is also Mr. CARTER's advice. On December 14th, Culen sent Rondos a cable. Unfortunately, I could not find it in the files of the correspondence, but, according to the contents of the aforementioned letter, we may guess that Culen's cable asked Rondos to obtain the confirmation from Ottawa by cable and to give to the Legation the power to issue visas. Having received it on December 15th, Rondos visited the agency of the Cunard Company and the Immigration Office in Winnipeg without getting a favourable response. In those circumstances he decided to seek the intervention to his close friend, Senator John Thomas Haig 11 , and visited his law " John Thomas Haig (I 877-1962), Influential politician in Winnipeg (Mani- toba). He was born to a Scottish family in Ontario and was a lawyer by profession . In 19 I 4 he was elected to several tenures in the Manitoba Legislature In �SLOVAKIA 132 office in the city. Unfortunately Haig was attending Parliament in Ottawa. His brother, who had received Rondos, reported to Haig in a letter dated December 15th (to which was enclosed a notice from Munroe, dated September 29th and a copy of Culen's cable dated December 14th): Your old friend , Mr. Rondos was in the office today. He has applied under the Immigration Act, to bring out his friend, Konstantin Culen, his wife and daughter who are presently in Italy. [ ... ] The difficulty seems to be that we have no immigration authority in Rome. There is nothing there but a Legation and without special authority, they apparently have not the power to grant immigration permits. You will note the wire asking that the permit be cabled and that authority be given to the legation to Grant a visa. [... ] The only difficulty seems to be the permit and the visa. We know that you will do everything in your power to have this rushed to completion before you return from Ottawa. Mr. Rondos is exceedingly anxious, he has gone to a lot of trouble and spent a lot of money, and would certainly appreciate anything you could do to iron out the difficulties. 1935 he was appointed to the Senate, Dominion of Canada. in Ottawa. From 1945 on he was the leader of the opposition party (the Progressive Con serva- tive Party) in the Senate. In June 1957. through the victory of his party in the general election, he became the leader of the governme nt party. In October of that year he was appointed Minister without portfolio in the Diefenbaker Governme nt. In May of 1958 he resigned this position. �SLOVAKIA 133 Receiving the news from Winnipeg, Senator Haig met with his personal friend, Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside 12 who was the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources and in charge of Immigration. After being "probed", Haig answered Rondos in a letter dated December 22nd as follows: [ ... ] You also know that I am leader of the Opposition [the Progressive Conservative Party] in the Senate of Canada and I took the time off to go and see the Deputy Minister of Mines and Natural Resources who is also the Deputy Minister of Immigration. He assured me that in two weeks from the 14th of December, that they would either have one of their own officers in Rome to give Visas for Canada or authority would be given to the Canadian Legation to issue them. The Deputy is a personal friend of mine and I am sure he will do exactly that thing. I sent the Immigration letter, about the duties to the Deputy Minister and he said it would all be cleared up in two weeks so that your friend [Cul en I will be able to get his Visas not later than January first. " Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside ( 1898- I 992). Canadian scholar. diplomat. and high-ranking civil servant. was born in Toronto. In 1928 he entered the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. In 1929- 1936 he served in Tokyo as First Secretary of the Canadian Legation in Japan. During World War II he was opposed to the forced evacuation of Japanese Canadians. In 1944-1947 he became Minister to Mexico. and in 1947-1950 the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources. In this period he published the article Canadian Immigration Policy. Vancouver, the University of British Columbia, 1948 . Later he held various important positions in the United Nations and in British Columbia. He published Memoirs of Hugh L. Keenleyside, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart Limited. 1981 -82. in two volumes. �134 SLOVAKIA On the same day Rondos, enclosing a copy of Haig's letter, answered General Mola in English: I was indeed pleased to receive your letter of December 13th with the detailed information therein. I also received the cable of Mr. Culen , and immediately took the necessary action with the Immigration officials in Ottawa. To assure you that immediate action will be taken by the Canadian Immigration authorities , I am enclosing herewith a copy of a letter written by Mr. John T. Haig, Leader of the Opposition in the Canadian Senate, which is self-explanatory . Many of Mr. Culen's Slovak friends in Canada are looking forward to his arrival. Culen described to Rondos, on December 31st how he felt when he received the letter: We were feeling very blue at the end of the year. It seemed that everything had gone wrong. And here, in the last hours of the passing year, your latest news, which you sent to General Mola, arrived. It delighted us very much and it gave us new hope. Yesterday General Mola told me: "I am 73 years old , I travelled around the world, I saw and experienced much, but I have never yet in my life met with such a case of a countryman's friendship, as I see here with Mr. Rondos. You can be proud of it not only as a human being, but especially as a Slovak." Meanwhile, on the same day General Mola went to petition the Canadian Legation with a copy of Senator Haig's letter of �SLOVAKIA 135 December 22nd which Rondos had sent him. Culen reported to Rondos about this episode at the end of his December 31st letter: Just a while ago the General returned from the Legation . They read the letter [from Haig] and they said that it is interesting, but according to the existing laws they may issue a visa only to Italian citizens, but not to foreigners. Until now they received nothing about our matter. They promised that they will send a cable and request an answer from Ottawa to the previous letter [dated November 22nd] about our matter. They have certain objections to our Red Cross passports and they say that we have to get others. In a word, there will be still many difficulties . By the way, the General is writing to you about this matter. They will have to get a special order to iss ue a visa to Culen and his family. While there is no order, nothing can be done. We also found in the file General Mola's letter to Rondos written in English (dated December 31st): Many thanks for your kind letter of Dec . 22nd and appended enclosure from Sen. JOHN T. HAIG . I immediately went to the Canadian Legation and showed them both letters to Mr.CARTER [Second Secretaryl . He was evidently impressed; but unfortunately he said that - though they already had authority to give visas without awaiting for the arrival of the Emigration Officials in Rome - this is for the time being applicable to Italians only. The Legation has as yet not received any similar instructions, neither for your specific case, nor for emigrants other than Italians. �SLOVAKIA 136 I saw H.E. DESY also, and he assured me they would do their showing their best good-will, since they promised me they would cable to-day to insist that OTT AWA should answer by cable to the letter the Legation originally wrote to the Department last November. Knowing unfortunately how slow burocracy [sic] is in all countries, may I suggest that - with this piece of news in hand - you should ask your powerful friends to specifically insist that a cable was immediately sent, as suggested by the Legation. General Mola wrote m detail about the passport problem which Culen mentioned only briefly: Another complication arose at the last moment: namely that the RED CROSS passports - which had been by the Legation declared valid - are now not considered fit , by some recent new regulations!!! It would be necessary to have them substituted by some C.S.I.R.O documents - which it would take an enormous time to obtain - even though the Legation promised their support to hasten matters. Couldn't it also be obtained from OTT AW A that they should cable and authorise the Legation to exceptionally accept the RED CROSS passports as valid for the CULENs case only? According to their expectation at the beginning, it would "take you [Culen's family] three to six months at most to enter Canada" (Rondos's letter of June 23rd, 1947). However, the barrier of the Canadian bureaucracy was greater than they imagined and 1947 drew to a close over the anxiety of obtaining a visa. In the second half of January 1948, Culen 's attempts to enter Canada looked hopeful. He reported in his letter to Rondos , dated January 16th as follows : �SLOVAKIA 137 Just a while ago they phoned me from the [Canadian] Legation, that. they already received the documents and perhaps within a week they will arrange the matter. They already fixed for us even the date of the medical examination. I hope it will end well, because we all feel ourselves quite healthy. [... ] If it will go well, we could perhaps get a visa by about [January] 23rd. Then it will take some time, while we receive an English and possibly an American [transit visa]. So we reckon that at the end of February we could arrive in Canada or in the United States. At that moment Culen thought that an entry visa to Canada was within reach. To his great disappointment, however, he failed his medical examination. Twenty-two years earlier Culen had suffered from a senous disease. At the end of August in 1926, when the twenty-one-yearold had worked in the editorial office of the daily Slovak in Bratislava, he was hospitalized for pleurisy. For two weeks he hovered between life and death. His temperature sometimes rose as high as 41 degrees. After three months of fighting the disease, he was allowed to leave the hospital. After convalescing for months at a sanatorium in the High Tatras, at the end of the year Culen returned to his regular life in Bratislava. 13 On January 28th, 1948, the Culen family reported to the newly established Canadian Immigration Office m Rome for a medical examination. Culen reported the results to Rondos in a letter dated the same day : It seemed that everything would be all right, when they suddenly looked at the X-ray of my bowels. Twenty-two " Frnntisck Ynuk. Zi votopis K onstantfna CuJena. p.45. �138 SLOVAKIA years ago I suffered from pleurisy. They said that even today one can see on the photograph traces of the inflammation. Since then I never got sick, but a Canadian doctor questioned it and postponed the issuance of our visas for later, only after the agreement of the Department of National Health and Welfare [for Canada] in London. They will send all the documents there. If they will agree, we can get visas, but if not, we can do nothing. We are for ever kept waiting. Culen continued in a pessimistic tone: Well, we truly did not expect it. Everything seemed all right. We received passports from the I.R.O. With the documents we had no problem, nor with the civil investigation . It never occurred to me that today they would call into question my illness of 22 years ago and that it would halt everything. My wife and daughter were recognised as healthy. This is sad and unexpected news for you and for us. So much work, so much running around and expenses, and finally this. You can hardly imagine what kind of medical examination we had. First of all the X-ray, then the medical and physical examination , then blood tests and then once more the face of a Canadian doctor. They were more strict than at the med ical check-ups for conscription. Now we have to wait for what they will decide in London. After so many experiences there is in our mind only a small spark of hope, si nce for emigrants things usually do not go well. What more can we do ? We arc truly bewildered and unhappy. We descended from hope into the abyss of hopelessness. �139 SLOVAKJA After he received Culen's "sad and unexpected news ", Rondos answered (in his letter of February 3rd) to keep his hopes up: .. . believe me, I and my whole family grieved when we read your letter. But, considering the whole matter, I think it will change for the better, because many people have suc h traces as you mentioned. The blood test will prove (that yo u are healthy) and in London they will reconsider the matter. I still believe in Almighty God and everything will be fin e. Please wait a couple of days, to see how they will answer yo u . And then, let me know instantly what kind of answer you get. If you do not fee l weak, I think it will pass and soon you can move in the direction of Canada. It was said that "within three weeks they will certainl y answer from London" (Culen's letter to Rondos of March 3rd), "at the latest within three weeks we will receive the answer" (his letter of March 20th ), but the repl y fro m the Department of National Health and Welfare for Canada in London was again delayed . Growing nervous, C ul en compl ained to Rondos on March 29th as fo ll ows : The Canadian gentlemen unpleasantl y trifled with us and in an un-Christian manner. The mos t unpl easant part is th at they said neither "yes" nor "no" . Government officials, havi ng a good life , tease poor emigrants. If one were not thoro ughl y affected by anti-Bolshevism, we ll , after such an ex perience one would like to give up, to leave for the other side and to say to them; "Forgive me, we wronged you." However, th e sorrowful truth is that the so-called democrats who chatter a lot about humanism and democracy practice such un - �140 SLOVAKIA Christian and such brutal things that on this point there are few differences between them and the Bolsheviks. [ ... ] Well, what shall we do? We all are against the heartlessness of the authorities and the stupidity of the bureaucracy and feel very helpless. You have done more than one could expect from a close family member. I am sorry that it turned out so badly. In Culen's letters we noticed several parts where he expressed dissatisfaction towards the immigration policy of Canada and the United States, and criticism and antipathy against the Western countries. Even the nationalist Culen, who professed to be a hardline anti-Bolshevik, reflected the emotional anti-Western sentiment of the contemporary left-wing intellectuals. Conversely, we found here and there sentences in which Culen praised the attitude of the Argentine and Spanish governments which gladly accepted immigrants . At the beginning of April Culen at last received a reply from London. The result was negative. In a letter to Rondoas of April 1st, Culen exploded in anger: Well, finally the obvious happened. Today we went to the Canadian ([Immigration] Office. They welcomed us very nicely, saying: "I just wanted to write you , you came just at the right time!" After such an introduction we were curious about the good news. They did not keep us waiting. They said:" You can not receive a visa for Canada. We received such an answer from our superiors." It did not surprise us. Because, after the long comedy which they subjected us to, we shouldn ' t have expected anything else. Your work was in vain . Our efforts were in �SLOVAKIA 141 vain. Even the intervention of Abbot Kojis of Cleveland was in vain and useless. It helped nothing. Canada needs men with strong fists such as Joe Louis, but it does not need men who dared once in their life to become sick. I am sorry about your efforts and work. Although on the other hand, I had a beautiful experience. And I see clearly the true character of the humanity and Christianity of the United States, Britain, and Canada in the international conferences against Bolshevism. They pretend as if only they are apostles of mercy. One is disgusted with it, when one hears these hypocritical speeches and sees these brutal behaviours. Believe me, they are as bad as the Communists . Culen also vented his anger on Senator Haig, who acted as an intermediary: I thought that such a Senator, as leader of the opposition, has yet some power and the right to speak. But it seems to me that he has not much. I was once an unimportant deputy, but when I petitioned to the Minister of the Interior [Alexander Mach I that there were several Polish refugees who were hunted by the Gestapo, and if they were arrested, they would be shot, it was sufficient for the Minister immediately to issue them Slovak passports and as Slovak citizens to place them in the state service. Our Minister did not send them to an X-ray examination in order to have a look at their lungs, whether they had not by chance some medical history. If you want , you may tell Mr. Senator that it is strange that such an important politician can do nothing even for such a trifle. We have to clench our teeth and regret the lost time. After such experiences, one has to consider what to do next. There are not �SLOVAKIA 142 many choices. One might even consider returning to the home country and to confess to the Bolsheviks as follows : "Forgive me, I was disappointed. In the West there is no democracy, no humanity, no Christianity, there are only forests for which they need cheap and absolutely healthy workers. No more, no less . Nothing had changed since the Americans carried slaves from Africa. The only difference is perhaps that now they check them even by X-ray, which they did not have one hundred years ago." In the morning of April 2nd , Culen received the notice with the same contents from the Canadian Immigration Office. Reporting to Rondos shortly thereafter, he wrote in a pessimistic tone that "otherwise I doubt that it is possible to change the matter" (letter dated April 2nd). To do justice to the Canadian authorities , it should be pointed out that they did not make a wrong diagnosis. In reality, in August of that year, Culen spat blood and was hospitalized . A spot was found in his right lung, but thanks to streptomycin and a calcium injection he was discharged from the hospital on September 10th. 14 In February of 1948, when Culen was disappointed by the medical examination and its aftermath, the Communist Party finally seized power in Czechoslovakia. When Culen suggested, perhaps only rhetorically, the possibility of returning to Czechoslovakia and of surrendering to the "Bolsheviks," in Czechoslovakia they were preparing a political trial against him. However, before Culen's trial started, the Communists organized another political trial against a group of people, including 14 Ibid. pp. 145-146. �SLOVAKIA 143 his youngest brother Ladislav Culen 15 , who remained in Slovakia. Ladislav was arrested in September of 1947, under suspicion of participating in the underground activities of the Slovak Action Committee [Slovensky akcny vybor] led by a nationalist politician in exile, Ferdinand Durcansky. Stefan Culen, Konstantin's younger brother, wrote in a letter to Rondos (stamped October 15th, 1947): I [Stefan Culenj received a letter from Slovakia. They arrested our brother [Ladislav Culen] who was a professor in Bratislava. We do not expect that he will come back alive, for many people were arrested and accused of wanting to assassinate Benes [then the Czechoslovak President] . It is nothing but pretence to murder them. Very many people are arrested . These poor guys will never return. Suspicions of plotting to assassinate President Edvard Benes were spread by the State Security Police (STB). However, it was true that these people, including Ladislav Culen , organized the underground, supporting the idea of an independent Slovak state , and supplied information to Dr. Duransky , one of the leaders of the Slovak independence movement, who was in exile in Italy (after July of 1947 in Argentina). 15 16 Ladislav Culen ( I 9 I 6- I 990 ), fi fth of fi ve brothers of Konstantin Cul en. stu - died history at Comenius University in Bratislava. During the independent Sl ovak State he served at the Slovak Embassy in Budapest. As me ntio ned above. he was arrested in September 1947, under suspicion o f participatin g in an anti - state conspiracy and was se ntenced in April 1948 . to 18 years in prison. He wa s released in 1962. 16 .. The organizational network of the Slovak Action Committee in Slovaki a was initiated at the suggestio n of J. Fickuli ak in May of 1947. The group o rganized aro und Jozef Dobrovodsky and parti cipated in this in iti ative through L �144 SLOVAKlA Otto Obuch, the central figure of the so-called "anti-state conspiracy", was a press officer who worked in the office of then deputy-Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak government, Jan Ursfny. Ursfny was one of the leaders of the Democratic Party, the largest political party in Slovakia at that time. Obuch was arrested in late September of 1947. By the end of October State Security, taking advantage of the affair, forced the deputy-P.M. Ursfny out of office. Slovakia fell into a political crisis (the so-called November crisis) and as a result, the Communist Party succeeded m weakening its rival, the Democratic Party, and strengthened its position in Slovak politics. 17 Culen. Members of this illegal organi zation. Action Committee - official ly named "the Sl ovak headqu arters in Brati slava", spread its acti vity to all of Slovakia, which was divided into three regions." Robert Letz, S/ovensk o v rokoch 1945- 1948 na ceste ku k onwnistickej to tali te [Sl ovakia in 1945- 1948 on the Road To Communist Totality]. Bratislava. Ustredie slovenskej t'anskej intc ligencic v Bratislavc. 1994. p. 157. Jozef Fickuliak supplied kres- "Obuch. Ladi slav Culen. and Durcansky with important material regarding the political backgro und. the negotiatio ns of the gove rnment. copies of laws and decrees. unusual articles in the press etc ." Robert Letz. "Slovenska politicka emigracia z rok u 1945 a ohlas na jej cinnost' doma [The Slovak Political Emi gration of 1945 and the Respo nse to its Activi ty at Home 1". In Slovenskf po vojnovf exil. Z bomfk materialov zo seminara Dejiny slovenskeho exilu p o roku 1945 v Matici s/ovenskej v Martine 27. -28. j1ina 1996 [The Slovak Pos t- war Emigres. Papers from the Seminar '·The History of the Slovak Emigres after 1945" organized by Matica slovenska in Martin on June 27th - 28th. 1996 ]. Martin, Matica slovenska . 1998 . p. 118 . 17 For details of the po litical bac kgro und of the "anti-state conspiracy" see : Michal Barnovsky. Na ceste k monopolu m oci. M ocensk opo/iticke zapasy na Slovensku v rokoch 1945- 1948 [On the Road to Monopoly of Power. Power- political Struggles in Slovakia in 1945 - 1948 ]. Bratislava. Archa. 1993. pp . I 6 1207: Robert Letz. Slovensk o v rok och 1945-1948 na ceste ku k omunistickej totali te. pp. 156- I 76 and p. 2 30. �145 SLOVAKIA After seizing power in February of 1948, between April 19th and 29th in Bratislava, the Communist regime tried Otto Obuch and his followers. Obuch was sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment. Ladislav Culen received 18 years for being a party to "the anti-state conspiracy" which intended to overthrow the Czechoslovak Government and to restore the independent Slovak State. Exdeputy-P.M. Ursfny, who was allegedly involved in the affair, was sentenced to seven years in prison . 18 Ladislav Culen was heavily punished, perhaps, as a warning to his older brother. Konstantin Culen wrote to Rondos on May 7th as follows: l- --1 in Bratislava they tried my brother as an "AngloAmerican" spy and the prosecutor demanded the death penalty. Well, we were in bitter and tense expectation of what would happen and how everything would develop. He received 18 years' imprisonment, which is the second heaviest sentence among the accused. The Czech judge [K.] Bedrna sentenced the accused in all to 85 years. In the Hungarian Kingdom, during the last century, Slovaks were sentenced to about 78 years and, now, at one stroke they got so much more, and it is still said that they are "liberated ." Besides , they treated my brother so badly that he will take it very hard. The worst thing is that everything was unnecessary, that if there had been no stupidity by [Ferdinand)] Durcansky , his unnecessary propagandizing and forecasting of war, his unneces""Jan Ursfny. byvaly podpredseda c-s vl:idy. bol ods udeny na 7 rokov viize nia ("Jan Ursfny. former Deputy Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak governme nt. was sentenced to 7 years in prison). Slovensk:i obrana. May 4th. 1948. On Ursfny 's memories of this episode see: J:in Ursfny. Zm6jho tivota (Prfspevok k vf- voju slovenskej n:irodnej mys/ienky). [From my Life (Co ntribution to the Deve lopment of the Slovak National Idea)]. Martin, Matica slovensk:i , 2000, pp. 134- 149. �146 SLOVAKIA sary instigating of young enthusiasts, of careless people, the trial would not have taken place. 19 Culen also wrote about the matter in his letter of May 13th: Otherwise from the country [Slovakia] there is always only news about trials. My brother was already sentenced as an "Anglo-American" spy; however, I can enter neither England nor America. Isn't it a little strange? In the country they would like to try me as a collaborator with Americans. How this world is confused! On May 28th and 29th, m the local court in Bratislava, Konstantfn Culen was tried m absentia. One of the Slovak newspapers reported : '""The State Security Police (STB) took advantage of the activities of the Slo vak Action Committee. Even th ough the activity of the Committee brought im portant arguments about the stru ggle for the Slovak statehood back home. it also enabled State Security to manufacture ··the anti-state conspiracy" and to accuse the Catholic wing of the Democratic Party of cooperating with po liti cal emigres. which they interpreted as anti-state activity. Robert Letz. "Slovenska emigracia z roku 1945 a ohlas na jej cinnost' doma" . In Slovensky povojnovy exil. pp.118- 11 9. For details of the illegal political movements in Slovakia after World War II see: Robert Letz. Slovensko v rokoch 1945- / 948 na ceste ku komunistickej totalite . pp. 129- 176. See also the memoirs of one of th e leading figures of the Slovak Action Committee. Stefan Polakovic. "Zaznam o cinnosti SA V-u [Records of the activity of the Slovak Action Committee]" . In Stefan Polakovic and Frantiasek Ynuk. Zahranicne akcie na zachranu a obnovcnie slovenskej samostatn osti (1943- / 948) [Activities Abroad for the Preservation and Renewal of Slovak Independence ( 1943-1948 )], Lakewood-Hamilton. Slovak Research Institute of America. 1988. pp . I 09-225 . politicka �SLOYAKJA 147 The people 's court in Bratislava, with Dr. Artur Sipka presiding, tried in absentia on the 28th of this month Konstantin Culen, former deputy of the Slovak Parliament. The Prosecutor accused Culen of the following crimes: that as an important politician he worked for the dissolution of the Czechoslovak Republic [in 1939], that he supported the military and political interests of Nazi Germany, that he supported the declaring and making of war against the Soviet Union, that he thwarted the struggle of the Slovak nation for the restoration of the Czec hoslovak Republic , that he became rich at the expense of other citizens , therefore he committed criminal acts of domestic treachery, collaboration, and treachery in the Uprising (of 1944). The public prosec utor of the trial is Dr. Amoast Barat. Vojteeh Vycanek spoke in his defence. The written statement and doc umentary material presented was proof of his guilt. The sentence will be passed on Saturday at 9 o'c lock.2' 1 Culen wrote in his diary of June 2nd , which is cited in Vnuk's biograph y, as fo llows: There is a newspaper with an article on my sentence "Cul en - 30 years' Imprisonment: [...)] Senate of Dr. Sipka of the people's court in Bratislava on Saturday of May 29 th passed judgement on Kon stantin Culen who was sentenced in his absentia to 30 years' imprisonment, 15 years' divestiture of citizenship, and confiscation of all his property ." Only 30 years! They fo und me guilty of so many cnmes and they gave me so few years! However, we two brothers, together with Laco [Ladislav Culen] got from the Czechs al- ' " Frantisek Vn uk. Zivotopis Konstantfna Cu/ena. pp.139- 140 . �148 SLOVAKIA most the same number of years as all Slovaks had gotten during the entire Hungarian regime. These gentlemen succeeded so well. The state prosecutor was Arnost Barath, a Hungarian from Nitra, whose two brothers, Elemer and Zoltan, are in exile, and one of them has just left for Venezuela. Vojta ([Vojtech] Vycanek, my old acquaintance, pleaded on my behalf. I am indeed curious how he did it. I wrote in a hurry an article for Jednota [a Slovak nationalist newspaper in the United States] where I just dealt with the curiosity that they could find for my trial neither a Slovak judge nor a Slovak lawyer. 21 Culen also wrote to Rondos on June 10th that "they sentenced my brother in Bratislava as an Anglo-American spy and confiscated all our property." These political trials perhaps dissuaded him from returning to Czechoslovakia and of surrendering to the "Bolsheviks". The trial of Kon stantin Culen belonged to a series of political trials which took place at that time in Bratislava. A group of Slovak nationalist intellectuals in exile were judged in absentia as well. Karol Sidor, Reverend Ferdinand Mondok, and Jozef M. Kirschbaum were each sentenced to 20 years in prison. The historian Frantisek Hrusovsky received ten years. It is worth mentioning that Culen received the heaviest sentence. In the meantime, Rondos, who had been informed by Culen 's letter of April 1st that London had turned down his visa application, once again visited Senator Haig. The Senator promised to bring to Ottawa the notice of the Canadian Immigration l l Ibid. p.140. �SLOVAKIA 149 Office in Rome, which Culen had sent, in order to tack.le the matter at first hand (Rondos's letter to Culen of April 8th). Late in May, when Rondos went to Ottawa as a member of the delegation of the Canadian Slovak League, he visited the office of the International Refugee Organization (IRO), where he found a file according to which the entrance visa to Canada for Culen and his family had already been issued on March 5th. Feeling doubtful about the situation , Rondos met the secretary of Senator Haig (at that time Haig was not in Ottawa), and asked about the matter (letter of June 16th). At Rondos 's request, Haig wrote a letter to the Department of Mines and Resources in Ottawa. He received an answer of July 6th from his acquaintance, Deputy Minister Keenleyside: Since Mr. Kulen (sic) has been refused a visa for reasons of health, any review must be on medical grounds. Accordingly, the Director of Immigration has forwarded the entire file to the Departmental medical advisor, in order that we may have the benefit of his professional opinion. The original certificate was severe and I would not wish , at this time, to raise any hope on the part of the applicant. Just as soon as the file is returned , I shall promptly advise you and , in view of your representation, I sincerely hope the medical findings arc favourable. On July 14th, Haig sent a copy of this letter to Rondos . In the morning of July 16th, Rondos visited the District Superintendent of the Immigration Branch, Munroe, who called him the day before. In Rondos's letter of July 15th to Culen, we have a detailed report of their conversation. Based on it, we will reproduce Rondos's petition. Rondos and Munroe talked for over one hour �150 SLOVAKIA about Culen's entrance into Canada. Naturally, they also talked about his medical examination in Rome: Munroe: They did not say that Mr. Culen is really weak, but he has a medical history. By the way, how do you know these people? Why did you help to raise the Culen matter? Rondos reported all the circumstances. Munroe: I know the Senator [Haig] from childhood and we are now very good friends. Well , how did you get in contact with Mr. [T.P.] Devlin, the chairman of the colonization of immigrants for West Canada? Rondos began to explain. Munroe: It is enough. I was informed by Mr. Devlin about what you are asking me. Do you support the application which Mr. Volek submitted? According to it Mr. Culcn will work on his farm . Rondos: I am sure from his letter that Mr. Culen will work on the farm. In Canada nobody will take care of him. He 1s responsible for himself. Munroe: I have information that he is highly educated. Rondoas: It is true , but he had his own farm in Slovakia and he understands farmer's work . Munroe: If Mr. Culen enters Canada and cannot work on Mr. Yolek's farm, I was told that your organization lthe Canadian Slovak League] would help him, because he is a writer and can write good anti-Communist articles . Is it true? Rondos: I have a secret which I would not normally reveal. But I recognise that I am talking with a high state official, so I confess to you . I have a close connection with the Royal Police in Canada I RCMP I and I provide them with information about Communist activities. When a Czech agita- �SLOVAKIA 151 tor comes here and the Police really want to know about his purpose, they ask me to participate in their meeting. Mr. Culen already sent me articles about what Communists write about Canada. These articles were sent long ago to the police office. If you want to know about them, call and ask s uchand-such an officer, whether or not I indeed provided the m with articles which Mr. Culen sent me from Rome. And our organization works against turnin g Canada " Red " . If Mr. Culen could not work for Mr. Volek, o ur organization will help him. If yo u need some ass urances for the help, I am ready to offer it. Munroe: I am satisfied with yo ur words . I do not demand any assurances. I already heard personally about your activity and , according to the information which state officials se nt me, I recognize your words as true. By the way, does Mr. Culen not have the intentio n to go to his brother [Stefan Culen] in America? R ondos: When Mr. Culen comes to Canada, he will become a citizen of thi s country. Because he is educated a nd we Slovaks in Canada do not have such people, we very much need ed ucated peo ple here. His brother in Chicago 1s only an ordinary worker. He cannot he lp him . Munroe: Is Mr. Vo lek sati sfied that he pro vided one year ago an applicatio n for Mr. Culcn 's entry to Canada? R ondo.s: Yes. If yo u do not believe me, please call the Senator. He knows Mr. Volek well and he will prove to you that Mr. Volek is waiting fo r Mr. Culen . Munroe: I am glad that you told me the truth. I will send a report to Ottawa that Mr. Culen is awaited in Canada. And I agree with it. �SLOVAKIA 152 At the end of the conversation, Munroe called his secretary and ordered him to dictate a letter to Ottawa that he (Munroe) supports Culen's entry into Canada. However, in spite of Rondos's "frank" petition and Munroe's "guarantee", on August 9th, Senator Haig received from the Acting Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources, R. A. Gibson , a polite notice of refusal (of July 30th): The [Culen] file has been returned to the Director of Immigration from the Departmental Medical Adviser and, I regret to inform you, the original diagnosis has been confirmed. Under the circumstances, the Immigration officials in Rome cannot be instructed to issue a visa for the Culen [sic] family . Undoubtedly Mr. Volek will be disappointed with these developments but the Immigration Branch can be of no further assistance in the matter. Haig transmitted the notice on the same day to Rondos with the short comment: "I got a very disappointing letter this mornin g which I enclose . I don't think anything further can be done ." Rondos reported to Culen in a letter of August 17th: "Believe me , it [the notice] shocked me so much that I lay down and fell asleep. t .. .] I waited while everything passed away. I went to the Senator's office. He was at home and said the following : Haig: George [Juraj), I am sorry about such mean news. Rondos: Mr. Senator, I had an important meeting with Mr. Munroe, the chief (of the Immigration Department) for Western Canada. It was July 15th. In the letter [from R. A. Gibson] he wrote that they received from England a message �SLOVAKIA 153 of decisive refusal. In my mind , an answer from England was hardly reached between July 15th and 30th , es pecially an official answer through Ottawa. I would like to know whether in Ottawa any Czech communist conducts the immigration administration or not. Munro e: I al so think that the an swer should have come later. George, go to the Immigration Department and onc e more ask directly for Mr. Munroe . Next Morning (perhaps on Aug ust 11th) Rondos called Munroe and got an appointment to meet at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. He was welcom ed. Rondos: Sorry about disturbing you, but I fee l nervo us and I would like to kn ow the situation tho rou g hl y. Rondos again explained to him, as he did to the Senator, and handed him the Jetter from Ottawa. Munroe read it and called his secretary, telling him to bring Cu/en's file. Wh en he brought it, Munroe read once m ore the Jetter which he had written concerning Cu/en to Ottawa on July 15th . Mun roe: Do not take the letter which yo u received from Ottawa seriously. It is written in Ottawa on Jul y 30th , but m y letter to them was sent onl y on Jul y 29th . So it is not the answer to my letter. Mr. Rondos, the fact th at I sent to Ottawa the letter is the same as if I pe rsonally went there in order to carry out the matter. Do not worry because I have not yet received an answer to my letter. And Munroe took the copy of his letter to read what he had written: "According to my special meeting with Mr. Rondos, I approve of the entrance of Mr. Cul en to Canada." Afterwards, Culen had a long wait. In his letters to Rondos we find such sentences as : "The Canadian [Immigration] Office has �SLOVAKIA 154 not replied yet." (Letter of September 6th, 1948), "We know how officials work, •so we are not surprised at all." (Letter of September 18th), "We are waiting until they finally invite us and say Here are your papers and here is your visa. Since nothing had happened, I went to ask them privately. We heard that they indeed received some letter and they have just answered it. We d o not know what kind of answer they received. Well, we can o nly guess as we wait, optimisticall y or pessimisticall y. However, it is certain that it will still take some time. But we are used to waiting patiently, so we will live with it. " (Letter of October 9th), "Besides, nothing special has happened . We are waiting, as we waited one year, two years, or three years ago. Slowly we will look like Jews who are also waiting for the Messiah." (Letter of Nove mber 6th), "We expected last year that we would not have to celebrate Christmas and Easter [sic] by letter, but that we would do it orally. Well , our plans did not materialize and we must one year later wish yo u Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year by letter. " (Letter of December 6th) , "Till now the local (Immigration) Office did not move even an inch on the matter, so to speak. We are still waiting for them to invite us, but in vain. We do no t know what has happened . Now it seems that it has been mo ved, somebody, somewhere, puts a brake on it. " (Letter of December 27th). In August of this year, when Rondos visited Haig's office, he sugges ted, half jokingly, the possibility of "sabotage by a Czech communist". Being psychologicall y exhausted from the long wait, Culen began to suspect that his entry to Canada had bee n bl ocked by the political intervention of "the enemies" . He wrote to Rondos on January l 0th, 1949: "It would be interesting to find out why it all happened. I think that my health was not the question, but it �SLOVAKJA 155 was Czech political interference." In his letter of March 29th, the conjecture changed into conviction: General (Mola) visited the Canadian (Immigration) office to ask whether by chance they had something new. There were new officials there, so they began to check various papers and finally revealed that the difficulty was not caused by an X-ray, but by something else. Well , it might be only political. And if political , it is clear that it was Czech interference. I know that they were not pleased with my appearance there. [ ... ] Because the fact is that there is not a greater enemy than a Czech . If it were possible, Czechs would drown us in a teaspoon[ul of water. Culen's biographer Ynuk also suggested the possibility of "enemy's intervention " .22 However, it is still unclear whether some pro-Czechoslovak groups (for example, the Czechoslovak National Alliance in Canada) or pro-Communist groups really did it o r not. Meanwhile, waiting for an answer from the Canadian Immigration Office, Culcn did not waste his time . After the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in February of 1948, the Slovak nationalist group in exile led by Karol Sidor began its political activities. In this period Culen participated, in addition to his ordinary work as a journalist, in two actions. The first was his radio broadcasting to Slovakia. We read in Culen's letter of November 16th, 1947, the following: u Ibid. p. 133. �SLOVAKIA 156 [.. .] the radio station Free Slovakia has started to operate in Europe. It broadcasts every day for two hours. Soon Radio Free Europe will have Slovak programmes, so the Iron curtain between Slovakia and the rest of the world will be breached and we can open our mouths again. There is much work with it, but it is joyful. Well, on such radio stations we already cite what your Kanadsky Slovak [the organ of the Canadian Slovak League] writes. We will have to arrange a quicker sending of the editorial page of Kanadsky Slovak in order to give our people at home more fresh news. Now we are waiting for a reaction from our homeland .2 3 In his letter of December 6th Culen also wrote the following: Now there is much to do. We prepare materials for our broadcasting to Slovakia. We hope it will be perfect. Well , every day half an hour is enough work for one person. One station is already operating . From the New Year on the Italian government will start short wave broadcasting every day for ten minutes. I hear that even in London [BBC] the Czech and Slovak broadcasting will be divided. If then the Canadian government wants the people in Slovakia to listen to their programmes [CBC International Service which started in 1945], they will have to do the same thing. If people at home will have the possibility to listen to programmes in the Slovak spirit, nobody 23 will tune in to the Czechoslovak jumble. The Czechoslovak section of Radi o Free Europe (RFE) began regular program- ming in May of 1951. However. the division between the Czech and Sl ov ak sections , which Culen had expected , did not materialize . On this problem see: Imrich Kruzliak , "Radio Slobodn a Europa a Slovaci [Radio Free Europe and the Slovaks]", In Slovensky povojnovy exil. pp.338-344. �SLOVAKIA 157 Everything which is connected with the Czechs is bad for the Slovaks. As Culen wrote, from the beginning of 1949 the Rome station began to provide Slovak programmes. He cooperated actively with it, writing articles and reading lectures. He wrote to Rondos on April 26th that "Now I have much work, for every Sunday I have a radio lecture for Slovakia and people there listen to it very carefully." Culen's second political activity of this period was participation in the newly established political organization of the Slovak nationalists in exile. In May of 1948 an agreement to establish a new organization was made between the group led by Karol Sidor and the Slovak National Council in London which was organized in January, 1944, by Peter Pridavok. On the front page of Kanadsky Slovak of December 16th, they announced the formation of the Slovak National Council Abroad as the coordinating body in the struggle for "the Slovak State within a federalized Europe" .24 It was dated Christmas of I 948 (in reality, it was published in the middle of December) and signed by Karol Sidor (as the president) and by Peter Prfdavok (as the general secretary). The main organizer was Jozef Kirschbaum. Culen supported him, and became one of its vice-presidents and at the same time chief of its Italian branch. 2 5 i, "Slovenska Narodna Rada v Zahranicf utvorcna [Creation of the Slovak Na- ti ona l Council Abroad]" , Kanadsky S lovak. December 16th. 1948 . is On the acti vities of the Slovak National Council Abroad see: Frantisek Vnuk. "S lovenska narodna rada v Londyne a v zahranicf (1943- 1948) (The Slovak National Council in London and Abroad (1943-1948))". In Stefan Polakovic and Frantisek Vnuk, Zahranicne akcie na zachran u a obnovenie s/ovenskej sa- mostatnosti (I 943-1948), pp.1-108; Genoveva Gracova , "Dve koncepcie boja za slovensku statnost' (Two conceptions of the struggle for Slovak statehood)", �158 SLOVAKIA With respect to this, Rondos wrote to Culen on December 18th that "the article of Mr. Sidor and Mr. Prfdavok [abovementioned] was published in [Kanadsky] Slovak and it provides evidence of the revival of the independence movement. [... ] As you are actively engaged in it, you are perhaps busy with it. Culen, meanwhile, reported to Rondos on January 18th, 1949: Otherwise we are led by the Slovak National Council [Abroad]. The press in Europe pays much attention to it. The Spanish press evaluated the meaning of this step as most important among all the European nations which are occupied by Communists. Even the Swiss press pays attention to our organization . We may say that until now not even one of our Slovak affairs created such a reaction . Yesterday American journalists visited the Minister [Sidor]. I was with them for half a day and we talked with them. In February of 1949 Culen departed for Paris, together with Sidor and Kirschbaum in order to negotiate with French government officials regarding the activities of the Slovak National Council Abroad. They arrived in Paris on February 20th . We found in the file of correspondence between Sidor and Rondos a post-card from Paris dated February 21st: "We sincerely greet you and on the occasion of the meeting of the Slovak National Council Abroad we remember you." The card was written by Culen and signed: Konsto [Konstantin] Culen, Karol Sidor, Laco [Ladislav)] Jankovic, and J. Kirschbaum . In S/ovensky povojnovy exil. pp.82-84: Frantisek Vnuk. "Aktivity exilu - obhajoba slovenskej statnosti v rokoch 1945- 1948 [Activities of the emigres The Defense of Slovak Statehood in I 945 - I 948 )". in Ibid. p.90 . �SLOVAKIA 159 On February 28th Culen returned to Rome. On March 29th he wrote: "There is now much work to do with the Slovak National Council IAbroadj. We described what had happened, and where we visited. I asked them to send you a copy in order to inform you. However, it is a confidential report and not for publication." Meanwhile, on May 6th, 1949, Senator Haig received a notice (dated April 30th) from the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources, Keenleyside : You may recall that on July 30th, 1948 Mr. R. A. Gibso n [Acting Deputy Minister of the Department] wrote advising favourable consideration in the case of Konstantin Culen and family, Czechoslovakian refugees in the Vatican City, could not be extended due to Mr. Culen's failure to comply with our medical requirements. You will now be pleased to know that on rev1ewmg the entire situation it has been decided to allow this family to come forward provided Mr. Culen 's state of health is no worse than indicated and they can otherwise meet with the Immigration Regulations . The necessary advice in the matter has been transmitted to our office in Rome , Italy in order that appropriate action may be taken on behalf of these perso ns . I trust that it will not be too long before this family will be in a position to come forward. Having received the notice, Haig sent a short message to Rondos: "Dear George : I enclose lforl you a letter received this morning from Ottawa. This looks [like] better news . When you come in bring this letter back with you." Rondos , in tum , informed Culcn of the delightful news m a letter of May 8th: �160 SLOVAKIA I cannot stop myself from informing you. The day before yesterday I received a letter from the Senator in which he informed me that your matter had moved and that now everything is on track. He [the Senator] also sent me the letter which he had received , but he asked me to bring it back to him when I would visit his office. So I typed it once more , how Ottawa classified you, and I attach it with this letter. You will read in it that Ottawa informed the office in Italy I to issue a visal if you arc not weaker than at the last examination. I hope you understand the letter, so I did not write more . Indeed, Rondos did not mention in the letter any more about the matter. However, he could feel deep satisfaction that he had finally achieved his intended objective after a long struggle with the bureaucracy. Culcn received the good news about May 15th (Ynuk writes that Culen received on May 18th the invitation from the Canadian selection committcc). 26 He reported to Rondos further developments in his letter of May 22nd: On the day that I received your letter attached with the notice I from Kccnlcysidc I to the Senator, they already called me from the consulate and at the same time they invited me also by letter to come there. When we arrived. they were very nice to us, full of' willingness. If my health condition, they said , docs not worsen . they will give me the visa. I was sent again for a medical examination. I had to go to Naples where the IRO camp is. We spent three days there , and finally we received the medical report which we now have to hand over to IRO. They have to issue us a new passport, because the old 1 " Frantisek Vnuk. tivotopis Konstantina Culena. p. 147 . �SLOVAKIA 161 one is already invalid. Then I have to again go to the consulate and there we will be told the results. At this moment I do not know them, but before sending this letter I will perhaps know , so I inform you at the end of the letter. I am really curious as to whether they will give me the visa or not , whether the old comedy of sending the documents to London and then from London to Ottawa, repeats itself, as it did the first time. After the previous disappointments , Culen was very skeptical about the results, but this time they proved to be positive. In the second half of the same letter he wrote: "We just came back from the consulate. Well , my dear friend Rondos , you won . We have the visa and, if nothing else happens, I will take part in the Congress !the 8th Convention of the Canadian Slovak Leag ue I as you wished." It took Culen two years to sec ure the entry visa to Canada. He should have felt deep satisfaction . Instead , it caused him a new kind of anxiety. At the end of the same letter he added: "However, now, the most serious problem will be to find suitabl e work. Is it possible to become an assistant editor at Kanadsky Slovak'? Of course, the others would have to approve . Or, perhaps , I will find something else. Well , I think that many people succeeded there, so I will do so somehow as well ." Afterwards, Culen was busy for days preparing for the journey: "I already bought the steamship ticket and railway ticket. I will not use the IRO transportation as I originally had to , but I will go privatel y, because this month there is no transportation and next month they still do not know when. So, I bought a ticket for Yulkania Iperhaps Culcn 's mistake. It had to be Saturnia I, the Italian ship, which will leave on June 21st direct to Halifax . So �162 SLOYAKlA perhaps about July 1st I will arrive in Canada. Then , I will board a train and depart for Winnipeg. [ ... ] Now we are just packing and saying good-bye to Rome." (Letter of June I Ith) "Just now the ship company called that my ship Satumia will leave port not on the 21st, as I was originally informed, but on the 18th. In one word, this week. So I am packing quickly, since it changed unexpectedly." (Letter of June 12th) Culen then sent a post-card to Rondos on June 15th from Lido di Ostia, a port in the suburbs of Rome. He wrote: "Saying good-bye to Rome, I am looking forward to seeing you soon" . Beside his signature there are several others: A. Culenova (his wife), Eva Culcnova (daughter), Karol Sidor, Angela Sidorova (Sidor's wife), M. Doranska (Jan Doransky's wife), Ladislav Pudis , and J. Kirschbaum etc. Another post-card was sent to Rondos on June 17th, this time from Naples : " Dear friend, saying good-bye to friends on the beach, we all remember you most heartily. We send you our greetings and I look forward to seeing you soon ." We noticed the signatures of Konstantin Culen, A. Culenova, Angela Sidorova , Karol Sidor, and Ferdinand Mondok. Perhaps they came from Rome to Naples to sec him off. Culen 's Italian friend, General Armando Mola also signed with a short English message: "We arc all happy & and unhappy! " Needless to say that they were "unhappy" to part with Culen . However, before the departure, one more problem arose. The steamship on which Culen was supposed to sail from Naples on June 18th, cancelled the voyage. In a letter of June 22nd from Naples he explained: Certainly you read in the newspaper that here in Italy the crew of the steamship Satumia, on which I was to depart, �SLOYAKJA 163 went on strike. I have been stuck here in Naples for a week. I am sick with worry. Nobody knows anything, so they tell us "Come tomorrow" . The next day they tell us " In the afternoon", in the afternoon they tell us "Tomorrow". Fortunately, I take it with some humour, so I do not get angry, not even insulted . I tell myself that I will at last find some ship on which they do not strike and I will depart on it. Today they promised us that the steamship So bieski will carry us. [ ... ] According to tod ay's information this ship will depart on Jun e 28th . In spite of Culcn ·s skepticism, the ship did , indeed , depart o n June 28th. He wrote in a letter of the same day from Naples: "Well , finally it appears that I will indeed say good-bye to Europe and the Sobieski will finally move out with us. So sometime around July 14th I will arrive in Canada." Culen departed a lone , because his family planned to leave Italy a nwnth later. Culcn's protector Sidor wrote from the Vatican to Ro nd os on June 29th (in the file of correspondence between Sidor and Rondos): "We arc all really happy that on June 28th on the steamship Sobieski Kon sto Culcn left Italy." It is interesting to note that Sidor in the same letter continued as follows : I do not know what you intend to do with Ko nsto Culen . My personal opinion is that it will be best for him to go to the editor of Kanadsky Slo vak , !Stefan) Hreha. Hreha and he could make of Kanadsky Slovak such a new spaper which even Slovaks in the United States do not have. I wrote to editor Hreha, too, but I would like to ask you to disc uss with your friends the proposal of acceptance of Culcn as an �SLOVAKIA 164 assistant editor, to recommend it and suggest to the competent authorities of the Canadian Slovak League to accept it. It is not clear whether Sidor made the suggestion on his own initiative, or whether Culen asked him to do so. In either case, judging by the prestige which Sidor had at that time as the president of the Slovak National Council Abroad, it could almost be interpreted as an order. The steamship Jan Sobieski stopped at Genoa (on June 29th), Cannes (on June 30th), and Gibraltar (on July 2nd). On that day Culen sent to Rondos his last letter from Europe: My journey was delayed whole ten days owing to the sailors' strike. [ ... ] Life on board ship is quite good. It is full of Italian emigrants who go to Canada. There are some Jews too , but they go to USA. We can hear many languages. However, most people are travelling with the hope that their life abroad will be better than at home. [ ... ] Today the sea is slightly stormy, so most passengers sigh and feed the fish . For me, nothing ever happened on the sea. Otherwise I am using my time on the ship to study English, everyday for several hours . I hope that in Canada, when I will have the opportunity to listen and speak, it will come to me fairly quickly. And I believe that in a short time I will master English so that I will be able to communicate fairly well. Otherwise, I read books and newspapers quite well. At the end of the letter Culcn wrote with some emotion: This is the last letter from European shores which I will send you. We have exchanged many letters. I sometimes felt pity for you and admired you. Because I saw that other �165 SLOYAKJA people also received many letters from you. Where did this person find the time ? I asked myself. · You will certainly be glad that one of your troublemakers will drop off your list. I will always remember your struggle on my behalf and I intend to somehow record it. This letter was written on a typewriter with Slovak phonetic characters. Perhaps Culen brought his favourite typewriter with him. The voyage and the arrival in Canada witnessed no problems . The Sobieski smoothly crossed the Atlantic Ocean in one week and arrived in Halifax on July 10th. On the same day Culcn sent a telegram to Rondos in English: "Safely arrived to [sic] Halifax expect me about Sunday". The second half of the telegraph meant that he would arrive in Winnipeg by train around July 17th. In his letter of July 11th, which was written on the train from Halifax to Montreal , Culen reported as follows : "In [Halifax I harbour a young Slovak named Janega awaited me. They say that Mr. Kunda sent him. He helped me with my baggage; we had a chat and a snack. His willingness was very much appreciated ." Culen arrived in Montreal on the evening of July 11th. Kanadsky Slovak of July 21st reported as follows : "Writer K. Culen in Canada - on the way to the West he stopped at Montreal and Toronto ." 27 It then continued , In the evening of Monday IJuly I l th I arrived in Montreal one of the prominent Slovak writers, politicians and publicists, a nationalist and uncompromising defender of Slo' vak truth [an independent Slovak state] - Konstantin Culen. 17 "Spisovater K. Culen v Kanade (The Writer K. Culen in Canada]". Kanadskf Slovak.July 21st. 1949 . �SLOVAKIA 166 At the Windsor Station prominent members of the Slovak community in Montreal welcomed him, along with a group of Slovak emigres . On Tuesday, in the National Home of the Canadian Slovak League, a small party was organized in his honour. Officials of the League and the Canadian Jednota and other persons took part in it. On behalf of Slovaks living in Montreal, chairpersons of associations welcomed K. Culen . In his speech Mr. Culen promised to cooperate, declaring that every Slovak emigrant should have participated in the national activities of the Canadian Slovaks . On July 14th Culen left Montreal and, after stopping m Toronto, in the morning of July 16th he departed for Winnipeg, sending again a telegram in English to Rondos : "Arriving CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway) 9 A.M. standard time Sunday". As expected, he arrived in Winnipeg in the morning of July 17th and was welcomed by Rondos . It must have been a very dramatic scene. Culen then participated in the 8th Convention of the Canadian 28 Slovak League in Winnipeg . 1 ' At the convention he was elected According to the Minutes of the 8th Convention. Culen said the following on the first day (July 25th) : ··1 do not want to speak long. I intend to visit all Sl ovak colonies (i n Canada). I bring you the greetings of Minister Sidor. the presi dent of the Slovak National Council Abroad. and also the greetin gs of st udents . theologians. and other Slovaks from Italy !The greetin gs. with the signatures of Karol Sidor and Jozef Kirschbaum of May 19th. 1949. were published at the end of the Minutes] . I bow down to your work. I come to you to contribute to the prosperity and en largement of the Canadian Slovak League." Zapisnica z VIII. k ongresu Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy. vydriiavaneho v diioch 25.. 26.. 27. a 28. ju/a 1949 v hoteli Marlborough [The Minutes of the 8th Convention of the Canadian Slovak League. held on July 25th - 28th, 1949. in the Hotel Marlborough], Winnipeg. Manitoba, Canada, p.2. On the second day (July 26th) parti cipants discussed the "Sidor versus Dursansky" problem. The following com- �167 SLOVAKIA as an assistant editor of the League 's newspaper Kanadskf Slovak . The convention also resolved that the Canad ian Slovak League, along with the Slovak League of America, recognized the Slovak National Council Abroad as "the competent representative to speak on behalf of the subjugated Slovak nation at home" (Kanadskf Slovak , August 11th, 1949) . At the beginning of August Culen returned from Winnipeg to Montreal where the editorial offices of Kanadsk f Slovak were located. His wife and dau g hter, who entered Canada through New York, on August 11th, came to Mo ntreal as well. After havin g found an apartment, Culen began to again work as a jo urnalist. Although it took two long years, Culen had finally succeeded in finding "a place where we could begin a new life and work and live in safety" (Letter of June 6th, 1947). Although this article should end on this happy note, it cannot. Even though he became an assistant editor of the newspaper promise was reac hed: '" they concluded th at brother preside nt [Andrej Kucera ] sho uld read the resolution on the recogn ition of the Slovak Nat io nal Co un ci l Abroad and th at th e Co uncil headed by Karo l Sidor. wh o is the compe te nt representative tn speak on be half nf the subjugated Slovak nation at home. Fo r Dr. Durcansky a letter has to be written in w hich they rronounce their esteem for hi s work for the freed om o f the Slovak nati on. Ibid. p. 18 . In the mo rning session of the last day (J ul y 28 th ) Ro ndos made a proposal to accept C ul en int o the edi torial office of Kanadsky S lovak. Kami Murin (fom1er pers1,11al secretary of Jozef Tiso) and Father Jan Zeman supported the proposal and it met wi th ge neral approval. In the evening sessio n "Konstantin Culen was elected as an assistant editor with applause. He is grateful for his election and promises to make efforts to build up the newspaper. He also will do his best to propagate the Ca nad ian Slovak Leag ue with all his might. He promises editor [Stefan] Hreha that he will be a loyal workmate. T hey will help each other. for brother Hreha knows Canad a and the Canadian si tuatio n well and he [Culen) knows in tum Slovaki a and the European situation." Ibid. pp.27-28. Also see the articl e "Po VIII. kongrese Kanadskej slovenskej ligy [After the 8th Conve ntion of the Canad ian Slovak League] ". Kanadsky S lovak. August I Ith . 1949. �SLOVAKIA 168 Kanadsky Slovak, Culen moved to Winnipeg in March of 1952, because the League had bought a small printery there. At that time he became the editor-in-chief. However, he became dissatisfied with this position, resigned in July, 1956, and moved to the United States. In September of the same year he became director of the Slovak Institute in Cleveland (Ohio) after the sudden death of the former director, the historian Frantisek Hrusovsky. Now his personal relations with leading members of Slovak organizations in the United States became complicated (His mimeographed work "V zajatf fa/osnych Jegiend a nenavistneho srdca (In the Grip of False Legends and an Unforgiving Heart)" which was published in New York in 1961, deals with this problem). Therefore, in September of 1958 he was dismissed from the Institute. Culen continued to write until his death on April 7th, 1964 in New York. His simple tombstone with the English inscription: "Culen / Konstantfn / Slovak historian / and writer / born in 1904 I died in 1964" stands modes ti y on the grounds of the Slovak cemetery in Passaic (New Jersey) . * * * Having reconstructed Cul en 's tortuous attempts to emigrate to Canada, we may conclude the following. Someone as famous as the nationalist journalist Culen could have had some advantages; he received the help of the influential Juraj Rondos, who shared Culen's nationalism. Thanks to Rondos ' s strong personal connections with Senator J. T. Haig, Culcn's matter was dealt with by the local government official, R. N. Munroe in Winnipeg. The matter reached even the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources, H. L. Keenlcyside, who was in charge of immigration to Canada. In Rome Culen was helped by the former Slovak �SLOYAKJA l69 Minister to the Vatican, Karol Sidor, and also by the Italian General A. Mola who had connections with the Canadian Minister to Italy, J. Desy. In spite of such advantages, Culen had to struggle for two years with the Canadian burea ucracy before sec uring an entry visa to Canada. Owing to Culen 's past as a stron g supporter of the independent Slovak State, which during World War II was allied with Nazi Germany , he had to make some false statements in his application. However, it seems that the Canadian authorities did not care much about them. Culen 's standin g as an "anti -co mmu nist writer" may have helped him. It is clear that Culen 's health record complicated and delayed the process of hi s entry to Canada. It is not clear whether it had been blocked by the political intervention of his "enemies". Juraj Rondos's self-sac rificing efforts on behalf o f Culcn were impressive. His strong will and activities, which were evident in the struggle with the Canadian bureaucracy, were trul y surpri sing. Culcn expressed admiration and gratitude to' him : "Whenever I meet with Minister Sidor, we almost always talk about your work with admiration , which will remain as a beautiful example of quiet and determined efforts with patriotic eagerness . Very seldom in life docs one ex perience such work." (C ulcn 's letter to Rondos of December 6th, 1948). When Kon stantfn 's younger brother, Stefan Culcn visited his brother in Montreal at the end of October, 1949, " he IStefan Culen I was also very thankful to you !Rondos I and he just does not understand that a man, who did not know us at all, could fight for us so courageously and finally win." (Letter of Konstantfn Culen's wife, Alzbeta Culenova, to the Rondos family of October 31st, 1949). Later a rumour was circulated among Slovak immigrant communities in Canada, according to which Rondos received mo- �SLOVAKlA 170 ney from the Canadian government for helping immigrants. However, Culen doubted the rumour and Rondos rejected it decisively in his memoirs. Judging by the contents of his correspondence, Rondos 's good faith is clear and we probably can accept his explanation that " I worked from love of Slovak affairs and not for money" .29 19 K. Culen wrote in an ano nymo us article as fo ll ows: "There are many of us in Canada who may thank the Canadian Slovak League for ou r emigration and for the fact that we again live as human beings and that we again stand on our feet and we are out of the camps of poverty . They may also thank brother Rond os who did this wo rk in the name of the League. He [Ro nd os] did it co urageo us ly and conscientio usly. Many know well the Slovak ' s worst failing. namely envy. and they began to spread gossi p. sayi ng that he [Ro nd os] is a good business man who receives JOO dollars from the Canadian government for every emi grant. Many emigrants were also angry with his alleged earning of 100 dollars for this purpose. When once someone to ld me that. I [Culen I answered him : ··1 feel offe nded . In my mind. Ro nd os sho uld ge t for me at least 1.000 dollars. If I was rich and had the money. and if the Canadian gove rnment did not give him the mo ney . as in reality it did not. I would give him for every me mber of my family 1.000 do ll ars. Even so. it wo uld not be enough for all that he has d o nc . •• Anonym [Konstantfn Culen J. "Ujo Rondos". Ka/cnd;ir Kanadskcj s/ovcnskcj ligy. I 953, p.211. Rondos himself remini sced about the episode in his later years as follows : "When after World War II o ur fellow -co untrymen dispersed around the world. I tried to get as many of them to Canada as possi ble. I took charge of the help and the !Canadian I Co lonization Office helped me. I managed to get many families and individuals into this country. However. there were certain people who accused me of being paid by the Canadian government up to 2,000 dollars for single families . Of course. this was just a fairy talc. I worked from love of Slovak affairs and not for money . I even spent my ow n money by constant running around and arranging of documents for Slovak emigrants. " Juraj Rondos . "Moje rozpomienky na zasle easy". Ibid. I 982, p.54. �SLOVAKJA 171 In his correspondence Konstantfn Culen repeatedly promised to write the story of his immigration to Canada. He 0 never did so.' This article is an attempt to do it for him. 111 Meanwhile. we identified the following articles in which Culen mentioned Rondos: Konstantin Culen. "Dolczitc pre novych emigrantov [Important News for New Emigrants]". Kan.1dsky Slovak. September 15th. 1949: Anonym [Kon stantin Culen]. "Ujo Rondos ". Kalendar Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy. /953. pp . 209-212 . � 112 SLOVAKJA DOCUMENTATION: V Konstantin Culen' s Long Journey from Italy to Canada As Illustrated by his Correspondence with Juraj Rondos 1 Susumu Nagayo The emigration of post-World War II political emigres from Europe to North America was a long and complicated process. Both the United States and Canada had passed legislation severely restricting immigration to their respective countries in the l 920's and l 930's and this legislation made it virtually impossible for post-war refugees to gain easy access into either country. T o illustrate this difficulty I will focu s upon one such refugee - the 2 nationalist Slovak writer Konstantin Culen . This article is based ' I would like to thank the staff of the Archives and Special Collec tio ns of Mori sset Library at the Uni versity of Ottawa fo r their kind supp011 of my work. I also deeply th ank Professor M. M. Stolarik fo r his critical comme nts and English correcti o ns. 2 On Konstantin C\ilen ' s life see the fo llowing works and arti cles: Franti sek Vnuk, Zivotopis Konstantina Culena [Biograph y of Konstantin Cul en]. C le veland , the Sl ovak Institute, 1984; S/ovensk f biografick f s/ovnik (od roku 833 do roku 1990) I [Slovak Biographical Dictionary (from 833 to 1990)]. I. Martin. Matica slovenska, 1986, pp.433-434; "Kalend ari um zivota a d iela [Chro nicle of his life and work s]". · In Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Konstantin Cu/en (1904 Brodsk e - 1964 New York ). Z bomik vydanf na pocest' nedoiitfch deviit'desiatych naro- �113 SLOVAKJA on the unpublished correspondence between Konstantin Culen and Juraj Rondos, which is in the Slovak Archives of Morisset Library at the University of Ottawa. 3 We will reconstruct Culen 's case by extensively quoting from his correspondence, which was written in Slovak. dcnfn historika a novinara [Konstantfn Culen. Almanac Published in Ho nor of the Ninetieth Birthday of the Historian and Journalist]. Martin , Mati ca slove nska. 1995, pp.66-68: Augustfn Mat'ovcfk and others, Reprezentacny biografic- ky Jexik6n 5/ovenska [Representative Biographical Lexicon of Slovakia] Martin, Matica slovenska. 1999, pp.59-60. During his life Culen wrote many boo k s and articles. We still do not have his complete bibliography. Meanwhile see the following articles : Jozef Kirschbaum, "Bibliografia literarnych prac K. C ul e na [Bibliography of Literary Works of K. Culen]", Slovak v Amerike, Jul y 29 th. 1964: Frantisek Vnuk, :Zvotopis Konstantfna C ulena. pp.225-227; 5/ovensky biograficky s/ovmk. I, p. 434; Jozef Pauco, "Predstavitelia slovenskej kulturnej tvorby [Representati ves of Slovak Cultural Creation]. Konstantfn C ulen ", Jcdnota, September 19th , 1990; "Bibliografia literarncj tvorby [Bibliography of Literary Creation] ". in Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Konstantfn Culen , pp .55 -63. Among the above-mentioned bibliographies. the last has the most information . ' The correspondence between Konstantin Culen and Juraj Rond os is located in the Slovak Archives of the Archives and Special Co llecti ons. It belongs to th e Imrich Stolarik Fonds (ARCS 98 -1). which co nsists of 38 boxes. The material s were donated to the Uni ve rsity at the end of 1998 by the fo nner President of th e Canadian Slovak League, Inu·ich Stolarik ( 1909-2000). They consist mainly of the organi zational papers of the League . but also contai n personal materials of the founders of the League. such as Gabriel Kurdel, Andrej Kucera, and Juraj Rondos. At prese nt (November of 200 1). the Imric h Stolarik Fonds is still being processed. A Preliminary Guide to the Imrich Stolarik Fo nds is available in the reading room of the Archives . The corresponde nce of Juraj Rondos is in fo ur boxes (575-578). It co nsists of his official and personal documents and co ntains thousands of items. Among them are interestin g materials relating t o Rondos ·s mediation on behalf of Slovak refu gees seeking to enter Canada after World War II. The file of correspondence between Cul en and Ro ndos is fo und in box 577. This fi le co ntain s 165 letters (6 1 from C ul e n to Rondos, 42 from Rondos to Culen. and other letters) from 1947 to 1952. �SLOVAKIA 114 * * * By the end of March, 1945, as World War II in Europe was coming to an end, a group of people evacuated from Slovakia to escape capture by the Red Army and possible retribution in postwar Czechoslovakia. They were representatives of the independent Slovak State which was allied with Nazi Germany. These refugees briefly stayed in Holic and Skalica in Western Slovakia and , at the beginning of April, they entered Austrian territory. Finally, they settled in Kremsmiinster, a small city to the south of Linz. Among them was Konstantfn Culen with his wife and daughter. On May 8th, 1945, representatives of the Slovak government capitulated in Kremsmiinster to the American Army. At the beginning they were treated politely. However, on May 19th the former Prime Minister Stefan Tiso and three other former Cabinet Ministers were arrested by the United States Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) . On June 7th fifteen more people, including Culen, were arrested as " Nazi collaborators". They were detained in American Army camps in Peuerbach (until September of 1945) and then in Glasenbach. In March of 1946 Culen was released from the camp due to the intervention of his wife. The family met again in Ried im Innkreis in Upper Austria. At the end of April, avoiding "war criminal" hunters of the Czechoslovak authorities, Culen moved to Munich. But even here he did not feel secure, so at the end of August he returned to Austria. On September 20th, with the help of a friend in the CIC, he illegally crossed the border into Italy, hiding in the trunk of his friend's car. The next day he arrived in Rome, where he was reunited with his family. In Rome, under the protection of Karol Sidor, the former Slovak Minister to the Vatican, Culen started to work again as a �115 SLOVAKIA journalist. Utilizing newspapers and magazines from Slovakia as sources, he began to contribute articles to Slovak nationalist newspapers in the United States and Canada. At the same time, through connections with Slovak organizations abroad, Culen began to seek entry into Canada. The story begins with a letter dated June 6th, 1947, which Culen sent to Juraj Rondos4 in Winnipeg. Rondos was one of the leading members of the nationalist fraternal organization, the Canadian Slovak League. At that time he was president of its ' Juraj (George) Rondos ( 1900- 1985) was born in May 1900. the so n of a fam1er in the village of Vinne (Michalovce district, Zemplfn County ) in eastern Sl ovakia. In March 1926. he came to Canada looking for work. After engaging in various jobs, in October 1928, he opened in Winnipeg (Manitoba) a restaurant with a boarding house. In 1930 he became a member of the Winnipeg branch of the Slovenska liga v Amerike [the Slovak League of Ame1ica]. In 1932 he established, together with his friend s Andrej Kucera and Pavo! Sabo. the fraternal organization Slovenska liga v Kanade [the Slovak League in Canada] which was renamed in 1934 the Kanadska slovenska liga [the Canadian Sl ovak Leag ue]. At the beginning of the 1930's he received hi s Canadian ci ti ze ns hip. In 1936- 1938 he parti cipated in the organization of colonization of Slovak agricultural immigrants to Rosewood (Manitoba). In 1938 he brought hi s wife and children to Canada. After World War II. as an official of the Canadian Slo vak Leag ue. he helped many Slovak refugees (Displaced Persons) to emigrate t o Canada. Cule n' s case, which I reconstructed in this article. was one of them. After holding various important posts of the League. Rondos died in Winnipeg in March of 1985 at the age of 84. For Rondos's life see: Anonym (Ko nstant in Culen), "Ujo Rondos [Uncle Rondos]". Kalendar Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy [Almanac of the Canadian Slovak Leag ue ], 1953, pp.209-212; Juraj Ro ndos. "V lete sli spat' na breh rieky [In the Summer They Slept on the Ri verbank] ". In lmrich Stolarik, ed .. Spomienky pionierov [Memories of Pio neers], Toro nto, Canadian Slovak Leag ue. 1978, pp.207-220: Juraj Rondos. "Moje rozpomie nky na zasle easy [My memories of lo ng-ago days] ", Jubilejnf kalendar Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy [Jubilee Almanac of the Canadian Slovak League] , 1982. pp.51 55: Anton Hacko, "Posledne Zbohom Ju rajovi Ro ndosovi [Last Farewell to Juraj Rondos]". Kalend ar KanadskeJ slovenskej /igy.1 985- 1986. pp.1 27- 129. �116 SLOVAKIA Colonization Committee. 5 In this letter Culen informed Rondos, with whom he had never met, of his desire to immigrate to Canada. Culen introduced himself as follows: As you know, in 1945, with many others I emigrated on my own initiative. After much pain and suffering, I settled here (in Rome). Since Czech and Bolshevik agents will not leave me alone and there is still the danger of being arrested , we would like to find us a place where we could begin a new life and work and live in safety. I have many friends and relatives in America, but it is still hard to go there. They promise us much, but quotas are small, so perhaps we would have to wait for decades. To go to South America seems perhaps more easy, but, even so, it requires 5 In the Minutes of the 7th Convention of the Canadian Slovak League, which was held in October of 1946, we read the following passages: "News from the Colonization Committee - Brother Rondos, the chairperson of the Colonization Committee, made an oral report and added that he has close contacts with members of the Colonization Office of the Canadian National Railways, who offered him the necessary information regarding immigration to Canada. es pecially with regard to Slovaks. Other ethnic groups also exert pressure on the Canadian government with respect to immigration of Displaced Persons. demanding revision of the Canadian Immigration Act. ( ... ) Brother Rondos. based on their explanation about the settlement of immigrants on Canadian farn1s. assured the delegates that the Canadian government would admit Slovaks to Canada if the provincial offices would give them permission . Brother Rond os strongly appealed for sponsors for Slovak refugees and to help them to enter Canada. (. .. ) At the end Brother Rondos clarified who can immigrate to Canada and also referred to difficulties, such as temporary passports. the voyage across the Atlantic, and the lack of ships etc. At the same time he displayed so me application forms which he received from the Colonization Office." Zapisnica zo VII. kongresu Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy vydriiavancho v diioch 28-29-30 a 31. okt6bra 1946 vo Windsoru, Ontario [Minutes of the 7th Convention of th e Canadian Slovak League. held on October 28th - 31st, 1946, in Windsor, On tario]. pp.9- 10. �117 SLOVAKJA time. So, I thought, what about Canada? I wrote a letter about this to Father Sprinc [Mikulas Sprinc], who in turn sent a letter to president [of the Canadian Slovak League] Kucera ([Andrej Kucera]. And he told us to send to you the necessary information . I have a brother in America [Stefan Culen in Chicago] who is also trying every possible means to get me nearer, so I want to try this as well . I would like to ask you the following : 1. Can we enter [Canada] ? There are three of us. 2. What do we need to do in order to enter? 3. How can you help us? Culen then provided his and his family's life histories. I was born on February 26th, 1904, in the village Brodske, District of Skalica, Slovakia. My occupation is engineer (do not worry about it; it is so registered in my passport. It is exact, because I studied engineering in high school.). Since April of 1945 I am in exile. The reason why I do not want to go back and cannot do so is an antipathy towards the domestic Bol shevik rule. I have a Red Cross passport iss ued in Rome . Alzbeta Culen, born on December 19th, 1906, m Bratislava, is my wife. She has a Red Cross passport too. Elena Eva Culen , born in January 22nd, 1929, m Bratislava, a student, is my daughter. She too has a Red Cross pass port. We are all stateless. As we can guess from Culen's defensive tone, this life history is not entirely accurate. Culen was no engineer. According to his biography, Culen was a middle-aged Slovak nationalist journalist. �SLOVAKIA 118 Although he did not have a university education, he had been a brilliant journalist even as a youth. At the time of political crisis in Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Culen participated in the activities of the Hlinka Slovak People's Party for Slovak autonomy. After March of 1939, when the independent Slovak State was declared, he became its strong supporter. He was a Member of Parliament (December, 1938 - March, 1939, the Slovak Autonomy Parliament, then March, 1939 - spring of 1945, the Parliament of the independent Slovak State) and he served as a cultural attache at the Czecho-Slovak Legation in Washington (January - March , 1939). Although he was prevented from participating in political activities by his political rivals from the summer of 1940 on, he continued to be active in the field of culture and journalism until the end of the war. In his letter to Rondos, Culen explained the reason for his emigration as "an antipathy towards the domestic Bolshevik rule" . He told only half of the story. In June of 1947, when the letter was written, the Communist Party already held the leading pos ition and had great influence in Czec hoslovakia, but political pluralism still existed. The Communists did not seize power until February of 1948. More likely, Culen was afraid of "war criminal" hunters and the so-called "people's courts" of the Czec hos lo6 vak authorities . • "Being condemned a ·war criminal' by London [the Czechoslovak government in exile], Moscow [the Czechos lovak Communist group in exile], and Banska Bystrica [the headquarters of the Slovak National Uprising in 1944]. he [Culen] had to go into exile to escape the gallows." Frantisek Vnuk. Z i votopis K onstantfna Culen a. p. l 02. - "To my question why he [Cu len] fled abroad at the end of war, he answered that he had been afraid of Bencs 's revenge." Imrich Krnzliak, "Spomienky na Kon stantfna Culena [Memories of Konstantin Cu len]", in Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Konstantin Cu/en. p.48 . - "When the front [of the Red Anny] approached, Culen. who opposed. as a Member of the Parli ame nt �SLOVAKIA 119 Culen shifted the whole responsibility of his emigration onto the "Bolsheviks", because he knew that the independent Slovak State, which he had strongly supported during World War II, had been allied with Nazi Germany and Canada had fought the war on the side of the Allies. He was also counting on the emerging Cold War, which was shaping Canada's relations with Western countries . However, as we may guess from the tone of his reply, Rondos already understood Culen's delicate situation . It was common knowledge, not only in Slovakia, but also in the Slovak immigrant communities in North America, that Culen had a "s plendid past record" as a Slovak nationalist. Without hesitation , Rondos answered Culen's request with a skillful and kind reply dated June 23rd. I understood well your letter, and your wish to enter Canada with your family. You asked me to answer the three following question s: 1. Whether can you enter Canada with your family ? You can enter Canada as a farm worker. I have close friend s who occupy high positions in the Canadian Immigration Office. I had a long conversation with them. I explained briefl y your situation . I simply told them as a friend that you arc highly educated and the reason why you were expelled abroad. I also told them what are you thinking of doing if you enter Canada. They assured me that, after arriving in Canada, you will be free here, according to your ability. But if you want to and representative politician of the first Slovak Republic. Bo ls hevism and especiall y Benes ' s Czechos lovak politics. which did not even recognize the ex istence of the Slovak nat ion. had to evacuate from Slovaki a by government decree ." Dusan M. Janota. "Spomienk a [Memories]", in Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Ibid. p.52 . �SLOVAKJA 120 enter Canada as soon as possible, you have to be registered together with your family as farm workers. Please forget other worries. Canada needs people like you. Here everybody is free and everybody is responsible for their own future . 2. What do you need to do for that? You have to do nothing. I will find for you a good Slovak farmer who will submit an application to the Canadian Immigration Office. He will petition to admit you and your family to Canada and declare that he has work and lodging on his farm for all of you . 3. What could I do fo r you ? I could do what I ex plained to you in 1. and 2. I will begin the work with your permission and by Divine protection. And I hope that our work will be successful according to the information which I provided for you and your family . A responsible person (at the Immigration Office) told me that it will take you three to six months at most to enter Canada. It was a smooth beginning. Culen was very pleased with the reply. As promised, Rondos quickly fo und a sponsor for the Culen family and so informed him of it in a letter dated Jul y 9th: Your fe llow-countryman from Tmava named Jozef Vo lek submitted an application that he needs you and your fam il y for work on the farm. He also submitted an application to th e Canadian Immigration Office, a copy of which I am enclos ing with this letter. Please do not worry. Either a Canadian Immigration Officer there will personally visit you or they will inform you by letter as to where you should present yourself. In the correspondence between Culen and Rondos we fo und drafts of an application entitled "This form has been prepared by �121 SLOVAKIA the Immigration Branch, Department of Mines and Resources, for the use of persons applying for the admission to Canada of immigrants". There are two copies of the same form, for Konstantin Culen and his wife Alzbeta Culen, and for their daughter Elena Eva Culen. Both copies indicate at the end: "Dated at Rosewood Man. (Manitoba) this 4 day of July A.D.1947. Volek" Signed Jozef 7 In this application there are some misleading statements. In the space for "relationship to applicant" they filled out as "friend" (needless to say, neither Culen nor his wife had ever met Volek) and in the space for "citizenship" as "C.S.R. [the Czechoslovak Republic]" (in his first letter to Rondoas Culen wrote that they were "stateless"). To the question "occupation in own county" they filled out as "fam1er" (not "engineer" as Culen had written before) and to the question "intended occupation in Canada", they answered: "to work on a farm". The most serious falsehood was the answer to the question "Has Immigrant ever lived in Canada or the United States? If so, between what dates and what address?" They simply answered "No", which was not true. Culen had actually lived in the United States three times. The first time (1905-1909) it was as a child with his parents, who were migrant workers; the second time 7 Jozef Volek ( 1903- ?) was one of the Slovak fam1ers who lived in Rosewood (Manitoba). He was born in 1903 in Trnava (Western Slovakia), came to Canada in 1927 and later obtained his Canadian citizenship. He acted as the financial secretary of the Branch 19 (Rosewood) of the Canadian Slovak League (the head of the Branch was Juraj Rondos). Volek wrote in the application , which was sent to the Immigration Office of the Ministry of Mines and Re sources in Ju Iy of 1947: ··1 have clear title to 560 acres( ... ) Financial resurses (sic) $ 25.000.oo. Anaal (sic) income about $ 7.000.oo ." Culen wrote in his letter of August 1st, 1947, to Rondos that Volek was a friend of the famous Slovak historian exile. Frantisek Hrusovsky. in �SLOVAKIA 122 (December, 1935 - July, 1936) as one of members of the delegation sent by Matica slovenska (Slovak national cultural organization) to visit fellow-countrymen in the United State; the third time (January - December, 1939), as indicated above, as a cultural attache at the Czecho-Slovak Legation in Washington and then, after March, as an editor of the official organ of the Slovak League in America, Slovenska obrana [The Slovak Defence]. Certainly the purpose of the last two stays was not as a fam1er. His third stay in 1939 was especially significant and controversial. At that time Culen openly supported Slovak autonomy and, ultimately, independence. Even though Volek filled in the application, he probably only took dictation from Rondos. Rondos must have known about Culen's career in the United States. However, as reported in his letter dated June 23rd, he already had prior consultations with high-ranking officials in the Immigration Office in Winnipeg, so he probably considered this application as just a formality. Furthermore, Volek filled out after the sentence that "I have made the following arrangements for a home and employment for the above named immigrants," as "We will recive (sic) them on aur (sic) Farm and guarantee full maintenance and farm Employment at going Wages. " To the question "Is transportation to be prepaid?" he answered that "I will pay transportation," even though Volek must have known from the beginning that the Culen family had no intention of working on a farm. On July 15th Culen received Rondos's letter dated July 9th . Enclosed were copies of the application which Volek had submitted to the Immigration Office. In his reply dated August l st, Culen complained as follows: �SLOVAKIA 123 Well, now I would only ask you to take up this matter with the proper authorities, because there are several Slovaks here who have papers like this and have been waiting for a long time, but nothing is happening. The worst thing is that they write much about our difficulties and thousands of people live by talking about the necessity of doing something to solve the refugee problem, and make as if they have done and deliberated . Meanwhile, emigrants are perishing physically and morally, while the gentlemen are having a good time. America in particular pays much attention to the matter, but not even one refugee is admitted. The bill, which should have been passed, was pigeonholed . Congress went into recess for a vacation. It will be reconvened again only in January ( of next year) and undoubtedly the bill will not be touched until the summer of 1948. If it is passed, migration can be started in 1949 or 1950. However, who can bear it? [In reality the DP (Displaced Persons) Act was passed in Congress in the spring of I 948 and the migration started in October of that year.] Why don ' t they speak less, write less and act more? Of course, what can we, small and simple people, do against the roguery of gentlemen's politics ? In reply to Culen's complaint (the letter was not dated, but according to its contents it was perhaps written in the middle of August), Rondos reported as follows: You asked me to expedite the matter. Well , I will tell you what is happening. Mr. Volek was summoned to the Immigration Office where he was asked [to provide evidence regarding the following l: I. Evidence from the district office that he [Volek] is really the owner of 520 acres of land [according �SLOVAKIA 124 to the application which Volek submitted to the Immigration office, it was 560 acres of land] . He proved it by showing a private letter from the district office and also doc ume nts which proved that he has no debt. 2. Evide nce from a bank regarding his savings. We could prove that easil y enough. But after that they asked the third question. We were asked to explain how Mr. Vo lek came to know yo u. We answered that he went to school together with you and he remembers yo u as a farmer's son who was also trained in bl ac ksmithing. Thu s, when Mr. Volek left fo r Canada twe nty years ago, you [C ulen] remained at home working as a village bl acksmith a nd also as the cultivator of a small estate. We were asked wh y you lived in ex ile. Did you run away as a civilian or as a soldier? To this we answered that you were not a soldier and that you ran away as a civilian from communist terror. In his repl y, dated A ugust 28th , Culen humorously promised to "tell the same story": Thank yo u for the in formation about the examin ation by the Canadian office. Well , arri ving there , I will prese nt myse lf as the blac ksmith . It is not such a big lie, because my fa th er was a blacksmith , and, fro m childhood I was in his shop. If necessary, I pumped the bellows and helped with the bi g hammer, so th is is not a craft which I co uld not ac kn ow ledge . I coul d, perhaps, pass the examinatio n. By the end o f September the Canadian bureaucracy fin all y replied. Culen's sponsor, Jozef Volek, received the fo llowing pos iti ve notice dated Septem ber 29th from R.N. Mun roe , the �125 SLOVAKlA District Superintendent of the Immigration Branch of the fro [sic-for] the Department of Mines and Resources in Winnipeg: In connection with your application admission to Canada of your friends, Konstantin Culen, his wife, Alzbeta and their daughter, Elena Eva, of c/o Karel (sicKarol) Sidor, Citta del Vaticano, Italy, this is to advise that the settlement arrangements have been found satisfactory, and the necessary steps are being taken to have the proposed immigrants examined overseas. It will , of course, take some little time to complete these arrangements . A copy of this notice was immediately sent by Rondos to Culen who wrote about the news in his reply dated October 20th. These were the most delightful letters which I received during almost three years of exile. And especially, as I see, it is serious and we can judge according to the letter which you received [the above-mentioned letter by Munroe] that in fact the matter has already been arranged . Now it is only a question of time, according to the letter. Culen concluded optimistically: I am ending this letter with thanks for all which you have done for now. I caused you much concern, but I really had nobody else to ask. After all kinds of promises and assurances which I received, what you have done is most real and most clear. Well , once again sincere thanks and if that "some little time" in office is prolonged (I do not know how the bureaucrats function in Canada, but in Slovakia they say that a short �SLOVAKIA 126 time lasts one year), please expedite it again. In any case, I hope that by Christmas I will be with you. While awaiting a reply from the Canadian bureaucrats , Rondos reported to Culen in a letter dated November 3rd that he had already arranged for Culen's tickets: "I am informing you that today I purchased for you and your family the steamship tickets . It means the following: You have your fare paid from Southampton , England, to New York by ship and from New York to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, by train ." As we shall see later, Rondos paid the fare out of his own pocket. However, on November 18th, Rondos received a notice dated November 17th from the Cunard White Star Line, where he had booked the tickets. In the notice a certain Patterson , the person in charge, wrote: You will recall our conversation, in which I advised you that we are not permitted to sell Prepaid for non-Canadians resident in Italy, for the reason that the Canadian Government has not an Examining Office for immigrants in that country. Our Head Office Iin England] is moct lsic-mostl anxious to assist us , but point out very plainly that they cannot take the responsibility of bringing the family forward to Paris for examination by the Canadian Civil and Medical Authorities , on the chance that they might be turned down . Therefore, I give you the suggestion, for what it is worth, that if these people can legitimately leave Italy and establish themselves in Paris, and you will confirm to us the Paris address at which they are resident, we could then make _representations to have the Permit transferred to Paris and the examination take place there . �127 SLOVAKIA Rondos at once wrote a letter (dated November 18th) to Culen. I have very close contacts with the company regarding your matter. Just now I received a letter from them in which they say that they cannot start with your matter and that you have to go to Paris with your family by yourself and that in Italy they cannot arrange a medical examination. In order not to explain much, I enclose you with this letter a copy of the notice. I hope you will choose a trip to Paris. And please present yourself at their company. [... ] And show them the copy of the notice which I am _sending you and either they or you announce yourself as soon as probable to the main office in England where they already have all the best information about you and the registered ship tickets are waiting for you. The same day Rondos sent a letter to Stefan Culen 8 , Kon stan- tin's younger brother, who lived in Chicago: " [... ] I dared to pay for the steamship tickets of your brother and his family from England to New York and I also paid for train tickets from New York to Winnipeg out of my own pocket $636.42 [ .. . ] I did not want to tell this even to my friends , in order not to confuse somebody about my work." Rondos also enclosed as evidence the copy of the notice from the ship company of November 17th and continued: "From your letter I understood that you are willing to pay your brother's fare, in order to get him here as soon as possible. I dared to pay it out of my own pocket. I hope that I am cooperating with good peo' Sefan Culen ( 1909- ?), third of five brothers of Konstantin Culen , was born in Pennsy lvania (USA), and worked in Chicago as a manual laborer. �SLOVAKIA 128 pie and that my money will not be wasted." Rondos here suggested that, since he paid Culen's travelling expenses, Stefan Culen should reimburse him. Referring to "your letter, Rondos had in mind Stefan Culen's letter (stamped October 15th) in which Stefan wrote from Chicago that, "As soon as they [his brother's family] get visas, I would like immediately to send them plane tickets. If I could somehow help, please write me." Stefan Culen, after receiving Rondos 's letter of November 18th, answered on November 21st, and informed him of his intention to reimburse Rondos, as requested .9 Meanwhile, around November 22nd, Kon stantin Culen visited the Canadian Legation to Italy in Rome accompanied by an Italian friend, General Armando Mola. The Legation was newlyestablished and the Minister to Italy, Jean Desy' 0 had just been appointed on October 13th of that year. In a letter dated November 24th, Culen reported to Rondos the result of his visit: A while ago I returned from the Canadian Embassy. I went there with our friend, the general , who knows the Ambassador well. They received us warmly. We explained to them how our matter is going. We gave them an English tran- 9 Because of the complication in getting Culen ' s entrance visa to Canada. Ro n- dos cancelled in June 1948. the reserved tickets. See the notice of the Cunard Donaldson Limited Company of June 17th. 1948 . '" Jean Desy (1893-1960), Canadian diplomat. was born in Montreal (Q uebec) to a French Canadian family. In 1925 he entered the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. He was one of the earliest Francophone diplomats in Canada. In I 941-1947 he was the Minister to Brazil (in 1943 promoted to Ambassador) . On October 13th, 1947, he was appoi nted Minister to Italy and on June 26th. 1948, was promoted to Ambassador and served in this position until 1952. In 1954-1958 he was the Ambassador to France and he died in Paris in 1960. �SLOVAKJA 129 slation of your last letter (of November 3rd) in which you wrote that travel expenses had been paid. We also gave them the letter (notice, dated September 29th) which the Immigration Office had sent to you. The Ambassador said that everything was O.K. He said that we do not even need to go to Paris and that he will arrange the matter himself, including a medical examination and visa. The only things you will need are the following: l. Confirmation from the (ship) company that travel expenses have been paid . 2. Confirmation from Ottawa (the Canadian government) that entry to Canada is permitted . We asked him (the Ambassador) to request the matter telegraphically on condition that we will pay the expense connected with it. He promised to arrange it in this way. We had already asked the agency of the Cunard Company here to obtain confirmation concerning the payment of travel expenses. It would be good, if you could call their attention to this matter as soon as possible. Because he [the Ambassador] said that, if he will have it [the Confirmation] in his hand , he may issue the visa, so we could depart about the middle of December. Well , we would truly like to do so. We would fly away from here to London and then we would await there the next ship and we would depart. Really, we are growing impatient, like children before Christmas , and already we would like to be on the road. We will rest only when our ship moves in your direction . Culen's optimism grew after he received two letters from Rondos (dated November I 8th and November 20th) and a copy of the notice from the ship company (dated November 17th). �130 SLOVAKIA Culen wrote in his letter dated November 27th as follows: "If the matter moves faster, we will be there (in Canada) even in December, if slower, we will be there in January. Anyway, our hope was never so clear, as it is now. We feel as if we have everything within reach." However, "Confirmation from Ottawa that entry to Canada is permitted," which they had asked the Legation to obtain did not come. As Culen reminded Rondos in his letter of December 3rd, "The Legation here is waiting for information from Ottawa that they may issue us visas. I think that he [the Ambassador] already requested it telegraphically. If you have an o pportunity , please ask them to send it here as soon as possible. Because, as long as we do not have a Canadian visa, we cannot take the next step." Feeling uneasy about the delay, Culen sent to Rondos the letter of General Mola written in English (dated December 13th). On behalf of Culen General Mola explained his situation as follows: I saw again this morning, Mr. [T.L.] CARTER, [Second] Secretary at the Canadian Legation , acting for the Ambassador Mr.[Jean] DESY, so as to facilitate matters in every possible way. 1) Everything is all right as regards prepaid tickets. since the Legation is satisfied with the written declaration given CULEN by the CUNARD Office (Mr. BROOKS). 2) Mr. CARTER took note of what you wrote about the permit to enter Canada having already been sent to Rome . Nothing, however, reached the Canadian Legation yet , though the latter wrote Ottawa about it Nov. 22nd already . 3) By same letter, the authorisation was asked of the Canadian Government for the Legation actually applying the �131 SLOVAKJA visas on the three passports, even though the immigration Officials, to whom such a task is usually entrusted, are still to arrive. In the opinion of the Legation, such an exception might be granted since all documents were checked and found all right, and since the Legation have already their own Doctor who'll be able to submit the CULENS to the required medical examination. Were the authorisation not granted, Mr. CARTER says there seems to be no hope for the proper office to be ready for work here before two months or so! It would seem therefore most advisable that you should kindly complete the extraordinary work you and Mr. VOLEK have already done in favour of our friends by personally going to the proper Department in OTTAW A and - making precise reference to the Legation's letter of Nov. 22nd insisting that it should be answered favourably, possibly by cable: mind, not for the permit only, but also for the power to be granted the Legation. This is also Mr. CARTER's advice. On December 14th, Culen sent Rondos a cable. Unfortunately, I could not find it in the files of the correspondence, but, according to the contents of the aforementioned letter, we may guess that Culen's cable asked Rondos to obtain the confirmation from Ottawa by cable and to give to the Legation the power to issue visas. Having received it on December 15th, Rondos visited the agency of the Cunard Company and the Immigration Office in Winnipeg without getting a favourable response. In those circumstances he decided to seek the intervention to his close friend, Senator John Thomas Haig 11 , and visited his law " John Thomas Haig (I 877-1962), Influential politician in Winnipeg (Mani- toba). He was born to a Scottish family in Ontario and was a lawyer by profession . In 19 I 4 he was elected to several tenures in the Manitoba Legislature In �SLOVAKIA 132 office in the city. Unfortunately Haig was attending Parliament in Ottawa. His brother, who had received Rondos, reported to Haig in a letter dated December 15th (to which was enclosed a notice from Munroe, dated September 29th and a copy of Culen's cable dated December 14th): Your old friend , Mr. Rondos was in the office today. He has applied under the Immigration Act, to bring out his friend, Konstantin Culen, his wife and daughter who are presently in Italy. [ ... ] The difficulty seems to be that we have no immigration authority in Rome. There is nothing there but a Legation and without special authority, they apparently have not the power to grant immigration permits. You will note the wire asking that the permit be cabled and that authority be given to the legation to Grant a visa. [... ] The only difficulty seems to be the permit and the visa. We know that you will do everything in your power to have this rushed to completion before you return from Ottawa. Mr. Rondos is exceedingly anxious, he has gone to a lot of trouble and spent a lot of money, and would certainly appreciate anything you could do to iron out the difficulties. 1935 he was appointed to the Senate, Dominion of Canada. in Ottawa. From 1945 on he was the leader of the opposition party (the Progressive Con serva- tive Party) in the Senate. In June 1957. through the victory of his party in the general election, he became the leader of the governme nt party. In October of that year he was appointed Minister without portfolio in the Diefenbaker Governme nt. In May of 1958 he resigned this position. �SLOVAKIA 133 Receiving the news from Winnipeg, Senator Haig met with his personal friend, Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside 12 who was the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources and in charge of Immigration. After being "probed", Haig answered Rondos in a letter dated December 22nd as follows: [ ... ] You also know that I am leader of the Opposition [the Progressive Conservative Party] in the Senate of Canada and I took the time off to go and see the Deputy Minister of Mines and Natural Resources who is also the Deputy Minister of Immigration. He assured me that in two weeks from the 14th of December, that they would either have one of their own officers in Rome to give Visas for Canada or authority would be given to the Canadian Legation to issue them. The Deputy is a personal friend of mine and I am sure he will do exactly that thing. I sent the Immigration letter, about the duties to the Deputy Minister and he said it would all be cleared up in two weeks so that your friend [Cul en I will be able to get his Visas not later than January first. " Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside ( 1898- I 992). Canadian scholar. diplomat. and high-ranking civil servant. was born in Toronto. In 1928 he entered the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. In 1929- 1936 he served in Tokyo as First Secretary of the Canadian Legation in Japan. During World War II he was opposed to the forced evacuation of Japanese Canadians. In 1944-1947 he became Minister to Mexico. and in 1947-1950 the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources. In this period he published the article Canadian Immigration Policy. Vancouver, the University of British Columbia, 1948 . Later he held various important positions in the United Nations and in British Columbia. He published Memoirs of Hugh L. Keenleyside, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart Limited. 1981 -82. in two volumes. �134 SLOVAKIA On the same day Rondos, enclosing a copy of Haig's letter, answered General Mola in English: I was indeed pleased to receive your letter of December 13th with the detailed information therein. I also received the cable of Mr. Culen , and immediately took the necessary action with the Immigration officials in Ottawa. To assure you that immediate action will be taken by the Canadian Immigration authorities , I am enclosing herewith a copy of a letter written by Mr. John T. Haig, Leader of the Opposition in the Canadian Senate, which is self-explanatory . Many of Mr. Culen's Slovak friends in Canada are looking forward to his arrival. Culen described to Rondos, on December 31st how he felt when he received the letter: We were feeling very blue at the end of the year. It seemed that everything had gone wrong. And here, in the last hours of the passing year, your latest news, which you sent to General Mola, arrived. It delighted us very much and it gave us new hope. Yesterday General Mola told me: "I am 73 years old , I travelled around the world, I saw and experienced much, but I have never yet in my life met with such a case of a countryman's friendship, as I see here with Mr. Rondos. You can be proud of it not only as a human being, but especially as a Slovak." Meanwhile, on the same day General Mola went to petition the Canadian Legation with a copy of Senator Haig's letter of �SLOVAKIA 135 December 22nd which Rondos had sent him. Culen reported to Rondos about this episode at the end of his December 31st letter: Just a while ago the General returned from the Legation . They read the letter [from Haig] and they said that it is interesting, but according to the existing laws they may issue a visa only to Italian citizens, but not to foreigners. Until now they received nothing about our matter. They promised that they will send a cable and request an answer from Ottawa to the previous letter [dated November 22nd] about our matter. They have certain objections to our Red Cross passports and they say that we have to get others. In a word, there will be still many difficulties . By the way, the General is writing to you about this matter. They will have to get a special order to iss ue a visa to Culen and his family. While there is no order, nothing can be done. We also found in the file General Mola's letter to Rondos written in English (dated December 31st): Many thanks for your kind letter of Dec . 22nd and appended enclosure from Sen. JOHN T. HAIG . I immediately went to the Canadian Legation and showed them both letters to Mr.CARTER [Second Secretaryl . He was evidently impressed; but unfortunately he said that - though they already had authority to give visas without awaiting for the arrival of the Emigration Officials in Rome - this is for the time being applicable to Italians only. The Legation has as yet not received any similar instructions, neither for your specific case, nor for emigrants other than Italians. �SLOVAKIA 136 I saw H.E. DESY also, and he assured me they would do their showing their best good-will, since they promised me they would cable to-day to insist that OTT AWA should answer by cable to the letter the Legation originally wrote to the Department last November. Knowing unfortunately how slow burocracy [sic] is in all countries, may I suggest that - with this piece of news in hand - you should ask your powerful friends to specifically insist that a cable was immediately sent, as suggested by the Legation. General Mola wrote m detail about the passport problem which Culen mentioned only briefly: Another complication arose at the last moment: namely that the RED CROSS passports - which had been by the Legation declared valid - are now not considered fit , by some recent new regulations!!! It would be necessary to have them substituted by some C.S.I.R.O documents - which it would take an enormous time to obtain - even though the Legation promised their support to hasten matters. Couldn't it also be obtained from OTT AW A that they should cable and authorise the Legation to exceptionally accept the RED CROSS passports as valid for the CULENs case only? According to their expectation at the beginning, it would "take you [Culen's family] three to six months at most to enter Canada" (Rondos's letter of June 23rd, 1947). However, the barrier of the Canadian bureaucracy was greater than they imagined and 1947 drew to a close over the anxiety of obtaining a visa. In the second half of January 1948, Culen 's attempts to enter Canada looked hopeful. He reported in his letter to Rondos , dated January 16th as follows : �SLOVAKIA 137 Just a while ago they phoned me from the [Canadian] Legation, that. they already received the documents and perhaps within a week they will arrange the matter. They already fixed for us even the date of the medical examination. I hope it will end well, because we all feel ourselves quite healthy. [... ] If it will go well, we could perhaps get a visa by about [January] 23rd. Then it will take some time, while we receive an English and possibly an American [transit visa]. So we reckon that at the end of February we could arrive in Canada or in the United States. At that moment Culen thought that an entry visa to Canada was within reach. To his great disappointment, however, he failed his medical examination. Twenty-two years earlier Culen had suffered from a senous disease. At the end of August in 1926, when the twenty-one-yearold had worked in the editorial office of the daily Slovak in Bratislava, he was hospitalized for pleurisy. For two weeks he hovered between life and death. His temperature sometimes rose as high as 41 degrees. After three months of fighting the disease, he was allowed to leave the hospital. After convalescing for months at a sanatorium in the High Tatras, at the end of the year Culen returned to his regular life in Bratislava. 13 On January 28th, 1948, the Culen family reported to the newly established Canadian Immigration Office m Rome for a medical examination. Culen reported the results to Rondos in a letter dated the same day : It seemed that everything would be all right, when they suddenly looked at the X-ray of my bowels. Twenty-two " Frnntisck Ynuk. Zi votopis K onstantfna CuJena. p.45. �138 SLOVAKIA years ago I suffered from pleurisy. They said that even today one can see on the photograph traces of the inflammation. Since then I never got sick, but a Canadian doctor questioned it and postponed the issuance of our visas for later, only after the agreement of the Department of National Health and Welfare [for Canada] in London. They will send all the documents there. If they will agree, we can get visas, but if not, we can do nothing. We are for ever kept waiting. Culen continued in a pessimistic tone: Well, we truly did not expect it. Everything seemed all right. We received passports from the I.R.O. With the documents we had no problem, nor with the civil investigation . It never occurred to me that today they would call into question my illness of 22 years ago and that it would halt everything. My wife and daughter were recognised as healthy. This is sad and unexpected news for you and for us. So much work, so much running around and expenses, and finally this. You can hardly imagine what kind of medical examination we had. First of all the X-ray, then the medical and physical examination , then blood tests and then once more the face of a Canadian doctor. They were more strict than at the med ical check-ups for conscription. Now we have to wait for what they will decide in London. After so many experiences there is in our mind only a small spark of hope, si nce for emigrants things usually do not go well. What more can we do ? We arc truly bewildered and unhappy. We descended from hope into the abyss of hopelessness. �139 SLOVAKJA After he received Culen's "sad and unexpected news ", Rondos answered (in his letter of February 3rd) to keep his hopes up: .. . believe me, I and my whole family grieved when we read your letter. But, considering the whole matter, I think it will change for the better, because many people have suc h traces as you mentioned. The blood test will prove (that yo u are healthy) and in London they will reconsider the matter. I still believe in Almighty God and everything will be fin e. Please wait a couple of days, to see how they will answer yo u . And then, let me know instantly what kind of answer you get. If you do not fee l weak, I think it will pass and soon you can move in the direction of Canada. It was said that "within three weeks they will certainl y answer from London" (Culen's letter to Rondos of March 3rd), "at the latest within three weeks we will receive the answer" (his letter of March 20th ), but the repl y fro m the Department of National Health and Welfare for Canada in London was again delayed . Growing nervous, C ul en compl ained to Rondos on March 29th as fo ll ows : The Canadian gentlemen unpleasantl y trifled with us and in an un-Christian manner. The mos t unpl easant part is th at they said neither "yes" nor "no" . Government officials, havi ng a good life , tease poor emigrants. If one were not thoro ughl y affected by anti-Bolshevism, we ll , after such an ex perience one would like to give up, to leave for the other side and to say to them; "Forgive me, we wronged you." However, th e sorrowful truth is that the so-called democrats who chatter a lot about humanism and democracy practice such un - �140 SLOVAKIA Christian and such brutal things that on this point there are few differences between them and the Bolsheviks. [ ... ] Well, what shall we do? We all are against the heartlessness of the authorities and the stupidity of the bureaucracy and feel very helpless. You have done more than one could expect from a close family member. I am sorry that it turned out so badly. In Culen's letters we noticed several parts where he expressed dissatisfaction towards the immigration policy of Canada and the United States, and criticism and antipathy against the Western countries. Even the nationalist Culen, who professed to be a hardline anti-Bolshevik, reflected the emotional anti-Western sentiment of the contemporary left-wing intellectuals. Conversely, we found here and there sentences in which Culen praised the attitude of the Argentine and Spanish governments which gladly accepted immigrants . At the beginning of April Culen at last received a reply from London. The result was negative. In a letter to Rondoas of April 1st, Culen exploded in anger: Well, finally the obvious happened. Today we went to the Canadian ([Immigration] Office. They welcomed us very nicely, saying: "I just wanted to write you , you came just at the right time!" After such an introduction we were curious about the good news. They did not keep us waiting. They said:" You can not receive a visa for Canada. We received such an answer from our superiors." It did not surprise us. Because, after the long comedy which they subjected us to, we shouldn ' t have expected anything else. Your work was in vain . Our efforts were in �SLOVAKIA 141 vain. Even the intervention of Abbot Kojis of Cleveland was in vain and useless. It helped nothing. Canada needs men with strong fists such as Joe Louis, but it does not need men who dared once in their life to become sick. I am sorry about your efforts and work. Although on the other hand, I had a beautiful experience. And I see clearly the true character of the humanity and Christianity of the United States, Britain, and Canada in the international conferences against Bolshevism. They pretend as if only they are apostles of mercy. One is disgusted with it, when one hears these hypocritical speeches and sees these brutal behaviours. Believe me, they are as bad as the Communists . Culen also vented his anger on Senator Haig, who acted as an intermediary: I thought that such a Senator, as leader of the opposition, has yet some power and the right to speak. But it seems to me that he has not much. I was once an unimportant deputy, but when I petitioned to the Minister of the Interior [Alexander Mach I that there were several Polish refugees who were hunted by the Gestapo, and if they were arrested, they would be shot, it was sufficient for the Minister immediately to issue them Slovak passports and as Slovak citizens to place them in the state service. Our Minister did not send them to an X-ray examination in order to have a look at their lungs, whether they had not by chance some medical history. If you want , you may tell Mr. Senator that it is strange that such an important politician can do nothing even for such a trifle. We have to clench our teeth and regret the lost time. After such experiences, one has to consider what to do next. There are not �SLOVAKIA 142 many choices. One might even consider returning to the home country and to confess to the Bolsheviks as follows : "Forgive me, I was disappointed. In the West there is no democracy, no humanity, no Christianity, there are only forests for which they need cheap and absolutely healthy workers. No more, no less . Nothing had changed since the Americans carried slaves from Africa. The only difference is perhaps that now they check them even by X-ray, which they did not have one hundred years ago." In the morning of April 2nd , Culen received the notice with the same contents from the Canadian Immigration Office. Reporting to Rondos shortly thereafter, he wrote in a pessimistic tone that "otherwise I doubt that it is possible to change the matter" (letter dated April 2nd). To do justice to the Canadian authorities , it should be pointed out that they did not make a wrong diagnosis. In reality, in August of that year, Culen spat blood and was hospitalized . A spot was found in his right lung, but thanks to streptomycin and a calcium injection he was discharged from the hospital on September 10th. 14 In February of 1948, when Culen was disappointed by the medical examination and its aftermath, the Communist Party finally seized power in Czechoslovakia. When Culen suggested, perhaps only rhetorically, the possibility of returning to Czechoslovakia and of surrendering to the "Bolsheviks," in Czechoslovakia they were preparing a political trial against him. However, before Culen's trial started, the Communists organized another political trial against a group of people, including 14 Ibid. pp. 145-146. �SLOVAKIA 143 his youngest brother Ladislav Culen 15 , who remained in Slovakia. Ladislav was arrested in September of 1947, under suspicion of participating in the underground activities of the Slovak Action Committee [Slovensky akcny vybor] led by a nationalist politician in exile, Ferdinand Durcansky. Stefan Culen, Konstantin's younger brother, wrote in a letter to Rondos (stamped October 15th, 1947): I [Stefan Culenj received a letter from Slovakia. They arrested our brother [Ladislav Culen] who was a professor in Bratislava. We do not expect that he will come back alive, for many people were arrested and accused of wanting to assassinate Benes [then the Czechoslovak President] . It is nothing but pretence to murder them. Very many people are arrested . These poor guys will never return. Suspicions of plotting to assassinate President Edvard Benes were spread by the State Security Police (STB). However, it was true that these people, including Ladislav Culen , organized the underground, supporting the idea of an independent Slovak state , and supplied information to Dr. Duransky , one of the leaders of the Slovak independence movement, who was in exile in Italy (after July of 1947 in Argentina). 15 16 Ladislav Culen ( I 9 I 6- I 990 ), fi fth of fi ve brothers of Konstantin Cul en. stu - died history at Comenius University in Bratislava. During the independent Sl ovak State he served at the Slovak Embassy in Budapest. As me ntio ned above. he was arrested in September 1947, under suspicion o f participatin g in an anti - state conspiracy and was se ntenced in April 1948 . to 18 years in prison. He wa s released in 1962. 16 .. The organizational network of the Slovak Action Committee in Slovaki a was initiated at the suggestio n of J. Fickuli ak in May of 1947. The group o rganized aro und Jozef Dobrovodsky and parti cipated in this in iti ative through L �144 SLOVAKlA Otto Obuch, the central figure of the so-called "anti-state conspiracy", was a press officer who worked in the office of then deputy-Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak government, Jan Ursfny. Ursfny was one of the leaders of the Democratic Party, the largest political party in Slovakia at that time. Obuch was arrested in late September of 1947. By the end of October State Security, taking advantage of the affair, forced the deputy-P.M. Ursfny out of office. Slovakia fell into a political crisis (the so-called November crisis) and as a result, the Communist Party succeeded m weakening its rival, the Democratic Party, and strengthened its position in Slovak politics. 17 Culen. Members of this illegal organi zation. Action Committee - official ly named "the Sl ovak headqu arters in Brati slava", spread its acti vity to all of Slovakia, which was divided into three regions." Robert Letz, S/ovensk o v rokoch 1945- 1948 na ceste ku k onwnistickej to tali te [Sl ovakia in 1945- 1948 on the Road To Communist Totality]. Bratislava. Ustredie slovenskej t'anskej intc ligencic v Bratislavc. 1994. p. 157. Jozef Fickuliak supplied kres- "Obuch. Ladi slav Culen. and Durcansky with important material regarding the political backgro und. the negotiatio ns of the gove rnment. copies of laws and decrees. unusual articles in the press etc ." Robert Letz. "Slovenska politicka emigracia z rok u 1945 a ohlas na jej cinnost' doma [The Slovak Political Emi gration of 1945 and the Respo nse to its Activi ty at Home 1". In Slovenskf po vojnovf exil. Z bomfk materialov zo seminara Dejiny slovenskeho exilu p o roku 1945 v Matici s/ovenskej v Martine 27. -28. j1ina 1996 [The Slovak Pos t- war Emigres. Papers from the Seminar '·The History of the Slovak Emigres after 1945" organized by Matica slovenska in Martin on June 27th - 28th. 1996 ]. Martin, Matica slovenska . 1998 . p. 118 . 17 For details of the po litical bac kgro und of the "anti-state conspiracy" see : Michal Barnovsky. Na ceste k monopolu m oci. M ocensk opo/iticke zapasy na Slovensku v rokoch 1945- 1948 [On the Road to Monopoly of Power. Power- political Struggles in Slovakia in 1945 - 1948 ]. Bratislava. Archa. 1993. pp . I 6 1207: Robert Letz. Slovensk o v rok och 1945-1948 na ceste ku k omunistickej totali te. pp. 156- I 76 and p. 2 30. �145 SLOVAKIA After seizing power in February of 1948, between April 19th and 29th in Bratislava, the Communist regime tried Otto Obuch and his followers. Obuch was sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment. Ladislav Culen received 18 years for being a party to "the anti-state conspiracy" which intended to overthrow the Czechoslovak Government and to restore the independent Slovak State. Exdeputy-P.M. Ursfny, who was allegedly involved in the affair, was sentenced to seven years in prison . 18 Ladislav Culen was heavily punished, perhaps, as a warning to his older brother. Konstantin Culen wrote to Rondos on May 7th as follows: l- --1 in Bratislava they tried my brother as an "AngloAmerican" spy and the prosecutor demanded the death penalty. Well, we were in bitter and tense expectation of what would happen and how everything would develop. He received 18 years' imprisonment, which is the second heaviest sentence among the accused. The Czech judge [K.] Bedrna sentenced the accused in all to 85 years. In the Hungarian Kingdom, during the last century, Slovaks were sentenced to about 78 years and, now, at one stroke they got so much more, and it is still said that they are "liberated ." Besides , they treated my brother so badly that he will take it very hard. The worst thing is that everything was unnecessary, that if there had been no stupidity by [Ferdinand)] Durcansky , his unnecessary propagandizing and forecasting of war, his unneces""Jan Ursfny. byvaly podpredseda c-s vl:idy. bol ods udeny na 7 rokov viize nia ("Jan Ursfny. former Deputy Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak governme nt. was sentenced to 7 years in prison). Slovensk:i obrana. May 4th. 1948. On Ursfny 's memories of this episode see: J:in Ursfny. Zm6jho tivota (Prfspevok k vf- voju slovenskej n:irodnej mys/ienky). [From my Life (Co ntribution to the Deve lopment of the Slovak National Idea)]. Martin, Matica slovensk:i , 2000, pp. 134- 149. �146 SLOVAKIA sary instigating of young enthusiasts, of careless people, the trial would not have taken place. 19 Culen also wrote about the matter in his letter of May 13th: Otherwise from the country [Slovakia] there is always only news about trials. My brother was already sentenced as an "Anglo-American" spy; however, I can enter neither England nor America. Isn't it a little strange? In the country they would like to try me as a collaborator with Americans. How this world is confused! On May 28th and 29th, m the local court in Bratislava, Konstantfn Culen was tried m absentia. One of the Slovak newspapers reported : '""The State Security Police (STB) took advantage of the activities of the Slo vak Action Committee. Even th ough the activity of the Committee brought im portant arguments about the stru ggle for the Slovak statehood back home. it also enabled State Security to manufacture ··the anti-state conspiracy" and to accuse the Catholic wing of the Democratic Party of cooperating with po liti cal emigres. which they interpreted as anti-state activity. Robert Letz. "Slovenska emigracia z roku 1945 a ohlas na jej cinnost' doma" . In Slovensky povojnovy exil. pp.118- 11 9. For details of the illegal political movements in Slovakia after World War II see: Robert Letz. Slovensko v rokoch 1945- / 948 na ceste ku komunistickej totalite . pp. 129- 176. See also the memoirs of one of th e leading figures of the Slovak Action Committee. Stefan Polakovic. "Zaznam o cinnosti SA V-u [Records of the activity of the Slovak Action Committee]" . In Stefan Polakovic and Frantiasek Ynuk. Zahranicne akcie na zachranu a obnovcnie slovenskej samostatn osti (1943- / 948) [Activities Abroad for the Preservation and Renewal of Slovak Independence ( 1943-1948 )], Lakewood-Hamilton. Slovak Research Institute of America. 1988. pp . I 09-225 . politicka �SLOYAKJA 147 The people 's court in Bratislava, with Dr. Artur Sipka presiding, tried in absentia on the 28th of this month Konstantin Culen, former deputy of the Slovak Parliament. The Prosecutor accused Culen of the following crimes: that as an important politician he worked for the dissolution of the Czechoslovak Republic [in 1939], that he supported the military and political interests of Nazi Germany, that he supported the declaring and making of war against the Soviet Union, that he thwarted the struggle of the Slovak nation for the restoration of the Czec hoslovak Republic , that he became rich at the expense of other citizens , therefore he committed criminal acts of domestic treachery, collaboration, and treachery in the Uprising (of 1944). The public prosec utor of the trial is Dr. Amoast Barat. Vojteeh Vycanek spoke in his defence. The written statement and doc umentary material presented was proof of his guilt. The sentence will be passed on Saturday at 9 o'c lock.2' 1 Culen wrote in his diary of June 2nd , which is cited in Vnuk's biograph y, as fo llows: There is a newspaper with an article on my sentence "Cul en - 30 years' Imprisonment: [...)] Senate of Dr. Sipka of the people's court in Bratislava on Saturday of May 29 th passed judgement on Kon stantin Culen who was sentenced in his absentia to 30 years' imprisonment, 15 years' divestiture of citizenship, and confiscation of all his property ." Only 30 years! They fo und me guilty of so many cnmes and they gave me so few years! However, we two brothers, together with Laco [Ladislav Culen] got from the Czechs al- ' " Frantisek Vn uk. Zivotopis Konstantfna Cu/ena. pp.139- 140 . �148 SLOVAKIA most the same number of years as all Slovaks had gotten during the entire Hungarian regime. These gentlemen succeeded so well. The state prosecutor was Arnost Barath, a Hungarian from Nitra, whose two brothers, Elemer and Zoltan, are in exile, and one of them has just left for Venezuela. Vojta ([Vojtech] Vycanek, my old acquaintance, pleaded on my behalf. I am indeed curious how he did it. I wrote in a hurry an article for Jednota [a Slovak nationalist newspaper in the United States] where I just dealt with the curiosity that they could find for my trial neither a Slovak judge nor a Slovak lawyer. 21 Culen also wrote to Rondos on June 10th that "they sentenced my brother in Bratislava as an Anglo-American spy and confiscated all our property." These political trials perhaps dissuaded him from returning to Czechoslovakia and of surrendering to the "Bolsheviks". The trial of Kon stantin Culen belonged to a series of political trials which took place at that time in Bratislava. A group of Slovak nationalist intellectuals in exile were judged in absentia as well. Karol Sidor, Reverend Ferdinand Mondok, and Jozef M. Kirschbaum were each sentenced to 20 years in prison. The historian Frantisek Hrusovsky received ten years. It is worth mentioning that Culen received the heaviest sentence. In the meantime, Rondos, who had been informed by Culen 's letter of April 1st that London had turned down his visa application, once again visited Senator Haig. The Senator promised to bring to Ottawa the notice of the Canadian Immigration l l Ibid. p.140. �SLOVAKIA 149 Office in Rome, which Culen had sent, in order to tack.le the matter at first hand (Rondos's letter to Culen of April 8th). Late in May, when Rondos went to Ottawa as a member of the delegation of the Canadian Slovak League, he visited the office of the International Refugee Organization (IRO), where he found a file according to which the entrance visa to Canada for Culen and his family had already been issued on March 5th. Feeling doubtful about the situation , Rondos met the secretary of Senator Haig (at that time Haig was not in Ottawa), and asked about the matter (letter of June 16th). At Rondos 's request, Haig wrote a letter to the Department of Mines and Resources in Ottawa. He received an answer of July 6th from his acquaintance, Deputy Minister Keenleyside: Since Mr. Kulen (sic) has been refused a visa for reasons of health, any review must be on medical grounds. Accordingly, the Director of Immigration has forwarded the entire file to the Departmental medical advisor, in order that we may have the benefit of his professional opinion. The original certificate was severe and I would not wish , at this time, to raise any hope on the part of the applicant. Just as soon as the file is returned , I shall promptly advise you and , in view of your representation, I sincerely hope the medical findings arc favourable. On July 14th, Haig sent a copy of this letter to Rondos . In the morning of July 16th, Rondos visited the District Superintendent of the Immigration Branch, Munroe, who called him the day before. In Rondos's letter of July 15th to Culen, we have a detailed report of their conversation. Based on it, we will reproduce Rondos's petition. Rondos and Munroe talked for over one hour �150 SLOVAKIA about Culen's entrance into Canada. Naturally, they also talked about his medical examination in Rome: Munroe: They did not say that Mr. Culen is really weak, but he has a medical history. By the way, how do you know these people? Why did you help to raise the Culen matter? Rondos reported all the circumstances. Munroe: I know the Senator [Haig] from childhood and we are now very good friends. Well , how did you get in contact with Mr. [T.P.] Devlin, the chairman of the colonization of immigrants for West Canada? Rondos began to explain. Munroe: It is enough. I was informed by Mr. Devlin about what you are asking me. Do you support the application which Mr. Volek submitted? According to it Mr. Culcn will work on his farm . Rondos: I am sure from his letter that Mr. Culen will work on the farm. In Canada nobody will take care of him. He 1s responsible for himself. Munroe: I have information that he is highly educated. Rondoas: It is true , but he had his own farm in Slovakia and he understands farmer's work . Munroe: If Mr. Culen enters Canada and cannot work on Mr. Yolek's farm, I was told that your organization lthe Canadian Slovak League] would help him, because he is a writer and can write good anti-Communist articles . Is it true? Rondos: I have a secret which I would not normally reveal. But I recognise that I am talking with a high state official, so I confess to you . I have a close connection with the Royal Police in Canada I RCMP I and I provide them with information about Communist activities. When a Czech agita- �SLOVAKIA 151 tor comes here and the Police really want to know about his purpose, they ask me to participate in their meeting. Mr. Culen already sent me articles about what Communists write about Canada. These articles were sent long ago to the police office. If you want to know about them, call and ask s uchand-such an officer, whether or not I indeed provided the m with articles which Mr. Culen sent me from Rome. And our organization works against turnin g Canada " Red " . If Mr. Culen could not work for Mr. Volek, o ur organization will help him. If yo u need some ass urances for the help, I am ready to offer it. Munroe: I am satisfied with yo ur words . I do not demand any assurances. I already heard personally about your activity and , according to the information which state officials se nt me, I recognize your words as true. By the way, does Mr. Culen not have the intentio n to go to his brother [Stefan Culen] in America? R ondos: When Mr. Culen comes to Canada, he will become a citizen of thi s country. Because he is educated a nd we Slovaks in Canada do not have such people, we very much need ed ucated peo ple here. His brother in Chicago 1s only an ordinary worker. He cannot he lp him . Munroe: Is Mr. Vo lek sati sfied that he pro vided one year ago an applicatio n for Mr. Culcn 's entry to Canada? R ondo.s: Yes. If yo u do not believe me, please call the Senator. He knows Mr. Volek well and he will prove to you that Mr. Volek is waiting fo r Mr. Culen . Munroe: I am glad that you told me the truth. I will send a report to Ottawa that Mr. Culen is awaited in Canada. And I agree with it. �SLOVAKIA 152 At the end of the conversation, Munroe called his secretary and ordered him to dictate a letter to Ottawa that he (Munroe) supports Culen's entry into Canada. However, in spite of Rondos's "frank" petition and Munroe's "guarantee", on August 9th, Senator Haig received from the Acting Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources, R. A. Gibson , a polite notice of refusal (of July 30th): The [Culen] file has been returned to the Director of Immigration from the Departmental Medical Adviser and, I regret to inform you, the original diagnosis has been confirmed. Under the circumstances, the Immigration officials in Rome cannot be instructed to issue a visa for the Culen [sic] family . Undoubtedly Mr. Volek will be disappointed with these developments but the Immigration Branch can be of no further assistance in the matter. Haig transmitted the notice on the same day to Rondos with the short comment: "I got a very disappointing letter this mornin g which I enclose . I don't think anything further can be done ." Rondos reported to Culen in a letter of August 17th: "Believe me , it [the notice] shocked me so much that I lay down and fell asleep. t .. .] I waited while everything passed away. I went to the Senator's office. He was at home and said the following : Haig: George [Juraj), I am sorry about such mean news. Rondos: Mr. Senator, I had an important meeting with Mr. Munroe, the chief (of the Immigration Department) for Western Canada. It was July 15th. In the letter [from R. A. Gibson] he wrote that they received from England a message �SLOVAKIA 153 of decisive refusal. In my mind , an answer from England was hardly reached between July 15th and 30th , es pecially an official answer through Ottawa. I would like to know whether in Ottawa any Czech communist conducts the immigration administration or not. Munro e: I al so think that the an swer should have come later. George, go to the Immigration Department and onc e more ask directly for Mr. Munroe . Next Morning (perhaps on Aug ust 11th) Rondos called Munroe and got an appointment to meet at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. He was welcom ed. Rondos: Sorry about disturbing you, but I fee l nervo us and I would like to kn ow the situation tho rou g hl y. Rondos again explained to him, as he did to the Senator, and handed him the Jetter from Ottawa. Munroe read it and called his secretary, telling him to bring Cu/en's file. Wh en he brought it, Munroe read once m ore the Jetter which he had written concerning Cu/en to Ottawa on July 15th . Mun roe: Do not take the letter which yo u received from Ottawa seriously. It is written in Ottawa on Jul y 30th , but m y letter to them was sent onl y on Jul y 29th . So it is not the answer to my letter. Mr. Rondos, the fact th at I sent to Ottawa the letter is the same as if I pe rsonally went there in order to carry out the matter. Do not worry because I have not yet received an answer to my letter. And Munroe took the copy of his letter to read what he had written: "According to my special meeting with Mr. Rondos, I approve of the entrance of Mr. Cul en to Canada." Afterwards, Culen had a long wait. In his letters to Rondos we find such sentences as : "The Canadian [Immigration] Office has �SLOVAKIA 154 not replied yet." (Letter of September 6th, 1948), "We know how officials work, •so we are not surprised at all." (Letter of September 18th), "We are waiting until they finally invite us and say Here are your papers and here is your visa. Since nothing had happened, I went to ask them privately. We heard that they indeed received some letter and they have just answered it. We d o not know what kind of answer they received. Well, we can o nly guess as we wait, optimisticall y or pessimisticall y. However, it is certain that it will still take some time. But we are used to waiting patiently, so we will live with it. " (Letter of October 9th), "Besides, nothing special has happened . We are waiting, as we waited one year, two years, or three years ago. Slowly we will look like Jews who are also waiting for the Messiah." (Letter of Nove mber 6th), "We expected last year that we would not have to celebrate Christmas and Easter [sic] by letter, but that we would do it orally. Well , our plans did not materialize and we must one year later wish yo u Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year by letter. " (Letter of December 6th) , "Till now the local (Immigration) Office did not move even an inch on the matter, so to speak. We are still waiting for them to invite us, but in vain. We do no t know what has happened . Now it seems that it has been mo ved, somebody, somewhere, puts a brake on it. " (Letter of December 27th). In August of this year, when Rondos visited Haig's office, he sugges ted, half jokingly, the possibility of "sabotage by a Czech communist". Being psychologicall y exhausted from the long wait, Culen began to suspect that his entry to Canada had bee n bl ocked by the political intervention of "the enemies" . He wrote to Rondos on January l 0th, 1949: "It would be interesting to find out why it all happened. I think that my health was not the question, but it �SLOVAKJA 155 was Czech political interference." In his letter of March 29th, the conjecture changed into conviction: General (Mola) visited the Canadian (Immigration) office to ask whether by chance they had something new. There were new officials there, so they began to check various papers and finally revealed that the difficulty was not caused by an X-ray, but by something else. Well , it might be only political. And if political , it is clear that it was Czech interference. I know that they were not pleased with my appearance there. [ ... ] Because the fact is that there is not a greater enemy than a Czech . If it were possible, Czechs would drown us in a teaspoon[ul of water. Culen's biographer Ynuk also suggested the possibility of "enemy's intervention " .22 However, it is still unclear whether some pro-Czechoslovak groups (for example, the Czechoslovak National Alliance in Canada) or pro-Communist groups really did it o r not. Meanwhile, waiting for an answer from the Canadian Immigration Office, Culcn did not waste his time . After the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in February of 1948, the Slovak nationalist group in exile led by Karol Sidor began its political activities. In this period Culen participated, in addition to his ordinary work as a journalist, in two actions. The first was his radio broadcasting to Slovakia. We read in Culen's letter of November 16th, 1947, the following: u Ibid. p. 133. �SLOVAKIA 156 [.. .] the radio station Free Slovakia has started to operate in Europe. It broadcasts every day for two hours. Soon Radio Free Europe will have Slovak programmes, so the Iron curtain between Slovakia and the rest of the world will be breached and we can open our mouths again. There is much work with it, but it is joyful. Well, on such radio stations we already cite what your Kanadsky Slovak [the organ of the Canadian Slovak League] writes. We will have to arrange a quicker sending of the editorial page of Kanadsky Slovak in order to give our people at home more fresh news. Now we are waiting for a reaction from our homeland .2 3 In his letter of December 6th Culen also wrote the following: Now there is much to do. We prepare materials for our broadcasting to Slovakia. We hope it will be perfect. Well , every day half an hour is enough work for one person. One station is already operating . From the New Year on the Italian government will start short wave broadcasting every day for ten minutes. I hear that even in London [BBC] the Czech and Slovak broadcasting will be divided. If then the Canadian government wants the people in Slovakia to listen to their programmes [CBC International Service which started in 1945], they will have to do the same thing. If people at home will have the possibility to listen to programmes in the Slovak spirit, nobody 23 will tune in to the Czechoslovak jumble. The Czechoslovak section of Radi o Free Europe (RFE) began regular program- ming in May of 1951. However. the division between the Czech and Sl ov ak sections , which Culen had expected , did not materialize . On this problem see: Imrich Kruzliak , "Radio Slobodn a Europa a Slovaci [Radio Free Europe and the Slovaks]", In Slovensky povojnovy exil. pp.338-344. �SLOVAKIA 157 Everything which is connected with the Czechs is bad for the Slovaks. As Culen wrote, from the beginning of 1949 the Rome station began to provide Slovak programmes. He cooperated actively with it, writing articles and reading lectures. He wrote to Rondos on April 26th that "Now I have much work, for every Sunday I have a radio lecture for Slovakia and people there listen to it very carefully." Culen's second political activity of this period was participation in the newly established political organization of the Slovak nationalists in exile. In May of 1948 an agreement to establish a new organization was made between the group led by Karol Sidor and the Slovak National Council in London which was organized in January, 1944, by Peter Pridavok. On the front page of Kanadsky Slovak of December 16th, they announced the formation of the Slovak National Council Abroad as the coordinating body in the struggle for "the Slovak State within a federalized Europe" .24 It was dated Christmas of I 948 (in reality, it was published in the middle of December) and signed by Karol Sidor (as the president) and by Peter Prfdavok (as the general secretary). The main organizer was Jozef Kirschbaum. Culen supported him, and became one of its vice-presidents and at the same time chief of its Italian branch. 2 5 i, "Slovenska Narodna Rada v Zahranicf utvorcna [Creation of the Slovak Na- ti ona l Council Abroad]" , Kanadsky S lovak. December 16th. 1948 . is On the acti vities of the Slovak National Council Abroad see: Frantisek Vnuk. "S lovenska narodna rada v Londyne a v zahranicf (1943- 1948) (The Slovak National Council in London and Abroad (1943-1948))". In Stefan Polakovic and Frantisek Vnuk, Zahranicne akcie na zachran u a obnovenie s/ovenskej sa- mostatnosti (I 943-1948), pp.1-108; Genoveva Gracova , "Dve koncepcie boja za slovensku statnost' (Two conceptions of the struggle for Slovak statehood)", �158 SLOVAKIA With respect to this, Rondos wrote to Culen on December 18th that "the article of Mr. Sidor and Mr. Prfdavok [abovementioned] was published in [Kanadsky] Slovak and it provides evidence of the revival of the independence movement. [... ] As you are actively engaged in it, you are perhaps busy with it. Culen, meanwhile, reported to Rondos on January 18th, 1949: Otherwise we are led by the Slovak National Council [Abroad]. The press in Europe pays much attention to it. The Spanish press evaluated the meaning of this step as most important among all the European nations which are occupied by Communists. Even the Swiss press pays attention to our organization . We may say that until now not even one of our Slovak affairs created such a reaction . Yesterday American journalists visited the Minister [Sidor]. I was with them for half a day and we talked with them. In February of 1949 Culen departed for Paris, together with Sidor and Kirschbaum in order to negotiate with French government officials regarding the activities of the Slovak National Council Abroad. They arrived in Paris on February 20th . We found in the file of correspondence between Sidor and Rondos a post-card from Paris dated February 21st: "We sincerely greet you and on the occasion of the meeting of the Slovak National Council Abroad we remember you." The card was written by Culen and signed: Konsto [Konstantin] Culen, Karol Sidor, Laco [Ladislav)] Jankovic, and J. Kirschbaum . In S/ovensky povojnovy exil. pp.82-84: Frantisek Vnuk. "Aktivity exilu - obhajoba slovenskej statnosti v rokoch 1945- 1948 [Activities of the emigres The Defense of Slovak Statehood in I 945 - I 948 )". in Ibid. p.90 . �SLOVAKIA 159 On February 28th Culen returned to Rome. On March 29th he wrote: "There is now much work to do with the Slovak National Council IAbroadj. We described what had happened, and where we visited. I asked them to send you a copy in order to inform you. However, it is a confidential report and not for publication." Meanwhile, on May 6th, 1949, Senator Haig received a notice (dated April 30th) from the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources, Keenleyside : You may recall that on July 30th, 1948 Mr. R. A. Gibso n [Acting Deputy Minister of the Department] wrote advising favourable consideration in the case of Konstantin Culen and family, Czechoslovakian refugees in the Vatican City, could not be extended due to Mr. Culen's failure to comply with our medical requirements. You will now be pleased to know that on rev1ewmg the entire situation it has been decided to allow this family to come forward provided Mr. Culen 's state of health is no worse than indicated and they can otherwise meet with the Immigration Regulations . The necessary advice in the matter has been transmitted to our office in Rome , Italy in order that appropriate action may be taken on behalf of these perso ns . I trust that it will not be too long before this family will be in a position to come forward. Having received the notice, Haig sent a short message to Rondos: "Dear George : I enclose lforl you a letter received this morning from Ottawa. This looks [like] better news . When you come in bring this letter back with you." Rondos , in tum , informed Culcn of the delightful news m a letter of May 8th: �160 SLOVAKIA I cannot stop myself from informing you. The day before yesterday I received a letter from the Senator in which he informed me that your matter had moved and that now everything is on track. He [the Senator] also sent me the letter which he had received , but he asked me to bring it back to him when I would visit his office. So I typed it once more , how Ottawa classified you, and I attach it with this letter. You will read in it that Ottawa informed the office in Italy I to issue a visal if you arc not weaker than at the last examination. I hope you understand the letter, so I did not write more . Indeed, Rondos did not mention in the letter any more about the matter. However, he could feel deep satisfaction that he had finally achieved his intended objective after a long struggle with the bureaucracy. Culcn received the good news about May 15th (Ynuk writes that Culen received on May 18th the invitation from the Canadian selection committcc). 26 He reported to Rondos further developments in his letter of May 22nd: On the day that I received your letter attached with the notice I from Kccnlcysidc I to the Senator, they already called me from the consulate and at the same time they invited me also by letter to come there. When we arrived. they were very nice to us, full of' willingness. If my health condition, they said , docs not worsen . they will give me the visa. I was sent again for a medical examination. I had to go to Naples where the IRO camp is. We spent three days there , and finally we received the medical report which we now have to hand over to IRO. They have to issue us a new passport, because the old 1 " Frantisek Vnuk. tivotopis Konstantina Culena. p. 147 . �SLOVAKIA 161 one is already invalid. Then I have to again go to the consulate and there we will be told the results. At this moment I do not know them, but before sending this letter I will perhaps know , so I inform you at the end of the letter. I am really curious as to whether they will give me the visa or not , whether the old comedy of sending the documents to London and then from London to Ottawa, repeats itself, as it did the first time. After the previous disappointments , Culen was very skeptical about the results, but this time they proved to be positive. In the second half of the same letter he wrote: "We just came back from the consulate. Well , my dear friend Rondos , you won . We have the visa and, if nothing else happens, I will take part in the Congress !the 8th Convention of the Canadian Slovak Leag ue I as you wished." It took Culen two years to sec ure the entry visa to Canada. He should have felt deep satisfaction . Instead , it caused him a new kind of anxiety. At the end of the same letter he added: "However, now, the most serious problem will be to find suitabl e work. Is it possible to become an assistant editor at Kanadsky Slovak'? Of course, the others would have to approve . Or, perhaps , I will find something else. Well , I think that many people succeeded there, so I will do so somehow as well ." Afterwards, Culen was busy for days preparing for the journey: "I already bought the steamship ticket and railway ticket. I will not use the IRO transportation as I originally had to , but I will go privatel y, because this month there is no transportation and next month they still do not know when. So, I bought a ticket for Yulkania Iperhaps Culcn 's mistake. It had to be Saturnia I, the Italian ship, which will leave on June 21st direct to Halifax . So �162 SLOYAKlA perhaps about July 1st I will arrive in Canada. Then , I will board a train and depart for Winnipeg. [ ... ] Now we are just packing and saying good-bye to Rome." (Letter of June I Ith) "Just now the ship company called that my ship Satumia will leave port not on the 21st, as I was originally informed, but on the 18th. In one word, this week. So I am packing quickly, since it changed unexpectedly." (Letter of June 12th) Culen then sent a post-card to Rondos on June 15th from Lido di Ostia, a port in the suburbs of Rome. He wrote: "Saying good-bye to Rome, I am looking forward to seeing you soon" . Beside his signature there are several others: A. Culenova (his wife), Eva Culcnova (daughter), Karol Sidor, Angela Sidorova (Sidor's wife), M. Doranska (Jan Doransky's wife), Ladislav Pudis , and J. Kirschbaum etc. Another post-card was sent to Rondos on June 17th, this time from Naples : " Dear friend, saying good-bye to friends on the beach, we all remember you most heartily. We send you our greetings and I look forward to seeing you soon ." We noticed the signatures of Konstantin Culen, A. Culenova, Angela Sidorova , Karol Sidor, and Ferdinand Mondok. Perhaps they came from Rome to Naples to sec him off. Culen 's Italian friend, General Armando Mola also signed with a short English message: "We arc all happy & and unhappy! " Needless to say that they were "unhappy" to part with Culen . However, before the departure, one more problem arose. The steamship on which Culen was supposed to sail from Naples on June 18th, cancelled the voyage. In a letter of June 22nd from Naples he explained: Certainly you read in the newspaper that here in Italy the crew of the steamship Satumia, on which I was to depart, �SLOYAKJA 163 went on strike. I have been stuck here in Naples for a week. I am sick with worry. Nobody knows anything, so they tell us "Come tomorrow" . The next day they tell us " In the afternoon", in the afternoon they tell us "Tomorrow". Fortunately, I take it with some humour, so I do not get angry, not even insulted . I tell myself that I will at last find some ship on which they do not strike and I will depart on it. Today they promised us that the steamship So bieski will carry us. [ ... ] According to tod ay's information this ship will depart on Jun e 28th . In spite of Culcn ·s skepticism, the ship did , indeed , depart o n June 28th. He wrote in a letter of the same day from Naples: "Well , finally it appears that I will indeed say good-bye to Europe and the Sobieski will finally move out with us. So sometime around July 14th I will arrive in Canada." Culen departed a lone , because his family planned to leave Italy a nwnth later. Culcn's protector Sidor wrote from the Vatican to Ro nd os on June 29th (in the file of correspondence between Sidor and Rondos): "We arc all really happy that on June 28th on the steamship Sobieski Kon sto Culcn left Italy." It is interesting to note that Sidor in the same letter continued as follows : I do not know what you intend to do with Ko nsto Culen . My personal opinion is that it will be best for him to go to the editor of Kanadsky Slo vak , !Stefan) Hreha. Hreha and he could make of Kanadsky Slovak such a new spaper which even Slovaks in the United States do not have. I wrote to editor Hreha, too, but I would like to ask you to disc uss with your friends the proposal of acceptance of Culcn as an �SLOVAKIA 164 assistant editor, to recommend it and suggest to the competent authorities of the Canadian Slovak League to accept it. It is not clear whether Sidor made the suggestion on his own initiative, or whether Culen asked him to do so. In either case, judging by the prestige which Sidor had at that time as the president of the Slovak National Council Abroad, it could almost be interpreted as an order. The steamship Jan Sobieski stopped at Genoa (on June 29th), Cannes (on June 30th), and Gibraltar (on July 2nd). On that day Culen sent to Rondos his last letter from Europe: My journey was delayed whole ten days owing to the sailors' strike. [ ... ] Life on board ship is quite good. It is full of Italian emigrants who go to Canada. There are some Jews too , but they go to USA. We can hear many languages. However, most people are travelling with the hope that their life abroad will be better than at home. [ ... ] Today the sea is slightly stormy, so most passengers sigh and feed the fish . For me, nothing ever happened on the sea. Otherwise I am using my time on the ship to study English, everyday for several hours . I hope that in Canada, when I will have the opportunity to listen and speak, it will come to me fairly quickly. And I believe that in a short time I will master English so that I will be able to communicate fairly well. Otherwise, I read books and newspapers quite well. At the end of the letter Culcn wrote with some emotion: This is the last letter from European shores which I will send you. We have exchanged many letters. I sometimes felt pity for you and admired you. Because I saw that other �165 SLOYAKJA people also received many letters from you. Where did this person find the time ? I asked myself. · You will certainly be glad that one of your troublemakers will drop off your list. I will always remember your struggle on my behalf and I intend to somehow record it. This letter was written on a typewriter with Slovak phonetic characters. Perhaps Culen brought his favourite typewriter with him. The voyage and the arrival in Canada witnessed no problems . The Sobieski smoothly crossed the Atlantic Ocean in one week and arrived in Halifax on July 10th. On the same day Culcn sent a telegram to Rondos in English: "Safely arrived to [sic] Halifax expect me about Sunday". The second half of the telegraph meant that he would arrive in Winnipeg by train around July 17th. In his letter of July 11th, which was written on the train from Halifax to Montreal , Culen reported as follows : "In [Halifax I harbour a young Slovak named Janega awaited me. They say that Mr. Kunda sent him. He helped me with my baggage; we had a chat and a snack. His willingness was very much appreciated ." Culen arrived in Montreal on the evening of July 11th. Kanadsky Slovak of July 21st reported as follows : "Writer K. Culen in Canada - on the way to the West he stopped at Montreal and Toronto ." 27 It then continued , In the evening of Monday IJuly I l th I arrived in Montreal one of the prominent Slovak writers, politicians and publicists, a nationalist and uncompromising defender of Slo' vak truth [an independent Slovak state] - Konstantin Culen. 17 "Spisovater K. Culen v Kanade (The Writer K. Culen in Canada]". Kanadskf Slovak.July 21st. 1949 . �SLOVAKIA 166 At the Windsor Station prominent members of the Slovak community in Montreal welcomed him, along with a group of Slovak emigres . On Tuesday, in the National Home of the Canadian Slovak League, a small party was organized in his honour. Officials of the League and the Canadian Jednota and other persons took part in it. On behalf of Slovaks living in Montreal, chairpersons of associations welcomed K. Culen . In his speech Mr. Culen promised to cooperate, declaring that every Slovak emigrant should have participated in the national activities of the Canadian Slovaks . On July 14th Culen left Montreal and, after stopping m Toronto, in the morning of July 16th he departed for Winnipeg, sending again a telegram in English to Rondos : "Arriving CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway) 9 A.M. standard time Sunday". As expected, he arrived in Winnipeg in the morning of July 17th and was welcomed by Rondos . It must have been a very dramatic scene. Culen then participated in the 8th Convention of the Canadian 28 Slovak League in Winnipeg . 1 ' At the convention he was elected According to the Minutes of the 8th Convention. Culen said the following on the first day (July 25th) : ··1 do not want to speak long. I intend to visit all Sl ovak colonies (i n Canada). I bring you the greetings of Minister Sidor. the presi dent of the Slovak National Council Abroad. and also the greetin gs of st udents . theologians. and other Slovaks from Italy !The greetin gs. with the signatures of Karol Sidor and Jozef Kirschbaum of May 19th. 1949. were published at the end of the Minutes] . I bow down to your work. I come to you to contribute to the prosperity and en largement of the Canadian Slovak League." Zapisnica z VIII. k ongresu Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy. vydriiavaneho v diioch 25.. 26.. 27. a 28. ju/a 1949 v hoteli Marlborough [The Minutes of the 8th Convention of the Canadian Slovak League. held on July 25th - 28th, 1949. in the Hotel Marlborough], Winnipeg. Manitoba, Canada, p.2. On the second day (July 26th) parti cipants discussed the "Sidor versus Dursansky" problem. The following com- �167 SLOVAKIA as an assistant editor of the League 's newspaper Kanadskf Slovak . The convention also resolved that the Canad ian Slovak League, along with the Slovak League of America, recognized the Slovak National Council Abroad as "the competent representative to speak on behalf of the subjugated Slovak nation at home" (Kanadskf Slovak , August 11th, 1949) . At the beginning of August Culen returned from Winnipeg to Montreal where the editorial offices of Kanadsk f Slovak were located. His wife and dau g hter, who entered Canada through New York, on August 11th, came to Mo ntreal as well. After havin g found an apartment, Culen began to again work as a jo urnalist. Although it took two long years, Culen had finally succeeded in finding "a place where we could begin a new life and work and live in safety" (Letter of June 6th, 1947). Although this article should end on this happy note, it cannot. Even though he became an assistant editor of the newspaper promise was reac hed: '" they concluded th at brother preside nt [Andrej Kucera ] sho uld read the resolution on the recogn ition of the Slovak Nat io nal Co un ci l Abroad and th at th e Co uncil headed by Karo l Sidor. wh o is the compe te nt representative tn speak on be half nf the subjugated Slovak nation at home. Fo r Dr. Durcansky a letter has to be written in w hich they rronounce their esteem for hi s work for the freed om o f the Slovak nati on. Ibid. p. 18 . In the mo rning session of the last day (J ul y 28 th ) Ro ndos made a proposal to accept C ul en int o the edi torial office of Kanadsky S lovak. Kami Murin (fom1er pers1,11al secretary of Jozef Tiso) and Father Jan Zeman supported the proposal and it met wi th ge neral approval. In the evening sessio n "Konstantin Culen was elected as an assistant editor with applause. He is grateful for his election and promises to make efforts to build up the newspaper. He also will do his best to propagate the Ca nad ian Slovak Leag ue with all his might. He promises editor [Stefan] Hreha that he will be a loyal workmate. T hey will help each other. for brother Hreha knows Canad a and the Canadian si tuatio n well and he [Culen) knows in tum Slovaki a and the European situation." Ibid. pp.27-28. Also see the articl e "Po VIII. kongrese Kanadskej slovenskej ligy [After the 8th Conve ntion of the Canad ian Slovak League] ". Kanadsky S lovak. August I Ith . 1949. �SLOVAKIA 168 Kanadsky Slovak, Culen moved to Winnipeg in March of 1952, because the League had bought a small printery there. At that time he became the editor-in-chief. However, he became dissatisfied with this position, resigned in July, 1956, and moved to the United States. In September of the same year he became director of the Slovak Institute in Cleveland (Ohio) after the sudden death of the former director, the historian Frantisek Hrusovsky. Now his personal relations with leading members of Slovak organizations in the United States became complicated (His mimeographed work "V zajatf fa/osnych Jegiend a nenavistneho srdca (In the Grip of False Legends and an Unforgiving Heart)" which was published in New York in 1961, deals with this problem). Therefore, in September of 1958 he was dismissed from the Institute. Culen continued to write until his death on April 7th, 1964 in New York. His simple tombstone with the English inscription: "Culen / Konstantfn / Slovak historian / and writer / born in 1904 I died in 1964" stands modes ti y on the grounds of the Slovak cemetery in Passaic (New Jersey) . * * * Having reconstructed Cul en 's tortuous attempts to emigrate to Canada, we may conclude the following. Someone as famous as the nationalist journalist Culen could have had some advantages; he received the help of the influential Juraj Rondos, who shared Culen's nationalism. Thanks to Rondos ' s strong personal connections with Senator J. T. Haig, Culcn's matter was dealt with by the local government official, R. N. Munroe in Winnipeg. The matter reached even the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources, H. L. Keenlcyside, who was in charge of immigration to Canada. In Rome Culen was helped by the former Slovak �SLOYAKJA l69 Minister to the Vatican, Karol Sidor, and also by the Italian General A. Mola who had connections with the Canadian Minister to Italy, J. Desy. In spite of such advantages, Culen had to struggle for two years with the Canadian burea ucracy before sec uring an entry visa to Canada. Owing to Culen 's past as a stron g supporter of the independent Slovak State, which during World War II was allied with Nazi Germany , he had to make some false statements in his application. However, it seems that the Canadian authorities did not care much about them. Culen 's standin g as an "anti -co mmu nist writer" may have helped him. It is clear that Culen 's health record complicated and delayed the process of hi s entry to Canada. It is not clear whether it had been blocked by the political intervention of his "enemies". Juraj Rondos's self-sac rificing efforts on behalf o f Culcn were impressive. His strong will and activities, which were evident in the struggle with the Canadian bureaucracy, were trul y surpri sing. Culcn expressed admiration and gratitude to' him : "Whenever I meet with Minister Sidor, we almost always talk about your work with admiration , which will remain as a beautiful example of quiet and determined efforts with patriotic eagerness . Very seldom in life docs one ex perience such work." (C ulcn 's letter to Rondos of December 6th, 1948). When Kon stantfn 's younger brother, Stefan Culcn visited his brother in Montreal at the end of October, 1949, " he IStefan Culen I was also very thankful to you !Rondos I and he just does not understand that a man, who did not know us at all, could fight for us so courageously and finally win." (Letter of Konstantfn Culen's wife, Alzbeta Culenova, to the Rondos family of October 31st, 1949). Later a rumour was circulated among Slovak immigrant communities in Canada, according to which Rondos received mo- �SLOVAKlA 170 ney from the Canadian government for helping immigrants. However, Culen doubted the rumour and Rondos rejected it decisively in his memoirs. Judging by the contents of his correspondence, Rondos 's good faith is clear and we probably can accept his explanation that " I worked from love of Slovak affairs and not for money" .29 19 K. Culen wrote in an ano nymo us article as fo ll ows: "There are many of us in Canada who may thank the Canadian Slovak League for ou r emigration and for the fact that we again live as human beings and that we again stand on our feet and we are out of the camps of poverty . They may also thank brother Rond os who did this wo rk in the name of the League. He [Ro nd os] did it co urageo us ly and conscientio usly. Many know well the Slovak ' s worst failing. namely envy. and they began to spread gossi p. sayi ng that he [Ro nd os] is a good business man who receives JOO dollars from the Canadian government for every emi grant. Many emigrants were also angry with his alleged earning of 100 dollars for this purpose. When once someone to ld me that. I [Culen I answered him : ··1 feel offe nded . In my mind. Ro nd os sho uld ge t for me at least 1.000 dollars. If I was rich and had the money. and if the Canadian gove rnment did not give him the mo ney . as in reality it did not. I would give him for every me mber of my family 1.000 do ll ars. Even so. it wo uld not be enough for all that he has d o nc . •• Anonym [Konstantfn Culen J. "Ujo Rondos". Ka/cnd;ir Kanadskcj s/ovcnskcj ligy. I 953, p.211. Rondos himself remini sced about the episode in his later years as follows : "When after World War II o ur fellow -co untrymen dispersed around the world. I tried to get as many of them to Canada as possi ble. I took charge of the help and the !Canadian I Co lonization Office helped me. I managed to get many families and individuals into this country. However. there were certain people who accused me of being paid by the Canadian government up to 2,000 dollars for single families . Of course. this was just a fairy talc. I worked from love of Slovak affairs and not for money . I even spent my ow n money by constant running around and arranging of documents for Slovak emigrants. " Juraj Rondos . "Moje rozpomienky na zasle easy". Ibid. I 982, p.54. �SLOVAKJA 171 In his correspondence Konstantfn Culen repeatedly promised to write the story of his immigration to Canada. He 0 never did so.' This article is an attempt to do it for him. 111 Meanwhile. we identified the following articles in which Culen mentioned Rondos: Konstantin Culen. "Dolczitc pre novych emigrantov [Important News for New Emigrants]". Kan.1dsky Slovak. September 15th. 1949: Anonym [Kon stantin Culen]. "Ujo Rondos ". Kalendar Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy. /953. pp . 209-212 . � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2003, Vol. 37 Description An account of the resource Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 112 SLOVAKJA DOCUMENTATION: V Konstantin Culen' s Long Journey from Italy to Canada As Illustrated by his Correspondence with Juraj Rondos 1 Susumu Nagayo The emigration of post-World War II political emigres from Europe to North America was a long and complicated process. Both the United States and Canada had passed legislation severely restricting immigration to their respective countries in the l 920's and l 930's and this legislation made it virtually impossible for post-war refugees to gain easy access into either country. T o illustrate this difficulty I will focu s upon one such refugee - the 2 nationalist Slovak writer Konstantin Culen . This article is based ' I would like to thank the staff of the Archives and Special Collec tio ns of Mori sset Library at the Uni versity of Ottawa fo r their kind supp011 of my work. I also deeply th ank Professor M. M. Stolarik fo r his critical comme nts and English correcti o ns. 2 On Konstantin C\ilen ' s life see the fo llowing works and arti cles: Franti sek Vnuk, Zivotopis Konstantina Culena [Biograph y of Konstantin Cul en]. C le veland , the Sl ovak Institute, 1984; S/ovensk f biografick f s/ovnik (od roku 833 do roku 1990) I [Slovak Biographical Dictionary (from 833 to 1990)]. I. Martin. Matica slovenska, 1986, pp.433-434; "Kalend ari um zivota a d iela [Chro nicle of his life and work s]". · In Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Konstantin Cu/en (1904 Brodsk e - 1964 New York ). Z bomik vydanf na pocest' nedoiitfch deviit'desiatych naro- 113 SLOVAKJA on the unpublished correspondence between Konstantin Culen and Juraj Rondos, which is in the Slovak Archives of Morisset Library at the University of Ottawa. 3 We will reconstruct Culen 's case by extensively quoting from his correspondence, which was written in Slovak. dcnfn historika a novinara [Konstantfn Culen. Almanac Published in Ho nor of the Ninetieth Birthday of the Historian and Journalist]. Martin , Mati ca slove nska. 1995, pp.66-68: Augustfn Mat'ovcfk and others, Reprezentacny biografic- ky Jexik6n 5/ovenska [Representative Biographical Lexicon of Slovakia] Martin, Matica slovenska. 1999, pp.59-60. During his life Culen wrote many boo k s and articles. We still do not have his complete bibliography. Meanwhile see the following articles : Jozef Kirschbaum, "Bibliografia literarnych prac K. C ul e na [Bibliography of Literary Works of K. Culen]", Slovak v Amerike, Jul y 29 th. 1964: Frantisek Vnuk, :Zvotopis Konstantfna C ulena. pp.225-227; 5/ovensky biograficky s/ovmk. I, p. 434; Jozef Pauco, "Predstavitelia slovenskej kulturnej tvorby [Representati ves of Slovak Cultural Creation]. Konstantfn C ulen ", Jcdnota, September 19th , 1990; "Bibliografia literarncj tvorby [Bibliography of Literary Creation] ". in Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Konstantfn Culen , pp .55 -63. Among the above-mentioned bibliographies. the last has the most information . ' The correspondence between Konstantin Culen and Juraj Rond os is located in the Slovak Archives of the Archives and Special Co llecti ons. It belongs to th e Imrich Stolarik Fonds (ARCS 98 -1). which co nsists of 38 boxes. The material s were donated to the Uni ve rsity at the end of 1998 by the fo nner President of th e Canadian Slovak League, Inu·ich Stolarik ( 1909-2000). They consist mainly of the organi zational papers of the League . but also contai n personal materials of the founders of the League. such as Gabriel Kurdel, Andrej Kucera, and Juraj Rondos. At prese nt (November of 200 1). the Imric h Stolarik Fonds is still being processed. A Preliminary Guide to the Imrich Stolarik Fo nds is available in the reading room of the Archives . The corresponde nce of Juraj Rondos is in fo ur boxes (575-578). It co nsists of his official and personal documents and co ntains thousands of items. Among them are interestin g materials relating t o Rondos ·s mediation on behalf of Slovak refu gees seeking to enter Canada after World War II. The file of correspondence between Cul en and Ro ndos is fo und in box 577. This fi le co ntain s 165 letters (6 1 from C ul e n to Rondos, 42 from Rondos to Culen. and other letters) from 1947 to 1952. SLOVAKIA 114 * * * By the end of March, 1945, as World War II in Europe was coming to an end, a group of people evacuated from Slovakia to escape capture by the Red Army and possible retribution in postwar Czechoslovakia. They were representatives of the independent Slovak State which was allied with Nazi Germany. These refugees briefly stayed in Holic and Skalica in Western Slovakia and , at the beginning of April, they entered Austrian territory. Finally, they settled in Kremsmiinster, a small city to the south of Linz. Among them was Konstantfn Culen with his wife and daughter. On May 8th, 1945, representatives of the Slovak government capitulated in Kremsmiinster to the American Army. At the beginning they were treated politely. However, on May 19th the former Prime Minister Stefan Tiso and three other former Cabinet Ministers were arrested by the United States Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) . On June 7th fifteen more people, including Culen, were arrested as " Nazi collaborators". They were detained in American Army camps in Peuerbach (until September of 1945) and then in Glasenbach. In March of 1946 Culen was released from the camp due to the intervention of his wife. The family met again in Ried im Innkreis in Upper Austria. At the end of April, avoiding "war criminal" hunters of the Czechoslovak authorities, Culen moved to Munich. But even here he did not feel secure, so at the end of August he returned to Austria. On September 20th, with the help of a friend in the CIC, he illegally crossed the border into Italy, hiding in the trunk of his friend's car. The next day he arrived in Rome, where he was reunited with his family. In Rome, under the protection of Karol Sidor, the former Slovak Minister to the Vatican, Culen started to work again as a 115 SLOVAKIA journalist. Utilizing newspapers and magazines from Slovakia as sources, he began to contribute articles to Slovak nationalist newspapers in the United States and Canada. At the same time, through connections with Slovak organizations abroad, Culen began to seek entry into Canada. The story begins with a letter dated June 6th, 1947, which Culen sent to Juraj Rondos4 in Winnipeg. Rondos was one of the leading members of the nationalist fraternal organization, the Canadian Slovak League. At that time he was president of its ' Juraj (George) Rondos ( 1900- 1985) was born in May 1900. the so n of a fam1er in the village of Vinne (Michalovce district, Zemplfn County ) in eastern Sl ovakia. In March 1926. he came to Canada looking for work. After engaging in various jobs, in October 1928, he opened in Winnipeg (Manitoba) a restaurant with a boarding house. In 1930 he became a member of the Winnipeg branch of the Slovenska liga v Amerike [the Slovak League of Ame1ica]. In 1932 he established, together with his friend s Andrej Kucera and Pavo! Sabo. the fraternal organization Slovenska liga v Kanade [the Slovak League in Canada] which was renamed in 1934 the Kanadska slovenska liga [the Canadian Sl ovak Leag ue]. At the beginning of the 1930's he received hi s Canadian ci ti ze ns hip. In 1936- 1938 he parti cipated in the organization of colonization of Slovak agricultural immigrants to Rosewood (Manitoba). In 1938 he brought hi s wife and children to Canada. After World War II. as an official of the Canadian Slo vak Leag ue. he helped many Slovak refugees (Displaced Persons) to emigrate t o Canada. Cule n' s case, which I reconstructed in this article. was one of them. After holding various important posts of the League. Rondos died in Winnipeg in March of 1985 at the age of 84. For Rondos's life see: Anonym (Ko nstant in Culen), "Ujo Rondos [Uncle Rondos]". Kalendar Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy [Almanac of the Canadian Slovak Leag ue ], 1953, pp.209-212; Juraj Ro ndos. "V lete sli spat' na breh rieky [In the Summer They Slept on the Ri verbank] ". In lmrich Stolarik, ed .. Spomienky pionierov [Memories of Pio neers], Toro nto, Canadian Slovak Leag ue. 1978, pp.207-220: Juraj Rondos. "Moje rozpomie nky na zasle easy [My memories of lo ng-ago days] ", Jubilejnf kalendar Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy [Jubilee Almanac of the Canadian Slovak League] , 1982. pp.51 55: Anton Hacko, "Posledne Zbohom Ju rajovi Ro ndosovi [Last Farewell to Juraj Rondos]". Kalend ar KanadskeJ slovenskej /igy.1 985- 1986. pp.1 27- 129. 116 SLOVAKIA Colonization Committee. 5 In this letter Culen informed Rondos, with whom he had never met, of his desire to immigrate to Canada. Culen introduced himself as follows: As you know, in 1945, with many others I emigrated on my own initiative. After much pain and suffering, I settled here (in Rome). Since Czech and Bolshevik agents will not leave me alone and there is still the danger of being arrested , we would like to find us a place where we could begin a new life and work and live in safety. I have many friends and relatives in America, but it is still hard to go there. They promise us much, but quotas are small, so perhaps we would have to wait for decades. To go to South America seems perhaps more easy, but, even so, it requires 5 In the Minutes of the 7th Convention of the Canadian Slovak League, which was held in October of 1946, we read the following passages: "News from the Colonization Committee - Brother Rondos, the chairperson of the Colonization Committee, made an oral report and added that he has close contacts with members of the Colonization Office of the Canadian National Railways, who offered him the necessary information regarding immigration to Canada. es pecially with regard to Slovaks. Other ethnic groups also exert pressure on the Canadian government with respect to immigration of Displaced Persons. demanding revision of the Canadian Immigration Act. ( ... ) Brother Rondos. based on their explanation about the settlement of immigrants on Canadian farn1s. assured the delegates that the Canadian government would admit Slovaks to Canada if the provincial offices would give them permission . Brother Rond os strongly appealed for sponsors for Slovak refugees and to help them to enter Canada. (. .. ) At the end Brother Rondos clarified who can immigrate to Canada and also referred to difficulties, such as temporary passports. the voyage across the Atlantic, and the lack of ships etc. At the same time he displayed so me application forms which he received from the Colonization Office." Zapisnica zo VII. kongresu Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy vydriiavancho v diioch 28-29-30 a 31. okt6bra 1946 vo Windsoru, Ontario [Minutes of the 7th Convention of th e Canadian Slovak League. held on October 28th - 31st, 1946, in Windsor, On tario]. pp.9- 10. 117 SLOVAKJA time. So, I thought, what about Canada? I wrote a letter about this to Father Sprinc [Mikulas Sprinc], who in turn sent a letter to president [of the Canadian Slovak League] Kucera ([Andrej Kucera]. And he told us to send to you the necessary information . I have a brother in America [Stefan Culen in Chicago] who is also trying every possible means to get me nearer, so I want to try this as well . I would like to ask you the following : 1. Can we enter [Canada] ? There are three of us. 2. What do we need to do in order to enter? 3. How can you help us? Culen then provided his and his family's life histories. I was born on February 26th, 1904, in the village Brodske, District of Skalica, Slovakia. My occupation is engineer (do not worry about it; it is so registered in my passport. It is exact, because I studied engineering in high school.). Since April of 1945 I am in exile. The reason why I do not want to go back and cannot do so is an antipathy towards the domestic Bol shevik rule. I have a Red Cross passport iss ued in Rome . Alzbeta Culen, born on December 19th, 1906, m Bratislava, is my wife. She has a Red Cross passport too. Elena Eva Culen , born in January 22nd, 1929, m Bratislava, a student, is my daughter. She too has a Red Cross pass port. We are all stateless. As we can guess from Culen's defensive tone, this life history is not entirely accurate. Culen was no engineer. According to his biography, Culen was a middle-aged Slovak nationalist journalist. SLOVAKIA 118 Although he did not have a university education, he had been a brilliant journalist even as a youth. At the time of political crisis in Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Culen participated in the activities of the Hlinka Slovak People's Party for Slovak autonomy. After March of 1939, when the independent Slovak State was declared, he became its strong supporter. He was a Member of Parliament (December, 1938 - March, 1939, the Slovak Autonomy Parliament, then March, 1939 - spring of 1945, the Parliament of the independent Slovak State) and he served as a cultural attache at the Czecho-Slovak Legation in Washington (January - March , 1939). Although he was prevented from participating in political activities by his political rivals from the summer of 1940 on, he continued to be active in the field of culture and journalism until the end of the war. In his letter to Rondos, Culen explained the reason for his emigration as "an antipathy towards the domestic Bolshevik rule" . He told only half of the story. In June of 1947, when the letter was written, the Communist Party already held the leading pos ition and had great influence in Czec hoslovakia, but political pluralism still existed. The Communists did not seize power until February of 1948. More likely, Culen was afraid of "war criminal" hunters and the so-called "people's courts" of the Czec hos lo6 vak authorities . • "Being condemned a ·war criminal' by London [the Czechoslovak government in exile], Moscow [the Czechos lovak Communist group in exile], and Banska Bystrica [the headquarters of the Slovak National Uprising in 1944]. he [Culen] had to go into exile to escape the gallows." Frantisek Vnuk. Z i votopis K onstantfna Culen a. p. l 02. - "To my question why he [Cu len] fled abroad at the end of war, he answered that he had been afraid of Bencs 's revenge." Imrich Krnzliak, "Spomienky na Kon stantfna Culena [Memories of Konstantin Cu len]", in Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Konstantin Cu/en. p.48 . - "When the front [of the Red Anny] approached, Culen. who opposed. as a Member of the Parli ame nt SLOVAKIA 119 Culen shifted the whole responsibility of his emigration onto the "Bolsheviks", because he knew that the independent Slovak State, which he had strongly supported during World War II, had been allied with Nazi Germany and Canada had fought the war on the side of the Allies. He was also counting on the emerging Cold War, which was shaping Canada's relations with Western countries . However, as we may guess from the tone of his reply, Rondos already understood Culen's delicate situation . It was common knowledge, not only in Slovakia, but also in the Slovak immigrant communities in North America, that Culen had a "s plendid past record" as a Slovak nationalist. Without hesitation , Rondos answered Culen's request with a skillful and kind reply dated June 23rd. I understood well your letter, and your wish to enter Canada with your family. You asked me to answer the three following question s: 1. Whether can you enter Canada with your family ? You can enter Canada as a farm worker. I have close friend s who occupy high positions in the Canadian Immigration Office. I had a long conversation with them. I explained briefl y your situation . I simply told them as a friend that you arc highly educated and the reason why you were expelled abroad. I also told them what are you thinking of doing if you enter Canada. They assured me that, after arriving in Canada, you will be free here, according to your ability. But if you want to and representative politician of the first Slovak Republic. Bo ls hevism and especiall y Benes ' s Czechos lovak politics. which did not even recognize the ex istence of the Slovak nat ion. had to evacuate from Slovaki a by government decree ." Dusan M. Janota. "Spomienk a [Memories]", in Stefan Baranovic (ed.), Ibid. p.52 . SLOVAKJA 120 enter Canada as soon as possible, you have to be registered together with your family as farm workers. Please forget other worries. Canada needs people like you. Here everybody is free and everybody is responsible for their own future . 2. What do you need to do for that? You have to do nothing. I will find for you a good Slovak farmer who will submit an application to the Canadian Immigration Office. He will petition to admit you and your family to Canada and declare that he has work and lodging on his farm for all of you . 3. What could I do fo r you ? I could do what I ex plained to you in 1. and 2. I will begin the work with your permission and by Divine protection. And I hope that our work will be successful according to the information which I provided for you and your family . A responsible person (at the Immigration Office) told me that it will take you three to six months at most to enter Canada. It was a smooth beginning. Culen was very pleased with the reply. As promised, Rondos quickly fo und a sponsor for the Culen family and so informed him of it in a letter dated Jul y 9th: Your fe llow-countryman from Tmava named Jozef Vo lek submitted an application that he needs you and your fam il y for work on the farm. He also submitted an application to th e Canadian Immigration Office, a copy of which I am enclos ing with this letter. Please do not worry. Either a Canadian Immigration Officer there will personally visit you or they will inform you by letter as to where you should present yourself. In the correspondence between Culen and Rondos we fo und drafts of an application entitled "This form has been prepared by 121 SLOVAKIA the Immigration Branch, Department of Mines and Resources, for the use of persons applying for the admission to Canada of immigrants". There are two copies of the same form, for Konstantin Culen and his wife Alzbeta Culen, and for their daughter Elena Eva Culen. Both copies indicate at the end: "Dated at Rosewood Man. (Manitoba) this 4 day of July A.D.1947. Volek" Signed Jozef 7 In this application there are some misleading statements. In the space for "relationship to applicant" they filled out as "friend" (needless to say, neither Culen nor his wife had ever met Volek) and in the space for "citizenship" as "C.S.R. [the Czechoslovak Republic]" (in his first letter to Rondoas Culen wrote that they were "stateless"). To the question "occupation in own county" they filled out as "fam1er" (not "engineer" as Culen had written before) and to the question "intended occupation in Canada", they answered: "to work on a farm". The most serious falsehood was the answer to the question "Has Immigrant ever lived in Canada or the United States? If so, between what dates and what address?" They simply answered "No", which was not true. Culen had actually lived in the United States three times. The first time (1905-1909) it was as a child with his parents, who were migrant workers; the second time 7 Jozef Volek ( 1903- ?) was one of the Slovak fam1ers who lived in Rosewood (Manitoba). He was born in 1903 in Trnava (Western Slovakia), came to Canada in 1927 and later obtained his Canadian citizenship. He acted as the financial secretary of the Branch 19 (Rosewood) of the Canadian Slovak League (the head of the Branch was Juraj Rondos). Volek wrote in the application , which was sent to the Immigration Office of the Ministry of Mines and Re sources in Ju Iy of 1947: ··1 have clear title to 560 acres( ... ) Financial resurses (sic) $ 25.000.oo. Anaal (sic) income about $ 7.000.oo ." Culen wrote in his letter of August 1st, 1947, to Rondos that Volek was a friend of the famous Slovak historian exile. Frantisek Hrusovsky. in SLOVAKIA 122 (December, 1935 - July, 1936) as one of members of the delegation sent by Matica slovenska (Slovak national cultural organization) to visit fellow-countrymen in the United State; the third time (January - December, 1939), as indicated above, as a cultural attache at the Czecho-Slovak Legation in Washington and then, after March, as an editor of the official organ of the Slovak League in America, Slovenska obrana [The Slovak Defence]. Certainly the purpose of the last two stays was not as a fam1er. His third stay in 1939 was especially significant and controversial. At that time Culen openly supported Slovak autonomy and, ultimately, independence. Even though Volek filled in the application, he probably only took dictation from Rondos. Rondos must have known about Culen's career in the United States. However, as reported in his letter dated June 23rd, he already had prior consultations with high-ranking officials in the Immigration Office in Winnipeg, so he probably considered this application as just a formality. Furthermore, Volek filled out after the sentence that "I have made the following arrangements for a home and employment for the above named immigrants," as "We will recive (sic) them on aur (sic) Farm and guarantee full maintenance and farm Employment at going Wages. " To the question "Is transportation to be prepaid?" he answered that "I will pay transportation," even though Volek must have known from the beginning that the Culen family had no intention of working on a farm. On July 15th Culen received Rondos's letter dated July 9th . Enclosed were copies of the application which Volek had submitted to the Immigration Office. In his reply dated August l st, Culen complained as follows: SLOVAKIA 123 Well, now I would only ask you to take up this matter with the proper authorities, because there are several Slovaks here who have papers like this and have been waiting for a long time, but nothing is happening. The worst thing is that they write much about our difficulties and thousands of people live by talking about the necessity of doing something to solve the refugee problem, and make as if they have done and deliberated . Meanwhile, emigrants are perishing physically and morally, while the gentlemen are having a good time. America in particular pays much attention to the matter, but not even one refugee is admitted. The bill, which should have been passed, was pigeonholed . Congress went into recess for a vacation. It will be reconvened again only in January ( of next year) and undoubtedly the bill will not be touched until the summer of 1948. If it is passed, migration can be started in 1949 or 1950. However, who can bear it? [In reality the DP (Displaced Persons) Act was passed in Congress in the spring of I 948 and the migration started in October of that year.] Why don ' t they speak less, write less and act more? Of course, what can we, small and simple people, do against the roguery of gentlemen's politics ? In reply to Culen's complaint (the letter was not dated, but according to its contents it was perhaps written in the middle of August), Rondos reported as follows: You asked me to expedite the matter. Well , I will tell you what is happening. Mr. Volek was summoned to the Immigration Office where he was asked [to provide evidence regarding the following l: I. Evidence from the district office that he [Volek] is really the owner of 520 acres of land [according SLOVAKIA 124 to the application which Volek submitted to the Immigration office, it was 560 acres of land] . He proved it by showing a private letter from the district office and also doc ume nts which proved that he has no debt. 2. Evide nce from a bank regarding his savings. We could prove that easil y enough. But after that they asked the third question. We were asked to explain how Mr. Vo lek came to know yo u. We answered that he went to school together with you and he remembers yo u as a farmer's son who was also trained in bl ac ksmithing. Thu s, when Mr. Volek left fo r Canada twe nty years ago, you [C ulen] remained at home working as a village bl acksmith a nd also as the cultivator of a small estate. We were asked wh y you lived in ex ile. Did you run away as a civilian or as a soldier? To this we answered that you were not a soldier and that you ran away as a civilian from communist terror. In his repl y, dated A ugust 28th , Culen humorously promised to "tell the same story": Thank yo u for the in formation about the examin ation by the Canadian office. Well , arri ving there , I will prese nt myse lf as the blac ksmith . It is not such a big lie, because my fa th er was a blacksmith , and, fro m childhood I was in his shop. If necessary, I pumped the bellows and helped with the bi g hammer, so th is is not a craft which I co uld not ac kn ow ledge . I coul d, perhaps, pass the examinatio n. By the end o f September the Canadian bureaucracy fin all y replied. Culen's sponsor, Jozef Volek, received the fo llowing pos iti ve notice dated Septem ber 29th from R.N. Mun roe , the 125 SLOVAKlA District Superintendent of the Immigration Branch of the fro [sic-for] the Department of Mines and Resources in Winnipeg: In connection with your application admission to Canada of your friends, Konstantin Culen, his wife, Alzbeta and their daughter, Elena Eva, of c/o Karel (sicKarol) Sidor, Citta del Vaticano, Italy, this is to advise that the settlement arrangements have been found satisfactory, and the necessary steps are being taken to have the proposed immigrants examined overseas. It will , of course, take some little time to complete these arrangements . A copy of this notice was immediately sent by Rondos to Culen who wrote about the news in his reply dated October 20th. These were the most delightful letters which I received during almost three years of exile. And especially, as I see, it is serious and we can judge according to the letter which you received [the above-mentioned letter by Munroe] that in fact the matter has already been arranged . Now it is only a question of time, according to the letter. Culen concluded optimistically: I am ending this letter with thanks for all which you have done for now. I caused you much concern, but I really had nobody else to ask. After all kinds of promises and assurances which I received, what you have done is most real and most clear. Well , once again sincere thanks and if that "some little time" in office is prolonged (I do not know how the bureaucrats function in Canada, but in Slovakia they say that a short SLOVAKIA 126 time lasts one year), please expedite it again. In any case, I hope that by Christmas I will be with you. While awaiting a reply from the Canadian bureaucrats , Rondos reported to Culen in a letter dated November 3rd that he had already arranged for Culen's tickets: "I am informing you that today I purchased for you and your family the steamship tickets . It means the following: You have your fare paid from Southampton , England, to New York by ship and from New York to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, by train ." As we shall see later, Rondos paid the fare out of his own pocket. However, on November 18th, Rondos received a notice dated November 17th from the Cunard White Star Line, where he had booked the tickets. In the notice a certain Patterson , the person in charge, wrote: You will recall our conversation, in which I advised you that we are not permitted to sell Prepaid for non-Canadians resident in Italy, for the reason that the Canadian Government has not an Examining Office for immigrants in that country. Our Head Office Iin England] is moct lsic-mostl anxious to assist us , but point out very plainly that they cannot take the responsibility of bringing the family forward to Paris for examination by the Canadian Civil and Medical Authorities , on the chance that they might be turned down . Therefore, I give you the suggestion, for what it is worth, that if these people can legitimately leave Italy and establish themselves in Paris, and you will confirm to us the Paris address at which they are resident, we could then make _representations to have the Permit transferred to Paris and the examination take place there . 127 SLOVAKIA Rondos at once wrote a letter (dated November 18th) to Culen. I have very close contacts with the company regarding your matter. Just now I received a letter from them in which they say that they cannot start with your matter and that you have to go to Paris with your family by yourself and that in Italy they cannot arrange a medical examination. In order not to explain much, I enclose you with this letter a copy of the notice. I hope you will choose a trip to Paris. And please present yourself at their company. [... ] And show them the copy of the notice which I am _sending you and either they or you announce yourself as soon as probable to the main office in England where they already have all the best information about you and the registered ship tickets are waiting for you. The same day Rondos sent a letter to Stefan Culen 8 , Kon stan- tin's younger brother, who lived in Chicago: " [... ] I dared to pay for the steamship tickets of your brother and his family from England to New York and I also paid for train tickets from New York to Winnipeg out of my own pocket $636.42 [ .. . ] I did not want to tell this even to my friends , in order not to confuse somebody about my work." Rondos also enclosed as evidence the copy of the notice from the ship company of November 17th and continued: "From your letter I understood that you are willing to pay your brother's fare, in order to get him here as soon as possible. I dared to pay it out of my own pocket. I hope that I am cooperating with good peo' Sefan Culen ( 1909- ?), third of five brothers of Konstantin Culen , was born in Pennsy lvania (USA), and worked in Chicago as a manual laborer. SLOVAKIA 128 pie and that my money will not be wasted." Rondos here suggested that, since he paid Culen's travelling expenses, Stefan Culen should reimburse him. Referring to "your letter, Rondos had in mind Stefan Culen's letter (stamped October 15th) in which Stefan wrote from Chicago that, "As soon as they [his brother's family] get visas, I would like immediately to send them plane tickets. If I could somehow help, please write me." Stefan Culen, after receiving Rondos 's letter of November 18th, answered on November 21st, and informed him of his intention to reimburse Rondos, as requested .9 Meanwhile, around November 22nd, Kon stantin Culen visited the Canadian Legation to Italy in Rome accompanied by an Italian friend, General Armando Mola. The Legation was newlyestablished and the Minister to Italy, Jean Desy' 0 had just been appointed on October 13th of that year. In a letter dated November 24th, Culen reported to Rondos the result of his visit: A while ago I returned from the Canadian Embassy. I went there with our friend, the general , who knows the Ambassador well. They received us warmly. We explained to them how our matter is going. We gave them an English tran- 9 Because of the complication in getting Culen ' s entrance visa to Canada. Ro n- dos cancelled in June 1948. the reserved tickets. See the notice of the Cunard Donaldson Limited Company of June 17th. 1948 . '" Jean Desy (1893-1960), Canadian diplomat. was born in Montreal (Q uebec) to a French Canadian family. In 1925 he entered the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. He was one of the earliest Francophone diplomats in Canada. In I 941-1947 he was the Minister to Brazil (in 1943 promoted to Ambassador) . On October 13th, 1947, he was appoi nted Minister to Italy and on June 26th. 1948, was promoted to Ambassador and served in this position until 1952. In 1954-1958 he was the Ambassador to France and he died in Paris in 1960. SLOVAKJA 129 slation of your last letter (of November 3rd) in which you wrote that travel expenses had been paid. We also gave them the letter (notice, dated September 29th) which the Immigration Office had sent to you. The Ambassador said that everything was O.K. He said that we do not even need to go to Paris and that he will arrange the matter himself, including a medical examination and visa. The only things you will need are the following: l. Confirmation from the (ship) company that travel expenses have been paid . 2. Confirmation from Ottawa (the Canadian government) that entry to Canada is permitted . We asked him (the Ambassador) to request the matter telegraphically on condition that we will pay the expense connected with it. He promised to arrange it in this way. We had already asked the agency of the Cunard Company here to obtain confirmation concerning the payment of travel expenses. It would be good, if you could call their attention to this matter as soon as possible. Because he [the Ambassador] said that, if he will have it [the Confirmation] in his hand , he may issue the visa, so we could depart about the middle of December. Well , we would truly like to do so. We would fly away from here to London and then we would await there the next ship and we would depart. Really, we are growing impatient, like children before Christmas , and already we would like to be on the road. We will rest only when our ship moves in your direction . Culen's optimism grew after he received two letters from Rondos (dated November I 8th and November 20th) and a copy of the notice from the ship company (dated November 17th). 130 SLOVAKIA Culen wrote in his letter dated November 27th as follows: "If the matter moves faster, we will be there (in Canada) even in December, if slower, we will be there in January. Anyway, our hope was never so clear, as it is now. We feel as if we have everything within reach." However, "Confirmation from Ottawa that entry to Canada is permitted," which they had asked the Legation to obtain did not come. As Culen reminded Rondos in his letter of December 3rd, "The Legation here is waiting for information from Ottawa that they may issue us visas. I think that he [the Ambassador] already requested it telegraphically. If you have an o pportunity , please ask them to send it here as soon as possible. Because, as long as we do not have a Canadian visa, we cannot take the next step." Feeling uneasy about the delay, Culen sent to Rondos the letter of General Mola written in English (dated December 13th). On behalf of Culen General Mola explained his situation as follows: I saw again this morning, Mr. [T.L.] CARTER, [Second] Secretary at the Canadian Legation , acting for the Ambassador Mr.[Jean] DESY, so as to facilitate matters in every possible way. 1) Everything is all right as regards prepaid tickets. since the Legation is satisfied with the written declaration given CULEN by the CUNARD Office (Mr. BROOKS). 2) Mr. CARTER took note of what you wrote about the permit to enter Canada having already been sent to Rome . Nothing, however, reached the Canadian Legation yet , though the latter wrote Ottawa about it Nov. 22nd already . 3) By same letter, the authorisation was asked of the Canadian Government for the Legation actually applying the 131 SLOVAKJA visas on the three passports, even though the immigration Officials, to whom such a task is usually entrusted, are still to arrive. In the opinion of the Legation, such an exception might be granted since all documents were checked and found all right, and since the Legation have already their own Doctor who'll be able to submit the CULENS to the required medical examination. Were the authorisation not granted, Mr. CARTER says there seems to be no hope for the proper office to be ready for work here before two months or so! It would seem therefore most advisable that you should kindly complete the extraordinary work you and Mr. VOLEK have already done in favour of our friends by personally going to the proper Department in OTTAW A and - making precise reference to the Legation's letter of Nov. 22nd insisting that it should be answered favourably, possibly by cable: mind, not for the permit only, but also for the power to be granted the Legation. This is also Mr. CARTER's advice. On December 14th, Culen sent Rondos a cable. Unfortunately, I could not find it in the files of the correspondence, but, according to the contents of the aforementioned letter, we may guess that Culen's cable asked Rondos to obtain the confirmation from Ottawa by cable and to give to the Legation the power to issue visas. Having received it on December 15th, Rondos visited the agency of the Cunard Company and the Immigration Office in Winnipeg without getting a favourable response. In those circumstances he decided to seek the intervention to his close friend, Senator John Thomas Haig 11 , and visited his law " John Thomas Haig (I 877-1962), Influential politician in Winnipeg (Mani- toba). He was born to a Scottish family in Ontario and was a lawyer by profession . In 19 I 4 he was elected to several tenures in the Manitoba Legislature In SLOVAKIA 132 office in the city. Unfortunately Haig was attending Parliament in Ottawa. His brother, who had received Rondos, reported to Haig in a letter dated December 15th (to which was enclosed a notice from Munroe, dated September 29th and a copy of Culen's cable dated December 14th): Your old friend , Mr. Rondos was in the office today. He has applied under the Immigration Act, to bring out his friend, Konstantin Culen, his wife and daughter who are presently in Italy. [ ... ] The difficulty seems to be that we have no immigration authority in Rome. There is nothing there but a Legation and without special authority, they apparently have not the power to grant immigration permits. You will note the wire asking that the permit be cabled and that authority be given to the legation to Grant a visa. [... ] The only difficulty seems to be the permit and the visa. We know that you will do everything in your power to have this rushed to completion before you return from Ottawa. Mr. Rondos is exceedingly anxious, he has gone to a lot of trouble and spent a lot of money, and would certainly appreciate anything you could do to iron out the difficulties. 1935 he was appointed to the Senate, Dominion of Canada. in Ottawa. From 1945 on he was the leader of the opposition party (the Progressive Con serva- tive Party) in the Senate. In June 1957. through the victory of his party in the general election, he became the leader of the governme nt party. In October of that year he was appointed Minister without portfolio in the Diefenbaker Governme nt. In May of 1958 he resigned this position. SLOVAKIA 133 Receiving the news from Winnipeg, Senator Haig met with his personal friend, Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside 12 who was the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources and in charge of Immigration. After being "probed", Haig answered Rondos in a letter dated December 22nd as follows: [ ... ] You also know that I am leader of the Opposition [the Progressive Conservative Party] in the Senate of Canada and I took the time off to go and see the Deputy Minister of Mines and Natural Resources who is also the Deputy Minister of Immigration. He assured me that in two weeks from the 14th of December, that they would either have one of their own officers in Rome to give Visas for Canada or authority would be given to the Canadian Legation to issue them. The Deputy is a personal friend of mine and I am sure he will do exactly that thing. I sent the Immigration letter, about the duties to the Deputy Minister and he said it would all be cleared up in two weeks so that your friend [Cul en I will be able to get his Visas not later than January first. " Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside ( 1898- I 992). Canadian scholar. diplomat. and high-ranking civil servant. was born in Toronto. In 1928 he entered the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. In 1929- 1936 he served in Tokyo as First Secretary of the Canadian Legation in Japan. During World War II he was opposed to the forced evacuation of Japanese Canadians. In 1944-1947 he became Minister to Mexico. and in 1947-1950 the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources. In this period he published the article Canadian Immigration Policy. Vancouver, the University of British Columbia, 1948 . Later he held various important positions in the United Nations and in British Columbia. He published Memoirs of Hugh L. Keenleyside, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart Limited. 1981 -82. in two volumes. 134 SLOVAKIA On the same day Rondos, enclosing a copy of Haig's letter, answered General Mola in English: I was indeed pleased to receive your letter of December 13th with the detailed information therein. I also received the cable of Mr. Culen , and immediately took the necessary action with the Immigration officials in Ottawa. To assure you that immediate action will be taken by the Canadian Immigration authorities , I am enclosing herewith a copy of a letter written by Mr. John T. Haig, Leader of the Opposition in the Canadian Senate, which is self-explanatory . Many of Mr. Culen's Slovak friends in Canada are looking forward to his arrival. Culen described to Rondos, on December 31st how he felt when he received the letter: We were feeling very blue at the end of the year. It seemed that everything had gone wrong. And here, in the last hours of the passing year, your latest news, which you sent to General Mola, arrived. It delighted us very much and it gave us new hope. Yesterday General Mola told me: "I am 73 years old , I travelled around the world, I saw and experienced much, but I have never yet in my life met with such a case of a countryman's friendship, as I see here with Mr. Rondos. You can be proud of it not only as a human being, but especially as a Slovak." Meanwhile, on the same day General Mola went to petition the Canadian Legation with a copy of Senator Haig's letter of SLOVAKIA 135 December 22nd which Rondos had sent him. Culen reported to Rondos about this episode at the end of his December 31st letter: Just a while ago the General returned from the Legation . They read the letter [from Haig] and they said that it is interesting, but according to the existing laws they may issue a visa only to Italian citizens, but not to foreigners. Until now they received nothing about our matter. They promised that they will send a cable and request an answer from Ottawa to the previous letter [dated November 22nd] about our matter. They have certain objections to our Red Cross passports and they say that we have to get others. In a word, there will be still many difficulties . By the way, the General is writing to you about this matter. They will have to get a special order to iss ue a visa to Culen and his family. While there is no order, nothing can be done. We also found in the file General Mola's letter to Rondos written in English (dated December 31st): Many thanks for your kind letter of Dec . 22nd and appended enclosure from Sen. JOHN T. HAIG . I immediately went to the Canadian Legation and showed them both letters to Mr.CARTER [Second Secretaryl . He was evidently impressed; but unfortunately he said that - though they already had authority to give visas without awaiting for the arrival of the Emigration Officials in Rome - this is for the time being applicable to Italians only. The Legation has as yet not received any similar instructions, neither for your specific case, nor for emigrants other than Italians. SLOVAKIA 136 I saw H.E. DESY also, and he assured me they would do their showing their best good-will, since they promised me they would cable to-day to insist that OTT AWA should answer by cable to the letter the Legation originally wrote to the Department last November. Knowing unfortunately how slow burocracy [sic] is in all countries, may I suggest that - with this piece of news in hand - you should ask your powerful friends to specifically insist that a cable was immediately sent, as suggested by the Legation. General Mola wrote m detail about the passport problem which Culen mentioned only briefly: Another complication arose at the last moment: namely that the RED CROSS passports - which had been by the Legation declared valid - are now not considered fit , by some recent new regulations!!! It would be necessary to have them substituted by some C.S.I.R.O documents - which it would take an enormous time to obtain - even though the Legation promised their support to hasten matters. Couldn't it also be obtained from OTT AW A that they should cable and authorise the Legation to exceptionally accept the RED CROSS passports as valid for the CULENs case only? According to their expectation at the beginning, it would "take you [Culen's family] three to six months at most to enter Canada" (Rondos's letter of June 23rd, 1947). However, the barrier of the Canadian bureaucracy was greater than they imagined and 1947 drew to a close over the anxiety of obtaining a visa. In the second half of January 1948, Culen 's attempts to enter Canada looked hopeful. He reported in his letter to Rondos , dated January 16th as follows : SLOVAKIA 137 Just a while ago they phoned me from the [Canadian] Legation, that. they already received the documents and perhaps within a week they will arrange the matter. They already fixed for us even the date of the medical examination. I hope it will end well, because we all feel ourselves quite healthy. [... ] If it will go well, we could perhaps get a visa by about [January] 23rd. Then it will take some time, while we receive an English and possibly an American [transit visa]. So we reckon that at the end of February we could arrive in Canada or in the United States. At that moment Culen thought that an entry visa to Canada was within reach. To his great disappointment, however, he failed his medical examination. Twenty-two years earlier Culen had suffered from a senous disease. At the end of August in 1926, when the twenty-one-yearold had worked in the editorial office of the daily Slovak in Bratislava, he was hospitalized for pleurisy. For two weeks he hovered between life and death. His temperature sometimes rose as high as 41 degrees. After three months of fighting the disease, he was allowed to leave the hospital. After convalescing for months at a sanatorium in the High Tatras, at the end of the year Culen returned to his regular life in Bratislava. 13 On January 28th, 1948, the Culen family reported to the newly established Canadian Immigration Office m Rome for a medical examination. Culen reported the results to Rondos in a letter dated the same day : It seemed that everything would be all right, when they suddenly looked at the X-ray of my bowels. Twenty-two " Frnntisck Ynuk. Zi votopis K onstantfna CuJena. p.45. 138 SLOVAKIA years ago I suffered from pleurisy. They said that even today one can see on the photograph traces of the inflammation. Since then I never got sick, but a Canadian doctor questioned it and postponed the issuance of our visas for later, only after the agreement of the Department of National Health and Welfare [for Canada] in London. They will send all the documents there. If they will agree, we can get visas, but if not, we can do nothing. We are for ever kept waiting. Culen continued in a pessimistic tone: Well, we truly did not expect it. Everything seemed all right. We received passports from the I.R.O. With the documents we had no problem, nor with the civil investigation . It never occurred to me that today they would call into question my illness of 22 years ago and that it would halt everything. My wife and daughter were recognised as healthy. This is sad and unexpected news for you and for us. So much work, so much running around and expenses, and finally this. You can hardly imagine what kind of medical examination we had. First of all the X-ray, then the medical and physical examination , then blood tests and then once more the face of a Canadian doctor. They were more strict than at the med ical check-ups for conscription. Now we have to wait for what they will decide in London. After so many experiences there is in our mind only a small spark of hope, si nce for emigrants things usually do not go well. What more can we do ? We arc truly bewildered and unhappy. We descended from hope into the abyss of hopelessness. 139 SLOVAKJA After he received Culen's "sad and unexpected news ", Rondos answered (in his letter of February 3rd) to keep his hopes up: .. . believe me, I and my whole family grieved when we read your letter. But, considering the whole matter, I think it will change for the better, because many people have suc h traces as you mentioned. The blood test will prove (that yo u are healthy) and in London they will reconsider the matter. I still believe in Almighty God and everything will be fin e. Please wait a couple of days, to see how they will answer yo u . And then, let me know instantly what kind of answer you get. If you do not fee l weak, I think it will pass and soon you can move in the direction of Canada. It was said that "within three weeks they will certainl y answer from London" (Culen's letter to Rondos of March 3rd), "at the latest within three weeks we will receive the answer" (his letter of March 20th ), but the repl y fro m the Department of National Health and Welfare for Canada in London was again delayed . Growing nervous, C ul en compl ained to Rondos on March 29th as fo ll ows : The Canadian gentlemen unpleasantl y trifled with us and in an un-Christian manner. The mos t unpl easant part is th at they said neither "yes" nor "no" . Government officials, havi ng a good life , tease poor emigrants. If one were not thoro ughl y affected by anti-Bolshevism, we ll , after such an ex perience one would like to give up, to leave for the other side and to say to them; "Forgive me, we wronged you." However, th e sorrowful truth is that the so-called democrats who chatter a lot about humanism and democracy practice such un - 140 SLOVAKIA Christian and such brutal things that on this point there are few differences between them and the Bolsheviks. [ ... ] Well, what shall we do? We all are against the heartlessness of the authorities and the stupidity of the bureaucracy and feel very helpless. You have done more than one could expect from a close family member. I am sorry that it turned out so badly. In Culen's letters we noticed several parts where he expressed dissatisfaction towards the immigration policy of Canada and the United States, and criticism and antipathy against the Western countries. Even the nationalist Culen, who professed to be a hardline anti-Bolshevik, reflected the emotional anti-Western sentiment of the contemporary left-wing intellectuals. Conversely, we found here and there sentences in which Culen praised the attitude of the Argentine and Spanish governments which gladly accepted immigrants . At the beginning of April Culen at last received a reply from London. The result was negative. In a letter to Rondoas of April 1st, Culen exploded in anger: Well, finally the obvious happened. Today we went to the Canadian ([Immigration] Office. They welcomed us very nicely, saying: "I just wanted to write you , you came just at the right time!" After such an introduction we were curious about the good news. They did not keep us waiting. They said:" You can not receive a visa for Canada. We received such an answer from our superiors." It did not surprise us. Because, after the long comedy which they subjected us to, we shouldn ' t have expected anything else. Your work was in vain . Our efforts were in SLOVAKIA 141 vain. Even the intervention of Abbot Kojis of Cleveland was in vain and useless. It helped nothing. Canada needs men with strong fists such as Joe Louis, but it does not need men who dared once in their life to become sick. I am sorry about your efforts and work. Although on the other hand, I had a beautiful experience. And I see clearly the true character of the humanity and Christianity of the United States, Britain, and Canada in the international conferences against Bolshevism. They pretend as if only they are apostles of mercy. One is disgusted with it, when one hears these hypocritical speeches and sees these brutal behaviours. Believe me, they are as bad as the Communists . Culen also vented his anger on Senator Haig, who acted as an intermediary: I thought that such a Senator, as leader of the opposition, has yet some power and the right to speak. But it seems to me that he has not much. I was once an unimportant deputy, but when I petitioned to the Minister of the Interior [Alexander Mach I that there were several Polish refugees who were hunted by the Gestapo, and if they were arrested, they would be shot, it was sufficient for the Minister immediately to issue them Slovak passports and as Slovak citizens to place them in the state service. Our Minister did not send them to an X-ray examination in order to have a look at their lungs, whether they had not by chance some medical history. If you want , you may tell Mr. Senator that it is strange that such an important politician can do nothing even for such a trifle. We have to clench our teeth and regret the lost time. After such experiences, one has to consider what to do next. There are not SLOVAKIA 142 many choices. One might even consider returning to the home country and to confess to the Bolsheviks as follows : "Forgive me, I was disappointed. In the West there is no democracy, no humanity, no Christianity, there are only forests for which they need cheap and absolutely healthy workers. No more, no less . Nothing had changed since the Americans carried slaves from Africa. The only difference is perhaps that now they check them even by X-ray, which they did not have one hundred years ago." In the morning of April 2nd , Culen received the notice with the same contents from the Canadian Immigration Office. Reporting to Rondos shortly thereafter, he wrote in a pessimistic tone that "otherwise I doubt that it is possible to change the matter" (letter dated April 2nd). To do justice to the Canadian authorities , it should be pointed out that they did not make a wrong diagnosis. In reality, in August of that year, Culen spat blood and was hospitalized . A spot was found in his right lung, but thanks to streptomycin and a calcium injection he was discharged from the hospital on September 10th. 14 In February of 1948, when Culen was disappointed by the medical examination and its aftermath, the Communist Party finally seized power in Czechoslovakia. When Culen suggested, perhaps only rhetorically, the possibility of returning to Czechoslovakia and of surrendering to the "Bolsheviks," in Czechoslovakia they were preparing a political trial against him. However, before Culen's trial started, the Communists organized another political trial against a group of people, including 14 Ibid. pp. 145-146. SLOVAKIA 143 his youngest brother Ladislav Culen 15 , who remained in Slovakia. Ladislav was arrested in September of 1947, under suspicion of participating in the underground activities of the Slovak Action Committee [Slovensky akcny vybor] led by a nationalist politician in exile, Ferdinand Durcansky. Stefan Culen, Konstantin's younger brother, wrote in a letter to Rondos (stamped October 15th, 1947): I [Stefan Culenj received a letter from Slovakia. They arrested our brother [Ladislav Culen] who was a professor in Bratislava. We do not expect that he will come back alive, for many people were arrested and accused of wanting to assassinate Benes [then the Czechoslovak President] . It is nothing but pretence to murder them. Very many people are arrested . These poor guys will never return. Suspicions of plotting to assassinate President Edvard Benes were spread by the State Security Police (STB). However, it was true that these people, including Ladislav Culen , organized the underground, supporting the idea of an independent Slovak state , and supplied information to Dr. Duransky , one of the leaders of the Slovak independence movement, who was in exile in Italy (after July of 1947 in Argentina). 15 16 Ladislav Culen ( I 9 I 6- I 990 ), fi fth of fi ve brothers of Konstantin Cul en. stu - died history at Comenius University in Bratislava. During the independent Sl ovak State he served at the Slovak Embassy in Budapest. As me ntio ned above. he was arrested in September 1947, under suspicion o f participatin g in an anti - state conspiracy and was se ntenced in April 1948 . to 18 years in prison. He wa s released in 1962. 16 .. The organizational network of the Slovak Action Committee in Slovaki a was initiated at the suggestio n of J. Fickuli ak in May of 1947. The group o rganized aro und Jozef Dobrovodsky and parti cipated in this in iti ative through L 144 SLOVAKlA Otto Obuch, the central figure of the so-called "anti-state conspiracy", was a press officer who worked in the office of then deputy-Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak government, Jan Ursfny. Ursfny was one of the leaders of the Democratic Party, the largest political party in Slovakia at that time. Obuch was arrested in late September of 1947. By the end of October State Security, taking advantage of the affair, forced the deputy-P.M. Ursfny out of office. Slovakia fell into a political crisis (the so-called November crisis) and as a result, the Communist Party succeeded m weakening its rival, the Democratic Party, and strengthened its position in Slovak politics. 17 Culen. Members of this illegal organi zation. Action Committee - official ly named "the Sl ovak headqu arters in Brati slava", spread its acti vity to all of Slovakia, which was divided into three regions." Robert Letz, S/ovensk o v rokoch 1945- 1948 na ceste ku k onwnistickej to tali te [Sl ovakia in 1945- 1948 on the Road To Communist Totality]. Bratislava. Ustredie slovenskej t'anskej intc ligencic v Bratislavc. 1994. p. 157. Jozef Fickuliak supplied kres- "Obuch. Ladi slav Culen. and Durcansky with important material regarding the political backgro und. the negotiatio ns of the gove rnment. copies of laws and decrees. unusual articles in the press etc ." Robert Letz. "Slovenska politicka emigracia z rok u 1945 a ohlas na jej cinnost' doma [The Slovak Political Emi gration of 1945 and the Respo nse to its Activi ty at Home 1". In Slovenskf po vojnovf exil. Z bomfk materialov zo seminara Dejiny slovenskeho exilu p o roku 1945 v Matici s/ovenskej v Martine 27. -28. j1ina 1996 [The Slovak Pos t- war Emigres. Papers from the Seminar '·The History of the Slovak Emigres after 1945" organized by Matica slovenska in Martin on June 27th - 28th. 1996 ]. Martin, Matica slovenska . 1998 . p. 118 . 17 For details of the po litical bac kgro und of the "anti-state conspiracy" see : Michal Barnovsky. Na ceste k monopolu m oci. M ocensk opo/iticke zapasy na Slovensku v rokoch 1945- 1948 [On the Road to Monopoly of Power. Power- political Struggles in Slovakia in 1945 - 1948 ]. Bratislava. Archa. 1993. pp . I 6 1207: Robert Letz. Slovensk o v rok och 1945-1948 na ceste ku k omunistickej totali te. pp. 156- I 76 and p. 2 30. 145 SLOVAKIA After seizing power in February of 1948, between April 19th and 29th in Bratislava, the Communist regime tried Otto Obuch and his followers. Obuch was sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment. Ladislav Culen received 18 years for being a party to "the anti-state conspiracy" which intended to overthrow the Czechoslovak Government and to restore the independent Slovak State. Exdeputy-P.M. Ursfny, who was allegedly involved in the affair, was sentenced to seven years in prison . 18 Ladislav Culen was heavily punished, perhaps, as a warning to his older brother. Konstantin Culen wrote to Rondos on May 7th as follows: l- --1 in Bratislava they tried my brother as an "AngloAmerican" spy and the prosecutor demanded the death penalty. Well, we were in bitter and tense expectation of what would happen and how everything would develop. He received 18 years' imprisonment, which is the second heaviest sentence among the accused. The Czech judge [K.] Bedrna sentenced the accused in all to 85 years. In the Hungarian Kingdom, during the last century, Slovaks were sentenced to about 78 years and, now, at one stroke they got so much more, and it is still said that they are "liberated ." Besides , they treated my brother so badly that he will take it very hard. The worst thing is that everything was unnecessary, that if there had been no stupidity by [Ferdinand)] Durcansky , his unnecessary propagandizing and forecasting of war, his unneces""Jan Ursfny. byvaly podpredseda c-s vl:idy. bol ods udeny na 7 rokov viize nia ("Jan Ursfny. former Deputy Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak governme nt. was sentenced to 7 years in prison). Slovensk:i obrana. May 4th. 1948. On Ursfny 's memories of this episode see: J:in Ursfny. Zm6jho tivota (Prfspevok k vf- voju slovenskej n:irodnej mys/ienky). [From my Life (Co ntribution to the Deve lopment of the Slovak National Idea)]. Martin, Matica slovensk:i , 2000, pp. 134- 149. 146 SLOVAKIA sary instigating of young enthusiasts, of careless people, the trial would not have taken place. 19 Culen also wrote about the matter in his letter of May 13th: Otherwise from the country [Slovakia] there is always only news about trials. My brother was already sentenced as an "Anglo-American" spy; however, I can enter neither England nor America. Isn't it a little strange? In the country they would like to try me as a collaborator with Americans. How this world is confused! On May 28th and 29th, m the local court in Bratislava, Konstantfn Culen was tried m absentia. One of the Slovak newspapers reported : '""The State Security Police (STB) took advantage of the activities of the Slo vak Action Committee. Even th ough the activity of the Committee brought im portant arguments about the stru ggle for the Slovak statehood back home. it also enabled State Security to manufacture ··the anti-state conspiracy" and to accuse the Catholic wing of the Democratic Party of cooperating with po liti cal emigres. which they interpreted as anti-state activity. Robert Letz. "Slovenska emigracia z roku 1945 a ohlas na jej cinnost' doma" . In Slovensky povojnovy exil. pp.118- 11 9. For details of the illegal political movements in Slovakia after World War II see: Robert Letz. Slovensko v rokoch 1945- / 948 na ceste ku komunistickej totalite . pp. 129- 176. See also the memoirs of one of th e leading figures of the Slovak Action Committee. Stefan Polakovic. "Zaznam o cinnosti SA V-u [Records of the activity of the Slovak Action Committee]" . In Stefan Polakovic and Frantiasek Ynuk. Zahranicne akcie na zachranu a obnovcnie slovenskej samostatn osti (1943- / 948) [Activities Abroad for the Preservation and Renewal of Slovak Independence ( 1943-1948 )], Lakewood-Hamilton. Slovak Research Institute of America. 1988. pp . I 09-225 . politicka SLOYAKJA 147 The people 's court in Bratislava, with Dr. Artur Sipka presiding, tried in absentia on the 28th of this month Konstantin Culen, former deputy of the Slovak Parliament. The Prosecutor accused Culen of the following crimes: that as an important politician he worked for the dissolution of the Czechoslovak Republic [in 1939], that he supported the military and political interests of Nazi Germany, that he supported the declaring and making of war against the Soviet Union, that he thwarted the struggle of the Slovak nation for the restoration of the Czec hoslovak Republic , that he became rich at the expense of other citizens , therefore he committed criminal acts of domestic treachery, collaboration, and treachery in the Uprising (of 1944). The public prosec utor of the trial is Dr. Amoast Barat. Vojteeh Vycanek spoke in his defence. The written statement and doc umentary material presented was proof of his guilt. The sentence will be passed on Saturday at 9 o'c lock.2' 1 Culen wrote in his diary of June 2nd , which is cited in Vnuk's biograph y, as fo llows: There is a newspaper with an article on my sentence "Cul en - 30 years' Imprisonment: [...)] Senate of Dr. Sipka of the people's court in Bratislava on Saturday of May 29 th passed judgement on Kon stantin Culen who was sentenced in his absentia to 30 years' imprisonment, 15 years' divestiture of citizenship, and confiscation of all his property ." Only 30 years! They fo und me guilty of so many cnmes and they gave me so few years! However, we two brothers, together with Laco [Ladislav Culen] got from the Czechs al- ' " Frantisek Vn uk. Zivotopis Konstantfna Cu/ena. pp.139- 140 . 148 SLOVAKIA most the same number of years as all Slovaks had gotten during the entire Hungarian regime. These gentlemen succeeded so well. The state prosecutor was Arnost Barath, a Hungarian from Nitra, whose two brothers, Elemer and Zoltan, are in exile, and one of them has just left for Venezuela. Vojta ([Vojtech] Vycanek, my old acquaintance, pleaded on my behalf. I am indeed curious how he did it. I wrote in a hurry an article for Jednota [a Slovak nationalist newspaper in the United States] where I just dealt with the curiosity that they could find for my trial neither a Slovak judge nor a Slovak lawyer. 21 Culen also wrote to Rondos on June 10th that "they sentenced my brother in Bratislava as an Anglo-American spy and confiscated all our property." These political trials perhaps dissuaded him from returning to Czechoslovakia and of surrendering to the "Bolsheviks". The trial of Kon stantin Culen belonged to a series of political trials which took place at that time in Bratislava. A group of Slovak nationalist intellectuals in exile were judged in absentia as well. Karol Sidor, Reverend Ferdinand Mondok, and Jozef M. Kirschbaum were each sentenced to 20 years in prison. The historian Frantisek Hrusovsky received ten years. It is worth mentioning that Culen received the heaviest sentence. In the meantime, Rondos, who had been informed by Culen 's letter of April 1st that London had turned down his visa application, once again visited Senator Haig. The Senator promised to bring to Ottawa the notice of the Canadian Immigration l l Ibid. p.140. SLOVAKIA 149 Office in Rome, which Culen had sent, in order to tack.le the matter at first hand (Rondos's letter to Culen of April 8th). Late in May, when Rondos went to Ottawa as a member of the delegation of the Canadian Slovak League, he visited the office of the International Refugee Organization (IRO), where he found a file according to which the entrance visa to Canada for Culen and his family had already been issued on March 5th. Feeling doubtful about the situation , Rondos met the secretary of Senator Haig (at that time Haig was not in Ottawa), and asked about the matter (letter of June 16th). At Rondos 's request, Haig wrote a letter to the Department of Mines and Resources in Ottawa. He received an answer of July 6th from his acquaintance, Deputy Minister Keenleyside: Since Mr. Kulen (sic) has been refused a visa for reasons of health, any review must be on medical grounds. Accordingly, the Director of Immigration has forwarded the entire file to the Departmental medical advisor, in order that we may have the benefit of his professional opinion. The original certificate was severe and I would not wish , at this time, to raise any hope on the part of the applicant. Just as soon as the file is returned , I shall promptly advise you and , in view of your representation, I sincerely hope the medical findings arc favourable. On July 14th, Haig sent a copy of this letter to Rondos . In the morning of July 16th, Rondos visited the District Superintendent of the Immigration Branch, Munroe, who called him the day before. In Rondos's letter of July 15th to Culen, we have a detailed report of their conversation. Based on it, we will reproduce Rondos's petition. Rondos and Munroe talked for over one hour 150 SLOVAKIA about Culen's entrance into Canada. Naturally, they also talked about his medical examination in Rome: Munroe: They did not say that Mr. Culen is really weak, but he has a medical history. By the way, how do you know these people? Why did you help to raise the Culen matter? Rondos reported all the circumstances. Munroe: I know the Senator [Haig] from childhood and we are now very good friends. Well , how did you get in contact with Mr. [T.P.] Devlin, the chairman of the colonization of immigrants for West Canada? Rondos began to explain. Munroe: It is enough. I was informed by Mr. Devlin about what you are asking me. Do you support the application which Mr. Volek submitted? According to it Mr. Culcn will work on his farm . Rondos: I am sure from his letter that Mr. Culen will work on the farm. In Canada nobody will take care of him. He 1s responsible for himself. Munroe: I have information that he is highly educated. Rondoas: It is true , but he had his own farm in Slovakia and he understands farmer's work . Munroe: If Mr. Culen enters Canada and cannot work on Mr. Yolek's farm, I was told that your organization lthe Canadian Slovak League] would help him, because he is a writer and can write good anti-Communist articles . Is it true? Rondos: I have a secret which I would not normally reveal. But I recognise that I am talking with a high state official, so I confess to you . I have a close connection with the Royal Police in Canada I RCMP I and I provide them with information about Communist activities. When a Czech agita- SLOVAKIA 151 tor comes here and the Police really want to know about his purpose, they ask me to participate in their meeting. Mr. Culen already sent me articles about what Communists write about Canada. These articles were sent long ago to the police office. If you want to know about them, call and ask s uchand-such an officer, whether or not I indeed provided the m with articles which Mr. Culen sent me from Rome. And our organization works against turnin g Canada " Red " . If Mr. Culen could not work for Mr. Volek, o ur organization will help him. If yo u need some ass urances for the help, I am ready to offer it. Munroe: I am satisfied with yo ur words . I do not demand any assurances. I already heard personally about your activity and , according to the information which state officials se nt me, I recognize your words as true. By the way, does Mr. Culen not have the intentio n to go to his brother [Stefan Culen] in America? R ondos: When Mr. Culen comes to Canada, he will become a citizen of thi s country. Because he is educated a nd we Slovaks in Canada do not have such people, we very much need ed ucated peo ple here. His brother in Chicago 1s only an ordinary worker. He cannot he lp him . Munroe: Is Mr. Vo lek sati sfied that he pro vided one year ago an applicatio n for Mr. Culcn 's entry to Canada? R ondo.s: Yes. If yo u do not believe me, please call the Senator. He knows Mr. Volek well and he will prove to you that Mr. Volek is waiting fo r Mr. Culen . Munroe: I am glad that you told me the truth. I will send a report to Ottawa that Mr. Culen is awaited in Canada. And I agree with it. SLOVAKIA 152 At the end of the conversation, Munroe called his secretary and ordered him to dictate a letter to Ottawa that he (Munroe) supports Culen's entry into Canada. However, in spite of Rondos's "frank" petition and Munroe's "guarantee", on August 9th, Senator Haig received from the Acting Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources, R. A. Gibson , a polite notice of refusal (of July 30th): The [Culen] file has been returned to the Director of Immigration from the Departmental Medical Adviser and, I regret to inform you, the original diagnosis has been confirmed. Under the circumstances, the Immigration officials in Rome cannot be instructed to issue a visa for the Culen [sic] family . Undoubtedly Mr. Volek will be disappointed with these developments but the Immigration Branch can be of no further assistance in the matter. Haig transmitted the notice on the same day to Rondos with the short comment: "I got a very disappointing letter this mornin g which I enclose . I don't think anything further can be done ." Rondos reported to Culen in a letter of August 17th: "Believe me , it [the notice] shocked me so much that I lay down and fell asleep. t .. .] I waited while everything passed away. I went to the Senator's office. He was at home and said the following : Haig: George [Juraj), I am sorry about such mean news. Rondos: Mr. Senator, I had an important meeting with Mr. Munroe, the chief (of the Immigration Department) for Western Canada. It was July 15th. In the letter [from R. A. Gibson] he wrote that they received from England a message SLOVAKIA 153 of decisive refusal. In my mind , an answer from England was hardly reached between July 15th and 30th , es pecially an official answer through Ottawa. I would like to know whether in Ottawa any Czech communist conducts the immigration administration or not. Munro e: I al so think that the an swer should have come later. George, go to the Immigration Department and onc e more ask directly for Mr. Munroe . Next Morning (perhaps on Aug ust 11th) Rondos called Munroe and got an appointment to meet at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. He was welcom ed. Rondos: Sorry about disturbing you, but I fee l nervo us and I would like to kn ow the situation tho rou g hl y. Rondos again explained to him, as he did to the Senator, and handed him the Jetter from Ottawa. Munroe read it and called his secretary, telling him to bring Cu/en's file. Wh en he brought it, Munroe read once m ore the Jetter which he had written concerning Cu/en to Ottawa on July 15th . Mun roe: Do not take the letter which yo u received from Ottawa seriously. It is written in Ottawa on Jul y 30th , but m y letter to them was sent onl y on Jul y 29th . So it is not the answer to my letter. Mr. Rondos, the fact th at I sent to Ottawa the letter is the same as if I pe rsonally went there in order to carry out the matter. Do not worry because I have not yet received an answer to my letter. And Munroe took the copy of his letter to read what he had written: "According to my special meeting with Mr. Rondos, I approve of the entrance of Mr. Cul en to Canada." Afterwards, Culen had a long wait. In his letters to Rondos we find such sentences as : "The Canadian [Immigration] Office has SLOVAKIA 154 not replied yet." (Letter of September 6th, 1948), "We know how officials work, •so we are not surprised at all." (Letter of September 18th), "We are waiting until they finally invite us and say Here are your papers and here is your visa. Since nothing had happened, I went to ask them privately. We heard that they indeed received some letter and they have just answered it. We d o not know what kind of answer they received. Well, we can o nly guess as we wait, optimisticall y or pessimisticall y. However, it is certain that it will still take some time. But we are used to waiting patiently, so we will live with it. " (Letter of October 9th), "Besides, nothing special has happened . We are waiting, as we waited one year, two years, or three years ago. Slowly we will look like Jews who are also waiting for the Messiah." (Letter of Nove mber 6th), "We expected last year that we would not have to celebrate Christmas and Easter [sic] by letter, but that we would do it orally. Well , our plans did not materialize and we must one year later wish yo u Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year by letter. " (Letter of December 6th) , "Till now the local (Immigration) Office did not move even an inch on the matter, so to speak. We are still waiting for them to invite us, but in vain. We do no t know what has happened . Now it seems that it has been mo ved, somebody, somewhere, puts a brake on it. " (Letter of December 27th). In August of this year, when Rondos visited Haig's office, he sugges ted, half jokingly, the possibility of "sabotage by a Czech communist". Being psychologicall y exhausted from the long wait, Culen began to suspect that his entry to Canada had bee n bl ocked by the political intervention of "the enemies" . He wrote to Rondos on January l 0th, 1949: "It would be interesting to find out why it all happened. I think that my health was not the question, but it SLOVAKJA 155 was Czech political interference." In his letter of March 29th, the conjecture changed into conviction: General (Mola) visited the Canadian (Immigration) office to ask whether by chance they had something new. There were new officials there, so they began to check various papers and finally revealed that the difficulty was not caused by an X-ray, but by something else. Well , it might be only political. And if political , it is clear that it was Czech interference. I know that they were not pleased with my appearance there. [ ... ] Because the fact is that there is not a greater enemy than a Czech . If it were possible, Czechs would drown us in a teaspoon[ul of water. Culen's biographer Ynuk also suggested the possibility of "enemy's intervention " .22 However, it is still unclear whether some pro-Czechoslovak groups (for example, the Czechoslovak National Alliance in Canada) or pro-Communist groups really did it o r not. Meanwhile, waiting for an answer from the Canadian Immigration Office, Culcn did not waste his time . After the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in February of 1948, the Slovak nationalist group in exile led by Karol Sidor began its political activities. In this period Culen participated, in addition to his ordinary work as a journalist, in two actions. The first was his radio broadcasting to Slovakia. We read in Culen's letter of November 16th, 1947, the following: u Ibid. p. 133. SLOVAKIA 156 [.. .] the radio station Free Slovakia has started to operate in Europe. It broadcasts every day for two hours. Soon Radio Free Europe will have Slovak programmes, so the Iron curtain between Slovakia and the rest of the world will be breached and we can open our mouths again. There is much work with it, but it is joyful. Well, on such radio stations we already cite what your Kanadsky Slovak [the organ of the Canadian Slovak League] writes. We will have to arrange a quicker sending of the editorial page of Kanadsky Slovak in order to give our people at home more fresh news. Now we are waiting for a reaction from our homeland .2 3 In his letter of December 6th Culen also wrote the following: Now there is much to do. We prepare materials for our broadcasting to Slovakia. We hope it will be perfect. Well , every day half an hour is enough work for one person. One station is already operating . From the New Year on the Italian government will start short wave broadcasting every day for ten minutes. I hear that even in London [BBC] the Czech and Slovak broadcasting will be divided. If then the Canadian government wants the people in Slovakia to listen to their programmes [CBC International Service which started in 1945], they will have to do the same thing. If people at home will have the possibility to listen to programmes in the Slovak spirit, nobody 23 will tune in to the Czechoslovak jumble. The Czechoslovak section of Radi o Free Europe (RFE) began regular program- ming in May of 1951. However. the division between the Czech and Sl ov ak sections , which Culen had expected , did not materialize . On this problem see: Imrich Kruzliak , "Radio Slobodn a Europa a Slovaci [Radio Free Europe and the Slovaks]", In Slovensky povojnovy exil. pp.338-344. SLOVAKIA 157 Everything which is connected with the Czechs is bad for the Slovaks. As Culen wrote, from the beginning of 1949 the Rome station began to provide Slovak programmes. He cooperated actively with it, writing articles and reading lectures. He wrote to Rondos on April 26th that "Now I have much work, for every Sunday I have a radio lecture for Slovakia and people there listen to it very carefully." Culen's second political activity of this period was participation in the newly established political organization of the Slovak nationalists in exile. In May of 1948 an agreement to establish a new organization was made between the group led by Karol Sidor and the Slovak National Council in London which was organized in January, 1944, by Peter Pridavok. On the front page of Kanadsky Slovak of December 16th, they announced the formation of the Slovak National Council Abroad as the coordinating body in the struggle for "the Slovak State within a federalized Europe" .24 It was dated Christmas of I 948 (in reality, it was published in the middle of December) and signed by Karol Sidor (as the president) and by Peter Prfdavok (as the general secretary). The main organizer was Jozef Kirschbaum. Culen supported him, and became one of its vice-presidents and at the same time chief of its Italian branch. 2 5 i, "Slovenska Narodna Rada v Zahranicf utvorcna [Creation of the Slovak Na- ti ona l Council Abroad]" , Kanadsky S lovak. December 16th. 1948 . is On the acti vities of the Slovak National Council Abroad see: Frantisek Vnuk. "S lovenska narodna rada v Londyne a v zahranicf (1943- 1948) (The Slovak National Council in London and Abroad (1943-1948))". In Stefan Polakovic and Frantisek Vnuk, Zahranicne akcie na zachran u a obnovenie s/ovenskej sa- mostatnosti (I 943-1948), pp.1-108; Genoveva Gracova , "Dve koncepcie boja za slovensku statnost' (Two conceptions of the struggle for Slovak statehood)", 158 SLOVAKIA With respect to this, Rondos wrote to Culen on December 18th that "the article of Mr. Sidor and Mr. Prfdavok [abovementioned] was published in [Kanadsky] Slovak and it provides evidence of the revival of the independence movement. [... ] As you are actively engaged in it, you are perhaps busy with it. Culen, meanwhile, reported to Rondos on January 18th, 1949: Otherwise we are led by the Slovak National Council [Abroad]. The press in Europe pays much attention to it. The Spanish press evaluated the meaning of this step as most important among all the European nations which are occupied by Communists. Even the Swiss press pays attention to our organization . We may say that until now not even one of our Slovak affairs created such a reaction . Yesterday American journalists visited the Minister [Sidor]. I was with them for half a day and we talked with them. In February of 1949 Culen departed for Paris, together with Sidor and Kirschbaum in order to negotiate with French government officials regarding the activities of the Slovak National Council Abroad. They arrived in Paris on February 20th . We found in the file of correspondence between Sidor and Rondos a post-card from Paris dated February 21st: "We sincerely greet you and on the occasion of the meeting of the Slovak National Council Abroad we remember you." The card was written by Culen and signed: Konsto [Konstantin] Culen, Karol Sidor, Laco [Ladislav)] Jankovic, and J. Kirschbaum . In S/ovensky povojnovy exil. pp.82-84: Frantisek Vnuk. "Aktivity exilu - obhajoba slovenskej statnosti v rokoch 1945- 1948 [Activities of the emigres The Defense of Slovak Statehood in I 945 - I 948 )". in Ibid. p.90 . SLOVAKIA 159 On February 28th Culen returned to Rome. On March 29th he wrote: "There is now much work to do with the Slovak National Council IAbroadj. We described what had happened, and where we visited. I asked them to send you a copy in order to inform you. However, it is a confidential report and not for publication." Meanwhile, on May 6th, 1949, Senator Haig received a notice (dated April 30th) from the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources, Keenleyside : You may recall that on July 30th, 1948 Mr. R. A. Gibso n [Acting Deputy Minister of the Department] wrote advising favourable consideration in the case of Konstantin Culen and family, Czechoslovakian refugees in the Vatican City, could not be extended due to Mr. Culen's failure to comply with our medical requirements. You will now be pleased to know that on rev1ewmg the entire situation it has been decided to allow this family to come forward provided Mr. Culen 's state of health is no worse than indicated and they can otherwise meet with the Immigration Regulations . The necessary advice in the matter has been transmitted to our office in Rome , Italy in order that appropriate action may be taken on behalf of these perso ns . I trust that it will not be too long before this family will be in a position to come forward. Having received the notice, Haig sent a short message to Rondos: "Dear George : I enclose lforl you a letter received this morning from Ottawa. This looks [like] better news . When you come in bring this letter back with you." Rondos , in tum , informed Culcn of the delightful news m a letter of May 8th: 160 SLOVAKIA I cannot stop myself from informing you. The day before yesterday I received a letter from the Senator in which he informed me that your matter had moved and that now everything is on track. He [the Senator] also sent me the letter which he had received , but he asked me to bring it back to him when I would visit his office. So I typed it once more , how Ottawa classified you, and I attach it with this letter. You will read in it that Ottawa informed the office in Italy I to issue a visal if you arc not weaker than at the last examination. I hope you understand the letter, so I did not write more . Indeed, Rondos did not mention in the letter any more about the matter. However, he could feel deep satisfaction that he had finally achieved his intended objective after a long struggle with the bureaucracy. Culcn received the good news about May 15th (Ynuk writes that Culen received on May 18th the invitation from the Canadian selection committcc). 26 He reported to Rondos further developments in his letter of May 22nd: On the day that I received your letter attached with the notice I from Kccnlcysidc I to the Senator, they already called me from the consulate and at the same time they invited me also by letter to come there. When we arrived. they were very nice to us, full of' willingness. If my health condition, they said , docs not worsen . they will give me the visa. I was sent again for a medical examination. I had to go to Naples where the IRO camp is. We spent three days there , and finally we received the medical report which we now have to hand over to IRO. They have to issue us a new passport, because the old 1 " Frantisek Vnuk. tivotopis Konstantina Culena. p. 147 . SLOVAKIA 161 one is already invalid. Then I have to again go to the consulate and there we will be told the results. At this moment I do not know them, but before sending this letter I will perhaps know , so I inform you at the end of the letter. I am really curious as to whether they will give me the visa or not , whether the old comedy of sending the documents to London and then from London to Ottawa, repeats itself, as it did the first time. After the previous disappointments , Culen was very skeptical about the results, but this time they proved to be positive. In the second half of the same letter he wrote: "We just came back from the consulate. Well , my dear friend Rondos , you won . We have the visa and, if nothing else happens, I will take part in the Congress !the 8th Convention of the Canadian Slovak Leag ue I as you wished." It took Culen two years to sec ure the entry visa to Canada. He should have felt deep satisfaction . Instead , it caused him a new kind of anxiety. At the end of the same letter he added: "However, now, the most serious problem will be to find suitabl e work. Is it possible to become an assistant editor at Kanadsky Slovak'? Of course, the others would have to approve . Or, perhaps , I will find something else. Well , I think that many people succeeded there, so I will do so somehow as well ." Afterwards, Culen was busy for days preparing for the journey: "I already bought the steamship ticket and railway ticket. I will not use the IRO transportation as I originally had to , but I will go privatel y, because this month there is no transportation and next month they still do not know when. So, I bought a ticket for Yulkania Iperhaps Culcn 's mistake. It had to be Saturnia I, the Italian ship, which will leave on June 21st direct to Halifax . So 162 SLOYAKlA perhaps about July 1st I will arrive in Canada. Then , I will board a train and depart for Winnipeg. [ ... ] Now we are just packing and saying good-bye to Rome." (Letter of June I Ith) "Just now the ship company called that my ship Satumia will leave port not on the 21st, as I was originally informed, but on the 18th. In one word, this week. So I am packing quickly, since it changed unexpectedly." (Letter of June 12th) Culen then sent a post-card to Rondos on June 15th from Lido di Ostia, a port in the suburbs of Rome. He wrote: "Saying good-bye to Rome, I am looking forward to seeing you soon" . Beside his signature there are several others: A. Culenova (his wife), Eva Culcnova (daughter), Karol Sidor, Angela Sidorova (Sidor's wife), M. Doranska (Jan Doransky's wife), Ladislav Pudis , and J. Kirschbaum etc. Another post-card was sent to Rondos on June 17th, this time from Naples : " Dear friend, saying good-bye to friends on the beach, we all remember you most heartily. We send you our greetings and I look forward to seeing you soon ." We noticed the signatures of Konstantin Culen, A. Culenova, Angela Sidorova , Karol Sidor, and Ferdinand Mondok. Perhaps they came from Rome to Naples to sec him off. Culen 's Italian friend, General Armando Mola also signed with a short English message: "We arc all happy & and unhappy! " Needless to say that they were "unhappy" to part with Culen . However, before the departure, one more problem arose. The steamship on which Culen was supposed to sail from Naples on June 18th, cancelled the voyage. In a letter of June 22nd from Naples he explained: Certainly you read in the newspaper that here in Italy the crew of the steamship Satumia, on which I was to depart, SLOYAKJA 163 went on strike. I have been stuck here in Naples for a week. I am sick with worry. Nobody knows anything, so they tell us "Come tomorrow" . The next day they tell us " In the afternoon", in the afternoon they tell us "Tomorrow". Fortunately, I take it with some humour, so I do not get angry, not even insulted . I tell myself that I will at last find some ship on which they do not strike and I will depart on it. Today they promised us that the steamship So bieski will carry us. [ ... ] According to tod ay's information this ship will depart on Jun e 28th . In spite of Culcn ·s skepticism, the ship did , indeed , depart o n June 28th. He wrote in a letter of the same day from Naples: "Well , finally it appears that I will indeed say good-bye to Europe and the Sobieski will finally move out with us. So sometime around July 14th I will arrive in Canada." Culen departed a lone , because his family planned to leave Italy a nwnth later. Culcn's protector Sidor wrote from the Vatican to Ro nd os on June 29th (in the file of correspondence between Sidor and Rondos): "We arc all really happy that on June 28th on the steamship Sobieski Kon sto Culcn left Italy." It is interesting to note that Sidor in the same letter continued as follows : I do not know what you intend to do with Ko nsto Culen . My personal opinion is that it will be best for him to go to the editor of Kanadsky Slo vak , !Stefan) Hreha. Hreha and he could make of Kanadsky Slovak such a new spaper which even Slovaks in the United States do not have. I wrote to editor Hreha, too, but I would like to ask you to disc uss with your friends the proposal of acceptance of Culcn as an SLOVAKIA 164 assistant editor, to recommend it and suggest to the competent authorities of the Canadian Slovak League to accept it. It is not clear whether Sidor made the suggestion on his own initiative, or whether Culen asked him to do so. In either case, judging by the prestige which Sidor had at that time as the president of the Slovak National Council Abroad, it could almost be interpreted as an order. The steamship Jan Sobieski stopped at Genoa (on June 29th), Cannes (on June 30th), and Gibraltar (on July 2nd). On that day Culen sent to Rondos his last letter from Europe: My journey was delayed whole ten days owing to the sailors' strike. [ ... ] Life on board ship is quite good. It is full of Italian emigrants who go to Canada. There are some Jews too , but they go to USA. We can hear many languages. However, most people are travelling with the hope that their life abroad will be better than at home. [ ... ] Today the sea is slightly stormy, so most passengers sigh and feed the fish . For me, nothing ever happened on the sea. Otherwise I am using my time on the ship to study English, everyday for several hours . I hope that in Canada, when I will have the opportunity to listen and speak, it will come to me fairly quickly. And I believe that in a short time I will master English so that I will be able to communicate fairly well. Otherwise, I read books and newspapers quite well. At the end of the letter Culcn wrote with some emotion: This is the last letter from European shores which I will send you. We have exchanged many letters. I sometimes felt pity for you and admired you. Because I saw that other 165 SLOYAKJA people also received many letters from you. Where did this person find the time ? I asked myself. · You will certainly be glad that one of your troublemakers will drop off your list. I will always remember your struggle on my behalf and I intend to somehow record it. This letter was written on a typewriter with Slovak phonetic characters. Perhaps Culen brought his favourite typewriter with him. The voyage and the arrival in Canada witnessed no problems . The Sobieski smoothly crossed the Atlantic Ocean in one week and arrived in Halifax on July 10th. On the same day Culcn sent a telegram to Rondos in English: "Safely arrived to [sic] Halifax expect me about Sunday". The second half of the telegraph meant that he would arrive in Winnipeg by train around July 17th. In his letter of July 11th, which was written on the train from Halifax to Montreal , Culen reported as follows : "In [Halifax I harbour a young Slovak named Janega awaited me. They say that Mr. Kunda sent him. He helped me with my baggage; we had a chat and a snack. His willingness was very much appreciated ." Culen arrived in Montreal on the evening of July 11th. Kanadsky Slovak of July 21st reported as follows : "Writer K. Culen in Canada - on the way to the West he stopped at Montreal and Toronto ." 27 It then continued , In the evening of Monday IJuly I l th I arrived in Montreal one of the prominent Slovak writers, politicians and publicists, a nationalist and uncompromising defender of Slo' vak truth [an independent Slovak state] - Konstantin Culen. 17 "Spisovater K. Culen v Kanade (The Writer K. Culen in Canada]". Kanadskf Slovak.July 21st. 1949 . SLOVAKIA 166 At the Windsor Station prominent members of the Slovak community in Montreal welcomed him, along with a group of Slovak emigres . On Tuesday, in the National Home of the Canadian Slovak League, a small party was organized in his honour. Officials of the League and the Canadian Jednota and other persons took part in it. On behalf of Slovaks living in Montreal, chairpersons of associations welcomed K. Culen . In his speech Mr. Culen promised to cooperate, declaring that every Slovak emigrant should have participated in the national activities of the Canadian Slovaks . On July 14th Culen left Montreal and, after stopping m Toronto, in the morning of July 16th he departed for Winnipeg, sending again a telegram in English to Rondos : "Arriving CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway) 9 A.M. standard time Sunday". As expected, he arrived in Winnipeg in the morning of July 17th and was welcomed by Rondos . It must have been a very dramatic scene. Culen then participated in the 8th Convention of the Canadian 28 Slovak League in Winnipeg . 1 ' At the convention he was elected According to the Minutes of the 8th Convention. Culen said the following on the first day (July 25th) : ··1 do not want to speak long. I intend to visit all Sl ovak colonies (i n Canada). I bring you the greetings of Minister Sidor. the presi dent of the Slovak National Council Abroad. and also the greetin gs of st udents . theologians. and other Slovaks from Italy !The greetin gs. with the signatures of Karol Sidor and Jozef Kirschbaum of May 19th. 1949. were published at the end of the Minutes] . I bow down to your work. I come to you to contribute to the prosperity and en largement of the Canadian Slovak League." Zapisnica z VIII. k ongresu Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy. vydriiavaneho v diioch 25.. 26.. 27. a 28. ju/a 1949 v hoteli Marlborough [The Minutes of the 8th Convention of the Canadian Slovak League. held on July 25th - 28th, 1949. in the Hotel Marlborough], Winnipeg. Manitoba, Canada, p.2. On the second day (July 26th) parti cipants discussed the "Sidor versus Dursansky" problem. The following com- 167 SLOVAKIA as an assistant editor of the League 's newspaper Kanadskf Slovak . The convention also resolved that the Canad ian Slovak League, along with the Slovak League of America, recognized the Slovak National Council Abroad as "the competent representative to speak on behalf of the subjugated Slovak nation at home" (Kanadskf Slovak , August 11th, 1949) . At the beginning of August Culen returned from Winnipeg to Montreal where the editorial offices of Kanadsk f Slovak were located. His wife and dau g hter, who entered Canada through New York, on August 11th, came to Mo ntreal as well. After havin g found an apartment, Culen began to again work as a jo urnalist. Although it took two long years, Culen had finally succeeded in finding "a place where we could begin a new life and work and live in safety" (Letter of June 6th, 1947). Although this article should end on this happy note, it cannot. Even though he became an assistant editor of the newspaper promise was reac hed: '" they concluded th at brother preside nt [Andrej Kucera ] sho uld read the resolution on the recogn ition of the Slovak Nat io nal Co un ci l Abroad and th at th e Co uncil headed by Karo l Sidor. wh o is the compe te nt representative tn speak on be half nf the subjugated Slovak nation at home. Fo r Dr. Durcansky a letter has to be written in w hich they rronounce their esteem for hi s work for the freed om o f the Slovak nati on. Ibid. p. 18 . In the mo rning session of the last day (J ul y 28 th ) Ro ndos made a proposal to accept C ul en int o the edi torial office of Kanadsky S lovak. Kami Murin (fom1er pers1,11al secretary of Jozef Tiso) and Father Jan Zeman supported the proposal and it met wi th ge neral approval. In the evening sessio n "Konstantin Culen was elected as an assistant editor with applause. He is grateful for his election and promises to make efforts to build up the newspaper. He also will do his best to propagate the Ca nad ian Slovak Leag ue with all his might. He promises editor [Stefan] Hreha that he will be a loyal workmate. T hey will help each other. for brother Hreha knows Canad a and the Canadian si tuatio n well and he [Culen) knows in tum Slovaki a and the European situation." Ibid. pp.27-28. Also see the articl e "Po VIII. kongrese Kanadskej slovenskej ligy [After the 8th Conve ntion of the Canad ian Slovak League] ". Kanadsky S lovak. August I Ith . 1949. SLOVAKIA 168 Kanadsky Slovak, Culen moved to Winnipeg in March of 1952, because the League had bought a small printery there. At that time he became the editor-in-chief. However, he became dissatisfied with this position, resigned in July, 1956, and moved to the United States. In September of the same year he became director of the Slovak Institute in Cleveland (Ohio) after the sudden death of the former director, the historian Frantisek Hrusovsky. Now his personal relations with leading members of Slovak organizations in the United States became complicated (His mimeographed work "V zajatf fa/osnych Jegiend a nenavistneho srdca (In the Grip of False Legends and an Unforgiving Heart)" which was published in New York in 1961, deals with this problem). Therefore, in September of 1958 he was dismissed from the Institute. Culen continued to write until his death on April 7th, 1964 in New York. His simple tombstone with the English inscription: "Culen / Konstantfn / Slovak historian / and writer / born in 1904 I died in 1964" stands modes ti y on the grounds of the Slovak cemetery in Passaic (New Jersey) . * * * Having reconstructed Cul en 's tortuous attempts to emigrate to Canada, we may conclude the following. Someone as famous as the nationalist journalist Culen could have had some advantages; he received the help of the influential Juraj Rondos, who shared Culen's nationalism. Thanks to Rondos ' s strong personal connections with Senator J. T. Haig, Culcn's matter was dealt with by the local government official, R. N. Munroe in Winnipeg. The matter reached even the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources, H. L. Keenlcyside, who was in charge of immigration to Canada. In Rome Culen was helped by the former Slovak SLOYAKJA l69 Minister to the Vatican, Karol Sidor, and also by the Italian General A. Mola who had connections with the Canadian Minister to Italy, J. Desy. In spite of such advantages, Culen had to struggle for two years with the Canadian burea ucracy before sec uring an entry visa to Canada. Owing to Culen 's past as a stron g supporter of the independent Slovak State, which during World War II was allied with Nazi Germany , he had to make some false statements in his application. However, it seems that the Canadian authorities did not care much about them. Culen 's standin g as an "anti -co mmu nist writer" may have helped him. It is clear that Culen 's health record complicated and delayed the process of hi s entry to Canada. It is not clear whether it had been blocked by the political intervention of his "enemies". Juraj Rondos's self-sac rificing efforts on behalf o f Culcn were impressive. His strong will and activities, which were evident in the struggle with the Canadian bureaucracy, were trul y surpri sing. Culcn expressed admiration and gratitude to' him : "Whenever I meet with Minister Sidor, we almost always talk about your work with admiration , which will remain as a beautiful example of quiet and determined efforts with patriotic eagerness . Very seldom in life docs one ex perience such work." (C ulcn 's letter to Rondos of December 6th, 1948). When Kon stantfn 's younger brother, Stefan Culcn visited his brother in Montreal at the end of October, 1949, " he IStefan Culen I was also very thankful to you !Rondos I and he just does not understand that a man, who did not know us at all, could fight for us so courageously and finally win." (Letter of Konstantfn Culen's wife, Alzbeta Culenova, to the Rondos family of October 31st, 1949). Later a rumour was circulated among Slovak immigrant communities in Canada, according to which Rondos received mo- SLOVAKlA 170 ney from the Canadian government for helping immigrants. However, Culen doubted the rumour and Rondos rejected it decisively in his memoirs. Judging by the contents of his correspondence, Rondos 's good faith is clear and we probably can accept his explanation that " I worked from love of Slovak affairs and not for money" .29 19 K. Culen wrote in an ano nymo us article as fo ll ows: "There are many of us in Canada who may thank the Canadian Slovak League for ou r emigration and for the fact that we again live as human beings and that we again stand on our feet and we are out of the camps of poverty . They may also thank brother Rond os who did this wo rk in the name of the League. He [Ro nd os] did it co urageo us ly and conscientio usly. Many know well the Slovak ' s worst failing. namely envy. and they began to spread gossi p. sayi ng that he [Ro nd os] is a good business man who receives JOO dollars from the Canadian government for every emi grant. Many emigrants were also angry with his alleged earning of 100 dollars for this purpose. When once someone to ld me that. I [Culen I answered him : ··1 feel offe nded . In my mind. Ro nd os sho uld ge t for me at least 1.000 dollars. If I was rich and had the money. and if the Canadian gove rnment did not give him the mo ney . as in reality it did not. I would give him for every me mber of my family 1.000 do ll ars. Even so. it wo uld not be enough for all that he has d o nc . •• Anonym [Konstantfn Culen J. "Ujo Rondos". Ka/cnd;ir Kanadskcj s/ovcnskcj ligy. I 953, p.211. Rondos himself remini sced about the episode in his later years as follows : "When after World War II o ur fellow -co untrymen dispersed around the world. I tried to get as many of them to Canada as possi ble. I took charge of the help and the !Canadian I Co lonization Office helped me. I managed to get many families and individuals into this country. However. there were certain people who accused me of being paid by the Canadian government up to 2,000 dollars for single families . Of course. this was just a fairy talc. I worked from love of Slovak affairs and not for money . I even spent my ow n money by constant running around and arranging of documents for Slovak emigrants. " Juraj Rondos . "Moje rozpomienky na zasle easy". Ibid. I 982, p.54. SLOVAKJA 171 In his correspondence Konstantfn Culen repeatedly promised to write the story of his immigration to Canada. He 0 never did so.' This article is an attempt to do it for him. 111 Meanwhile. we identified the following articles in which Culen mentioned Rondos: Konstantin Culen. "Dolczitc pre novych emigrantov [Important News for New Emigrants]". Kan.1dsky Slovak. September 15th. 1949: Anonym [Kon stantin Culen]. "Ujo Rondos ". Kalendar Kanadskej s/ovenskej ligy. /953. pp . 209-212 .  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Konštantín Čulen's Long Journey from Italy to Canada as illustrated by his correspondence with Juraj Rondoš Description An account of the resource Susumu Nagayo Slovakia, Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003 pp. 112-171 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nagayo, Susumu Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/74e92f3c4011eb55a040b909f3f3f351.pdf d085a6846bc9f744ad30c6fda7fd224c PDF Text Text 172 SLOVAKIA DOCUMENTATION: THE POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND CULTURAL SITUATION IN THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC (AS OF MAY, 1995) M. Mark Stolarik (Paper Presented to the Symposium " Economies in Transition: Europe to the Bering Strait, University of Montana, Missoula, May 1, 1995) 1 It is difficult to paint a clear picture of contemporary Slovakia because this newly-independent country is still undergoing rcvo1utionary changes at all levels of society due to the collapse of Communism in 1989. Since there is no model for the Slovaks ( or other states of East Central Europe) to follow in the transition from totalitarian Communism to democratic Capitalism. the current Slovak government is proceeding slowly and cautiously in this direction, amid much criticism. My observations arc based on official and unofficial visits to Slovakia in the last five years, on ' This paper was supposed to have been published as a part of the Proceedings by the organizers of the symposium. Since the Proceedings never saw the light of day. the author clecicled to publish the article in Slovakia because it an:urately reflected the political. economic and cultural situation in 1995 Slovakia. It should be react as a document of its time. �SLOVAKIA 173 my reading of a portion of the Slovak and western press, on reports issued by Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, and on long discussions with various government officials, who have asked to remain anonymous . The political situation in the Slovak Republic is the most problematic. The Parliament (officially called the National Council of the Slovak Republic) consists of a unicameral legislature of 150 deputies who are elected to a four-year term on the basis of proportional representation. Slovakia has over 50 political parties but only seven of them (or party coalitions) are currently represented in Parliament. In order to run in an election, each new party must first obtain 10,000 certified signatures on a petition, and then must win at least 5% of the votes in order to obtain a seat. Party coalitions must win at least 10% of the vote. The seats are apportioned according to the percentage of votes won by each party .2 The elections held on September 30-October I, 1994, produced no clear winner, as is usual in a proportional representative system. Slovakia is currently governed by a coalition consisting of the left-of-center Movement for a Democratic Slovakia led by Vladimir Mcciar, which won 35% of the popular vote. or 61 scats; by the pro-communist Association of Workers of Slovakia led by Jan r.uptak. which won 7.3% of the vote and 13 scats: and the ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party led by Jan Slota. which won 5 .4% of the vote and 9 scats in Parliament. This coalition ended up with a grand total of 83 scats, although in April I 99 5 three members of the Association of Workers of Slovakia split with their leader and they reduced the coalition's voting majority 1 For more details on the electoral process in the Slovak Republic sec "The Con- stitution of the Slovak Republic." in Albert P. Blaustein & Gisbert H. Flanz. eds .. Constitution.~ of the Countries of the World (Dobbs Fe1Ty. New York: Oceana Publications. Inc .. 1993). 84-88 . �SLOVAKJA 174 to 80 seats. The oppos1t1on consists of the left-wing coalition Common Choice led by Peter Weiss, with 10.4 % of the popular vote or 17 seats; the Coalition of Magyar Parties led by Miklos Ouray, with 10.2% of the vote or 16 seats ; the right-wing Christian Democratic Movement led by Jan Carnog ursky , with I 0 . 1°4, of the votes or 16 seats; and the centrist Democratic Union of Slovakia led by Jozef Moravcik, with 8.6% of the vote or 13 seats.' Current Slovak politics is dominated by one strong leader who seems determined to undercut, by whatever means possible, other political leaders, many of whom are his former friends and associates . Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, who is an attorney by training , and who supported the reforms of Alexander Dubcek in the 1960's, was purged from the ruling Communist Party in 1970 , and later became a corporate lawyer near the city of Trencfn . He entered politics in 1990, when the ruling Public Against Violence , the group of intellectuals which took power from the Communists in Slovakia in November of 1989, advertized for the position of Minister of the Interior of the post-communist Slovak Republic . Mr. Meciar won the competition and allegedly used his control over the Interior Ministry to both discover the past sins of his opponents, and to cover up those of his supporters . After the 3 "S lovakia's voters again turn to pugnacio us fom1er PM ." The Globe and Ma il (Toronto). October 3. 1994. The official election results were communicated to all embassies of the Sl ovak Rep ubli c by a "Tlacovy telegram MZY SR pre zahranicnu dipl omatich1 sluzbu SR." on October 3. 1994. of wh ich I have a copy. Fur an analysis of the results see Martin Yotruba's "S lovak News" (mimeogra phed). Slovak Studies Program. University of Pittsburgh. Sept. 27-Oct. 2. 1994. A much later analysis by Michael J. Kopanic. Jr.. including the creation of the coalition. appeared as "The Recent Elections in Slovakia." in Association for th e Study of NMion.1/ities: A nalysis of Current Eve nts. 6 (No.9. May. 1995). 1-3. For the split in the Association of Workers in Slovakia see Narodmi obroda, April 4. 1995 . �SLOVAKIA 175 Public Against Violence won the largest percentage of the vote in the June elections of 1990, it selected Mr. Meciar to become Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic , which at that time was still a part of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. While in this post, Mr. Meciar allegedly joined with others in slowing or manipulating the process of investigating (" lustracny proces" in Slovak) whether or not high government officials had collaborated with, or served as agents. of the dreaded communist secret p olice. He also increasi ngly argued with the presidium of the Public Against Violence, and its coalition partner, the Christian Demo4 cratic Movement, over government policy . Even though Mr. Meciar is very intelligent, 1s an excellent speaker, has a photographic memory, and radiates charisma wherever he goes, he appears to have what is colloquially known as a "type A" personality. In other words, he feels that he has to be in complete control of any situation, he seldom seeks advice, and is not very tol erant of criticism. He prefers to be surrounded by "yes ' For a brief biography or Mci'iar sec Kto Jc kto na S/ovensku. 199 P ( Ko nzo rci u111 Encyk lopcd ia: Bratislava. 199 I ). I 14- 15: The allegations ;:igainst Meci;:ir were 111adc by his political oppone nts in the Slovak Parlia111cnt's Defense and Security Co111111ittec on November 7. 1991 . cf. ··'Secret Report' Clai111s Meciar KGB Connections:· Foreign Bmadcast ln fonna tion Service (Washington. D.C.. hereafter FBIS). November 13. 1991. p.1 4: and summarized by Jan Obrman ··S lo vak Politician Accused or Secret Police Tics:· R adio Free Europe I R adio Liberty Rese.irch R eport (hereafter R FEIRL R ese.irch R eport ). Apri l 10. 1992 . Sec also ··Meciar Proposes Repeal or Screening Law:· CTK. December 21. I 99 3 . Two highly -placed public servants in the Slovak government. one or whom worked in the Office or the Pri111c Minister for both Mr. Mci': iar. and hi s predecessors. recently repeated these allegations to 111e. Since they fear for their jobs. the se public servants have asked me to keep secret their names. and the circu mstances or our 111cetings. At this time it is impossible to confinn. or disprove. these allegations since the ril es of the fonner secret police. which are in Prague. arc not open to the public . �SLOYAKJA 176 men" .5 Since the governing coalition Presidium was also composed of some very strong personalities, who opposed Mr. Meciar's attempts to become Chairman of the Public Against Violence in March of 1991, they decided to remove him from his Prime Ministerial post in April of that year. The Presidium replaced Mr. Meciar with Jan Carnogursky, an attorney and former Catholic dissident during the communist regime, who was also the founder and Chairman of the Christian Democratic Movement. 6 Mr. Meciar, and his most loyal supporters, subsequently withdrew from the Public Against Violence, which later fell apart, and they created the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, which won the largest percentage of the votes in the June, 1992 elections . 7 In the next two years Mr. Meciar reached the height of his glory, but also suffered the humiliation of defeat. It was Mr. Meciar who in the summer of 1992, as Slovak Prime Minister, negotiated with Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus the dissolution 5 This observation is based on my reading of the Slovak press. on observing Mr. Mcciar delivering a po litical address in Nitra in August. 1993. on a pri va tc meeting that I had with him in September. 1993. and on several discussions that I had with Mr. Igor Uhrfk. The latte r is a fervent Slovak nationali st who sold his successful industrial-insurance business in New York city in 1992 and returned to Slovakia to ··help o ut" in 1993. He contributed 1,000.000 Slovak crowns to the Slovak National Pa11y. was made vicc-Chainnan of the Party. and later be came a principal advisor to the Minister of Privatization of the Slovak govern ment (as a volunteer). After Mr. Meciar's return to power in the fall of 1994. and a split in the Slovak National Party. among other things. Mr. Uhrfk became disgusted with Slovak politics and returned to the United States . " Kto je kto na S/ovensk11 1991 '.'. 190. 7 Jiri Pchc, ··s1ovak Nationalists Agitate for more Autonomy. Oppose Radical Pri vatizatio n." RFEIRL Research R eport. March 20. I 991: '"50,000 rally after Slovak leader fired," New York Times. April 24, I 99 I. A9: For more details sec Robert A. Young. The Breakup of Czechas/avakia (Kingston: Queen 's Uni vcrs ity. Insti tute of Intergovernmental Relati ons. Research Paper #3 2. 1994 ). 5. IO - J6. �SLOVAKIA 177 of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, and it was Mr. Meciar who proudly stood at the helm of the newly-independent Slovak Republic on January 1, 1993. Even though Mr. Meciar was not initially a nationalist, he shrewdly perceived that Slovak nationalism was the strongest single force in post-Communist CzechoSlovakia, and by 1992 he and his followers had firmly embraced this movement. 8 Slovak nationalism, however, was not enough to save Mr. Meciar from himself. He suffered his second major political defeat when the Slovak Parliament in February 1993 elected, not the physician Roman Kovac , the preferred candidate of Mr. Meciar's party for President of the Republic, but rather the fom1er Minister of Finance Michal Kovac .9 Much to Mr. Meciar's surprise, the latter refused to become a mere figurehead and instead took his duties as President quite seriously, to the point of attacking Mr. Meciar in the Slovak Parliament for alleged dictatorial tendencies in March of 1994. Meanwhile, Mr. Meciar had lost the confidence of several of his key allies and supporters, including Milan Knazko, his former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jozef Moravcfk, the subsequent Minister of Foreign Affairs, and two Deputy Prime Ministers, including Roman Kovac and I.:udovft Cernak, the latter '"Talks fail: Czechoslovakia dose to breakup. " Ottawa Citizen. June 9. 1992 : "Leaders start negotiations on splitting Czechoslovakia." The Globe and Mail. June 17. 1992: "Who Split Czechoslovakia'?" The New York Times. September 24. 1992. A29: "Parliament approves Czech-Slovak split." The Globe and Mail. November 26. 1992. "Fireworks. Tears and Doubt in Slovakia." The New York Times.January I. 1993. Al4: sec also Sabrina Petra Ramct. "The Reemergence of Slovakia." Nationalities Papers. 22 (No. I. Spring. 1994). I07 - 112 . '' "Havel elected first president of Czech Republic: Slovaks to hold runoff after vote rebuffs Prime Minister's candidate." The Globe and Mail. January 27. I 993 , A6: "Ex-Communist Chosen President of Slovakia." The New York Times. February 16. 1993. A7. �178 SLOVAKIA his coalition partner from the Slovak National Party! The net result was a parliamentary vote of no-confidence in Mr. Meciar and his party, his third political defeat, and his loss of power for a second time. Most of his former allies in the MOS, who abandoned him, joined Jozef Moravcfk's centrist Democratic Union of Slovakia. From March to October of 1994, a left-right coalition headed by Prime Minister Jozef Moravcfk ruled Slovakia. 111 For these reasons, ever since his election victory of 1994, and his subsequent return to power, Mr. Mcciar has tried to topple the President of the Slovak Republic and to destroy the Democratic Union of Slovakia. Between October and December of 1994 Mr. Meciar looked for coalition partners who would join him in his campaign against the President but had to settle for the two coalition partners mentioned above, who assured him of a voting majority in the Parliament, but not enough votes (90) to remove the President. Since he could not muster the votes to remove the President, he decided to try to strip him of some of his legal powers. For example, in April of 1995 Mr. Mcciar prevailed upon the Slovak Parliament to transfer from the President to the Prime Minister the right to appoint the Chief of Slovakia's Security Intelligence Service (the successor to the Secret Policc). 11 1 " .. Broad Coaliti on to govern Slovakia." The Globe and Mail. March 15 . 1994 . For the viewpoints of the two protagonists regarding the reasons for their fal - ling out see --sprava o stave Slovenskej republiky prednesena prezidentom SR Michalom Kovacom v Naroclncj radc SR dna 8.3.1994" and .. Prcjav predscdu vlady Slovcnskej republiky Yladimfra Mcciara na 27. sch6dzi NR SR di\a 11.3. 1994." published in a special issue of Republika (Bratis lava.March. I 9. 1994 ). I 5pp. For a legal interpretation of this struggle sec Spencer Zifcak ...The Battle over Presidential Power in Slovakia," Slovakia. 36 ( 1998). 70-80. For a profile of the Moravcfk government and its policies sec --cTK Profiles New Cabinet Members" in FB/S,March 17. 1994.4- 12 and --Text of Policy Statement of Slovak Government," FBIS. April 25. 1994, 16-30. 11 "Je Lexa v NR SR. v SIS. alebo v Iese?" Sme (Bratislava). April 26. 199 5. �179 SLOVAKIA Meanwhile, Mr. Meciar charged that the Democratic Union of Slovakia had not gathered the necessary 10,000 signatures before the elections of 1994. If he could prove his charge, then the DU members of Parliament would be stripped of their seats and Mr. Meciar would by default have the three-fifths of the votes necessary to remove the President. Unfortunately for Mr. Meciar, the Slovak Constitutional Court, headed by Milan Cic, the first Prime Minister of the post-communist Slovak Republic, and a former friend of Mr. Meciar, upheld the validity of the 10,000 signatures obtained by the DU before the 1994 elections. This did not stop Mr. Meciar from having his 80 supporters in Parliament pass a motion of " no confidence" in the President on May 5th, and in ordering the Slovak police to check on the validity of the l 0,000 signatures by visiting the homes of the signatories, and in the process harassing supporters of the DU. 12 Mr. Mcciar has also had his difficulties with the press . While he was out of office in 1994, the previous coalition government supported full freedom of the press , including radio and televi sion, and appointed boards of directors who were likewise inclined. Very few of these individuals were supporters of Mr. Mcciar. Once he returned to power in December of 1994 (it took him over two months to put together a coalition), Mr. Meciar began to fire the old boards of directors of radio and television (which arc still state-controlled), and to replace them \.Vith his own people. These , in turn , cancelled certain satiric television programs which had made fun of Mr. Meciar. As a result, there have been several mass-demonstrations in Bratislava against Mr. Meciar's alleged attempts to control the mass-media. Therefore, while television and radio commentators have ceased to lampoon 11 Zifcak. op.cit.. p.70; ··overovanie podpisov na harkoch DU je porusenie peticneho prava obcanov." Srne. May 23 . 1995 . �SLOVAKIA 180 Mr. Meciar, the print media, which 1s largely privatized , is still very critical of him . 13 The economic situation in Slovakia, meanwhile, is improving. Slovakia did not slide into a deep depression after it became independent, as some Western pundits had predicted . Instead, after some uncertainty in 1993, its economy grew by a spectacular 4.8% in 1994 and its budget deficit was a respectable 3% of GDP. Meanwhile, the Slovak crown , its basic unit of currency, was devalued by only 10% in 1993, it is convertible to hard currencies , and it remains stable. The rate of inflation also dropped from 25% in 1993 to around 11. 7% in 1994. Unemployment, however, remains high -14%. One of the causes of Slovak unemployment is the collapse of its heavy-arms industry, which used to serve the now-defunct Warsaw Pact and its allies world-wide. Converting this arms industry into something more useful remains a major challenge to the government of the Slovak Republic. 13 14 Re uter, December 16. 1994, as reported by Martin Votruba in Slovak News. December 16- 18. 1994; Jiri Pchc, .. Anti-Mcciar Rall y in Bratislava," R FEIRL Reports. Ibid., December 8- 11. In a TA SR report of May 12. 1995. Mr. Mcciar was quoted as saying that the press is free in Slovakia... but all newspapers should admit who owns them. and who pays them." impl ying that the print press in Slovakia is large ly financed by fore igners who arc hosti le to the current governme nt. The CTK on the same date quoted Juraj Veres. editor of N,irod n;i obroda (Bratislava). as agree ing that the Slovak press was still free . but th at ··the government is trying to gain contro l over the dailies:· However. he added th at lately "the go vernment has been backing down ." For Mr. Mci:iar's earlier problems with the press sec Jan Obnuan ...The Slovak Government vers us the Media." RFEIRL Research R eport. February 5. 1993 . 14 For an example of negative reporting o n Slovakia's eco nomic future sec Step- hen Enge lberg, "New Nation. Imperiled Economy." New York Time.~. February 12. 1993. DI; for an admission that the Slovak economy is doing surprisingly well see "How the Slovaks Have Taken Flight." The Globe nncl Mail. December 5, 1994. A JO (reprinted from the Wall Street Jo urnal); and --standard and Poors o Slovensk u." Sme. April 7. 199 5. �181 SLOVAKJA Indeed, converting the whole system from a command economy to a form of private enterprise remain s the major problem for the Slovak government. U ndcr Communism the state nationalized all the industry and the bulk of the land, it controlled all the means of production, it regulated prices, and subsidized housing , transportation and food, and created a complete welfare state with free education from pre-school through university, and free universal health-care. Unfortunately, the state enacted all these changes without the consent of the people, it enforced them through the use of police terror, and it discriminated in favour of members of the Communist Party and children of the workingclass when dispensing economic and cultural benefits. 15 Now that the Communists are no longer in charge, the various governments of Slovakia have tried to transform the economy into a form of private enterprise, as called for in the Constitution of the Slovak Republic. Since no real models exist on how to do this , n umcrous laws and regulations have been passed to try to bring it about. The first steps were taken in early 1991 when the Parliament of the C1.ech and Slovak Federal Republic passed a law for the restitution of confiscated private property (chiefly land). While some former landowners were delighted to receive their land back, most young people in Slovakia showed no interest in working it. The amount of land seized from individual families by the Communists had been small in the first place, and most young ' ' The literature on this subject is vast. For two co ncise a11iclcs that deal with most of this period sec Robert K. Evanson. ··Regime and Working Class in Czechoslovakia. 1948- 1%8." Soviet Studies. 37 (Nn. 2. 1985 ). 248-68; and by the same author "Political Repressi o n in Czechoslovakia. Slavonic Pi1pcrs. 28 (No. I. 1986). 1-21. 1948- 1984." Canadian �182 SLOVAKJA people have no intention of becoming smallholding • peasants 16 agam . Managers, officials, and many workers on collective and state farms , on the other hand , wish to preserve these institutions. Since collectives and state farms provide their employees with a guaranteed income, regular hours, easy work, and many opportunities for theft, the employees are loath to see such farms disappear. Such employees are among the pillars of support that Mr. Meciar can count on during elections. 17 The various churches of Slovakia, meanwhile, especially the Roman and Greek Catholic Churches, which were singled out for persecution by the Communists, have had much of their confiscated property returned . In l 991-92 the federal government returned most of the buildings that the Communists had seized from religious orders, and in the fall of l 993 Mr. Meciar's government returned most of the buildings that had been confiscated from Church Dioceses. However, most church land that was confiscated and turned into state or collective farms was not returned, largely because of the opposition of the collectives. Thus , the churches continue to rely upon government support for their existence, and '" "Czechoslovakia plans to return property ." Philadelphia 24, I 99 L ..Transfonn:icia pornohospod:irstva Inquirer. February a rcstitucie:· Pr.ic:.i (Bra ti slava). May 31. 1993; "Refonns Alter the Landscape or Czechoslovakia's Fanning ." New Y ork Times, June 4, I 99 L Milan Svec, "Czechoslovakia's Velvet Di vorce." Current Hist ory (November. I 992 ). 377; and discussions with the tw o public servants mentioned above in footnote 3. 17 "Who voted for Whom'1" (a poll conducted by the Slovak Research Office). as reported by Martin Yotruba in Slovak News. 7-9 October. 1994. p.4. The o bservatio ns abo ut state fam1s and collectives were made by the two public servants mentioned above. On many occasions when I visited Slovakia in the era of Communism. I also discussed collectives and state fanns with some of my relatives. who worked at such institutions. They detalied the many kinds of theft possible at state farms and collectives. �183 SLOVAKIA from a North American perspective, this . I8 S h Ip . IS an unhealthy relation- Meanwhile, the federal Parliament also passed the "small privatization" Act of J 990 concerning small business. This Act enabled a few thousand entrepreneurs to borrow money from banks to establish small retail businesses such as travel agencies, restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, computer stores, and various skilled trades. These kinds of enterprises are flourishing all over Slovakia. 19 A little later the federal Parliament passed another Act that concerned itself with the privatization of large industries, the socalled "large privatization." This would involve all except the most strategic industries such as atomic energy, natural gas, transportation, the arms industry and so on . However, since the government did not wish its large industries to be bought by foreigners, and since most of the citizens of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic did not have the wealth tn purchase these industries outright, the government decided to enact a "coupon privati1.ation." By this plan , every citi1.cn over the age of 18 was entitled to buy a privatization coupon for J .000 C1.echoslovak crowns (Kcs), and then invest it in the company of his choice. The " For the story of the persecution of the churches in Slovakia sec Theodoric J. Zubek. The Church of Silence in Slovakia (Whi ting. IN: John J. Lach. 1956). and Michal Lacko. "The Forced Liquidation of the Union of Uzhorocl." Slovak Studies. I (1961). 145-85: for the story of the underground church in Slovakia under Communism sec "Secret Bishop." and for the story of the rebuilding of the Jesuit Order sec " New Oppmtunitics in Slovakia." Company: a magazine o{ the American Jc.m ils. 8 (No. 3. Spring. 1991 ). 2-5. and 9- 11. Details of the resti tution laws passed after 1990 can be found in Sharon Fisher. "Church Restitu tion Law Passed in Slovakia." RFEIRL Rese.1rch Report. November 19. 1993 . '" "Chystiime historicky ziikon: Ekonomicka refonna konecnc dostala tviir." Niirodn,i obroda. September 5. 1990. 13: Svec. op.cit.. 377 . �184 SLOVAKIA number of shares he would receive would depend upon the value of the company. This was the first step in the creation of a stock market in the Republic. The government also decided that this process would be divided into several rounds since it involved so many industries. The first round took place while the CzcchoSlovak Federation still existed ? ' The second round of the coupon privatization was supposed to take place after Slovakia became independent. However, the government of Mr. Mcciar soon discovered that most Slovaks were not investing their coupons directly into the companies for sale, but rather were selling them to investment companies controlled by foreigners . The Meciar government did not want to allow these foreign-owned holding companies to buy up so much of Slovakia's industries, and it postponed this privatization . However, the Moravcik government, which ruled Slovakia between March and October, 1994, allowed this privatization to continue . Then, when Mr. Meciar returned to power in the fall of 1994, he halted the privatization again. At the end of March, 1995 the government of Mr. Meciar decided to allow half of this coupon privatization to proceed, but he reserved the other half for potential Slovak buyers, most of whom arc in fact the managers of these industries . These managers allegedly neglected the upkeep of their factories and, therefore, their value has declined. Thus, if this privatization continues, the managers of these factories stand to make a lot of money once the value of their factories goes up again. Mr. Meciar's enemies have charged that these managers arc in league with Mr. Mcciar, that they arc all former Communists, and that they provide him with financial support. Mr. Meciar's supporters, on the other hand, charge that the proponents of the 1 " "A Divorce that Could Save the Czech Economy," The Wall Street Journal. March 11. 1991 ; Svec. op. cit.. 377 . �SLOVAKIA 185 strict coupon privatization are in leag ue with Mr. Moravcik and . financially support the opposition parties. Neutral observers have told me that both sides arc guilty of profiteering from this privatization process , and the greed and corruption involved goes a long way toward s explaining the bitterness of current Slovak politics. Also, because Mr. Meciar reduced the number of businesses to be privati1.ed in half, that is, from an estimated value of 80 billion Sk to 40 billion Sk, the 3.2 million holders of pri vatization coupons in the Slovak Republic witnessed a drop in the value of their coupons from 24,000 Sk to 12,000 Sk by March of 1995. Forty deputies of the Slovak Parliament then approached the Constitutional Court in Kosicc to protest against Law No . 340/ J 994, which had halted the coupon privatization on November 3-4, 1994, a nd the Constitutional Court decided in their favour. It then o rdere d the Slovak Parliament to re-write the law so that it would no t violate individuals' rights to private property as guaranteed by th e Slovak Constitution . Mr.Meciar's reaction was to propose that the privatization coupons be exchanged for government bo nd s, which could be redeemed for 10,000 Sk, or held for their interest, or used to purchase shares in companies. Most opposition deputies denounced this suggestion as ··theft" from the coupon-holders . 21 The average citizen. meanwhile, has had to tighten his belt several notches since the fall of Communism. While the gove rnment still controls the price o f electricity, transportation. fuel and basic " Smc. Apri l 6. 1995: "Privatizacny zakon nie je v s11lade s ustavou SR." TA SR. May 25 . 1995: "V . Meciar o novej kuponovej privatiz,icii ." Smc. June 8. 1995: "Anketa Sme:• Smc. June 8. 1995. Once again . the two public servants. cited above. ex plained the complexity of this iss ue to me. Dr. Juraj Svec. the Recto r of Comenius University in Bratislava. and a member of Parliament for the DU. confinned their analysis when he visited with me o n March 26. 1995. �186 SLOYAKJA foodstuffs, it has decided to provide smaller subsidies for these goods or services and, therefore, it has raised their prices dramatically in the last four years . Thus, while a streetcar ride used to cost a mere one crown, it now costs five ; while gasoline used to cost seven crowns a litre, it now costs nineteen. And, while a liter 22 of milk used to cost two crowns, it now costs twclvc . Wages, of state employees, on the other hand, have not kept up with the rise in prices. While members of the Slovak Parliament voted themselves hefty pay increases in the summer of 1993 (from 10,000 Sk to 25,000 Sk per month), ordinary state employees do not share in this largesse. Indeed, the wage-structure of state employees is still very Communist. Thus , a physician starting his career receives only 4,000 Sk, which is less than the wage of the average truck-driver! As a result, physicians in Slovakia recently demanded a 200% wage increase, and threatened to go on strike if they did not receive it. Teachers and professors are s1m1larly und erpaid , with the former receiving 5,000 Sk and the latter 8,600 Sk. Even though Mr. Mcciar promised during the last election campaign, among other things, to double teachers' salaries , " Interviews with the the two public servan ts cited above. plus my ow n observations on visits to Slovakia in the summers or 1990. 1991. 1992. I ()9J and 1994. In May of 1990 I visi ted Slovak ia as a delegate of the Slovak League of Ame ri ca. wh ich had come on a ••fact -finding" mission. This was an offi cial mis sio n. spo nsored by the governme nt of the Slovak Republic. It was the first official visi t of the Slovak Leag ue since 1938. whe n the first de legati on of th e League brought to Slovakia the original of the Pittsburgh Ag reeme nt. In 1993 I visited Slovakia as the newl y-elected president of the Canadian Slovak League. In this capaci ty I had official di scussio ns with Prime Minister Meciar and with Jan Findra, Chancellor to the President. My visits in I 991. 1992 and 1994 were for scholarly purposes - to participate in historical co nfere nces. �SLOVAKIA 187 he has thus far failed to do so. Indeed, Slovak schoolteachers are also threatening to go on strike over this issue. 23 Employees of the growing private enterprises, on the other hand , generally make much more than state employees. For instance, clerks in private banks earn 10,000-15,000 crowns a month. Accountants and computer programmers in private firms make up to 20,000 Sk per month. And attorneys, who were among the first to privatize in the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic , arc among the highest-paid professionals in Slovakia. Finally, growing numbers of entrepreneurs have become millionaires many times over. and some of these 'nouveau-riche' flaunt their wealth with expensive western cars, clothes, and other consumer goods. They have provoked increasing resentment among state employees, whose salaries have remained far behind the increase in the cost of consumer goods and scrviccs. 24 The price of housing has also skyrocketed . Under Communism, if one had the right connections, one could obtain a beautiful villa in the hills overlooking Bratislava and the Danube river officially for about 250,000 Kcs (and unofficially, that is, with an additional under-the-table payment of 250.000 Kcs). Now these villas cost anywhere from 2,000,000 to 20,000.000 Sk. Similarly, state and co-op apartments, which usually consist of only three rooms plus a small kitchen and tiny bath, are commanding premium prices. The co-op apartments, where one purchased the 11 Smc. April 6. 1995: " Pricskum ukaza l. zc vysc 70% lckarov jc oc ho tnych vs tupit' dn st rajku." Smc. April 26 . 1995: " Skolstvo dostane 530 mili6nov ." Smc. May 14. 1995 : "Ultimatum lckarnv na zvyscnic platov o 200% vyprsalo. strajkovat' sa asi ncbudc." Sme. May 15. 1995 : ··Pricmern,i mzda v skolstve nad'alcj ncjasna." Smc. June 8. 1995: and discussions with the two public servants cited above. " Discussions with the two public servants cited above. plus personal observations from past visits to Slovakia. �188 SLOVAKIA right to live for 30,000 Kcs under Communism , can now be bought by the renters for 50,000 Sk, and can then be re-sold for anywhere between 750,000 to 1,000,000 Sk 1 Former state-ow ned apartments, meanwhile, which until recently could not be purchased were often sub-leased to others for very hig h rents. The process of their sale will soon approximate what happened with the co-op apartments. The state, meanwhile, has lost interest in providing additional ho using for the people. Various entcrpreneurs have taken over this task, and the newly-built apartments generall y sell for around 1,000,000 Sk, which is far beyond what the average Slovak can a ffo rd. 25 Health care, meanwhile, is also in a state o f transition . Before 1989, health care was universal and free. However, one received quality care only if one was either a high functionary of the Communist Party, which had its own special clinics and hospitals , with modern , western , equipment; or, if one bribed one's physician and nurse with extra money or gifts. And, exotic western drugs were usuall y not available, except to the privileged few . Many American and Canadian Slovaks remember well the pl ain tive letters that they used to receive from their unfortunate relatives in Slovakia under Communism, and how these relatives sent prescriptions for Western-made drugs, along with the addresses of pharmacies in Switzerland , which when paid in hard 21 currencies, were willing to fill these orders for them . ' 15 Ibid. 1 Milada Vachudova and Sharon Fisher. "' Health Care Crisis : The Czech and '' Slovak Republics ." RFEIRL Research Report. October 8. 1993. 44-46: and dis c ussio ns wi th friends and relatives on visits to Slovakia in 1968. 1970. 1983 and 1988 . Our fami ly in Canada used to regularly receive requests fo r western drugs. and we filled these requests th rough a willing phannacist in Switze rland . Dr. Do broslav Valik of Bry n Mawr. Pe nnsy lvani a. to ld me in Octo ber of 1992 of having tried to establish a Dental Clinic in Bratislava right after the "'Ve lve t �SLOVAKIA 189 In an effort to save money, the Slovak government is trying to privatize parts of the health-care system, but at a very slow pace. Pharmacies have all been privatized and one can now buy whatever drugs one needs. However, the state pays only for routine drugs, and not always for the full amount. The more exotic drugs, which arc now readily available, must be paid for by the patient. Dentists are also privatizing as quickly as they can, with about one-third currently being self-s upporting and ex pensive . Most physicians, however, have not yet taken the plunge and arc unlikel y to do so. Because of their poor salaries , most M.D.'s in Slovakia cannot afford to purchase the expensive equipment necessary to open an office or clinic, and they also cannot afford private liability insurance. As long as they continue to work for state-run hospitals, they do not need liability insurance, and, thu s, they continue to be state employees . And, because they continue to be underpaid , many demand extra payments or gifts if they are to provide quality care. Meanwhile, most Slovaks oppose the privatization of their health care. They want it to remain universal and free . Thus, the Mcciar government is moving slowly and cautiously in trying to reform the health-care systcm. 27 The educational system of Slovakia is also undergo ing change. Shortly after the Communists sci1.cd power the y a bolished all religious schools and put education at the service or the state. The whole system from pre-school throug h university was then statefunded and controlled. Marxism was taught as the philosophy or Revo luti o n.. of 1989. Much to his amazement. his friends from the VPN showed him the clinic for funner me mbers of the Commu nist Pa11y in Bratislava. It had all the latest western equipment one could imagine. unlike clin ics for the general public . 17 Yaduchova & Fisher. op. cit.. 48-49. a nd discussions servants cited above . with the two public �SLOVAKIA 190 the state, and all teachers had to conform or face expulsion . Higher • education was free but operated under a quota system whereby in the process of admission children o f the working-class were favoured over those of the middle or upper classes . The latter then resorted to bribery to get their children into institutions of higher learning. Meanwhile , to their credit, the Communists also established several new universities , including the full-service Safarik University in Kos ice and the College of Transportation in Zilina, among others, to satisfy the demands of an increasingly industrialized society .2x After the downfall of Communism, state-support for cd ucation continued , but not its ideological requirements . Most universities held new elections for rectors and deans , and the professors and students threw out the communist administrators . However, because most of the communist professors have tenure, the uni versities cannot get rid of them. It will take another generation before these Marxist professors reach retirement age, and arc finally replaced by a new generation of professors . And even the new generation will bo hard to find, because the wages paid to professors arc so low. Meanwhile. the quota system that favored students of working-class origins has been replaced by a 4uota " Ladi slav G resfk. --vyc hova rokoch 1956 - 1960 ." vy,o kos ko lskej inte ligencie na Sl ove nsku v Historicky i'a.rnri.~. 31 ( No .6 . 198) ). 8') 1-91 O: A 111011 Hrnko & Jozef Zatkuliak," Uni vcrzita Ko me nskc ho na rozhranf piitiles iatyc h a sestHesialyc h rokov ." Hi.~toricky t'a .r npis. 32 (No.4. I 984 ). 59J-(1 19: pe rso na l o bservati o ns fro n1 past visi ts to Slovakia. di scussio ns w ith the two pub I ic servants cited abo ve. and di sc ussio n with Rudolf Korec. Recto r of Safarik U ni versity. May. 1990. On a visit to Slovakia in the summer of 1968 I asked one of my co usins what he was studying. He replied .. Philosophy ." When I in4uired a bo ut the kind o f philosophy . he replied "'Marxism-Lcnini sm 1" His mo ther. meanw hil e . w ho was a sc hoolteac her. used to go to church in a vill age o ut s id e o f the to wn in whi ch she lived. because if she had been seen atlendin g c hurc h services in her home to wn . she would have lost her job. �SLOVAKIA 191 based on grades . Even though Slovakia today has 14 institutions of higher learning, including brand-new universities in Trnava and Banska Bystrica, it still enrolls only 18% of high sc hool grad uatcs, which is very low when compared to Western Europe or North America, which attract between 30% and 50%. Meanwhile , the state has permitted the re-establishment of religious sc hools funded by the government. However, their number remains small beca use forty years of Communism thoroughly discredited religious education , and most employees of the Ministry of Education arc still opposed to their expansion .2'> Whether or not the government decides to in vest more m higher education remains to be seen. Recent attempts to introduce tuition to cover 20% of the cost of their education have met fierc e resistance from the students. Meanwhile, the quality of university education in Slovakia is not very high, large ly because the teaching staff was cut off from the West for over 40 years , and also because universities stressed education rather than researc h. Tha t is why all the Slovak universities arc hurridly signing agreements with universities all over the Western world that provide for scholarly exchanges o f staff and students . However. it is difficult to attract top Western scholars to teach at Slovak uni versities when they can expect salaries of only $300.00 per month . Onl y true idealists have thu s far volunteered to teac h at Slovak unive rsities under such conditions. 10 ' " Disrnssion with Rudolf Korec. Rector or Safarik University in Kosice. May. 1990: discussion wi th Dean Ladislav Pauliny. Farn lty of A11s. Co menius U ni ve rsity. May. 1994: discussio n with Juraj Svec. Rec tor of Comcni us Univers it y. March 26. 1995 : and discu ssions with the two public servants cited above. '" Discussion with Juraj Svec. op.cit.. and " Pod l'a prof. M. Urbana. dost:.\vaj11 vysokc skoly v SR iba tretinu financii v porovnani s vyspelymi st:.\tmi." TA SR. May 26. 1995. �SLOVAKIA 192 Slovak culture, meanwhile, is also undergoing a radical transformation. Under Communism all cultural activities were state-financed and controlled, and all cultural output was for the sake of promoting Marxism. A Slovak Academy of Sciences, as well as Unions of writers and creative artists were founded in the early l 950's, and they operated under five-year plans . Compliant historians, writers, and creative artists not only became state employees with respectable salaries, but they also received such perks as the use of confiscated castles for meetings and vacations, and statesubsidized clubs that served good food at very low prices . As long as they toed the Party line, their books were published or their paintings and illustrations were bought by mu se ums or publishing houses, and no-one worried, for instance, about how many copies of a book were actually sold, since the government subsidized everything. On the other hand , historians , writers and creative artists could only praise Communism and denounce Capitalism. Certain key personages in Slovak history, such as the Rev. Andrej Hlinka, founder and leader of the Slovak People's Party in the first third of the twentieth century, either became "non-persons" in official publications, or else were denounced as reactionary clcrico-fascists . The past was deliberately distorted to serve the communist futurc. Those intellectuals who refused to go along with this system were persecuted by being allowed to work only at menial labour, and those who dared to openly oppose this Marxist control over culture ended up in jail. 11 .II Julius Mesaros. " Retlexie O piitaesiatych a sestl:lcsiatych rokoch." f-lis/orick f casopis. 39 (Nos. 4-5. 199 I ). 379-88: Richard Marsina. "S lovensk.i historiografia I 945- I 990." f-li storickf brnpi5. 39 (Nos .4-5. I 99 I). 370-79: and discussions with Slovak historians and writers during my visits to Slovakia between 1968 and 1994. �SLOVAKJA 193 After the collapse of Communism, most Slovak intellectuals threw off the shackles of Marxism and started to create freely, as in other countries. Freedom, however, came with a price - declining government support. The bloated Slovak Academy of Sciences (SA V) has been reduced from 7,000 members in 1989 to 3,000 in 1995. While some people have been advocating its total abolition, others have come to its defense. In recent days , certain members of Mr. Meciar's government have even advocated that the Academy be retained in its present form , and that it continue to do basic research as before, while leaving university professors to do the teaching. This Soviet model runs contrary to western traditions, whereby university professors do both research and teaching, and government-supported research is kept to a minimum. Rectors of Slovakia's universities wish to adopt the western model and arc currently negotiating with the Meciar government to try to reach a compromise on this very touchy . \1 question. Slovakia's writers. meanwhile, have had to learn to fend for themselves. Some have become entrepreneurs in the publishing industry , which has shrunk in size and has become more selective in what it accepts for publication , based upon its market potential; others have entered politics and the diplomatic service, giving these professions an unusual (in North America, at least) intellectual llair; and a third group is now dependent upon government grants to subsidize its publications. Needless to say, the compc- 11 ·-z prejavu predsedu SA V Branislava Lichardusa na slavnostnom zhromaz- denf k 40. vyrociu SAY'". Spdvy sluvcnskcj akademic vied. 30 (No. I. 1994). 35; discussion with Dr. Juraj Svec. Rector of Comenius University. March 26. I 995; and discussion with Dr. Branislav Lichardus. president of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the United States, April 22. 1995. in Washington. D.C. �SLOVAKIA 194 tition for such grants is very fierce, with only the best writers receiving support. No wonder that Slovak writers jealously g uard their perks and get very indignant when reminded that the government will not for long let them keep their castle at Budmerice, especially if some wealthy westerner offers to buy it for a large sum of money .D Slovak writers also face fierce competition from western writers. Bookstores are full of novels by westerners, especially Americans such as Stephen King (in translation), and only outstanding Slovak novels now have any chance of commercial success. This also applies to children's books , especially those published by the Walt Disney Corporation. Traditional Slovak children 's books, illustrated by Slovak graphic artists, now have to compete for the hearts and minds of Slovak children with Walt Disney characters such as Bambi and Mowgli speaking in Slovak! Unfortunately, Slovak writers also have to compete with the whole world of pornography, which is also a specialty of the West. Newspaper Kiosks in Bratislava feature as many naked women on magazine covers as one can see in Western Europe . This is another kind of price that one pays for freedom. 34 The Slovak media is also undergoing rapid change. The Slovak film industry (Koliba studios), which used to produce ten JJ Di sc ussions with the two public servants cited above. When I visited Slova- kia in the summer of 1992. I tonnented writer l.'.ubos Jurik with the suggestion th at he would soon lose his summer retreat at Budmcricc castle whe n some .. ri c h Arab sheik would offer $50.000,000 for it. " Jurik . who now works as the official spokesman fo r Dr. Ivan Gasparovic, the Speaker of the Slovak Parliament. became indignant at my suggestion. Meanwhile. the writer Anton Hykisch now serves as Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to Canada. 14 Personal observati ons based upo n my visits to Slovakia in 1990. 199 1, 1992. 1993 , 1994. The semi -monthl y KniinJ revue (Bratislava). now regularly features reviews of books published in the major western lan guages. �SLOVAKIA 195 fairly high-quality feature films per year with government subsidies in the past, now struggles to produce one a year. This industry, too, has to compete with the West, especially with Hollywood, and no country has yet succeeded in doing this. Thus, if the Slovak government wishes its film industry to continue to exist, it will have to continue to subsidize it. 35 Slovak television , meanwhile, is in the throes of a great controversy. Only two Slovak television stations exist at the moment , and both arc government-funded and controlled . As mentioned above, Mr. Meciar recently dismissed the Boards of Directors of both stations and replaced them with his own people, and many intellectuals have accused him of trying to control the electronic media. These intellectuals seem to have forgotten the folk-saying .. he who pays the piper, calls the tune. " The only solution that I sec to this dilemma is for Slovak entrepreneurs to establish private television stations, either in Slovakia. or, if necessary, in neighbouring Austria or the Czech lands, which will compete for the hearts and minds of their audiences. the same way that private television stations <lo in the West. Meanwhile. cheap films and programs from all over the world, either dubbed or licensed in Slovakia, now dominate the air-wavcs. 11 ' The Slovak print media, by contrast. 1s vibrant and free . Under Communism all media, whether print or electronic. had to " Ce lestine Bohlen . .. East Europe's Cultural Life. Once a Refu ge. Now Ec lipsed:· New York Ti Illes. November 13. 1990. A I. A 12: discussions public servants cited above: personal observations with the based upon my visits t o Slovakia . '" Sec above. footnote 12. for the dismissal of the directors of Slo vak radio and televisio n. Interestingly enough. on April 22. 1995. the first private cable net work began to broadcast in Slo vakia. It is called ··Vasa tcl c vfzia" (Your Televi sion ). or VTV. and at the moment covers only the Bratisl ava area. although it soon hopes to expand across the co untry. CL Slllc. April 24. 1995 . �196 SLOVAKIA parrot the Party line. In order to discover what was really gomg on, people had to learn to "read between the lines." Clever journalists often sent subtle signals to their readers by, for instance, not mentioning some prominent Party functionaries in a story, which meant that they were falling into disfavour, or else by lavishing praise upon them, which meant that they were about to be promoted . Not any more. Slovakia has about a dozen nationwide independent dailies , and only one - Slovenska republika supports the Meciar government. The rest are generally critical of the government, with Narodna obroda being the most objective , while Sme, which is edited by former members of the Public Against Violence, is the most critical. Unfortunately, the government still controls the supply and price of newsprint, and recently threatened, through taxes , to raise the price by I00% if the criticism of Mr. Meciar did not stop. Ten independent dailies responded by issuing newspapers with blank front pages, and the government backed off. Nevertheless, this game of "chicken" between Mr. Meciar, and Slovakia's independent press continues .~7 In spite of all the difficulties it faces, Slovakia is well on its way towards democratic Capitalism. Mr. Meciar's "Type 'A' ·'personality notwithstanding, Slovakia is a functioning democracy with a democratically-elected Parliament and President. And by signing a historic treaty with Hungary on March 19th. in which he promised that Slovakia would guarantee the cultural and JJ For the implications of the switd1 from a government-controlled press tu one that is free see Owen V. Johnson. '"Half Slave - Half Free: The Crisis of the Russian and East European Press," AAASS Newsletter. 33 (March. 1993 ). I. 4. The opinion regarding the objectivity of various Slovak newspapers is mine. For details regarding the recent struggle between Mr. Mcciar and the Slovak press see "Slovak Press Special," Slovak News (U . of Pittsburgh), March 3-5. 1995. For the reaction of America's most important daily to this struggle sec ··Slovakia Takes a Wrong Tum," New York Times. March 7. 1995. A 18 . �SLOVAKIA 197 linguistic rights of its Hungarian citizens, Mr. Meciar showed that he is capable of compromise, · and he can, if he is so inclined, behave as a pan-European politician. The Members of Parliament, and government Ministers, however, still have to learn the political culture of democracy--to treat each other with respect, and to serve the people, not just their own interests. This will take time, however, and we should be patient while it does. After all, some of our own politicians need to learn the same lesson .38 It should be apparent, therefore, that the most difficult part of the transition from Communism to Capitalism is in the realm of individual versus collective rights. After the overthrow of the Communists in 1989 most Slovaks were delighted to recover their individual rights, such as the freedom of expression, the freedom to travel to the West, and so on. However, with the increase in the cost of living that has occurred in the last four years, these rights have lost some of their lustre. Instead, many people are growing increasingly restive about their collective rights, that is, to free and universal health care, to free education, and to a whole host or previously free social programs which Communism inaugurated. It was Mr. Meciar's promises in the last elections to guarantee some of these social programs that, along with his strong nationalism. brought him the largest number of votes. How he will manage to retain these expensive social programs, and at the same time reform the economy and make it more market-oriented, remains to be seen. Indeed. many western countries share Mr. " For a grudging acknowledgement that Slovakia is a functioning democracy sec "2-Ycar-Old Slovakia Toddling Toward Democracy." New York Times. March I 9. 1995. AJ. For the treaty with Hungary see Sharon Fisher "Slovakia and Hungary Sign Bilateral Treaty.'' OMRI. Inc .. as cited in Slovak News. March 19. 1995. �198 SLOVAKIA Meciar's dilemma - how to promote capitalist growth while subsidizing expensive social programs . � 172 SLOVAKIA DOCUMENTATION: THE POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND CULTURAL SITUATION IN THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC (AS OF MAY, 1995) M. Mark Stolarik (Paper Presented to the Symposium " Economies in Transition: Europe to the Bering Strait, University of Montana, Missoula, May 1, 1995) 1 It is difficult to paint a clear picture of contemporary Slovakia because this newly-independent country is still undergoing rcvo1utionary changes at all levels of society due to the collapse of Communism in 1989. Since there is no model for the Slovaks ( or other states of East Central Europe) to follow in the transition from totalitarian Communism to democratic Capitalism. the current Slovak government is proceeding slowly and cautiously in this direction, amid much criticism. My observations arc based on official and unofficial visits to Slovakia in the last five years, on ' This paper was supposed to have been published as a part of the Proceedings by the organizers of the symposium. Since the Proceedings never saw the light of day. the author clecicled to publish the article in Slovakia because it an:urately reflected the political. economic and cultural situation in 1995 Slovakia. It should be react as a document of its time. �SLOVAKIA 173 my reading of a portion of the Slovak and western press, on reports issued by Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, and on long discussions with various government officials, who have asked to remain anonymous . The political situation in the Slovak Republic is the most problematic. The Parliament (officially called the National Council of the Slovak Republic) consists of a unicameral legislature of 150 deputies who are elected to a four-year term on the basis of proportional representation. Slovakia has over 50 political parties but only seven of them (or party coalitions) are currently represented in Parliament. In order to run in an election, each new party must first obtain 10,000 certified signatures on a petition, and then must win at least 5% of the votes in order to obtain a seat. Party coalitions must win at least 10% of the vote. The seats are apportioned according to the percentage of votes won by each party .2 The elections held on September 30-October I, 1994, produced no clear winner, as is usual in a proportional representative system. Slovakia is currently governed by a coalition consisting of the left-of-center Movement for a Democratic Slovakia led by Vladimir Mcciar, which won 35% of the popular vote. or 61 scats; by the pro-communist Association of Workers of Slovakia led by Jan r.uptak. which won 7.3% of the vote and 13 scats: and the ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party led by Jan Slota. which won 5 .4% of the vote and 9 scats in Parliament. This coalition ended up with a grand total of 83 scats, although in April I 99 5 three members of the Association of Workers of Slovakia split with their leader and they reduced the coalition's voting majority 1 For more details on the electoral process in the Slovak Republic sec "The Con- stitution of the Slovak Republic." in Albert P. Blaustein & Gisbert H. Flanz. eds .. Constitution.~ of the Countries of the World (Dobbs Fe1Ty. New York: Oceana Publications. Inc .. 1993). 84-88 . �SLOVAKJA 174 to 80 seats. The oppos1t1on consists of the left-wing coalition Common Choice led by Peter Weiss, with 10.4 % of the popular vote or 17 seats; the Coalition of Magyar Parties led by Miklos Ouray, with 10.2% of the vote or 16 seats ; the right-wing Christian Democratic Movement led by Jan Carnog ursky , with I 0 . 1°4, of the votes or 16 seats; and the centrist Democratic Union of Slovakia led by Jozef Moravcik, with 8.6% of the vote or 13 seats.' Current Slovak politics is dominated by one strong leader who seems determined to undercut, by whatever means possible, other political leaders, many of whom are his former friends and associates . Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, who is an attorney by training , and who supported the reforms of Alexander Dubcek in the 1960's, was purged from the ruling Communist Party in 1970 , and later became a corporate lawyer near the city of Trencfn . He entered politics in 1990, when the ruling Public Against Violence , the group of intellectuals which took power from the Communists in Slovakia in November of 1989, advertized for the position of Minister of the Interior of the post-communist Slovak Republic . Mr. Meciar won the competition and allegedly used his control over the Interior Ministry to both discover the past sins of his opponents, and to cover up those of his supporters . After the 3 "S lovakia's voters again turn to pugnacio us fom1er PM ." The Globe and Ma il (Toronto). October 3. 1994. The official election results were communicated to all embassies of the Sl ovak Rep ubli c by a "Tlacovy telegram MZY SR pre zahranicnu dipl omatich1 sluzbu SR." on October 3. 1994. of wh ich I have a copy. Fur an analysis of the results see Martin Yotruba's "S lovak News" (mimeogra phed). Slovak Studies Program. University of Pittsburgh. Sept. 27-Oct. 2. 1994. A much later analysis by Michael J. Kopanic. Jr.. including the creation of the coalition. appeared as "The Recent Elections in Slovakia." in Association for th e Study of NMion.1/ities: A nalysis of Current Eve nts. 6 (No.9. May. 1995). 1-3. For the split in the Association of Workers in Slovakia see Narodmi obroda, April 4. 1995 . �SLOVAKIA 175 Public Against Violence won the largest percentage of the vote in the June elections of 1990, it selected Mr. Meciar to become Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic , which at that time was still a part of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. While in this post, Mr. Meciar allegedly joined with others in slowing or manipulating the process of investigating (" lustracny proces" in Slovak) whether or not high government officials had collaborated with, or served as agents. of the dreaded communist secret p olice. He also increasi ngly argued with the presidium of the Public Against Violence, and its coalition partner, the Christian Demo4 cratic Movement, over government policy . Even though Mr. Meciar is very intelligent, 1s an excellent speaker, has a photographic memory, and radiates charisma wherever he goes, he appears to have what is colloquially known as a "type A" personality. In other words, he feels that he has to be in complete control of any situation, he seldom seeks advice, and is not very tol erant of criticism. He prefers to be surrounded by "yes ' For a brief biography or Mci'iar sec Kto Jc kto na S/ovensku. 199 P ( Ko nzo rci u111 Encyk lopcd ia: Bratislava. 199 I ). I 14- 15: The allegations ;:igainst Meci;:ir were 111adc by his political oppone nts in the Slovak Parlia111cnt's Defense and Security Co111111ittec on November 7. 1991 . cf. ··'Secret Report' Clai111s Meciar KGB Connections:· Foreign Bmadcast ln fonna tion Service (Washington. D.C.. hereafter FBIS). November 13. 1991. p.1 4: and summarized by Jan Obrman ··S lo vak Politician Accused or Secret Police Tics:· R adio Free Europe I R adio Liberty Rese.irch R eport (hereafter R FEIRL R ese.irch R eport ). Apri l 10. 1992 . Sec also ··Meciar Proposes Repeal or Screening Law:· CTK. December 21. I 99 3 . Two highly -placed public servants in the Slovak government. one or whom worked in the Office or the Pri111c Minister for both Mr. Mci': iar. and hi s predecessors. recently repeated these allegations to 111e. Since they fear for their jobs. the se public servants have asked me to keep secret their names. and the circu mstances or our 111cetings. At this time it is impossible to confinn. or disprove. these allegations since the ril es of the fonner secret police. which are in Prague. arc not open to the public . �SLOYAKJA 176 men" .5 Since the governing coalition Presidium was also composed of some very strong personalities, who opposed Mr. Meciar's attempts to become Chairman of the Public Against Violence in March of 1991, they decided to remove him from his Prime Ministerial post in April of that year. The Presidium replaced Mr. Meciar with Jan Carnogursky, an attorney and former Catholic dissident during the communist regime, who was also the founder and Chairman of the Christian Democratic Movement. 6 Mr. Meciar, and his most loyal supporters, subsequently withdrew from the Public Against Violence, which later fell apart, and they created the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, which won the largest percentage of the votes in the June, 1992 elections . 7 In the next two years Mr. Meciar reached the height of his glory, but also suffered the humiliation of defeat. It was Mr. Meciar who in the summer of 1992, as Slovak Prime Minister, negotiated with Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus the dissolution 5 This observation is based on my reading of the Slovak press. on observing Mr. Mcciar delivering a po litical address in Nitra in August. 1993. on a pri va tc meeting that I had with him in September. 1993. and on several discussions that I had with Mr. Igor Uhrfk. The latte r is a fervent Slovak nationali st who sold his successful industrial-insurance business in New York city in 1992 and returned to Slovakia to ··help o ut" in 1993. He contributed 1,000.000 Slovak crowns to the Slovak National Pa11y. was made vicc-Chainnan of the Party. and later be came a principal advisor to the Minister of Privatization of the Slovak govern ment (as a volunteer). After Mr. Meciar's return to power in the fall of 1994. and a split in the Slovak National Party. among other things. Mr. Uhrfk became disgusted with Slovak politics and returned to the United States . " Kto je kto na S/ovensk11 1991 '.'. 190. 7 Jiri Pchc, ··s1ovak Nationalists Agitate for more Autonomy. Oppose Radical Pri vatizatio n." RFEIRL Research R eport. March 20. I 991: '"50,000 rally after Slovak leader fired," New York Times. April 24, I 99 I. A9: For more details sec Robert A. Young. The Breakup of Czechas/avakia (Kingston: Queen 's Uni vcrs ity. Insti tute of Intergovernmental Relati ons. Research Paper #3 2. 1994 ). 5. IO - J6. �SLOVAKIA 177 of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, and it was Mr. Meciar who proudly stood at the helm of the newly-independent Slovak Republic on January 1, 1993. Even though Mr. Meciar was not initially a nationalist, he shrewdly perceived that Slovak nationalism was the strongest single force in post-Communist CzechoSlovakia, and by 1992 he and his followers had firmly embraced this movement. 8 Slovak nationalism, however, was not enough to save Mr. Meciar from himself. He suffered his second major political defeat when the Slovak Parliament in February 1993 elected, not the physician Roman Kovac , the preferred candidate of Mr. Meciar's party for President of the Republic, but rather the fom1er Minister of Finance Michal Kovac .9 Much to Mr. Meciar's surprise, the latter refused to become a mere figurehead and instead took his duties as President quite seriously, to the point of attacking Mr. Meciar in the Slovak Parliament for alleged dictatorial tendencies in March of 1994. Meanwhile, Mr. Meciar had lost the confidence of several of his key allies and supporters, including Milan Knazko, his former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jozef Moravcfk, the subsequent Minister of Foreign Affairs, and two Deputy Prime Ministers, including Roman Kovac and I.:udovft Cernak, the latter '"Talks fail: Czechoslovakia dose to breakup. " Ottawa Citizen. June 9. 1992 : "Leaders start negotiations on splitting Czechoslovakia." The Globe and Mail. June 17. 1992: "Who Split Czechoslovakia'?" The New York Times. September 24. 1992. A29: "Parliament approves Czech-Slovak split." The Globe and Mail. November 26. 1992. "Fireworks. Tears and Doubt in Slovakia." The New York Times.January I. 1993. Al4: sec also Sabrina Petra Ramct. "The Reemergence of Slovakia." Nationalities Papers. 22 (No. I. Spring. 1994). I07 - 112 . '' "Havel elected first president of Czech Republic: Slovaks to hold runoff after vote rebuffs Prime Minister's candidate." The Globe and Mail. January 27. I 993 , A6: "Ex-Communist Chosen President of Slovakia." The New York Times. February 16. 1993. A7. �178 SLOVAKIA his coalition partner from the Slovak National Party! The net result was a parliamentary vote of no-confidence in Mr. Meciar and his party, his third political defeat, and his loss of power for a second time. Most of his former allies in the MOS, who abandoned him, joined Jozef Moravcfk's centrist Democratic Union of Slovakia. From March to October of 1994, a left-right coalition headed by Prime Minister Jozef Moravcfk ruled Slovakia. 111 For these reasons, ever since his election victory of 1994, and his subsequent return to power, Mr. Mcciar has tried to topple the President of the Slovak Republic and to destroy the Democratic Union of Slovakia. Between October and December of 1994 Mr. Meciar looked for coalition partners who would join him in his campaign against the President but had to settle for the two coalition partners mentioned above, who assured him of a voting majority in the Parliament, but not enough votes (90) to remove the President. Since he could not muster the votes to remove the President, he decided to try to strip him of some of his legal powers. For example, in April of 1995 Mr. Mcciar prevailed upon the Slovak Parliament to transfer from the President to the Prime Minister the right to appoint the Chief of Slovakia's Security Intelligence Service (the successor to the Secret Policc). 11 1 " .. Broad Coaliti on to govern Slovakia." The Globe and Mail. March 15 . 1994 . For the viewpoints of the two protagonists regarding the reasons for their fal - ling out see --sprava o stave Slovenskej republiky prednesena prezidentom SR Michalom Kovacom v Naroclncj radc SR dna 8.3.1994" and .. Prcjav predscdu vlady Slovcnskej republiky Yladimfra Mcciara na 27. sch6dzi NR SR di\a 11.3. 1994." published in a special issue of Republika (Bratis lava.March. I 9. 1994 ). I 5pp. For a legal interpretation of this struggle sec Spencer Zifcak ...The Battle over Presidential Power in Slovakia," Slovakia. 36 ( 1998). 70-80. For a profile of the Moravcfk government and its policies sec --cTK Profiles New Cabinet Members" in FB/S,March 17. 1994.4- 12 and --Text of Policy Statement of Slovak Government," FBIS. April 25. 1994, 16-30. 11 "Je Lexa v NR SR. v SIS. alebo v Iese?" Sme (Bratislava). April 26. 199 5. �179 SLOVAKIA Meanwhile, Mr. Meciar charged that the Democratic Union of Slovakia had not gathered the necessary 10,000 signatures before the elections of 1994. If he could prove his charge, then the DU members of Parliament would be stripped of their seats and Mr. Meciar would by default have the three-fifths of the votes necessary to remove the President. Unfortunately for Mr. Meciar, the Slovak Constitutional Court, headed by Milan Cic, the first Prime Minister of the post-communist Slovak Republic, and a former friend of Mr. Meciar, upheld the validity of the 10,000 signatures obtained by the DU before the 1994 elections. This did not stop Mr. Meciar from having his 80 supporters in Parliament pass a motion of " no confidence" in the President on May 5th, and in ordering the Slovak police to check on the validity of the l 0,000 signatures by visiting the homes of the signatories, and in the process harassing supporters of the DU. 12 Mr. Mcciar has also had his difficulties with the press . While he was out of office in 1994, the previous coalition government supported full freedom of the press , including radio and televi sion, and appointed boards of directors who were likewise inclined. Very few of these individuals were supporters of Mr. Mcciar. Once he returned to power in December of 1994 (it took him over two months to put together a coalition), Mr. Meciar began to fire the old boards of directors of radio and television (which arc still state-controlled), and to replace them \.Vith his own people. These , in turn , cancelled certain satiric television programs which had made fun of Mr. Meciar. As a result, there have been several mass-demonstrations in Bratislava against Mr. Meciar's alleged attempts to control the mass-media. Therefore, while television and radio commentators have ceased to lampoon 11 Zifcak. op.cit.. p.70; ··overovanie podpisov na harkoch DU je porusenie peticneho prava obcanov." Srne. May 23 . 1995 . �SLOVAKIA 180 Mr. Meciar, the print media, which 1s largely privatized , is still very critical of him . 13 The economic situation in Slovakia, meanwhile, is improving. Slovakia did not slide into a deep depression after it became independent, as some Western pundits had predicted . Instead, after some uncertainty in 1993, its economy grew by a spectacular 4.8% in 1994 and its budget deficit was a respectable 3% of GDP. Meanwhile, the Slovak crown , its basic unit of currency, was devalued by only 10% in 1993, it is convertible to hard currencies , and it remains stable. The rate of inflation also dropped from 25% in 1993 to around 11. 7% in 1994. Unemployment, however, remains high -14%. One of the causes of Slovak unemployment is the collapse of its heavy-arms industry, which used to serve the now-defunct Warsaw Pact and its allies world-wide. Converting this arms industry into something more useful remains a major challenge to the government of the Slovak Republic. 13 14 Re uter, December 16. 1994, as reported by Martin Votruba in Slovak News. December 16- 18. 1994; Jiri Pchc, .. Anti-Mcciar Rall y in Bratislava," R FEIRL Reports. Ibid., December 8- 11. In a TA SR report of May 12. 1995. Mr. Mcciar was quoted as saying that the press is free in Slovakia... but all newspapers should admit who owns them. and who pays them." impl ying that the print press in Slovakia is large ly financed by fore igners who arc hosti le to the current governme nt. The CTK on the same date quoted Juraj Veres. editor of N,irod n;i obroda (Bratislava). as agree ing that the Slovak press was still free . but th at ··the government is trying to gain contro l over the dailies:· However. he added th at lately "the go vernment has been backing down ." For Mr. Mci:iar's earlier problems with the press sec Jan Obnuan ...The Slovak Government vers us the Media." RFEIRL Research R eport. February 5. 1993 . 14 For an example of negative reporting o n Slovakia's eco nomic future sec Step- hen Enge lberg, "New Nation. Imperiled Economy." New York Time.~. February 12. 1993. DI; for an admission that the Slovak economy is doing surprisingly well see "How the Slovaks Have Taken Flight." The Globe nncl Mail. December 5, 1994. A JO (reprinted from the Wall Street Jo urnal); and --standard and Poors o Slovensk u." Sme. April 7. 199 5. �181 SLOVAKJA Indeed, converting the whole system from a command economy to a form of private enterprise remain s the major problem for the Slovak government. U ndcr Communism the state nationalized all the industry and the bulk of the land, it controlled all the means of production, it regulated prices, and subsidized housing , transportation and food, and created a complete welfare state with free education from pre-school through university, and free universal health-care. Unfortunately, the state enacted all these changes without the consent of the people, it enforced them through the use of police terror, and it discriminated in favour of members of the Communist Party and children of the workingclass when dispensing economic and cultural benefits. 15 Now that the Communists are no longer in charge, the various governments of Slovakia have tried to transform the economy into a form of private enterprise, as called for in the Constitution of the Slovak Republic. Since no real models exist on how to do this , n umcrous laws and regulations have been passed to try to bring it about. The first steps were taken in early 1991 when the Parliament of the C1.ech and Slovak Federal Republic passed a law for the restitution of confiscated private property (chiefly land). While some former landowners were delighted to receive their land back, most young people in Slovakia showed no interest in working it. The amount of land seized from individual families by the Communists had been small in the first place, and most young ' ' The literature on this subject is vast. For two co ncise a11iclcs that deal with most of this period sec Robert K. Evanson. ··Regime and Working Class in Czechoslovakia. 1948- 1%8." Soviet Studies. 37 (Nn. 2. 1985 ). 248-68; and by the same author "Political Repressi o n in Czechoslovakia. Slavonic Pi1pcrs. 28 (No. I. 1986). 1-21. 1948- 1984." Canadian �182 SLOVAKJA people have no intention of becoming smallholding • peasants 16 agam . Managers, officials, and many workers on collective and state farms , on the other hand , wish to preserve these institutions. Since collectives and state farms provide their employees with a guaranteed income, regular hours, easy work, and many opportunities for theft, the employees are loath to see such farms disappear. Such employees are among the pillars of support that Mr. Meciar can count on during elections. 17 The various churches of Slovakia, meanwhile, especially the Roman and Greek Catholic Churches, which were singled out for persecution by the Communists, have had much of their confiscated property returned . In l 991-92 the federal government returned most of the buildings that the Communists had seized from religious orders, and in the fall of l 993 Mr. Meciar's government returned most of the buildings that had been confiscated from Church Dioceses. However, most church land that was confiscated and turned into state or collective farms was not returned, largely because of the opposition of the collectives. Thus , the churches continue to rely upon government support for their existence, and '" "Czechoslovakia plans to return property ." Philadelphia 24, I 99 L ..Transfonn:icia pornohospod:irstva Inquirer. February a rcstitucie:· Pr.ic:.i (Bra ti slava). May 31. 1993; "Refonns Alter the Landscape or Czechoslovakia's Fanning ." New Y ork Times, June 4, I 99 L Milan Svec, "Czechoslovakia's Velvet Di vorce." Current Hist ory (November. I 992 ). 377; and discussions with the tw o public servants mentioned above in footnote 3. 17 "Who voted for Whom'1" (a poll conducted by the Slovak Research Office). as reported by Martin Yotruba in Slovak News. 7-9 October. 1994. p.4. The o bservatio ns abo ut state fam1s and collectives were made by the two public servants mentioned above. On many occasions when I visited Slovakia in the era of Communism. I also discussed collectives and state fanns with some of my relatives. who worked at such institutions. They detalied the many kinds of theft possible at state farms and collectives. �183 SLOVAKIA from a North American perspective, this . I8 S h Ip . IS an unhealthy relation- Meanwhile, the federal Parliament also passed the "small privatization" Act of J 990 concerning small business. This Act enabled a few thousand entrepreneurs to borrow money from banks to establish small retail businesses such as travel agencies, restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, computer stores, and various skilled trades. These kinds of enterprises are flourishing all over Slovakia. 19 A little later the federal Parliament passed another Act that concerned itself with the privatization of large industries, the socalled "large privatization." This would involve all except the most strategic industries such as atomic energy, natural gas, transportation, the arms industry and so on . However, since the government did not wish its large industries to be bought by foreigners, and since most of the citizens of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic did not have the wealth tn purchase these industries outright, the government decided to enact a "coupon privati1.ation." By this plan , every citi1.cn over the age of 18 was entitled to buy a privatization coupon for J .000 C1.echoslovak crowns (Kcs), and then invest it in the company of his choice. The " For the story of the persecution of the churches in Slovakia sec Theodoric J. Zubek. The Church of Silence in Slovakia (Whi ting. IN: John J. Lach. 1956). and Michal Lacko. "The Forced Liquidation of the Union of Uzhorocl." Slovak Studies. I (1961). 145-85: for the story of the underground church in Slovakia under Communism sec "Secret Bishop." and for the story of the rebuilding of the Jesuit Order sec " New Oppmtunitics in Slovakia." Company: a magazine o{ the American Jc.m ils. 8 (No. 3. Spring. 1991 ). 2-5. and 9- 11. Details of the resti tution laws passed after 1990 can be found in Sharon Fisher. "Church Restitu tion Law Passed in Slovakia." RFEIRL Rese.1rch Report. November 19. 1993 . '" "Chystiime historicky ziikon: Ekonomicka refonna konecnc dostala tviir." Niirodn,i obroda. September 5. 1990. 13: Svec. op.cit.. 377 . �184 SLOVAKIA number of shares he would receive would depend upon the value of the company. This was the first step in the creation of a stock market in the Republic. The government also decided that this process would be divided into several rounds since it involved so many industries. The first round took place while the CzcchoSlovak Federation still existed ? ' The second round of the coupon privatization was supposed to take place after Slovakia became independent. However, the government of Mr. Mcciar soon discovered that most Slovaks were not investing their coupons directly into the companies for sale, but rather were selling them to investment companies controlled by foreigners . The Meciar government did not want to allow these foreign-owned holding companies to buy up so much of Slovakia's industries, and it postponed this privatization . However, the Moravcik government, which ruled Slovakia between March and October, 1994, allowed this privatization to continue . Then, when Mr. Meciar returned to power in the fall of 1994, he halted the privatization again. At the end of March, 1995 the government of Mr. Meciar decided to allow half of this coupon privatization to proceed, but he reserved the other half for potential Slovak buyers, most of whom arc in fact the managers of these industries . These managers allegedly neglected the upkeep of their factories and, therefore, their value has declined. Thus, if this privatization continues, the managers of these factories stand to make a lot of money once the value of their factories goes up again. Mr. Meciar's enemies have charged that these managers arc in league with Mr. Mcciar, that they arc all former Communists, and that they provide him with financial support. Mr. Meciar's supporters, on the other hand, charge that the proponents of the 1 " "A Divorce that Could Save the Czech Economy," The Wall Street Journal. March 11. 1991 ; Svec. op. cit.. 377 . �SLOVAKIA 185 strict coupon privatization are in leag ue with Mr. Moravcik and . financially support the opposition parties. Neutral observers have told me that both sides arc guilty of profiteering from this privatization process , and the greed and corruption involved goes a long way toward s explaining the bitterness of current Slovak politics. Also, because Mr. Meciar reduced the number of businesses to be privati1.ed in half, that is, from an estimated value of 80 billion Sk to 40 billion Sk, the 3.2 million holders of pri vatization coupons in the Slovak Republic witnessed a drop in the value of their coupons from 24,000 Sk to 12,000 Sk by March of 1995. Forty deputies of the Slovak Parliament then approached the Constitutional Court in Kosicc to protest against Law No . 340/ J 994, which had halted the coupon privatization on November 3-4, 1994, a nd the Constitutional Court decided in their favour. It then o rdere d the Slovak Parliament to re-write the law so that it would no t violate individuals' rights to private property as guaranteed by th e Slovak Constitution . Mr.Meciar's reaction was to propose that the privatization coupons be exchanged for government bo nd s, which could be redeemed for 10,000 Sk, or held for their interest, or used to purchase shares in companies. Most opposition deputies denounced this suggestion as ··theft" from the coupon-holders . 21 The average citizen. meanwhile, has had to tighten his belt several notches since the fall of Communism. While the gove rnment still controls the price o f electricity, transportation. fuel and basic " Smc. Apri l 6. 1995: "Privatizacny zakon nie je v s11lade s ustavou SR." TA SR. May 25 . 1995: "V . Meciar o novej kuponovej privatiz,icii ." Smc. June 8. 1995: "Anketa Sme:• Smc. June 8. 1995. Once again . the two public servants. cited above. ex plained the complexity of this iss ue to me. Dr. Juraj Svec. the Recto r of Comenius University in Bratislava. and a member of Parliament for the DU. confinned their analysis when he visited with me o n March 26. 1995. �186 SLOYAKJA foodstuffs, it has decided to provide smaller subsidies for these goods or services and, therefore, it has raised their prices dramatically in the last four years . Thus, while a streetcar ride used to cost a mere one crown, it now costs five ; while gasoline used to cost seven crowns a litre, it now costs nineteen. And, while a liter 22 of milk used to cost two crowns, it now costs twclvc . Wages, of state employees, on the other hand, have not kept up with the rise in prices. While members of the Slovak Parliament voted themselves hefty pay increases in the summer of 1993 (from 10,000 Sk to 25,000 Sk per month), ordinary state employees do not share in this largesse. Indeed, the wage-structure of state employees is still very Communist. Thus , a physician starting his career receives only 4,000 Sk, which is less than the wage of the average truck-driver! As a result, physicians in Slovakia recently demanded a 200% wage increase, and threatened to go on strike if they did not receive it. Teachers and professors are s1m1larly und erpaid , with the former receiving 5,000 Sk and the latter 8,600 Sk. Even though Mr. Mcciar promised during the last election campaign, among other things, to double teachers' salaries , " Interviews with the the two public servan ts cited above. plus my ow n observations on visits to Slovakia in the summers or 1990. 1991. 1992. I ()9J and 1994. In May of 1990 I visi ted Slovak ia as a delegate of the Slovak League of Ame ri ca. wh ich had come on a ••fact -finding" mission. This was an offi cial mis sio n. spo nsored by the governme nt of the Slovak Republic. It was the first official visi t of the Slovak Leag ue since 1938. whe n the first de legati on of th e League brought to Slovakia the original of the Pittsburgh Ag reeme nt. In 1993 I visited Slovakia as the newl y-elected president of the Canadian Slovak League. In this capaci ty I had official di scussio ns with Prime Minister Meciar and with Jan Findra, Chancellor to the President. My visits in I 991. 1992 and 1994 were for scholarly purposes - to participate in historical co nfere nces. �SLOVAKIA 187 he has thus far failed to do so. Indeed, Slovak schoolteachers are also threatening to go on strike over this issue. 23 Employees of the growing private enterprises, on the other hand , generally make much more than state employees. For instance, clerks in private banks earn 10,000-15,000 crowns a month. Accountants and computer programmers in private firms make up to 20,000 Sk per month. And attorneys, who were among the first to privatize in the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic , arc among the highest-paid professionals in Slovakia. Finally, growing numbers of entrepreneurs have become millionaires many times over. and some of these 'nouveau-riche' flaunt their wealth with expensive western cars, clothes, and other consumer goods. They have provoked increasing resentment among state employees, whose salaries have remained far behind the increase in the cost of consumer goods and scrviccs. 24 The price of housing has also skyrocketed . Under Communism, if one had the right connections, one could obtain a beautiful villa in the hills overlooking Bratislava and the Danube river officially for about 250,000 Kcs (and unofficially, that is, with an additional under-the-table payment of 250.000 Kcs). Now these villas cost anywhere from 2,000,000 to 20,000.000 Sk. Similarly, state and co-op apartments, which usually consist of only three rooms plus a small kitchen and tiny bath, are commanding premium prices. The co-op apartments, where one purchased the 11 Smc. April 6. 1995: " Pricskum ukaza l. zc vysc 70% lckarov jc oc ho tnych vs tupit' dn st rajku." Smc. April 26 . 1995: " Skolstvo dostane 530 mili6nov ." Smc. May 14. 1995 : "Ultimatum lckarnv na zvyscnic platov o 200% vyprsalo. strajkovat' sa asi ncbudc." Sme. May 15. 1995 : ··Pricmern,i mzda v skolstve nad'alcj ncjasna." Smc. June 8. 1995: and discussions with the two public servants cited above. " Discussions with the two public servants cited above. plus personal observations from past visits to Slovakia. �188 SLOVAKIA right to live for 30,000 Kcs under Communism , can now be bought by the renters for 50,000 Sk, and can then be re-sold for anywhere between 750,000 to 1,000,000 Sk 1 Former state-ow ned apartments, meanwhile, which until recently could not be purchased were often sub-leased to others for very hig h rents. The process of their sale will soon approximate what happened with the co-op apartments. The state, meanwhile, has lost interest in providing additional ho using for the people. Various entcrpreneurs have taken over this task, and the newly-built apartments generall y sell for around 1,000,000 Sk, which is far beyond what the average Slovak can a ffo rd. 25 Health care, meanwhile, is also in a state o f transition . Before 1989, health care was universal and free. However, one received quality care only if one was either a high functionary of the Communist Party, which had its own special clinics and hospitals , with modern , western , equipment; or, if one bribed one's physician and nurse with extra money or gifts. And, exotic western drugs were usuall y not available, except to the privileged few . Many American and Canadian Slovaks remember well the pl ain tive letters that they used to receive from their unfortunate relatives in Slovakia under Communism, and how these relatives sent prescriptions for Western-made drugs, along with the addresses of pharmacies in Switzerland , which when paid in hard 21 currencies, were willing to fill these orders for them . ' 15 Ibid. 1 Milada Vachudova and Sharon Fisher. "' Health Care Crisis : The Czech and '' Slovak Republics ." RFEIRL Research Report. October 8. 1993. 44-46: and dis c ussio ns wi th friends and relatives on visits to Slovakia in 1968. 1970. 1983 and 1988 . Our fami ly in Canada used to regularly receive requests fo r western drugs. and we filled these requests th rough a willing phannacist in Switze rland . Dr. Do broslav Valik of Bry n Mawr. Pe nnsy lvani a. to ld me in Octo ber of 1992 of having tried to establish a Dental Clinic in Bratislava right after the "'Ve lve t �SLOVAKIA 189 In an effort to save money, the Slovak government is trying to privatize parts of the health-care system, but at a very slow pace. Pharmacies have all been privatized and one can now buy whatever drugs one needs. However, the state pays only for routine drugs, and not always for the full amount. The more exotic drugs, which arc now readily available, must be paid for by the patient. Dentists are also privatizing as quickly as they can, with about one-third currently being self-s upporting and ex pensive . Most physicians, however, have not yet taken the plunge and arc unlikel y to do so. Because of their poor salaries , most M.D.'s in Slovakia cannot afford to purchase the expensive equipment necessary to open an office or clinic, and they also cannot afford private liability insurance. As long as they continue to work for state-run hospitals, they do not need liability insurance, and, thu s, they continue to be state employees . And, because they continue to be underpaid , many demand extra payments or gifts if they are to provide quality care. Meanwhile, most Slovaks oppose the privatization of their health care. They want it to remain universal and free . Thus, the Mcciar government is moving slowly and cautiously in trying to reform the health-care systcm. 27 The educational system of Slovakia is also undergo ing change. Shortly after the Communists sci1.cd power the y a bolished all religious schools and put education at the service or the state. The whole system from pre-school throug h university was then statefunded and controlled. Marxism was taught as the philosophy or Revo luti o n.. of 1989. Much to his amazement. his friends from the VPN showed him the clinic for funner me mbers of the Commu nist Pa11y in Bratislava. It had all the latest western equipment one could imagine. unlike clin ics for the general public . 17 Yaduchova & Fisher. op. cit.. 48-49. a nd discussions servants cited above . with the two public �SLOVAKIA 190 the state, and all teachers had to conform or face expulsion . Higher • education was free but operated under a quota system whereby in the process of admission children o f the working-class were favoured over those of the middle or upper classes . The latter then resorted to bribery to get their children into institutions of higher learning. Meanwhile , to their credit, the Communists also established several new universities , including the full-service Safarik University in Kos ice and the College of Transportation in Zilina, among others, to satisfy the demands of an increasingly industrialized society .2x After the downfall of Communism, state-support for cd ucation continued , but not its ideological requirements . Most universities held new elections for rectors and deans , and the professors and students threw out the communist administrators . However, because most of the communist professors have tenure, the uni versities cannot get rid of them. It will take another generation before these Marxist professors reach retirement age, and arc finally replaced by a new generation of professors . And even the new generation will bo hard to find, because the wages paid to professors arc so low. Meanwhile. the quota system that favored students of working-class origins has been replaced by a 4uota " Ladi slav G resfk. --vyc hova rokoch 1956 - 1960 ." vy,o kos ko lskej inte ligencie na Sl ove nsku v Historicky i'a.rnri.~. 31 ( No .6 . 198) ). 8') 1-91 O: A 111011 Hrnko & Jozef Zatkuliak," Uni vcrzita Ko me nskc ho na rozhranf piitiles iatyc h a sestHesialyc h rokov ." Hi.~toricky t'a .r npis. 32 (No.4. I 984 ). 59J-(1 19: pe rso na l o bservati o ns fro n1 past visi ts to Slovakia. di scussio ns w ith the two pub I ic servants cited abo ve. and di sc ussio n with Rudolf Korec. Recto r of Safarik U ni versity. May. 1990. On a visit to Slovakia in the summer of 1968 I asked one of my co usins what he was studying. He replied .. Philosophy ." When I in4uired a bo ut the kind o f philosophy . he replied "'Marxism-Lcnini sm 1" His mo ther. meanw hil e . w ho was a sc hoolteac her. used to go to church in a vill age o ut s id e o f the to wn in whi ch she lived. because if she had been seen atlendin g c hurc h services in her home to wn . she would have lost her job. �SLOVAKIA 191 based on grades . Even though Slovakia today has 14 institutions of higher learning, including brand-new universities in Trnava and Banska Bystrica, it still enrolls only 18% of high sc hool grad uatcs, which is very low when compared to Western Europe or North America, which attract between 30% and 50%. Meanwhile , the state has permitted the re-establishment of religious sc hools funded by the government. However, their number remains small beca use forty years of Communism thoroughly discredited religious education , and most employees of the Ministry of Education arc still opposed to their expansion .2'> Whether or not the government decides to in vest more m higher education remains to be seen. Recent attempts to introduce tuition to cover 20% of the cost of their education have met fierc e resistance from the students. Meanwhile, the quality of university education in Slovakia is not very high, large ly because the teaching staff was cut off from the West for over 40 years , and also because universities stressed education rather than researc h. Tha t is why all the Slovak universities arc hurridly signing agreements with universities all over the Western world that provide for scholarly exchanges o f staff and students . However. it is difficult to attract top Western scholars to teach at Slovak uni versities when they can expect salaries of only $300.00 per month . Onl y true idealists have thu s far volunteered to teac h at Slovak unive rsities under such conditions. 10 ' " Disrnssion with Rudolf Korec. Rector or Safarik University in Kosice. May. 1990: discussion wi th Dean Ladislav Pauliny. Farn lty of A11s. Co menius U ni ve rsity. May. 1994: discussio n with Juraj Svec. Rec tor of Comcni us Univers it y. March 26. 1995 : and discu ssions with the two public servants cited above. '" Discussion with Juraj Svec. op.cit.. and " Pod l'a prof. M. Urbana. dost:.\vaj11 vysokc skoly v SR iba tretinu financii v porovnani s vyspelymi st:.\tmi." TA SR. May 26. 1995. �SLOVAKIA 192 Slovak culture, meanwhile, is also undergoing a radical transformation. Under Communism all cultural activities were state-financed and controlled, and all cultural output was for the sake of promoting Marxism. A Slovak Academy of Sciences, as well as Unions of writers and creative artists were founded in the early l 950's, and they operated under five-year plans . Compliant historians, writers, and creative artists not only became state employees with respectable salaries, but they also received such perks as the use of confiscated castles for meetings and vacations, and statesubsidized clubs that served good food at very low prices . As long as they toed the Party line, their books were published or their paintings and illustrations were bought by mu se ums or publishing houses, and no-one worried, for instance, about how many copies of a book were actually sold, since the government subsidized everything. On the other hand , historians , writers and creative artists could only praise Communism and denounce Capitalism. Certain key personages in Slovak history, such as the Rev. Andrej Hlinka, founder and leader of the Slovak People's Party in the first third of the twentieth century, either became "non-persons" in official publications, or else were denounced as reactionary clcrico-fascists . The past was deliberately distorted to serve the communist futurc. Those intellectuals who refused to go along with this system were persecuted by being allowed to work only at menial labour, and those who dared to openly oppose this Marxist control over culture ended up in jail. 11 .II Julius Mesaros. " Retlexie O piitaesiatych a sestl:lcsiatych rokoch." f-lis/orick f casopis. 39 (Nos. 4-5. 199 I ). 379-88: Richard Marsina. "S lovensk.i historiografia I 945- I 990." f-li storickf brnpi5. 39 (Nos .4-5. I 99 I). 370-79: and discussions with Slovak historians and writers during my visits to Slovakia between 1968 and 1994. �SLOVAKJA 193 After the collapse of Communism, most Slovak intellectuals threw off the shackles of Marxism and started to create freely, as in other countries. Freedom, however, came with a price - declining government support. The bloated Slovak Academy of Sciences (SA V) has been reduced from 7,000 members in 1989 to 3,000 in 1995. While some people have been advocating its total abolition, others have come to its defense. In recent days , certain members of Mr. Meciar's government have even advocated that the Academy be retained in its present form , and that it continue to do basic research as before, while leaving university professors to do the teaching. This Soviet model runs contrary to western traditions, whereby university professors do both research and teaching, and government-supported research is kept to a minimum. Rectors of Slovakia's universities wish to adopt the western model and arc currently negotiating with the Meciar government to try to reach a compromise on this very touchy . \1 question. Slovakia's writers. meanwhile, have had to learn to fend for themselves. Some have become entrepreneurs in the publishing industry , which has shrunk in size and has become more selective in what it accepts for publication , based upon its market potential; others have entered politics and the diplomatic service, giving these professions an unusual (in North America, at least) intellectual llair; and a third group is now dependent upon government grants to subsidize its publications. Needless to say, the compc- 11 ·-z prejavu predsedu SA V Branislava Lichardusa na slavnostnom zhromaz- denf k 40. vyrociu SAY'". Spdvy sluvcnskcj akademic vied. 30 (No. I. 1994). 35; discussion with Dr. Juraj Svec. Rector of Comenius University. March 26. I 995; and discussion with Dr. Branislav Lichardus. president of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the United States, April 22. 1995. in Washington. D.C. �SLOVAKIA 194 tition for such grants is very fierce, with only the best writers receiving support. No wonder that Slovak writers jealously g uard their perks and get very indignant when reminded that the government will not for long let them keep their castle at Budmerice, especially if some wealthy westerner offers to buy it for a large sum of money .D Slovak writers also face fierce competition from western writers. Bookstores are full of novels by westerners, especially Americans such as Stephen King (in translation), and only outstanding Slovak novels now have any chance of commercial success. This also applies to children's books , especially those published by the Walt Disney Corporation. Traditional Slovak children 's books, illustrated by Slovak graphic artists, now have to compete for the hearts and minds of Slovak children with Walt Disney characters such as Bambi and Mowgli speaking in Slovak! Unfortunately, Slovak writers also have to compete with the whole world of pornography, which is also a specialty of the West. Newspaper Kiosks in Bratislava feature as many naked women on magazine covers as one can see in Western Europe . This is another kind of price that one pays for freedom. 34 The Slovak media is also undergoing rapid change. The Slovak film industry (Koliba studios), which used to produce ten JJ Di sc ussions with the two public servants cited above. When I visited Slova- kia in the summer of 1992. I tonnented writer l.'.ubos Jurik with the suggestion th at he would soon lose his summer retreat at Budmcricc castle whe n some .. ri c h Arab sheik would offer $50.000,000 for it. " Jurik . who now works as the official spokesman fo r Dr. Ivan Gasparovic, the Speaker of the Slovak Parliament. became indignant at my suggestion. Meanwhile. the writer Anton Hykisch now serves as Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to Canada. 14 Personal observati ons based upo n my visits to Slovakia in 1990. 199 1, 1992. 1993 , 1994. The semi -monthl y KniinJ revue (Bratislava). now regularly features reviews of books published in the major western lan guages. �SLOVAKIA 195 fairly high-quality feature films per year with government subsidies in the past, now struggles to produce one a year. This industry, too, has to compete with the West, especially with Hollywood, and no country has yet succeeded in doing this. Thus, if the Slovak government wishes its film industry to continue to exist, it will have to continue to subsidize it. 35 Slovak television , meanwhile, is in the throes of a great controversy. Only two Slovak television stations exist at the moment , and both arc government-funded and controlled . As mentioned above, Mr. Meciar recently dismissed the Boards of Directors of both stations and replaced them with his own people, and many intellectuals have accused him of trying to control the electronic media. These intellectuals seem to have forgotten the folk-saying .. he who pays the piper, calls the tune. " The only solution that I sec to this dilemma is for Slovak entrepreneurs to establish private television stations, either in Slovakia. or, if necessary, in neighbouring Austria or the Czech lands, which will compete for the hearts and minds of their audiences. the same way that private television stations <lo in the West. Meanwhile. cheap films and programs from all over the world, either dubbed or licensed in Slovakia, now dominate the air-wavcs. 11 ' The Slovak print media, by contrast. 1s vibrant and free . Under Communism all media, whether print or electronic. had to " Ce lestine Bohlen . .. East Europe's Cultural Life. Once a Refu ge. Now Ec lipsed:· New York Ti Illes. November 13. 1990. A I. A 12: discussions public servants cited above: personal observations with the based upon my visits t o Slovakia . '" Sec above. footnote 12. for the dismissal of the directors of Slo vak radio and televisio n. Interestingly enough. on April 22. 1995. the first private cable net work began to broadcast in Slo vakia. It is called ··Vasa tcl c vfzia" (Your Televi sion ). or VTV. and at the moment covers only the Bratisl ava area. although it soon hopes to expand across the co untry. CL Slllc. April 24. 1995 . �196 SLOVAKIA parrot the Party line. In order to discover what was really gomg on, people had to learn to "read between the lines." Clever journalists often sent subtle signals to their readers by, for instance, not mentioning some prominent Party functionaries in a story, which meant that they were falling into disfavour, or else by lavishing praise upon them, which meant that they were about to be promoted . Not any more. Slovakia has about a dozen nationwide independent dailies , and only one - Slovenska republika supports the Meciar government. The rest are generally critical of the government, with Narodna obroda being the most objective , while Sme, which is edited by former members of the Public Against Violence, is the most critical. Unfortunately, the government still controls the supply and price of newsprint, and recently threatened, through taxes , to raise the price by I00% if the criticism of Mr. Meciar did not stop. Ten independent dailies responded by issuing newspapers with blank front pages, and the government backed off. Nevertheless, this game of "chicken" between Mr. Meciar, and Slovakia's independent press continues .~7 In spite of all the difficulties it faces, Slovakia is well on its way towards democratic Capitalism. Mr. Meciar's "Type 'A' ·'personality notwithstanding, Slovakia is a functioning democracy with a democratically-elected Parliament and President. And by signing a historic treaty with Hungary on March 19th. in which he promised that Slovakia would guarantee the cultural and JJ For the implications of the switd1 from a government-controlled press tu one that is free see Owen V. Johnson. '"Half Slave - Half Free: The Crisis of the Russian and East European Press," AAASS Newsletter. 33 (March. 1993 ). I. 4. The opinion regarding the objectivity of various Slovak newspapers is mine. For details regarding the recent struggle between Mr. Mcciar and the Slovak press see "Slovak Press Special," Slovak News (U . of Pittsburgh), March 3-5. 1995. For the reaction of America's most important daily to this struggle sec ··Slovakia Takes a Wrong Tum," New York Times. March 7. 1995. A 18 . �SLOVAKIA 197 linguistic rights of its Hungarian citizens, Mr. Meciar showed that he is capable of compromise, · and he can, if he is so inclined, behave as a pan-European politician. The Members of Parliament, and government Ministers, however, still have to learn the political culture of democracy--to treat each other with respect, and to serve the people, not just their own interests. This will take time, however, and we should be patient while it does. After all, some of our own politicians need to learn the same lesson .38 It should be apparent, therefore, that the most difficult part of the transition from Communism to Capitalism is in the realm of individual versus collective rights. After the overthrow of the Communists in 1989 most Slovaks were delighted to recover their individual rights, such as the freedom of expression, the freedom to travel to the West, and so on. However, with the increase in the cost of living that has occurred in the last four years, these rights have lost some of their lustre. Instead, many people are growing increasingly restive about their collective rights, that is, to free and universal health care, to free education, and to a whole host or previously free social programs which Communism inaugurated. It was Mr. Meciar's promises in the last elections to guarantee some of these social programs that, along with his strong nationalism. brought him the largest number of votes. How he will manage to retain these expensive social programs, and at the same time reform the economy and make it more market-oriented, remains to be seen. Indeed. many western countries share Mr. " For a grudging acknowledgement that Slovakia is a functioning democracy sec "2-Ycar-Old Slovakia Toddling Toward Democracy." New York Times. March I 9. 1995. AJ. For the treaty with Hungary see Sharon Fisher "Slovakia and Hungary Sign Bilateral Treaty.'' OMRI. Inc .. as cited in Slovak News. March 19. 1995. �198 SLOVAKIA Meciar's dilemma - how to promote capitalist growth while subsidizing expensive social programs . � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2003, Vol. 37 Description An account of the resource Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 172 SLOVAKIA DOCUMENTATION: THE POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND CULTURAL SITUATION IN THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC (AS OF MAY, 1995) M. Mark Stolarik (Paper Presented to the Symposium " Economies in Transition: Europe to the Bering Strait, University of Montana, Missoula, May 1, 1995) 1 It is difficult to paint a clear picture of contemporary Slovakia because this newly-independent country is still undergoing rcvo1utionary changes at all levels of society due to the collapse of Communism in 1989. Since there is no model for the Slovaks ( or other states of East Central Europe) to follow in the transition from totalitarian Communism to democratic Capitalism. the current Slovak government is proceeding slowly and cautiously in this direction, amid much criticism. My observations arc based on official and unofficial visits to Slovakia in the last five years, on ' This paper was supposed to have been published as a part of the Proceedings by the organizers of the symposium. Since the Proceedings never saw the light of day. the author clecicled to publish the article in Slovakia because it an:urately reflected the political. economic and cultural situation in 1995 Slovakia. It should be react as a document of its time. SLOVAKIA 173 my reading of a portion of the Slovak and western press, on reports issued by Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, and on long discussions with various government officials, who have asked to remain anonymous . The political situation in the Slovak Republic is the most problematic. The Parliament (officially called the National Council of the Slovak Republic) consists of a unicameral legislature of 150 deputies who are elected to a four-year term on the basis of proportional representation. Slovakia has over 50 political parties but only seven of them (or party coalitions) are currently represented in Parliament. In order to run in an election, each new party must first obtain 10,000 certified signatures on a petition, and then must win at least 5% of the votes in order to obtain a seat. Party coalitions must win at least 10% of the vote. The seats are apportioned according to the percentage of votes won by each party .2 The elections held on September 30-October I, 1994, produced no clear winner, as is usual in a proportional representative system. Slovakia is currently governed by a coalition consisting of the left-of-center Movement for a Democratic Slovakia led by Vladimir Mcciar, which won 35% of the popular vote. or 61 scats; by the pro-communist Association of Workers of Slovakia led by Jan r.uptak. which won 7.3% of the vote and 13 scats: and the ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party led by Jan Slota. which won 5 .4% of the vote and 9 scats in Parliament. This coalition ended up with a grand total of 83 scats, although in April I 99 5 three members of the Association of Workers of Slovakia split with their leader and they reduced the coalition's voting majority 1 For more details on the electoral process in the Slovak Republic sec "The Con- stitution of the Slovak Republic." in Albert P. Blaustein & Gisbert H. Flanz. eds .. Constitution.~ of the Countries of the World (Dobbs Fe1Ty. New York: Oceana Publications. Inc .. 1993). 84-88 . SLOVAKJA 174 to 80 seats. The oppos1t1on consists of the left-wing coalition Common Choice led by Peter Weiss, with 10.4 % of the popular vote or 17 seats; the Coalition of Magyar Parties led by Miklos Ouray, with 10.2% of the vote or 16 seats ; the right-wing Christian Democratic Movement led by Jan Carnog ursky , with I 0 . 1°4, of the votes or 16 seats; and the centrist Democratic Union of Slovakia led by Jozef Moravcik, with 8.6% of the vote or 13 seats.' Current Slovak politics is dominated by one strong leader who seems determined to undercut, by whatever means possible, other political leaders, many of whom are his former friends and associates . Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, who is an attorney by training , and who supported the reforms of Alexander Dubcek in the 1960's, was purged from the ruling Communist Party in 1970 , and later became a corporate lawyer near the city of Trencfn . He entered politics in 1990, when the ruling Public Against Violence , the group of intellectuals which took power from the Communists in Slovakia in November of 1989, advertized for the position of Minister of the Interior of the post-communist Slovak Republic . Mr. Meciar won the competition and allegedly used his control over the Interior Ministry to both discover the past sins of his opponents, and to cover up those of his supporters . After the 3 "S lovakia's voters again turn to pugnacio us fom1er PM ." The Globe and Ma il (Toronto). October 3. 1994. The official election results were communicated to all embassies of the Sl ovak Rep ubli c by a "Tlacovy telegram MZY SR pre zahranicnu dipl omatich1 sluzbu SR." on October 3. 1994. of wh ich I have a copy. Fur an analysis of the results see Martin Yotruba's "S lovak News" (mimeogra phed). Slovak Studies Program. University of Pittsburgh. Sept. 27-Oct. 2. 1994. A much later analysis by Michael J. Kopanic. Jr.. including the creation of the coalition. appeared as "The Recent Elections in Slovakia." in Association for th e Study of NMion.1/ities: A nalysis of Current Eve nts. 6 (No.9. May. 1995). 1-3. For the split in the Association of Workers in Slovakia see Narodmi obroda, April 4. 1995 . SLOVAKIA 175 Public Against Violence won the largest percentage of the vote in the June elections of 1990, it selected Mr. Meciar to become Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic , which at that time was still a part of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. While in this post, Mr. Meciar allegedly joined with others in slowing or manipulating the process of investigating (" lustracny proces" in Slovak) whether or not high government officials had collaborated with, or served as agents. of the dreaded communist secret p olice. He also increasi ngly argued with the presidium of the Public Against Violence, and its coalition partner, the Christian Demo4 cratic Movement, over government policy . Even though Mr. Meciar is very intelligent, 1s an excellent speaker, has a photographic memory, and radiates charisma wherever he goes, he appears to have what is colloquially known as a "type A" personality. In other words, he feels that he has to be in complete control of any situation, he seldom seeks advice, and is not very tol erant of criticism. He prefers to be surrounded by "yes ' For a brief biography or Mci'iar sec Kto Jc kto na S/ovensku. 199 P ( Ko nzo rci u111 Encyk lopcd ia: Bratislava. 199 I ). I 14- 15: The allegations ;:igainst Meci;:ir were 111adc by his political oppone nts in the Slovak Parlia111cnt's Defense and Security Co111111ittec on November 7. 1991 . cf. ··'Secret Report' Clai111s Meciar KGB Connections:· Foreign Bmadcast ln fonna tion Service (Washington. D.C.. hereafter FBIS). November 13. 1991. p.1 4: and summarized by Jan Obrman ··S lo vak Politician Accused or Secret Police Tics:· R adio Free Europe I R adio Liberty Rese.irch R eport (hereafter R FEIRL R ese.irch R eport ). Apri l 10. 1992 . Sec also ··Meciar Proposes Repeal or Screening Law:· CTK. December 21. I 99 3 . Two highly -placed public servants in the Slovak government. one or whom worked in the Office or the Pri111c Minister for both Mr. Mci': iar. and hi s predecessors. recently repeated these allegations to 111e. Since they fear for their jobs. the se public servants have asked me to keep secret their names. and the circu mstances or our 111cetings. At this time it is impossible to confinn. or disprove. these allegations since the ril es of the fonner secret police. which are in Prague. arc not open to the public . SLOYAKJA 176 men" .5 Since the governing coalition Presidium was also composed of some very strong personalities, who opposed Mr. Meciar's attempts to become Chairman of the Public Against Violence in March of 1991, they decided to remove him from his Prime Ministerial post in April of that year. The Presidium replaced Mr. Meciar with Jan Carnogursky, an attorney and former Catholic dissident during the communist regime, who was also the founder and Chairman of the Christian Democratic Movement. 6 Mr. Meciar, and his most loyal supporters, subsequently withdrew from the Public Against Violence, which later fell apart, and they created the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, which won the largest percentage of the votes in the June, 1992 elections . 7 In the next two years Mr. Meciar reached the height of his glory, but also suffered the humiliation of defeat. It was Mr. Meciar who in the summer of 1992, as Slovak Prime Minister, negotiated with Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus the dissolution 5 This observation is based on my reading of the Slovak press. on observing Mr. Mcciar delivering a po litical address in Nitra in August. 1993. on a pri va tc meeting that I had with him in September. 1993. and on several discussions that I had with Mr. Igor Uhrfk. The latte r is a fervent Slovak nationali st who sold his successful industrial-insurance business in New York city in 1992 and returned to Slovakia to ··help o ut" in 1993. He contributed 1,000.000 Slovak crowns to the Slovak National Pa11y. was made vicc-Chainnan of the Party. and later be came a principal advisor to the Minister of Privatization of the Slovak govern ment (as a volunteer). After Mr. Meciar's return to power in the fall of 1994. and a split in the Slovak National Party. among other things. Mr. Uhrfk became disgusted with Slovak politics and returned to the United States . " Kto je kto na S/ovensk11 1991 '.'. 190. 7 Jiri Pchc, ··s1ovak Nationalists Agitate for more Autonomy. Oppose Radical Pri vatizatio n." RFEIRL Research R eport. March 20. I 991: '"50,000 rally after Slovak leader fired," New York Times. April 24, I 99 I. A9: For more details sec Robert A. Young. The Breakup of Czechas/avakia (Kingston: Queen 's Uni vcrs ity. Insti tute of Intergovernmental Relati ons. Research Paper #3 2. 1994 ). 5. IO - J6. SLOVAKIA 177 of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, and it was Mr. Meciar who proudly stood at the helm of the newly-independent Slovak Republic on January 1, 1993. Even though Mr. Meciar was not initially a nationalist, he shrewdly perceived that Slovak nationalism was the strongest single force in post-Communist CzechoSlovakia, and by 1992 he and his followers had firmly embraced this movement. 8 Slovak nationalism, however, was not enough to save Mr. Meciar from himself. He suffered his second major political defeat when the Slovak Parliament in February 1993 elected, not the physician Roman Kovac , the preferred candidate of Mr. Meciar's party for President of the Republic, but rather the fom1er Minister of Finance Michal Kovac .9 Much to Mr. Meciar's surprise, the latter refused to become a mere figurehead and instead took his duties as President quite seriously, to the point of attacking Mr. Meciar in the Slovak Parliament for alleged dictatorial tendencies in March of 1994. Meanwhile, Mr. Meciar had lost the confidence of several of his key allies and supporters, including Milan Knazko, his former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jozef Moravcfk, the subsequent Minister of Foreign Affairs, and two Deputy Prime Ministers, including Roman Kovac and I.:udovft Cernak, the latter '"Talks fail: Czechoslovakia dose to breakup. " Ottawa Citizen. June 9. 1992 : "Leaders start negotiations on splitting Czechoslovakia." The Globe and Mail. June 17. 1992: "Who Split Czechoslovakia'?" The New York Times. September 24. 1992. A29: "Parliament approves Czech-Slovak split." The Globe and Mail. November 26. 1992. "Fireworks. Tears and Doubt in Slovakia." The New York Times.January I. 1993. Al4: sec also Sabrina Petra Ramct. "The Reemergence of Slovakia." Nationalities Papers. 22 (No. I. Spring. 1994). I07 - 112 . '' "Havel elected first president of Czech Republic: Slovaks to hold runoff after vote rebuffs Prime Minister's candidate." The Globe and Mail. January 27. I 993 , A6: "Ex-Communist Chosen President of Slovakia." The New York Times. February 16. 1993. A7. 178 SLOVAKIA his coalition partner from the Slovak National Party! The net result was a parliamentary vote of no-confidence in Mr. Meciar and his party, his third political defeat, and his loss of power for a second time. Most of his former allies in the MOS, who abandoned him, joined Jozef Moravcfk's centrist Democratic Union of Slovakia. From March to October of 1994, a left-right coalition headed by Prime Minister Jozef Moravcfk ruled Slovakia. 111 For these reasons, ever since his election victory of 1994, and his subsequent return to power, Mr. Mcciar has tried to topple the President of the Slovak Republic and to destroy the Democratic Union of Slovakia. Between October and December of 1994 Mr. Meciar looked for coalition partners who would join him in his campaign against the President but had to settle for the two coalition partners mentioned above, who assured him of a voting majority in the Parliament, but not enough votes (90) to remove the President. Since he could not muster the votes to remove the President, he decided to try to strip him of some of his legal powers. For example, in April of 1995 Mr. Mcciar prevailed upon the Slovak Parliament to transfer from the President to the Prime Minister the right to appoint the Chief of Slovakia's Security Intelligence Service (the successor to the Secret Policc). 11 1 " .. Broad Coaliti on to govern Slovakia." The Globe and Mail. March 15 . 1994 . For the viewpoints of the two protagonists regarding the reasons for their fal - ling out see --sprava o stave Slovenskej republiky prednesena prezidentom SR Michalom Kovacom v Naroclncj radc SR dna 8.3.1994" and .. Prcjav predscdu vlady Slovcnskej republiky Yladimfra Mcciara na 27. sch6dzi NR SR di\a 11.3. 1994." published in a special issue of Republika (Bratis lava.March. I 9. 1994 ). I 5pp. For a legal interpretation of this struggle sec Spencer Zifcak ...The Battle over Presidential Power in Slovakia," Slovakia. 36 ( 1998). 70-80. For a profile of the Moravcfk government and its policies sec --cTK Profiles New Cabinet Members" in FB/S,March 17. 1994.4- 12 and --Text of Policy Statement of Slovak Government," FBIS. April 25. 1994, 16-30. 11 "Je Lexa v NR SR. v SIS. alebo v Iese?" Sme (Bratislava). April 26. 199 5. 179 SLOVAKIA Meanwhile, Mr. Meciar charged that the Democratic Union of Slovakia had not gathered the necessary 10,000 signatures before the elections of 1994. If he could prove his charge, then the DU members of Parliament would be stripped of their seats and Mr. Meciar would by default have the three-fifths of the votes necessary to remove the President. Unfortunately for Mr. Meciar, the Slovak Constitutional Court, headed by Milan Cic, the first Prime Minister of the post-communist Slovak Republic, and a former friend of Mr. Meciar, upheld the validity of the 10,000 signatures obtained by the DU before the 1994 elections. This did not stop Mr. Meciar from having his 80 supporters in Parliament pass a motion of " no confidence" in the President on May 5th, and in ordering the Slovak police to check on the validity of the l 0,000 signatures by visiting the homes of the signatories, and in the process harassing supporters of the DU. 12 Mr. Mcciar has also had his difficulties with the press . While he was out of office in 1994, the previous coalition government supported full freedom of the press , including radio and televi sion, and appointed boards of directors who were likewise inclined. Very few of these individuals were supporters of Mr. Mcciar. Once he returned to power in December of 1994 (it took him over two months to put together a coalition), Mr. Meciar began to fire the old boards of directors of radio and television (which arc still state-controlled), and to replace them \.Vith his own people. These , in turn , cancelled certain satiric television programs which had made fun of Mr. Meciar. As a result, there have been several mass-demonstrations in Bratislava against Mr. Meciar's alleged attempts to control the mass-media. Therefore, while television and radio commentators have ceased to lampoon 11 Zifcak. op.cit.. p.70; ··overovanie podpisov na harkoch DU je porusenie peticneho prava obcanov." Srne. May 23 . 1995 . SLOVAKIA 180 Mr. Meciar, the print media, which 1s largely privatized , is still very critical of him . 13 The economic situation in Slovakia, meanwhile, is improving. Slovakia did not slide into a deep depression after it became independent, as some Western pundits had predicted . Instead, after some uncertainty in 1993, its economy grew by a spectacular 4.8% in 1994 and its budget deficit was a respectable 3% of GDP. Meanwhile, the Slovak crown , its basic unit of currency, was devalued by only 10% in 1993, it is convertible to hard currencies , and it remains stable. The rate of inflation also dropped from 25% in 1993 to around 11. 7% in 1994. Unemployment, however, remains high -14%. One of the causes of Slovak unemployment is the collapse of its heavy-arms industry, which used to serve the now-defunct Warsaw Pact and its allies world-wide. Converting this arms industry into something more useful remains a major challenge to the government of the Slovak Republic. 13 14 Re uter, December 16. 1994, as reported by Martin Votruba in Slovak News. December 16- 18. 1994; Jiri Pchc, .. Anti-Mcciar Rall y in Bratislava," R FEIRL Reports. Ibid., December 8- 11. In a TA SR report of May 12. 1995. Mr. Mcciar was quoted as saying that the press is free in Slovakia... but all newspapers should admit who owns them. and who pays them." impl ying that the print press in Slovakia is large ly financed by fore igners who arc hosti le to the current governme nt. The CTK on the same date quoted Juraj Veres. editor of N,irod n;i obroda (Bratislava). as agree ing that the Slovak press was still free . but th at ··the government is trying to gain contro l over the dailies:· However. he added th at lately "the go vernment has been backing down ." For Mr. Mci:iar's earlier problems with the press sec Jan Obnuan ...The Slovak Government vers us the Media." RFEIRL Research R eport. February 5. 1993 . 14 For an example of negative reporting o n Slovakia's eco nomic future sec Step- hen Enge lberg, "New Nation. Imperiled Economy." New York Time.~. February 12. 1993. DI; for an admission that the Slovak economy is doing surprisingly well see "How the Slovaks Have Taken Flight." The Globe nncl Mail. December 5, 1994. A JO (reprinted from the Wall Street Jo urnal); and --standard and Poors o Slovensk u." Sme. April 7. 199 5. 181 SLOVAKJA Indeed, converting the whole system from a command economy to a form of private enterprise remain s the major problem for the Slovak government. U ndcr Communism the state nationalized all the industry and the bulk of the land, it controlled all the means of production, it regulated prices, and subsidized housing , transportation and food, and created a complete welfare state with free education from pre-school through university, and free universal health-care. Unfortunately, the state enacted all these changes without the consent of the people, it enforced them through the use of police terror, and it discriminated in favour of members of the Communist Party and children of the workingclass when dispensing economic and cultural benefits. 15 Now that the Communists are no longer in charge, the various governments of Slovakia have tried to transform the economy into a form of private enterprise, as called for in the Constitution of the Slovak Republic. Since no real models exist on how to do this , n umcrous laws and regulations have been passed to try to bring it about. The first steps were taken in early 1991 when the Parliament of the C1.ech and Slovak Federal Republic passed a law for the restitution of confiscated private property (chiefly land). While some former landowners were delighted to receive their land back, most young people in Slovakia showed no interest in working it. The amount of land seized from individual families by the Communists had been small in the first place, and most young ' ' The literature on this subject is vast. For two co ncise a11iclcs that deal with most of this period sec Robert K. Evanson. ··Regime and Working Class in Czechoslovakia. 1948- 1%8." Soviet Studies. 37 (Nn. 2. 1985 ). 248-68; and by the same author "Political Repressi o n in Czechoslovakia. Slavonic Pi1pcrs. 28 (No. I. 1986). 1-21. 1948- 1984." Canadian 182 SLOVAKJA people have no intention of becoming smallholding • peasants 16 agam . Managers, officials, and many workers on collective and state farms , on the other hand , wish to preserve these institutions. Since collectives and state farms provide their employees with a guaranteed income, regular hours, easy work, and many opportunities for theft, the employees are loath to see such farms disappear. Such employees are among the pillars of support that Mr. Meciar can count on during elections. 17 The various churches of Slovakia, meanwhile, especially the Roman and Greek Catholic Churches, which were singled out for persecution by the Communists, have had much of their confiscated property returned . In l 991-92 the federal government returned most of the buildings that the Communists had seized from religious orders, and in the fall of l 993 Mr. Meciar's government returned most of the buildings that had been confiscated from Church Dioceses. However, most church land that was confiscated and turned into state or collective farms was not returned, largely because of the opposition of the collectives. Thus , the churches continue to rely upon government support for their existence, and '" "Czechoslovakia plans to return property ." Philadelphia 24, I 99 L ..Transfonn:icia pornohospod:irstva Inquirer. February a rcstitucie:· Pr.ic:.i (Bra ti slava). May 31. 1993; "Refonns Alter the Landscape or Czechoslovakia's Fanning ." New Y ork Times, June 4, I 99 L Milan Svec, "Czechoslovakia's Velvet Di vorce." Current Hist ory (November. I 992 ). 377; and discussions with the tw o public servants mentioned above in footnote 3. 17 "Who voted for Whom'1" (a poll conducted by the Slovak Research Office). as reported by Martin Yotruba in Slovak News. 7-9 October. 1994. p.4. The o bservatio ns abo ut state fam1s and collectives were made by the two public servants mentioned above. On many occasions when I visited Slovakia in the era of Communism. I also discussed collectives and state fanns with some of my relatives. who worked at such institutions. They detalied the many kinds of theft possible at state farms and collectives. 183 SLOVAKIA from a North American perspective, this . I8 S h Ip . IS an unhealthy relation- Meanwhile, the federal Parliament also passed the "small privatization" Act of J 990 concerning small business. This Act enabled a few thousand entrepreneurs to borrow money from banks to establish small retail businesses such as travel agencies, restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, computer stores, and various skilled trades. These kinds of enterprises are flourishing all over Slovakia. 19 A little later the federal Parliament passed another Act that concerned itself with the privatization of large industries, the socalled "large privatization." This would involve all except the most strategic industries such as atomic energy, natural gas, transportation, the arms industry and so on . However, since the government did not wish its large industries to be bought by foreigners, and since most of the citizens of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic did not have the wealth tn purchase these industries outright, the government decided to enact a "coupon privati1.ation." By this plan , every citi1.cn over the age of 18 was entitled to buy a privatization coupon for J .000 C1.echoslovak crowns (Kcs), and then invest it in the company of his choice. The " For the story of the persecution of the churches in Slovakia sec Theodoric J. Zubek. The Church of Silence in Slovakia (Whi ting. IN: John J. Lach. 1956). and Michal Lacko. "The Forced Liquidation of the Union of Uzhorocl." Slovak Studies. I (1961). 145-85: for the story of the underground church in Slovakia under Communism sec "Secret Bishop." and for the story of the rebuilding of the Jesuit Order sec " New Oppmtunitics in Slovakia." Company: a magazine o{ the American Jc.m ils. 8 (No. 3. Spring. 1991 ). 2-5. and 9- 11. Details of the resti tution laws passed after 1990 can be found in Sharon Fisher. "Church Restitu tion Law Passed in Slovakia." RFEIRL Rese.1rch Report. November 19. 1993 . '" "Chystiime historicky ziikon: Ekonomicka refonna konecnc dostala tviir." Niirodn,i obroda. September 5. 1990. 13: Svec. op.cit.. 377 . 184 SLOVAKIA number of shares he would receive would depend upon the value of the company. This was the first step in the creation of a stock market in the Republic. The government also decided that this process would be divided into several rounds since it involved so many industries. The first round took place while the CzcchoSlovak Federation still existed ? ' The second round of the coupon privatization was supposed to take place after Slovakia became independent. However, the government of Mr. Mcciar soon discovered that most Slovaks were not investing their coupons directly into the companies for sale, but rather were selling them to investment companies controlled by foreigners . The Meciar government did not want to allow these foreign-owned holding companies to buy up so much of Slovakia's industries, and it postponed this privatization . However, the Moravcik government, which ruled Slovakia between March and October, 1994, allowed this privatization to continue . Then, when Mr. Meciar returned to power in the fall of 1994, he halted the privatization again. At the end of March, 1995 the government of Mr. Meciar decided to allow half of this coupon privatization to proceed, but he reserved the other half for potential Slovak buyers, most of whom arc in fact the managers of these industries . These managers allegedly neglected the upkeep of their factories and, therefore, their value has declined. Thus, if this privatization continues, the managers of these factories stand to make a lot of money once the value of their factories goes up again. Mr. Meciar's enemies have charged that these managers arc in league with Mr. Mcciar, that they arc all former Communists, and that they provide him with financial support. Mr. Meciar's supporters, on the other hand, charge that the proponents of the 1 " "A Divorce that Could Save the Czech Economy," The Wall Street Journal. March 11. 1991 ; Svec. op. cit.. 377 . SLOVAKIA 185 strict coupon privatization are in leag ue with Mr. Moravcik and . financially support the opposition parties. Neutral observers have told me that both sides arc guilty of profiteering from this privatization process , and the greed and corruption involved goes a long way toward s explaining the bitterness of current Slovak politics. Also, because Mr. Meciar reduced the number of businesses to be privati1.ed in half, that is, from an estimated value of 80 billion Sk to 40 billion Sk, the 3.2 million holders of pri vatization coupons in the Slovak Republic witnessed a drop in the value of their coupons from 24,000 Sk to 12,000 Sk by March of 1995. Forty deputies of the Slovak Parliament then approached the Constitutional Court in Kosicc to protest against Law No . 340/ J 994, which had halted the coupon privatization on November 3-4, 1994, a nd the Constitutional Court decided in their favour. It then o rdere d the Slovak Parliament to re-write the law so that it would no t violate individuals' rights to private property as guaranteed by th e Slovak Constitution . Mr.Meciar's reaction was to propose that the privatization coupons be exchanged for government bo nd s, which could be redeemed for 10,000 Sk, or held for their interest, or used to purchase shares in companies. Most opposition deputies denounced this suggestion as ··theft" from the coupon-holders . 21 The average citizen. meanwhile, has had to tighten his belt several notches since the fall of Communism. While the gove rnment still controls the price o f electricity, transportation. fuel and basic " Smc. Apri l 6. 1995: "Privatizacny zakon nie je v s11lade s ustavou SR." TA SR. May 25 . 1995: "V . Meciar o novej kuponovej privatiz,icii ." Smc. June 8. 1995: "Anketa Sme:• Smc. June 8. 1995. Once again . the two public servants. cited above. ex plained the complexity of this iss ue to me. Dr. Juraj Svec. the Recto r of Comenius University in Bratislava. and a member of Parliament for the DU. confinned their analysis when he visited with me o n March 26. 1995. 186 SLOYAKJA foodstuffs, it has decided to provide smaller subsidies for these goods or services and, therefore, it has raised their prices dramatically in the last four years . Thus, while a streetcar ride used to cost a mere one crown, it now costs five ; while gasoline used to cost seven crowns a litre, it now costs nineteen. And, while a liter 22 of milk used to cost two crowns, it now costs twclvc . Wages, of state employees, on the other hand, have not kept up with the rise in prices. While members of the Slovak Parliament voted themselves hefty pay increases in the summer of 1993 (from 10,000 Sk to 25,000 Sk per month), ordinary state employees do not share in this largesse. Indeed, the wage-structure of state employees is still very Communist. Thus , a physician starting his career receives only 4,000 Sk, which is less than the wage of the average truck-driver! As a result, physicians in Slovakia recently demanded a 200% wage increase, and threatened to go on strike if they did not receive it. Teachers and professors are s1m1larly und erpaid , with the former receiving 5,000 Sk and the latter 8,600 Sk. Even though Mr. Mcciar promised during the last election campaign, among other things, to double teachers' salaries , " Interviews with the the two public servan ts cited above. plus my ow n observations on visits to Slovakia in the summers or 1990. 1991. 1992. I ()9J and 1994. In May of 1990 I visi ted Slovak ia as a delegate of the Slovak League of Ame ri ca. wh ich had come on a ••fact -finding" mission. This was an offi cial mis sio n. spo nsored by the governme nt of the Slovak Republic. It was the first official visi t of the Slovak Leag ue since 1938. whe n the first de legati on of th e League brought to Slovakia the original of the Pittsburgh Ag reeme nt. In 1993 I visited Slovakia as the newl y-elected president of the Canadian Slovak League. In this capaci ty I had official di scussio ns with Prime Minister Meciar and with Jan Findra, Chancellor to the President. My visits in I 991. 1992 and 1994 were for scholarly purposes - to participate in historical co nfere nces. SLOVAKIA 187 he has thus far failed to do so. Indeed, Slovak schoolteachers are also threatening to go on strike over this issue. 23 Employees of the growing private enterprises, on the other hand , generally make much more than state employees. For instance, clerks in private banks earn 10,000-15,000 crowns a month. Accountants and computer programmers in private firms make up to 20,000 Sk per month. And attorneys, who were among the first to privatize in the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic , arc among the highest-paid professionals in Slovakia. Finally, growing numbers of entrepreneurs have become millionaires many times over. and some of these 'nouveau-riche' flaunt their wealth with expensive western cars, clothes, and other consumer goods. They have provoked increasing resentment among state employees, whose salaries have remained far behind the increase in the cost of consumer goods and scrviccs. 24 The price of housing has also skyrocketed . Under Communism, if one had the right connections, one could obtain a beautiful villa in the hills overlooking Bratislava and the Danube river officially for about 250,000 Kcs (and unofficially, that is, with an additional under-the-table payment of 250.000 Kcs). Now these villas cost anywhere from 2,000,000 to 20,000.000 Sk. Similarly, state and co-op apartments, which usually consist of only three rooms plus a small kitchen and tiny bath, are commanding premium prices. The co-op apartments, where one purchased the 11 Smc. April 6. 1995: " Pricskum ukaza l. zc vysc 70% lckarov jc oc ho tnych vs tupit' dn st rajku." Smc. April 26 . 1995: " Skolstvo dostane 530 mili6nov ." Smc. May 14. 1995 : "Ultimatum lckarnv na zvyscnic platov o 200% vyprsalo. strajkovat' sa asi ncbudc." Sme. May 15. 1995 : ··Pricmern,i mzda v skolstve nad'alcj ncjasna." Smc. June 8. 1995: and discussions with the two public servants cited above. " Discussions with the two public servants cited above. plus personal observations from past visits to Slovakia. 188 SLOVAKIA right to live for 30,000 Kcs under Communism , can now be bought by the renters for 50,000 Sk, and can then be re-sold for anywhere between 750,000 to 1,000,000 Sk 1 Former state-ow ned apartments, meanwhile, which until recently could not be purchased were often sub-leased to others for very hig h rents. The process of their sale will soon approximate what happened with the co-op apartments. The state, meanwhile, has lost interest in providing additional ho using for the people. Various entcrpreneurs have taken over this task, and the newly-built apartments generall y sell for around 1,000,000 Sk, which is far beyond what the average Slovak can a ffo rd. 25 Health care, meanwhile, is also in a state o f transition . Before 1989, health care was universal and free. However, one received quality care only if one was either a high functionary of the Communist Party, which had its own special clinics and hospitals , with modern , western , equipment; or, if one bribed one's physician and nurse with extra money or gifts. And, exotic western drugs were usuall y not available, except to the privileged few . Many American and Canadian Slovaks remember well the pl ain tive letters that they used to receive from their unfortunate relatives in Slovakia under Communism, and how these relatives sent prescriptions for Western-made drugs, along with the addresses of pharmacies in Switzerland , which when paid in hard 21 currencies, were willing to fill these orders for them . ' 15 Ibid. 1 Milada Vachudova and Sharon Fisher. "' Health Care Crisis : The Czech and '' Slovak Republics ." RFEIRL Research Report. October 8. 1993. 44-46: and dis c ussio ns wi th friends and relatives on visits to Slovakia in 1968. 1970. 1983 and 1988 . Our fami ly in Canada used to regularly receive requests fo r western drugs. and we filled these requests th rough a willing phannacist in Switze rland . Dr. Do broslav Valik of Bry n Mawr. Pe nnsy lvani a. to ld me in Octo ber of 1992 of having tried to establish a Dental Clinic in Bratislava right after the "'Ve lve t SLOVAKIA 189 In an effort to save money, the Slovak government is trying to privatize parts of the health-care system, but at a very slow pace. Pharmacies have all been privatized and one can now buy whatever drugs one needs. However, the state pays only for routine drugs, and not always for the full amount. The more exotic drugs, which arc now readily available, must be paid for by the patient. Dentists are also privatizing as quickly as they can, with about one-third currently being self-s upporting and ex pensive . Most physicians, however, have not yet taken the plunge and arc unlikel y to do so. Because of their poor salaries , most M.D.'s in Slovakia cannot afford to purchase the expensive equipment necessary to open an office or clinic, and they also cannot afford private liability insurance. As long as they continue to work for state-run hospitals, they do not need liability insurance, and, thu s, they continue to be state employees . And, because they continue to be underpaid , many demand extra payments or gifts if they are to provide quality care. Meanwhile, most Slovaks oppose the privatization of their health care. They want it to remain universal and free . Thus, the Mcciar government is moving slowly and cautiously in trying to reform the health-care systcm. 27 The educational system of Slovakia is also undergo ing change. Shortly after the Communists sci1.cd power the y a bolished all religious schools and put education at the service or the state. The whole system from pre-school throug h university was then statefunded and controlled. Marxism was taught as the philosophy or Revo luti o n.. of 1989. Much to his amazement. his friends from the VPN showed him the clinic for funner me mbers of the Commu nist Pa11y in Bratislava. It had all the latest western equipment one could imagine. unlike clin ics for the general public . 17 Yaduchova & Fisher. op. cit.. 48-49. a nd discussions servants cited above . with the two public SLOVAKIA 190 the state, and all teachers had to conform or face expulsion . Higher • education was free but operated under a quota system whereby in the process of admission children o f the working-class were favoured over those of the middle or upper classes . The latter then resorted to bribery to get their children into institutions of higher learning. Meanwhile , to their credit, the Communists also established several new universities , including the full-service Safarik University in Kos ice and the College of Transportation in Zilina, among others, to satisfy the demands of an increasingly industrialized society .2x After the downfall of Communism, state-support for cd ucation continued , but not its ideological requirements . Most universities held new elections for rectors and deans , and the professors and students threw out the communist administrators . However, because most of the communist professors have tenure, the uni versities cannot get rid of them. It will take another generation before these Marxist professors reach retirement age, and arc finally replaced by a new generation of professors . And even the new generation will bo hard to find, because the wages paid to professors arc so low. Meanwhile. the quota system that favored students of working-class origins has been replaced by a 4uota " Ladi slav G resfk. --vyc hova rokoch 1956 - 1960 ." vy,o kos ko lskej inte ligencie na Sl ove nsku v Historicky i'a.rnri.~. 31 ( No .6 . 198) ). 8') 1-91 O: A 111011 Hrnko & Jozef Zatkuliak," Uni vcrzita Ko me nskc ho na rozhranf piitiles iatyc h a sestHesialyc h rokov ." Hi.~toricky t'a .r npis. 32 (No.4. I 984 ). 59J-(1 19: pe rso na l o bservati o ns fro n1 past visi ts to Slovakia. di scussio ns w ith the two pub I ic servants cited abo ve. and di sc ussio n with Rudolf Korec. Recto r of Safarik U ni versity. May. 1990. On a visit to Slovakia in the summer of 1968 I asked one of my co usins what he was studying. He replied .. Philosophy ." When I in4uired a bo ut the kind o f philosophy . he replied "'Marxism-Lcnini sm 1" His mo ther. meanw hil e . w ho was a sc hoolteac her. used to go to church in a vill age o ut s id e o f the to wn in whi ch she lived. because if she had been seen atlendin g c hurc h services in her home to wn . she would have lost her job. SLOVAKIA 191 based on grades . Even though Slovakia today has 14 institutions of higher learning, including brand-new universities in Trnava and Banska Bystrica, it still enrolls only 18% of high sc hool grad uatcs, which is very low when compared to Western Europe or North America, which attract between 30% and 50%. Meanwhile , the state has permitted the re-establishment of religious sc hools funded by the government. However, their number remains small beca use forty years of Communism thoroughly discredited religious education , and most employees of the Ministry of Education arc still opposed to their expansion .2'> Whether or not the government decides to in vest more m higher education remains to be seen. Recent attempts to introduce tuition to cover 20% of the cost of their education have met fierc e resistance from the students. Meanwhile, the quality of university education in Slovakia is not very high, large ly because the teaching staff was cut off from the West for over 40 years , and also because universities stressed education rather than researc h. Tha t is why all the Slovak universities arc hurridly signing agreements with universities all over the Western world that provide for scholarly exchanges o f staff and students . However. it is difficult to attract top Western scholars to teach at Slovak uni versities when they can expect salaries of only $300.00 per month . Onl y true idealists have thu s far volunteered to teac h at Slovak unive rsities under such conditions. 10 ' " Disrnssion with Rudolf Korec. Rector or Safarik University in Kosice. May. 1990: discussion wi th Dean Ladislav Pauliny. Farn lty of A11s. Co menius U ni ve rsity. May. 1994: discussio n with Juraj Svec. Rec tor of Comcni us Univers it y. March 26. 1995 : and discu ssions with the two public servants cited above. '" Discussion with Juraj Svec. op.cit.. and " Pod l'a prof. M. Urbana. dost:.\vaj11 vysokc skoly v SR iba tretinu financii v porovnani s vyspelymi st:.\tmi." TA SR. May 26. 1995. SLOVAKIA 192 Slovak culture, meanwhile, is also undergoing a radical transformation. Under Communism all cultural activities were state-financed and controlled, and all cultural output was for the sake of promoting Marxism. A Slovak Academy of Sciences, as well as Unions of writers and creative artists were founded in the early l 950's, and they operated under five-year plans . Compliant historians, writers, and creative artists not only became state employees with respectable salaries, but they also received such perks as the use of confiscated castles for meetings and vacations, and statesubsidized clubs that served good food at very low prices . As long as they toed the Party line, their books were published or their paintings and illustrations were bought by mu se ums or publishing houses, and no-one worried, for instance, about how many copies of a book were actually sold, since the government subsidized everything. On the other hand , historians , writers and creative artists could only praise Communism and denounce Capitalism. Certain key personages in Slovak history, such as the Rev. Andrej Hlinka, founder and leader of the Slovak People's Party in the first third of the twentieth century, either became "non-persons" in official publications, or else were denounced as reactionary clcrico-fascists . The past was deliberately distorted to serve the communist futurc. Those intellectuals who refused to go along with this system were persecuted by being allowed to work only at menial labour, and those who dared to openly oppose this Marxist control over culture ended up in jail. 11 .II Julius Mesaros. " Retlexie O piitaesiatych a sestl:lcsiatych rokoch." f-lis/orick f casopis. 39 (Nos. 4-5. 199 I ). 379-88: Richard Marsina. "S lovensk.i historiografia I 945- I 990." f-li storickf brnpi5. 39 (Nos .4-5. I 99 I). 370-79: and discussions with Slovak historians and writers during my visits to Slovakia between 1968 and 1994. SLOVAKJA 193 After the collapse of Communism, most Slovak intellectuals threw off the shackles of Marxism and started to create freely, as in other countries. Freedom, however, came with a price - declining government support. The bloated Slovak Academy of Sciences (SA V) has been reduced from 7,000 members in 1989 to 3,000 in 1995. While some people have been advocating its total abolition, others have come to its defense. In recent days , certain members of Mr. Meciar's government have even advocated that the Academy be retained in its present form , and that it continue to do basic research as before, while leaving university professors to do the teaching. This Soviet model runs contrary to western traditions, whereby university professors do both research and teaching, and government-supported research is kept to a minimum. Rectors of Slovakia's universities wish to adopt the western model and arc currently negotiating with the Meciar government to try to reach a compromise on this very touchy . \1 question. Slovakia's writers. meanwhile, have had to learn to fend for themselves. Some have become entrepreneurs in the publishing industry , which has shrunk in size and has become more selective in what it accepts for publication , based upon its market potential; others have entered politics and the diplomatic service, giving these professions an unusual (in North America, at least) intellectual llair; and a third group is now dependent upon government grants to subsidize its publications. Needless to say, the compc- 11 ·-z prejavu predsedu SA V Branislava Lichardusa na slavnostnom zhromaz- denf k 40. vyrociu SAY'". Spdvy sluvcnskcj akademic vied. 30 (No. I. 1994). 35; discussion with Dr. Juraj Svec. Rector of Comenius University. March 26. I 995; and discussion with Dr. Branislav Lichardus. president of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the United States, April 22. 1995. in Washington. D.C. SLOVAKIA 194 tition for such grants is very fierce, with only the best writers receiving support. No wonder that Slovak writers jealously g uard their perks and get very indignant when reminded that the government will not for long let them keep their castle at Budmerice, especially if some wealthy westerner offers to buy it for a large sum of money .D Slovak writers also face fierce competition from western writers. Bookstores are full of novels by westerners, especially Americans such as Stephen King (in translation), and only outstanding Slovak novels now have any chance of commercial success. This also applies to children's books , especially those published by the Walt Disney Corporation. Traditional Slovak children 's books, illustrated by Slovak graphic artists, now have to compete for the hearts and minds of Slovak children with Walt Disney characters such as Bambi and Mowgli speaking in Slovak! Unfortunately, Slovak writers also have to compete with the whole world of pornography, which is also a specialty of the West. Newspaper Kiosks in Bratislava feature as many naked women on magazine covers as one can see in Western Europe . This is another kind of price that one pays for freedom. 34 The Slovak media is also undergoing rapid change. The Slovak film industry (Koliba studios), which used to produce ten JJ Di sc ussions with the two public servants cited above. When I visited Slova- kia in the summer of 1992. I tonnented writer l.'.ubos Jurik with the suggestion th at he would soon lose his summer retreat at Budmcricc castle whe n some .. ri c h Arab sheik would offer $50.000,000 for it. " Jurik . who now works as the official spokesman fo r Dr. Ivan Gasparovic, the Speaker of the Slovak Parliament. became indignant at my suggestion. Meanwhile. the writer Anton Hykisch now serves as Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to Canada. 14 Personal observati ons based upo n my visits to Slovakia in 1990. 199 1, 1992. 1993 , 1994. The semi -monthl y KniinJ revue (Bratislava). now regularly features reviews of books published in the major western lan guages. SLOVAKIA 195 fairly high-quality feature films per year with government subsidies in the past, now struggles to produce one a year. This industry, too, has to compete with the West, especially with Hollywood, and no country has yet succeeded in doing this. Thus, if the Slovak government wishes its film industry to continue to exist, it will have to continue to subsidize it. 35 Slovak television , meanwhile, is in the throes of a great controversy. Only two Slovak television stations exist at the moment , and both arc government-funded and controlled . As mentioned above, Mr. Meciar recently dismissed the Boards of Directors of both stations and replaced them with his own people, and many intellectuals have accused him of trying to control the electronic media. These intellectuals seem to have forgotten the folk-saying .. he who pays the piper, calls the tune. " The only solution that I sec to this dilemma is for Slovak entrepreneurs to establish private television stations, either in Slovakia. or, if necessary, in neighbouring Austria or the Czech lands, which will compete for the hearts and minds of their audiences. the same way that private television stations <lo in the West. Meanwhile. cheap films and programs from all over the world, either dubbed or licensed in Slovakia, now dominate the air-wavcs. 11 ' The Slovak print media, by contrast. 1s vibrant and free . Under Communism all media, whether print or electronic. had to " Ce lestine Bohlen . .. East Europe's Cultural Life. Once a Refu ge. Now Ec lipsed:· New York Ti Illes. November 13. 1990. A I. A 12: discussions public servants cited above: personal observations with the based upon my visits t o Slovakia . '" Sec above. footnote 12. for the dismissal of the directors of Slo vak radio and televisio n. Interestingly enough. on April 22. 1995. the first private cable net work began to broadcast in Slo vakia. It is called ··Vasa tcl c vfzia" (Your Televi sion ). or VTV. and at the moment covers only the Bratisl ava area. although it soon hopes to expand across the co untry. CL Slllc. April 24. 1995 . 196 SLOVAKIA parrot the Party line. In order to discover what was really gomg on, people had to learn to "read between the lines." Clever journalists often sent subtle signals to their readers by, for instance, not mentioning some prominent Party functionaries in a story, which meant that they were falling into disfavour, or else by lavishing praise upon them, which meant that they were about to be promoted . Not any more. Slovakia has about a dozen nationwide independent dailies , and only one - Slovenska republika supports the Meciar government. The rest are generally critical of the government, with Narodna obroda being the most objective , while Sme, which is edited by former members of the Public Against Violence, is the most critical. Unfortunately, the government still controls the supply and price of newsprint, and recently threatened, through taxes , to raise the price by I00% if the criticism of Mr. Meciar did not stop. Ten independent dailies responded by issuing newspapers with blank front pages, and the government backed off. Nevertheless, this game of "chicken" between Mr. Meciar, and Slovakia's independent press continues .~7 In spite of all the difficulties it faces, Slovakia is well on its way towards democratic Capitalism. Mr. Meciar's "Type 'A' ·'personality notwithstanding, Slovakia is a functioning democracy with a democratically-elected Parliament and President. And by signing a historic treaty with Hungary on March 19th. in which he promised that Slovakia would guarantee the cultural and JJ For the implications of the switd1 from a government-controlled press tu one that is free see Owen V. Johnson. '"Half Slave - Half Free: The Crisis of the Russian and East European Press," AAASS Newsletter. 33 (March. 1993 ). I. 4. The opinion regarding the objectivity of various Slovak newspapers is mine. For details regarding the recent struggle between Mr. Mcciar and the Slovak press see "Slovak Press Special," Slovak News (U . of Pittsburgh), March 3-5. 1995. For the reaction of America's most important daily to this struggle sec ··Slovakia Takes a Wrong Tum," New York Times. March 7. 1995. A 18 . SLOVAKIA 197 linguistic rights of its Hungarian citizens, Mr. Meciar showed that he is capable of compromise, · and he can, if he is so inclined, behave as a pan-European politician. The Members of Parliament, and government Ministers, however, still have to learn the political culture of democracy--to treat each other with respect, and to serve the people, not just their own interests. This will take time, however, and we should be patient while it does. After all, some of our own politicians need to learn the same lesson .38 It should be apparent, therefore, that the most difficult part of the transition from Communism to Capitalism is in the realm of individual versus collective rights. After the overthrow of the Communists in 1989 most Slovaks were delighted to recover their individual rights, such as the freedom of expression, the freedom to travel to the West, and so on. However, with the increase in the cost of living that has occurred in the last four years, these rights have lost some of their lustre. Instead, many people are growing increasingly restive about their collective rights, that is, to free and universal health care, to free education, and to a whole host or previously free social programs which Communism inaugurated. It was Mr. Meciar's promises in the last elections to guarantee some of these social programs that, along with his strong nationalism. brought him the largest number of votes. How he will manage to retain these expensive social programs, and at the same time reform the economy and make it more market-oriented, remains to be seen. Indeed. many western countries share Mr. " For a grudging acknowledgement that Slovakia is a functioning democracy sec "2-Ycar-Old Slovakia Toddling Toward Democracy." New York Times. March I 9. 1995. AJ. For the treaty with Hungary see Sharon Fisher "Slovakia and Hungary Sign Bilateral Treaty.'' OMRI. Inc .. as cited in Slovak News. March 19. 1995. 198 SLOVAKIA Meciar's dilemma - how to promote capitalist growth while subsidizing expensive social programs .  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Political, Economic, and Cultural Situation in the Slovak Republic (As of May, 1995) Description An account of the resource M. Mark Stolarik Slovakia, Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003 pp. 172-198 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stolarik, M. Mark, 1943- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/05dfafdd202334bbd4ae128be709e595.pdf 3cff60302ef100432f5cf13ff2767e89 PDF Text Text REVIEWS ��SLOVAKIA 201 Stephen L. Crane, Survivor From An Unknown War: The Life of lsakjan Narzikul. Upland, PA.: Diane Publishing, 1999, 333pp. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN Tallahassee, Florida One of the most fundamental dilemmas confronting politically conscious individuals in East Central Europe during World War II was that of choosing between two evils: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. For the peoples of Soviet Central Asia, the choice was deceptively simple. They had never suffered under German domination , whereas Stalin's regime had abolished many aspects of their traditional way of life. Consequently, a Turkistani battalion served as part of the German Army and later the Nazi SS . The experiences of a Turkistani officer, Is.ikjan Narzikul, is the subject of the present work . lsakjan Nar1.ikul's boyhood offered every indication he would become a model Soviet citizen. Notwithstanding the Communist doctrine of international solidarity, at the military academy of Tashkent (predominately Russian in composition), Isakjan was treated as a member of a despised, dark-skinned minority. Yet he performed well , and was commissioned a lieutenant m the Red Army. During the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Isakjan was stationed in the Baltic territories, where he was captured. At this time a number of German military officers broke with Nazi racial ideology. They felt that, in order for Germany to win the war in the East, it was necessary to rally the Soviet peoples in a popular struggle against the Stalinist Soviet Union. Among the �202 SLOVAKJA various organizations sponsored in Berlin was the National Turkistani Unity Committee. Isakjan Narzikul became an adherent, and subseq uentl y an officer in the Turkistani battalion . This unit admitted and concealed the religious identity of Turkistan's Jewish co-nationals . Ironically, then , under Turkistani auspices, Jews served in the SS. The Turkistanis aided the Germans in the suppression of the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944. They conducted themselves with far less brutality toward s the civilians than did the Germans, although they were not averse to a certain amount of looting. From there they were transferred to Slovakia. The author did not mention that Slovakia experienced a full-fledged uprising in the autumn of 1944; he merely stated that the area was characterized by "partisan activity ." The Slovak National Uprising was formally crushed when the Germans captured the rebel center of Hanska Bystrica late in October. The Turkistanis did not arrive until December. Given the loot that they had acquired in Warsaw, and Slovakia's relative prosperity, it was initially an idyllic intervention . Isakjan's life underwent a dramatic change when his superior officer (who had a Ru ssian partisan girlfriend) decided to change sides once again. Only a few officers, including lsakjan, were consulted; the rank and file were shanghaied into the partisan movement. The Soviet officer who received them gave them the name Chapajcv group. It is worth noting here that a Chapajcv Brigade of partisans had previously been outstandingly active tn the Slovak uprising. The Turkistani gro up was largely decimated in a German ambush; Isakjan gathered together the survivors . He commanded a curious group of partisans, whose objectives did not include �SLOVAKIA 203 destroying railways , cutting communication wires, or ambushing German troops . Isakjan was concerned that its members simply survive. Eventually, they returned fire when the Germans fired upon them. But Isakjan 's most noteworthy accomplishment was winning the goodwill of the Slovak people. He maintained strict discipline over his unit in the village it occupied, punished an attempted rape, and was scrupulous in matters of requisition . Ultimately, he married a Slovak woman and overcame the distrust of his future father-in-law. After the war Isakjan became a Czechoslovak citizen. He was popular with the local Slovaks, who helped thwart Soviet efforts to deport him back to Turkistan . Eventually, however, Isakjan had to nee Czechoslovakia. He ultimately made his way to Philadelphia, where he worked hard and experienced a measure of success. He came to the attention of a local doctor, whose nephew , Stephen Crane, authored the present work . Survivor from an Unknown War suffers from several weaknesses . Crane is not a professional historian . He repeatedly refers to the Soviet intelligence/secret police apparatus as the KGB. During World War IL Soviet state security was referred to as the NKVD; KGB was not adopted as an acronym until 1964 . The book's index is virtually worthless. having numerous inaccuracies in page citations . In at least one instance it refers the reader to a blank page' Finally, when compared with other foreign groups which participated in the Slovak uprising (Frenchmen, Yugoslavs, Russians and Ukrainians) and non-Slovak nati vc groups (Jews and Roma), the participation or the Turkistanis was at best peripheral. None of this, however, detracts from Crane's poignant portrayal of a man who maintained his moral integrity under extremely adverse circumstances . The book also re11ccts favourably on the �204 SLOVAKJA Slovak people's sense of fair-play and hospitality during a particularly painful period in their hi story. Konstantin V. Lifanov, Jazyk duxovnoj literatury slovackich kato/ikov 16-18 vv. i kodifikacija A. Berno/aka. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 2000, I I 8pp . MARTIN VOTRUBA University of Pittsburgh During the early years of communism in the J95(fs, Slovak linguists - agreeing with their former Czech professors - wrote that literary Slovak was first codified in the 1780s by Anton Bernolak, a priest and zcman (lower nobleman) from Orava County. According to them, the written norm before Bernolak had been literary Czech, with varying degrees of regional Slovak influences. While insightful works about the development of the Slovak language as such had already been published by then , only limited research into its written norms prior to Bernolak was actually carried out earlier, or after that, and the assertions from the 1950s have been repeated since. Detailed analyses of the norms and standards did not reappear until the 1990s. Interestingly , they were done by linguists outside Slovakia: [ubomfr Durovic at the University of Lund, Sweden ; Mark Lauersdorf at Luther University, Iowa: and Konstantin Lifanov, at the M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University , Russia. In February of 2001 Moscow University published Lifanov ' s book on the language of Slovak Catholic ecclesiastical literature from the l 6th through the 18th centuries. During two decades of �SLOVAKJA 205 research in Slovak archives and libraries , Lifanov analyzed both printed and written texts that originated before Bernolak. Lifanov concluded that, contrary to earlier assumptions, Slovak authors have used a written standard separate from the written standard of Prague since the 16th century. The Kingdom of Bohemia, with its large Czech population , was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and as such was among the first areas in Central Europe to pick up on new trends from the West, including writing in the local vernacular instead of in Latin. The written standard that developed in Prag ue served as an influential model in the establishment of Polish writing, and was adopted outright by the Slovaks in the Kingdom of Hungary to the east of Bohemia in the 14th century. At that time Czech was closer to Slovak than it is now . However, prompted by the spread of Luther's reforms m the Kingdom of Hungary after the 1530s, the need to publish in the vernacular, rather than in Latin, grew and ongoing changes m the Czech written standard gradually ceased to be picked up by Slovak writers. They began to rely on their own traditions , first in religious writing, and later in administrative texts as well. The changes in the written standard involved both a retention of grammatical features originally adopted from Czech, which had become obsolete in the written standard of Prague, and an establishment of Slovak features in many instances where the two languages differed. By the 1610s a systematic written standard was in place in Slovakia, which was never used in Moravia or Bohemia. It was respected by authors regardless of their religious affiliation Catholic, or Lutheran. While Slovak linguists in the 1950s said that their written language had been subdivided into western, central and eastern varieties, Lifanov demonstrated that Slovak �SLOVAKIA 206 authors in the Kingdom of Hungary respected a single literary standard , which mainly relied on western Slovak features. According to Lifanov, Bcrnolak 's " manual of style" from the l 780s was not a new standardization , but a description and adjustment of the Slovak written standard that had been in place since the early 17th century. Only the Lutheran ecclesiastical writin g and poetry (but not many of their other texts) took a different path during the counter-Reformation , when their persec ution peaked . But the Lutherans did not use the contemporary Prague written standard either. Rather, they reverted to the archaic style of a Protestant translation of the Bible published in Moravia in the 1590s, whose lang uage had already been o bsolete for one or two ce nturies at the time of its publication . During empress Maria Theresa's re ig n in the 18th century, the close adherence to th e language of that tran slatio n of the Bible in their ' hig h literature' became an article of faith and religious survival for the Lutherans. Tradition made their descendants partial to the o bsolete style fo r several decades after emperor Joseph ll 's Edict of Toleration of 1781. Czec h and Slovak lin guists in the 20th century ge nerally reviewed only old high literature, and hig h literature was mos tl y written by the Lutheran intelligentsia. Moreover, Slovak and Czech have many common features. and the academics Czech and later their Slovak disciples - first took all the features that did not differ from Czech to be Czech, including in the vast num ber of instances when the features were the same in Slovak. To illustrate the approach in a theo retical example, if the features m a text were one-third Czech, one-third the same in Czech and Slovak , and one-third Slovak, the whole text would be seen as two-thirds, i.e. " in principle" Czech, rather than as two-third s �207 SLOVAKIA Slovak, or as open to both interpretations and subject to further analysis. Yet another reason for misidentification was that, by comparison to modem Slovak, west Slovak features, which used to be the main source of the Slovak written standard, are ofte n closer to Czech. That increased the like lihood that 20th-ce ntury linguists, not familiar with regional varieties of Slovak, dismissive of the possibility of their employment in the old written standard , or not s ufficiently th orough, would no t take account of them. It is worth noting that, although his research may no t converge with Lifanov 's, Durovic showed in a recent paper th at there indeed was a concept of a written standard before Bernolak 's manual of style. Bcmo lak drew o n a grammar book pub lished in Bratislava in the 1740s by Lutheran Pas tor Pavel Do lezal, who chastised his contemporaries for writing in their 18th century lang uage instead of using the archaic Biblical style. According to Lifanov, the pre-existin g Slovak written standard was established so well that even those who welcomed Bcrnolak 's manual of style often just appeared to respect it where Bcmolak 's codification agreed with the existing norm , but adhered to the traditional standard where Bcrnolak di verged from it. To sum up. Lifanov ·s research shows that the Slovaks ado pted the ir written norm from Prague in the 14th ce ntury. Slovak and Czech writing bifurcated after the 1530s, when the Slovaks began to ignore ongoing changes in Prag ue , and introduced Slovak innovations. A Slovak written standard had developed by the 1610s. Except for a reversal to an arc haic style limited to hi g h literature by Lutheran authors in the 18th and earl y 19th centuries, that written standard was used through its major reform by [udovft Stur in the middle of the 19th ce ntury. � REVIEWS ��SLOVAKIA 201 Stephen L. Crane, Survivor From An Unknown War: The Life of lsakjan Narzikul. Upland, PA.: Diane Publishing, 1999, 333pp. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN Tallahassee, Florida One of the most fundamental dilemmas confronting politically conscious individuals in East Central Europe during World War II was that of choosing between two evils: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. For the peoples of Soviet Central Asia, the choice was deceptively simple. They had never suffered under German domination , whereas Stalin's regime had abolished many aspects of their traditional way of life. Consequently, a Turkistani battalion served as part of the German Army and later the Nazi SS . The experiences of a Turkistani officer, Is.ikjan Narzikul, is the subject of the present work . lsakjan Nar1.ikul's boyhood offered every indication he would become a model Soviet citizen. Notwithstanding the Communist doctrine of international solidarity, at the military academy of Tashkent (predominately Russian in composition), Isakjan was treated as a member of a despised, dark-skinned minority. Yet he performed well , and was commissioned a lieutenant m the Red Army. During the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Isakjan was stationed in the Baltic territories, where he was captured. At this time a number of German military officers broke with Nazi racial ideology. They felt that, in order for Germany to win the war in the East, it was necessary to rally the Soviet peoples in a popular struggle against the Stalinist Soviet Union. Among the �202 SLOVAKJA various organizations sponsored in Berlin was the National Turkistani Unity Committee. Isakjan Narzikul became an adherent, and subseq uentl y an officer in the Turkistani battalion . This unit admitted and concealed the religious identity of Turkistan's Jewish co-nationals . Ironically, then , under Turkistani auspices, Jews served in the SS. The Turkistanis aided the Germans in the suppression of the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944. They conducted themselves with far less brutality toward s the civilians than did the Germans, although they were not averse to a certain amount of looting. From there they were transferred to Slovakia. The author did not mention that Slovakia experienced a full-fledged uprising in the autumn of 1944; he merely stated that the area was characterized by "partisan activity ." The Slovak National Uprising was formally crushed when the Germans captured the rebel center of Hanska Bystrica late in October. The Turkistanis did not arrive until December. Given the loot that they had acquired in Warsaw, and Slovakia's relative prosperity, it was initially an idyllic intervention . Isakjan's life underwent a dramatic change when his superior officer (who had a Ru ssian partisan girlfriend) decided to change sides once again. Only a few officers, including lsakjan, were consulted; the rank and file were shanghaied into the partisan movement. The Soviet officer who received them gave them the name Chapajcv group. It is worth noting here that a Chapajcv Brigade of partisans had previously been outstandingly active tn the Slovak uprising. The Turkistani gro up was largely decimated in a German ambush; Isakjan gathered together the survivors . He commanded a curious group of partisans, whose objectives did not include �SLOVAKIA 203 destroying railways , cutting communication wires, or ambushing German troops . Isakjan was concerned that its members simply survive. Eventually, they returned fire when the Germans fired upon them. But Isakjan 's most noteworthy accomplishment was winning the goodwill of the Slovak people. He maintained strict discipline over his unit in the village it occupied, punished an attempted rape, and was scrupulous in matters of requisition . Ultimately, he married a Slovak woman and overcame the distrust of his future father-in-law. After the war Isakjan became a Czechoslovak citizen. He was popular with the local Slovaks, who helped thwart Soviet efforts to deport him back to Turkistan . Eventually, however, Isakjan had to nee Czechoslovakia. He ultimately made his way to Philadelphia, where he worked hard and experienced a measure of success. He came to the attention of a local doctor, whose nephew , Stephen Crane, authored the present work . Survivor from an Unknown War suffers from several weaknesses . Crane is not a professional historian . He repeatedly refers to the Soviet intelligence/secret police apparatus as the KGB. During World War IL Soviet state security was referred to as the NKVD; KGB was not adopted as an acronym until 1964 . The book's index is virtually worthless. having numerous inaccuracies in page citations . In at least one instance it refers the reader to a blank page' Finally, when compared with other foreign groups which participated in the Slovak uprising (Frenchmen, Yugoslavs, Russians and Ukrainians) and non-Slovak nati vc groups (Jews and Roma), the participation or the Turkistanis was at best peripheral. None of this, however, detracts from Crane's poignant portrayal of a man who maintained his moral integrity under extremely adverse circumstances . The book also re11ccts favourably on the �204 SLOVAKJA Slovak people's sense of fair-play and hospitality during a particularly painful period in their hi story. Konstantin V. Lifanov, Jazyk duxovnoj literatury slovackich kato/ikov 16-18 vv. i kodifikacija A. Berno/aka. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 2000, I I 8pp . MARTIN VOTRUBA University of Pittsburgh During the early years of communism in the J95(fs, Slovak linguists - agreeing with their former Czech professors - wrote that literary Slovak was first codified in the 1780s by Anton Bernolak, a priest and zcman (lower nobleman) from Orava County. According to them, the written norm before Bernolak had been literary Czech, with varying degrees of regional Slovak influences. While insightful works about the development of the Slovak language as such had already been published by then , only limited research into its written norms prior to Bernolak was actually carried out earlier, or after that, and the assertions from the 1950s have been repeated since. Detailed analyses of the norms and standards did not reappear until the 1990s. Interestingly , they were done by linguists outside Slovakia: [ubomfr Durovic at the University of Lund, Sweden ; Mark Lauersdorf at Luther University, Iowa: and Konstantin Lifanov, at the M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University , Russia. In February of 2001 Moscow University published Lifanov ' s book on the language of Slovak Catholic ecclesiastical literature from the l 6th through the 18th centuries. During two decades of �SLOVAKJA 205 research in Slovak archives and libraries , Lifanov analyzed both printed and written texts that originated before Bernolak. Lifanov concluded that, contrary to earlier assumptions, Slovak authors have used a written standard separate from the written standard of Prague since the 16th century. The Kingdom of Bohemia, with its large Czech population , was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and as such was among the first areas in Central Europe to pick up on new trends from the West, including writing in the local vernacular instead of in Latin. The written standard that developed in Prag ue served as an influential model in the establishment of Polish writing, and was adopted outright by the Slovaks in the Kingdom of Hungary to the east of Bohemia in the 14th century. At that time Czech was closer to Slovak than it is now . However, prompted by the spread of Luther's reforms m the Kingdom of Hungary after the 1530s, the need to publish in the vernacular, rather than in Latin, grew and ongoing changes m the Czech written standard gradually ceased to be picked up by Slovak writers. They began to rely on their own traditions , first in religious writing, and later in administrative texts as well. The changes in the written standard involved both a retention of grammatical features originally adopted from Czech, which had become obsolete in the written standard of Prague, and an establishment of Slovak features in many instances where the two languages differed. By the 1610s a systematic written standard was in place in Slovakia, which was never used in Moravia or Bohemia. It was respected by authors regardless of their religious affiliation Catholic, or Lutheran. While Slovak linguists in the 1950s said that their written language had been subdivided into western, central and eastern varieties, Lifanov demonstrated that Slovak �SLOVAKIA 206 authors in the Kingdom of Hungary respected a single literary standard , which mainly relied on western Slovak features. According to Lifanov, Bcrnolak 's " manual of style" from the l 780s was not a new standardization , but a description and adjustment of the Slovak written standard that had been in place since the early 17th century. Only the Lutheran ecclesiastical writin g and poetry (but not many of their other texts) took a different path during the counter-Reformation , when their persec ution peaked . But the Lutherans did not use the contemporary Prague written standard either. Rather, they reverted to the archaic style of a Protestant translation of the Bible published in Moravia in the 1590s, whose lang uage had already been o bsolete for one or two ce nturies at the time of its publication . During empress Maria Theresa's re ig n in the 18th century, the close adherence to th e language of that tran slatio n of the Bible in their ' hig h literature' became an article of faith and religious survival for the Lutherans. Tradition made their descendants partial to the o bsolete style fo r several decades after emperor Joseph ll 's Edict of Toleration of 1781. Czec h and Slovak lin guists in the 20th century ge nerally reviewed only old high literature, and hig h literature was mos tl y written by the Lutheran intelligentsia. Moreover, Slovak and Czech have many common features. and the academics Czech and later their Slovak disciples - first took all the features that did not differ from Czech to be Czech, including in the vast num ber of instances when the features were the same in Slovak. To illustrate the approach in a theo retical example, if the features m a text were one-third Czech, one-third the same in Czech and Slovak , and one-third Slovak, the whole text would be seen as two-thirds, i.e. " in principle" Czech, rather than as two-third s �207 SLOVAKIA Slovak, or as open to both interpretations and subject to further analysis. Yet another reason for misidentification was that, by comparison to modem Slovak, west Slovak features, which used to be the main source of the Slovak written standard, are ofte n closer to Czech. That increased the like lihood that 20th-ce ntury linguists, not familiar with regional varieties of Slovak, dismissive of the possibility of their employment in the old written standard , or not s ufficiently th orough, would no t take account of them. It is worth noting that, although his research may no t converge with Lifanov 's, Durovic showed in a recent paper th at there indeed was a concept of a written standard before Bernolak 's manual of style. Bcmo lak drew o n a grammar book pub lished in Bratislava in the 1740s by Lutheran Pas tor Pavel Do lezal, who chastised his contemporaries for writing in their 18th century lang uage instead of using the archaic Biblical style. According to Lifanov, the pre-existin g Slovak written standard was established so well that even those who welcomed Bcrnolak 's manual of style often just appeared to respect it where Bcmolak 's codification agreed with the existing norm , but adhered to the traditional standard where Bcrnolak di verged from it. To sum up. Lifanov ·s research shows that the Slovaks ado pted the ir written norm from Prague in the 14th ce ntury. Slovak and Czech writing bifurcated after the 1530s, when the Slovaks began to ignore ongoing changes in Prag ue , and introduced Slovak innovations. A Slovak written standard had developed by the 1610s. Except for a reversal to an arc haic style limited to hi g h literature by Lutheran authors in the 18th and earl y 19th centuries, that written standard was used through its major reform by [udovft Stur in the middle of the 19th ce ntury. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2003, Vol. 37 Description An account of the resource Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document REVIEWS SLOVAKIA 201 Stephen L. Crane, Survivor From An Unknown War: The Life of lsakjan Narzikul. Upland, PA.: Diane Publishing, 1999, 333pp. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN Tallahassee, Florida One of the most fundamental dilemmas confronting politically conscious individuals in East Central Europe during World War II was that of choosing between two evils: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. For the peoples of Soviet Central Asia, the choice was deceptively simple. They had never suffered under German domination , whereas Stalin's regime had abolished many aspects of their traditional way of life. Consequently, a Turkistani battalion served as part of the German Army and later the Nazi SS . The experiences of a Turkistani officer, Is.ikjan Narzikul, is the subject of the present work . lsakjan Nar1.ikul's boyhood offered every indication he would become a model Soviet citizen. Notwithstanding the Communist doctrine of international solidarity, at the military academy of Tashkent (predominately Russian in composition), Isakjan was treated as a member of a despised, dark-skinned minority. Yet he performed well , and was commissioned a lieutenant m the Red Army. During the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Isakjan was stationed in the Baltic territories, where he was captured. At this time a number of German military officers broke with Nazi racial ideology. They felt that, in order for Germany to win the war in the East, it was necessary to rally the Soviet peoples in a popular struggle against the Stalinist Soviet Union. Among the 202 SLOVAKJA various organizations sponsored in Berlin was the National Turkistani Unity Committee. Isakjan Narzikul became an adherent, and subseq uentl y an officer in the Turkistani battalion . This unit admitted and concealed the religious identity of Turkistan's Jewish co-nationals . Ironically, then , under Turkistani auspices, Jews served in the SS. The Turkistanis aided the Germans in the suppression of the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944. They conducted themselves with far less brutality toward s the civilians than did the Germans, although they were not averse to a certain amount of looting. From there they were transferred to Slovakia. The author did not mention that Slovakia experienced a full-fledged uprising in the autumn of 1944; he merely stated that the area was characterized by "partisan activity ." The Slovak National Uprising was formally crushed when the Germans captured the rebel center of Hanska Bystrica late in October. The Turkistanis did not arrive until December. Given the loot that they had acquired in Warsaw, and Slovakia's relative prosperity, it was initially an idyllic intervention . Isakjan's life underwent a dramatic change when his superior officer (who had a Ru ssian partisan girlfriend) decided to change sides once again. Only a few officers, including lsakjan, were consulted; the rank and file were shanghaied into the partisan movement. The Soviet officer who received them gave them the name Chapajcv group. It is worth noting here that a Chapajcv Brigade of partisans had previously been outstandingly active tn the Slovak uprising. The Turkistani gro up was largely decimated in a German ambush; Isakjan gathered together the survivors . He commanded a curious group of partisans, whose objectives did not include SLOVAKIA 203 destroying railways , cutting communication wires, or ambushing German troops . Isakjan was concerned that its members simply survive. Eventually, they returned fire when the Germans fired upon them. But Isakjan 's most noteworthy accomplishment was winning the goodwill of the Slovak people. He maintained strict discipline over his unit in the village it occupied, punished an attempted rape, and was scrupulous in matters of requisition . Ultimately, he married a Slovak woman and overcame the distrust of his future father-in-law. After the war Isakjan became a Czechoslovak citizen. He was popular with the local Slovaks, who helped thwart Soviet efforts to deport him back to Turkistan . Eventually, however, Isakjan had to nee Czechoslovakia. He ultimately made his way to Philadelphia, where he worked hard and experienced a measure of success. He came to the attention of a local doctor, whose nephew , Stephen Crane, authored the present work . Survivor from an Unknown War suffers from several weaknesses . Crane is not a professional historian . He repeatedly refers to the Soviet intelligence/secret police apparatus as the KGB. During World War IL Soviet state security was referred to as the NKVD; KGB was not adopted as an acronym until 1964 . The book's index is virtually worthless. having numerous inaccuracies in page citations . In at least one instance it refers the reader to a blank page' Finally, when compared with other foreign groups which participated in the Slovak uprising (Frenchmen, Yugoslavs, Russians and Ukrainians) and non-Slovak nati vc groups (Jews and Roma), the participation or the Turkistanis was at best peripheral. None of this, however, detracts from Crane's poignant portrayal of a man who maintained his moral integrity under extremely adverse circumstances . The book also re11ccts favourably on the 204 SLOVAKJA Slovak people's sense of fair-play and hospitality during a particularly painful period in their hi story. Konstantin V. Lifanov, Jazyk duxovnoj literatury slovackich kato/ikov 16-18 vv. i kodifikacija A. Berno/aka. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 2000, I I 8pp . MARTIN VOTRUBA University of Pittsburgh During the early years of communism in the J95(fs, Slovak linguists - agreeing with their former Czech professors - wrote that literary Slovak was first codified in the 1780s by Anton Bernolak, a priest and zcman (lower nobleman) from Orava County. According to them, the written norm before Bernolak had been literary Czech, with varying degrees of regional Slovak influences. While insightful works about the development of the Slovak language as such had already been published by then , only limited research into its written norms prior to Bernolak was actually carried out earlier, or after that, and the assertions from the 1950s have been repeated since. Detailed analyses of the norms and standards did not reappear until the 1990s. Interestingly , they were done by linguists outside Slovakia: [ubomfr Durovic at the University of Lund, Sweden ; Mark Lauersdorf at Luther University, Iowa: and Konstantin Lifanov, at the M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University , Russia. In February of 2001 Moscow University published Lifanov ' s book on the language of Slovak Catholic ecclesiastical literature from the l 6th through the 18th centuries. During two decades of SLOVAKJA 205 research in Slovak archives and libraries , Lifanov analyzed both printed and written texts that originated before Bernolak. Lifanov concluded that, contrary to earlier assumptions, Slovak authors have used a written standard separate from the written standard of Prague since the 16th century. The Kingdom of Bohemia, with its large Czech population , was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and as such was among the first areas in Central Europe to pick up on new trends from the West, including writing in the local vernacular instead of in Latin. The written standard that developed in Prag ue served as an influential model in the establishment of Polish writing, and was adopted outright by the Slovaks in the Kingdom of Hungary to the east of Bohemia in the 14th century. At that time Czech was closer to Slovak than it is now . However, prompted by the spread of Luther's reforms m the Kingdom of Hungary after the 1530s, the need to publish in the vernacular, rather than in Latin, grew and ongoing changes m the Czech written standard gradually ceased to be picked up by Slovak writers. They began to rely on their own traditions , first in religious writing, and later in administrative texts as well. The changes in the written standard involved both a retention of grammatical features originally adopted from Czech, which had become obsolete in the written standard of Prague, and an establishment of Slovak features in many instances where the two languages differed. By the 1610s a systematic written standard was in place in Slovakia, which was never used in Moravia or Bohemia. It was respected by authors regardless of their religious affiliation Catholic, or Lutheran. While Slovak linguists in the 1950s said that their written language had been subdivided into western, central and eastern varieties, Lifanov demonstrated that Slovak SLOVAKIA 206 authors in the Kingdom of Hungary respected a single literary standard , which mainly relied on western Slovak features. According to Lifanov, Bcrnolak 's " manual of style" from the l 780s was not a new standardization , but a description and adjustment of the Slovak written standard that had been in place since the early 17th century. Only the Lutheran ecclesiastical writin g and poetry (but not many of their other texts) took a different path during the counter-Reformation , when their persec ution peaked . But the Lutherans did not use the contemporary Prague written standard either. Rather, they reverted to the archaic style of a Protestant translation of the Bible published in Moravia in the 1590s, whose lang uage had already been o bsolete for one or two ce nturies at the time of its publication . During empress Maria Theresa's re ig n in the 18th century, the close adherence to th e language of that tran slatio n of the Bible in their ' hig h literature' became an article of faith and religious survival for the Lutherans. Tradition made their descendants partial to the o bsolete style fo r several decades after emperor Joseph ll 's Edict of Toleration of 1781. Czec h and Slovak lin guists in the 20th century ge nerally reviewed only old high literature, and hig h literature was mos tl y written by the Lutheran intelligentsia. Moreover, Slovak and Czech have many common features. and the academics Czech and later their Slovak disciples - first took all the features that did not differ from Czech to be Czech, including in the vast num ber of instances when the features were the same in Slovak. To illustrate the approach in a theo retical example, if the features m a text were one-third Czech, one-third the same in Czech and Slovak , and one-third Slovak, the whole text would be seen as two-thirds, i.e. " in principle" Czech, rather than as two-third s 207 SLOVAKIA Slovak, or as open to both interpretations and subject to further analysis. Yet another reason for misidentification was that, by comparison to modem Slovak, west Slovak features, which used to be the main source of the Slovak written standard, are ofte n closer to Czech. That increased the like lihood that 20th-ce ntury linguists, not familiar with regional varieties of Slovak, dismissive of the possibility of their employment in the old written standard , or not s ufficiently th orough, would no t take account of them. It is worth noting that, although his research may no t converge with Lifanov 's, Durovic showed in a recent paper th at there indeed was a concept of a written standard before Bernolak 's manual of style. Bcmo lak drew o n a grammar book pub lished in Bratislava in the 1740s by Lutheran Pas tor Pavel Do lezal, who chastised his contemporaries for writing in their 18th century lang uage instead of using the archaic Biblical style. According to Lifanov, the pre-existin g Slovak written standard was established so well that even those who welcomed Bcrnolak 's manual of style often just appeared to respect it where Bcmolak 's codification agreed with the existing norm , but adhered to the traditional standard where Bcrnolak di verged from it. To sum up. Lifanov ·s research shows that the Slovaks ado pted the ir written norm from Prague in the 14th ce ntury. Slovak and Czech writing bifurcated after the 1530s, when the Slovaks began to ignore ongoing changes in Prag ue , and introduced Slovak innovations. A Slovak written standard had developed by the 1610s. Except for a reversal to an arc haic style limited to hi g h literature by Lutheran authors in the 18th and earl y 19th centuries, that written standard was used through its major reform by [udovft Stur in the middle of the 19th ce ntury.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Book Reviews, Slovakia, Vol. 37 (No. 68-69) Description An account of the resource includes:<br /><ul><li>Stephen L. Crane, Survivor From An Unknown War: The Life of Isakjan Narzikul (Vladimír Baumgarten), p. 201</li> <li>Konstantin V. Lifanov, Jazyk duxovnoj literatury slovackich katolikov 16-18 vv. i kodifikacija A. Bernolaka (Martin Votruba), p. 204</li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Baumgarten, R. Vladimir Votruba, Martin Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 LCNAF name https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/5a2fafd7139eef1d2eec0d44618b498c.pdf 7887d46da9598e2b36037e9965fb5875 PDF Text Text 208 SLOVAKIA CONTRIBUTORS JAMES R. FELAK is Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington. He is the author of 'At the Price of the Republic': Hlinka 's Slovak People's Party, 1929-/938 (Pittsburgh , 1994) which won the 1996 Slovak Studies Association Prize, as well as the Orbis Prize of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. He has al so published many articles in scholarly journals. He specializes in the history of East Central Europe in the 20th century, with a focus on nationalism, communism, and religion. JAN CARNOGURSKY was Slovakia's leading Catholic dissident in the era of 'Normalization ' ( 1969-1989). As an attor- ney he defended fellow -dissidents in communist courts , and , from 1980 on , he published the underground newspaper Bratislavskc listy. Freed from jail during the 'Velvet Revolution' of 1989, Carnog ursky was propelled to the position of Deputy Prime Minister o f the non-communist federal government. He founded and Chaired (until 2002) the Christian Democratic Movement in the spring of 1990. After the June, 1990 elections Carnogursky became Deputy Prime Minister of the Slovak government and in the spring of I 991 Prime Minister. After the June, 1992 elections he was a Member of Parliament in opposition to the Meciar government. After the 1998 elections he served as Minister of Justice in the Dzurinda government active politics in September of 2002 . until his retirement from �SLOVAKIA 209 PAAL SIGURD HILDE is a doctoral candidate at St. Anthony ' s College, Oxford University . He is writing his dissertation on Slovak nationalism after the collapse of Communism and has published "Slovak Nationalism and the Breakup of Czechoslovakia" . Europe-Asia Studies, 5 (No.2, 1998), 54 7-65. SUSUMU NAGA YO is Associate Professor of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has published numerous articles about the Slovak language, literature, history and politics in Japanese, Slovak and American sc holarly journals. He is fluent in Russ ian and Slovak and also teaches those languages at his university . M. MARK STOLARIK is Professor of Hi story and holder of the Chair in Slovak History and Culture at the University of Ottawa. He specializes in the history of Slovak immigration to North America and has published many books and articles in the field. including Growing Up on the South Side: Three Genera- tions of Slovaks in Bethlehem. Pennsylvania. I 880-1976 (1985) and I111111igration a11(/ Urbani7.ation : The Slovak Experience. I 870- I 9 / 8 ( 1989). MARTIN VOTRUBA 1s Director of the Slovak Studies Programme in the Slavic Department of the University of Pittsburgh. He teaches courses in Slovak lan g uage , literature, film. and history. In the past he worked for Radio Free Europe and is still its U.S. correspondent. �210 SLOVAKIA GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts for poss ible publication sho uld be sent to th e editor. Articles sho uld not normally exceed twenty-five pages in length, should be submitted in duplicate and typed double -s paced, with generou s margins for copy-editing. Footnotes shou ld be numbered , entered consecutively and placed at the end of the paper. A copy of the paper s ho uld also be submitted on a flopp y disc, either in WordPerfect or MicrosoftWord format. Text and format should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. Proper orthography and diacritical marks mu st be s upplied for all foreign words . Manuscripts will no t be returned unless specifically requested and postage is provided. Books for review arc to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book reviews are not encouraged . Individuals who wish to review books should request th e m from the editor . ��THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA Organized in 1907 Dr. LUDWIG J. PAVLO President W. NINA HOLY Secretary-Treasurer Vice-presidents: MIKULAS BENO ANNE Z. SAROSY JUSTINE WESNAK Executive Board: Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, W. Nina Holy, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner, Daniel F. Tanzone, Dr. John Karch, John A Holy, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., Thomas M. Hricik, Sue Ann M. Seich, Rita M. Simalchik, David G. Balzek, Frank Rudzik Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $10.00 per issue � 208 SLOVAKIA CONTRIBUTORS JAMES R. FELAK is Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington. He is the author of 'At the Price of the Republic': Hlinka 's Slovak People's Party, 1929-/938 (Pittsburgh , 1994) which won the 1996 Slovak Studies Association Prize, as well as the Orbis Prize of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. He has al so published many articles in scholarly journals. He specializes in the history of East Central Europe in the 20th century, with a focus on nationalism, communism, and religion. JAN CARNOGURSKY was Slovakia's leading Catholic dissident in the era of 'Normalization ' ( 1969-1989). As an attor- ney he defended fellow -dissidents in communist courts , and , from 1980 on , he published the underground newspaper Bratislavskc listy. Freed from jail during the 'Velvet Revolution' of 1989, Carnog ursky was propelled to the position of Deputy Prime Minister o f the non-communist federal government. He founded and Chaired (until 2002) the Christian Democratic Movement in the spring of 1990. After the June, 1990 elections Carnogursky became Deputy Prime Minister of the Slovak government and in the spring of I 991 Prime Minister. After the June, 1992 elections he was a Member of Parliament in opposition to the Meciar government. After the 1998 elections he served as Minister of Justice in the Dzurinda government active politics in September of 2002 . until his retirement from �SLOVAKIA 209 PAAL SIGURD HILDE is a doctoral candidate at St. Anthony ' s College, Oxford University . He is writing his dissertation on Slovak nationalism after the collapse of Communism and has published "Slovak Nationalism and the Breakup of Czechoslovakia" . Europe-Asia Studies, 5 (No.2, 1998), 54 7-65. SUSUMU NAGA YO is Associate Professor of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has published numerous articles about the Slovak language, literature, history and politics in Japanese, Slovak and American sc holarly journals. He is fluent in Russ ian and Slovak and also teaches those languages at his university . M. MARK STOLARIK is Professor of Hi story and holder of the Chair in Slovak History and Culture at the University of Ottawa. He specializes in the history of Slovak immigration to North America and has published many books and articles in the field. including Growing Up on the South Side: Three Genera- tions of Slovaks in Bethlehem. Pennsylvania. I 880-1976 (1985) and I111111igration a11(/ Urbani7.ation : The Slovak Experience. I 870- I 9 / 8 ( 1989). MARTIN VOTRUBA 1s Director of the Slovak Studies Programme in the Slavic Department of the University of Pittsburgh. He teaches courses in Slovak lan g uage , literature, film. and history. In the past he worked for Radio Free Europe and is still its U.S. correspondent. �210 SLOVAKIA GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts for poss ible publication sho uld be sent to th e editor. Articles sho uld not normally exceed twenty-five pages in length, should be submitted in duplicate and typed double -s paced, with generou s margins for copy-editing. Footnotes shou ld be numbered , entered consecutively and placed at the end of the paper. A copy of the paper s ho uld also be submitted on a flopp y disc, either in WordPerfect or MicrosoftWord format. Text and format should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. Proper orthography and diacritical marks mu st be s upplied for all foreign words . Manuscripts will no t be returned unless specifically requested and postage is provided. Books for review arc to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book reviews are not encouraged . Individuals who wish to review books should request th e m from the editor . ��THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA Organized in 1907 Dr. LUDWIG J. PAVLO President W. NINA HOLY Secretary-Treasurer Vice-presidents: MIKULAS BENO ANNE Z. SAROSY JUSTINE WESNAK Executive Board: Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, W. Nina Holy, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner, Daniel F. Tanzone, Dr. John Karch, John A Holy, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., Thomas M. Hricik, Sue Ann M. Seich, Rita M. Simalchik, David G. Balzek, Frank Rudzik Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $10.00 per issue � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 2003, Vol. 37 Description An account of the resource Vol. 37 (No. 68-69), 2003. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 208 SLOVAKIA CONTRIBUTORS JAMES R. FELAK is Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington. He is the author of 'At the Price of the Republic': Hlinka 's Slovak People's Party, 1929-/938 (Pittsburgh , 1994) which won the 1996 Slovak Studies Association Prize, as well as the Orbis Prize of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. He has al so published many articles in scholarly journals. He specializes in the history of East Central Europe in the 20th century, with a focus on nationalism, communism, and religion. JAN CARNOGURSKY was Slovakia's leading Catholic dissident in the era of 'Normalization ' ( 1969-1989). As an attor- ney he defended fellow -dissidents in communist courts , and , from 1980 on , he published the underground newspaper Bratislavskc listy. Freed from jail during the 'Velvet Revolution' of 1989, Carnog ursky was propelled to the position of Deputy Prime Minister o f the non-communist federal government. He founded and Chaired (until 2002) the Christian Democratic Movement in the spring of 1990. After the June, 1990 elections Carnogursky became Deputy Prime Minister of the Slovak government and in the spring of I 991 Prime Minister. After the June, 1992 elections he was a Member of Parliament in opposition to the Meciar government. After the 1998 elections he served as Minister of Justice in the Dzurinda government active politics in September of 2002 . until his retirement from SLOVAKIA 209 PAAL SIGURD HILDE is a doctoral candidate at St. Anthony ' s College, Oxford University . He is writing his dissertation on Slovak nationalism after the collapse of Communism and has published "Slovak Nationalism and the Breakup of Czechoslovakia" . Europe-Asia Studies, 5 (No.2, 1998), 54 7-65. SUSUMU NAGA YO is Associate Professor of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has published numerous articles about the Slovak language, literature, history and politics in Japanese, Slovak and American sc holarly journals. He is fluent in Russ ian and Slovak and also teaches those languages at his university . M. MARK STOLARIK is Professor of Hi story and holder of the Chair in Slovak History and Culture at the University of Ottawa. He specializes in the history of Slovak immigration to North America and has published many books and articles in the field. including Growing Up on the South Side: Three Genera- tions of Slovaks in Bethlehem. Pennsylvania. I 880-1976 (1985) and I111111igration a11(/ Urbani7.ation : The Slovak Experience. I 870- I 9 / 8 ( 1989). MARTIN VOTRUBA 1s Director of the Slovak Studies Programme in the Slavic Department of the University of Pittsburgh. He teaches courses in Slovak lan g uage , literature, film. and history. In the past he worked for Radio Free Europe and is still its U.S. correspondent. 210 SLOVAKIA GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts for poss ible publication sho uld be sent to th e editor. Articles sho uld not normally exceed twenty-five pages in length, should be submitted in duplicate and typed double -s paced, with generou s margins for copy-editing. Footnotes shou ld be numbered , entered consecutively and placed at the end of the paper. A copy of the paper s ho uld also be submitted on a flopp y disc, either in WordPerfect or MicrosoftWord format. Text and format should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. Proper orthography and diacritical marks mu st be s upplied for all foreign words . Manuscripts will no t be returned unless specifically requested and postage is provided. Books for review arc to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book reviews are not encouraged . Individuals who wish to review books should request th e m from the editor . THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA Organized in 1907 Dr. LUDWIG J. PAVLO President W. NINA HOLY Secretary-Treasurer Vice-presidents: MIKULAS BENO ANNE Z. SAROSY JUSTINE WESNAK Executive Board: Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, W. Nina Holy, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner, Daniel F. Tanzone, Dr. John Karch, John A Holy, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., Thomas M. Hricik, Sue Ann M. Seich, Rita M. Simalchik, David G. Balzek, Frank Rudzik Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $10.00 per issue  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Back Matter, Slovakia, Vol. 37 (No. 68-69) Description An account of the resource includes Contributors; Guidelines for Manuscripts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/d56fd6074c3661cf914ed03573d66881.pdf 5ce335b13322a29391c25ad02763435a PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA ��SLOVAKIA VOLUME XXXVI NUMBERS 66-67 1998 A scholarly annual devot ed to the history, literature, and culture o f the Slovaks the world over. Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ott awa Editorial Board ...{)A YID P. DANIEL Slovak Academic Informatio n Agency MICHAEL NOVAK American Enterprise Institute ROBERT K. EV ANSON University of Missouri PETER PETRO University of British Columbia LOUISE B. HAMMER Indiana University NORMAL. RUDINSKY Oregon State University Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Madison Str. Passaic, NJ 07055 Inquiries regarding subscriptions should be sent to the above address. The cost of a single issue is U.S. $8.00 Manuscripts for possible publication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia, 22 Bren- Maur Road, Nepean, Ontario, Canada K2J 3Z7. ��Table of Contents ARTICLES Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in North America: An Overview (18831993) M. Mark Stolarik .... .. ... .... .......... .. ... .. ... ... ........ .... ...... ...... .... .. ....... ... 7 The Roma of Slovakia Since 1939 David M. Crowe ..... ... .... ............ ......... .. ...... .... ...... ... .. ....... .... .... .. .. 26 Reflections on the Downfall of Communism and the Transition to Capitalism......_ Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec ...... .... ................ .. ............. .. .... ... ..... 56 The Battle Over Presidential Power in Slovakia Spencer tifcak ........ ...... .... ............ ............ ... ..... ..... .... ...... .. ........... 70 The Cleveland and Pittsburgh Documents Stanislav J. Kirschbaum ....... ..... .. ....... ........ .. ...... .. .. .... .. ..... .... ........ . 81 Une oraison de messe: monument culture! europeen Stefan Polako vic ..... ..... ....................... .. ......... ... ...... ..... ..... ..... ...... . 98 REVIEWS Paul R. Magocsi, Historical A das of East Central Europe George J. Demko ... .. ..... ... ... ... .. ... ............ ........ ...... ..... .. ..... .......... . 119 Anton Spiesz, Dejiny Slovenska na ceste k sebauvedomeniu Gregory C. Ference .. .. .......... .... .... .. ... ............ ..... ....... ................. .. 121 Richard Marsina a kolektfv, Slovenske dejiny R . Vladimir Baumgarten ... ..................... .. ... ...................... ....... ..... 123 �4 SLOVAKIA Katarfna Sultrajerova, comp., Najstarsie rody na Slovensku Duncan B . Gardiner .... .... ...... .. .... ...... .... ... .... .... ..... ...... .. ... ....... .... . 125 Emil Krapka and Vojtech Mikula, eds., Dejiny Spolocnosti Jeiisovej na Slovensku Gerald J. Sabo ... .... ....... ........ ....... .... .... ........ ... .. ... .. .. ........ .... .. .. .. . 129 James Felak, "A t the Price of the Republic." Hlinka ' s Slovak People's Party Stanislav J. Kirschbaum ............ ....... .. ........ .... .......... .... .... ... ........ . 13 I Jiff Hochman, ed., Hope Dies Last: The Autobiogra[Xly of Alexander Dubcek Robert K. Evanson .................. .. .. ... ........ .. .. .......... ................... ... . 134 Paul R. Magocsi, The Rusyns of Slovakia Keith P. Dyrud .............. ........ ... .......... .. ..... ..... .... ...... ......... ...... ... 140 Ann L. Pawliczko, ed., Ukraine and Ukrainians Throughout the World Paul R. Magocsi .. ..... .... .. .... ... .... ... .... .. .... .... .... .......... .... .. .... ... .... . 142 Nina Trnka, Slovak-English/English-Slovak Dictionary John M . Kochik ......................... ... .... ........ .. ........ ...... ..... ......... .... 144 Contributors ... .. .... ... .... ........ ............. ............ ... .... .... ......... .......... .1 - .. 148 Guidelines for Manuscripts ...... ......... .. .. ........ .. ...... ......................... ...... 150 �ARTICLES �� SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA ��SLOVAKIA VOLUME XXXVI NUMBERS 66-67 1998 A scholarly annual devot ed to the history, literature, and culture o f the Slovaks the world over. Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ott awa Editorial Board ...{)A YID P. DANIEL Slovak Academic Informatio n Agency MICHAEL NOVAK American Enterprise Institute ROBERT K. EV ANSON University of Missouri PETER PETRO University of British Columbia LOUISE B. HAMMER Indiana University NORMAL. RUDINSKY Oregon State University Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Madison Str. Passaic, NJ 07055 Inquiries regarding subscriptions should be sent to the above address. The cost of a single issue is U.S. $8.00 Manuscripts for possible publication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia, 22 Bren- Maur Road, Nepean, Ontario, Canada K2J 3Z7. ��Table of Contents ARTICLES Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in North America: An Overview (18831993) M. Mark Stolarik .... .. ... .... .......... .. ... .. ... ... ........ .... ...... ...... .... .. ....... ... 7 The Roma of Slovakia Since 1939 David M. Crowe ..... ... .... ............ ......... .. ...... .... ...... ... .. ....... .... .... .. .. 26 Reflections on the Downfall of Communism and the Transition to Capitalism......_ Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec ...... .... ................ .. ............. .. .... ... ..... 56 The Battle Over Presidential Power in Slovakia Spencer tifcak ........ ...... .... ............ ............ ... ..... ..... .... ...... .. ........... 70 The Cleveland and Pittsburgh Documents Stanislav J. Kirschbaum ....... ..... .. ....... ........ .. ...... .. .. .... .. ..... .... ........ . 81 Une oraison de messe: monument culture! europeen Stefan Polako vic ..... ..... ....................... .. ......... ... ...... ..... ..... ..... ...... . 98 REVIEWS Paul R. Magocsi, Historical A das of East Central Europe George J. Demko ... .. ..... ... ... ... .. ... ............ ........ ...... ..... .. ..... .......... . 119 Anton Spiesz, Dejiny Slovenska na ceste k sebauvedomeniu Gregory C. Ference .. .. .......... .... .... .. ... ............ ..... ....... ................. .. 121 Richard Marsina a kolektfv, Slovenske dejiny R . Vladimir Baumgarten ... ..................... .. ... ...................... ....... ..... 123 �4 SLOVAKIA Katarfna Sultrajerova, comp., Najstarsie rody na Slovensku Duncan B . Gardiner .... .... ...... .. .... ...... .... ... .... .... ..... ...... .. ... ....... .... . 125 Emil Krapka and Vojtech Mikula, eds., Dejiny Spolocnosti Jeiisovej na Slovensku Gerald J. Sabo ... .... ....... ........ ....... .... .... ........ ... .. ... .. .. ........ .... .. .. .. . 129 James Felak, "A t the Price of the Republic." Hlinka ' s Slovak People's Party Stanislav J. Kirschbaum ............ ....... .. ........ .... .......... .... .... ... ........ . 13 I Jiff Hochman, ed., Hope Dies Last: The Autobiogra[Xly of Alexander Dubcek Robert K. Evanson .................. .. .. ... ........ .. .. .......... ................... ... . 134 Paul R. Magocsi, The Rusyns of Slovakia Keith P. Dyrud .............. ........ ... .......... .. ..... ..... .... ...... ......... ...... ... 140 Ann L. Pawliczko, ed., Ukraine and Ukrainians Throughout the World Paul R. Magocsi .. ..... .... .. .... ... .... ... .... .. .... .... .... .......... .... .. .... ... .... . 142 Nina Trnka, Slovak-English/English-Slovak Dictionary John M . Kochik ......................... ... .... ........ .. ........ ...... ..... ......... .... 144 Contributors ... .. .... ... .... ........ ............. ............ ... .... .... ......... .......... .1 - .. 148 Guidelines for Manuscripts ...... ......... .. .. ........ .. ...... ......................... ...... 150 �ARTICLES �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1998, Vol. 36 Description An account of the resource Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA SLOVAKIA VOLUME XXXVI NUMBERS 66-67 1998 A scholarly annual devot ed to the history, literature, and culture o f the Slovaks the world over. Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ott awa Editorial Board ...{)A YID P. DANIEL Slovak Academic Informatio n Agency MICHAEL NOVAK American Enterprise Institute ROBERT K. EV ANSON University of Missouri PETER PETRO University of British Columbia LOUISE B. HAMMER Indiana University NORMAL. RUDINSKY Oregon State University Publisher Slovak League of America 205 Madison Str. Passaic, NJ 07055 Inquiries regarding subscriptions should be sent to the above address. The cost of a single issue is U.S. $8.00 Manuscripts for possible publication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia, 22 Bren- Maur Road, Nepean, Ontario, Canada K2J 3Z7. Table of Contents ARTICLES Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in North America: An Overview (18831993) M. Mark Stolarik .... .. ... .... .......... .. ... .. ... ... ........ .... ...... ...... .... .. ....... ... 7 The Roma of Slovakia Since 1939 David M. Crowe ..... ... .... ............ ......... .. ...... .... ...... ... .. ....... .... .... .. .. 26 Reflections on the Downfall of Communism and the Transition to Capitalism......_ Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec ...... .... ................ .. ............. .. .... ... ..... 56 The Battle Over Presidential Power in Slovakia Spencer tifcak ........ ...... .... ............ ............ ... ..... ..... .... ...... .. ........... 70 The Cleveland and Pittsburgh Documents Stanislav J. Kirschbaum ....... ..... .. ....... ........ .. ...... .. .. .... .. ..... .... ........ . 81 Une oraison de messe: monument culture! europeen Stefan Polako vic ..... ..... ....................... .. ......... ... ...... ..... ..... ..... ...... . 98 REVIEWS Paul R. Magocsi, Historical A das of East Central Europe George J. Demko ... .. ..... ... ... ... .. ... ............ ........ ...... ..... .. ..... .......... . 119 Anton Spiesz, Dejiny Slovenska na ceste k sebauvedomeniu Gregory C. Ference .. .. .......... .... .... .. ... ............ ..... ....... ................. .. 121 Richard Marsina a kolektfv, Slovenske dejiny R . Vladimir Baumgarten ... ..................... .. ... ...................... ....... ..... 123 4 SLOVAKIA Katarfna Sultrajerova, comp., Najstarsie rody na Slovensku Duncan B . Gardiner .... .... ...... .. .... ...... .... ... .... .... ..... ...... .. ... ....... .... . 125 Emil Krapka and Vojtech Mikula, eds., Dejiny Spolocnosti Jeiisovej na Slovensku Gerald J. Sabo ... .... ....... ........ ....... .... .... ........ ... .. ... .. .. ........ .... .. .. .. . 129 James Felak, "A t the Price of the Republic." Hlinka ' s Slovak People's Party Stanislav J. Kirschbaum ............ ....... .. ........ .... .......... .... .... ... ........ . 13 I Jiff Hochman, ed., Hope Dies Last: The Autobiogra[Xly of Alexander Dubcek Robert K. Evanson .................. .. .. ... ........ .. .. .......... ................... ... . 134 Paul R. Magocsi, The Rusyns of Slovakia Keith P. Dyrud .............. ........ ... .......... .. ..... ..... .... ...... ......... ...... ... 140 Ann L. Pawliczko, ed., Ukraine and Ukrainians Throughout the World Paul R. Magocsi .. ..... .... .. .... ... .... ... .... .. .... .... .... .......... .... .. .... ... .... . 142 Nina Trnka, Slovak-English/English-Slovak Dictionary John M . Kochik ......................... ... .... ........ .. ........ ...... ..... ......... .... 144 Contributors ... .. .... ... .... ........ ............. ............ ... .... .... ......... .......... .1 - .. 148 Guidelines for Manuscripts ...... ......... .. .. ........ .. ...... ......................... ...... 150 ARTICLES  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Front Matter, Slovakia, Vol. 36 (No. 66-67) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/331321884c9f55aa84206b61ad4f3cc0.pdf 64fa100b538c3e122102ada6133bffb9 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 7 Slovak FraternalBenefit Societies in North America: An Overview (1883-1993) M. Mark Stolarik (Conference on The Development and Significance of the Fraternal Movement and Fraternal Organizations Among Immigrants in North and South America and Europe, Maribor, Slovenia, May, 1994) In a book of essays that set out to explore how ethnic groups have used the principles of collectivism to deal with their new life in America, Scott Cummings lamented that "Relatively little has been written about self-help institutions and mutual benefit societies created by immigrant groups." 1 When applied to the Slovaks in North America, this statement still holds true. While several community studies of Slovaks in North America have appeared in recent years, none have compared and contrasted the creation of fraternal-benefit societies among Slovaks in the United States and Canada. 2 This essay will make such an attempt, 1 Scott Cummings, ed., Self-Help in Urban America: Patterns of Minority Business Enterprise (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980), 5. 2 The principal community studies are M. Mark Stolarik, Growing Up on the South Side: Three Generations of Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, /880- 1976 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985) and June Granatir Alexander, �8 SLOVAKIA although only in a preliminary fashion, because we still lack professional studies of the many fraternal-benefit societies established by Slovak immigrants to North America over the last 100 years. 3 When Slovaks from the Kingdom of Hungary (and other immigrants as well) began to migrate to North America in search of work in the late 19th century, they quickly discovered that, while the New World had plenty of job opportunities in the coal mines, steel mills and oil refineries, it did not provide much in the way of social welfare benefits. Thus, if an immigrant fell ill, was injured on the job, or even killed, neither his employer, nor The Immigrant Church and Community: Pittsburgh's Slovak Catholics and Lutherans, 1880-1915 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987). 3 Besides many jubilee-books written by talented amateurs (some of which will be cited later on), three semi-professional histories of Slovak fratemals do exist: Jozef Pauco's 75 rokov Prvej Katolfckej Slovenskej Jednoty (75 Years of the First Catholic Slovak Union] (Cleveland : First Catholic Slovak Union , 1965); Anthony X. Sutherland's The Canadian Slovak League: A History, /9321982 (Toronto: Canadian Slovak League, 1984); and R. Vladimir Baumgarten's and Joseph Stefka's The National Slovak Society: JOO Year History, 1890-1990 (Pittsburgh: National Slovak Society, 1990). Although the latter do provide us with basic information about these societies over time, they are all "in-house" histories aimed at their members and ignore the basic conventions of professional historians, especially the concerns of the new social history. In addition, three articles (or chapters in books) written by professional historians or anthropologists focusing on Slovak fraternals in specific locations also exist. June Alexander has detailed the rise and functions of fraternals in the Pittsburgh area in chapter two "From Self-Help to Community Development: Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies," of her book cited above, pp.15-27; the psycho-anthropologist Howard F. Stein has analyzed Slovak fraternals in western Pennsylvania, especially in the McKeesport and Duquesne settlements in "An Ethnohistory of Slovak-American Religious and Fraternal Associations: A Study in Cultural Meaning, Group Identity, and Social Institutions," in Slovakia, XXIX (1980-1981) , 63-88; and the author of this paper has provided an over-view of Slovak-American fraternals based upon his study of the Slovak community in Bethlehem in "A Place for Everyone: Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies," in the book edited by Scott Cummings, cited above, pp.130-41. �SLOVAKIA 9 any level of government, paid him or his family any form of support or compensation. 4 The Slovaks were not the first to discover this shortcoming in American society. Indeed, as early as the 17th century, Scottish immigrants to America began to form self-help organizations, which later came to be known as fraternal-benefit societies. These were private bodies consisting of immigrants and their descendants who pooled their resources, established a common treasury, and paid relief or compensation to members who had become victims of some misfortune. 5 Contrary to Oscar Handlin's claim that they were products of the American environment, fraternal-benefit societies had roots in Europe dating back to at least the 15th century, and perhaps even earlier. Similarly, craft-guilds, which were not abolished until 1872 in the Kingdom of Hungary, also had a social-welfare component. 6 4 Margaret Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (Pitt sburgh : The Russell Sage Foundation, 1910. Reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 161. 5 Gordon Donaldson, "Scots," in Stephan Thernstrom et.al., Harvard Encyclo- pedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1980), 915 . 6 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that MadetheAmerican People (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1951), 170-71, 176; Al:!beta Gacsova traced the first fraternal-benefit society in Hungary to the silver miners of Slovakia in 1460. See her Boje slovenskeho fudu proti feudalnemu utlaku a vykorist'ovaniu [The Struggle of the Slovak People Against Feudal Oppression and Exploitation] (Bratislava: Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1960), 64; Slovak editors discussed both fraternal-benefit societies and craft guilds in Narodnf hlasnik (National Herald , Turc. Sv. Martin), October 31, 1868, p.225 ; January 31, 1869, p.22; November 30, 1871, pp.331-32; and August 31, 1872, pp.242-44; and workers in Slovakia did try to organize fraternal-benefit societies in the 1870's and l 880's, before the massive emigration of Slovaks to the United States began. Cf. Narodnf hlasnik, March 31, 1874, pp.62-3, and Narodnie noviny (National News, Turc. Sv. Martin), February 8, 1881 , p. I. For an analysis of workers' societies in the city of Kosice in eastern Slovakia in the late �SLOVAKIA Thus, when central and eastern European migrants came to North America in the late 19th century, they had several models to choose from when they began to establish fraternal-benefit societies. They could copy from their American neighbours the structure of their fraternal-benefit societies, or some of these Slovaks, especially the skilled craftsmen or former miners, could draw upon previous experiences with craft guilds or fraternalbenefit societies in their homelands.7 Whatever their model, Slovak immigrants, who started to appear in the United States in the late 1870's, established around 50 local fraternal-benefit societies by 1890. 8 When one looks closely at these societies, one is bound to notice a tremendous variety in their origins, composition, religious, secular or national orientation. From Stefan Vesely's recent description, and listing of Slovak-American fraternals between 1883 and 1890, I extrapolated the following information: seven of these fraternals included the word "Hungarian" (along with "Slovak") in their titles; 26 used only the word "Slovak" (and not Hungarian) in their official name; 16 were secular-oriented, and 33 were religious. Of the 16 secular ones, two were organized by and for craftsmen. Furthermore, 25 of the fratemals arose in Pennsylvania, 8 in New Jersey, 6 in Ohio, 5 in New York, 3 in Connecticut and 1 each in Illinois and Minnesota. The largest concentration in and around cities was found in the Pittsburgh region 19th century, see Pavel Hapak, "K dejinam robotnfckych spolkov v Ko~iciach v druhej polovici 19. storocia," Nove obzory, 4 (1962), 162-63. 7 Slovaks in Bayonne, New Jersey and in Braddock, Pennsylvania said they learned about fraternal -benefit societies from their German and Irish neighbours. Cf. Ignac Gessay, "Spolky pred organizaciami." [Fraternals Before Organizations] , Narodnf kalendar, 191 I (Pittsburgh), 74-76. For a discussion of fraternal-benefit societies in Slovakia in the late 19th century see my Immigration and Urbanization: The Slovak Experience, 1870-/918 (New York : AMS Press, 1989), 70-72. 8 Stefan Vesely, "Prve slovenske spolky v Spojenych Statoch Americkych" [The First Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in America], S/ovaci v zahranicf, 4-5 (Martin: Matica slovenska, 1979, 53-55. �SLOVAKIA 11 (7), followed by Cleveland (6), New York City (3), Passaic, New Jersey (3) and Bridgeport, Connecticut (3). The largest regional concentration was in eastern Pennsylvania, where 16 of the 50 fraternals sprang up. 9 The above statistical summary very nicely parallels what is widely-known about the Slovak-American community: that approximately half of all Slovak immigrants settled in Pennsylvania, and the rest in the surrounding Northeastern states; that the religious orientation of Slovak immigrants outweighed the secular, and that Slovak nationalism established a quick foothold in America at the expense of pro-Hungarian feeling. 10 Furthermore, when one looks at Slovak fraternals at a local level, as I have done in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, one will learn even more about the Slovak community in America. Between 1891 and 1918, the approximately 1,000 Slovaks who settled in the steel town of Bethlehem in eastern Pennsylvania, established 19 fraternal-benefit societies. Since the men had come first, they created the 10 earliest fraternals, starting in 1891, and their wives followed suit with 9 fraternals of their own (the men initially did not allow women to join their fraternals ). 11 In addition to this division by sex, Slovak fraternals were also established on the basis of religion. Thus, of the 19 fraternals in Bethlehem, 12 were religious, with the Roman Catholics claiming eight, the Lutherans two and the Greek Catholics two as well. These religiously-based fraternals were equally divided by gender. 12 9 Ibid. IO Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, Vol. II, Population: General Report and Analytical Tables (Washington, D.C., 1922), 984. Stolarik, Immigration and Urbanization, 99; Alexander, Immigrant Church and Community, 132-34; and M. Mark Stolarik, "The Slovak Search for Identity in the United States, 1880-19 I 8," Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism , XX (Nos. 1-2, 1993), 45-55 . I I Stolarik, Growing Up, 34-38. 12 Ibid. �12 SLOVAKIA Seven of the Slovak fraternals in Bethlehem were secularoriented, and they also highlighted both national and regional differences among the Slovaks. Six of these fraternals were ultra-nationalist, and their members hailed predominantly from central and western Slovakia. 13 This major difference among Slovaks in Bethlehem became apparent only in the fraternal records, because the majority of Slovaks in this town came from Eastern Slovakia. 14 Both dialectical, and national feelings, divided the Slovaks in Bethlehem. Furthermore, some of the fraternal records in Bethlehem also revealed class divisions within the Slovak community. The Sts. Cyril and Methodius Society, for instance, which was the first to be founded (in 1891 ), attracted the wealthiest and most successful of the Slovak businessmen in town, and by 1900 it demanded a $6.00 initiation fee from prospective members. Since this represented half a week's wages in the steel mill, only the better-off Slovaks could afford to join this lodge. The rest had to content themselves with less-expensive (and lessprestigious) lodges.1 s While Slovak fraternals mirrored the divisions within the community, they also performed many positive functions. As already mentioned, in return for monthly dues of about $0.50 they provided accident, illness or death benefits to their members, or their survivors. 16 They also provided personal loans, or even mortgages, to members in good standing, if their treasuries were large enough. 17 Furthermore, they taught their members the principles of democracy through their election of officers, and through the procedure of their meetings. 18 Indeed, many Slovak 13 Ibid., 36. 14 Ibid., 23, 28-30, 36. 15 Ibid., 34-5. I 6 Ibid., 38, 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 39. �SLOVAKIA 13 politicians started their careers as officers of fraternal-benefit societies, and used them as launching pads for election to city and even state offices. 19 Fratemals also enforced a personal code of behavior, especially if they were founded on religious principles. 20 And, by helping to establish parish churches, by publishing their own newspapers, and often by erecting meeting halls, they helped to create other very important pillars of their ethnic communities. 21 Meanwhile, among the Slovaks in North America, local fratemals began to federate into larger bodies starting in 1890. This movement was launched by the ex-seminarian and leading Slovak nationalist Peter V. Rovnianek ( 1867-1933 ). He dreamed of uniting all Slovak fratemals into a National Slovak Society, which he founded in Pittsburgh on February 15, 1890.22 However, another budding leader of American Slovaks, the Rev. Stefan Furdek ( 1855-1915) dashed Rovnianek's dreams. Furdek, who was pastor of a Czech parish in Cleveland, had witnessed the growing anti-clericalism of the secular Czech Slavic Benevolent Society which had been founded in St. Louis in 1854. Furdek feared that Rovnianek's society would follow a similar path. Therefore, on September 4, 1890, he founded the First Catholic Slovak Union of the United States of America I 9 Ibid., 102-03. 20 Ibid., 39. 21 Ibid., 45-9, 39-40; for the story of Slovak newspapers published by fraternal- benefit societies see my "The Slovak-American Press," in Sally M. Miller's The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 356. 22 P.V. Rovnianek, Zapisky z.a liva pochovaneho. Z mojho 25 rocneho verejneho ucinkovania na naroda roli dedicnej [Notes of One Buried Alive: My 25 Years of Work on Behalf of the Slovak Nation] (Pittsburgh : National Slovak Society, 1924), 127-30. �14 SLOVAKIA (and later Canada) and formalized at the national level what had already been happening locally. 23 Once the secular-Catholic split was formalized, other groups followed suit. Slovak Lutherans established their Slovak Evangelical Union in Freeland, Pennsylvania in 1893, and the Calvinists likewise created their Slovak Calvin Presbyterian Union in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania in 1901.24 Militant Slovak nationalists, meanwhile, formed the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol in 1896 in New York City, while their more devout countrymen split off and established the Slovak Roman and Greek Catholic Sokol in Passaic, New Jersey in 1905. 25 Even a tiny group of Slovak socialists established a Slovak Workers' Society in Newark, New Jersey, in 1915. 26 All of these organizations encouraged the local fratemals to federate with their national bodies, and most did so. 23 Ibid., 127; Jan Pankuch, Dejiny Clevelandskfch a Lakewoodskfch Slovakov [A History of Cleveland and Lakewood Slovaks] (Cleveland: Author's publication, I 930), 32; Stefan Furdek, "Katolfcka Slovenska Jednota v Spojenych Statoch Americkych" [The First Catholic Slovak Union of the United States of America], Kalendar Jednota, 1896 (Cleveland), 26-7; for more Information on the Czech Slavic Benevolent Society see Jan Habenicht, Dejiny Cechuv Americkfch [A History of American Czechs] (St. Louis: Hlas Publishing Co., 1910), 36-7, and Thomas Capek, The Cechs (Bohemians) in America (Boston : Houghton Mifflin), 1920, 258 . 24 Stefan Zeman, "Pat'desiat rokov st'achetnej prace slov . evanjelikov v Amerike," in Martin Brozek ed., Zlata kniha Slovenskej Evanje/ickej Jednoty, 1893-/943 [Golden Jubilee of the Slovak Evangelical Union, 1893-1943] (Pittsburgh : Slovenskf hlasnik, 1943), 33-36; Frank Uherk.a, "Kratky prehfad S.K.P. Jednoty" [A Short History of the Slovak Calvin Presbyterian Union], Kalendar pre slovenskfch Kalvfnov, 1927 (Pittsburgh), 37-8. 25 Amerikansko-slovenske noviny (Pittsburgh), July 13, 1896, p.l, and Gusto Kosfk, "Prve desairocie nasej Jednoty" [The First Decade of Our Union], Sbomik Rfmsko a Grecko Katolfckej Telocvitnej Jednoty Sokol, 1916 (Passaic, NJ.), 35-51. 26 Jan Diacik, "Z dejin Slovenskeho Robotnickeho Spolku" [A History of the Slovak Workers' Society], in Jan Vrabel ed., Pamatnik Slovenskeho Robotnfckeho Spolku, 1915-1925 (Chicago, Rovnos( l:udu, 1925), 5. �SLOVAKIA 15 Since these national Slovak fratemals were founded by men, and initially most did not admit women into their ranks, Slovak women quickly proceeded to establish their own national organizations. The first to do so were the wives of the men who had founded the National Slovak Society. Urged on by P. V. Rovnianek, these women founded the 'Zivena' Slovak National Women's Benefit Society on July 19, 1891 in New York City. 27 Not to be outdone, the Reverend Stefan Furdek then urged a group of Roman Catholic women in Cleveland to establish the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union in 1892. 28 After this Lutheran women established their own Evangelical Slovak Women's Union, and the wives of the secular and Catholic Sokols established their own "Wreaths" as adjuncts to the men's national organizations. 29 In addition, Slovaks also established fraternals on a regional basis. For instance, in 1893 Slovak men in eastern Pennsylvania created the Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union and a little later their wives organized the Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Ladies Union.30 Similarly, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Slovaks founded the Slovak Wreath of the Free Eagle in 1896. 31 Similar regional organizations also arose in New York, Passaic, New Jersey, 27 Helen Pn1cazky, "Kratke dejiny I. odboru v New York, N.Y." [A Short Hi story of Branch I in New York], in Pavel Blazek, ed., Pamiitnica k zlatemu jubileju Ziveny, 1891-1941 (Pittsburgh : Slavia Printing Company, 1941), 211. 28 Kenneth Baka, "The First Catholic Slovak Ladies Association," in Joseph C. Krajsa et.al., Slovaks in America: A Bicentennial Study (Middletown, PA: Slovak League of America, 1976), 172. 29 Alvin J. Schmidt, Fraternal Organizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 343 for the establishment of the Evangelical Slovak Women's Union, and Joseph G. Prufa, ed., Golden Jubilee (1905-1955) Souvenir Book of the Slovak Catholic Sokol (Passaic, NJ : Slovak Catholic Sokol, 1955), for the Sokol Wreaths. 30 Amerikansko-slovenske noviny, July 4, I 896, p. l ; "Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union," in Krajsa et.al., Slovaks in America, 197; and "The Ladies Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union, 1898-1976," Ibid., 20 I. 31 "First Slovak Wreath of the Free Eagle," Ibid., 22 I. �16 SLOVAKIA Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and elsewhere, and many soon also began to recruit members nation-wide.32 If we look at some membership statistics, we will quickly notice that Slovak Catholic fratemals attracted far more members than the secular ones in the United States. For instance, Thomas Capek Jr. did a survey of the principal Slovak national fratemals in 1920 and discovered that twelve such societies had a combined adult membership of 212,241. 33 This was an astonishing number when one considers that the 1920 United States Census counted 619,866 Slovaks in this country. 34 Furthermore, Capek's survey actually under-counted the number of Slovaks enrolled in fraternals because he did not list members of youth divisions. For instance, in 1920 the First Catholic Slovak Union also had 21,860 Youth Division members and the National Slovak Society's Young Folks Circle counted 14,124. 35 Nevertheless, if we break down Capek's adult members into those who belonged to religious fraternals versus those who belonged to secular ones, we discover that 142,946 were members of religious fraternals and only 69,315 belonged to non-denominational ones.36 If we compare the principal Catholic versus secular societies established by Slovaks in the United States over a longer period of time, we will notice an ever-widening gulf between them. Thus, while the National Slovak Society initially enrolled more members than the First Catholic Slovak Union (2,871 versus 864 in 1891), by 1898 the FCSU had overtaken the NSS 32 Thomas Capek, Jr., The Slovaks in America (New York: Czechoslovak Section of America's Making, Inc. , 1921 ), 88-9. 33 Ibid., 89. 34 See above, footnote 10. 35 Paufo, 75 rokov, 158; and Juraj J. Niznansky and Vendelin Platek, compilers, Dejiny a Pamatnica Narodneho Slovenskeho Spolku, 1890-1950 (Pittsburgh: National Slovak Society, 1950), 219. 36 Capek, Jr., op.cit., 88-9. �SLOVAKIA 17 (10,547 versus 9,573) and eventually left it far behind. 37 By 1929, when the membership of the National Slovak Society peaked, the latter had 42,646 adult members and 21,437 youth, for a grand total of 64,083, whereas the First Catholic Slovak Union had 102,000 adult and youth members that year. 38 Indeed, after 1929 membership in the NSS began a slow and steady decline to only 30,129 adult members and 7,508 youth in 1949, while the FCSU actually grew to 104,558 members in 1931, declined to 91,719 in 1939 due to the Great Depression, but rebounded after World War II to 95,712 members in 1948, and ultimately to 105,800 members in 1977, when its membership peaked.39 By contrast, membership in the National Slovak Society had fallen to 23,415 in 1975.40 While no-one has yet systematically studied the rise and decline of the major Slovak fraternal-benefit societies in America, I have noticed a surprising trend when briefly comparing men's and women's fratemals. For instance, while Capek reported 49,680 adult members in the First Catholic Slovak Union in 1920, and only 28,264 adult members in the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union that year,41 by 1985 the women's organization had outstripped the men in both membership and assets. In that year the women's Union had 105,955 members and assets of $94,000,000 versus 95,090 members in the men's Union, and assets of only $51 ,800,000.42 How and why the women overtook the men still needs to be determined. 37 Nifoansky & Platek, Dejiny, 2 14; Pauco, 75 rokov, 13, 31. 38 Nifoansky & Platek, Dejiny, 214, 219; Pauco, 75 rokov, 230. 39 Nifoansky & Platek, Dejiny, 214; Pauco, 75 rokov, 246, 322, 370, and Slovakia, 27 (1977), back cover. 4o Baumgarten & Stefka, The National Slovak Society, 156. 4 l Capek, Jr., op.cit., 88. 42 1985 Statistics of Fraternal Benefit Societies, 1986 Edition (Naperville, ILL: The National Fraternal Congress of America, 1986), I I 8-19. �18 SLOVAKIA The story of the establishment of Slovak fraternal-benefit societies in Canada likewise reveals a great deal about the Slovak-Canadian community, and its similarities and differences when compared with the American community. Unlike Slovak immigration to the United States, which proceeded directly from Slovakia to the industrial heartland of the American Northeast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Slovak immigration to Canada before World War I was principally from the United States to the western provinces. American Slovaks were lured to Canada's west either by work to be found in the newly-opened coal mines of Alberta or British Columbia, to construction of spurs of Canada's railroads through the Rocky Mountains, or by cheap and available farmland on the prairies. 43 Since these Slovak pioneers had gone to Canada via the United States, they naturally brought with them ties to SlovakAmerican institutions, including fraternal-benefit societies. From the only complete list of Canadian branches of an American Slovak fraternal in existence, we can clearly see the pattern of Slovak settlement in Canada. The first branch of a SlovakAmerican fraternal arose in the coal-mining town of Ladysmith, British Columbia in 1891. It was Assembly number 52 of the 4 3 Slovak-American newspapers had many reports from these "pioneers" who settled in Canada before World War I. For examples of coal miners who settled in British Columbia and Alberta see Amerikansko-slovenske noviny, January 28, 1902, p.1, Slovak v Amerike (New York), January 12, 1902, p.1, February 11 , 1902, p.l, February 9, 1906, p.3, July 29, 1913, p.7, Narodnie noviny, No. 69 (1902), p.3, Jed nota (Cleveland), August 23, 1905, p.5, October 10, 1906, p.1, April 9, 1909, p.2, November 15, 191 I, p.2, December 20, 1911, p.2, December 4, 1912, p.2, November 26, 1913, p.2; for examples of American Slovaks who settled on Canada's prairies and took up farming see Slovak v Amerike, October 29, 1901, p.3, January 2, 1908, p.2, June 17, 1909, p.2, December 21, 1909, p.4, August 25, 1910, p.2, January 2, 1912, p.3, June 17, 1913, p.6, Jednota, February 22, 1905, p.5, October 15, 1905, p.5, June 27, 1906, p.2, January 8, 1914, p.3 . For the story of a railroad worker who came to British Columbia via the United States in 1910 consult my interview with Andrej Potocky of Thunder Bay, Ontario, June 24, 1977, tapes STO-C-46, 47, 48, 49, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec. �SLOVAKIA 19 National Slovak Society, and in subsequent years branches of the NSS also arose in Fernie, British Columbia (1900), in Natal, B.C. (1903), in Coleman, Alberta (1904), in Frank Alberta (1905), in Trail, B.C. (1906), in Canmore, Alberta (1906), in Corbin, B.C. (1909), in Maple Leaf, Ontario (1913) and in Blainnore, Alberta ( 1918). 44 Thus, nine of the ten branches of the NSS established in Canada before the end of World War I were in the two westernmost provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. Only after World War I, when the United States started to close its borders to unrestricted immigration, while Canada still accepted cheap laborers, did the pattern of Slovak settlement change. 45 Now Slovaks immigrated directly to Canada via the ports of Quebec and Montreal, and, although the Canadian government wanted them to continue on to the West, most chose to settle in Ontario and Quebec, which formed the industrial heartland of Canada. 46 Thus, branches of the National Slovak Society sprang up in Windsor in 1929 and in 1937; in Montreal in 1931; in Hamilton in 1931 and 1939 and in Timmins in 1932. After World War II more branches arose in Toronto in 1956, and in Montreal that same year; in Welland in 1957, another one in Toronto in 1964, and in Galt in 1965.47 In spite of this growth in branches, membership in the NSS in Canada was unimpres- 44 Baumgarten & Stefka, The National Slovak Society, 251, 264, 266-67, 27071, 275-76, 278. 45 For the story of the Immigration Restriction Acts in the United States see E.P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798-1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press for the Balch Institute, 1981 ), 171-213. 46 For Canada's Immigration Policies during the 1920's see Donald Avery, Reluctant Host: Canada's Response to Immigrant Workers , 1896-1994 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1995), 82-107. 4 7 Baumgarten & Stefka, op.cit., 279-82. �20 SLOVAKIA sive at only 320 adults in 1964.48 Indeed, in 1989 the few remaining members of the NSS in Canada were urged by the Head Officers in Pittsburgh to join local branches of the First Catholic Slovak Union because the cost of administering so few members had become prohibitive. 49 While we do not have complete lists of branches of other Slovak-American societies in Canada, we do have partial listings of their locations, and these confirm the above observations. Thus, the first five branches of the First Catholic Slovak Union established in Canada before World War I appeared in Lethbridge, Alberta (1894), Fernie, B.C., Canmore and Coleman, Alberta, and Fort William, Ontario. 50 After the first and second World Wars another 51 branches of the "Jednota" were established principally in Ontario and Quebec, and by 1965 all the Jednota branches combined had 2,988 members, making them by far the largest American-Slovak fraternal-benefit society in Canada. 51 Meanwhile, among other American fraternals established in Canada, the same pattern appears. Thus, two branches of the Slovak Catholic Sokol arose in Canmore and Blairmore, Alberta, before World War I; and one each in Toronto and Montreal after the war. 52 The Slovak Evangelical Union did not move into Canada until after World War I, probably because Slovak Lutherans did not come in any great numbers until that time. However, it did eventually establish twelve branches in Ontario and Quebec, starting in Fort William in 1927, and later in Windsor, 48 Joseph M. Kirschbaum, Slovaks in Canada (Toronto: Canadian Ethnic Press Association of Ontario, 1967), 182. 49 Baumgarten & Stefka, op.cit., 184. 5o Kirschbaum, op.cit., 184; and Elena Jake~ova, Vysfahovalectvo Slovakov do Kanady (Bratislava: Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1981), 75-6. 5 l Kirschbaum, op.cit., 185. 52 Ibid., 187. �SLOVAKIA 21 Timmins, Toronto, Montreal, and elsewhere. 53 The Slovak Workers' Society also established six branches in Canada between 1926 and 1929, principally in Ontario and Quebec. 54 By 1934 various American Slovak fraternal-benefit societies had organized around 100 branches in Canada performing the same functions, and reflecting the same divisions in the Slovak community, as they had had in the United States. 55 Meanwhile, with the arrival of immigrants directly from Slovakia in the 1920's, a movement arose to establish purely Canadian fraternals as well. It started in Montreal in 1924 when the restaurant-owner Frantisek Capkovic decided to create a Slovak fraternal-benefit society. However, some Czechs also wished to join it, and the local Czechoslovak Consul persuaded Capkovic to organize the Czechoslovak Benefit Society, in order to promote the philosophy of "Czechoslovakism" among immigrants in Canada. This philosophy received official government sanction in 1918 with the creation of the new Republic of Czechoslovakia upon the ruins of Austria-Hungary. Thus, the new Czechoslovak Consulate in Montreal subsidized the Czechoslovak Benefit Society with a monthly contribution of $60.00. 56 While this Czechoslovak society grew to 1, 135 members in 17 branches across Ontario and Quebec, and even a few in the west by 1931, old-world politics ultimately divided it. Slovak nationalists in both the United States and Canada attacked this society as a tool of the Czechoslovak government. Therefore, in 1931 it split into the First Slovak Benefit Society headquartered 53 Jake§ova, op. cit., 113. 5 4 Ibid., 113-15. 55 This is my estimate, based upon my reading of Kirschbaum, Jake~ova, Baumgarten & Stefka. Kirschbaum under-counted them at only 78 in that year. Cf. Kirschbaum, op.cit., 193. The exact number of branches of Slovak-American fratemals in Canada in that year, and in others, still remains to be determined. 56 Jakdova, op. cit., I 16. �22 SLOVAKIA in Montreal (8 branches) and the old Czechoslovak Benefit Society (9 branches).57 Furthermore, one of the early organizers and supporters of the original Czechoslovak Benefit Society also broke with it Gabriel Kurdel, who had been its secretary in 1926-1927, decided to take up farming near Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1928. However, his organizing instinct spurred him to establish several Slovak Benefit Societies in the West, and also among the precious metals miners in Northern Ontario between 1929 and 1932. These societies eventually federated into the Canadian Slovak Benefit Society in 1946, and became the second-largest purely Canadian fraternal with 38 branches and 2,035 members in 1965. 58 The largest Slovak-Canadian fraternal-benefit society, ironically enough, was a child of an American organization. Nationalist Slovaks in Fort William, Ontario, had established a branch of the Slovak League of America in 1916, and other branches arose soon after the war in Corbin, British Columbia, Flin Flon and Winnipeg, Manitoba, Toronto and Oshawa, Ontario, Montreal, Quebec, and in New Waterford, Nova Scotia. 59 Slovaks in these centers were grateful that a delegate of the Slovak League of America had visited various camps in Canada in which Slovaks, among others, had been interned as "enemy aliens" in 1915 and 1916, and had persuaded the Canadian authorities to release them. 60 Unfortunately for these Canadian members of the Slovak League of America, the latter was not a fraternal-benefit society. It was the cover organization that spoke for most American57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 117-20; Kirschbaum, op. cit., 194-95, 204, 206-09. 59 Kirschbaum, op. cit., 198-20 I ; Jakefova, op. cit., 120; Sutherland, op. cit., 24-8. 60 Jednota , June 9, 1915, p.1, June 23 , 1915, p.5, July 14, 1915, p.l , July 21, 1915, p.1, August 11 , 1915, p. l , January 12, 1916, p.5, February 2, 1916, p.1, June 13, 1917, p.6. See also Kirschbaum, op. cit. , 92-3. �SLOVAKIA 23 Slovak fratemals, but it had few assets of its own. 61 Thus, after the Great Depression had broken out, members of the Slovak League of America in Canada felt the need to organize a mutualaid society, and, therefore, in December, 1932, in a meeting in Winnipeg, Manitoba, delegates from Slovak League of America branches in Winnipeg, Montreal, and Corbin, B.C., met and established the Canadian Slovak League, which remained strongly nationalist, but also began to function as a fraternalbenefit society.62 In the next few decades the Canadian Slovak League grew into the largest Slovak organization in Canada, with 55 branches and 3,247 members in 1965. 63 Also, as a reflection of the shifting population of Slovaks in the Dominion, the Canadian Slovak League moved its headquarters first from Winnipeg to Fort William, Ontario, later to Montreal, and finally , to Toronto, where most Slovak-Canadian fraternals are now headquartered. 64 Slovak socialists, meanwhile, also began to shift allegiances. After the Great Depression broke out, Canadian members of the American Slovak Workers' Society were no longer able to pay their dues, and the six branches of the American society withered. 65 However, the Canadian socialists did not abandon the cause. Instead, in 1931 they began to establish "Workers' Education Clubs," along the lines followed by other ethnic groups, principally the Hungarians. In 1934 these clubs joined the Communist Party of Canada, and by 1936 they federated into the 61 For a brief history of the Slovak League of America see Mikula~ Sprinc, ed., Slovenska Liga v Amerike styridsalrocna [Forty Y~ of the Slovak League of America], (Scranton, PA: Obrana Press, 1947). 62 Sutherland, op. cit., 25 . 63 Kirschbaum, op. cit., 198, 204. 64 Jake~ova, op.cit., 120, and Sutherland, op. cit., 70. According to lmrich Stolarik, who was president of the CSL at the time, the League's headquarters was moved to Toronto in 1980, when the League purchased a building for this purpose (telephone conversation with the author, May 6, 1994). 65 Jake~ova, op. cit., 120. �24 SLOVAKIA Slovak Cultural Society. During the Second World War these Slovak socialists finally formed a fraternal Slovak Benefit Society and by 1965 it had grown to 27 branches with 1,200 members, making it the third-largest Slovak-Canadian fraternalbenefit organization at that time. 66 Having surveyed the creation of the principal American and Canadian Slovak fraternal-benefit societies over the last 100 years, we are now in a position to notice their similarities and differences. American Slovak fraternals tended to reflect their earlier origins and were divided by religion, gender, class, regionalism and nationalism. Thus, among American fraternals the religious ones predominated, the men and women established their own organizations, there was some class differentiation both at the local, and at the national level, as there was in regional origins, and the chief political division initially had to do with Slovak nationalism versus loyalty to Hungary. Branches of American fraternals established in Canada tended to reflect these divisions. Canadian Slovak fraternals, by contrast, were founded later and reflected new political and other concerns. The major political divisions among them concerned Slovak identity versus 'Czechoslovakism.' On the other hand, Canadian Slovaks did not establish fraternals based upon gender, nor did they splinter along religious lines. Their much stronger national feeling, arising from their origins in the new Republic of Czechoslovakia, seemed to overcome these potential divisions. On class lines, however, Canadian Slovaks showed a much greater propensity towards division than did American Slovaks. While both groups founded Slovak "workers" organizations, those in Canada had proportionately more members than their cousins in the United States. Thus, in 1939, when the American Slovak Workers' Society peaked at approximately 11,000 members (out of a total of perhaps 400,000 Slovaks organized in 66 Ibid., 121-23, and Kirschbaum, op. cit., 209-12. �SLOVAKIA 25 fratemals), its Canadian counterpart peaked at 1,200 members in 1965.67 At first glance, the latter number seems very small, but it actually represents third place among Slovak-Canadian fratemals (the Canadian Slovak League had over 3,000 members and the Canadian Slovak Benefit Society around 2,000 in that same year). If we were to rank the American Slovak Workers' Society in 1939, it would not even have made tenth place among its countrymen's fraternals . Thus, socialism had a much stronger hold upon Canadian Slovaks than it did among its American cousins. In the final analysis, when establishing fraternal-benefit societies, Canadian Slovaks faced the same dilemmas that other immigrants to North America confronted: would they follow American models, or create distinctly Canadian ones? They ended up doing both, which is a typically Canadian reaction to the problem of ethnic identity in North America. 68 67 Milo~ Gosiorovsky, "K hist6rii Slovenskeho robotnfckeho spolku v USA" (A History of the Slovak Workers Society in the USA], Zbomlk Fi/ozofickej Fakulty Univerzity Komenskeho, historica , //-12 (Bratislava: Comenius University, 1962), 56. 68 For a brilliant discussion of Canada's continuing efforts to forge a national identity see Robert F. Hamey, "So Great a Heritage as Ours" : Immigration and the Survival of the Canadian Polity," Daedalus, 117 (No. 4, 1988), 51-97. � SLOVAKIA 7 Slovak FraternalBenefit Societies in North America: An Overview (1883-1993) M. Mark Stolarik (Conference on The Development and Significance of the Fraternal Movement and Fraternal Organizations Among Immigrants in North and South America and Europe, Maribor, Slovenia, May, 1994) In a book of essays that set out to explore how ethnic groups have used the principles of collectivism to deal with their new life in America, Scott Cummings lamented that "Relatively little has been written about self-help institutions and mutual benefit societies created by immigrant groups." 1 When applied to the Slovaks in North America, this statement still holds true. While several community studies of Slovaks in North America have appeared in recent years, none have compared and contrasted the creation of fraternal-benefit societies among Slovaks in the United States and Canada. 2 This essay will make such an attempt, 1 Scott Cummings, ed., Self-Help in Urban America: Patterns of Minority Business Enterprise (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980), 5. 2 The principal community studies are M. Mark Stolarik, Growing Up on the South Side: Three Generations of Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, /880- 1976 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985) and June Granatir Alexander, �8 SLOVAKIA although only in a preliminary fashion, because we still lack professional studies of the many fraternal-benefit societies established by Slovak immigrants to North America over the last 100 years. 3 When Slovaks from the Kingdom of Hungary (and other immigrants as well) began to migrate to North America in search of work in the late 19th century, they quickly discovered that, while the New World had plenty of job opportunities in the coal mines, steel mills and oil refineries, it did not provide much in the way of social welfare benefits. Thus, if an immigrant fell ill, was injured on the job, or even killed, neither his employer, nor The Immigrant Church and Community: Pittsburgh's Slovak Catholics and Lutherans, 1880-1915 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987). 3 Besides many jubilee-books written by talented amateurs (some of which will be cited later on), three semi-professional histories of Slovak fratemals do exist: Jozef Pauco's 75 rokov Prvej Katolfckej Slovenskej Jednoty (75 Years of the First Catholic Slovak Union] (Cleveland : First Catholic Slovak Union , 1965); Anthony X. Sutherland's The Canadian Slovak League: A History, /9321982 (Toronto: Canadian Slovak League, 1984); and R. Vladimir Baumgarten's and Joseph Stefka's The National Slovak Society: JOO Year History, 1890-1990 (Pittsburgh: National Slovak Society, 1990). Although the latter do provide us with basic information about these societies over time, they are all "in-house" histories aimed at their members and ignore the basic conventions of professional historians, especially the concerns of the new social history. In addition, three articles (or chapters in books) written by professional historians or anthropologists focusing on Slovak fraternals in specific locations also exist. June Alexander has detailed the rise and functions of fraternals in the Pittsburgh area in chapter two "From Self-Help to Community Development: Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies," of her book cited above, pp.15-27; the psycho-anthropologist Howard F. Stein has analyzed Slovak fraternals in western Pennsylvania, especially in the McKeesport and Duquesne settlements in "An Ethnohistory of Slovak-American Religious and Fraternal Associations: A Study in Cultural Meaning, Group Identity, and Social Institutions," in Slovakia, XXIX (1980-1981) , 63-88; and the author of this paper has provided an over-view of Slovak-American fraternals based upon his study of the Slovak community in Bethlehem in "A Place for Everyone: Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies," in the book edited by Scott Cummings, cited above, pp.130-41. �SLOVAKIA 9 any level of government, paid him or his family any form of support or compensation. 4 The Slovaks were not the first to discover this shortcoming in American society. Indeed, as early as the 17th century, Scottish immigrants to America began to form self-help organizations, which later came to be known as fraternal-benefit societies. These were private bodies consisting of immigrants and their descendants who pooled their resources, established a common treasury, and paid relief or compensation to members who had become victims of some misfortune. 5 Contrary to Oscar Handlin's claim that they were products of the American environment, fraternal-benefit societies had roots in Europe dating back to at least the 15th century, and perhaps even earlier. Similarly, craft-guilds, which were not abolished until 1872 in the Kingdom of Hungary, also had a social-welfare component. 6 4 Margaret Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (Pitt sburgh : The Russell Sage Foundation, 1910. Reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 161. 5 Gordon Donaldson, "Scots," in Stephan Thernstrom et.al., Harvard Encyclo- pedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1980), 915 . 6 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that MadetheAmerican People (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1951), 170-71, 176; Al:!beta Gacsova traced the first fraternal-benefit society in Hungary to the silver miners of Slovakia in 1460. See her Boje slovenskeho fudu proti feudalnemu utlaku a vykorist'ovaniu [The Struggle of the Slovak People Against Feudal Oppression and Exploitation] (Bratislava: Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1960), 64; Slovak editors discussed both fraternal-benefit societies and craft guilds in Narodnf hlasnik (National Herald , Turc. Sv. Martin), October 31, 1868, p.225 ; January 31, 1869, p.22; November 30, 1871, pp.331-32; and August 31, 1872, pp.242-44; and workers in Slovakia did try to organize fraternal-benefit societies in the 1870's and l 880's, before the massive emigration of Slovaks to the United States began. Cf. Narodnf hlasnik, March 31, 1874, pp.62-3, and Narodnie noviny (National News, Turc. Sv. Martin), February 8, 1881 , p. I. For an analysis of workers' societies in the city of Kosice in eastern Slovakia in the late �SLOVAKIA Thus, when central and eastern European migrants came to North America in the late 19th century, they had several models to choose from when they began to establish fraternal-benefit societies. They could copy from their American neighbours the structure of their fraternal-benefit societies, or some of these Slovaks, especially the skilled craftsmen or former miners, could draw upon previous experiences with craft guilds or fraternalbenefit societies in their homelands.7 Whatever their model, Slovak immigrants, who started to appear in the United States in the late 1870's, established around 50 local fraternal-benefit societies by 1890. 8 When one looks closely at these societies, one is bound to notice a tremendous variety in their origins, composition, religious, secular or national orientation. From Stefan Vesely's recent description, and listing of Slovak-American fraternals between 1883 and 1890, I extrapolated the following information: seven of these fraternals included the word "Hungarian" (along with "Slovak") in their titles; 26 used only the word "Slovak" (and not Hungarian) in their official name; 16 were secular-oriented, and 33 were religious. Of the 16 secular ones, two were organized by and for craftsmen. Furthermore, 25 of the fratemals arose in Pennsylvania, 8 in New Jersey, 6 in Ohio, 5 in New York, 3 in Connecticut and 1 each in Illinois and Minnesota. The largest concentration in and around cities was found in the Pittsburgh region 19th century, see Pavel Hapak, "K dejinam robotnfckych spolkov v Ko~iciach v druhej polovici 19. storocia," Nove obzory, 4 (1962), 162-63. 7 Slovaks in Bayonne, New Jersey and in Braddock, Pennsylvania said they learned about fraternal -benefit societies from their German and Irish neighbours. Cf. Ignac Gessay, "Spolky pred organizaciami." [Fraternals Before Organizations] , Narodnf kalendar, 191 I (Pittsburgh), 74-76. For a discussion of fraternal-benefit societies in Slovakia in the late 19th century see my Immigration and Urbanization: The Slovak Experience, 1870-/918 (New York : AMS Press, 1989), 70-72. 8 Stefan Vesely, "Prve slovenske spolky v Spojenych Statoch Americkych" [The First Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in America], S/ovaci v zahranicf, 4-5 (Martin: Matica slovenska, 1979, 53-55. �SLOVAKIA 11 (7), followed by Cleveland (6), New York City (3), Passaic, New Jersey (3) and Bridgeport, Connecticut (3). The largest regional concentration was in eastern Pennsylvania, where 16 of the 50 fraternals sprang up. 9 The above statistical summary very nicely parallels what is widely-known about the Slovak-American community: that approximately half of all Slovak immigrants settled in Pennsylvania, and the rest in the surrounding Northeastern states; that the religious orientation of Slovak immigrants outweighed the secular, and that Slovak nationalism established a quick foothold in America at the expense of pro-Hungarian feeling. 10 Furthermore, when one looks at Slovak fraternals at a local level, as I have done in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, one will learn even more about the Slovak community in America. Between 1891 and 1918, the approximately 1,000 Slovaks who settled in the steel town of Bethlehem in eastern Pennsylvania, established 19 fraternal-benefit societies. Since the men had come first, they created the 10 earliest fraternals, starting in 1891, and their wives followed suit with 9 fraternals of their own (the men initially did not allow women to join their fraternals ). 11 In addition to this division by sex, Slovak fraternals were also established on the basis of religion. Thus, of the 19 fraternals in Bethlehem, 12 were religious, with the Roman Catholics claiming eight, the Lutherans two and the Greek Catholics two as well. These religiously-based fraternals were equally divided by gender. 12 9 Ibid. IO Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, Vol. II, Population: General Report and Analytical Tables (Washington, D.C., 1922), 984. Stolarik, Immigration and Urbanization, 99; Alexander, Immigrant Church and Community, 132-34; and M. Mark Stolarik, "The Slovak Search for Identity in the United States, 1880-19 I 8," Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism , XX (Nos. 1-2, 1993), 45-55 . I I Stolarik, Growing Up, 34-38. 12 Ibid. �12 SLOVAKIA Seven of the Slovak fraternals in Bethlehem were secularoriented, and they also highlighted both national and regional differences among the Slovaks. Six of these fraternals were ultra-nationalist, and their members hailed predominantly from central and western Slovakia. 13 This major difference among Slovaks in Bethlehem became apparent only in the fraternal records, because the majority of Slovaks in this town came from Eastern Slovakia. 14 Both dialectical, and national feelings, divided the Slovaks in Bethlehem. Furthermore, some of the fraternal records in Bethlehem also revealed class divisions within the Slovak community. The Sts. Cyril and Methodius Society, for instance, which was the first to be founded (in 1891 ), attracted the wealthiest and most successful of the Slovak businessmen in town, and by 1900 it demanded a $6.00 initiation fee from prospective members. Since this represented half a week's wages in the steel mill, only the better-off Slovaks could afford to join this lodge. The rest had to content themselves with less-expensive (and lessprestigious) lodges.1 s While Slovak fraternals mirrored the divisions within the community, they also performed many positive functions. As already mentioned, in return for monthly dues of about $0.50 they provided accident, illness or death benefits to their members, or their survivors. 16 They also provided personal loans, or even mortgages, to members in good standing, if their treasuries were large enough. 17 Furthermore, they taught their members the principles of democracy through their election of officers, and through the procedure of their meetings. 18 Indeed, many Slovak 13 Ibid., 36. 14 Ibid., 23, 28-30, 36. 15 Ibid., 34-5. I 6 Ibid., 38, 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 39. �SLOVAKIA 13 politicians started their careers as officers of fraternal-benefit societies, and used them as launching pads for election to city and even state offices. 19 Fratemals also enforced a personal code of behavior, especially if they were founded on religious principles. 20 And, by helping to establish parish churches, by publishing their own newspapers, and often by erecting meeting halls, they helped to create other very important pillars of their ethnic communities. 21 Meanwhile, among the Slovaks in North America, local fratemals began to federate into larger bodies starting in 1890. This movement was launched by the ex-seminarian and leading Slovak nationalist Peter V. Rovnianek ( 1867-1933 ). He dreamed of uniting all Slovak fratemals into a National Slovak Society, which he founded in Pittsburgh on February 15, 1890.22 However, another budding leader of American Slovaks, the Rev. Stefan Furdek ( 1855-1915) dashed Rovnianek's dreams. Furdek, who was pastor of a Czech parish in Cleveland, had witnessed the growing anti-clericalism of the secular Czech Slavic Benevolent Society which had been founded in St. Louis in 1854. Furdek feared that Rovnianek's society would follow a similar path. Therefore, on September 4, 1890, he founded the First Catholic Slovak Union of the United States of America I 9 Ibid., 102-03. 20 Ibid., 39. 21 Ibid., 45-9, 39-40; for the story of Slovak newspapers published by fraternal- benefit societies see my "The Slovak-American Press," in Sally M. Miller's The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 356. 22 P.V. Rovnianek, Zapisky z.a liva pochovaneho. Z mojho 25 rocneho verejneho ucinkovania na naroda roli dedicnej [Notes of One Buried Alive: My 25 Years of Work on Behalf of the Slovak Nation] (Pittsburgh : National Slovak Society, 1924), 127-30. �14 SLOVAKIA (and later Canada) and formalized at the national level what had already been happening locally. 23 Once the secular-Catholic split was formalized, other groups followed suit. Slovak Lutherans established their Slovak Evangelical Union in Freeland, Pennsylvania in 1893, and the Calvinists likewise created their Slovak Calvin Presbyterian Union in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania in 1901.24 Militant Slovak nationalists, meanwhile, formed the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol in 1896 in New York City, while their more devout countrymen split off and established the Slovak Roman and Greek Catholic Sokol in Passaic, New Jersey in 1905. 25 Even a tiny group of Slovak socialists established a Slovak Workers' Society in Newark, New Jersey, in 1915. 26 All of these organizations encouraged the local fratemals to federate with their national bodies, and most did so. 23 Ibid., 127; Jan Pankuch, Dejiny Clevelandskfch a Lakewoodskfch Slovakov [A History of Cleveland and Lakewood Slovaks] (Cleveland: Author's publication, I 930), 32; Stefan Furdek, "Katolfcka Slovenska Jednota v Spojenych Statoch Americkych" [The First Catholic Slovak Union of the United States of America], Kalendar Jednota, 1896 (Cleveland), 26-7; for more Information on the Czech Slavic Benevolent Society see Jan Habenicht, Dejiny Cechuv Americkfch [A History of American Czechs] (St. Louis: Hlas Publishing Co., 1910), 36-7, and Thomas Capek, The Cechs (Bohemians) in America (Boston : Houghton Mifflin), 1920, 258 . 24 Stefan Zeman, "Pat'desiat rokov st'achetnej prace slov . evanjelikov v Amerike," in Martin Brozek ed., Zlata kniha Slovenskej Evanje/ickej Jednoty, 1893-/943 [Golden Jubilee of the Slovak Evangelical Union, 1893-1943] (Pittsburgh : Slovenskf hlasnik, 1943), 33-36; Frank Uherk.a, "Kratky prehfad S.K.P. Jednoty" [A Short History of the Slovak Calvin Presbyterian Union], Kalendar pre slovenskfch Kalvfnov, 1927 (Pittsburgh), 37-8. 25 Amerikansko-slovenske noviny (Pittsburgh), July 13, 1896, p.l, and Gusto Kosfk, "Prve desairocie nasej Jednoty" [The First Decade of Our Union], Sbomik Rfmsko a Grecko Katolfckej Telocvitnej Jednoty Sokol, 1916 (Passaic, NJ.), 35-51. 26 Jan Diacik, "Z dejin Slovenskeho Robotnickeho Spolku" [A History of the Slovak Workers' Society], in Jan Vrabel ed., Pamatnik Slovenskeho Robotnfckeho Spolku, 1915-1925 (Chicago, Rovnos( l:udu, 1925), 5. �SLOVAKIA 15 Since these national Slovak fratemals were founded by men, and initially most did not admit women into their ranks, Slovak women quickly proceeded to establish their own national organizations. The first to do so were the wives of the men who had founded the National Slovak Society. Urged on by P. V. Rovnianek, these women founded the 'Zivena' Slovak National Women's Benefit Society on July 19, 1891 in New York City. 27 Not to be outdone, the Reverend Stefan Furdek then urged a group of Roman Catholic women in Cleveland to establish the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union in 1892. 28 After this Lutheran women established their own Evangelical Slovak Women's Union, and the wives of the secular and Catholic Sokols established their own "Wreaths" as adjuncts to the men's national organizations. 29 In addition, Slovaks also established fraternals on a regional basis. For instance, in 1893 Slovak men in eastern Pennsylvania created the Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union and a little later their wives organized the Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Ladies Union.30 Similarly, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Slovaks founded the Slovak Wreath of the Free Eagle in 1896. 31 Similar regional organizations also arose in New York, Passaic, New Jersey, 27 Helen Pn1cazky, "Kratke dejiny I. odboru v New York, N.Y." [A Short Hi story of Branch I in New York], in Pavel Blazek, ed., Pamiitnica k zlatemu jubileju Ziveny, 1891-1941 (Pittsburgh : Slavia Printing Company, 1941), 211. 28 Kenneth Baka, "The First Catholic Slovak Ladies Association," in Joseph C. Krajsa et.al., Slovaks in America: A Bicentennial Study (Middletown, PA: Slovak League of America, 1976), 172. 29 Alvin J. Schmidt, Fraternal Organizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 343 for the establishment of the Evangelical Slovak Women's Union, and Joseph G. Prufa, ed., Golden Jubilee (1905-1955) Souvenir Book of the Slovak Catholic Sokol (Passaic, NJ : Slovak Catholic Sokol, 1955), for the Sokol Wreaths. 30 Amerikansko-slovenske noviny, July 4, I 896, p. l ; "Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union," in Krajsa et.al., Slovaks in America, 197; and "The Ladies Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union, 1898-1976," Ibid., 20 I. 31 "First Slovak Wreath of the Free Eagle," Ibid., 22 I. �16 SLOVAKIA Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and elsewhere, and many soon also began to recruit members nation-wide.32 If we look at some membership statistics, we will quickly notice that Slovak Catholic fratemals attracted far more members than the secular ones in the United States. For instance, Thomas Capek Jr. did a survey of the principal Slovak national fratemals in 1920 and discovered that twelve such societies had a combined adult membership of 212,241. 33 This was an astonishing number when one considers that the 1920 United States Census counted 619,866 Slovaks in this country. 34 Furthermore, Capek's survey actually under-counted the number of Slovaks enrolled in fraternals because he did not list members of youth divisions. For instance, in 1920 the First Catholic Slovak Union also had 21,860 Youth Division members and the National Slovak Society's Young Folks Circle counted 14,124. 35 Nevertheless, if we break down Capek's adult members into those who belonged to religious fraternals versus those who belonged to secular ones, we discover that 142,946 were members of religious fraternals and only 69,315 belonged to non-denominational ones.36 If we compare the principal Catholic versus secular societies established by Slovaks in the United States over a longer period of time, we will notice an ever-widening gulf between them. Thus, while the National Slovak Society initially enrolled more members than the First Catholic Slovak Union (2,871 versus 864 in 1891), by 1898 the FCSU had overtaken the NSS 32 Thomas Capek, Jr., The Slovaks in America (New York: Czechoslovak Section of America's Making, Inc. , 1921 ), 88-9. 33 Ibid., 89. 34 See above, footnote 10. 35 Paufo, 75 rokov, 158; and Juraj J. Niznansky and Vendelin Platek, compilers, Dejiny a Pamatnica Narodneho Slovenskeho Spolku, 1890-1950 (Pittsburgh: National Slovak Society, 1950), 219. 36 Capek, Jr., op.cit., 88-9. �SLOVAKIA 17 (10,547 versus 9,573) and eventually left it far behind. 37 By 1929, when the membership of the National Slovak Society peaked, the latter had 42,646 adult members and 21,437 youth, for a grand total of 64,083, whereas the First Catholic Slovak Union had 102,000 adult and youth members that year. 38 Indeed, after 1929 membership in the NSS began a slow and steady decline to only 30,129 adult members and 7,508 youth in 1949, while the FCSU actually grew to 104,558 members in 1931, declined to 91,719 in 1939 due to the Great Depression, but rebounded after World War II to 95,712 members in 1948, and ultimately to 105,800 members in 1977, when its membership peaked.39 By contrast, membership in the National Slovak Society had fallen to 23,415 in 1975.40 While no-one has yet systematically studied the rise and decline of the major Slovak fraternal-benefit societies in America, I have noticed a surprising trend when briefly comparing men's and women's fratemals. For instance, while Capek reported 49,680 adult members in the First Catholic Slovak Union in 1920, and only 28,264 adult members in the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union that year,41 by 1985 the women's organization had outstripped the men in both membership and assets. In that year the women's Union had 105,955 members and assets of $94,000,000 versus 95,090 members in the men's Union, and assets of only $51 ,800,000.42 How and why the women overtook the men still needs to be determined. 37 Nifoansky & Platek, Dejiny, 2 14; Pauco, 75 rokov, 13, 31. 38 Nifoansky & Platek, Dejiny, 214, 219; Pauco, 75 rokov, 230. 39 Nifoansky & Platek, Dejiny, 214; Pauco, 75 rokov, 246, 322, 370, and Slovakia, 27 (1977), back cover. 4o Baumgarten & Stefka, The National Slovak Society, 156. 4 l Capek, Jr., op.cit., 88. 42 1985 Statistics of Fraternal Benefit Societies, 1986 Edition (Naperville, ILL: The National Fraternal Congress of America, 1986), I I 8-19. �18 SLOVAKIA The story of the establishment of Slovak fraternal-benefit societies in Canada likewise reveals a great deal about the Slovak-Canadian community, and its similarities and differences when compared with the American community. Unlike Slovak immigration to the United States, which proceeded directly from Slovakia to the industrial heartland of the American Northeast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Slovak immigration to Canada before World War I was principally from the United States to the western provinces. American Slovaks were lured to Canada's west either by work to be found in the newly-opened coal mines of Alberta or British Columbia, to construction of spurs of Canada's railroads through the Rocky Mountains, or by cheap and available farmland on the prairies. 43 Since these Slovak pioneers had gone to Canada via the United States, they naturally brought with them ties to SlovakAmerican institutions, including fraternal-benefit societies. From the only complete list of Canadian branches of an American Slovak fraternal in existence, we can clearly see the pattern of Slovak settlement in Canada. The first branch of a SlovakAmerican fraternal arose in the coal-mining town of Ladysmith, British Columbia in 1891. It was Assembly number 52 of the 4 3 Slovak-American newspapers had many reports from these "pioneers" who settled in Canada before World War I. For examples of coal miners who settled in British Columbia and Alberta see Amerikansko-slovenske noviny, January 28, 1902, p.1, Slovak v Amerike (New York), January 12, 1902, p.1, February 11 , 1902, p.l, February 9, 1906, p.3, July 29, 1913, p.7, Narodnie noviny, No. 69 (1902), p.3, Jed nota (Cleveland), August 23, 1905, p.5, October 10, 1906, p.1, April 9, 1909, p.2, November 15, 191 I, p.2, December 20, 1911, p.2, December 4, 1912, p.2, November 26, 1913, p.2; for examples of American Slovaks who settled on Canada's prairies and took up farming see Slovak v Amerike, October 29, 1901, p.3, January 2, 1908, p.2, June 17, 1909, p.2, December 21, 1909, p.4, August 25, 1910, p.2, January 2, 1912, p.3, June 17, 1913, p.6, Jednota, February 22, 1905, p.5, October 15, 1905, p.5, June 27, 1906, p.2, January 8, 1914, p.3 . For the story of a railroad worker who came to British Columbia via the United States in 1910 consult my interview with Andrej Potocky of Thunder Bay, Ontario, June 24, 1977, tapes STO-C-46, 47, 48, 49, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec. �SLOVAKIA 19 National Slovak Society, and in subsequent years branches of the NSS also arose in Fernie, British Columbia (1900), in Natal, B.C. (1903), in Coleman, Alberta (1904), in Frank Alberta (1905), in Trail, B.C. (1906), in Canmore, Alberta (1906), in Corbin, B.C. (1909), in Maple Leaf, Ontario (1913) and in Blainnore, Alberta ( 1918). 44 Thus, nine of the ten branches of the NSS established in Canada before the end of World War I were in the two westernmost provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. Only after World War I, when the United States started to close its borders to unrestricted immigration, while Canada still accepted cheap laborers, did the pattern of Slovak settlement change. 45 Now Slovaks immigrated directly to Canada via the ports of Quebec and Montreal, and, although the Canadian government wanted them to continue on to the West, most chose to settle in Ontario and Quebec, which formed the industrial heartland of Canada. 46 Thus, branches of the National Slovak Society sprang up in Windsor in 1929 and in 1937; in Montreal in 1931; in Hamilton in 1931 and 1939 and in Timmins in 1932. After World War II more branches arose in Toronto in 1956, and in Montreal that same year; in Welland in 1957, another one in Toronto in 1964, and in Galt in 1965.47 In spite of this growth in branches, membership in the NSS in Canada was unimpres- 44 Baumgarten & Stefka, The National Slovak Society, 251, 264, 266-67, 27071, 275-76, 278. 45 For the story of the Immigration Restriction Acts in the United States see E.P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798-1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press for the Balch Institute, 1981 ), 171-213. 46 For Canada's Immigration Policies during the 1920's see Donald Avery, Reluctant Host: Canada's Response to Immigrant Workers , 1896-1994 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1995), 82-107. 4 7 Baumgarten & Stefka, op.cit., 279-82. �20 SLOVAKIA sive at only 320 adults in 1964.48 Indeed, in 1989 the few remaining members of the NSS in Canada were urged by the Head Officers in Pittsburgh to join local branches of the First Catholic Slovak Union because the cost of administering so few members had become prohibitive. 49 While we do not have complete lists of branches of other Slovak-American societies in Canada, we do have partial listings of their locations, and these confirm the above observations. Thus, the first five branches of the First Catholic Slovak Union established in Canada before World War I appeared in Lethbridge, Alberta (1894), Fernie, B.C., Canmore and Coleman, Alberta, and Fort William, Ontario. 50 After the first and second World Wars another 51 branches of the "Jednota" were established principally in Ontario and Quebec, and by 1965 all the Jednota branches combined had 2,988 members, making them by far the largest American-Slovak fraternal-benefit society in Canada. 51 Meanwhile, among other American fraternals established in Canada, the same pattern appears. Thus, two branches of the Slovak Catholic Sokol arose in Canmore and Blairmore, Alberta, before World War I; and one each in Toronto and Montreal after the war. 52 The Slovak Evangelical Union did not move into Canada until after World War I, probably because Slovak Lutherans did not come in any great numbers until that time. However, it did eventually establish twelve branches in Ontario and Quebec, starting in Fort William in 1927, and later in Windsor, 48 Joseph M. Kirschbaum, Slovaks in Canada (Toronto: Canadian Ethnic Press Association of Ontario, 1967), 182. 49 Baumgarten & Stefka, op.cit., 184. 5o Kirschbaum, op.cit., 184; and Elena Jake~ova, Vysfahovalectvo Slovakov do Kanady (Bratislava: Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1981), 75-6. 5 l Kirschbaum, op.cit., 185. 52 Ibid., 187. �SLOVAKIA 21 Timmins, Toronto, Montreal, and elsewhere. 53 The Slovak Workers' Society also established six branches in Canada between 1926 and 1929, principally in Ontario and Quebec. 54 By 1934 various American Slovak fraternal-benefit societies had organized around 100 branches in Canada performing the same functions, and reflecting the same divisions in the Slovak community, as they had had in the United States. 55 Meanwhile, with the arrival of immigrants directly from Slovakia in the 1920's, a movement arose to establish purely Canadian fraternals as well. It started in Montreal in 1924 when the restaurant-owner Frantisek Capkovic decided to create a Slovak fraternal-benefit society. However, some Czechs also wished to join it, and the local Czechoslovak Consul persuaded Capkovic to organize the Czechoslovak Benefit Society, in order to promote the philosophy of "Czechoslovakism" among immigrants in Canada. This philosophy received official government sanction in 1918 with the creation of the new Republic of Czechoslovakia upon the ruins of Austria-Hungary. Thus, the new Czechoslovak Consulate in Montreal subsidized the Czechoslovak Benefit Society with a monthly contribution of $60.00. 56 While this Czechoslovak society grew to 1, 135 members in 17 branches across Ontario and Quebec, and even a few in the west by 1931, old-world politics ultimately divided it. Slovak nationalists in both the United States and Canada attacked this society as a tool of the Czechoslovak government. Therefore, in 1931 it split into the First Slovak Benefit Society headquartered 53 Jake§ova, op. cit., 113. 5 4 Ibid., 113-15. 55 This is my estimate, based upon my reading of Kirschbaum, Jake~ova, Baumgarten & Stefka. Kirschbaum under-counted them at only 78 in that year. Cf. Kirschbaum, op.cit., 193. The exact number of branches of Slovak-American fratemals in Canada in that year, and in others, still remains to be determined. 56 Jakdova, op. cit., I 16. �22 SLOVAKIA in Montreal (8 branches) and the old Czechoslovak Benefit Society (9 branches).57 Furthermore, one of the early organizers and supporters of the original Czechoslovak Benefit Society also broke with it Gabriel Kurdel, who had been its secretary in 1926-1927, decided to take up farming near Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1928. However, his organizing instinct spurred him to establish several Slovak Benefit Societies in the West, and also among the precious metals miners in Northern Ontario between 1929 and 1932. These societies eventually federated into the Canadian Slovak Benefit Society in 1946, and became the second-largest purely Canadian fraternal with 38 branches and 2,035 members in 1965. 58 The largest Slovak-Canadian fraternal-benefit society, ironically enough, was a child of an American organization. Nationalist Slovaks in Fort William, Ontario, had established a branch of the Slovak League of America in 1916, and other branches arose soon after the war in Corbin, British Columbia, Flin Flon and Winnipeg, Manitoba, Toronto and Oshawa, Ontario, Montreal, Quebec, and in New Waterford, Nova Scotia. 59 Slovaks in these centers were grateful that a delegate of the Slovak League of America had visited various camps in Canada in which Slovaks, among others, had been interned as "enemy aliens" in 1915 and 1916, and had persuaded the Canadian authorities to release them. 60 Unfortunately for these Canadian members of the Slovak League of America, the latter was not a fraternal-benefit society. It was the cover organization that spoke for most American57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 117-20; Kirschbaum, op. cit., 194-95, 204, 206-09. 59 Kirschbaum, op. cit., 198-20 I ; Jakefova, op. cit., 120; Sutherland, op. cit., 24-8. 60 Jednota , June 9, 1915, p.1, June 23 , 1915, p.5, July 14, 1915, p.l , July 21, 1915, p.1, August 11 , 1915, p. l , January 12, 1916, p.5, February 2, 1916, p.1, June 13, 1917, p.6. See also Kirschbaum, op. cit. , 92-3. �SLOVAKIA 23 Slovak fratemals, but it had few assets of its own. 61 Thus, after the Great Depression had broken out, members of the Slovak League of America in Canada felt the need to organize a mutualaid society, and, therefore, in December, 1932, in a meeting in Winnipeg, Manitoba, delegates from Slovak League of America branches in Winnipeg, Montreal, and Corbin, B.C., met and established the Canadian Slovak League, which remained strongly nationalist, but also began to function as a fraternalbenefit society.62 In the next few decades the Canadian Slovak League grew into the largest Slovak organization in Canada, with 55 branches and 3,247 members in 1965. 63 Also, as a reflection of the shifting population of Slovaks in the Dominion, the Canadian Slovak League moved its headquarters first from Winnipeg to Fort William, Ontario, later to Montreal, and finally , to Toronto, where most Slovak-Canadian fraternals are now headquartered. 64 Slovak socialists, meanwhile, also began to shift allegiances. After the Great Depression broke out, Canadian members of the American Slovak Workers' Society were no longer able to pay their dues, and the six branches of the American society withered. 65 However, the Canadian socialists did not abandon the cause. Instead, in 1931 they began to establish "Workers' Education Clubs," along the lines followed by other ethnic groups, principally the Hungarians. In 1934 these clubs joined the Communist Party of Canada, and by 1936 they federated into the 61 For a brief history of the Slovak League of America see Mikula~ Sprinc, ed., Slovenska Liga v Amerike styridsalrocna [Forty Y~ of the Slovak League of America], (Scranton, PA: Obrana Press, 1947). 62 Sutherland, op. cit., 25 . 63 Kirschbaum, op. cit., 198, 204. 64 Jake~ova, op.cit., 120, and Sutherland, op. cit., 70. According to lmrich Stolarik, who was president of the CSL at the time, the League's headquarters was moved to Toronto in 1980, when the League purchased a building for this purpose (telephone conversation with the author, May 6, 1994). 65 Jake~ova, op. cit., 120. �24 SLOVAKIA Slovak Cultural Society. During the Second World War these Slovak socialists finally formed a fraternal Slovak Benefit Society and by 1965 it had grown to 27 branches with 1,200 members, making it the third-largest Slovak-Canadian fraternalbenefit organization at that time. 66 Having surveyed the creation of the principal American and Canadian Slovak fraternal-benefit societies over the last 100 years, we are now in a position to notice their similarities and differences. American Slovak fraternals tended to reflect their earlier origins and were divided by religion, gender, class, regionalism and nationalism. Thus, among American fraternals the religious ones predominated, the men and women established their own organizations, there was some class differentiation both at the local, and at the national level, as there was in regional origins, and the chief political division initially had to do with Slovak nationalism versus loyalty to Hungary. Branches of American fraternals established in Canada tended to reflect these divisions. Canadian Slovak fraternals, by contrast, were founded later and reflected new political and other concerns. The major political divisions among them concerned Slovak identity versus 'Czechoslovakism.' On the other hand, Canadian Slovaks did not establish fraternals based upon gender, nor did they splinter along religious lines. Their much stronger national feeling, arising from their origins in the new Republic of Czechoslovakia, seemed to overcome these potential divisions. On class lines, however, Canadian Slovaks showed a much greater propensity towards division than did American Slovaks. While both groups founded Slovak "workers" organizations, those in Canada had proportionately more members than their cousins in the United States. Thus, in 1939, when the American Slovak Workers' Society peaked at approximately 11,000 members (out of a total of perhaps 400,000 Slovaks organized in 66 Ibid., 121-23, and Kirschbaum, op. cit., 209-12. �SLOVAKIA 25 fratemals), its Canadian counterpart peaked at 1,200 members in 1965.67 At first glance, the latter number seems very small, but it actually represents third place among Slovak-Canadian fratemals (the Canadian Slovak League had over 3,000 members and the Canadian Slovak Benefit Society around 2,000 in that same year). If we were to rank the American Slovak Workers' Society in 1939, it would not even have made tenth place among its countrymen's fraternals . Thus, socialism had a much stronger hold upon Canadian Slovaks than it did among its American cousins. In the final analysis, when establishing fraternal-benefit societies, Canadian Slovaks faced the same dilemmas that other immigrants to North America confronted: would they follow American models, or create distinctly Canadian ones? They ended up doing both, which is a typically Canadian reaction to the problem of ethnic identity in North America. 68 67 Milo~ Gosiorovsky, "K hist6rii Slovenskeho robotnfckeho spolku v USA" (A History of the Slovak Workers Society in the USA], Zbomlk Fi/ozofickej Fakulty Univerzity Komenskeho, historica , //-12 (Bratislava: Comenius University, 1962), 56. 68 For a brilliant discussion of Canada's continuing efforts to forge a national identity see Robert F. Hamey, "So Great a Heritage as Ours" : Immigration and the Survival of the Canadian Polity," Daedalus, 117 (No. 4, 1988), 51-97. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1998, Vol. 36 Description An account of the resource Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 7 Slovak FraternalBenefit Societies in North America: An Overview (1883-1993) M. Mark Stolarik (Conference on The Development and Significance of the Fraternal Movement and Fraternal Organizations Among Immigrants in North and South America and Europe, Maribor, Slovenia, May, 1994) In a book of essays that set out to explore how ethnic groups have used the principles of collectivism to deal with their new life in America, Scott Cummings lamented that "Relatively little has been written about self-help institutions and mutual benefit societies created by immigrant groups." 1 When applied to the Slovaks in North America, this statement still holds true. While several community studies of Slovaks in North America have appeared in recent years, none have compared and contrasted the creation of fraternal-benefit societies among Slovaks in the United States and Canada. 2 This essay will make such an attempt, 1 Scott Cummings, ed., Self-Help in Urban America: Patterns of Minority Business Enterprise (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980), 5. 2 The principal community studies are M. Mark Stolarik, Growing Up on the South Side: Three Generations of Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, /880- 1976 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985) and June Granatir Alexander, 8 SLOVAKIA although only in a preliminary fashion, because we still lack professional studies of the many fraternal-benefit societies established by Slovak immigrants to North America over the last 100 years. 3 When Slovaks from the Kingdom of Hungary (and other immigrants as well) began to migrate to North America in search of work in the late 19th century, they quickly discovered that, while the New World had plenty of job opportunities in the coal mines, steel mills and oil refineries, it did not provide much in the way of social welfare benefits. Thus, if an immigrant fell ill, was injured on the job, or even killed, neither his employer, nor The Immigrant Church and Community: Pittsburgh's Slovak Catholics and Lutherans, 1880-1915 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987). 3 Besides many jubilee-books written by talented amateurs (some of which will be cited later on), three semi-professional histories of Slovak fratemals do exist: Jozef Pauco's 75 rokov Prvej Katolfckej Slovenskej Jednoty (75 Years of the First Catholic Slovak Union] (Cleveland : First Catholic Slovak Union , 1965); Anthony X. Sutherland's The Canadian Slovak League: A History, /9321982 (Toronto: Canadian Slovak League, 1984); and R. Vladimir Baumgarten's and Joseph Stefka's The National Slovak Society: JOO Year History, 1890-1990 (Pittsburgh: National Slovak Society, 1990). Although the latter do provide us with basic information about these societies over time, they are all "in-house" histories aimed at their members and ignore the basic conventions of professional historians, especially the concerns of the new social history. In addition, three articles (or chapters in books) written by professional historians or anthropologists focusing on Slovak fraternals in specific locations also exist. June Alexander has detailed the rise and functions of fraternals in the Pittsburgh area in chapter two "From Self-Help to Community Development: Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies," of her book cited above, pp.15-27; the psycho-anthropologist Howard F. Stein has analyzed Slovak fraternals in western Pennsylvania, especially in the McKeesport and Duquesne settlements in "An Ethnohistory of Slovak-American Religious and Fraternal Associations: A Study in Cultural Meaning, Group Identity, and Social Institutions," in Slovakia, XXIX (1980-1981) , 63-88; and the author of this paper has provided an over-view of Slovak-American fraternals based upon his study of the Slovak community in Bethlehem in "A Place for Everyone: Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies," in the book edited by Scott Cummings, cited above, pp.130-41. SLOVAKIA 9 any level of government, paid him or his family any form of support or compensation. 4 The Slovaks were not the first to discover this shortcoming in American society. Indeed, as early as the 17th century, Scottish immigrants to America began to form self-help organizations, which later came to be known as fraternal-benefit societies. These were private bodies consisting of immigrants and their descendants who pooled their resources, established a common treasury, and paid relief or compensation to members who had become victims of some misfortune. 5 Contrary to Oscar Handlin's claim that they were products of the American environment, fraternal-benefit societies had roots in Europe dating back to at least the 15th century, and perhaps even earlier. Similarly, craft-guilds, which were not abolished until 1872 in the Kingdom of Hungary, also had a social-welfare component. 6 4 Margaret Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (Pitt sburgh : The Russell Sage Foundation, 1910. Reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 161. 5 Gordon Donaldson, "Scots," in Stephan Thernstrom et.al., Harvard Encyclo- pedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1980), 915 . 6 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that MadetheAmerican People (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1951), 170-71, 176; Al:!beta Gacsova traced the first fraternal-benefit society in Hungary to the silver miners of Slovakia in 1460. See her Boje slovenskeho fudu proti feudalnemu utlaku a vykorist'ovaniu [The Struggle of the Slovak People Against Feudal Oppression and Exploitation] (Bratislava: Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1960), 64; Slovak editors discussed both fraternal-benefit societies and craft guilds in Narodnf hlasnik (National Herald , Turc. Sv. Martin), October 31, 1868, p.225 ; January 31, 1869, p.22; November 30, 1871, pp.331-32; and August 31, 1872, pp.242-44; and workers in Slovakia did try to organize fraternal-benefit societies in the 1870's and l 880's, before the massive emigration of Slovaks to the United States began. Cf. Narodnf hlasnik, March 31, 1874, pp.62-3, and Narodnie noviny (National News, Turc. Sv. Martin), February 8, 1881 , p. I. For an analysis of workers' societies in the city of Kosice in eastern Slovakia in the late SLOVAKIA Thus, when central and eastern European migrants came to North America in the late 19th century, they had several models to choose from when they began to establish fraternal-benefit societies. They could copy from their American neighbours the structure of their fraternal-benefit societies, or some of these Slovaks, especially the skilled craftsmen or former miners, could draw upon previous experiences with craft guilds or fraternalbenefit societies in their homelands.7 Whatever their model, Slovak immigrants, who started to appear in the United States in the late 1870's, established around 50 local fraternal-benefit societies by 1890. 8 When one looks closely at these societies, one is bound to notice a tremendous variety in their origins, composition, religious, secular or national orientation. From Stefan Vesely's recent description, and listing of Slovak-American fraternals between 1883 and 1890, I extrapolated the following information: seven of these fraternals included the word "Hungarian" (along with "Slovak") in their titles; 26 used only the word "Slovak" (and not Hungarian) in their official name; 16 were secular-oriented, and 33 were religious. Of the 16 secular ones, two were organized by and for craftsmen. Furthermore, 25 of the fratemals arose in Pennsylvania, 8 in New Jersey, 6 in Ohio, 5 in New York, 3 in Connecticut and 1 each in Illinois and Minnesota. The largest concentration in and around cities was found in the Pittsburgh region 19th century, see Pavel Hapak, "K dejinam robotnfckych spolkov v Ko~iciach v druhej polovici 19. storocia," Nove obzory, 4 (1962), 162-63. 7 Slovaks in Bayonne, New Jersey and in Braddock, Pennsylvania said they learned about fraternal -benefit societies from their German and Irish neighbours. Cf. Ignac Gessay, "Spolky pred organizaciami." [Fraternals Before Organizations] , Narodnf kalendar, 191 I (Pittsburgh), 74-76. For a discussion of fraternal-benefit societies in Slovakia in the late 19th century see my Immigration and Urbanization: The Slovak Experience, 1870-/918 (New York : AMS Press, 1989), 70-72. 8 Stefan Vesely, "Prve slovenske spolky v Spojenych Statoch Americkych" [The First Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in America], S/ovaci v zahranicf, 4-5 (Martin: Matica slovenska, 1979, 53-55. SLOVAKIA 11 (7), followed by Cleveland (6), New York City (3), Passaic, New Jersey (3) and Bridgeport, Connecticut (3). The largest regional concentration was in eastern Pennsylvania, where 16 of the 50 fraternals sprang up. 9 The above statistical summary very nicely parallels what is widely-known about the Slovak-American community: that approximately half of all Slovak immigrants settled in Pennsylvania, and the rest in the surrounding Northeastern states; that the religious orientation of Slovak immigrants outweighed the secular, and that Slovak nationalism established a quick foothold in America at the expense of pro-Hungarian feeling. 10 Furthermore, when one looks at Slovak fraternals at a local level, as I have done in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, one will learn even more about the Slovak community in America. Between 1891 and 1918, the approximately 1,000 Slovaks who settled in the steel town of Bethlehem in eastern Pennsylvania, established 19 fraternal-benefit societies. Since the men had come first, they created the 10 earliest fraternals, starting in 1891, and their wives followed suit with 9 fraternals of their own (the men initially did not allow women to join their fraternals ). 11 In addition to this division by sex, Slovak fraternals were also established on the basis of religion. Thus, of the 19 fraternals in Bethlehem, 12 were religious, with the Roman Catholics claiming eight, the Lutherans two and the Greek Catholics two as well. These religiously-based fraternals were equally divided by gender. 12 9 Ibid. IO Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, Vol. II, Population: General Report and Analytical Tables (Washington, D.C., 1922), 984. Stolarik, Immigration and Urbanization, 99; Alexander, Immigrant Church and Community, 132-34; and M. Mark Stolarik, "The Slovak Search for Identity in the United States, 1880-19 I 8," Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism , XX (Nos. 1-2, 1993), 45-55 . I I Stolarik, Growing Up, 34-38. 12 Ibid. 12 SLOVAKIA Seven of the Slovak fraternals in Bethlehem were secularoriented, and they also highlighted both national and regional differences among the Slovaks. Six of these fraternals were ultra-nationalist, and their members hailed predominantly from central and western Slovakia. 13 This major difference among Slovaks in Bethlehem became apparent only in the fraternal records, because the majority of Slovaks in this town came from Eastern Slovakia. 14 Both dialectical, and national feelings, divided the Slovaks in Bethlehem. Furthermore, some of the fraternal records in Bethlehem also revealed class divisions within the Slovak community. The Sts. Cyril and Methodius Society, for instance, which was the first to be founded (in 1891 ), attracted the wealthiest and most successful of the Slovak businessmen in town, and by 1900 it demanded a $6.00 initiation fee from prospective members. Since this represented half a week's wages in the steel mill, only the better-off Slovaks could afford to join this lodge. The rest had to content themselves with less-expensive (and lessprestigious) lodges.1 s While Slovak fraternals mirrored the divisions within the community, they also performed many positive functions. As already mentioned, in return for monthly dues of about $0.50 they provided accident, illness or death benefits to their members, or their survivors. 16 They also provided personal loans, or even mortgages, to members in good standing, if their treasuries were large enough. 17 Furthermore, they taught their members the principles of democracy through their election of officers, and through the procedure of their meetings. 18 Indeed, many Slovak 13 Ibid., 36. 14 Ibid., 23, 28-30, 36. 15 Ibid., 34-5. I 6 Ibid., 38, 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 39. SLOVAKIA 13 politicians started their careers as officers of fraternal-benefit societies, and used them as launching pads for election to city and even state offices. 19 Fratemals also enforced a personal code of behavior, especially if they were founded on religious principles. 20 And, by helping to establish parish churches, by publishing their own newspapers, and often by erecting meeting halls, they helped to create other very important pillars of their ethnic communities. 21 Meanwhile, among the Slovaks in North America, local fratemals began to federate into larger bodies starting in 1890. This movement was launched by the ex-seminarian and leading Slovak nationalist Peter V. Rovnianek ( 1867-1933 ). He dreamed of uniting all Slovak fratemals into a National Slovak Society, which he founded in Pittsburgh on February 15, 1890.22 However, another budding leader of American Slovaks, the Rev. Stefan Furdek ( 1855-1915) dashed Rovnianek's dreams. Furdek, who was pastor of a Czech parish in Cleveland, had witnessed the growing anti-clericalism of the secular Czech Slavic Benevolent Society which had been founded in St. Louis in 1854. Furdek feared that Rovnianek's society would follow a similar path. Therefore, on September 4, 1890, he founded the First Catholic Slovak Union of the United States of America I 9 Ibid., 102-03. 20 Ibid., 39. 21 Ibid., 45-9, 39-40; for the story of Slovak newspapers published by fraternal- benefit societies see my "The Slovak-American Press," in Sally M. Miller's The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 356. 22 P.V. Rovnianek, Zapisky z.a liva pochovaneho. Z mojho 25 rocneho verejneho ucinkovania na naroda roli dedicnej [Notes of One Buried Alive: My 25 Years of Work on Behalf of the Slovak Nation] (Pittsburgh : National Slovak Society, 1924), 127-30. 14 SLOVAKIA (and later Canada) and formalized at the national level what had already been happening locally. 23 Once the secular-Catholic split was formalized, other groups followed suit. Slovak Lutherans established their Slovak Evangelical Union in Freeland, Pennsylvania in 1893, and the Calvinists likewise created their Slovak Calvin Presbyterian Union in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania in 1901.24 Militant Slovak nationalists, meanwhile, formed the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol in 1896 in New York City, while their more devout countrymen split off and established the Slovak Roman and Greek Catholic Sokol in Passaic, New Jersey in 1905. 25 Even a tiny group of Slovak socialists established a Slovak Workers' Society in Newark, New Jersey, in 1915. 26 All of these organizations encouraged the local fratemals to federate with their national bodies, and most did so. 23 Ibid., 127; Jan Pankuch, Dejiny Clevelandskfch a Lakewoodskfch Slovakov [A History of Cleveland and Lakewood Slovaks] (Cleveland: Author's publication, I 930), 32; Stefan Furdek, "Katolfcka Slovenska Jednota v Spojenych Statoch Americkych" [The First Catholic Slovak Union of the United States of America], Kalendar Jednota, 1896 (Cleveland), 26-7; for more Information on the Czech Slavic Benevolent Society see Jan Habenicht, Dejiny Cechuv Americkfch [A History of American Czechs] (St. Louis: Hlas Publishing Co., 1910), 36-7, and Thomas Capek, The Cechs (Bohemians) in America (Boston : Houghton Mifflin), 1920, 258 . 24 Stefan Zeman, "Pat'desiat rokov st'achetnej prace slov . evanjelikov v Amerike," in Martin Brozek ed., Zlata kniha Slovenskej Evanje/ickej Jednoty, 1893-/943 [Golden Jubilee of the Slovak Evangelical Union, 1893-1943] (Pittsburgh : Slovenskf hlasnik, 1943), 33-36; Frank Uherk.a, "Kratky prehfad S.K.P. Jednoty" [A Short History of the Slovak Calvin Presbyterian Union], Kalendar pre slovenskfch Kalvfnov, 1927 (Pittsburgh), 37-8. 25 Amerikansko-slovenske noviny (Pittsburgh), July 13, 1896, p.l, and Gusto Kosfk, "Prve desairocie nasej Jednoty" [The First Decade of Our Union], Sbomik Rfmsko a Grecko Katolfckej Telocvitnej Jednoty Sokol, 1916 (Passaic, NJ.), 35-51. 26 Jan Diacik, "Z dejin Slovenskeho Robotnickeho Spolku" [A History of the Slovak Workers' Society], in Jan Vrabel ed., Pamatnik Slovenskeho Robotnfckeho Spolku, 1915-1925 (Chicago, Rovnos( l:udu, 1925), 5. SLOVAKIA 15 Since these national Slovak fratemals were founded by men, and initially most did not admit women into their ranks, Slovak women quickly proceeded to establish their own national organizations. The first to do so were the wives of the men who had founded the National Slovak Society. Urged on by P. V. Rovnianek, these women founded the 'Zivena' Slovak National Women's Benefit Society on July 19, 1891 in New York City. 27 Not to be outdone, the Reverend Stefan Furdek then urged a group of Roman Catholic women in Cleveland to establish the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union in 1892. 28 After this Lutheran women established their own Evangelical Slovak Women's Union, and the wives of the secular and Catholic Sokols established their own "Wreaths" as adjuncts to the men's national organizations. 29 In addition, Slovaks also established fraternals on a regional basis. For instance, in 1893 Slovak men in eastern Pennsylvania created the Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union and a little later their wives organized the Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Ladies Union.30 Similarly, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Slovaks founded the Slovak Wreath of the Free Eagle in 1896. 31 Similar regional organizations also arose in New York, Passaic, New Jersey, 27 Helen Pn1cazky, "Kratke dejiny I. odboru v New York, N.Y." [A Short Hi story of Branch I in New York], in Pavel Blazek, ed., Pamiitnica k zlatemu jubileju Ziveny, 1891-1941 (Pittsburgh : Slavia Printing Company, 1941), 211. 28 Kenneth Baka, "The First Catholic Slovak Ladies Association," in Joseph C. Krajsa et.al., Slovaks in America: A Bicentennial Study (Middletown, PA: Slovak League of America, 1976), 172. 29 Alvin J. Schmidt, Fraternal Organizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 343 for the establishment of the Evangelical Slovak Women's Union, and Joseph G. Prufa, ed., Golden Jubilee (1905-1955) Souvenir Book of the Slovak Catholic Sokol (Passaic, NJ : Slovak Catholic Sokol, 1955), for the Sokol Wreaths. 30 Amerikansko-slovenske noviny, July 4, I 896, p. l ; "Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union," in Krajsa et.al., Slovaks in America, 197; and "The Ladies Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union, 1898-1976," Ibid., 20 I. 31 "First Slovak Wreath of the Free Eagle," Ibid., 22 I. 16 SLOVAKIA Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and elsewhere, and many soon also began to recruit members nation-wide.32 If we look at some membership statistics, we will quickly notice that Slovak Catholic fratemals attracted far more members than the secular ones in the United States. For instance, Thomas Capek Jr. did a survey of the principal Slovak national fratemals in 1920 and discovered that twelve such societies had a combined adult membership of 212,241. 33 This was an astonishing number when one considers that the 1920 United States Census counted 619,866 Slovaks in this country. 34 Furthermore, Capek's survey actually under-counted the number of Slovaks enrolled in fraternals because he did not list members of youth divisions. For instance, in 1920 the First Catholic Slovak Union also had 21,860 Youth Division members and the National Slovak Society's Young Folks Circle counted 14,124. 35 Nevertheless, if we break down Capek's adult members into those who belonged to religious fraternals versus those who belonged to secular ones, we discover that 142,946 were members of religious fraternals and only 69,315 belonged to non-denominational ones.36 If we compare the principal Catholic versus secular societies established by Slovaks in the United States over a longer period of time, we will notice an ever-widening gulf between them. Thus, while the National Slovak Society initially enrolled more members than the First Catholic Slovak Union (2,871 versus 864 in 1891), by 1898 the FCSU had overtaken the NSS 32 Thomas Capek, Jr., The Slovaks in America (New York: Czechoslovak Section of America's Making, Inc. , 1921 ), 88-9. 33 Ibid., 89. 34 See above, footnote 10. 35 Paufo, 75 rokov, 158; and Juraj J. Niznansky and Vendelin Platek, compilers, Dejiny a Pamatnica Narodneho Slovenskeho Spolku, 1890-1950 (Pittsburgh: National Slovak Society, 1950), 219. 36 Capek, Jr., op.cit., 88-9. SLOVAKIA 17 (10,547 versus 9,573) and eventually left it far behind. 37 By 1929, when the membership of the National Slovak Society peaked, the latter had 42,646 adult members and 21,437 youth, for a grand total of 64,083, whereas the First Catholic Slovak Union had 102,000 adult and youth members that year. 38 Indeed, after 1929 membership in the NSS began a slow and steady decline to only 30,129 adult members and 7,508 youth in 1949, while the FCSU actually grew to 104,558 members in 1931, declined to 91,719 in 1939 due to the Great Depression, but rebounded after World War II to 95,712 members in 1948, and ultimately to 105,800 members in 1977, when its membership peaked.39 By contrast, membership in the National Slovak Society had fallen to 23,415 in 1975.40 While no-one has yet systematically studied the rise and decline of the major Slovak fraternal-benefit societies in America, I have noticed a surprising trend when briefly comparing men's and women's fratemals. For instance, while Capek reported 49,680 adult members in the First Catholic Slovak Union in 1920, and only 28,264 adult members in the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union that year,41 by 1985 the women's organization had outstripped the men in both membership and assets. In that year the women's Union had 105,955 members and assets of $94,000,000 versus 95,090 members in the men's Union, and assets of only $51 ,800,000.42 How and why the women overtook the men still needs to be determined. 37 Nifoansky & Platek, Dejiny, 2 14; Pauco, 75 rokov, 13, 31. 38 Nifoansky & Platek, Dejiny, 214, 219; Pauco, 75 rokov, 230. 39 Nifoansky & Platek, Dejiny, 214; Pauco, 75 rokov, 246, 322, 370, and Slovakia, 27 (1977), back cover. 4o Baumgarten & Stefka, The National Slovak Society, 156. 4 l Capek, Jr., op.cit., 88. 42 1985 Statistics of Fraternal Benefit Societies, 1986 Edition (Naperville, ILL: The National Fraternal Congress of America, 1986), I I 8-19. 18 SLOVAKIA The story of the establishment of Slovak fraternal-benefit societies in Canada likewise reveals a great deal about the Slovak-Canadian community, and its similarities and differences when compared with the American community. Unlike Slovak immigration to the United States, which proceeded directly from Slovakia to the industrial heartland of the American Northeast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Slovak immigration to Canada before World War I was principally from the United States to the western provinces. American Slovaks were lured to Canada's west either by work to be found in the newly-opened coal mines of Alberta or British Columbia, to construction of spurs of Canada's railroads through the Rocky Mountains, or by cheap and available farmland on the prairies. 43 Since these Slovak pioneers had gone to Canada via the United States, they naturally brought with them ties to SlovakAmerican institutions, including fraternal-benefit societies. From the only complete list of Canadian branches of an American Slovak fraternal in existence, we can clearly see the pattern of Slovak settlement in Canada. The first branch of a SlovakAmerican fraternal arose in the coal-mining town of Ladysmith, British Columbia in 1891. It was Assembly number 52 of the 4 3 Slovak-American newspapers had many reports from these "pioneers" who settled in Canada before World War I. For examples of coal miners who settled in British Columbia and Alberta see Amerikansko-slovenske noviny, January 28, 1902, p.1, Slovak v Amerike (New York), January 12, 1902, p.1, February 11 , 1902, p.l, February 9, 1906, p.3, July 29, 1913, p.7, Narodnie noviny, No. 69 (1902), p.3, Jed nota (Cleveland), August 23, 1905, p.5, October 10, 1906, p.1, April 9, 1909, p.2, November 15, 191 I, p.2, December 20, 1911, p.2, December 4, 1912, p.2, November 26, 1913, p.2; for examples of American Slovaks who settled on Canada's prairies and took up farming see Slovak v Amerike, October 29, 1901, p.3, January 2, 1908, p.2, June 17, 1909, p.2, December 21, 1909, p.4, August 25, 1910, p.2, January 2, 1912, p.3, June 17, 1913, p.6, Jednota, February 22, 1905, p.5, October 15, 1905, p.5, June 27, 1906, p.2, January 8, 1914, p.3 . For the story of a railroad worker who came to British Columbia via the United States in 1910 consult my interview with Andrej Potocky of Thunder Bay, Ontario, June 24, 1977, tapes STO-C-46, 47, 48, 49, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec. SLOVAKIA 19 National Slovak Society, and in subsequent years branches of the NSS also arose in Fernie, British Columbia (1900), in Natal, B.C. (1903), in Coleman, Alberta (1904), in Frank Alberta (1905), in Trail, B.C. (1906), in Canmore, Alberta (1906), in Corbin, B.C. (1909), in Maple Leaf, Ontario (1913) and in Blainnore, Alberta ( 1918). 44 Thus, nine of the ten branches of the NSS established in Canada before the end of World War I were in the two westernmost provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. Only after World War I, when the United States started to close its borders to unrestricted immigration, while Canada still accepted cheap laborers, did the pattern of Slovak settlement change. 45 Now Slovaks immigrated directly to Canada via the ports of Quebec and Montreal, and, although the Canadian government wanted them to continue on to the West, most chose to settle in Ontario and Quebec, which formed the industrial heartland of Canada. 46 Thus, branches of the National Slovak Society sprang up in Windsor in 1929 and in 1937; in Montreal in 1931; in Hamilton in 1931 and 1939 and in Timmins in 1932. After World War II more branches arose in Toronto in 1956, and in Montreal that same year; in Welland in 1957, another one in Toronto in 1964, and in Galt in 1965.47 In spite of this growth in branches, membership in the NSS in Canada was unimpres- 44 Baumgarten & Stefka, The National Slovak Society, 251, 264, 266-67, 27071, 275-76, 278. 45 For the story of the Immigration Restriction Acts in the United States see E.P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798-1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press for the Balch Institute, 1981 ), 171-213. 46 For Canada's Immigration Policies during the 1920's see Donald Avery, Reluctant Host: Canada's Response to Immigrant Workers , 1896-1994 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1995), 82-107. 4 7 Baumgarten & Stefka, op.cit., 279-82. 20 SLOVAKIA sive at only 320 adults in 1964.48 Indeed, in 1989 the few remaining members of the NSS in Canada were urged by the Head Officers in Pittsburgh to join local branches of the First Catholic Slovak Union because the cost of administering so few members had become prohibitive. 49 While we do not have complete lists of branches of other Slovak-American societies in Canada, we do have partial listings of their locations, and these confirm the above observations. Thus, the first five branches of the First Catholic Slovak Union established in Canada before World War I appeared in Lethbridge, Alberta (1894), Fernie, B.C., Canmore and Coleman, Alberta, and Fort William, Ontario. 50 After the first and second World Wars another 51 branches of the "Jednota" were established principally in Ontario and Quebec, and by 1965 all the Jednota branches combined had 2,988 members, making them by far the largest American-Slovak fraternal-benefit society in Canada. 51 Meanwhile, among other American fraternals established in Canada, the same pattern appears. Thus, two branches of the Slovak Catholic Sokol arose in Canmore and Blairmore, Alberta, before World War I; and one each in Toronto and Montreal after the war. 52 The Slovak Evangelical Union did not move into Canada until after World War I, probably because Slovak Lutherans did not come in any great numbers until that time. However, it did eventually establish twelve branches in Ontario and Quebec, starting in Fort William in 1927, and later in Windsor, 48 Joseph M. Kirschbaum, Slovaks in Canada (Toronto: Canadian Ethnic Press Association of Ontario, 1967), 182. 49 Baumgarten & Stefka, op.cit., 184. 5o Kirschbaum, op.cit., 184; and Elena Jake~ova, Vysfahovalectvo Slovakov do Kanady (Bratislava: Slovak Academy of Sciences, 1981), 75-6. 5 l Kirschbaum, op.cit., 185. 52 Ibid., 187. SLOVAKIA 21 Timmins, Toronto, Montreal, and elsewhere. 53 The Slovak Workers' Society also established six branches in Canada between 1926 and 1929, principally in Ontario and Quebec. 54 By 1934 various American Slovak fraternal-benefit societies had organized around 100 branches in Canada performing the same functions, and reflecting the same divisions in the Slovak community, as they had had in the United States. 55 Meanwhile, with the arrival of immigrants directly from Slovakia in the 1920's, a movement arose to establish purely Canadian fraternals as well. It started in Montreal in 1924 when the restaurant-owner Frantisek Capkovic decided to create a Slovak fraternal-benefit society. However, some Czechs also wished to join it, and the local Czechoslovak Consul persuaded Capkovic to organize the Czechoslovak Benefit Society, in order to promote the philosophy of "Czechoslovakism" among immigrants in Canada. This philosophy received official government sanction in 1918 with the creation of the new Republic of Czechoslovakia upon the ruins of Austria-Hungary. Thus, the new Czechoslovak Consulate in Montreal subsidized the Czechoslovak Benefit Society with a monthly contribution of $60.00. 56 While this Czechoslovak society grew to 1, 135 members in 17 branches across Ontario and Quebec, and even a few in the west by 1931, old-world politics ultimately divided it. Slovak nationalists in both the United States and Canada attacked this society as a tool of the Czechoslovak government. Therefore, in 1931 it split into the First Slovak Benefit Society headquartered 53 Jake§ova, op. cit., 113. 5 4 Ibid., 113-15. 55 This is my estimate, based upon my reading of Kirschbaum, Jake~ova, Baumgarten & Stefka. Kirschbaum under-counted them at only 78 in that year. Cf. Kirschbaum, op.cit., 193. The exact number of branches of Slovak-American fratemals in Canada in that year, and in others, still remains to be determined. 56 Jakdova, op. cit., I 16. 22 SLOVAKIA in Montreal (8 branches) and the old Czechoslovak Benefit Society (9 branches).57 Furthermore, one of the early organizers and supporters of the original Czechoslovak Benefit Society also broke with it Gabriel Kurdel, who had been its secretary in 1926-1927, decided to take up farming near Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1928. However, his organizing instinct spurred him to establish several Slovak Benefit Societies in the West, and also among the precious metals miners in Northern Ontario between 1929 and 1932. These societies eventually federated into the Canadian Slovak Benefit Society in 1946, and became the second-largest purely Canadian fraternal with 38 branches and 2,035 members in 1965. 58 The largest Slovak-Canadian fraternal-benefit society, ironically enough, was a child of an American organization. Nationalist Slovaks in Fort William, Ontario, had established a branch of the Slovak League of America in 1916, and other branches arose soon after the war in Corbin, British Columbia, Flin Flon and Winnipeg, Manitoba, Toronto and Oshawa, Ontario, Montreal, Quebec, and in New Waterford, Nova Scotia. 59 Slovaks in these centers were grateful that a delegate of the Slovak League of America had visited various camps in Canada in which Slovaks, among others, had been interned as "enemy aliens" in 1915 and 1916, and had persuaded the Canadian authorities to release them. 60 Unfortunately for these Canadian members of the Slovak League of America, the latter was not a fraternal-benefit society. It was the cover organization that spoke for most American57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 117-20; Kirschbaum, op. cit., 194-95, 204, 206-09. 59 Kirschbaum, op. cit., 198-20 I ; Jakefova, op. cit., 120; Sutherland, op. cit., 24-8. 60 Jednota , June 9, 1915, p.1, June 23 , 1915, p.5, July 14, 1915, p.l , July 21, 1915, p.1, August 11 , 1915, p. l , January 12, 1916, p.5, February 2, 1916, p.1, June 13, 1917, p.6. See also Kirschbaum, op. cit. , 92-3. SLOVAKIA 23 Slovak fratemals, but it had few assets of its own. 61 Thus, after the Great Depression had broken out, members of the Slovak League of America in Canada felt the need to organize a mutualaid society, and, therefore, in December, 1932, in a meeting in Winnipeg, Manitoba, delegates from Slovak League of America branches in Winnipeg, Montreal, and Corbin, B.C., met and established the Canadian Slovak League, which remained strongly nationalist, but also began to function as a fraternalbenefit society.62 In the next few decades the Canadian Slovak League grew into the largest Slovak organization in Canada, with 55 branches and 3,247 members in 1965. 63 Also, as a reflection of the shifting population of Slovaks in the Dominion, the Canadian Slovak League moved its headquarters first from Winnipeg to Fort William, Ontario, later to Montreal, and finally , to Toronto, where most Slovak-Canadian fraternals are now headquartered. 64 Slovak socialists, meanwhile, also began to shift allegiances. After the Great Depression broke out, Canadian members of the American Slovak Workers' Society were no longer able to pay their dues, and the six branches of the American society withered. 65 However, the Canadian socialists did not abandon the cause. Instead, in 1931 they began to establish "Workers' Education Clubs," along the lines followed by other ethnic groups, principally the Hungarians. In 1934 these clubs joined the Communist Party of Canada, and by 1936 they federated into the 61 For a brief history of the Slovak League of America see Mikula~ Sprinc, ed., Slovenska Liga v Amerike styridsalrocna [Forty Y~ of the Slovak League of America], (Scranton, PA: Obrana Press, 1947). 62 Sutherland, op. cit., 25 . 63 Kirschbaum, op. cit., 198, 204. 64 Jake~ova, op.cit., 120, and Sutherland, op. cit., 70. According to lmrich Stolarik, who was president of the CSL at the time, the League's headquarters was moved to Toronto in 1980, when the League purchased a building for this purpose (telephone conversation with the author, May 6, 1994). 65 Jake~ova, op. cit., 120. 24 SLOVAKIA Slovak Cultural Society. During the Second World War these Slovak socialists finally formed a fraternal Slovak Benefit Society and by 1965 it had grown to 27 branches with 1,200 members, making it the third-largest Slovak-Canadian fraternalbenefit organization at that time. 66 Having surveyed the creation of the principal American and Canadian Slovak fraternal-benefit societies over the last 100 years, we are now in a position to notice their similarities and differences. American Slovak fraternals tended to reflect their earlier origins and were divided by religion, gender, class, regionalism and nationalism. Thus, among American fraternals the religious ones predominated, the men and women established their own organizations, there was some class differentiation both at the local, and at the national level, as there was in regional origins, and the chief political division initially had to do with Slovak nationalism versus loyalty to Hungary. Branches of American fraternals established in Canada tended to reflect these divisions. Canadian Slovak fraternals, by contrast, were founded later and reflected new political and other concerns. The major political divisions among them concerned Slovak identity versus 'Czechoslovakism.' On the other hand, Canadian Slovaks did not establish fraternals based upon gender, nor did they splinter along religious lines. Their much stronger national feeling, arising from their origins in the new Republic of Czechoslovakia, seemed to overcome these potential divisions. On class lines, however, Canadian Slovaks showed a much greater propensity towards division than did American Slovaks. While both groups founded Slovak "workers" organizations, those in Canada had proportionately more members than their cousins in the United States. Thus, in 1939, when the American Slovak Workers' Society peaked at approximately 11,000 members (out of a total of perhaps 400,000 Slovaks organized in 66 Ibid., 121-23, and Kirschbaum, op. cit., 209-12. SLOVAKIA 25 fratemals), its Canadian counterpart peaked at 1,200 members in 1965.67 At first glance, the latter number seems very small, but it actually represents third place among Slovak-Canadian fratemals (the Canadian Slovak League had over 3,000 members and the Canadian Slovak Benefit Society around 2,000 in that same year). If we were to rank the American Slovak Workers' Society in 1939, it would not even have made tenth place among its countrymen's fraternals . Thus, socialism had a much stronger hold upon Canadian Slovaks than it did among its American cousins. In the final analysis, when establishing fraternal-benefit societies, Canadian Slovaks faced the same dilemmas that other immigrants to North America confronted: would they follow American models, or create distinctly Canadian ones? They ended up doing both, which is a typically Canadian reaction to the problem of ethnic identity in North America. 68 67 Milo~ Gosiorovsky, "K hist6rii Slovenskeho robotnfckeho spolku v USA" (A History of the Slovak Workers Society in the USA], Zbomlk Fi/ozofickej Fakulty Univerzity Komenskeho, historica , //-12 (Bratislava: Comenius University, 1962), 56. 68 For a brilliant discussion of Canada's continuing efforts to forge a national identity see Robert F. Hamey, "So Great a Heritage as Ours" : Immigration and the Survival of the Canadian Polity," Daedalus, 117 (No. 4, 1988), 51-97.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in North America: An Overview (1883-1993) Description An account of the resource M. Mark Stolarik Slovakia, Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998 pp. 7-25 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stolarik, M. Mark, 1943- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/6ab65a70c2b64609832cfafbb7ce7d5d.pdf f6a76f57ce452b3fd5966ad435268d54 PDF Text Text 26 SLOVAKIA The Roma Of Slovakia Since 1939 David M. Crowe One of the most intriguing ethnic groups in Slovakia are the Roma or Gypsies. Traditionally regarded as social outcasts and misfits, the Roma have been a unique part of the Slovak historical landscape. Though there have been Roma in Slovakia since the Middle Ages, it was not until World War II that significant efforts were made to deal with the Slovak Roma. From 1939 until 1945, the Roma, often lumped together with the country's Jews, were subjected to a number of restrictive policies. Within a decade after the end of World War II, attention again was drawn to the Roma in the reconstructed Czechoslovak Republic, but particularly in Slovakia, where most of the country's Gypsies lived. To Czechoslovakia's communist leaders, the low socioeconomic status of the Roma was a national embarassment and underscored at least one failed aspect of the communist experiment. Driven by statistics that illustrated the low social, economic, educational, and cultural status of the Roma, considerable efforts were made through the 1980s to transform this traditionally nomadic people into sedentary, assimilated Slovak and Czech citizens. Though some significant gains were made, Slovak and Czech leaders were unable to stifle the centuries-old prejudice that had haunted Gypsies throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Though large numbers of Slovak Roma fled to the �SLOVAKIA 27 Czech Republic after the 1993 breakup of Czechoslovakia, a large Roma population still resides in Slovakia. The Roma or Gypsies have lived in Slovakia since the Middle Ages. By the 14th century, considerable Gypsy settlements began to appear in the Slovak portions of Hungary, particularly around feudal castles such as Spis (Zips) Castle. Initially, Roma were welcomed by local officials. Slovak peasants regarded these "Egyptians" as religious exiles from the Middle East. However, over time, positive Slovak attitudes towards the Roma began to change, particularly during the 16th century, when the region was plagued by religious wars and the Turkish threat. In Slovak Royal Hungary, for example, some noblemen began forcibly to expel Gypsies or force them to settle on the outskirts of towns and villages. 1 During the 17th century, Gypsies and others fleeing the Thirty Years War (1618 - 1648) entered Slovakia, which adopted new anti-Gypsy regulations to deal with the new Roma presence. Once the Austrian Habsburgs retook much of Hungary at the end of the 17th century, they implemented new regulations that strongly discouraged Roma settlement throughout the Austrian Empire. These harsh policies began to change under Maria Theresa (1740 - 1780). Her policies were designed to halt Gypsy immigration into her empire and force those already there to become sedentary. The Roma now became subject to all imperial taxes and obligations such as the draft. Gypsies were also required to give up their traditional dress and customs, and forbidden to marry other Gypsies. Roma children over five were taken from their parents and placed in the care of non-Gypsy Catholic parents. These policies were continued by Maria Theresa's son, Jopseph II (r. 1780 -1790), but fell into disarray after his death. 2 1 David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 ), pp. 31-35. ' Ibid., pp. 36-40. �28 SLOVAKIA There are few glimpses of Slovak Rom during the first half of the 19th century, though there is more on them during the second half of this period. In 1856, a Gypsy school, one of the first in Europe, was opened in Nove Zamky. However, it was not until the general Hungarian census of 1880 and the Hungarian Gypsy census of 1893 that the first concrete evidence about the Roma presence in Slovakia surfaced. According to 1893 data, there were 36,231 Roma in Slovakia, most of them settled. Almost half of those employed worked in traditional Gypsy occupations, while an almost equal number were musicians. The census also indicated that a considerable number of Roma were involved in unsavory occupations. Almost 90% of Slovakia's Gypsies were Roman Catholics.3 Total Gypsy population figures declined dramatically in the new post-World War I Czechoslovak census of 1921. It showed only 7,967 Roma in Slovakia and almost none in the Czech lands. Experts reasoned that the low numbers could be caused by exclusive use of "mother tongue" in the census. More accurate 1926 data indicated 62,192 Roma in Slovakia, though gypsiologist Dr. Eva Davidova felt the real numbers were much higher. 4 Efforts were made in Slovakia during this period to open schools for Gypsies and to encourage the development of cultural organizations for them. Some attempts were also inade privately to improve Gypsy health. One of the most famous Gypsy schools in Slovakia at this time was in Uzhorod. Opened in 1925 by Pavel Fodor, it gained an international reputation for its instruction in Slovak. 5 What gains were made by Slovak Roma disappeared with the coming of World War II. After the German dismemberment 3 Ibid., pp. 40-42. • Ibid., pp. 42-44. ' Ibid., pp. 44-47. �SLOVAKIA 29 of Czechoslovak.a in 1939, two separate states emerged - the German- controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the German-allied state of Slovakia. Whereas Gypsies in Bohemia and Moravia suffered from harsh Nazi policies throughout the Porajmos or Gypsy Holocaust, the Roma in Slovakia fared much better. 6 Part of the reason for Slovakia's comparatively mild treatment of its Gypsies centered around Germany's desire for Slovakia to be a model satellite state in southeastern Europe. Consequently, the government, the Catholic church, and business enjoyed semi-autonomy. Furthermore, Father Jozef Tiso, the head of state, opposed the complete nazification of his country. In time, Reich officials came to realize that the only way - they could achieve their goals was through political pressure and an intense propaganda campaign. Anything else would hamper Slovakia's contribution to the German war effort. Almost all of Slovakia's Gypsies survived the war because of this. This did not mean, however, that the Slovak government left its Roma population alone. Within months after the creation of Slovakia in the spring of 1939, the Tiso government ordered nomadic Gypsies to return to their legal residences, and made it illegal for them to do any horse trading. On September 25, 1939, Jews were deprived of their Slovak citizenship, while Gypsies who were born in Slovakia and wanted Slovak citizenship had to prove that they lived an orderly way of life; had a steady place of residence and employment; and were honorable citizens as reflected in their education, their moral and political trustworthiness, and their activity in their community, could they be included in the Slovak national community. If they did not fulfill the aforementioned conditions, or if they fulfilled them only ' Ibid. , pp. 47-51. �30 SLOVAKIA partially-if they worked only occasionally, if they spoke the Gypsy language among themselves, if their moral and political trustworthiness was doubtful, etc.--they could not be considered members of the Slovak national community. In other words, wandering Gypsies did not qualify for citizenship. 1 Four months later, Ferdinand Durcansky, Slovakia's Interior Minister, ordered that Gypsies and Jews were to work in special labor units as alternatives to military service, which was later set "at two terms of two months twice annually." Durcansky defined a Gypsy in Law No. 130/1940 of June 18, 1940, as someone who had two Roma parents and lived as a nomad, or a sedentary person who avoided work. Other regulations issued during this period made it illegal for Gypsies to ride public transportation, eat in cafes, or enter public parks. As Germany intensified pressure on the Slovaks to increase their contribution to the war effort, the Tiso government created seasonal labor camps in 1941 where Gypsies often made up over half of the workers. Conditions in the labor units were bad. Inmates suffered increasingly from inadequate clothing and shoes, cold, infestation with lice and bedbugs, hunger, and disease, especially trachoma and typhus. 8 7 Jorg K. Hoensch, "The Slovak Republic, 1939-1945," in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomfr Luza, eds., A History of the Czechoslovak Republic J9 J 8- J 948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 278-279, 284-286; Jiff Upa, "The Fate of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia under Nazi Domination," in Michael Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims· Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 209-210; Ctibor Necas. Nad osudem ceskych a sI ovenskych Cikam1 v letech I 939- I 945 (Brno: Univerzita J. E. Purkyne, 1981 ), p. 70. • Upa, "Fate of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. 210; Gypsy and Jewish service regulations were included in legislation of January 18, 1940, and February 29, 1940. Necas, Nad osudem, pp. 82-129, devotes a great deal of time to the little �SLOVAKIA 31 Many prisoners practiced self-mutilation to gain their freedom. In 1943, one member of the Slovak Diet, Hut'ka, criticized the conditions of the camps at Bystre nad Topl'ou. He felt the labor camps had been opened "to re-educate the asocial elements, not...to torture people and bring them into an even worse moral degradation." 9 On April 20, 1941, nomadic Gypsies were given eight days to return home. Once there, they were watched by the police and only allowed to leave with special permission. The Roma were also given two weeks to dispose of their horses and wagons . Gypsy houses located near public thoroughfares had to be torn down and reconstructed at a new site determined by officials. A Gypsy representative was to work with the local mayor to ensure that local ordinances were followed. Roma were also not allowed to own dogs. These regulations evidently did not curb all Gypsy nomadism, and officials explained when they opened a new labor camp in Krupina in the summer of 1941, that nomadic Roma were to be put in such camps to force them to live a sedentary life and to learn to do productive labor. These efforts still did not stop Gypsy nomadism, and on June 21, 1943, the government ordered that all Gypsy housing be removed from alongside busy roads. 10 Each Slovak community dealt with its Roma in a different manner. The 500 Gypsies in the village of Smizany were well integrated and none were sent to labor camps. When Hlinka Guards, the Slovak paramilitary group that modeled itself on the Italian "Black Shirts" and the German SA, arrived to take Gypknown history of the Gypsy Labor Units (pracovni utvary) from 1941-1944. He provides detailed Gypsy inmate statistics for the camps at Bystre nad Topl'ou , Dubnica nad Vlihom, llava, and Revuca; Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, ~ Destiny of Europe's Gypsies (New York: Basic Books, I972), p. 136. • Lfpa, "Fate of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. 210. 10 Ibid., p. 211; Necas, Nad osudem, pp. 74-75, 130. �32 SLOVAKIA sies from the village of Letanovce, the mayor only agreed to send two Roma who had reputations as drunks. Both Gypsies returned to Letanovce at the end of the war. 11 This atmosphere changed drastically during the summer of 1944. In June, Slovak Roma were accused of spreading typhoid throughout the country, and were forbidden to ride trains unless they had a special travel permit backed by a physician's certificate that showed them free of typhoid. Gypsies could only use the rail passes for outbound trips and had to get another one if they wanted to return home. The following month, the Interior Ministry informed its regional offices that there were still Roma in some of the country's towns and villages. It ordered local officials to move all Gypsies away from roadsides, and said that if any refused to comply, they would be executed. The decree added that more forced labor camps were being prepared for Slovak Roma. 12 The climate for the Gypsies got considerably worse with the German occupation of Slovakia on September 29, 1944. Spurred by the Slovak National Insurrection of August 29-0ctober 27, 1944, the Germans clamped down harshly on the Slovaks, including the Roma, because they had actively supported the uprising. One Gypsy leader, Tomas Farkas, headed a mixed guerilla band of Roma and Slovaks during the uprising. Farkas' detachment momentarily held up German forces near Tisovec as they moved towards Banska Bystrica, the military center of the rebellion. After Banska Bystrica fell, authorities arrested Farkas' son, and imprisoned him. When Slovak partisans retreated in the 11 Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, p. 136; Emflia Horvlithova, Cii:ani na SJovensku (Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Slovenskej Akademie Vied, 1964), p. 171. Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, p. 137; Horvathova, Ciian.i na SJoyensku, p. 171; the train regulations were issued on June 13, 1944, while others appeared on June 19-21, 1944. Necas, Nad osudem, pp. 130-132. 12 �SLOVAKIA 33 face of the German advance in the fall of 1944, the Gypsies, using hidden weapons, stayed behind to protect their families. After the rebellion's collapse, a German intelligence officer tricked the Roma into revealing details about their weapons cache. Hlinka Guards executed the Gypsy partisans as their families watched in horror. The Germans then killed all Roma women and children and buried their bodies in a lime pit. 13 Similar Gypsy massacres took place in other parts of Slovakia as retribution for their role in the Slovak National Insurrection. On November 14, 1944, 65 Roma were burned to death in two huts in Cierny Balog, while other Gypsies were forced to dig a large grave for their fallen comrades. Hlinka - Guards murdered the entire community of 111 Gypsies in Ilija eight days later, and on November 23 , butchered as many Roma as they could find in Slatina. Only three Gypsies escaped the massacre. A similar tragedy took place at Neresnice, where only two families survived. 14 Atrocities also took place at the labor camp at Dubnica nad Vahom. On September 29, 1944, German authorities in Trencin just south of Dubnica nad Vahom ordered that all male Roma from this region be sent to the labor camp at Dubnica. The Gypsy transfers were halted once the camp became full two weeks later. On November 2, 1944, Dubnica na Vahom was transformed into a concentration center for all Roma. Authorites freed all of the camp's non-Gypsy inmates to make room for the Roma. After a typhus epidemic ravaged a Gypsy camp at Ustie 1 Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, pp. 137- 138; Hoensch, "The Slovak Republic," pp. 293-295 ; Anna Josko, "The Slovak Resistance Movement," in Mamatey and Luza, Histocy of the Czechoslovak Republic, pp . 375-380, 382-383. 14 Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gyspies. pp. 137-138; authorities later found a mass grave at Kremnica, which was occupied by the Germans from November 5, 1944, to January 12, 1945. It contaimed 3,723 bodies, some of them Gypsies. Netas, Nad osudem, pp. 138-141. ' �34 SLOVAKIA nad Oravou in mid-December, authorites shipped its inmates to Dubnica nad Vahom. Before the arrival of the new Roma inmates, there were 729 Roma at Dubnica nad V ahom, 250 of them children. The only recorded atrocity at the camp took place on January 17, 1945, when 16 sick Gypsy prisoners were taken from the camp and told they were being shipped to the hopsital at Trencfn. Instead, they were driven in military trucks to a wooded area, forced into a pit, and executed. The Dubnica nad V ahom camp was closed on the eve of its capture by Soviet forces on April 8, 1945. Despite these tragedies, the Gypsy survival rate in Slovakia was quite high, and estimates are that only a few hundred of Slovakia's 100,000 Rom died in the Porajmos. 15 The liberation of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1945 found the country traumatized by the human and economic devastation of the war. A massive campaign of expulsions aimed primarily at Germans and Magyars saw I .5 million people move into the former Sudetenland from other parts of Czechoslovakia, including some Gypsies. As the Germans were expelled from Cze- __ choslovakia, many Slovak Gypsies were sent to camps in northern Bohemia and Moravia where they worked as unskilled laborers. Not all Slovak Gypsies remained in the Czech lands, 15 Lfpa, "Fate of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 211 -213; Necas, Nad llS..Ll.d.e.m, pp. 111-112, I 34- 137 ; Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, p. 138; Horvathova, Cii:ani na S)ovensku, p. 173 n34; David J. Kostelancik, "The Gypsies of Czechoslovakia: Political and Ideological Considerations in the Development of Policy," Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter 1984), p. 309; the Gypsies were not Slovakia's only victims after the Slovak National Insurrection. Estimates are that from August 1944 until April 1945, "7,500 soldiers and 2,500 partisans were killed and 3,723 civilians ... were murdered and buried in mass graves; 900 were burned in lime kilns; 30,000 people were de)Xlrted to German concentration camps; 60 communities were completely destroyed by fires and 142 were partially wiped out." Josko, "Slovak Resistance Movement," p. 383. �SLOVAKIA 35 and some returned to Slovakia where they began to buy new homes. In addition, about 6,000 Olach [Olassti] Gypsies continued to live as nomads. Officials hoped the returning Slovak Roma would help solve the regions's severe labor shortage and serve as role models for other Roma. After the strong communist showing in the May 26, 1946, elections, the new Minister of the Interior, the Czech Vaclav Nosek, and others, called for restrictive policies against the Roma, whom Nosek and his supporters called questionable citizens of Czechoslovakia. 16 Efforts by Evzan Erban, the Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, to continue to send Slovak Gypsies to camps in the Czech lands were stopped by the non-communist Minister of Justice, Prokop Drtina in 1947. Nosek convinced Drtina to do a census of the country's Roma population to determine how many lived as nomads. According to the census, there were 84,438 Roma in Slovakia, and 16,752 in the Czech lands. The successful communist coup in early 1948 brought to power a party that a year earlier had pledged that it would do everything possible to integrate the Gypsies into the fabric of Czechoslovakian society, and raise their social, economic, and cultural status. 17 In 1949, the government of Klement Gottwald created a special commission to investigate the "Gypsy question." The 16 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 309-310; Willy Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms: The Case of Czechoslovakia," in Farnham Rehfisch, ed., Gypsies Tinkers and Other Travellers (New York: Academic Press, 1975), p. 213; Tom~ Grulich and Tom~ Hai~man, "lnstitucionalnf zajem o cikanske obyvatelstvo v Ceskoslovensku v letech 1945-1958," C:esky Lid, Vol. 73 , No. 2 ( 1986), p. 73. 17 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 310-3 I I ; Vladimir Srb, "Cikani v Ceskoslovensku Demo2rafje, Vol. Xl , No. 3 (1969), p. 194; Zdenek Suda, The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 32-36; Radomfr Luui, "Czechoslovakia between Democracy and Communism," in Mamatey and Luui, History of the Czechoslovak Republic, pp. 412-415. �36 SLOVAKIA new commission sponsored a detailed study of Czechoslovakia's Gypsies that appeared in 1950 as Zarazovani osob cikanskeho puvodu do trvaleho pracovniho procesu (Position of Individuals of Gypsy Origin in the Work Process). Two years later, this study was partly integrated into another report by the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, Uprava pomeru osob cikanskeho puvodu (Report About the Life of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia). This latter study blamed earlier governments and societies for the Roma's low social and economic status, and promised that the new People's Democratic State would resolve the "Gypsy question" if the Roma willingly and quickly become accustomed to conscientious work, they adopt trades, they take part in socialist competition, they become shock-workers, members and functionaries of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the Revolutionary Trade-Union Movement. 18 However, over the next eight years, Czechoslovak leaders did little to help the Gypsies improve their quality of life. Numerous regional and local decrees touched on health care and housing needs, and emphasized changing the behavior of the Roma. 19 Communist Party propaganda, however, underscored improved Gypsy school attendance, literacy, and new attitudes towards work and integration. By the mid-1950s, this congratulatory tone changed as the reality of the Gypsy's plight and demographic growth became more apparent to the country's leadership. In 1956, authorities began to talk about a national Gypsy crisis, which was linked to their continued nomadism. 18 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 3 I 0-311; Grulich and Hai~man, "Institucionalnf zajem o cikanske," p. 74. " Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 311, 320; Josef Kalvoda, "The Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," in David M. Crowe and John Kolsti, eds., ~ Gypsies of Eastern Europe (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), p. 93. �SLOVAKIA 37 According to an article in Zemedelske Novjny (Agricultural Newspaper) in 1957, only 40% of the country's Roma were working in industry and agriculture. The Slovak journal Smena (Direction) added that the nomadic Roma lifestyle heightened prejudice towards them, which the journal compared to "discrimination against the Negro in the United States.":n These problems and attitudes, coupled with the size of the Roma population nationwide, which Radio Bratislava estimated in 1958 to be 150,000, prompted the Communist Party to approve a resolution on April 8, 1958, that demanded a new campaign to resolve the "Gypsy question." Similar to new policies throughout the Soviet bloc at that time, the Party called for a mass campaign addressed to both the Gypsies and white -- bigots, for lifting the Gypsies' extraterritorial immunities and punishment of nomadism. 21 Czechoslovakia's Gypsies were now officially divided into three categories - nomads, semi-nomads, and completely sedentary - in anticipation of Law No. 74, of October 17, 1958, "Act on Permanent Settlement of Nomadic People." The new law instructed local officials to work with nomads, whom it defined as an individual who 0 Otto Ulc, "Communist National Minority Policy: The Case of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," Soviet Studies, Vol. XX, No. 4 (April 1969), pp. 422-424 ; "Minorites in Eastern Europe," Eastern Europe. Vol. 8, No. 3 (March 1959), pp . 13-14. 21 "M inorities in Eastern Europe," p. 14; Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," p. 311, improperly places the date for the passage of Law No. 74 as November 17, 1958; Grulich and Hai§man, "Jnstitucionalnf zajem o cikanske," pp. 77-78; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 214-215. Guy estimates the number of registered nomads at 20,000-27,000; Ulc, "Gyps ies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 424-426, says officials estimated that the semi-nomadic Rom were the largest group among the Gypsies. ' �38 SLOVAKIA in groups or individually, wanders from place to place, shuns honest work or obtains his livelihood by iniquitious means even though he may be registered in some community as its permanent resident.-n. According to the new law, if anyone continued to live in this manner, he or she could be imprisoned for six months to three years. Two other parts of Law No. 74 gave the Minister of the Interior the right 11 to issue executive orders to this effect, including registration of the nomads. 11 Though the new regulations never mentioned the Roma, they were its only target, particularly the country's 6,000 nomadic Olach Gypsies. Official estimates indicated that there were from 11,000 to 40,000 nomadic Roma in Czechoslovakia at this time. 23 In an effort to avoid charges of racism, officials also upgraded the Gypsies' official status to a "socio-ethnic group." Unfortunately, Czechoslovak authorities did not anticipate the complex economic and social problems that would accompany their efforts to force the complete integration of the nation's Gypsies. Many nomadic Roma found ways to avoid punishment for thsir lifestyle, while local efforts to force settlement through the assignment of precious housing to Gypsies created growing resentment against a group that some came to see as privileged. Many Slovaks and Czechs felt the Roma were a privileged group that had special rights without obligations. The public complained that the Gypsies were measured by different standards and took advantage of their unique position. More importantly, the government's new efforts did little to upgrade the low socio-economic status of the Roma, and perhaps made it worse for the newly settled Gypsies, who, located principally in Slova- 22 23 UII!, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 424-425. Ibid., pp. 425-426. �SLOVAKIA 39 kia, still lived in slums with inadequate plumbing and sanitation facilites. 24 Consequently, in 1965, the Communist Party asked local officials to do a more thorough investigation of the plight of the Roma and develop a long range plan for Gypsy assimilation. The result was Ordinance No. 502 of June 1965, which developed a Gypsy reform progam that centered around fullemployment possibilities for Gypsies able to work full time. These efforts were considered essential to upgrading the standard of living for Roma, and tied to plans to destroy substandard Gypsy settlements and the movement of Roma from Slovakia to other parts of the country. The Academy of Sciences was asked to do a study of Roma life, while the state-controlled media was ord.tred to help counter nationwide prejudice against the Roma. A new government body, the National Council for Questions of the Gypsy Population (NCQGP), which had no Gypsy members, was to serve as the program's watchdog. The NCQGP produced three position papers, but was abolished in 1968. 25 At the center of this new program was the destruction of substandard Gypsy housing and settlements, primarily in Slovakia, and the forced resettlement and employment of their Rom inhabitants. Officials estimated that 67.3% of Slovakia's 153,000 Gypsies lived in extremely substandard housing. The government pin-pointed 1,266 Roma settlements in Slovakia for destruction, and the transfer of 64,096 Gypsies. Officials planned to move the effected Slovak Gypsies to the Czech lands after their settlements were razed. Local governments, aided by national ,. Kostelancik, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. 426; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia." pp. 98-99. 25 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia." pp. 312-313; Ult, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia." pp. 430-431. Of the 56,000 Rom in eastern Slovakia, only 2.2% had an adequate water supply; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 2 I 922 . �40 SLOVAKIA subsidies, would then be responsible for the Gypsies' housing and employment. The resettlement program was voluntary. Once a Gypsy family was convinced of the wisdom of moving, the government would give the family a special payment, combined with a 25-30% subsidy and low cost government loan, which would be used to purchase a new home in the Czech lands. However, inadequate funding, coupled with growing resentment towards the new Roma presence in the Czech lands, and the unwillingness of some Gypsies to remain there, undercut the success of the program. Between 1965-1968, the government was only able to eliminate a third of the Roma settlements targeted for destruction. 26 As authorities struggled with the mixed results of this new transfer and employment program, Czechoslovakia was turned inside out by the events of the Prague Spring in 1968.Z7 On the eve of the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia had an official Gypsy population of 223,993, with 164,526 in Slovakia, and 59,467 in the Czech lands. In 1968, the Roma in Slovakia formed their first official organization, the Union of Gypsy-Romanies (UGR or Zvaz Cikanov-Romov; Romani, Romano Jekhetaniben), followed by a similar Czech organization in 1969. Later that year, both groups joined together, but maintained separate Slovak and Czech branches. The UGR received funds from the National Front and had branches throughout Czechoslovakia. Its goals were to improve the socio-economic status of the Roma and enhance the Gypsies' awareness of their own culture and 2 • Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 432-433 ; Kostelancik, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 312-314; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 219-220; Hiibschmannova, "Co je tak zvana cikanska otazka," p. 115 n I 9. 27 Otto Ulc, "Czechoslovakia," in Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, ed., Communism io Eastern Europe, Second Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 121-123; William Shawcross, ~ (New York : Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1990), pp. 114-119. �SLOVAKIA 41 traditions. The UGR also wanted to acquire nationality status for the Roma, which triggered an engaging debate between Gypsy and non-Gypsy intellectuals about the entire "Gypsy question." Central to the debate was Jaroslav Sus' 1963 study, Cikanska otazka v CSSR (The Gypsy Question in the CSSR), which described the Rom way of life as [an] undesirable combination of 'nomadism, tribalism ...and blood f euds,' and the Romani language as ... unworthy of preservation. Consequently, Sus felt that "unconditional assimilation [was] ... the only solution for the question." 28 Roma scholar Elena Htibschmannova, long an advcoate of --Gypsy nationality status, led the attack on Sus' ideas. Htibschmannova shifted responsibility for some aspects of the "Gypsy Question" to the shoulders of the government, as did the August 1969 Programme of the Founding Congress of the Czech Gypsy-Rom Association [Union], which felt that "fears of the results of granting rights to the Gypsies as a nationality" lay at the heart of the question. As this debate raged, plans were made to start a Roma journal, and the UGR's membership rolls swelled to 20,000 between 1968 - 1971. Several hundred Gypsy musical and sports groups were formed, and the media began to refer to the country's Roma as "citizens of Gypsy origin." Unfortunately, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, the new government of Gustav Husak introduced an era of "normalization" that gradually chipped away at many of the gains achieved by the Roma during the Prague Spring. In April I 973, the government expelled the UGR from the National Front, and outlawed other Gypsy organizations because "they had failed to fulfill their integrative function." 29 21 " Crowe, Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia, pp. 58-59. Srb, "Cikani v Ceskoslovensku, ~ p. 194; Kostelancik, "Gypsies of �42 SLOVAKIA What followed was a renewed effort to force Gypsy integration and assimilation, coupled with a new sterialization scheme to reduce Gypsy births.~ One of the darker sides of the new Roma assimilation campaign were efforts to promote the sterilization of Gypsy women. The seed for this idea was planted in a February 29, 1972, Ministry of Health "Decree on Sterilization." Though "designed to safeguard against arbitrary or illinformed sterilization of all Czechoslovak citizens," the decree was used to encourage the sterilization of Romany women in order to reduce the high unhealthy' Romany population and, as a result, a disproportionately high number of Romany women were sterilized, often in violation of the existing safeguards and of their rights to non-discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or sex. 3 ' Czechoslovakia," pp. 3 I 7-318 ; Eva Davidova, "The Gypsies of Czechoslovakia, " Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society. Third Series, Vol. I, Nos. 12 (Jan uary-April), pp. 53-54; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 220-22 I , 223, n44; Grattan Puxon, "Gypsies: Blacks of East Europe," The Nation. April 17, I 976, pp. 461-462; Hlibschmannova, "Co je tak zvana cikanska otazka," pp . 105, I 12 nl6, I 13- 114, I 16 n23, 117-118 ; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 101-103 ; Otto Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia: A Case of Unfinished Integration," Eastern European Politics and Societies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring 1988), pp. 310-312. 30 Other estimates put the 1970 Roma population at over 300,000. Vladimir Srb, "Demograficky profil ~eskoslovenskych romu," Cesky Lid, Vol. 72 ( 1985), p. 139; Vladimir Srb, "K integraci cikanskeho obyvatelstva v CSSR," Demoi:rafie, Vol. XXI, No. 4 (1979), p. 323; V. Srb and J. Job, "Nektere demograficke, ekonomicke a kultumi charakteristiky romskehe obyvatelstva v CSSR 1970," Demoi:rafie, Vol. XVI, No. 2 (1974), p. 173 ; Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," p. 106; Paul S. Shoup, The East European and Soviet Data Handbook (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 42, 48; Chris Cook and John Stevenson, The Loni:man Handbook of Modern European History )763-)985 (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 216,218. 31 Rachael Tritt, Jeri Laber, and Lois Whitman, Strui:i:Jini: for Ethnic Identity · Czechoslovakia's Endani:eced Gypsies (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992), �SLOVAKIA 43 According to a Slovak document released in 1979 by Charter 77, a Czechoslovak dissident group, the Slovak government had already begun a program that used economic incentives to get Gypsy women to be sterilized because of earlier, unsuccessful government efforts "to control the high unhealthy Romany population through family planning and contraception." Local health workers offered some prospective sterilization candidates as much as 5,000 Crowns to undergo the procedure. As pressure intensified to get more Gypsy women to agree to sterilization, some health workers often made unfulfilled offers of as high as 30,000 Crowns. Charter 77 protested this practice in 1979, and claimed that it violated Article No. 259 of the state penal code, which dealt with genocide. But this was not the only - . criticism in Charter 77's 1979 document. On a broader scale, Charter 77 decried government practices designed to stop Gypsy nomadism and force assimilation, and the official denial of Roma ethnic status. According to Charter 77, the collective impact of these programs set into play "a process of social disintegration which has no comparison in the history of the Gypsies. This fact is substantiated by an ever increasing number of Gypsies who are sentenced to loss of freedom." 32 While it difficult to gauge the impact of the 1979 Charter 77 report on the plight of the Roma, population data from the 1980 census spurred further government action. The 1980 census showed a Roma population of 288,440, an increase of 31.3% over 1970 figures. Czechoslovakia's total population only grew by 6%. during the same period. The greatest increase in Gypsy growth rates was in the Czech republic, where the Roma population increased 47% between 1970 - 1980, versus a 25.5% rise in Slovakia. Even these figures, though, are misleading, since pp. 19, 139-144. 2 ' Tritt, Czechoslovakia's Endangered Gypsies, pp. 20, 24, 26-27; Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 314-315. �44 SLOVAKIA arbitrary counting methods showed a discrepancy between national census figures, and those recorded in local "Gypsy Registers," which indicated that there were 306,246 Roma in Czechoslovakia in 1980. The absolute rise in Gypsy population numbers was less troubling to the government than the national and Rom childbirth rate figures. The overall Czechoslovak childbirth rate was on the decline, and by 1982 was "below the level of biological reproduction." The average Czechoslovak woman bore 2.4 children in the 1970s compared to 6.4 children for a Gypsy woman. 33 These increases were remarkable, particularly in light of continued government efforts to destroy Slovak Gypsy slums and the forced movement of Slovak Roma to Czech portions of the country. Other Gypsies also moved to the Czech lands because of better job opportunities and a higher standard of living. Between 1972-1980, officials destroyed 4,000 Roma dwellings in Slovakia, and moved 4,850 Gypsies elsewhere. Though Gypsy housing standards improved appreciably between during this period, there were still 5.6 persons in thct average Roma apartment or house versus a national average of 3.1 persons per dwelling. By 1980, a little more than 70% of the country's Gypsy population lived in apartments, while 10% still lived in primitive settlements that were to be destroyed by 1990. The number in extremely unfit housing dropped from 80.7% in 1970 to 49% between 1970 and 1980. Another part of the Roma assimilation campaign centered around attempts to force more Gypsy children into the public schools. In 1971, only 10% of the eligible Roma children in Czechoslovakia attended kindergarten, a figure that rose to 33 Srb, "Demograficky profil foskoslovenskych Romu," pp. 139-140. There were 88,507 Gypsies in the Czech Republic in 1980, and 199,853 in Slovakia; Ul~, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 315-316; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 108-109. �SLOVAKIA 45 58.5% in 1980. During the same period, the number .of Gypsy children that finished public school rose from 16.6% to 25.6%, while the number enrolled in colleges and universities increased from 39 to 191. Nationwide, literacy rates rose to 90% among Roma adults. On the other hand, Gypsy school dropout rates in Slovakia increased substantially as Roma pupils moved from grade to grade. In 1983-1984, 72.2% of the Slovak students who failed to go into the second grade were Gypsies, and almost a third of the Roma who went to second grade barely had minimal literacy skills, a figure that jumped to 50% for Gypsy 4th graders. Nationwide, many Gypsies entered the school system with a knowledge of only a few hundred Slovak or Czech words, and were often assigned to special instititions (zvlastnf skoly) designed for the mentally retarded. Only a third of the country's Gypsy children finished 8th grade in 19831984, and only 4% went on to university or college. 34 Gypsy employment figures for this period were also a mixture of success and failure. Though 1981 data showed an 87.7% employment rate for male Gypsy workers that was close to the national average of 91 .9% for all adult males, the 54.95% employment rate for Roma female workers was well below the national average of 87.7% for all women. In addition, over three quarters of all Gypsies employed held low paying, non-skilled jobs. The overall impact of the employment, educational, and housing data found Czechoslovakia's Roma on a socio-economic plateau that proved difficult to transcend. According to Irnrich Farkas, the official responsible for Gypsy matters in Slovakia, the government felt that it would be harder to improve the quality " Kostelanc ik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 313-3 I 5. In I 980, 59% of the Gypsies in Slovakia lived in the lowest classification for housing, Class IV. Kindergarten attendance rates in eastern Slovakia, where 53% of Slovakia's Rom lived in 1980, rose from 10% to 66% between 1970-1980; Ult, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 319-320. �46 SLOVAKIA of Gypsy life "because increasingly left for solution are those socially and culturally backward families." 35 The government tried to put the best light on its assimilation efforts, and publicized some Gypsy success stories. Bratislava Pravda reported that 435 Roma had been elected to predominantly low level positions as deputies of Peoples Committees, and that one Gypsy, Emil Rigo, had briefly been a member of the Politburo in 1968. Officials also used successful Gypsies to counter efforts to acquire nationality status for the Roma. In 1986, Rude Pravo responded to the World Romany Congress' appeal for nationality status for Czechoslovakia's Gypsies partially with a statement by Mirosalv 2.ajda, an assimilated Roma and Party member who told the newspaper that he was quite content with his life. 36 The lack of nationality status for Czechoslovakia's Roma, who were officially referred to as citizens "of Gypsy origin," robbed them of the special rights and financial support afforded officially recognized minorities. It also placed them into a limbo world where they were forced to identify with other ethnic groups. Their plight was compounded by the growing body of prejudice that accompanied their growing numbers and official attention. 37 To many Slovaks and Czechs, Gypsies were the tmavi kluci (dark boys), a term that automatically identified one as a Roma. According to Otto Ulc, post-1968 Czechsolvakia became a society that was "less tolerant, more impatient, and egotistic." Increasingly, he observed, the public saw Gypsies as "beneficiaries of a host of privileges on their path to the less- " Kostelancik, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 3I3-315; Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 322-323 . 36 Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 322 n36, 326. 37 Ibid., pp. 323-326. Not all Gypsies suffered from lack of nationality status on the same scale, and there were a number of instances, particularly in Slovakia, where local officials encouraged Rom ethnicity. �SLOVAKIA 47 than-cherished goal of integration." Furthermore, Ulc argued, Slovaks and Czechs became "thoroughly uninhibited about making racial slurs and expressing racist prejudice of the oldfashioned vintage." They saw the Roma as "dirty, lazy, dishonest, primitive, parasitic, and inferior." 38 Government efforts to counter this prejudice met with mixed results, since the press used stories that gave explicit details about instances of unfair treatment of Gypsies with others that detailed Roma crime. Bratislava Pravda, for example, claimed in 1983 that the Gypsies, who made up 4 % of Slovakia's population, accounted for 24 percent of the charges of parasitism, 50 __ percent of robberies, 60 percent of petty thefts, 75 percent of charges for endangering the morals of youth, and 20 percent of all crimes committed.'39 The overall impact of such reports was to create a very unwelcome, suspicious climate for Czechoslovakia's growing Roma population that worsened as the country and its leadership drifted towards the collapse of the system that had dominated the country since 1948.'° As the Velvet Revolution swept Czechoslovakia in 1989, a plethora of political parties and other organizations surfaced. A number of Gypsy parties emerged during this period, including the Party of the Integration of the Romany People in Slovakia and the Party of the Democratic Romany Union. The most important was the Romany Civic Inititative (ROI or Romska obcanska iniciativa), which had close links to Civic Forum (Obcanske Forum), the umbrella political organization for a number of the country's dissident factions . ROI soon had a 31 Ult, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 327-328. " Kalvoda, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. I06. •• lhid., p. 106. �48 SLOVAKIA membership of over 70,000, and held its first national meeting in Prague in the spring of 1990. One of its first decisions was to vote to erect a monument in Bratislava to the Rom victims of the Holocaust. The ROI congress elected Emil Scuka, a lawyer and playwright, to head the organization.41 Yet the very democracy that gave Slovak and Czech Gypsies the opportunity to form their own political and other organizations also created a new atmosphere for open, virulent expressions of prejudice towards them. Of particular concern to many non-Gypsies was the dramatic growth of the Roma population. In 1988, the government estimated that there were 391 ,000 Rom in Czechoslovakia, a 35.5% increase over 1980 figures. Other sources estimated there were as many as 700,000-800,000 Roma in Czechoslovakia, with 470,000 a more reasonable figure. Some perceived these figures to be a new threat, and the newspaper Express warned in an article on July 2, 1990, "that the Gypsy fertility may mean a ' tragedy', that within a century the country may well have to be renamed the Romska republika. 42 These fears combined with the deep-rooted, traditional prejudices towards the Roma, and prompted some people to depict the-Gypsies as new symbols of everything gone awry in Czechoslo- " Otto Ulc, "Integration of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," Ethnic Groups. Vol. 9, No. 2 ( 1991 ), pp. 11 2- 11 3; in 1986, Scuka produced the "musical drama Amaro Drom (Our Road)...only the second play in Romanes ever to be staged in Czechoslovakia." Grattan Puxon, Roma· Europe's Gypsies (London: Minority Rights Group, 1987), p. 11 . " Radio Free Europe/Rad io Liberty, "Ethnic Minorities and Foreigners," Radio Free Europe Research, Vol. 14, No. 39 (22 September 1989), pp. 33, 36-37 ; Ulc, "Integration of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 113-114; Czechoslovakia's population was 15,658,079, in Ju ly 1989, and 15,683,234, a year later, an increase of 25,155. Suda, "Czechoslovakia," p. 319, and Carol Skalnik Leff, "Czechoslovakia," in Richard F. Staar and Margit N. Grigory, eds., Yearbook on International Communist Affairs 1221 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1991), p. 269. �SLOVAKIA 49 vakia. At the forefront of this new assualt on the Rom were renewed charges of criminality. Dramatic increases in crime had plagued the country since the early 1980s, particularly in Bratislava and Prague. In a society accustomed to traditionally low crime rates, crime reached epidemic proportions by 1990. Slovakia experienced a 17.7% rise in crime between 1988-1989, while the Czech Republic reported a 52% increase during the same pericxi. Much of this increase was attributed to Gypsies, who as early as 1987 had been blamed by television reports for 38% of Bratislava's crimes, and 40% of those committed in eastern Slovakia. Gypsies 18 years old and younger were accused of being part of over 44% of all crimes nationwide in 1988. Clearer heads proved that many of these statistics were exaggerated, and that the Roma were responsible for no more than 7.5-11 % of the crime in the country. Though the more conservative estimates were still out of proportion to the number of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia, they were directly tied to post1989 Gypsy unemployment figures that reached as high as 50% in certain areas. 43 Whatever the true numbers, Czechoslovakia's Roma paid a dear price for the accusations against them. Skinhead attacks, sometimes quietly encouraged by onlookers, mounted dangerously against Gypsies and the 35,000 Vietnamese workers in Czechoslovakia throughout 1990. On April 26, Prime Minister Petr Pithart of the Czech Republic called for "peaceful coexis0 Jan Orbman, "Crime Rate Among the Young," Radio Free Europe Research, Vol. 12, No. 32 (14 August 1987), p. 18; Martina Nevesky, "The Gypsy Problem," Radio Free Europe Research, Vol. 14, No. 31 (4 August 1989), p. 40; Jan Orbman, "Minorities Not a Major Issue Yet," Report on Eastern Europe, Vol. 2, No. 50 (December 13, 1991 ), p. 11 ; Wheaton and Kavan, The Yel vet Revo)utjon, p. 147; Jiti Pehe, "Crime Rises in Czechoslovakia," R.EElRL Research Report, Vol. 1, No. 14 (3 April 1992), p. 58; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," p. 112, claims the Rom were responsible for 15.6% of all crimes in the Czech Republic. �50 SLOVAKIA tence with our fellow citizens of Gypsy origin," while federal Deputy Prime Minister Jan Carnogursky demanded "tougher action against those skinheads who had attacked the Gypsies." On May 3, 1990, ROI urged national leaders and organizations to speak out against racist incidents against Roma and foreigners. Four days later, Charter 77 and the Czechoslovak Helsinki Committee condemned such attacks on the Vietnamese and Gypsies, and said they constitute attacks on all of us. They are attacks on the most basic principles of ethics and humanism, attacks on the state based on Jaw that is being bom , attacks contradicting the ideals of our democratic revolution. The fact that we silently tolerate such attacks makes us accomplices. We call on all citizens to stop being indifferent to the manifestations of violence and intolerance. We appeal to our executive bodies to put a final stop to these attacks. Let us make the people who for years have been working in our country feel that they live in a society in which it is JX)SSible to have their basic human rights protected.44 Vaclav Havel detailed the wrongs done Gypsies in public statements on May 2 and in an address on July 27, 1990, to the First World Romany Festival in Brno. Though admirable, particularly when coupled with the new rights acquired by the Roma over the next year, they did not prevent the racially motivated deaths of 26 Gypsies before the breakup of Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1993.45 Both the federal and individual Czechoslovak republics granted the Roma full minority status, rights, and protections in " Jiri Pehe, "Racial Violence Increasing," Report on Eastern Europe, Vol. I, No. 20 (May I 8, 1990), pp. 15, 18; David Binder, "European Gypsies Issue Call for Human Rights at Meeting," The New York Times, May 5, 1993, p. 6. 5 • Tritt, Czechoslovakia's Endangered Gypsies, pp. 13-14. �SLOVAKIA 51 1990-1991. Over thirty Gypsy cultural organizations arose during this period, anchored by the Union of Romany Writers and numerous newspapers and magazines. Programs in Romany Studies were opened at Charles University in Prague and at the Pedagogical Faculty in Nitra. Unfortunately, these developments were overshadowed by a new set of problems that accompanied the breakup of Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1993. Before the formal separation, Slovakia had an estimated Gypsy population of 400,000, and the Czech lands, 150,000. However, only 81,000 Slovak Gypsies officially identified themselves as Roma in the 1991 census. In anticipation of the breakup, a number of Slovak Rom began to move to the Czech lands because they felt • the political and social atmosphere would be more tolerant, and economic conditions better. The sudden increase in "unemployed Romanies, often unassimilated families from Romany villages in eastern Slovakia," stunned many Czechs, who soon claimed that 90% of the republic's new crime was committed by Slovak Roma. Led by individual community actions throughout the Czech Republic, the new state's Prosecutor-General "proposed to the Czech parliament a draft Law on Extraordinary Measures as a means of dealing with unrest caused by undisciplined groups of migrants." Though condemned by human rights groups and the Romany Democratic Congress, which represented 19 Gypsy groups in the Czech Republic, the law had surprising support from conservatives and local officials. The controversial legislation never passed, while the debate that surrounded it brought to the surface traditionally strong prejudice towards the Roma. 46 These feelings were also expressed in several public opinion surveys conducted before and after the January 1, 1993, breakup " Jin Pehe, "Law on Romanies Causes Uproar in Czech Republic,• REElRL Research Report, Vol. 2, No. 7 (12 February 1993), pp. 18-22; Zoltan Barany, "Grim Realities in Eastern Europe." Transition, Vol. I, No. 4 (29 May 1995), p. 8. �52 SLOVAKIA of Czechoslovakia that showed almost universal hatred and distrust towards Gypsies, particularly among young Slovaks and Czechs. Officials in both countries have also been critical of the Roma. One Czech official claimed in the summer of 1993 that the Gypsies remained "a problem ... because most of them are criminals who are getting rich through thievery and prostitution." Slovak Premier Vladimfr Meciar, who lost his post in midMarch 1994 but later regained it, created an uproar on September 4, 1993, in a speech he made in Spis, where Gypsies made up 13% of the population. Meciar felt it "was necessary to curtail the extended reproduction of the socially unadaptable and mentally backward population by decreasing family allowances," which some observers felt was a reference to the country's Gypsies. Famed Nazi hunter and human rights advocate Simon Wiesenthal said that Meciar "has adopted the thinking and diction of Nazism." Meciar sued the newspaperman who originally wrote about his speech, while the Slovak government threatened to sue "any newspaper, radio or television station which refused to apologize for reporting it." Slovak authorities explained that the media had distorted Meciar's speech and released an official translation of his talk. Part of it read: They [Gypsies] should be perceived as a problem group that is growing in size ...This means that if we do not deal with them now, they will deal with us later.. Another thing we have to consider is extended reproduction of socially inadequate population.,f/ 0 Los Angeles Times Mirror, The Pulse of Europe· A Survey of Political and Socja! Values and Attitudes (Washington: Times Mirror Center for People & The Press, 1992), pp. 184-185; Freedom House and The American Jewish Committee, Democracy Economic Reform and Western Assistance in Czechoslovakia Huni:ary and Poland· A Comparative Public Opinion Survey (New York: Freedom House and The American Jewish Committee, 1991), pp. 63-65; "Iron in the Soul," The Economist, March 12, 1994, pp. 55-56; Jane Perlez, "A New �SLOVAKIA 53 Several months later, Monika Nemcokova, the Press Secretary for the Slovak Embassy in Washington, D.C., wrote The New York Times to complain about other distortions in an article by Henry Kamm, "In Slovak Gypsy Ghetto, Hovels and Plea for Jobs." Kamm's article centered on Gypsies in the Slovak village of Svinia, and their poor living conditions and high unemployment. According to a parish priest in the village of Medzev, the Rom "don't want to work," and were satisfied subsisting on government welfare. The mayor of Medzev said the only solution to Slovakia's Gypsy problem was "to shoot them all," though, after a few moments, he added, "I'm no racist...But some Gypsies you would have to shoot." Ms. Nemcokova said such attitudes were "not based on racial intole. ranee, but on a significant difference in life styles and standards." She added that almost 40% of all crimes in Slovakia were committed by Roma, figures that ranged from 40-50% for all "youth cases in Slovakia." The Press Secretary felt that the Rom stipend of $71 a month was more than adequate to maintain a reasonable lifestyle in Slovakia, though she admitted it was less than half the average monthly salary of a worker. Ms. Nemcokova strongly disagreed with Kamm's assertion that there were 400,000 Roma in Slovakia, and put the figure at 250,000. She noted that the government spent 70 milllion crowns annually to help the Roma, which was "used for improving living standards in Gypsy villages, education and children's summer camps, including 3.6 million crowns for Gypsy periodicals, and 10.7 million crowns for Gypsy cultural activities.''48 Slovak Government Pledges Moderation,• The New York Times, March 17, 1994, p. A6; Peter Maas, "Half a Century after Hitler, Gypsies Face New Fight to Exist," The Washini:ton Post, August 13, 1993, p. A29; "Reported Racist Remarks Makes Slovakians Angry," Greensboro News & Record, Setpember 7, 1993, p. A5; "His Struggle," The Economjst, September 18-24, 1993, p. 56. " Henry Kamm, "In Slovak Gypsy Ghetto, Hovels and Plea for Jobs,• The New �SLOVAKIA 54 The current status of the Roma in Slovakia is quite grim. The Slovak Gypsies have been hit particularly hard by the sluggish economy, and there are reports of Roma unemployment rates as high as 100%, particularly in eastern Slovakia, where most Roma live. The rather topsy turvy political situation and lack of commitment to address the complex problems faced by the country's Roma has stifled any significant government efforts to develop a mature program to raise Gypsy educational, social, and economic standards. The Slovak Government's minority department has only five people on its staff, and there is only one Gypsy expert in the Ministry of Education. Until something more is done to address the sad plight of Slovak Roma, they will remain a community outside of the fabric of Slovak society. 49 The serious social, economic, employment, and educational problems faced by Slovakia's Roma are not unique to this young Republic. Roma suffer from similar difficulties throughout Central and Eastern Europe, where most continental Gypsies live. Most of Slovakia's neighbors are faced with rising Roma birthrates vis vis static native rates, and serious financial problems that hinder the dramatic types of educational and social experiments used earlier to try to draw the Roma more deeply into the fabric of the societies of Central and Eastern Europe. These difficulties, though, should not be used as an excuse to fail to deal with the problems of this growing minority. Hopes that the Roma, in the right circumstances, might move elsewhere, are misguided, since Slovakia's Roma have lived in the region for centuries and have deep roots there. Furthermore, in light of their growing numbers and new political activism, the Roma could, in future, present an interesting political threat to Slovakia's current ruling parties. Moreover, rulers in Slovakia and a York Times, November 28, 1993, p. A4; Monica Nemcokova, "Don't Blame Slovakia for Gypsy Problem," The New York Times, December 15, 1993, p. A14. " Barany, "Grim Realities," p. 8. �SLOVAKIA 55 elsewhere in the region should remember that their treatment of the Roma has become an important litmus test of the depth of their democratic experiments in Western eyes. Any failure to deal positively and creatively with each country's Roma population could have negative implications for any of the states in the region trying to draw closer to the West. � 26 SLOVAKIA The Roma Of Slovakia Since 1939 David M. Crowe One of the most intriguing ethnic groups in Slovakia are the Roma or Gypsies. Traditionally regarded as social outcasts and misfits, the Roma have been a unique part of the Slovak historical landscape. Though there have been Roma in Slovakia since the Middle Ages, it was not until World War II that significant efforts were made to deal with the Slovak Roma. From 1939 until 1945, the Roma, often lumped together with the country's Jews, were subjected to a number of restrictive policies. Within a decade after the end of World War II, attention again was drawn to the Roma in the reconstructed Czechoslovak Republic, but particularly in Slovakia, where most of the country's Gypsies lived. To Czechoslovakia's communist leaders, the low socioeconomic status of the Roma was a national embarassment and underscored at least one failed aspect of the communist experiment. Driven by statistics that illustrated the low social, economic, educational, and cultural status of the Roma, considerable efforts were made through the 1980s to transform this traditionally nomadic people into sedentary, assimilated Slovak and Czech citizens. Though some significant gains were made, Slovak and Czech leaders were unable to stifle the centuries-old prejudice that had haunted Gypsies throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Though large numbers of Slovak Roma fled to the �SLOVAKIA 27 Czech Republic after the 1993 breakup of Czechoslovakia, a large Roma population still resides in Slovakia. The Roma or Gypsies have lived in Slovakia since the Middle Ages. By the 14th century, considerable Gypsy settlements began to appear in the Slovak portions of Hungary, particularly around feudal castles such as Spis (Zips) Castle. Initially, Roma were welcomed by local officials. Slovak peasants regarded these "Egyptians" as religious exiles from the Middle East. However, over time, positive Slovak attitudes towards the Roma began to change, particularly during the 16th century, when the region was plagued by religious wars and the Turkish threat. In Slovak Royal Hungary, for example, some noblemen began forcibly to expel Gypsies or force them to settle on the outskirts of towns and villages. 1 During the 17th century, Gypsies and others fleeing the Thirty Years War (1618 - 1648) entered Slovakia, which adopted new anti-Gypsy regulations to deal with the new Roma presence. Once the Austrian Habsburgs retook much of Hungary at the end of the 17th century, they implemented new regulations that strongly discouraged Roma settlement throughout the Austrian Empire. These harsh policies began to change under Maria Theresa (1740 - 1780). Her policies were designed to halt Gypsy immigration into her empire and force those already there to become sedentary. The Roma now became subject to all imperial taxes and obligations such as the draft. Gypsies were also required to give up their traditional dress and customs, and forbidden to marry other Gypsies. Roma children over five were taken from their parents and placed in the care of non-Gypsy Catholic parents. These policies were continued by Maria Theresa's son, Jopseph II (r. 1780 -1790), but fell into disarray after his death. 2 1 David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 ), pp. 31-35. ' Ibid., pp. 36-40. �28 SLOVAKIA There are few glimpses of Slovak Rom during the first half of the 19th century, though there is more on them during the second half of this period. In 1856, a Gypsy school, one of the first in Europe, was opened in Nove Zamky. However, it was not until the general Hungarian census of 1880 and the Hungarian Gypsy census of 1893 that the first concrete evidence about the Roma presence in Slovakia surfaced. According to 1893 data, there were 36,231 Roma in Slovakia, most of them settled. Almost half of those employed worked in traditional Gypsy occupations, while an almost equal number were musicians. The census also indicated that a considerable number of Roma were involved in unsavory occupations. Almost 90% of Slovakia's Gypsies were Roman Catholics.3 Total Gypsy population figures declined dramatically in the new post-World War I Czechoslovak census of 1921. It showed only 7,967 Roma in Slovakia and almost none in the Czech lands. Experts reasoned that the low numbers could be caused by exclusive use of "mother tongue" in the census. More accurate 1926 data indicated 62,192 Roma in Slovakia, though gypsiologist Dr. Eva Davidova felt the real numbers were much higher. 4 Efforts were made in Slovakia during this period to open schools for Gypsies and to encourage the development of cultural organizations for them. Some attempts were also inade privately to improve Gypsy health. One of the most famous Gypsy schools in Slovakia at this time was in Uzhorod. Opened in 1925 by Pavel Fodor, it gained an international reputation for its instruction in Slovak. 5 What gains were made by Slovak Roma disappeared with the coming of World War II. After the German dismemberment 3 Ibid., pp. 40-42. • Ibid., pp. 42-44. ' Ibid., pp. 44-47. �SLOVAKIA 29 of Czechoslovak.a in 1939, two separate states emerged - the German- controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the German-allied state of Slovakia. Whereas Gypsies in Bohemia and Moravia suffered from harsh Nazi policies throughout the Porajmos or Gypsy Holocaust, the Roma in Slovakia fared much better. 6 Part of the reason for Slovakia's comparatively mild treatment of its Gypsies centered around Germany's desire for Slovakia to be a model satellite state in southeastern Europe. Consequently, the government, the Catholic church, and business enjoyed semi-autonomy. Furthermore, Father Jozef Tiso, the head of state, opposed the complete nazification of his country. In time, Reich officials came to realize that the only way - they could achieve their goals was through political pressure and an intense propaganda campaign. Anything else would hamper Slovakia's contribution to the German war effort. Almost all of Slovakia's Gypsies survived the war because of this. This did not mean, however, that the Slovak government left its Roma population alone. Within months after the creation of Slovakia in the spring of 1939, the Tiso government ordered nomadic Gypsies to return to their legal residences, and made it illegal for them to do any horse trading. On September 25, 1939, Jews were deprived of their Slovak citizenship, while Gypsies who were born in Slovakia and wanted Slovak citizenship had to prove that they lived an orderly way of life; had a steady place of residence and employment; and were honorable citizens as reflected in their education, their moral and political trustworthiness, and their activity in their community, could they be included in the Slovak national community. If they did not fulfill the aforementioned conditions, or if they fulfilled them only ' Ibid. , pp. 47-51. �30 SLOVAKIA partially-if they worked only occasionally, if they spoke the Gypsy language among themselves, if their moral and political trustworthiness was doubtful, etc.--they could not be considered members of the Slovak national community. In other words, wandering Gypsies did not qualify for citizenship. 1 Four months later, Ferdinand Durcansky, Slovakia's Interior Minister, ordered that Gypsies and Jews were to work in special labor units as alternatives to military service, which was later set "at two terms of two months twice annually." Durcansky defined a Gypsy in Law No. 130/1940 of June 18, 1940, as someone who had two Roma parents and lived as a nomad, or a sedentary person who avoided work. Other regulations issued during this period made it illegal for Gypsies to ride public transportation, eat in cafes, or enter public parks. As Germany intensified pressure on the Slovaks to increase their contribution to the war effort, the Tiso government created seasonal labor camps in 1941 where Gypsies often made up over half of the workers. Conditions in the labor units were bad. Inmates suffered increasingly from inadequate clothing and shoes, cold, infestation with lice and bedbugs, hunger, and disease, especially trachoma and typhus. 8 7 Jorg K. Hoensch, "The Slovak Republic, 1939-1945," in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomfr Luza, eds., A History of the Czechoslovak Republic J9 J 8- J 948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 278-279, 284-286; Jiff Upa, "The Fate of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia under Nazi Domination," in Michael Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims· Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 209-210; Ctibor Necas. Nad osudem ceskych a sI ovenskych Cikam1 v letech I 939- I 945 (Brno: Univerzita J. E. Purkyne, 1981 ), p. 70. • Upa, "Fate of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. 210; Gypsy and Jewish service regulations were included in legislation of January 18, 1940, and February 29, 1940. Necas, Nad osudem, pp. 82-129, devotes a great deal of time to the little �SLOVAKIA 31 Many prisoners practiced self-mutilation to gain their freedom. In 1943, one member of the Slovak Diet, Hut'ka, criticized the conditions of the camps at Bystre nad Topl'ou. He felt the labor camps had been opened "to re-educate the asocial elements, not...to torture people and bring them into an even worse moral degradation." 9 On April 20, 1941, nomadic Gypsies were given eight days to return home. Once there, they were watched by the police and only allowed to leave with special permission. The Roma were also given two weeks to dispose of their horses and wagons . Gypsy houses located near public thoroughfares had to be torn down and reconstructed at a new site determined by officials. A Gypsy representative was to work with the local mayor to ensure that local ordinances were followed. Roma were also not allowed to own dogs. These regulations evidently did not curb all Gypsy nomadism, and officials explained when they opened a new labor camp in Krupina in the summer of 1941, that nomadic Roma were to be put in such camps to force them to live a sedentary life and to learn to do productive labor. These efforts still did not stop Gypsy nomadism, and on June 21, 1943, the government ordered that all Gypsy housing be removed from alongside busy roads. 10 Each Slovak community dealt with its Roma in a different manner. The 500 Gypsies in the village of Smizany were well integrated and none were sent to labor camps. When Hlinka Guards, the Slovak paramilitary group that modeled itself on the Italian "Black Shirts" and the German SA, arrived to take Gypknown history of the Gypsy Labor Units (pracovni utvary) from 1941-1944. He provides detailed Gypsy inmate statistics for the camps at Bystre nad Topl'ou , Dubnica nad Vlihom, llava, and Revuca; Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, ~ Destiny of Europe's Gypsies (New York: Basic Books, I972), p. 136. • Lfpa, "Fate of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. 210. 10 Ibid., p. 211; Necas, Nad osudem, pp. 74-75, 130. �32 SLOVAKIA sies from the village of Letanovce, the mayor only agreed to send two Roma who had reputations as drunks. Both Gypsies returned to Letanovce at the end of the war. 11 This atmosphere changed drastically during the summer of 1944. In June, Slovak Roma were accused of spreading typhoid throughout the country, and were forbidden to ride trains unless they had a special travel permit backed by a physician's certificate that showed them free of typhoid. Gypsies could only use the rail passes for outbound trips and had to get another one if they wanted to return home. The following month, the Interior Ministry informed its regional offices that there were still Roma in some of the country's towns and villages. It ordered local officials to move all Gypsies away from roadsides, and said that if any refused to comply, they would be executed. The decree added that more forced labor camps were being prepared for Slovak Roma. 12 The climate for the Gypsies got considerably worse with the German occupation of Slovakia on September 29, 1944. Spurred by the Slovak National Insurrection of August 29-0ctober 27, 1944, the Germans clamped down harshly on the Slovaks, including the Roma, because they had actively supported the uprising. One Gypsy leader, Tomas Farkas, headed a mixed guerilla band of Roma and Slovaks during the uprising. Farkas' detachment momentarily held up German forces near Tisovec as they moved towards Banska Bystrica, the military center of the rebellion. After Banska Bystrica fell, authorities arrested Farkas' son, and imprisoned him. When Slovak partisans retreated in the 11 Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, p. 136; Emflia Horvlithova, Cii:ani na SJovensku (Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Slovenskej Akademie Vied, 1964), p. 171. Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, p. 137; Horvathova, Ciian.i na SJoyensku, p. 171; the train regulations were issued on June 13, 1944, while others appeared on June 19-21, 1944. Necas, Nad osudem, pp. 130-132. 12 �SLOVAKIA 33 face of the German advance in the fall of 1944, the Gypsies, using hidden weapons, stayed behind to protect their families. After the rebellion's collapse, a German intelligence officer tricked the Roma into revealing details about their weapons cache. Hlinka Guards executed the Gypsy partisans as their families watched in horror. The Germans then killed all Roma women and children and buried their bodies in a lime pit. 13 Similar Gypsy massacres took place in other parts of Slovakia as retribution for their role in the Slovak National Insurrection. On November 14, 1944, 65 Roma were burned to death in two huts in Cierny Balog, while other Gypsies were forced to dig a large grave for their fallen comrades. Hlinka - Guards murdered the entire community of 111 Gypsies in Ilija eight days later, and on November 23 , butchered as many Roma as they could find in Slatina. Only three Gypsies escaped the massacre. A similar tragedy took place at Neresnice, where only two families survived. 14 Atrocities also took place at the labor camp at Dubnica nad Vahom. On September 29, 1944, German authorities in Trencin just south of Dubnica nad Vahom ordered that all male Roma from this region be sent to the labor camp at Dubnica. The Gypsy transfers were halted once the camp became full two weeks later. On November 2, 1944, Dubnica na Vahom was transformed into a concentration center for all Roma. Authorites freed all of the camp's non-Gypsy inmates to make room for the Roma. After a typhus epidemic ravaged a Gypsy camp at Ustie 1 Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, pp. 137- 138; Hoensch, "The Slovak Republic," pp. 293-295 ; Anna Josko, "The Slovak Resistance Movement," in Mamatey and Luza, Histocy of the Czechoslovak Republic, pp . 375-380, 382-383. 14 Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gyspies. pp. 137-138; authorities later found a mass grave at Kremnica, which was occupied by the Germans from November 5, 1944, to January 12, 1945. It contaimed 3,723 bodies, some of them Gypsies. Netas, Nad osudem, pp. 138-141. ' �34 SLOVAKIA nad Oravou in mid-December, authorites shipped its inmates to Dubnica nad Vahom. Before the arrival of the new Roma inmates, there were 729 Roma at Dubnica nad V ahom, 250 of them children. The only recorded atrocity at the camp took place on January 17, 1945, when 16 sick Gypsy prisoners were taken from the camp and told they were being shipped to the hopsital at Trencfn. Instead, they were driven in military trucks to a wooded area, forced into a pit, and executed. The Dubnica nad V ahom camp was closed on the eve of its capture by Soviet forces on April 8, 1945. Despite these tragedies, the Gypsy survival rate in Slovakia was quite high, and estimates are that only a few hundred of Slovakia's 100,000 Rom died in the Porajmos. 15 The liberation of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1945 found the country traumatized by the human and economic devastation of the war. A massive campaign of expulsions aimed primarily at Germans and Magyars saw I .5 million people move into the former Sudetenland from other parts of Czechoslovakia, including some Gypsies. As the Germans were expelled from Cze- __ choslovakia, many Slovak Gypsies were sent to camps in northern Bohemia and Moravia where they worked as unskilled laborers. Not all Slovak Gypsies remained in the Czech lands, 15 Lfpa, "Fate of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 211 -213; Necas, Nad llS..Ll.d.e.m, pp. 111-112, I 34- 137 ; Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, p. 138; Horvathova, Cii:ani na S)ovensku, p. 173 n34; David J. Kostelancik, "The Gypsies of Czechoslovakia: Political and Ideological Considerations in the Development of Policy," Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter 1984), p. 309; the Gypsies were not Slovakia's only victims after the Slovak National Insurrection. Estimates are that from August 1944 until April 1945, "7,500 soldiers and 2,500 partisans were killed and 3,723 civilians ... were murdered and buried in mass graves; 900 were burned in lime kilns; 30,000 people were de)Xlrted to German concentration camps; 60 communities were completely destroyed by fires and 142 were partially wiped out." Josko, "Slovak Resistance Movement," p. 383. �SLOVAKIA 35 and some returned to Slovakia where they began to buy new homes. In addition, about 6,000 Olach [Olassti] Gypsies continued to live as nomads. Officials hoped the returning Slovak Roma would help solve the regions's severe labor shortage and serve as role models for other Roma. After the strong communist showing in the May 26, 1946, elections, the new Minister of the Interior, the Czech Vaclav Nosek, and others, called for restrictive policies against the Roma, whom Nosek and his supporters called questionable citizens of Czechoslovakia. 16 Efforts by Evzan Erban, the Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, to continue to send Slovak Gypsies to camps in the Czech lands were stopped by the non-communist Minister of Justice, Prokop Drtina in 1947. Nosek convinced Drtina to do a census of the country's Roma population to determine how many lived as nomads. According to the census, there were 84,438 Roma in Slovakia, and 16,752 in the Czech lands. The successful communist coup in early 1948 brought to power a party that a year earlier had pledged that it would do everything possible to integrate the Gypsies into the fabric of Czechoslovakian society, and raise their social, economic, and cultural status. 17 In 1949, the government of Klement Gottwald created a special commission to investigate the "Gypsy question." The 16 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 309-310; Willy Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms: The Case of Czechoslovakia," in Farnham Rehfisch, ed., Gypsies Tinkers and Other Travellers (New York: Academic Press, 1975), p. 213; Tom~ Grulich and Tom~ Hai~man, "lnstitucionalnf zajem o cikanske obyvatelstvo v Ceskoslovensku v letech 1945-1958," C:esky Lid, Vol. 73 , No. 2 ( 1986), p. 73. 17 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 310-3 I I ; Vladimir Srb, "Cikani v Ceskoslovensku Demo2rafje, Vol. Xl , No. 3 (1969), p. 194; Zdenek Suda, The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 32-36; Radomfr Luui, "Czechoslovakia between Democracy and Communism," in Mamatey and Luui, History of the Czechoslovak Republic, pp. 412-415. �36 SLOVAKIA new commission sponsored a detailed study of Czechoslovakia's Gypsies that appeared in 1950 as Zarazovani osob cikanskeho puvodu do trvaleho pracovniho procesu (Position of Individuals of Gypsy Origin in the Work Process). Two years later, this study was partly integrated into another report by the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, Uprava pomeru osob cikanskeho puvodu (Report About the Life of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia). This latter study blamed earlier governments and societies for the Roma's low social and economic status, and promised that the new People's Democratic State would resolve the "Gypsy question" if the Roma willingly and quickly become accustomed to conscientious work, they adopt trades, they take part in socialist competition, they become shock-workers, members and functionaries of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the Revolutionary Trade-Union Movement. 18 However, over the next eight years, Czechoslovak leaders did little to help the Gypsies improve their quality of life. Numerous regional and local decrees touched on health care and housing needs, and emphasized changing the behavior of the Roma. 19 Communist Party propaganda, however, underscored improved Gypsy school attendance, literacy, and new attitudes towards work and integration. By the mid-1950s, this congratulatory tone changed as the reality of the Gypsy's plight and demographic growth became more apparent to the country's leadership. In 1956, authorities began to talk about a national Gypsy crisis, which was linked to their continued nomadism. 18 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 3 I 0-311; Grulich and Hai~man, "Institucionalnf zajem o cikanske," p. 74. " Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 311, 320; Josef Kalvoda, "The Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," in David M. Crowe and John Kolsti, eds., ~ Gypsies of Eastern Europe (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), p. 93. �SLOVAKIA 37 According to an article in Zemedelske Novjny (Agricultural Newspaper) in 1957, only 40% of the country's Roma were working in industry and agriculture. The Slovak journal Smena (Direction) added that the nomadic Roma lifestyle heightened prejudice towards them, which the journal compared to "discrimination against the Negro in the United States.":n These problems and attitudes, coupled with the size of the Roma population nationwide, which Radio Bratislava estimated in 1958 to be 150,000, prompted the Communist Party to approve a resolution on April 8, 1958, that demanded a new campaign to resolve the "Gypsy question." Similar to new policies throughout the Soviet bloc at that time, the Party called for a mass campaign addressed to both the Gypsies and white -- bigots, for lifting the Gypsies' extraterritorial immunities and punishment of nomadism. 21 Czechoslovakia's Gypsies were now officially divided into three categories - nomads, semi-nomads, and completely sedentary - in anticipation of Law No. 74, of October 17, 1958, "Act on Permanent Settlement of Nomadic People." The new law instructed local officials to work with nomads, whom it defined as an individual who 0 Otto Ulc, "Communist National Minority Policy: The Case of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," Soviet Studies, Vol. XX, No. 4 (April 1969), pp. 422-424 ; "Minorites in Eastern Europe," Eastern Europe. Vol. 8, No. 3 (March 1959), pp . 13-14. 21 "M inorities in Eastern Europe," p. 14; Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," p. 311, improperly places the date for the passage of Law No. 74 as November 17, 1958; Grulich and Hai§man, "Jnstitucionalnf zajem o cikanske," pp. 77-78; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 214-215. Guy estimates the number of registered nomads at 20,000-27,000; Ulc, "Gyps ies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 424-426, says officials estimated that the semi-nomadic Rom were the largest group among the Gypsies. ' �38 SLOVAKIA in groups or individually, wanders from place to place, shuns honest work or obtains his livelihood by iniquitious means even though he may be registered in some community as its permanent resident.-n. According to the new law, if anyone continued to live in this manner, he or she could be imprisoned for six months to three years. Two other parts of Law No. 74 gave the Minister of the Interior the right 11 to issue executive orders to this effect, including registration of the nomads. 11 Though the new regulations never mentioned the Roma, they were its only target, particularly the country's 6,000 nomadic Olach Gypsies. Official estimates indicated that there were from 11,000 to 40,000 nomadic Roma in Czechoslovakia at this time. 23 In an effort to avoid charges of racism, officials also upgraded the Gypsies' official status to a "socio-ethnic group." Unfortunately, Czechoslovak authorities did not anticipate the complex economic and social problems that would accompany their efforts to force the complete integration of the nation's Gypsies. Many nomadic Roma found ways to avoid punishment for thsir lifestyle, while local efforts to force settlement through the assignment of precious housing to Gypsies created growing resentment against a group that some came to see as privileged. Many Slovaks and Czechs felt the Roma were a privileged group that had special rights without obligations. The public complained that the Gypsies were measured by different standards and took advantage of their unique position. More importantly, the government's new efforts did little to upgrade the low socio-economic status of the Roma, and perhaps made it worse for the newly settled Gypsies, who, located principally in Slova- 22 23 UII!, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 424-425. Ibid., pp. 425-426. �SLOVAKIA 39 kia, still lived in slums with inadequate plumbing and sanitation facilites. 24 Consequently, in 1965, the Communist Party asked local officials to do a more thorough investigation of the plight of the Roma and develop a long range plan for Gypsy assimilation. The result was Ordinance No. 502 of June 1965, which developed a Gypsy reform progam that centered around fullemployment possibilities for Gypsies able to work full time. These efforts were considered essential to upgrading the standard of living for Roma, and tied to plans to destroy substandard Gypsy settlements and the movement of Roma from Slovakia to other parts of the country. The Academy of Sciences was asked to do a study of Roma life, while the state-controlled media was ord.tred to help counter nationwide prejudice against the Roma. A new government body, the National Council for Questions of the Gypsy Population (NCQGP), which had no Gypsy members, was to serve as the program's watchdog. The NCQGP produced three position papers, but was abolished in 1968. 25 At the center of this new program was the destruction of substandard Gypsy housing and settlements, primarily in Slovakia, and the forced resettlement and employment of their Rom inhabitants. Officials estimated that 67.3% of Slovakia's 153,000 Gypsies lived in extremely substandard housing. The government pin-pointed 1,266 Roma settlements in Slovakia for destruction, and the transfer of 64,096 Gypsies. Officials planned to move the effected Slovak Gypsies to the Czech lands after their settlements were razed. Local governments, aided by national ,. Kostelancik, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. 426; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia." pp. 98-99. 25 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia." pp. 312-313; Ult, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia." pp. 430-431. Of the 56,000 Rom in eastern Slovakia, only 2.2% had an adequate water supply; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 2 I 922 . �40 SLOVAKIA subsidies, would then be responsible for the Gypsies' housing and employment. The resettlement program was voluntary. Once a Gypsy family was convinced of the wisdom of moving, the government would give the family a special payment, combined with a 25-30% subsidy and low cost government loan, which would be used to purchase a new home in the Czech lands. However, inadequate funding, coupled with growing resentment towards the new Roma presence in the Czech lands, and the unwillingness of some Gypsies to remain there, undercut the success of the program. Between 1965-1968, the government was only able to eliminate a third of the Roma settlements targeted for destruction. 26 As authorities struggled with the mixed results of this new transfer and employment program, Czechoslovakia was turned inside out by the events of the Prague Spring in 1968.Z7 On the eve of the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia had an official Gypsy population of 223,993, with 164,526 in Slovakia, and 59,467 in the Czech lands. In 1968, the Roma in Slovakia formed their first official organization, the Union of Gypsy-Romanies (UGR or Zvaz Cikanov-Romov; Romani, Romano Jekhetaniben), followed by a similar Czech organization in 1969. Later that year, both groups joined together, but maintained separate Slovak and Czech branches. The UGR received funds from the National Front and had branches throughout Czechoslovakia. Its goals were to improve the socio-economic status of the Roma and enhance the Gypsies' awareness of their own culture and 2 • Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 432-433 ; Kostelancik, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 312-314; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 219-220; Hiibschmannova, "Co je tak zvana cikanska otazka," p. 115 n I 9. 27 Otto Ulc, "Czechoslovakia," in Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, ed., Communism io Eastern Europe, Second Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 121-123; William Shawcross, ~ (New York : Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1990), pp. 114-119. �SLOVAKIA 41 traditions. The UGR also wanted to acquire nationality status for the Roma, which triggered an engaging debate between Gypsy and non-Gypsy intellectuals about the entire "Gypsy question." Central to the debate was Jaroslav Sus' 1963 study, Cikanska otazka v CSSR (The Gypsy Question in the CSSR), which described the Rom way of life as [an] undesirable combination of 'nomadism, tribalism ...and blood f euds,' and the Romani language as ... unworthy of preservation. Consequently, Sus felt that "unconditional assimilation [was] ... the only solution for the question." 28 Roma scholar Elena Htibschmannova, long an advcoate of --Gypsy nationality status, led the attack on Sus' ideas. Htibschmannova shifted responsibility for some aspects of the "Gypsy Question" to the shoulders of the government, as did the August 1969 Programme of the Founding Congress of the Czech Gypsy-Rom Association [Union], which felt that "fears of the results of granting rights to the Gypsies as a nationality" lay at the heart of the question. As this debate raged, plans were made to start a Roma journal, and the UGR's membership rolls swelled to 20,000 between 1968 - 1971. Several hundred Gypsy musical and sports groups were formed, and the media began to refer to the country's Roma as "citizens of Gypsy origin." Unfortunately, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, the new government of Gustav Husak introduced an era of "normalization" that gradually chipped away at many of the gains achieved by the Roma during the Prague Spring. In April I 973, the government expelled the UGR from the National Front, and outlawed other Gypsy organizations because "they had failed to fulfill their integrative function." 29 21 " Crowe, Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia, pp. 58-59. Srb, "Cikani v Ceskoslovensku, ~ p. 194; Kostelancik, "Gypsies of �42 SLOVAKIA What followed was a renewed effort to force Gypsy integration and assimilation, coupled with a new sterialization scheme to reduce Gypsy births.~ One of the darker sides of the new Roma assimilation campaign were efforts to promote the sterilization of Gypsy women. The seed for this idea was planted in a February 29, 1972, Ministry of Health "Decree on Sterilization." Though "designed to safeguard against arbitrary or illinformed sterilization of all Czechoslovak citizens," the decree was used to encourage the sterilization of Romany women in order to reduce the high unhealthy' Romany population and, as a result, a disproportionately high number of Romany women were sterilized, often in violation of the existing safeguards and of their rights to non-discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or sex. 3 ' Czechoslovakia," pp. 3 I 7-318 ; Eva Davidova, "The Gypsies of Czechoslovakia, " Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society. Third Series, Vol. I, Nos. 12 (Jan uary-April), pp. 53-54; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 220-22 I , 223, n44; Grattan Puxon, "Gypsies: Blacks of East Europe," The Nation. April 17, I 976, pp. 461-462; Hlibschmannova, "Co je tak zvana cikanska otazka," pp . 105, I 12 nl6, I 13- 114, I 16 n23, 117-118 ; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 101-103 ; Otto Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia: A Case of Unfinished Integration," Eastern European Politics and Societies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring 1988), pp. 310-312. 30 Other estimates put the 1970 Roma population at over 300,000. Vladimir Srb, "Demograficky profil ~eskoslovenskych romu," Cesky Lid, Vol. 72 ( 1985), p. 139; Vladimir Srb, "K integraci cikanskeho obyvatelstva v CSSR," Demoi:rafie, Vol. XXI, No. 4 (1979), p. 323; V. Srb and J. Job, "Nektere demograficke, ekonomicke a kultumi charakteristiky romskehe obyvatelstva v CSSR 1970," Demoi:rafie, Vol. XVI, No. 2 (1974), p. 173 ; Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," p. 106; Paul S. Shoup, The East European and Soviet Data Handbook (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 42, 48; Chris Cook and John Stevenson, The Loni:man Handbook of Modern European History )763-)985 (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 216,218. 31 Rachael Tritt, Jeri Laber, and Lois Whitman, Strui:i:Jini: for Ethnic Identity · Czechoslovakia's Endani:eced Gypsies (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992), �SLOVAKIA 43 According to a Slovak document released in 1979 by Charter 77, a Czechoslovak dissident group, the Slovak government had already begun a program that used economic incentives to get Gypsy women to be sterilized because of earlier, unsuccessful government efforts "to control the high unhealthy Romany population through family planning and contraception." Local health workers offered some prospective sterilization candidates as much as 5,000 Crowns to undergo the procedure. As pressure intensified to get more Gypsy women to agree to sterilization, some health workers often made unfulfilled offers of as high as 30,000 Crowns. Charter 77 protested this practice in 1979, and claimed that it violated Article No. 259 of the state penal code, which dealt with genocide. But this was not the only - . criticism in Charter 77's 1979 document. On a broader scale, Charter 77 decried government practices designed to stop Gypsy nomadism and force assimilation, and the official denial of Roma ethnic status. According to Charter 77, the collective impact of these programs set into play "a process of social disintegration which has no comparison in the history of the Gypsies. This fact is substantiated by an ever increasing number of Gypsies who are sentenced to loss of freedom." 32 While it difficult to gauge the impact of the 1979 Charter 77 report on the plight of the Roma, population data from the 1980 census spurred further government action. The 1980 census showed a Roma population of 288,440, an increase of 31.3% over 1970 figures. Czechoslovakia's total population only grew by 6%. during the same period. The greatest increase in Gypsy growth rates was in the Czech republic, where the Roma population increased 47% between 1970 - 1980, versus a 25.5% rise in Slovakia. Even these figures, though, are misleading, since pp. 19, 139-144. 2 ' Tritt, Czechoslovakia's Endangered Gypsies, pp. 20, 24, 26-27; Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 314-315. �44 SLOVAKIA arbitrary counting methods showed a discrepancy between national census figures, and those recorded in local "Gypsy Registers," which indicated that there were 306,246 Roma in Czechoslovakia in 1980. The absolute rise in Gypsy population numbers was less troubling to the government than the national and Rom childbirth rate figures. The overall Czechoslovak childbirth rate was on the decline, and by 1982 was "below the level of biological reproduction." The average Czechoslovak woman bore 2.4 children in the 1970s compared to 6.4 children for a Gypsy woman. 33 These increases were remarkable, particularly in light of continued government efforts to destroy Slovak Gypsy slums and the forced movement of Slovak Roma to Czech portions of the country. Other Gypsies also moved to the Czech lands because of better job opportunities and a higher standard of living. Between 1972-1980, officials destroyed 4,000 Roma dwellings in Slovakia, and moved 4,850 Gypsies elsewhere. Though Gypsy housing standards improved appreciably between during this period, there were still 5.6 persons in thct average Roma apartment or house versus a national average of 3.1 persons per dwelling. By 1980, a little more than 70% of the country's Gypsy population lived in apartments, while 10% still lived in primitive settlements that were to be destroyed by 1990. The number in extremely unfit housing dropped from 80.7% in 1970 to 49% between 1970 and 1980. Another part of the Roma assimilation campaign centered around attempts to force more Gypsy children into the public schools. In 1971, only 10% of the eligible Roma children in Czechoslovakia attended kindergarten, a figure that rose to 33 Srb, "Demograficky profil foskoslovenskych Romu," pp. 139-140. There were 88,507 Gypsies in the Czech Republic in 1980, and 199,853 in Slovakia; Ul~, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 315-316; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 108-109. �SLOVAKIA 45 58.5% in 1980. During the same period, the number .of Gypsy children that finished public school rose from 16.6% to 25.6%, while the number enrolled in colleges and universities increased from 39 to 191. Nationwide, literacy rates rose to 90% among Roma adults. On the other hand, Gypsy school dropout rates in Slovakia increased substantially as Roma pupils moved from grade to grade. In 1983-1984, 72.2% of the Slovak students who failed to go into the second grade were Gypsies, and almost a third of the Roma who went to second grade barely had minimal literacy skills, a figure that jumped to 50% for Gypsy 4th graders. Nationwide, many Gypsies entered the school system with a knowledge of only a few hundred Slovak or Czech words, and were often assigned to special instititions (zvlastnf skoly) designed for the mentally retarded. Only a third of the country's Gypsy children finished 8th grade in 19831984, and only 4% went on to university or college. 34 Gypsy employment figures for this period were also a mixture of success and failure. Though 1981 data showed an 87.7% employment rate for male Gypsy workers that was close to the national average of 91 .9% for all adult males, the 54.95% employment rate for Roma female workers was well below the national average of 87.7% for all women. In addition, over three quarters of all Gypsies employed held low paying, non-skilled jobs. The overall impact of the employment, educational, and housing data found Czechoslovakia's Roma on a socio-economic plateau that proved difficult to transcend. According to Irnrich Farkas, the official responsible for Gypsy matters in Slovakia, the government felt that it would be harder to improve the quality " Kostelanc ik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 313-3 I 5. In I 980, 59% of the Gypsies in Slovakia lived in the lowest classification for housing, Class IV. Kindergarten attendance rates in eastern Slovakia, where 53% of Slovakia's Rom lived in 1980, rose from 10% to 66% between 1970-1980; Ult, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 319-320. �46 SLOVAKIA of Gypsy life "because increasingly left for solution are those socially and culturally backward families." 35 The government tried to put the best light on its assimilation efforts, and publicized some Gypsy success stories. Bratislava Pravda reported that 435 Roma had been elected to predominantly low level positions as deputies of Peoples Committees, and that one Gypsy, Emil Rigo, had briefly been a member of the Politburo in 1968. Officials also used successful Gypsies to counter efforts to acquire nationality status for the Roma. In 1986, Rude Pravo responded to the World Romany Congress' appeal for nationality status for Czechoslovakia's Gypsies partially with a statement by Mirosalv 2.ajda, an assimilated Roma and Party member who told the newspaper that he was quite content with his life. 36 The lack of nationality status for Czechoslovakia's Roma, who were officially referred to as citizens "of Gypsy origin," robbed them of the special rights and financial support afforded officially recognized minorities. It also placed them into a limbo world where they were forced to identify with other ethnic groups. Their plight was compounded by the growing body of prejudice that accompanied their growing numbers and official attention. 37 To many Slovaks and Czechs, Gypsies were the tmavi kluci (dark boys), a term that automatically identified one as a Roma. According to Otto Ulc, post-1968 Czechsolvakia became a society that was "less tolerant, more impatient, and egotistic." Increasingly, he observed, the public saw Gypsies as "beneficiaries of a host of privileges on their path to the less- " Kostelancik, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 3I3-315; Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 322-323 . 36 Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 322 n36, 326. 37 Ibid., pp. 323-326. Not all Gypsies suffered from lack of nationality status on the same scale, and there were a number of instances, particularly in Slovakia, where local officials encouraged Rom ethnicity. �SLOVAKIA 47 than-cherished goal of integration." Furthermore, Ulc argued, Slovaks and Czechs became "thoroughly uninhibited about making racial slurs and expressing racist prejudice of the oldfashioned vintage." They saw the Roma as "dirty, lazy, dishonest, primitive, parasitic, and inferior." 38 Government efforts to counter this prejudice met with mixed results, since the press used stories that gave explicit details about instances of unfair treatment of Gypsies with others that detailed Roma crime. Bratislava Pravda, for example, claimed in 1983 that the Gypsies, who made up 4 % of Slovakia's population, accounted for 24 percent of the charges of parasitism, 50 __ percent of robberies, 60 percent of petty thefts, 75 percent of charges for endangering the morals of youth, and 20 percent of all crimes committed.'39 The overall impact of such reports was to create a very unwelcome, suspicious climate for Czechoslovakia's growing Roma population that worsened as the country and its leadership drifted towards the collapse of the system that had dominated the country since 1948.'° As the Velvet Revolution swept Czechoslovakia in 1989, a plethora of political parties and other organizations surfaced. A number of Gypsy parties emerged during this period, including the Party of the Integration of the Romany People in Slovakia and the Party of the Democratic Romany Union. The most important was the Romany Civic Inititative (ROI or Romska obcanska iniciativa), which had close links to Civic Forum (Obcanske Forum), the umbrella political organization for a number of the country's dissident factions . ROI soon had a 31 Ult, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 327-328. " Kalvoda, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. I06. •• lhid., p. 106. �48 SLOVAKIA membership of over 70,000, and held its first national meeting in Prague in the spring of 1990. One of its first decisions was to vote to erect a monument in Bratislava to the Rom victims of the Holocaust. The ROI congress elected Emil Scuka, a lawyer and playwright, to head the organization.41 Yet the very democracy that gave Slovak and Czech Gypsies the opportunity to form their own political and other organizations also created a new atmosphere for open, virulent expressions of prejudice towards them. Of particular concern to many non-Gypsies was the dramatic growth of the Roma population. In 1988, the government estimated that there were 391 ,000 Rom in Czechoslovakia, a 35.5% increase over 1980 figures. Other sources estimated there were as many as 700,000-800,000 Roma in Czechoslovakia, with 470,000 a more reasonable figure. Some perceived these figures to be a new threat, and the newspaper Express warned in an article on July 2, 1990, "that the Gypsy fertility may mean a ' tragedy', that within a century the country may well have to be renamed the Romska republika. 42 These fears combined with the deep-rooted, traditional prejudices towards the Roma, and prompted some people to depict the-Gypsies as new symbols of everything gone awry in Czechoslo- " Otto Ulc, "Integration of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," Ethnic Groups. Vol. 9, No. 2 ( 1991 ), pp. 11 2- 11 3; in 1986, Scuka produced the "musical drama Amaro Drom (Our Road)...only the second play in Romanes ever to be staged in Czechoslovakia." Grattan Puxon, Roma· Europe's Gypsies (London: Minority Rights Group, 1987), p. 11 . " Radio Free Europe/Rad io Liberty, "Ethnic Minorities and Foreigners," Radio Free Europe Research, Vol. 14, No. 39 (22 September 1989), pp. 33, 36-37 ; Ulc, "Integration of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 113-114; Czechoslovakia's population was 15,658,079, in Ju ly 1989, and 15,683,234, a year later, an increase of 25,155. Suda, "Czechoslovakia," p. 319, and Carol Skalnik Leff, "Czechoslovakia," in Richard F. Staar and Margit N. Grigory, eds., Yearbook on International Communist Affairs 1221 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1991), p. 269. �SLOVAKIA 49 vakia. At the forefront of this new assualt on the Rom were renewed charges of criminality. Dramatic increases in crime had plagued the country since the early 1980s, particularly in Bratislava and Prague. In a society accustomed to traditionally low crime rates, crime reached epidemic proportions by 1990. Slovakia experienced a 17.7% rise in crime between 1988-1989, while the Czech Republic reported a 52% increase during the same pericxi. Much of this increase was attributed to Gypsies, who as early as 1987 had been blamed by television reports for 38% of Bratislava's crimes, and 40% of those committed in eastern Slovakia. Gypsies 18 years old and younger were accused of being part of over 44% of all crimes nationwide in 1988. Clearer heads proved that many of these statistics were exaggerated, and that the Roma were responsible for no more than 7.5-11 % of the crime in the country. Though the more conservative estimates were still out of proportion to the number of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia, they were directly tied to post1989 Gypsy unemployment figures that reached as high as 50% in certain areas. 43 Whatever the true numbers, Czechoslovakia's Roma paid a dear price for the accusations against them. Skinhead attacks, sometimes quietly encouraged by onlookers, mounted dangerously against Gypsies and the 35,000 Vietnamese workers in Czechoslovakia throughout 1990. On April 26, Prime Minister Petr Pithart of the Czech Republic called for "peaceful coexis0 Jan Orbman, "Crime Rate Among the Young," Radio Free Europe Research, Vol. 12, No. 32 (14 August 1987), p. 18; Martina Nevesky, "The Gypsy Problem," Radio Free Europe Research, Vol. 14, No. 31 (4 August 1989), p. 40; Jan Orbman, "Minorities Not a Major Issue Yet," Report on Eastern Europe, Vol. 2, No. 50 (December 13, 1991 ), p. 11 ; Wheaton and Kavan, The Yel vet Revo)utjon, p. 147; Jiti Pehe, "Crime Rises in Czechoslovakia," R.EElRL Research Report, Vol. 1, No. 14 (3 April 1992), p. 58; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," p. 112, claims the Rom were responsible for 15.6% of all crimes in the Czech Republic. �50 SLOVAKIA tence with our fellow citizens of Gypsy origin," while federal Deputy Prime Minister Jan Carnogursky demanded "tougher action against those skinheads who had attacked the Gypsies." On May 3, 1990, ROI urged national leaders and organizations to speak out against racist incidents against Roma and foreigners. Four days later, Charter 77 and the Czechoslovak Helsinki Committee condemned such attacks on the Vietnamese and Gypsies, and said they constitute attacks on all of us. They are attacks on the most basic principles of ethics and humanism, attacks on the state based on Jaw that is being bom , attacks contradicting the ideals of our democratic revolution. The fact that we silently tolerate such attacks makes us accomplices. We call on all citizens to stop being indifferent to the manifestations of violence and intolerance. We appeal to our executive bodies to put a final stop to these attacks. Let us make the people who for years have been working in our country feel that they live in a society in which it is JX)SSible to have their basic human rights protected.44 Vaclav Havel detailed the wrongs done Gypsies in public statements on May 2 and in an address on July 27, 1990, to the First World Romany Festival in Brno. Though admirable, particularly when coupled with the new rights acquired by the Roma over the next year, they did not prevent the racially motivated deaths of 26 Gypsies before the breakup of Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1993.45 Both the federal and individual Czechoslovak republics granted the Roma full minority status, rights, and protections in " Jiri Pehe, "Racial Violence Increasing," Report on Eastern Europe, Vol. I, No. 20 (May I 8, 1990), pp. 15, 18; David Binder, "European Gypsies Issue Call for Human Rights at Meeting," The New York Times, May 5, 1993, p. 6. 5 • Tritt, Czechoslovakia's Endangered Gypsies, pp. 13-14. �SLOVAKIA 51 1990-1991. Over thirty Gypsy cultural organizations arose during this period, anchored by the Union of Romany Writers and numerous newspapers and magazines. Programs in Romany Studies were opened at Charles University in Prague and at the Pedagogical Faculty in Nitra. Unfortunately, these developments were overshadowed by a new set of problems that accompanied the breakup of Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1993. Before the formal separation, Slovakia had an estimated Gypsy population of 400,000, and the Czech lands, 150,000. However, only 81,000 Slovak Gypsies officially identified themselves as Roma in the 1991 census. In anticipation of the breakup, a number of Slovak Rom began to move to the Czech lands because they felt • the political and social atmosphere would be more tolerant, and economic conditions better. The sudden increase in "unemployed Romanies, often unassimilated families from Romany villages in eastern Slovakia," stunned many Czechs, who soon claimed that 90% of the republic's new crime was committed by Slovak Roma. Led by individual community actions throughout the Czech Republic, the new state's Prosecutor-General "proposed to the Czech parliament a draft Law on Extraordinary Measures as a means of dealing with unrest caused by undisciplined groups of migrants." Though condemned by human rights groups and the Romany Democratic Congress, which represented 19 Gypsy groups in the Czech Republic, the law had surprising support from conservatives and local officials. The controversial legislation never passed, while the debate that surrounded it brought to the surface traditionally strong prejudice towards the Roma. 46 These feelings were also expressed in several public opinion surveys conducted before and after the January 1, 1993, breakup " Jin Pehe, "Law on Romanies Causes Uproar in Czech Republic,• REElRL Research Report, Vol. 2, No. 7 (12 February 1993), pp. 18-22; Zoltan Barany, "Grim Realities in Eastern Europe." Transition, Vol. I, No. 4 (29 May 1995), p. 8. �52 SLOVAKIA of Czechoslovakia that showed almost universal hatred and distrust towards Gypsies, particularly among young Slovaks and Czechs. Officials in both countries have also been critical of the Roma. One Czech official claimed in the summer of 1993 that the Gypsies remained "a problem ... because most of them are criminals who are getting rich through thievery and prostitution." Slovak Premier Vladimfr Meciar, who lost his post in midMarch 1994 but later regained it, created an uproar on September 4, 1993, in a speech he made in Spis, where Gypsies made up 13% of the population. Meciar felt it "was necessary to curtail the extended reproduction of the socially unadaptable and mentally backward population by decreasing family allowances," which some observers felt was a reference to the country's Gypsies. Famed Nazi hunter and human rights advocate Simon Wiesenthal said that Meciar "has adopted the thinking and diction of Nazism." Meciar sued the newspaperman who originally wrote about his speech, while the Slovak government threatened to sue "any newspaper, radio or television station which refused to apologize for reporting it." Slovak authorities explained that the media had distorted Meciar's speech and released an official translation of his talk. Part of it read: They [Gypsies] should be perceived as a problem group that is growing in size ...This means that if we do not deal with them now, they will deal with us later.. Another thing we have to consider is extended reproduction of socially inadequate population.,f/ 0 Los Angeles Times Mirror, The Pulse of Europe· A Survey of Political and Socja! Values and Attitudes (Washington: Times Mirror Center for People & The Press, 1992), pp. 184-185; Freedom House and The American Jewish Committee, Democracy Economic Reform and Western Assistance in Czechoslovakia Huni:ary and Poland· A Comparative Public Opinion Survey (New York: Freedom House and The American Jewish Committee, 1991), pp. 63-65; "Iron in the Soul," The Economist, March 12, 1994, pp. 55-56; Jane Perlez, "A New �SLOVAKIA 53 Several months later, Monika Nemcokova, the Press Secretary for the Slovak Embassy in Washington, D.C., wrote The New York Times to complain about other distortions in an article by Henry Kamm, "In Slovak Gypsy Ghetto, Hovels and Plea for Jobs." Kamm's article centered on Gypsies in the Slovak village of Svinia, and their poor living conditions and high unemployment. According to a parish priest in the village of Medzev, the Rom "don't want to work," and were satisfied subsisting on government welfare. The mayor of Medzev said the only solution to Slovakia's Gypsy problem was "to shoot them all," though, after a few moments, he added, "I'm no racist...But some Gypsies you would have to shoot." Ms. Nemcokova said such attitudes were "not based on racial intole. ranee, but on a significant difference in life styles and standards." She added that almost 40% of all crimes in Slovakia were committed by Roma, figures that ranged from 40-50% for all "youth cases in Slovakia." The Press Secretary felt that the Rom stipend of $71 a month was more than adequate to maintain a reasonable lifestyle in Slovakia, though she admitted it was less than half the average monthly salary of a worker. Ms. Nemcokova strongly disagreed with Kamm's assertion that there were 400,000 Roma in Slovakia, and put the figure at 250,000. She noted that the government spent 70 milllion crowns annually to help the Roma, which was "used for improving living standards in Gypsy villages, education and children's summer camps, including 3.6 million crowns for Gypsy periodicals, and 10.7 million crowns for Gypsy cultural activities.''48 Slovak Government Pledges Moderation,• The New York Times, March 17, 1994, p. A6; Peter Maas, "Half a Century after Hitler, Gypsies Face New Fight to Exist," The Washini:ton Post, August 13, 1993, p. A29; "Reported Racist Remarks Makes Slovakians Angry," Greensboro News & Record, Setpember 7, 1993, p. A5; "His Struggle," The Economjst, September 18-24, 1993, p. 56. " Henry Kamm, "In Slovak Gypsy Ghetto, Hovels and Plea for Jobs,• The New �SLOVAKIA 54 The current status of the Roma in Slovakia is quite grim. The Slovak Gypsies have been hit particularly hard by the sluggish economy, and there are reports of Roma unemployment rates as high as 100%, particularly in eastern Slovakia, where most Roma live. The rather topsy turvy political situation and lack of commitment to address the complex problems faced by the country's Roma has stifled any significant government efforts to develop a mature program to raise Gypsy educational, social, and economic standards. The Slovak Government's minority department has only five people on its staff, and there is only one Gypsy expert in the Ministry of Education. Until something more is done to address the sad plight of Slovak Roma, they will remain a community outside of the fabric of Slovak society. 49 The serious social, economic, employment, and educational problems faced by Slovakia's Roma are not unique to this young Republic. Roma suffer from similar difficulties throughout Central and Eastern Europe, where most continental Gypsies live. Most of Slovakia's neighbors are faced with rising Roma birthrates vis vis static native rates, and serious financial problems that hinder the dramatic types of educational and social experiments used earlier to try to draw the Roma more deeply into the fabric of the societies of Central and Eastern Europe. These difficulties, though, should not be used as an excuse to fail to deal with the problems of this growing minority. Hopes that the Roma, in the right circumstances, might move elsewhere, are misguided, since Slovakia's Roma have lived in the region for centuries and have deep roots there. Furthermore, in light of their growing numbers and new political activism, the Roma could, in future, present an interesting political threat to Slovakia's current ruling parties. Moreover, rulers in Slovakia and a York Times, November 28, 1993, p. A4; Monica Nemcokova, "Don't Blame Slovakia for Gypsy Problem," The New York Times, December 15, 1993, p. A14. " Barany, "Grim Realities," p. 8. �SLOVAKIA 55 elsewhere in the region should remember that their treatment of the Roma has become an important litmus test of the depth of their democratic experiments in Western eyes. Any failure to deal positively and creatively with each country's Roma population could have negative implications for any of the states in the region trying to draw closer to the West. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1998, Vol. 36 Description An account of the resource Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 26 SLOVAKIA The Roma Of Slovakia Since 1939 David M. Crowe One of the most intriguing ethnic groups in Slovakia are the Roma or Gypsies. Traditionally regarded as social outcasts and misfits, the Roma have been a unique part of the Slovak historical landscape. Though there have been Roma in Slovakia since the Middle Ages, it was not until World War II that significant efforts were made to deal with the Slovak Roma. From 1939 until 1945, the Roma, often lumped together with the country's Jews, were subjected to a number of restrictive policies. Within a decade after the end of World War II, attention again was drawn to the Roma in the reconstructed Czechoslovak Republic, but particularly in Slovakia, where most of the country's Gypsies lived. To Czechoslovakia's communist leaders, the low socioeconomic status of the Roma was a national embarassment and underscored at least one failed aspect of the communist experiment. Driven by statistics that illustrated the low social, economic, educational, and cultural status of the Roma, considerable efforts were made through the 1980s to transform this traditionally nomadic people into sedentary, assimilated Slovak and Czech citizens. Though some significant gains were made, Slovak and Czech leaders were unable to stifle the centuries-old prejudice that had haunted Gypsies throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Though large numbers of Slovak Roma fled to the SLOVAKIA 27 Czech Republic after the 1993 breakup of Czechoslovakia, a large Roma population still resides in Slovakia. The Roma or Gypsies have lived in Slovakia since the Middle Ages. By the 14th century, considerable Gypsy settlements began to appear in the Slovak portions of Hungary, particularly around feudal castles such as Spis (Zips) Castle. Initially, Roma were welcomed by local officials. Slovak peasants regarded these "Egyptians" as religious exiles from the Middle East. However, over time, positive Slovak attitudes towards the Roma began to change, particularly during the 16th century, when the region was plagued by religious wars and the Turkish threat. In Slovak Royal Hungary, for example, some noblemen began forcibly to expel Gypsies or force them to settle on the outskirts of towns and villages. 1 During the 17th century, Gypsies and others fleeing the Thirty Years War (1618 - 1648) entered Slovakia, which adopted new anti-Gypsy regulations to deal with the new Roma presence. Once the Austrian Habsburgs retook much of Hungary at the end of the 17th century, they implemented new regulations that strongly discouraged Roma settlement throughout the Austrian Empire. These harsh policies began to change under Maria Theresa (1740 - 1780). Her policies were designed to halt Gypsy immigration into her empire and force those already there to become sedentary. The Roma now became subject to all imperial taxes and obligations such as the draft. Gypsies were also required to give up their traditional dress and customs, and forbidden to marry other Gypsies. Roma children over five were taken from their parents and placed in the care of non-Gypsy Catholic parents. These policies were continued by Maria Theresa's son, Jopseph II (r. 1780 -1790), but fell into disarray after his death. 2 1 David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 ), pp. 31-35. ' Ibid., pp. 36-40. 28 SLOVAKIA There are few glimpses of Slovak Rom during the first half of the 19th century, though there is more on them during the second half of this period. In 1856, a Gypsy school, one of the first in Europe, was opened in Nove Zamky. However, it was not until the general Hungarian census of 1880 and the Hungarian Gypsy census of 1893 that the first concrete evidence about the Roma presence in Slovakia surfaced. According to 1893 data, there were 36,231 Roma in Slovakia, most of them settled. Almost half of those employed worked in traditional Gypsy occupations, while an almost equal number were musicians. The census also indicated that a considerable number of Roma were involved in unsavory occupations. Almost 90% of Slovakia's Gypsies were Roman Catholics.3 Total Gypsy population figures declined dramatically in the new post-World War I Czechoslovak census of 1921. It showed only 7,967 Roma in Slovakia and almost none in the Czech lands. Experts reasoned that the low numbers could be caused by exclusive use of "mother tongue" in the census. More accurate 1926 data indicated 62,192 Roma in Slovakia, though gypsiologist Dr. Eva Davidova felt the real numbers were much higher. 4 Efforts were made in Slovakia during this period to open schools for Gypsies and to encourage the development of cultural organizations for them. Some attempts were also inade privately to improve Gypsy health. One of the most famous Gypsy schools in Slovakia at this time was in Uzhorod. Opened in 1925 by Pavel Fodor, it gained an international reputation for its instruction in Slovak. 5 What gains were made by Slovak Roma disappeared with the coming of World War II. After the German dismemberment 3 Ibid., pp. 40-42. • Ibid., pp. 42-44. ' Ibid., pp. 44-47. SLOVAKIA 29 of Czechoslovak.a in 1939, two separate states emerged - the German- controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the German-allied state of Slovakia. Whereas Gypsies in Bohemia and Moravia suffered from harsh Nazi policies throughout the Porajmos or Gypsy Holocaust, the Roma in Slovakia fared much better. 6 Part of the reason for Slovakia's comparatively mild treatment of its Gypsies centered around Germany's desire for Slovakia to be a model satellite state in southeastern Europe. Consequently, the government, the Catholic church, and business enjoyed semi-autonomy. Furthermore, Father Jozef Tiso, the head of state, opposed the complete nazification of his country. In time, Reich officials came to realize that the only way - they could achieve their goals was through political pressure and an intense propaganda campaign. Anything else would hamper Slovakia's contribution to the German war effort. Almost all of Slovakia's Gypsies survived the war because of this. This did not mean, however, that the Slovak government left its Roma population alone. Within months after the creation of Slovakia in the spring of 1939, the Tiso government ordered nomadic Gypsies to return to their legal residences, and made it illegal for them to do any horse trading. On September 25, 1939, Jews were deprived of their Slovak citizenship, while Gypsies who were born in Slovakia and wanted Slovak citizenship had to prove that they lived an orderly way of life; had a steady place of residence and employment; and were honorable citizens as reflected in their education, their moral and political trustworthiness, and their activity in their community, could they be included in the Slovak national community. If they did not fulfill the aforementioned conditions, or if they fulfilled them only ' Ibid. , pp. 47-51. 30 SLOVAKIA partially-if they worked only occasionally, if they spoke the Gypsy language among themselves, if their moral and political trustworthiness was doubtful, etc.--they could not be considered members of the Slovak national community. In other words, wandering Gypsies did not qualify for citizenship. 1 Four months later, Ferdinand Durcansky, Slovakia's Interior Minister, ordered that Gypsies and Jews were to work in special labor units as alternatives to military service, which was later set "at two terms of two months twice annually." Durcansky defined a Gypsy in Law No. 130/1940 of June 18, 1940, as someone who had two Roma parents and lived as a nomad, or a sedentary person who avoided work. Other regulations issued during this period made it illegal for Gypsies to ride public transportation, eat in cafes, or enter public parks. As Germany intensified pressure on the Slovaks to increase their contribution to the war effort, the Tiso government created seasonal labor camps in 1941 where Gypsies often made up over half of the workers. Conditions in the labor units were bad. Inmates suffered increasingly from inadequate clothing and shoes, cold, infestation with lice and bedbugs, hunger, and disease, especially trachoma and typhus. 8 7 Jorg K. Hoensch, "The Slovak Republic, 1939-1945," in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomfr Luza, eds., A History of the Czechoslovak Republic J9 J 8- J 948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 278-279, 284-286; Jiff Upa, "The Fate of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia under Nazi Domination," in Michael Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims· Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 209-210; Ctibor Necas. Nad osudem ceskych a sI ovenskych Cikam1 v letech I 939- I 945 (Brno: Univerzita J. E. Purkyne, 1981 ), p. 70. • Upa, "Fate of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. 210; Gypsy and Jewish service regulations were included in legislation of January 18, 1940, and February 29, 1940. Necas, Nad osudem, pp. 82-129, devotes a great deal of time to the little SLOVAKIA 31 Many prisoners practiced self-mutilation to gain their freedom. In 1943, one member of the Slovak Diet, Hut'ka, criticized the conditions of the camps at Bystre nad Topl'ou. He felt the labor camps had been opened "to re-educate the asocial elements, not...to torture people and bring them into an even worse moral degradation." 9 On April 20, 1941, nomadic Gypsies were given eight days to return home. Once there, they were watched by the police and only allowed to leave with special permission. The Roma were also given two weeks to dispose of their horses and wagons . Gypsy houses located near public thoroughfares had to be torn down and reconstructed at a new site determined by officials. A Gypsy representative was to work with the local mayor to ensure that local ordinances were followed. Roma were also not allowed to own dogs. These regulations evidently did not curb all Gypsy nomadism, and officials explained when they opened a new labor camp in Krupina in the summer of 1941, that nomadic Roma were to be put in such camps to force them to live a sedentary life and to learn to do productive labor. These efforts still did not stop Gypsy nomadism, and on June 21, 1943, the government ordered that all Gypsy housing be removed from alongside busy roads. 10 Each Slovak community dealt with its Roma in a different manner. The 500 Gypsies in the village of Smizany were well integrated and none were sent to labor camps. When Hlinka Guards, the Slovak paramilitary group that modeled itself on the Italian "Black Shirts" and the German SA, arrived to take Gypknown history of the Gypsy Labor Units (pracovni utvary) from 1941-1944. He provides detailed Gypsy inmate statistics for the camps at Bystre nad Topl'ou , Dubnica nad Vlihom, llava, and Revuca; Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, ~ Destiny of Europe's Gypsies (New York: Basic Books, I972), p. 136. • Lfpa, "Fate of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. 210. 10 Ibid., p. 211; Necas, Nad osudem, pp. 74-75, 130. 32 SLOVAKIA sies from the village of Letanovce, the mayor only agreed to send two Roma who had reputations as drunks. Both Gypsies returned to Letanovce at the end of the war. 11 This atmosphere changed drastically during the summer of 1944. In June, Slovak Roma were accused of spreading typhoid throughout the country, and were forbidden to ride trains unless they had a special travel permit backed by a physician's certificate that showed them free of typhoid. Gypsies could only use the rail passes for outbound trips and had to get another one if they wanted to return home. The following month, the Interior Ministry informed its regional offices that there were still Roma in some of the country's towns and villages. It ordered local officials to move all Gypsies away from roadsides, and said that if any refused to comply, they would be executed. The decree added that more forced labor camps were being prepared for Slovak Roma. 12 The climate for the Gypsies got considerably worse with the German occupation of Slovakia on September 29, 1944. Spurred by the Slovak National Insurrection of August 29-0ctober 27, 1944, the Germans clamped down harshly on the Slovaks, including the Roma, because they had actively supported the uprising. One Gypsy leader, Tomas Farkas, headed a mixed guerilla band of Roma and Slovaks during the uprising. Farkas' detachment momentarily held up German forces near Tisovec as they moved towards Banska Bystrica, the military center of the rebellion. After Banska Bystrica fell, authorities arrested Farkas' son, and imprisoned him. When Slovak partisans retreated in the 11 Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, p. 136; Emflia Horvlithova, Cii:ani na SJovensku (Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Slovenskej Akademie Vied, 1964), p. 171. Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, p. 137; Horvathova, Ciian.i na SJoyensku, p. 171; the train regulations were issued on June 13, 1944, while others appeared on June 19-21, 1944. Necas, Nad osudem, pp. 130-132. 12 SLOVAKIA 33 face of the German advance in the fall of 1944, the Gypsies, using hidden weapons, stayed behind to protect their families. After the rebellion's collapse, a German intelligence officer tricked the Roma into revealing details about their weapons cache. Hlinka Guards executed the Gypsy partisans as their families watched in horror. The Germans then killed all Roma women and children and buried their bodies in a lime pit. 13 Similar Gypsy massacres took place in other parts of Slovakia as retribution for their role in the Slovak National Insurrection. On November 14, 1944, 65 Roma were burned to death in two huts in Cierny Balog, while other Gypsies were forced to dig a large grave for their fallen comrades. Hlinka - Guards murdered the entire community of 111 Gypsies in Ilija eight days later, and on November 23 , butchered as many Roma as they could find in Slatina. Only three Gypsies escaped the massacre. A similar tragedy took place at Neresnice, where only two families survived. 14 Atrocities also took place at the labor camp at Dubnica nad Vahom. On September 29, 1944, German authorities in Trencin just south of Dubnica nad Vahom ordered that all male Roma from this region be sent to the labor camp at Dubnica. The Gypsy transfers were halted once the camp became full two weeks later. On November 2, 1944, Dubnica na Vahom was transformed into a concentration center for all Roma. Authorites freed all of the camp's non-Gypsy inmates to make room for the Roma. After a typhus epidemic ravaged a Gypsy camp at Ustie 1 Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, pp. 137- 138; Hoensch, "The Slovak Republic," pp. 293-295 ; Anna Josko, "The Slovak Resistance Movement," in Mamatey and Luza, Histocy of the Czechoslovak Republic, pp . 375-380, 382-383. 14 Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gyspies. pp. 137-138; authorities later found a mass grave at Kremnica, which was occupied by the Germans from November 5, 1944, to January 12, 1945. It contaimed 3,723 bodies, some of them Gypsies. Netas, Nad osudem, pp. 138-141. ' 34 SLOVAKIA nad Oravou in mid-December, authorites shipped its inmates to Dubnica nad Vahom. Before the arrival of the new Roma inmates, there were 729 Roma at Dubnica nad V ahom, 250 of them children. The only recorded atrocity at the camp took place on January 17, 1945, when 16 sick Gypsy prisoners were taken from the camp and told they were being shipped to the hopsital at Trencfn. Instead, they were driven in military trucks to a wooded area, forced into a pit, and executed. The Dubnica nad V ahom camp was closed on the eve of its capture by Soviet forces on April 8, 1945. Despite these tragedies, the Gypsy survival rate in Slovakia was quite high, and estimates are that only a few hundred of Slovakia's 100,000 Rom died in the Porajmos. 15 The liberation of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1945 found the country traumatized by the human and economic devastation of the war. A massive campaign of expulsions aimed primarily at Germans and Magyars saw I .5 million people move into the former Sudetenland from other parts of Czechoslovakia, including some Gypsies. As the Germans were expelled from Cze- __ choslovakia, many Slovak Gypsies were sent to camps in northern Bohemia and Moravia where they worked as unskilled laborers. Not all Slovak Gypsies remained in the Czech lands, 15 Lfpa, "Fate of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 211 -213; Necas, Nad llS..Ll.d.e.m, pp. 111-112, I 34- 137 ; Kenrick and Puxon, Destiny of Europe's Gypsies, p. 138; Horvathova, Cii:ani na S)ovensku, p. 173 n34; David J. Kostelancik, "The Gypsies of Czechoslovakia: Political and Ideological Considerations in the Development of Policy," Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter 1984), p. 309; the Gypsies were not Slovakia's only victims after the Slovak National Insurrection. Estimates are that from August 1944 until April 1945, "7,500 soldiers and 2,500 partisans were killed and 3,723 civilians ... were murdered and buried in mass graves; 900 were burned in lime kilns; 30,000 people were de)Xlrted to German concentration camps; 60 communities were completely destroyed by fires and 142 were partially wiped out." Josko, "Slovak Resistance Movement," p. 383. SLOVAKIA 35 and some returned to Slovakia where they began to buy new homes. In addition, about 6,000 Olach [Olassti] Gypsies continued to live as nomads. Officials hoped the returning Slovak Roma would help solve the regions's severe labor shortage and serve as role models for other Roma. After the strong communist showing in the May 26, 1946, elections, the new Minister of the Interior, the Czech Vaclav Nosek, and others, called for restrictive policies against the Roma, whom Nosek and his supporters called questionable citizens of Czechoslovakia. 16 Efforts by Evzan Erban, the Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, to continue to send Slovak Gypsies to camps in the Czech lands were stopped by the non-communist Minister of Justice, Prokop Drtina in 1947. Nosek convinced Drtina to do a census of the country's Roma population to determine how many lived as nomads. According to the census, there were 84,438 Roma in Slovakia, and 16,752 in the Czech lands. The successful communist coup in early 1948 brought to power a party that a year earlier had pledged that it would do everything possible to integrate the Gypsies into the fabric of Czechoslovakian society, and raise their social, economic, and cultural status. 17 In 1949, the government of Klement Gottwald created a special commission to investigate the "Gypsy question." The 16 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 309-310; Willy Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms: The Case of Czechoslovakia," in Farnham Rehfisch, ed., Gypsies Tinkers and Other Travellers (New York: Academic Press, 1975), p. 213; Tom~ Grulich and Tom~ Hai~man, "lnstitucionalnf zajem o cikanske obyvatelstvo v Ceskoslovensku v letech 1945-1958," C:esky Lid, Vol. 73 , No. 2 ( 1986), p. 73. 17 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 310-3 I I ; Vladimir Srb, "Cikani v Ceskoslovensku Demo2rafje, Vol. Xl , No. 3 (1969), p. 194; Zdenek Suda, The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 32-36; Radomfr Luui, "Czechoslovakia between Democracy and Communism," in Mamatey and Luui, History of the Czechoslovak Republic, pp. 412-415. 36 SLOVAKIA new commission sponsored a detailed study of Czechoslovakia's Gypsies that appeared in 1950 as Zarazovani osob cikanskeho puvodu do trvaleho pracovniho procesu (Position of Individuals of Gypsy Origin in the Work Process). Two years later, this study was partly integrated into another report by the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, Uprava pomeru osob cikanskeho puvodu (Report About the Life of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia). This latter study blamed earlier governments and societies for the Roma's low social and economic status, and promised that the new People's Democratic State would resolve the "Gypsy question" if the Roma willingly and quickly become accustomed to conscientious work, they adopt trades, they take part in socialist competition, they become shock-workers, members and functionaries of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the Revolutionary Trade-Union Movement. 18 However, over the next eight years, Czechoslovak leaders did little to help the Gypsies improve their quality of life. Numerous regional and local decrees touched on health care and housing needs, and emphasized changing the behavior of the Roma. 19 Communist Party propaganda, however, underscored improved Gypsy school attendance, literacy, and new attitudes towards work and integration. By the mid-1950s, this congratulatory tone changed as the reality of the Gypsy's plight and demographic growth became more apparent to the country's leadership. In 1956, authorities began to talk about a national Gypsy crisis, which was linked to their continued nomadism. 18 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 3 I 0-311; Grulich and Hai~man, "Institucionalnf zajem o cikanske," p. 74. " Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 311, 320; Josef Kalvoda, "The Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," in David M. Crowe and John Kolsti, eds., ~ Gypsies of Eastern Europe (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), p. 93. SLOVAKIA 37 According to an article in Zemedelske Novjny (Agricultural Newspaper) in 1957, only 40% of the country's Roma were working in industry and agriculture. The Slovak journal Smena (Direction) added that the nomadic Roma lifestyle heightened prejudice towards them, which the journal compared to "discrimination against the Negro in the United States.":n These problems and attitudes, coupled with the size of the Roma population nationwide, which Radio Bratislava estimated in 1958 to be 150,000, prompted the Communist Party to approve a resolution on April 8, 1958, that demanded a new campaign to resolve the "Gypsy question." Similar to new policies throughout the Soviet bloc at that time, the Party called for a mass campaign addressed to both the Gypsies and white -- bigots, for lifting the Gypsies' extraterritorial immunities and punishment of nomadism. 21 Czechoslovakia's Gypsies were now officially divided into three categories - nomads, semi-nomads, and completely sedentary - in anticipation of Law No. 74, of October 17, 1958, "Act on Permanent Settlement of Nomadic People." The new law instructed local officials to work with nomads, whom it defined as an individual who 0 Otto Ulc, "Communist National Minority Policy: The Case of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," Soviet Studies, Vol. XX, No. 4 (April 1969), pp. 422-424 ; "Minorites in Eastern Europe," Eastern Europe. Vol. 8, No. 3 (March 1959), pp . 13-14. 21 "M inorities in Eastern Europe," p. 14; Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," p. 311, improperly places the date for the passage of Law No. 74 as November 17, 1958; Grulich and Hai§man, "Jnstitucionalnf zajem o cikanske," pp. 77-78; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 214-215. Guy estimates the number of registered nomads at 20,000-27,000; Ulc, "Gyps ies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 424-426, says officials estimated that the semi-nomadic Rom were the largest group among the Gypsies. ' 38 SLOVAKIA in groups or individually, wanders from place to place, shuns honest work or obtains his livelihood by iniquitious means even though he may be registered in some community as its permanent resident.-n. According to the new law, if anyone continued to live in this manner, he or she could be imprisoned for six months to three years. Two other parts of Law No. 74 gave the Minister of the Interior the right 11 to issue executive orders to this effect, including registration of the nomads. 11 Though the new regulations never mentioned the Roma, they were its only target, particularly the country's 6,000 nomadic Olach Gypsies. Official estimates indicated that there were from 11,000 to 40,000 nomadic Roma in Czechoslovakia at this time. 23 In an effort to avoid charges of racism, officials also upgraded the Gypsies' official status to a "socio-ethnic group." Unfortunately, Czechoslovak authorities did not anticipate the complex economic and social problems that would accompany their efforts to force the complete integration of the nation's Gypsies. Many nomadic Roma found ways to avoid punishment for thsir lifestyle, while local efforts to force settlement through the assignment of precious housing to Gypsies created growing resentment against a group that some came to see as privileged. Many Slovaks and Czechs felt the Roma were a privileged group that had special rights without obligations. The public complained that the Gypsies were measured by different standards and took advantage of their unique position. More importantly, the government's new efforts did little to upgrade the low socio-economic status of the Roma, and perhaps made it worse for the newly settled Gypsies, who, located principally in Slova- 22 23 UII!, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 424-425. Ibid., pp. 425-426. SLOVAKIA 39 kia, still lived in slums with inadequate plumbing and sanitation facilites. 24 Consequently, in 1965, the Communist Party asked local officials to do a more thorough investigation of the plight of the Roma and develop a long range plan for Gypsy assimilation. The result was Ordinance No. 502 of June 1965, which developed a Gypsy reform progam that centered around fullemployment possibilities for Gypsies able to work full time. These efforts were considered essential to upgrading the standard of living for Roma, and tied to plans to destroy substandard Gypsy settlements and the movement of Roma from Slovakia to other parts of the country. The Academy of Sciences was asked to do a study of Roma life, while the state-controlled media was ord.tred to help counter nationwide prejudice against the Roma. A new government body, the National Council for Questions of the Gypsy Population (NCQGP), which had no Gypsy members, was to serve as the program's watchdog. The NCQGP produced three position papers, but was abolished in 1968. 25 At the center of this new program was the destruction of substandard Gypsy housing and settlements, primarily in Slovakia, and the forced resettlement and employment of their Rom inhabitants. Officials estimated that 67.3% of Slovakia's 153,000 Gypsies lived in extremely substandard housing. The government pin-pointed 1,266 Roma settlements in Slovakia for destruction, and the transfer of 64,096 Gypsies. Officials planned to move the effected Slovak Gypsies to the Czech lands after their settlements were razed. Local governments, aided by national ,. Kostelancik, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. 426; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia." pp. 98-99. 25 Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia." pp. 312-313; Ult, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia." pp. 430-431. Of the 56,000 Rom in eastern Slovakia, only 2.2% had an adequate water supply; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 2 I 922 . 40 SLOVAKIA subsidies, would then be responsible for the Gypsies' housing and employment. The resettlement program was voluntary. Once a Gypsy family was convinced of the wisdom of moving, the government would give the family a special payment, combined with a 25-30% subsidy and low cost government loan, which would be used to purchase a new home in the Czech lands. However, inadequate funding, coupled with growing resentment towards the new Roma presence in the Czech lands, and the unwillingness of some Gypsies to remain there, undercut the success of the program. Between 1965-1968, the government was only able to eliminate a third of the Roma settlements targeted for destruction. 26 As authorities struggled with the mixed results of this new transfer and employment program, Czechoslovakia was turned inside out by the events of the Prague Spring in 1968.Z7 On the eve of the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia had an official Gypsy population of 223,993, with 164,526 in Slovakia, and 59,467 in the Czech lands. In 1968, the Roma in Slovakia formed their first official organization, the Union of Gypsy-Romanies (UGR or Zvaz Cikanov-Romov; Romani, Romano Jekhetaniben), followed by a similar Czech organization in 1969. Later that year, both groups joined together, but maintained separate Slovak and Czech branches. The UGR received funds from the National Front and had branches throughout Czechoslovakia. Its goals were to improve the socio-economic status of the Roma and enhance the Gypsies' awareness of their own culture and 2 • Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 432-433 ; Kostelancik, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 312-314; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 219-220; Hiibschmannova, "Co je tak zvana cikanska otazka," p. 115 n I 9. 27 Otto Ulc, "Czechoslovakia," in Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, ed., Communism io Eastern Europe, Second Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 121-123; William Shawcross, ~ (New York : Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1990), pp. 114-119. SLOVAKIA 41 traditions. The UGR also wanted to acquire nationality status for the Roma, which triggered an engaging debate between Gypsy and non-Gypsy intellectuals about the entire "Gypsy question." Central to the debate was Jaroslav Sus' 1963 study, Cikanska otazka v CSSR (The Gypsy Question in the CSSR), which described the Rom way of life as [an] undesirable combination of 'nomadism, tribalism ...and blood f euds,' and the Romani language as ... unworthy of preservation. Consequently, Sus felt that "unconditional assimilation [was] ... the only solution for the question." 28 Roma scholar Elena Htibschmannova, long an advcoate of --Gypsy nationality status, led the attack on Sus' ideas. Htibschmannova shifted responsibility for some aspects of the "Gypsy Question" to the shoulders of the government, as did the August 1969 Programme of the Founding Congress of the Czech Gypsy-Rom Association [Union], which felt that "fears of the results of granting rights to the Gypsies as a nationality" lay at the heart of the question. As this debate raged, plans were made to start a Roma journal, and the UGR's membership rolls swelled to 20,000 between 1968 - 1971. Several hundred Gypsy musical and sports groups were formed, and the media began to refer to the country's Roma as "citizens of Gypsy origin." Unfortunately, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, the new government of Gustav Husak introduced an era of "normalization" that gradually chipped away at many of the gains achieved by the Roma during the Prague Spring. In April I 973, the government expelled the UGR from the National Front, and outlawed other Gypsy organizations because "they had failed to fulfill their integrative function." 29 21 " Crowe, Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia, pp. 58-59. Srb, "Cikani v Ceskoslovensku, ~ p. 194; Kostelancik, "Gypsies of 42 SLOVAKIA What followed was a renewed effort to force Gypsy integration and assimilation, coupled with a new sterialization scheme to reduce Gypsy births.~ One of the darker sides of the new Roma assimilation campaign were efforts to promote the sterilization of Gypsy women. The seed for this idea was planted in a February 29, 1972, Ministry of Health "Decree on Sterilization." Though "designed to safeguard against arbitrary or illinformed sterilization of all Czechoslovak citizens," the decree was used to encourage the sterilization of Romany women in order to reduce the high unhealthy' Romany population and, as a result, a disproportionately high number of Romany women were sterilized, often in violation of the existing safeguards and of their rights to non-discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or sex. 3 ' Czechoslovakia," pp. 3 I 7-318 ; Eva Davidova, "The Gypsies of Czechoslovakia, " Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society. Third Series, Vol. I, Nos. 12 (Jan uary-April), pp. 53-54; Guy, "Ways of Looking at Roms," pp. 220-22 I , 223, n44; Grattan Puxon, "Gypsies: Blacks of East Europe," The Nation. April 17, I 976, pp. 461-462; Hlibschmannova, "Co je tak zvana cikanska otazka," pp . 105, I 12 nl6, I 13- 114, I 16 n23, 117-118 ; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 101-103 ; Otto Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia: A Case of Unfinished Integration," Eastern European Politics and Societies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring 1988), pp. 310-312. 30 Other estimates put the 1970 Roma population at over 300,000. Vladimir Srb, "Demograficky profil ~eskoslovenskych romu," Cesky Lid, Vol. 72 ( 1985), p. 139; Vladimir Srb, "K integraci cikanskeho obyvatelstva v CSSR," Demoi:rafie, Vol. XXI, No. 4 (1979), p. 323; V. Srb and J. Job, "Nektere demograficke, ekonomicke a kultumi charakteristiky romskehe obyvatelstva v CSSR 1970," Demoi:rafie, Vol. XVI, No. 2 (1974), p. 173 ; Kostelancik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," p. 106; Paul S. Shoup, The East European and Soviet Data Handbook (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 42, 48; Chris Cook and John Stevenson, The Loni:man Handbook of Modern European History )763-)985 (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 216,218. 31 Rachael Tritt, Jeri Laber, and Lois Whitman, Strui:i:Jini: for Ethnic Identity · Czechoslovakia's Endani:eced Gypsies (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992), SLOVAKIA 43 According to a Slovak document released in 1979 by Charter 77, a Czechoslovak dissident group, the Slovak government had already begun a program that used economic incentives to get Gypsy women to be sterilized because of earlier, unsuccessful government efforts "to control the high unhealthy Romany population through family planning and contraception." Local health workers offered some prospective sterilization candidates as much as 5,000 Crowns to undergo the procedure. As pressure intensified to get more Gypsy women to agree to sterilization, some health workers often made unfulfilled offers of as high as 30,000 Crowns. Charter 77 protested this practice in 1979, and claimed that it violated Article No. 259 of the state penal code, which dealt with genocide. But this was not the only - . criticism in Charter 77's 1979 document. On a broader scale, Charter 77 decried government practices designed to stop Gypsy nomadism and force assimilation, and the official denial of Roma ethnic status. According to Charter 77, the collective impact of these programs set into play "a process of social disintegration which has no comparison in the history of the Gypsies. This fact is substantiated by an ever increasing number of Gypsies who are sentenced to loss of freedom." 32 While it difficult to gauge the impact of the 1979 Charter 77 report on the plight of the Roma, population data from the 1980 census spurred further government action. The 1980 census showed a Roma population of 288,440, an increase of 31.3% over 1970 figures. Czechoslovakia's total population only grew by 6%. during the same period. The greatest increase in Gypsy growth rates was in the Czech republic, where the Roma population increased 47% between 1970 - 1980, versus a 25.5% rise in Slovakia. Even these figures, though, are misleading, since pp. 19, 139-144. 2 ' Tritt, Czechoslovakia's Endangered Gypsies, pp. 20, 24, 26-27; Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 314-315. 44 SLOVAKIA arbitrary counting methods showed a discrepancy between national census figures, and those recorded in local "Gypsy Registers," which indicated that there were 306,246 Roma in Czechoslovakia in 1980. The absolute rise in Gypsy population numbers was less troubling to the government than the national and Rom childbirth rate figures. The overall Czechoslovak childbirth rate was on the decline, and by 1982 was "below the level of biological reproduction." The average Czechoslovak woman bore 2.4 children in the 1970s compared to 6.4 children for a Gypsy woman. 33 These increases were remarkable, particularly in light of continued government efforts to destroy Slovak Gypsy slums and the forced movement of Slovak Roma to Czech portions of the country. Other Gypsies also moved to the Czech lands because of better job opportunities and a higher standard of living. Between 1972-1980, officials destroyed 4,000 Roma dwellings in Slovakia, and moved 4,850 Gypsies elsewhere. Though Gypsy housing standards improved appreciably between during this period, there were still 5.6 persons in thct average Roma apartment or house versus a national average of 3.1 persons per dwelling. By 1980, a little more than 70% of the country's Gypsy population lived in apartments, while 10% still lived in primitive settlements that were to be destroyed by 1990. The number in extremely unfit housing dropped from 80.7% in 1970 to 49% between 1970 and 1980. Another part of the Roma assimilation campaign centered around attempts to force more Gypsy children into the public schools. In 1971, only 10% of the eligible Roma children in Czechoslovakia attended kindergarten, a figure that rose to 33 Srb, "Demograficky profil foskoslovenskych Romu," pp. 139-140. There were 88,507 Gypsies in the Czech Republic in 1980, and 199,853 in Slovakia; Ul~, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 315-316; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 108-109. SLOVAKIA 45 58.5% in 1980. During the same period, the number .of Gypsy children that finished public school rose from 16.6% to 25.6%, while the number enrolled in colleges and universities increased from 39 to 191. Nationwide, literacy rates rose to 90% among Roma adults. On the other hand, Gypsy school dropout rates in Slovakia increased substantially as Roma pupils moved from grade to grade. In 1983-1984, 72.2% of the Slovak students who failed to go into the second grade were Gypsies, and almost a third of the Roma who went to second grade barely had minimal literacy skills, a figure that jumped to 50% for Gypsy 4th graders. Nationwide, many Gypsies entered the school system with a knowledge of only a few hundred Slovak or Czech words, and were often assigned to special instititions (zvlastnf skoly) designed for the mentally retarded. Only a third of the country's Gypsy children finished 8th grade in 19831984, and only 4% went on to university or college. 34 Gypsy employment figures for this period were also a mixture of success and failure. Though 1981 data showed an 87.7% employment rate for male Gypsy workers that was close to the national average of 91 .9% for all adult males, the 54.95% employment rate for Roma female workers was well below the national average of 87.7% for all women. In addition, over three quarters of all Gypsies employed held low paying, non-skilled jobs. The overall impact of the employment, educational, and housing data found Czechoslovakia's Roma on a socio-economic plateau that proved difficult to transcend. According to Irnrich Farkas, the official responsible for Gypsy matters in Slovakia, the government felt that it would be harder to improve the quality " Kostelanc ik, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," pp. 313-3 I 5. In I 980, 59% of the Gypsies in Slovakia lived in the lowest classification for housing, Class IV. Kindergarten attendance rates in eastern Slovakia, where 53% of Slovakia's Rom lived in 1980, rose from 10% to 66% between 1970-1980; Ult, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 319-320. 46 SLOVAKIA of Gypsy life "because increasingly left for solution are those socially and culturally backward families." 35 The government tried to put the best light on its assimilation efforts, and publicized some Gypsy success stories. Bratislava Pravda reported that 435 Roma had been elected to predominantly low level positions as deputies of Peoples Committees, and that one Gypsy, Emil Rigo, had briefly been a member of the Politburo in 1968. Officials also used successful Gypsies to counter efforts to acquire nationality status for the Roma. In 1986, Rude Pravo responded to the World Romany Congress' appeal for nationality status for Czechoslovakia's Gypsies partially with a statement by Mirosalv 2.ajda, an assimilated Roma and Party member who told the newspaper that he was quite content with his life. 36 The lack of nationality status for Czechoslovakia's Roma, who were officially referred to as citizens "of Gypsy origin," robbed them of the special rights and financial support afforded officially recognized minorities. It also placed them into a limbo world where they were forced to identify with other ethnic groups. Their plight was compounded by the growing body of prejudice that accompanied their growing numbers and official attention. 37 To many Slovaks and Czechs, Gypsies were the tmavi kluci (dark boys), a term that automatically identified one as a Roma. According to Otto Ulc, post-1968 Czechsolvakia became a society that was "less tolerant, more impatient, and egotistic." Increasingly, he observed, the public saw Gypsies as "beneficiaries of a host of privileges on their path to the less- " Kostelancik, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 3I3-315; Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 322-323 . 36 Ulc, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 322 n36, 326. 37 Ibid., pp. 323-326. Not all Gypsies suffered from lack of nationality status on the same scale, and there were a number of instances, particularly in Slovakia, where local officials encouraged Rom ethnicity. SLOVAKIA 47 than-cherished goal of integration." Furthermore, Ulc argued, Slovaks and Czechs became "thoroughly uninhibited about making racial slurs and expressing racist prejudice of the oldfashioned vintage." They saw the Roma as "dirty, lazy, dishonest, primitive, parasitic, and inferior." 38 Government efforts to counter this prejudice met with mixed results, since the press used stories that gave explicit details about instances of unfair treatment of Gypsies with others that detailed Roma crime. Bratislava Pravda, for example, claimed in 1983 that the Gypsies, who made up 4 % of Slovakia's population, accounted for 24 percent of the charges of parasitism, 50 __ percent of robberies, 60 percent of petty thefts, 75 percent of charges for endangering the morals of youth, and 20 percent of all crimes committed.'39 The overall impact of such reports was to create a very unwelcome, suspicious climate for Czechoslovakia's growing Roma population that worsened as the country and its leadership drifted towards the collapse of the system that had dominated the country since 1948.'° As the Velvet Revolution swept Czechoslovakia in 1989, a plethora of political parties and other organizations surfaced. A number of Gypsy parties emerged during this period, including the Party of the Integration of the Romany People in Slovakia and the Party of the Democratic Romany Union. The most important was the Romany Civic Inititative (ROI or Romska obcanska iniciativa), which had close links to Civic Forum (Obcanske Forum), the umbrella political organization for a number of the country's dissident factions . ROI soon had a 31 Ult, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 327-328. " Kalvoda, "Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," p. I06. •• lhid., p. 106. 48 SLOVAKIA membership of over 70,000, and held its first national meeting in Prague in the spring of 1990. One of its first decisions was to vote to erect a monument in Bratislava to the Rom victims of the Holocaust. The ROI congress elected Emil Scuka, a lawyer and playwright, to head the organization.41 Yet the very democracy that gave Slovak and Czech Gypsies the opportunity to form their own political and other organizations also created a new atmosphere for open, virulent expressions of prejudice towards them. Of particular concern to many non-Gypsies was the dramatic growth of the Roma population. In 1988, the government estimated that there were 391 ,000 Rom in Czechoslovakia, a 35.5% increase over 1980 figures. Other sources estimated there were as many as 700,000-800,000 Roma in Czechoslovakia, with 470,000 a more reasonable figure. Some perceived these figures to be a new threat, and the newspaper Express warned in an article on July 2, 1990, "that the Gypsy fertility may mean a ' tragedy', that within a century the country may well have to be renamed the Romska republika. 42 These fears combined with the deep-rooted, traditional prejudices towards the Roma, and prompted some people to depict the-Gypsies as new symbols of everything gone awry in Czechoslo- " Otto Ulc, "Integration of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," Ethnic Groups. Vol. 9, No. 2 ( 1991 ), pp. 11 2- 11 3; in 1986, Scuka produced the "musical drama Amaro Drom (Our Road)...only the second play in Romanes ever to be staged in Czechoslovakia." Grattan Puxon, Roma· Europe's Gypsies (London: Minority Rights Group, 1987), p. 11 . " Radio Free Europe/Rad io Liberty, "Ethnic Minorities and Foreigners," Radio Free Europe Research, Vol. 14, No. 39 (22 September 1989), pp. 33, 36-37 ; Ulc, "Integration of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia," pp. 113-114; Czechoslovakia's population was 15,658,079, in Ju ly 1989, and 15,683,234, a year later, an increase of 25,155. Suda, "Czechoslovakia," p. 319, and Carol Skalnik Leff, "Czechoslovakia," in Richard F. Staar and Margit N. Grigory, eds., Yearbook on International Communist Affairs 1221 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1991), p. 269. SLOVAKIA 49 vakia. At the forefront of this new assualt on the Rom were renewed charges of criminality. Dramatic increases in crime had plagued the country since the early 1980s, particularly in Bratislava and Prague. In a society accustomed to traditionally low crime rates, crime reached epidemic proportions by 1990. Slovakia experienced a 17.7% rise in crime between 1988-1989, while the Czech Republic reported a 52% increase during the same pericxi. Much of this increase was attributed to Gypsies, who as early as 1987 had been blamed by television reports for 38% of Bratislava's crimes, and 40% of those committed in eastern Slovakia. Gypsies 18 years old and younger were accused of being part of over 44% of all crimes nationwide in 1988. Clearer heads proved that many of these statistics were exaggerated, and that the Roma were responsible for no more than 7.5-11 % of the crime in the country. Though the more conservative estimates were still out of proportion to the number of Gypsies in Czechoslovakia, they were directly tied to post1989 Gypsy unemployment figures that reached as high as 50% in certain areas. 43 Whatever the true numbers, Czechoslovakia's Roma paid a dear price for the accusations against them. Skinhead attacks, sometimes quietly encouraged by onlookers, mounted dangerously against Gypsies and the 35,000 Vietnamese workers in Czechoslovakia throughout 1990. On April 26, Prime Minister Petr Pithart of the Czech Republic called for "peaceful coexis0 Jan Orbman, "Crime Rate Among the Young," Radio Free Europe Research, Vol. 12, No. 32 (14 August 1987), p. 18; Martina Nevesky, "The Gypsy Problem," Radio Free Europe Research, Vol. 14, No. 31 (4 August 1989), p. 40; Jan Orbman, "Minorities Not a Major Issue Yet," Report on Eastern Europe, Vol. 2, No. 50 (December 13, 1991 ), p. 11 ; Wheaton and Kavan, The Yel vet Revo)utjon, p. 147; Jiti Pehe, "Crime Rises in Czechoslovakia," R.EElRL Research Report, Vol. 1, No. 14 (3 April 1992), p. 58; Kalvoda, "Gypsies of Czechoslovakia," p. 112, claims the Rom were responsible for 15.6% of all crimes in the Czech Republic. 50 SLOVAKIA tence with our fellow citizens of Gypsy origin," while federal Deputy Prime Minister Jan Carnogursky demanded "tougher action against those skinheads who had attacked the Gypsies." On May 3, 1990, ROI urged national leaders and organizations to speak out against racist incidents against Roma and foreigners. Four days later, Charter 77 and the Czechoslovak Helsinki Committee condemned such attacks on the Vietnamese and Gypsies, and said they constitute attacks on all of us. They are attacks on the most basic principles of ethics and humanism, attacks on the state based on Jaw that is being bom , attacks contradicting the ideals of our democratic revolution. The fact that we silently tolerate such attacks makes us accomplices. We call on all citizens to stop being indifferent to the manifestations of violence and intolerance. We appeal to our executive bodies to put a final stop to these attacks. Let us make the people who for years have been working in our country feel that they live in a society in which it is JX)SSible to have their basic human rights protected.44 Vaclav Havel detailed the wrongs done Gypsies in public statements on May 2 and in an address on July 27, 1990, to the First World Romany Festival in Brno. Though admirable, particularly when coupled with the new rights acquired by the Roma over the next year, they did not prevent the racially motivated deaths of 26 Gypsies before the breakup of Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1993.45 Both the federal and individual Czechoslovak republics granted the Roma full minority status, rights, and protections in " Jiri Pehe, "Racial Violence Increasing," Report on Eastern Europe, Vol. I, No. 20 (May I 8, 1990), pp. 15, 18; David Binder, "European Gypsies Issue Call for Human Rights at Meeting," The New York Times, May 5, 1993, p. 6. 5 • Tritt, Czechoslovakia's Endangered Gypsies, pp. 13-14. SLOVAKIA 51 1990-1991. Over thirty Gypsy cultural organizations arose during this period, anchored by the Union of Romany Writers and numerous newspapers and magazines. Programs in Romany Studies were opened at Charles University in Prague and at the Pedagogical Faculty in Nitra. Unfortunately, these developments were overshadowed by a new set of problems that accompanied the breakup of Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1993. Before the formal separation, Slovakia had an estimated Gypsy population of 400,000, and the Czech lands, 150,000. However, only 81,000 Slovak Gypsies officially identified themselves as Roma in the 1991 census. In anticipation of the breakup, a number of Slovak Rom began to move to the Czech lands because they felt • the political and social atmosphere would be more tolerant, and economic conditions better. The sudden increase in "unemployed Romanies, often unassimilated families from Romany villages in eastern Slovakia," stunned many Czechs, who soon claimed that 90% of the republic's new crime was committed by Slovak Roma. Led by individual community actions throughout the Czech Republic, the new state's Prosecutor-General "proposed to the Czech parliament a draft Law on Extraordinary Measures as a means of dealing with unrest caused by undisciplined groups of migrants." Though condemned by human rights groups and the Romany Democratic Congress, which represented 19 Gypsy groups in the Czech Republic, the law had surprising support from conservatives and local officials. The controversial legislation never passed, while the debate that surrounded it brought to the surface traditionally strong prejudice towards the Roma. 46 These feelings were also expressed in several public opinion surveys conducted before and after the January 1, 1993, breakup " Jin Pehe, "Law on Romanies Causes Uproar in Czech Republic,• REElRL Research Report, Vol. 2, No. 7 (12 February 1993), pp. 18-22; Zoltan Barany, "Grim Realities in Eastern Europe." Transition, Vol. I, No. 4 (29 May 1995), p. 8. 52 SLOVAKIA of Czechoslovakia that showed almost universal hatred and distrust towards Gypsies, particularly among young Slovaks and Czechs. Officials in both countries have also been critical of the Roma. One Czech official claimed in the summer of 1993 that the Gypsies remained "a problem ... because most of them are criminals who are getting rich through thievery and prostitution." Slovak Premier Vladimfr Meciar, who lost his post in midMarch 1994 but later regained it, created an uproar on September 4, 1993, in a speech he made in Spis, where Gypsies made up 13% of the population. Meciar felt it "was necessary to curtail the extended reproduction of the socially unadaptable and mentally backward population by decreasing family allowances," which some observers felt was a reference to the country's Gypsies. Famed Nazi hunter and human rights advocate Simon Wiesenthal said that Meciar "has adopted the thinking and diction of Nazism." Meciar sued the newspaperman who originally wrote about his speech, while the Slovak government threatened to sue "any newspaper, radio or television station which refused to apologize for reporting it." Slovak authorities explained that the media had distorted Meciar's speech and released an official translation of his talk. Part of it read: They [Gypsies] should be perceived as a problem group that is growing in size ...This means that if we do not deal with them now, they will deal with us later.. Another thing we have to consider is extended reproduction of socially inadequate population.,f/ 0 Los Angeles Times Mirror, The Pulse of Europe· A Survey of Political and Socja! Values and Attitudes (Washington: Times Mirror Center for People & The Press, 1992), pp. 184-185; Freedom House and The American Jewish Committee, Democracy Economic Reform and Western Assistance in Czechoslovakia Huni:ary and Poland· A Comparative Public Opinion Survey (New York: Freedom House and The American Jewish Committee, 1991), pp. 63-65; "Iron in the Soul," The Economist, March 12, 1994, pp. 55-56; Jane Perlez, "A New SLOVAKIA 53 Several months later, Monika Nemcokova, the Press Secretary for the Slovak Embassy in Washington, D.C., wrote The New York Times to complain about other distortions in an article by Henry Kamm, "In Slovak Gypsy Ghetto, Hovels and Plea for Jobs." Kamm's article centered on Gypsies in the Slovak village of Svinia, and their poor living conditions and high unemployment. According to a parish priest in the village of Medzev, the Rom "don't want to work," and were satisfied subsisting on government welfare. The mayor of Medzev said the only solution to Slovakia's Gypsy problem was "to shoot them all," though, after a few moments, he added, "I'm no racist...But some Gypsies you would have to shoot." Ms. Nemcokova said such attitudes were "not based on racial intole. ranee, but on a significant difference in life styles and standards." She added that almost 40% of all crimes in Slovakia were committed by Roma, figures that ranged from 40-50% for all "youth cases in Slovakia." The Press Secretary felt that the Rom stipend of $71 a month was more than adequate to maintain a reasonable lifestyle in Slovakia, though she admitted it was less than half the average monthly salary of a worker. Ms. Nemcokova strongly disagreed with Kamm's assertion that there were 400,000 Roma in Slovakia, and put the figure at 250,000. She noted that the government spent 70 milllion crowns annually to help the Roma, which was "used for improving living standards in Gypsy villages, education and children's summer camps, including 3.6 million crowns for Gypsy periodicals, and 10.7 million crowns for Gypsy cultural activities.''48 Slovak Government Pledges Moderation,• The New York Times, March 17, 1994, p. A6; Peter Maas, "Half a Century after Hitler, Gypsies Face New Fight to Exist," The Washini:ton Post, August 13, 1993, p. A29; "Reported Racist Remarks Makes Slovakians Angry," Greensboro News & Record, Setpember 7, 1993, p. A5; "His Struggle," The Economjst, September 18-24, 1993, p. 56. " Henry Kamm, "In Slovak Gypsy Ghetto, Hovels and Plea for Jobs,• The New SLOVAKIA 54 The current status of the Roma in Slovakia is quite grim. The Slovak Gypsies have been hit particularly hard by the sluggish economy, and there are reports of Roma unemployment rates as high as 100%, particularly in eastern Slovakia, where most Roma live. The rather topsy turvy political situation and lack of commitment to address the complex problems faced by the country's Roma has stifled any significant government efforts to develop a mature program to raise Gypsy educational, social, and economic standards. The Slovak Government's minority department has only five people on its staff, and there is only one Gypsy expert in the Ministry of Education. Until something more is done to address the sad plight of Slovak Roma, they will remain a community outside of the fabric of Slovak society. 49 The serious social, economic, employment, and educational problems faced by Slovakia's Roma are not unique to this young Republic. Roma suffer from similar difficulties throughout Central and Eastern Europe, where most continental Gypsies live. Most of Slovakia's neighbors are faced with rising Roma birthrates vis vis static native rates, and serious financial problems that hinder the dramatic types of educational and social experiments used earlier to try to draw the Roma more deeply into the fabric of the societies of Central and Eastern Europe. These difficulties, though, should not be used as an excuse to fail to deal with the problems of this growing minority. Hopes that the Roma, in the right circumstances, might move elsewhere, are misguided, since Slovakia's Roma have lived in the region for centuries and have deep roots there. Furthermore, in light of their growing numbers and new political activism, the Roma could, in future, present an interesting political threat to Slovakia's current ruling parties. Moreover, rulers in Slovakia and a York Times, November 28, 1993, p. A4; Monica Nemcokova, "Don't Blame Slovakia for Gypsy Problem," The New York Times, December 15, 1993, p. A14. " Barany, "Grim Realities," p. 8. SLOVAKIA 55 elsewhere in the region should remember that their treatment of the Roma has become an important litmus test of the depth of their democratic experiments in Western eyes. Any failure to deal positively and creatively with each country's Roma population could have negative implications for any of the states in the region trying to draw closer to the West.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Roma of Slovakia Since 1939 Description An account of the resource David M. Crowe Slovakia, Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998 pp. 26-55 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Crowe, David M., 1943- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 LCNAF+dates https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/3a823f2f39ca0ebe74a15054e883f343.pdf b4b83f53dbab03ee2267a07c3949cb2e PDF Text Text 56 SLOVAKIA Reflections on the Downfall of Communism and the Transition to Capitalism Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec (Address of His Eminence on the Occasion of the Conferral on him of the degree Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, by Sacred Heart University, Bridgeport, CT February 22, 1992) Eminences, Excellencies, Reverend Fathers, Mr. President, venerable members of the Board of Trustees, professors, students, honourable guests, dear American friends, beloved Slovak compatriots! I would like to say a few words about my life in bondage over the last forty years, and about our current search for a new way of life in our reborn democracy. I will not address you as a teacher--you have here excellent professors and competent lecturers. Instead, I would like to bear witness to an experience which did not arise from academia, but from sweatshops where I labored for the last twenty years, and from jail cells which I and others inhabited during our fight against the forces of totalitarianism. I was secretly consecrated a bishop during severe persecutions forty years ago, in a time when the prisons were overcrowded, and people were being executed. At that time I tried to promote a Christian way of life, especially among students and families. As a worker, I clandestinely wrote books that are still �SLOVAKIA 57 being read today-books that defended life and faith in order to raise people's hopes and spread the message of love. Only today do we realize how many things we were deprived of by the Marxist-atheists for forty years, and how backward we are today. Our teachers lack solid knowledge, the new politicians do not have the necessary experience of life, many writers are mindless, others have no conscience or character. We live in a country whose ecology and spiritual life has been devastated. We face the huge task of educating a new generation of young people, fathers and mothers, intellectuals and leaders of the nation. It will have to be an all-embracing education, which will not consider people to be merely cogs in a machine, or mute faces in the hands of powerful dictators and tyrants. Such an education will have to seek its inspiration in the Gospels, in our only true teacher Jesus Christ, and in our mother Church, which has experienced the true Spirit of God for twenty centuries. As we approached the end of the twentieth century, we were surprised by unexpected events. Communism collapsed in most of the world. This collapse was preceded by the disintegration of an artificial and inhumane ideology which had propped it up. Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, the president of Germany, recently said at a symposium in Bratislava that, "The year 1989 will never be forgotten. Six states in eastern Europe experienced revolutions that led to their freedom. In five of these countries, it happened without any bloodshed, which is unique in history. This road to freedom is an unforseen and exciting gift. But, in the long run, it is in danger. 11 Mr. Weizsacker then expressed some concerns about this freedom: Economic freedom became one of the most important events. But, does the market economy solve social problems? Is it able, for instance, to prevent our living space from being destroyed? The social and economic order, as well as that of our living space, are determined within the framework of the �58 SLOVAKIA state. But there is not only one state in the world. It is humanity as a whole that must face the problems of the modem world. But how? The first necessity is to change people's consciousness. Thus, Germany's president has also expressed the main goal of education--to change people's way of thinking about themselves and the world in which they live. Economic freedom alone cannot solve our problems. The market economy is essentially restricted in itself--because of the egoism of its practitioners. This danger was revealed very emphatically in all of the papal social encyclicals, including the "Centesimus Annus." It's one thing to be ambitious and diligent; it's quite another to be egotistical. The latter is a menace to every community. Egoism, which rejects concern for one's neighbor, is not only un-Christian, but it is inhuman and even stupid. Society cannot be better than the capacity of all its members to look at each other respectfully. This is man's fundamental calling. If we have to create new laws, then let us do so with the goal of changing people's minds and consciences. This is the mission of the Church. Just as the market economy will not save us in our new-found freedom, so too will technology not save us. Technology is dangerous if it does not consider the good of all nations and of all of humankind. That is why we need a good moral education, in addition to technical expertise, in order to change our ways of thinking. In eastern Europe there exist nations, which were almost destroyed by Communism, that are experiencing a rebirth. It is important to note that this is not a re-awakening of the "masses," but of nations. This is a phenomenon that is not always acknowledged or understood in the west. For us it is very evident. Once there existed only tribes, towns, principalities and empires. After �SLOVAKIA 59 that nations with a Christian tradition were formed. Today the term "nation" is unavoidable. The French, the Germans and the Italians are nations. The Croats and the Slovaks are nations as well. The largest organization in the world bears the name "United Nations." It is a natural right and desire of every nation to be independent. This right is also embodied in the Charter of the United Nations. We know that Communism tried to be international but it did not work. Communist internationalism nearly destroyed our country's national traditions and devastated our lives. Now our nation has experienced a revival and has rediscovered its Christian tradition. Nations, as such, must not succumb to chauvinism. They must be open to each other, without barbed-wire frontiers, and they must also develop a mutual exchange of spiritual and economic goods. This should hold true not only in a united Europe, but in a united world. Since 1948 in central and eastern Europe we experienced a harsh rule of selfish and unscrupulous regimes that considered people as mere cogs in machines. Everything was moral which served those in power. Everybody had to accept Marxist ideology. Those who refused lost their jobs because the state was the only employer. The Communist Party directed the school curriculum, controlled radio and television programs, as well as the press and culture in general. The Church was regarded as Communism's greatest enemy. All of its institutionsmonasteries, schools, seminaries and publishing houses-were closed. Almost all the bishops, many priests and laypersons were imprisoned, and the Greek Catholic Church was dissolved. In this situation, at the age of 27, I was secretly consecrated a bishop in 1951. For the next 20 years I lived the life of a worker. Since the visible Church was controlled by the Communists, I did my religious work underground. Meanwhile, the cruelty of the regime spread. Even Communist ministers were imprisoned! Everybody suspected everybody else. Many people informed on �60 SLOVAKIA each other. In this way, the atheistic regime poisoned our lives. Politicians ruled in the name of the "working class," but from my experience as a worker I can attest to the fact that the workers toiled in dirty factories while the ruling class lived in palaces, villas and hunting lodges. Any kind of criticism was dangerous, and many critics were executed. When in 1960 I was discovered and sentenced to twelve years of prison for my pastoral work, I met six other bishops and 200 priests in jail! After the failure of the experiment to create "socialism with a human face" in 1968, resistance against totalitarianism began in earnest. Some former Communists, who had fallen into disgrace, became dissidents, but their number was small. The main resistance to Communism in Slovakia was still organized by believers. They defended the dignity of the human person, and demanded the freedom to educate their children as they pleased. They risked a lot. Many were imprisoned, faced discrimination at school, in their professions and in public life in general. They could not teach, become historians or philosophers, were never given any responsible jobs, whether in civilian life or in the army. But, they did not give up. They met in the privacy of their homes, or in the woods. Later on they participated 'en masse' in pilgrimages, sometimes attracting over 200,000 followers! On March 25th, 1988, many thousands held a public prayer-meeting at Hviezdoslav square in Bratislava. They were attacked by police armed with truncheons and water-cannons. A Marxist dissident described it as a unique manifestation because it was not for better wages but rather for human rights. State atheism, with its cruelty and emptiness, had awakened the force of faith and the immense dynamism of the Church! The fight for freedom and human rights in our country was closely linked with the defense of the nation and its Christian traditions. Nowadays it quite often happens that the reality which �SLOVAKIA 61 we call a nation is regarded with suspicion. In our country the existence of the nation always fulfilled, and continues to fulfil, a positive role. Pope John Paul II had a similar experience in Poland and he expressed it to UNESCO in the following words: I am the son of a nation that has overcome the most horrible experience in history .. .It has preserved its Christian identity ... only with the help of its own national culture which has proved to be stronger than any other numerical superiority ... This is not a remote echo of nationalism, but a permanent element of human experience and humanistic perspective on the whole subsequent development of man! Eastern Europe was quite fortunate to find, at first, individuals, then groups, and finally hundreds and thousands of people who resisted the humiliation of Communism. At first, after 1948, there were only tiny pockets of resistance among believers. A great many, however, resisted quietly, but firmly. In 1946 the anti-Communist Democratic Party won 62% of the vote in Slovakia. Now, in 1991, 65% of the population of Slovakia reported that they were practicing Catholics. What helped our people to keep their faith during the last 40 years of persecution? There are several reasons. The proclamation of Sts. Cyril and Methodius as co-parton Saints of Europe by Pope John Paul II in 1980 certainly helped. Indeed, the interventions of Pope Paul VI and John Paul II, who publicly addressed us on several occasions, gave us great encouragement. By citing the Gospels, the Church defended humanity and freedom, and it helped the workers to stand up against the only employer under Communism, the state with all of its power. What can we learn from our experiences? Marxism brought with it only totalitarianism and inhumanity. A person can develop his real abilities and his moral being only if he is free. �62 SLOVAKIA Communism interpreted this freedom as submitting oneself to the necessity of history. This necessity was determined by a few leaders of the Party. Everyone else had to obey and fill the quotas. Hatred became the principle of life. The enemy of the working class had to be destroyed, even if that enemy was your father, your brother or sister. Human life in such a system became slavery. The roots of morality were severed by atheism. People became an anonymous herd, in the beginning filled with enthusiasm and many promises, later becoming cowardly, and finally frightened and powerless in the merciless grip of the well-paid police. During the era of Communism, people lost their individuality. Children did not belong to their parents, but to the state. The student was not allowed to think independently. He had to embrace the convictions of the state. He had to be an atheist. Only atheists were allowed to become teachers, professors, military officers, government officials, and so on. Therefore, some people conformed to the system, others played along, and society was deformed. People were not allowed to o._wn property, or even to possess themselves. In public everybody had to speak the language of the state. So, people were alienated. Only in private could people speak their minds. The following joke summed it up: At a political screening, an employee was asked for his reaction to a recent government measure. He professed to agree with it. His bosses wanted him to elaborate. He answered, "Even if I had an opinion, I could not agree with it!" Nobody could publicly agree with his own convictions. This state of permanent hypocrisy was terrible. But what is offered to us in the post-Communist era? Some people think it is liberalism in its economic, political, cultural and ethical forms. What does this mean? If it means "everything goes," it is but another route to the cemetery. Dostoevski once said that if atheism and life without God took over, it would no �SLOVAKIA 63 longer be possible to determine what is good and what is bad, and in the end everything would be allowed. Communism sanctioned everything, even the murder of tens of thousands of people. Hitler did the same thing. Without God there was no morality. And, without morality, society is destroyed. Dostoevski wrote that, if that moment arrived, such a darkness would come over us that the whole structure would collapse under the burden of human blasphemy. The structure of Communism fell in the same way as Nazism. Whenever life lost its conscience, good and evil lost their meaning. The only measure of morality was usefulness--either to the pure race or to the working-class. What are we offered now? If we conceive of liberalism as a system where everything is allowed, we have a new reason to worry. Francis Fukuzama writes that the fall of Communism does not spell the victory of economic and political liberalism, and therefore, he does not foresee a new golden age for mankind; he even fears the end of history, where the spirit of sacrifice for an ideal or a moral value will perish. The struggle for ideas requiring courage and enthusiasm will be replaced by purely economic calculations and technological solutions. Everything will be concentrated on care for the environment, on consumer claims, and on unlimited entertainment. If Communism maintained that it marked the end of history, and that afterwards there was nothing else to be expected, it represented something like the end of history. Time came to a standstill, the system blocked all new ideas, and dead precepts no longer worked. We withdrew from history for decades. Now that we have abandoned Communism, we can re-enter into history and can help to re-build it. But which road should we now follow? Pure liberalism, as some people assert, is the offer of some kind of new paradise. We are offered the market economy, free enterprise, private ownership, a share in the profits, respect for a plurality of ideas in matters of morality, art, �64 SLOVAKIA culture, and all that goes with them without any inhibitions. We are offered consumer goodies of every kind, starting with food of all sorts, holidays by the sea, as well as pornography and sex without any barriers. Liberal well-being without any limits is being offered to us. And this is supposed to bring us happiness? Our believers did not resist Communist tyranny for this kind of happiness. We resisted in the name of God and for the respect of the human being! Communism failed because it did not understand man, either in his greatness, or in his weakness. At the same time, it sought to create a new man. But it did not. It produced some tyrants, many egotists and a great many cowards. Liberalism, which some people are trying to introduce into our country, is a faulty system which does not understand man, and makes many of the same mistakes as Communism. A man is not a man because he has many choices in what he eats. Consumption is not enough. And, man is a sinner--he can be ferocious, selfish and uncaring. That is why he has to set limits for himself. If he does not do it by himself, then society must do it for him. Therefore, Communism cannot just be replaced by a boundless liberalism where a few thousand people live in luxury, as they had under Communism, while the great majority toil in factories without question. Christianity offers us a much fuller life, one of liberty but guided by our consciences as ordered by God. During the Communist era history seemed to stop. Mankind had reached the last stage of its development, according to Marxist theory. Collective ownership was the key to paradise. But there was no paradise. Instead, there was hell. Stalin gave orders to execute thousands of workers, then hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers, among them Marshal Tuchacevski, and others. Together with Molotov and Lazar M. Kaganovich, he signed a list ordering the execution of about 230,000 people at once! Similar things happened in Poland, Czecho- �SLOVAKIA 65 Slovakia, Hungary, in Cambodia and Ethiopia later on. Man was valued only for his capacity to work. If he disagreed with those in power, he lost his value and was shot. This was the horror of Christian Europe. What was moral and just was what served the so-called working class, and this was decided by three or four people in power. Everybody else trembled with fear, even among co-workers or friends. The atheist totalitarian state tried to buy everyone off, especially the young. It constructed an open morality. It tried to awake base passions. It created slogans such as "Whoever is not with us, is against us!" or "Down with religion! It is the opiate of the people!" and "Man must redeem himself. Paradise is here on earth. The Soviet Union is our model!" It was all done by force. Prisons were overcrowded, labor camps were organized, and false accusations abounded: "collaborator," "saboteur," "enemy of the working-class," "spy," "traitor," "subversive," "reactionary," "clerical," and so on were hurled about. If a worker criticized his master, it was considered an attack upon socialism and the whole Republic. Therefore, workers stayed quiet and were the most wretched class of people. I toiled among them for about twenty-five years, whether at liberty or in prison. In my last job I repaired elevators. The workers I knew had minds of their own, but during official meetings they said not a word. How did this dehumanized life shape our people? It deformed them. It affected families, workers, officials, prisoners and even children, because everyone was encouraged to become an informer! In his Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn describes the effects of this suffocating atheism. In 1955 the writer A.A. Fadeev committed suicide in the USSR. He explained his action in the following words: "The best writers died all too soon ... they did not even make it to age forty or fifty ... My life as a writer has lost its purpose and I am running away from an existence where man is turned over to emptiness and lies." �66 SLOVAKIA The Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka wrote similarly before his death: "All the authorities who were blaspheming God were humiliating us." Another writer who supported the atheistic regime for decades wrote in 1990: "Marxism has been dead for a long time .. .It could not stand up to the social or personal test of time. The blackboard of hope is empty." Still another wrote in 1992 after he was hospitalized: "And suddenly it has dawned! Without being aware of it, you realize that you have changed. Everything that you mocked yesterday you understand today. And you start to enjoy God's blessings in order not to walk alone with empty hands on such a long journey ... " These are no longer complaints. They reflect the search for and the discovery of life in God and His Church. What are our experiences and attitudes after the collapse of 40 years totalitarianism? We face a lot of shortcomings and diseases. But neither the country, not the nation is dead, although they have been severely weakened by many vices. Every society is beset by vices. The important thing is to recognize our vices, and to try to overcome them. The Church, which viewed man as the personification of God, played a major role in the struggle with atheistic regimes. It never ceased to stress the dignity and greatness of the human being, who cannot be altered into an obedient tool of tyrants, or into a mere worker or a powerless sheep in a large herd. Man is born free, made into the image and likeness of God, and is on his way to eternity with Him. The Church has to remind man of his greatness, it must educate and protect him. This is the Church's mission, whether it is practiced at Masses or at universities. This is the only road to true freedom and happiness. During the last forty years we had to fight against atheistic slavery for freedom. Again and again we preached that "Man does not live by bread alone." Without freedom even well-fed people committed suicide. Freedom is not found in material �SLOVAKIA 67 goods, but in people. That is the message we preached. Our goal was always clear, and it was worth every sacrifice. We now face a new problem. Our people are divided on how to interpret and live in the new freedom. That is because two generations were educated in atheistic Marxism. To many intellectuals the idea that man was created in the image of God is a foreign concept. They still conceive of man as a product of his environment. To them it is very difficult to define what is a "conscience," what are "ethics," what is "responsibility" and what is man's goal in life? In such a confused state, they mistake freedom for wilfulness, and decide that everything is permitted. Thus, there are no limits of morality in art, science, in sexual practices, and so on. That is why it is so difficult to have a dialogue with them. That is why we often have to begin it with pragmatic and practical arguments. However, we cannot stop here. We have to convince everyone that it is wrong to attack or to kill someone; it is anti-social and destructive to spread drugs; it is wilful to use guns just as it is forbidden to poison wells. The freedom of the individual has limits; certain principles must be accepted. The state is bound by laws, just as the whole world community is bound by conventions based on moral principles. After a forty-year struggle for the lower limit of freedom, we are now struggling with the upper limit of human freedom. But at which point can man become happy in his freedom? We have learned that not everything that can be done by man is moral. Life teaches us that. I will conclude with a reference to science and technology. If people doubt the validity of Christian principles in matters of abortion or euthanasia, then surely they must face other situations where they are confronted by the matter of morals and ethics. Nowadays we have to ask ourselves if humankind is permitted to do all that it is capable of doing physically with nuclear weapons and biogenetics. We already have international agreements that prohibit the use of chemical �68 SLOVAKIA weapons, that prohibit nuclear testing, and that provide for the gradual reduction of the nuclear arsenal. It is at this point that science runs into religion, and Christianity in particular. A meeting of the two could prove useful in reconciling these opposite poles. In his unrestrained desire for power, man could devastate our planet. This must never happen! Here is where the dialogue between people of good will must begin. A common formulation and elaboration of questions would be a good starting point. Shortly before his death in 1973, the Nobel Prize-winner Werner Heisenberg wrote in Der Tei] und das Ganze (The Part and the Whole): While in our western world we often ask the question what is good and bad, what is worth fighting for and what must be refused, we still run into Christianity's measures of values, even when many people do not understand the images and allegories used by this religion. Should this magnetic force directing the compass of our life ever disappear, then I am afraid that many terrible things would occur, even more terrible than concentration camps and nuclear bombs ... After our experience of life without God for over forty years, we can appreciate these words of warning. Christianity has something to say about man, about nations and about the world. In 1945 Europe was liberated from the horrors of Nazism. But this liberation did not bring us liberty. It brought us a new slavery called Communism. Now we are liberated from this slavery as well. Some of the new programs that are offered to us keep repeating the same mistakes as before. Real freedom is not self-will. This is what threatens us all, whether in the economic sphere or in culture. Our experience tells us that real freedom can only take root in a ground that is based upon truth. And only the �SLOVAKIA 69 truth as revealed by Gcxt will make us free. It is the task of those of us who are believers to spread this truth, and to build our lives upon it in our quest for eternal happiness. This is exactly what your famous University tries to teach, as your president Mr. Cemera wrote to me a few weeks ago: "The University aims to assist in the development of people, knowledge of self, rooted in faith, educated in mind, compassionate in heart, responsive to social and civic obligations, and able to respond to an everchanging world." Envy is a sin and we must avoid it. However, if there exists something outwardly similar, in reality it is admiration and the desire to achieve the same result. In this sense we admire you and your University and in our hearts we long for all that you have here. It is an excellent gift of Gcxt and an important means of education for new generations of scholars. � 56 SLOVAKIA Reflections on the Downfall of Communism and the Transition to Capitalism Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec (Address of His Eminence on the Occasion of the Conferral on him of the degree Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, by Sacred Heart University, Bridgeport, CT February 22, 1992) Eminences, Excellencies, Reverend Fathers, Mr. President, venerable members of the Board of Trustees, professors, students, honourable guests, dear American friends, beloved Slovak compatriots! I would like to say a few words about my life in bondage over the last forty years, and about our current search for a new way of life in our reborn democracy. I will not address you as a teacher--you have here excellent professors and competent lecturers. Instead, I would like to bear witness to an experience which did not arise from academia, but from sweatshops where I labored for the last twenty years, and from jail cells which I and others inhabited during our fight against the forces of totalitarianism. I was secretly consecrated a bishop during severe persecutions forty years ago, in a time when the prisons were overcrowded, and people were being executed. At that time I tried to promote a Christian way of life, especially among students and families. As a worker, I clandestinely wrote books that are still �SLOVAKIA 57 being read today-books that defended life and faith in order to raise people's hopes and spread the message of love. Only today do we realize how many things we were deprived of by the Marxist-atheists for forty years, and how backward we are today. Our teachers lack solid knowledge, the new politicians do not have the necessary experience of life, many writers are mindless, others have no conscience or character. We live in a country whose ecology and spiritual life has been devastated. We face the huge task of educating a new generation of young people, fathers and mothers, intellectuals and leaders of the nation. It will have to be an all-embracing education, which will not consider people to be merely cogs in a machine, or mute faces in the hands of powerful dictators and tyrants. Such an education will have to seek its inspiration in the Gospels, in our only true teacher Jesus Christ, and in our mother Church, which has experienced the true Spirit of God for twenty centuries. As we approached the end of the twentieth century, we were surprised by unexpected events. Communism collapsed in most of the world. This collapse was preceded by the disintegration of an artificial and inhumane ideology which had propped it up. Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, the president of Germany, recently said at a symposium in Bratislava that, "The year 1989 will never be forgotten. Six states in eastern Europe experienced revolutions that led to their freedom. In five of these countries, it happened without any bloodshed, which is unique in history. This road to freedom is an unforseen and exciting gift. But, in the long run, it is in danger. 11 Mr. Weizsacker then expressed some concerns about this freedom: Economic freedom became one of the most important events. But, does the market economy solve social problems? Is it able, for instance, to prevent our living space from being destroyed? The social and economic order, as well as that of our living space, are determined within the framework of the �58 SLOVAKIA state. But there is not only one state in the world. It is humanity as a whole that must face the problems of the modem world. But how? The first necessity is to change people's consciousness. Thus, Germany's president has also expressed the main goal of education--to change people's way of thinking about themselves and the world in which they live. Economic freedom alone cannot solve our problems. The market economy is essentially restricted in itself--because of the egoism of its practitioners. This danger was revealed very emphatically in all of the papal social encyclicals, including the "Centesimus Annus." It's one thing to be ambitious and diligent; it's quite another to be egotistical. The latter is a menace to every community. Egoism, which rejects concern for one's neighbor, is not only un-Christian, but it is inhuman and even stupid. Society cannot be better than the capacity of all its members to look at each other respectfully. This is man's fundamental calling. If we have to create new laws, then let us do so with the goal of changing people's minds and consciences. This is the mission of the Church. Just as the market economy will not save us in our new-found freedom, so too will technology not save us. Technology is dangerous if it does not consider the good of all nations and of all of humankind. That is why we need a good moral education, in addition to technical expertise, in order to change our ways of thinking. In eastern Europe there exist nations, which were almost destroyed by Communism, that are experiencing a rebirth. It is important to note that this is not a re-awakening of the "masses," but of nations. This is a phenomenon that is not always acknowledged or understood in the west. For us it is very evident. Once there existed only tribes, towns, principalities and empires. After �SLOVAKIA 59 that nations with a Christian tradition were formed. Today the term "nation" is unavoidable. The French, the Germans and the Italians are nations. The Croats and the Slovaks are nations as well. The largest organization in the world bears the name "United Nations." It is a natural right and desire of every nation to be independent. This right is also embodied in the Charter of the United Nations. We know that Communism tried to be international but it did not work. Communist internationalism nearly destroyed our country's national traditions and devastated our lives. Now our nation has experienced a revival and has rediscovered its Christian tradition. Nations, as such, must not succumb to chauvinism. They must be open to each other, without barbed-wire frontiers, and they must also develop a mutual exchange of spiritual and economic goods. This should hold true not only in a united Europe, but in a united world. Since 1948 in central and eastern Europe we experienced a harsh rule of selfish and unscrupulous regimes that considered people as mere cogs in machines. Everything was moral which served those in power. Everybody had to accept Marxist ideology. Those who refused lost their jobs because the state was the only employer. The Communist Party directed the school curriculum, controlled radio and television programs, as well as the press and culture in general. The Church was regarded as Communism's greatest enemy. All of its institutionsmonasteries, schools, seminaries and publishing houses-were closed. Almost all the bishops, many priests and laypersons were imprisoned, and the Greek Catholic Church was dissolved. In this situation, at the age of 27, I was secretly consecrated a bishop in 1951. For the next 20 years I lived the life of a worker. Since the visible Church was controlled by the Communists, I did my religious work underground. Meanwhile, the cruelty of the regime spread. Even Communist ministers were imprisoned! Everybody suspected everybody else. Many people informed on �60 SLOVAKIA each other. In this way, the atheistic regime poisoned our lives. Politicians ruled in the name of the "working class," but from my experience as a worker I can attest to the fact that the workers toiled in dirty factories while the ruling class lived in palaces, villas and hunting lodges. Any kind of criticism was dangerous, and many critics were executed. When in 1960 I was discovered and sentenced to twelve years of prison for my pastoral work, I met six other bishops and 200 priests in jail! After the failure of the experiment to create "socialism with a human face" in 1968, resistance against totalitarianism began in earnest. Some former Communists, who had fallen into disgrace, became dissidents, but their number was small. The main resistance to Communism in Slovakia was still organized by believers. They defended the dignity of the human person, and demanded the freedom to educate their children as they pleased. They risked a lot. Many were imprisoned, faced discrimination at school, in their professions and in public life in general. They could not teach, become historians or philosophers, were never given any responsible jobs, whether in civilian life or in the army. But, they did not give up. They met in the privacy of their homes, or in the woods. Later on they participated 'en masse' in pilgrimages, sometimes attracting over 200,000 followers! On March 25th, 1988, many thousands held a public prayer-meeting at Hviezdoslav square in Bratislava. They were attacked by police armed with truncheons and water-cannons. A Marxist dissident described it as a unique manifestation because it was not for better wages but rather for human rights. State atheism, with its cruelty and emptiness, had awakened the force of faith and the immense dynamism of the Church! The fight for freedom and human rights in our country was closely linked with the defense of the nation and its Christian traditions. Nowadays it quite often happens that the reality which �SLOVAKIA 61 we call a nation is regarded with suspicion. In our country the existence of the nation always fulfilled, and continues to fulfil, a positive role. Pope John Paul II had a similar experience in Poland and he expressed it to UNESCO in the following words: I am the son of a nation that has overcome the most horrible experience in history .. .It has preserved its Christian identity ... only with the help of its own national culture which has proved to be stronger than any other numerical superiority ... This is not a remote echo of nationalism, but a permanent element of human experience and humanistic perspective on the whole subsequent development of man! Eastern Europe was quite fortunate to find, at first, individuals, then groups, and finally hundreds and thousands of people who resisted the humiliation of Communism. At first, after 1948, there were only tiny pockets of resistance among believers. A great many, however, resisted quietly, but firmly. In 1946 the anti-Communist Democratic Party won 62% of the vote in Slovakia. Now, in 1991, 65% of the population of Slovakia reported that they were practicing Catholics. What helped our people to keep their faith during the last 40 years of persecution? There are several reasons. The proclamation of Sts. Cyril and Methodius as co-parton Saints of Europe by Pope John Paul II in 1980 certainly helped. Indeed, the interventions of Pope Paul VI and John Paul II, who publicly addressed us on several occasions, gave us great encouragement. By citing the Gospels, the Church defended humanity and freedom, and it helped the workers to stand up against the only employer under Communism, the state with all of its power. What can we learn from our experiences? Marxism brought with it only totalitarianism and inhumanity. A person can develop his real abilities and his moral being only if he is free. �62 SLOVAKIA Communism interpreted this freedom as submitting oneself to the necessity of history. This necessity was determined by a few leaders of the Party. Everyone else had to obey and fill the quotas. Hatred became the principle of life. The enemy of the working class had to be destroyed, even if that enemy was your father, your brother or sister. Human life in such a system became slavery. The roots of morality were severed by atheism. People became an anonymous herd, in the beginning filled with enthusiasm and many promises, later becoming cowardly, and finally frightened and powerless in the merciless grip of the well-paid police. During the era of Communism, people lost their individuality. Children did not belong to their parents, but to the state. The student was not allowed to think independently. He had to embrace the convictions of the state. He had to be an atheist. Only atheists were allowed to become teachers, professors, military officers, government officials, and so on. Therefore, some people conformed to the system, others played along, and society was deformed. People were not allowed to o._wn property, or even to possess themselves. In public everybody had to speak the language of the state. So, people were alienated. Only in private could people speak their minds. The following joke summed it up: At a political screening, an employee was asked for his reaction to a recent government measure. He professed to agree with it. His bosses wanted him to elaborate. He answered, "Even if I had an opinion, I could not agree with it!" Nobody could publicly agree with his own convictions. This state of permanent hypocrisy was terrible. But what is offered to us in the post-Communist era? Some people think it is liberalism in its economic, political, cultural and ethical forms. What does this mean? If it means "everything goes," it is but another route to the cemetery. Dostoevski once said that if atheism and life without God took over, it would no �SLOVAKIA 63 longer be possible to determine what is good and what is bad, and in the end everything would be allowed. Communism sanctioned everything, even the murder of tens of thousands of people. Hitler did the same thing. Without God there was no morality. And, without morality, society is destroyed. Dostoevski wrote that, if that moment arrived, such a darkness would come over us that the whole structure would collapse under the burden of human blasphemy. The structure of Communism fell in the same way as Nazism. Whenever life lost its conscience, good and evil lost their meaning. The only measure of morality was usefulness--either to the pure race or to the working-class. What are we offered now? If we conceive of liberalism as a system where everything is allowed, we have a new reason to worry. Francis Fukuzama writes that the fall of Communism does not spell the victory of economic and political liberalism, and therefore, he does not foresee a new golden age for mankind; he even fears the end of history, where the spirit of sacrifice for an ideal or a moral value will perish. The struggle for ideas requiring courage and enthusiasm will be replaced by purely economic calculations and technological solutions. Everything will be concentrated on care for the environment, on consumer claims, and on unlimited entertainment. If Communism maintained that it marked the end of history, and that afterwards there was nothing else to be expected, it represented something like the end of history. Time came to a standstill, the system blocked all new ideas, and dead precepts no longer worked. We withdrew from history for decades. Now that we have abandoned Communism, we can re-enter into history and can help to re-build it. But which road should we now follow? Pure liberalism, as some people assert, is the offer of some kind of new paradise. We are offered the market economy, free enterprise, private ownership, a share in the profits, respect for a plurality of ideas in matters of morality, art, �64 SLOVAKIA culture, and all that goes with them without any inhibitions. We are offered consumer goodies of every kind, starting with food of all sorts, holidays by the sea, as well as pornography and sex without any barriers. Liberal well-being without any limits is being offered to us. And this is supposed to bring us happiness? Our believers did not resist Communist tyranny for this kind of happiness. We resisted in the name of God and for the respect of the human being! Communism failed because it did not understand man, either in his greatness, or in his weakness. At the same time, it sought to create a new man. But it did not. It produced some tyrants, many egotists and a great many cowards. Liberalism, which some people are trying to introduce into our country, is a faulty system which does not understand man, and makes many of the same mistakes as Communism. A man is not a man because he has many choices in what he eats. Consumption is not enough. And, man is a sinner--he can be ferocious, selfish and uncaring. That is why he has to set limits for himself. If he does not do it by himself, then society must do it for him. Therefore, Communism cannot just be replaced by a boundless liberalism where a few thousand people live in luxury, as they had under Communism, while the great majority toil in factories without question. Christianity offers us a much fuller life, one of liberty but guided by our consciences as ordered by God. During the Communist era history seemed to stop. Mankind had reached the last stage of its development, according to Marxist theory. Collective ownership was the key to paradise. But there was no paradise. Instead, there was hell. Stalin gave orders to execute thousands of workers, then hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers, among them Marshal Tuchacevski, and others. Together with Molotov and Lazar M. Kaganovich, he signed a list ordering the execution of about 230,000 people at once! Similar things happened in Poland, Czecho- �SLOVAKIA 65 Slovakia, Hungary, in Cambodia and Ethiopia later on. Man was valued only for his capacity to work. If he disagreed with those in power, he lost his value and was shot. This was the horror of Christian Europe. What was moral and just was what served the so-called working class, and this was decided by three or four people in power. Everybody else trembled with fear, even among co-workers or friends. The atheist totalitarian state tried to buy everyone off, especially the young. It constructed an open morality. It tried to awake base passions. It created slogans such as "Whoever is not with us, is against us!" or "Down with religion! It is the opiate of the people!" and "Man must redeem himself. Paradise is here on earth. The Soviet Union is our model!" It was all done by force. Prisons were overcrowded, labor camps were organized, and false accusations abounded: "collaborator," "saboteur," "enemy of the working-class," "spy," "traitor," "subversive," "reactionary," "clerical," and so on were hurled about. If a worker criticized his master, it was considered an attack upon socialism and the whole Republic. Therefore, workers stayed quiet and were the most wretched class of people. I toiled among them for about twenty-five years, whether at liberty or in prison. In my last job I repaired elevators. The workers I knew had minds of their own, but during official meetings they said not a word. How did this dehumanized life shape our people? It deformed them. It affected families, workers, officials, prisoners and even children, because everyone was encouraged to become an informer! In his Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn describes the effects of this suffocating atheism. In 1955 the writer A.A. Fadeev committed suicide in the USSR. He explained his action in the following words: "The best writers died all too soon ... they did not even make it to age forty or fifty ... My life as a writer has lost its purpose and I am running away from an existence where man is turned over to emptiness and lies." �66 SLOVAKIA The Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka wrote similarly before his death: "All the authorities who were blaspheming God were humiliating us." Another writer who supported the atheistic regime for decades wrote in 1990: "Marxism has been dead for a long time .. .It could not stand up to the social or personal test of time. The blackboard of hope is empty." Still another wrote in 1992 after he was hospitalized: "And suddenly it has dawned! Without being aware of it, you realize that you have changed. Everything that you mocked yesterday you understand today. And you start to enjoy God's blessings in order not to walk alone with empty hands on such a long journey ... " These are no longer complaints. They reflect the search for and the discovery of life in God and His Church. What are our experiences and attitudes after the collapse of 40 years totalitarianism? We face a lot of shortcomings and diseases. But neither the country, not the nation is dead, although they have been severely weakened by many vices. Every society is beset by vices. The important thing is to recognize our vices, and to try to overcome them. The Church, which viewed man as the personification of God, played a major role in the struggle with atheistic regimes. It never ceased to stress the dignity and greatness of the human being, who cannot be altered into an obedient tool of tyrants, or into a mere worker or a powerless sheep in a large herd. Man is born free, made into the image and likeness of God, and is on his way to eternity with Him. The Church has to remind man of his greatness, it must educate and protect him. This is the Church's mission, whether it is practiced at Masses or at universities. This is the only road to true freedom and happiness. During the last forty years we had to fight against atheistic slavery for freedom. Again and again we preached that "Man does not live by bread alone." Without freedom even well-fed people committed suicide. Freedom is not found in material �SLOVAKIA 67 goods, but in people. That is the message we preached. Our goal was always clear, and it was worth every sacrifice. We now face a new problem. Our people are divided on how to interpret and live in the new freedom. That is because two generations were educated in atheistic Marxism. To many intellectuals the idea that man was created in the image of God is a foreign concept. They still conceive of man as a product of his environment. To them it is very difficult to define what is a "conscience," what are "ethics," what is "responsibility" and what is man's goal in life? In such a confused state, they mistake freedom for wilfulness, and decide that everything is permitted. Thus, there are no limits of morality in art, science, in sexual practices, and so on. That is why it is so difficult to have a dialogue with them. That is why we often have to begin it with pragmatic and practical arguments. However, we cannot stop here. We have to convince everyone that it is wrong to attack or to kill someone; it is anti-social and destructive to spread drugs; it is wilful to use guns just as it is forbidden to poison wells. The freedom of the individual has limits; certain principles must be accepted. The state is bound by laws, just as the whole world community is bound by conventions based on moral principles. After a forty-year struggle for the lower limit of freedom, we are now struggling with the upper limit of human freedom. But at which point can man become happy in his freedom? We have learned that not everything that can be done by man is moral. Life teaches us that. I will conclude with a reference to science and technology. If people doubt the validity of Christian principles in matters of abortion or euthanasia, then surely they must face other situations where they are confronted by the matter of morals and ethics. Nowadays we have to ask ourselves if humankind is permitted to do all that it is capable of doing physically with nuclear weapons and biogenetics. We already have international agreements that prohibit the use of chemical �68 SLOVAKIA weapons, that prohibit nuclear testing, and that provide for the gradual reduction of the nuclear arsenal. It is at this point that science runs into religion, and Christianity in particular. A meeting of the two could prove useful in reconciling these opposite poles. In his unrestrained desire for power, man could devastate our planet. This must never happen! Here is where the dialogue between people of good will must begin. A common formulation and elaboration of questions would be a good starting point. Shortly before his death in 1973, the Nobel Prize-winner Werner Heisenberg wrote in Der Tei] und das Ganze (The Part and the Whole): While in our western world we often ask the question what is good and bad, what is worth fighting for and what must be refused, we still run into Christianity's measures of values, even when many people do not understand the images and allegories used by this religion. Should this magnetic force directing the compass of our life ever disappear, then I am afraid that many terrible things would occur, even more terrible than concentration camps and nuclear bombs ... After our experience of life without God for over forty years, we can appreciate these words of warning. Christianity has something to say about man, about nations and about the world. In 1945 Europe was liberated from the horrors of Nazism. But this liberation did not bring us liberty. It brought us a new slavery called Communism. Now we are liberated from this slavery as well. Some of the new programs that are offered to us keep repeating the same mistakes as before. Real freedom is not self-will. This is what threatens us all, whether in the economic sphere or in culture. Our experience tells us that real freedom can only take root in a ground that is based upon truth. And only the �SLOVAKIA 69 truth as revealed by Gcxt will make us free. It is the task of those of us who are believers to spread this truth, and to build our lives upon it in our quest for eternal happiness. This is exactly what your famous University tries to teach, as your president Mr. Cemera wrote to me a few weeks ago: "The University aims to assist in the development of people, knowledge of self, rooted in faith, educated in mind, compassionate in heart, responsive to social and civic obligations, and able to respond to an everchanging world." Envy is a sin and we must avoid it. However, if there exists something outwardly similar, in reality it is admiration and the desire to achieve the same result. In this sense we admire you and your University and in our hearts we long for all that you have here. It is an excellent gift of Gcxt and an important means of education for new generations of scholars. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1998, Vol. 36 Description An account of the resource Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 56 SLOVAKIA Reflections on the Downfall of Communism and the Transition to Capitalism Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec (Address of His Eminence on the Occasion of the Conferral on him of the degree Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, by Sacred Heart University, Bridgeport, CT February 22, 1992) Eminences, Excellencies, Reverend Fathers, Mr. President, venerable members of the Board of Trustees, professors, students, honourable guests, dear American friends, beloved Slovak compatriots! I would like to say a few words about my life in bondage over the last forty years, and about our current search for a new way of life in our reborn democracy. I will not address you as a teacher--you have here excellent professors and competent lecturers. Instead, I would like to bear witness to an experience which did not arise from academia, but from sweatshops where I labored for the last twenty years, and from jail cells which I and others inhabited during our fight against the forces of totalitarianism. I was secretly consecrated a bishop during severe persecutions forty years ago, in a time when the prisons were overcrowded, and people were being executed. At that time I tried to promote a Christian way of life, especially among students and families. As a worker, I clandestinely wrote books that are still SLOVAKIA 57 being read today-books that defended life and faith in order to raise people's hopes and spread the message of love. Only today do we realize how many things we were deprived of by the Marxist-atheists for forty years, and how backward we are today. Our teachers lack solid knowledge, the new politicians do not have the necessary experience of life, many writers are mindless, others have no conscience or character. We live in a country whose ecology and spiritual life has been devastated. We face the huge task of educating a new generation of young people, fathers and mothers, intellectuals and leaders of the nation. It will have to be an all-embracing education, which will not consider people to be merely cogs in a machine, or mute faces in the hands of powerful dictators and tyrants. Such an education will have to seek its inspiration in the Gospels, in our only true teacher Jesus Christ, and in our mother Church, which has experienced the true Spirit of God for twenty centuries. As we approached the end of the twentieth century, we were surprised by unexpected events. Communism collapsed in most of the world. This collapse was preceded by the disintegration of an artificial and inhumane ideology which had propped it up. Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, the president of Germany, recently said at a symposium in Bratislava that, "The year 1989 will never be forgotten. Six states in eastern Europe experienced revolutions that led to their freedom. In five of these countries, it happened without any bloodshed, which is unique in history. This road to freedom is an unforseen and exciting gift. But, in the long run, it is in danger. 11 Mr. Weizsacker then expressed some concerns about this freedom: Economic freedom became one of the most important events. But, does the market economy solve social problems? Is it able, for instance, to prevent our living space from being destroyed? The social and economic order, as well as that of our living space, are determined within the framework of the 58 SLOVAKIA state. But there is not only one state in the world. It is humanity as a whole that must face the problems of the modem world. But how? The first necessity is to change people's consciousness. Thus, Germany's president has also expressed the main goal of education--to change people's way of thinking about themselves and the world in which they live. Economic freedom alone cannot solve our problems. The market economy is essentially restricted in itself--because of the egoism of its practitioners. This danger was revealed very emphatically in all of the papal social encyclicals, including the "Centesimus Annus." It's one thing to be ambitious and diligent; it's quite another to be egotistical. The latter is a menace to every community. Egoism, which rejects concern for one's neighbor, is not only un-Christian, but it is inhuman and even stupid. Society cannot be better than the capacity of all its members to look at each other respectfully. This is man's fundamental calling. If we have to create new laws, then let us do so with the goal of changing people's minds and consciences. This is the mission of the Church. Just as the market economy will not save us in our new-found freedom, so too will technology not save us. Technology is dangerous if it does not consider the good of all nations and of all of humankind. That is why we need a good moral education, in addition to technical expertise, in order to change our ways of thinking. In eastern Europe there exist nations, which were almost destroyed by Communism, that are experiencing a rebirth. It is important to note that this is not a re-awakening of the "masses," but of nations. This is a phenomenon that is not always acknowledged or understood in the west. For us it is very evident. Once there existed only tribes, towns, principalities and empires. After SLOVAKIA 59 that nations with a Christian tradition were formed. Today the term "nation" is unavoidable. The French, the Germans and the Italians are nations. The Croats and the Slovaks are nations as well. The largest organization in the world bears the name "United Nations." It is a natural right and desire of every nation to be independent. This right is also embodied in the Charter of the United Nations. We know that Communism tried to be international but it did not work. Communist internationalism nearly destroyed our country's national traditions and devastated our lives. Now our nation has experienced a revival and has rediscovered its Christian tradition. Nations, as such, must not succumb to chauvinism. They must be open to each other, without barbed-wire frontiers, and they must also develop a mutual exchange of spiritual and economic goods. This should hold true not only in a united Europe, but in a united world. Since 1948 in central and eastern Europe we experienced a harsh rule of selfish and unscrupulous regimes that considered people as mere cogs in machines. Everything was moral which served those in power. Everybody had to accept Marxist ideology. Those who refused lost their jobs because the state was the only employer. The Communist Party directed the school curriculum, controlled radio and television programs, as well as the press and culture in general. The Church was regarded as Communism's greatest enemy. All of its institutionsmonasteries, schools, seminaries and publishing houses-were closed. Almost all the bishops, many priests and laypersons were imprisoned, and the Greek Catholic Church was dissolved. In this situation, at the age of 27, I was secretly consecrated a bishop in 1951. For the next 20 years I lived the life of a worker. Since the visible Church was controlled by the Communists, I did my religious work underground. Meanwhile, the cruelty of the regime spread. Even Communist ministers were imprisoned! Everybody suspected everybody else. Many people informed on 60 SLOVAKIA each other. In this way, the atheistic regime poisoned our lives. Politicians ruled in the name of the "working class," but from my experience as a worker I can attest to the fact that the workers toiled in dirty factories while the ruling class lived in palaces, villas and hunting lodges. Any kind of criticism was dangerous, and many critics were executed. When in 1960 I was discovered and sentenced to twelve years of prison for my pastoral work, I met six other bishops and 200 priests in jail! After the failure of the experiment to create "socialism with a human face" in 1968, resistance against totalitarianism began in earnest. Some former Communists, who had fallen into disgrace, became dissidents, but their number was small. The main resistance to Communism in Slovakia was still organized by believers. They defended the dignity of the human person, and demanded the freedom to educate their children as they pleased. They risked a lot. Many were imprisoned, faced discrimination at school, in their professions and in public life in general. They could not teach, become historians or philosophers, were never given any responsible jobs, whether in civilian life or in the army. But, they did not give up. They met in the privacy of their homes, or in the woods. Later on they participated 'en masse' in pilgrimages, sometimes attracting over 200,000 followers! On March 25th, 1988, many thousands held a public prayer-meeting at Hviezdoslav square in Bratislava. They were attacked by police armed with truncheons and water-cannons. A Marxist dissident described it as a unique manifestation because it was not for better wages but rather for human rights. State atheism, with its cruelty and emptiness, had awakened the force of faith and the immense dynamism of the Church! The fight for freedom and human rights in our country was closely linked with the defense of the nation and its Christian traditions. Nowadays it quite often happens that the reality which SLOVAKIA 61 we call a nation is regarded with suspicion. In our country the existence of the nation always fulfilled, and continues to fulfil, a positive role. Pope John Paul II had a similar experience in Poland and he expressed it to UNESCO in the following words: I am the son of a nation that has overcome the most horrible experience in history .. .It has preserved its Christian identity ... only with the help of its own national culture which has proved to be stronger than any other numerical superiority ... This is not a remote echo of nationalism, but a permanent element of human experience and humanistic perspective on the whole subsequent development of man! Eastern Europe was quite fortunate to find, at first, individuals, then groups, and finally hundreds and thousands of people who resisted the humiliation of Communism. At first, after 1948, there were only tiny pockets of resistance among believers. A great many, however, resisted quietly, but firmly. In 1946 the anti-Communist Democratic Party won 62% of the vote in Slovakia. Now, in 1991, 65% of the population of Slovakia reported that they were practicing Catholics. What helped our people to keep their faith during the last 40 years of persecution? There are several reasons. The proclamation of Sts. Cyril and Methodius as co-parton Saints of Europe by Pope John Paul II in 1980 certainly helped. Indeed, the interventions of Pope Paul VI and John Paul II, who publicly addressed us on several occasions, gave us great encouragement. By citing the Gospels, the Church defended humanity and freedom, and it helped the workers to stand up against the only employer under Communism, the state with all of its power. What can we learn from our experiences? Marxism brought with it only totalitarianism and inhumanity. A person can develop his real abilities and his moral being only if he is free. 62 SLOVAKIA Communism interpreted this freedom as submitting oneself to the necessity of history. This necessity was determined by a few leaders of the Party. Everyone else had to obey and fill the quotas. Hatred became the principle of life. The enemy of the working class had to be destroyed, even if that enemy was your father, your brother or sister. Human life in such a system became slavery. The roots of morality were severed by atheism. People became an anonymous herd, in the beginning filled with enthusiasm and many promises, later becoming cowardly, and finally frightened and powerless in the merciless grip of the well-paid police. During the era of Communism, people lost their individuality. Children did not belong to their parents, but to the state. The student was not allowed to think independently. He had to embrace the convictions of the state. He had to be an atheist. Only atheists were allowed to become teachers, professors, military officers, government officials, and so on. Therefore, some people conformed to the system, others played along, and society was deformed. People were not allowed to o._wn property, or even to possess themselves. In public everybody had to speak the language of the state. So, people were alienated. Only in private could people speak their minds. The following joke summed it up: At a political screening, an employee was asked for his reaction to a recent government measure. He professed to agree with it. His bosses wanted him to elaborate. He answered, "Even if I had an opinion, I could not agree with it!" Nobody could publicly agree with his own convictions. This state of permanent hypocrisy was terrible. But what is offered to us in the post-Communist era? Some people think it is liberalism in its economic, political, cultural and ethical forms. What does this mean? If it means "everything goes," it is but another route to the cemetery. Dostoevski once said that if atheism and life without God took over, it would no SLOVAKIA 63 longer be possible to determine what is good and what is bad, and in the end everything would be allowed. Communism sanctioned everything, even the murder of tens of thousands of people. Hitler did the same thing. Without God there was no morality. And, without morality, society is destroyed. Dostoevski wrote that, if that moment arrived, such a darkness would come over us that the whole structure would collapse under the burden of human blasphemy. The structure of Communism fell in the same way as Nazism. Whenever life lost its conscience, good and evil lost their meaning. The only measure of morality was usefulness--either to the pure race or to the working-class. What are we offered now? If we conceive of liberalism as a system where everything is allowed, we have a new reason to worry. Francis Fukuzama writes that the fall of Communism does not spell the victory of economic and political liberalism, and therefore, he does not foresee a new golden age for mankind; he even fears the end of history, where the spirit of sacrifice for an ideal or a moral value will perish. The struggle for ideas requiring courage and enthusiasm will be replaced by purely economic calculations and technological solutions. Everything will be concentrated on care for the environment, on consumer claims, and on unlimited entertainment. If Communism maintained that it marked the end of history, and that afterwards there was nothing else to be expected, it represented something like the end of history. Time came to a standstill, the system blocked all new ideas, and dead precepts no longer worked. We withdrew from history for decades. Now that we have abandoned Communism, we can re-enter into history and can help to re-build it. But which road should we now follow? Pure liberalism, as some people assert, is the offer of some kind of new paradise. We are offered the market economy, free enterprise, private ownership, a share in the profits, respect for a plurality of ideas in matters of morality, art, 64 SLOVAKIA culture, and all that goes with them without any inhibitions. We are offered consumer goodies of every kind, starting with food of all sorts, holidays by the sea, as well as pornography and sex without any barriers. Liberal well-being without any limits is being offered to us. And this is supposed to bring us happiness? Our believers did not resist Communist tyranny for this kind of happiness. We resisted in the name of God and for the respect of the human being! Communism failed because it did not understand man, either in his greatness, or in his weakness. At the same time, it sought to create a new man. But it did not. It produced some tyrants, many egotists and a great many cowards. Liberalism, which some people are trying to introduce into our country, is a faulty system which does not understand man, and makes many of the same mistakes as Communism. A man is not a man because he has many choices in what he eats. Consumption is not enough. And, man is a sinner--he can be ferocious, selfish and uncaring. That is why he has to set limits for himself. If he does not do it by himself, then society must do it for him. Therefore, Communism cannot just be replaced by a boundless liberalism where a few thousand people live in luxury, as they had under Communism, while the great majority toil in factories without question. Christianity offers us a much fuller life, one of liberty but guided by our consciences as ordered by God. During the Communist era history seemed to stop. Mankind had reached the last stage of its development, according to Marxist theory. Collective ownership was the key to paradise. But there was no paradise. Instead, there was hell. Stalin gave orders to execute thousands of workers, then hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers, among them Marshal Tuchacevski, and others. Together with Molotov and Lazar M. Kaganovich, he signed a list ordering the execution of about 230,000 people at once! Similar things happened in Poland, Czecho- SLOVAKIA 65 Slovakia, Hungary, in Cambodia and Ethiopia later on. Man was valued only for his capacity to work. If he disagreed with those in power, he lost his value and was shot. This was the horror of Christian Europe. What was moral and just was what served the so-called working class, and this was decided by three or four people in power. Everybody else trembled with fear, even among co-workers or friends. The atheist totalitarian state tried to buy everyone off, especially the young. It constructed an open morality. It tried to awake base passions. It created slogans such as "Whoever is not with us, is against us!" or "Down with religion! It is the opiate of the people!" and "Man must redeem himself. Paradise is here on earth. The Soviet Union is our model!" It was all done by force. Prisons were overcrowded, labor camps were organized, and false accusations abounded: "collaborator," "saboteur," "enemy of the working-class," "spy," "traitor," "subversive," "reactionary," "clerical," and so on were hurled about. If a worker criticized his master, it was considered an attack upon socialism and the whole Republic. Therefore, workers stayed quiet and were the most wretched class of people. I toiled among them for about twenty-five years, whether at liberty or in prison. In my last job I repaired elevators. The workers I knew had minds of their own, but during official meetings they said not a word. How did this dehumanized life shape our people? It deformed them. It affected families, workers, officials, prisoners and even children, because everyone was encouraged to become an informer! In his Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn describes the effects of this suffocating atheism. In 1955 the writer A.A. Fadeev committed suicide in the USSR. He explained his action in the following words: "The best writers died all too soon ... they did not even make it to age forty or fifty ... My life as a writer has lost its purpose and I am running away from an existence where man is turned over to emptiness and lies." 66 SLOVAKIA The Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka wrote similarly before his death: "All the authorities who were blaspheming God were humiliating us." Another writer who supported the atheistic regime for decades wrote in 1990: "Marxism has been dead for a long time .. .It could not stand up to the social or personal test of time. The blackboard of hope is empty." Still another wrote in 1992 after he was hospitalized: "And suddenly it has dawned! Without being aware of it, you realize that you have changed. Everything that you mocked yesterday you understand today. And you start to enjoy God's blessings in order not to walk alone with empty hands on such a long journey ... " These are no longer complaints. They reflect the search for and the discovery of life in God and His Church. What are our experiences and attitudes after the collapse of 40 years totalitarianism? We face a lot of shortcomings and diseases. But neither the country, not the nation is dead, although they have been severely weakened by many vices. Every society is beset by vices. The important thing is to recognize our vices, and to try to overcome them. The Church, which viewed man as the personification of God, played a major role in the struggle with atheistic regimes. It never ceased to stress the dignity and greatness of the human being, who cannot be altered into an obedient tool of tyrants, or into a mere worker or a powerless sheep in a large herd. Man is born free, made into the image and likeness of God, and is on his way to eternity with Him. The Church has to remind man of his greatness, it must educate and protect him. This is the Church's mission, whether it is practiced at Masses or at universities. This is the only road to true freedom and happiness. During the last forty years we had to fight against atheistic slavery for freedom. Again and again we preached that "Man does not live by bread alone." Without freedom even well-fed people committed suicide. Freedom is not found in material SLOVAKIA 67 goods, but in people. That is the message we preached. Our goal was always clear, and it was worth every sacrifice. We now face a new problem. Our people are divided on how to interpret and live in the new freedom. That is because two generations were educated in atheistic Marxism. To many intellectuals the idea that man was created in the image of God is a foreign concept. They still conceive of man as a product of his environment. To them it is very difficult to define what is a "conscience," what are "ethics," what is "responsibility" and what is man's goal in life? In such a confused state, they mistake freedom for wilfulness, and decide that everything is permitted. Thus, there are no limits of morality in art, science, in sexual practices, and so on. That is why it is so difficult to have a dialogue with them. That is why we often have to begin it with pragmatic and practical arguments. However, we cannot stop here. We have to convince everyone that it is wrong to attack or to kill someone; it is anti-social and destructive to spread drugs; it is wilful to use guns just as it is forbidden to poison wells. The freedom of the individual has limits; certain principles must be accepted. The state is bound by laws, just as the whole world community is bound by conventions based on moral principles. After a forty-year struggle for the lower limit of freedom, we are now struggling with the upper limit of human freedom. But at which point can man become happy in his freedom? We have learned that not everything that can be done by man is moral. Life teaches us that. I will conclude with a reference to science and technology. If people doubt the validity of Christian principles in matters of abortion or euthanasia, then surely they must face other situations where they are confronted by the matter of morals and ethics. Nowadays we have to ask ourselves if humankind is permitted to do all that it is capable of doing physically with nuclear weapons and biogenetics. We already have international agreements that prohibit the use of chemical 68 SLOVAKIA weapons, that prohibit nuclear testing, and that provide for the gradual reduction of the nuclear arsenal. It is at this point that science runs into religion, and Christianity in particular. A meeting of the two could prove useful in reconciling these opposite poles. In his unrestrained desire for power, man could devastate our planet. This must never happen! Here is where the dialogue between people of good will must begin. A common formulation and elaboration of questions would be a good starting point. Shortly before his death in 1973, the Nobel Prize-winner Werner Heisenberg wrote in Der Tei] und das Ganze (The Part and the Whole): While in our western world we often ask the question what is good and bad, what is worth fighting for and what must be refused, we still run into Christianity's measures of values, even when many people do not understand the images and allegories used by this religion. Should this magnetic force directing the compass of our life ever disappear, then I am afraid that many terrible things would occur, even more terrible than concentration camps and nuclear bombs ... After our experience of life without God for over forty years, we can appreciate these words of warning. Christianity has something to say about man, about nations and about the world. In 1945 Europe was liberated from the horrors of Nazism. But this liberation did not bring us liberty. It brought us a new slavery called Communism. Now we are liberated from this slavery as well. Some of the new programs that are offered to us keep repeating the same mistakes as before. Real freedom is not self-will. This is what threatens us all, whether in the economic sphere or in culture. Our experience tells us that real freedom can only take root in a ground that is based upon truth. And only the SLOVAKIA 69 truth as revealed by Gcxt will make us free. It is the task of those of us who are believers to spread this truth, and to build our lives upon it in our quest for eternal happiness. This is exactly what your famous University tries to teach, as your president Mr. Cemera wrote to me a few weeks ago: "The University aims to assist in the development of people, knowledge of self, rooted in faith, educated in mind, compassionate in heart, responsive to social and civic obligations, and able to respond to an everchanging world." Envy is a sin and we must avoid it. However, if there exists something outwardly similar, in reality it is admiration and the desire to achieve the same result. In this sense we admire you and your University and in our hearts we long for all that you have here. It is an excellent gift of Gcxt and an important means of education for new generations of scholars.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reflections on the Downfall of Communism and the Transition to Capitalism Description An account of the resource Ján Chryzostom Cardinal Korec Slovakia, Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998 pp. 56-69 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Korec, Ján Chryzostom, 1924-2015 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 SNK https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/b39a1656e960f4eb12a2ef6d79601d00.pdf b13ae9748db576ed4e4a1e2d6018043b PDF Text Text 70 SLOVAKIA The Battle Over Presidential Power In Slovakia Spencer Zifcak On the 5th May, 1995 the National Council of the Slovak Republic, the country's parliament, passed a motion of no confidence in the President, Mr. Michal Kovac. This motion was passed 80 votes to 40 with 30 abstentions. It was a clear victory - but Mr. Kovac stayed put. Kovac declared that the parliament's vote was unconstitutional and meaningless, indicating to the press and the public that he would not, under any circumstances, be forced to resign. The Prime Minister, Vladimir Meciar, responded by saying that the President had acted contrary to the interest of the state and of the democratically-elected parliament. He renewed his calls for Mr. Kovac to vacate his office. This was a test of strength, he asserted, between the will of the democratically-elected government and a President who had lost both his mandate and authority. The two then traded further insults in bitter personal exchanges that would make most western observers blanch. It was these vitriolic exchanges that captured the attention of the press and the public. It is a sad fact of the recent Slovak political life that invective has tended to replace debate as the "modus vivendi" of political and journalistic discourse. Beneath these exchanges, however, lay more fundamental political and constitutional issues. For the impasse that was reached in May would not have occured had the institutional and constitutional structure of Slovakia been different. Without the �SLOVAKIA 71 clear appreciation of these latter difficulties, therefore, the political brawling that has recently taken place cannot be seen in its proper perspective. In the remainder of this article, I will examine this flawed constitutional framework with a view to casting a clearer light on current political development. The Curious Constitutional Relationship between President, Government and Parliament. The Slovak Constitution establishes a parliamentary form of government. 1 That is, it provides that the government is drawn from the parliament which is directly elected by the people. The government is then responsible to the parliament and through the parliament to the people. The government, headed by the Prime Minister, is designated as the principal repository of state power. It is the government, therefore, which has stewardship of the affairs of state. The President is the head of state. In this role he/she performs a number of important but essentially residual functions. Unlike the parliament, however, the President is not elected directly. He or she is elected for a five year term by the parliament and requires a three-fifths majority of the parliament in order to assume the position. The President appoints and recalls the Prime Minister, the government and heads of important state authorities. He or she convenes sessions of the parliament and may dissolve it under certain specified conditions. The President signs all laws and may return them to the parliament for comment, thus exercising a limited form of veto. But here the similarities in the well-understood relationship between President, government and parliament end. For the position of the President in Slovakia also possesses some rather 1 See further Shugart M. "Of Presidents and Parliaments" East European Constitutional Review (Winter, 1993), pp. 30-32. �72 SLOVAKIA unusual features which, for example, set it apart from its counterparts in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Unlike the constitutions of Hungary and the Czech Republic, the Slovak Constitution does not distinguish clearly between the powers its President exercises independently and those which he or she must exercise upon government advice. From a purely textual reading, it would appear that, with the notable exeption of declaring war, the President may exercise each and every one of his or her other powers independently of the recommendation of the government of the day. Potentially, therefore, the Presidency may assume considerable political importance. The strength of the office is also enhanced by a number of other constitutional provisions. For example, the President may submit reports on the state of the nation and other serious political issues to the parliament and may also submit bills and other decrees for its consideration. More extraordinarily, however, the President has the right not only to attend sessions of the parliament but also to attend sessions of the government, to chair them and to demand reports from the government and its members as he or she sees fit. 2 This confuses the position of President and Prime Minister in a parliamentary system and injects an immediate element of conflict between them. Although the President's position in relation to the government is a strong one, his or her position in relation to the parliament is weak. The President may disolve the parliament only if the Government' s programme is rejected by the parliament three times within six months of it assuming office. Once the government's programme is accepted, however, the parliament may not be disolved until the time of the next election. More importantly, the parliament may remove the President from office at any time during his or her term. So, the President may be recalled if he or 2 This latter provision is contained in Article 102(q) of the Constitution and, as far as I am aware, has no other counterpart in the Central European region. �SLOVAKIA 73 she "undertakes activities directed against the sovereignty and integrity of the Slovak Republic or if his (or her) activities undermine the democratic order of the Slovak Republic." 3 The votes of three-fifths of the members of parliament are needed to remove the President from office. Again, this provision is inconsistent with traditional understanding of parliamentary democracy. According to these understandings, the Presidency exists to guard the constitution, to act as a counterweight to the abuse of governmental power and provide the means through which governmental and parliamentary crises may be resolved. It is incompatible with each of these roles for the President to be removable on broadly defined grounds at the will of either the government or parliament. It is against this somewhat strange constitutional backround that the present political turmoil is best understood. Presidential and Prime Ministerial Power In 1993 a row erupted between Prime Minister Meciar and his foreign minister Milan Knazko. Meciar accused Knazko of treachery in that he had persuaded some members of the governing coalition to vote against Meciar' s preferred candidate for the Presidency. Knazko denied the charges and counterattacked, saying that Meciar conducted government in an authoritarian manner and ought to consult more widely with the parliament and the public. Meciar then advised the new President, Mr. Kovac, to recall Mr. Knazko from his ministerial post. At first, Kovac cavilled at this request, preferring instead to refer the matter to the Constitutional Court. More specifically, the President petitioned the Court to determine whether he was under a duty to follow the Prime Minister's advice when appointing and 3 Article 106 of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic. �74 SLOVAKIA recalling ministers. Undeterred, Meciar threatened to resign unless Knazko was removed. To defuse the situation, Kovac then recalled Knazko from office before the Court had rolled on his petition. The Court's decision appeared in June and favoured the President. After an extensive examination of the relevant constitutional provisions and an exploration of the political and constitutional history of the office of President, the Court decided that the President was not obliged to follow the Prime Minister's recomendations.4 The Court remarked that the Constitution had created a Presidency possessing considerable power. Further, it observed that article 111, which provides that the President appoints and recalls ministers on the Prime Minister's recomendation, was cast in discretionary rather then imperative terms. For these and other reasons it determined that the President exercised his powers of appointment and recall independently. This decission had no impact in the Knazko case but ignited new fires in November, 1993 when Prime Minister Meciar submitted a new cabinet for the President's approval. Meciar submitted seven names as a package, indicating to the President that he must appoint every person nominated or appoint no one at all. Kovac, however, took exception to the appointment of Ivan Lexa as minister for privatisation on the grounds that Lexa was unqualified for the position and that a conflict of interest rendered him unfit to hold the post. He refused to appoint him, calling the Prime Minister's bluff and provoking a hostile governmental response. Three months later, Meciar' s government come to an end. The Prime Minister proposed to amend privatisation laws in a manner that would have concentrated all power over privati- • Decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic, Volume 1, C.5. �SLOVAKIA 75 sation in his own hands and slowed the privatisation program significantly. President Kovac publicly criticised the Prime Minister, warning that his dictatorial style could produce significant problems for Slovak democracy. With Kovac's tacit approval, a number of opposition parties then banded together to pass a vote of no confidence in the government. Meciar resigned and Kovac installed the new government led by Jozef Moravcik five days afterwards. New elections were held in September, 1994 and, despite his setback, Meciar' s HZDS emerged with the largest single block of votes. HZDS deputies were infuriated, however, when President Kovac failed immediately to appoint Meciar as Prime Minister, prefering instead to allow the new parliamentary deputies to explore a number of different governmental configurations. A Meciar-led coalition was finally appointed however and parliament reconvened on November 3. After its first formal session, the governing parties reconvened parliament immediately for a second sitting which took place throughout the night. During that evening, the new coalition partners moved a vote of no confidence in two former Moravcfk government ministers and dismissed a swath of senior governmental officials including members of the boards of Slovak Radio and television, members of the National Property Fund and the chairman and vice chairman of the Supreme Auditing Office. 5 The coalition also attempted to introduce retrospective amendments to privatisation laws instituted by the previous government but this initiative met with a Presidential veto a few days later. The relationship between the Prime Minister and the President had sunk to an all-time low and it was simply a matter of time before their political and personal animosity would be rekindled. 5 For further details of these disturbing parliamentary developments see "Slovakia" East European Constitutional Review (Winter, 1995), pp. 30-32. �76 SLOVAKIA The Parliament's Vote of No Confidence in the President On May, 5 1995 and without notice, HZDS deputies in the parliament moved a vote of no confidence in President Kovac. The HZDS statement which accompanied the motion declared that after two years in office, the President "is not capable of carrying out his duties because he is causing a polarisation of society, his actions are not impartial and he has failed to respect the seriousness of the democratic decisions approved by the parliament, and, thus, the will of the majority of Slovak people." The motion of no confidence was based on a confidential report produced by OKO, the parliamentary committee responsible for overseeing the operation of the state intelligence services (SIS). This committee was headed by Ivan Lexa, whose appointment as privatisation minister the President had rejected one year before. The contents of the report are not known. Nor is the content of the parliamentary discussion about it. This is because the government and some members of the opposition parties voted ' to close the session of parliament at which the report was considered. The Constitution permits the closure of parliament if three-fifths of the deputies vote in favor of doing so. 6 For one day, democracy in Slovakia was suspended. In any event, the parliament voted in favor of the motion of no confidence but failed to achieve the three-fifths majority that was required to remove the President from office. The President was not given a copy of the report and it was not until six days later that he was permitted to enter parliament to deliver his defence. As he stood to address the parliament, every member of the governing coalition rose and left the chamber leaving the parliament in tatters. In his address, the President denied the 6 Article 83(4). �SLOVAKIA 77 rumoured charges against him, which included the allegation that he had requested the SIS to produce confidential security reports on his political opponents. He criticized the Meciar government's propensity to concentrate power in its own hands. He argued that the parliament's resolution conformed neither with parliamentary standing orders nor with the terms of the constitution. He concluded by reaffirming that he would not be driven from his position. The following day, the Prime Minister was on the attack again asserting that the President's mandate had concluded with his own re-election. In the light of the parliament's vote of no confidence, therefore, the only principled position the President could take was to resign. Constitutional Travail It is clear from this account of events that the marriage between former political allies Kovac and Meciar has broken down irretrievably. But to say this is to tell only half the relevant story. The constitutional problematic is just as important and far more interesting. In conclusion, therefore, let me draw out this salient points. 1. The constitution itself established the preconditions for the current political debacle. It juxtaposes a strong government with a strong presidency, leaving it quite unclear, therefore, how the respective roles of President and Prime Minister should properly be reconciled. In certain key respects, the constitutional text is uncertain or indefinite. The problem of whether and when the President should exercise his or her designated constitutional functions independently provides the clearest and most pressing example of this textual ambiguity. The lack of clarity in these two respects is aggravated by the absence of established constitutional conventions governing the relationship between �78 SLOVAKIA the two offices in question. In the absence of either mutual respect or good will between the protagonists, the political traditions that are now being established are likely to create even greater conflict and uncertainty in the future. 2. The stability of the Presidency and hence the effective operation of the separation of powers is undermined completely by the parliament's power to remove the President from office. Such a provision does not exist in other comparable constitutions in the region and this for good reason. Symbolically, the role of the President is to unify the nation and to protect its democratic institutions. In practice, the President can cause a government to think before it acts precipitously, either to misuse or enhance its own power or to deny other institutions and individuals the capacity to exercise theirs. It is in recognition of the fact that the President represents the continuity and certainty of constitutional values, that the office holder is, in most cases, elected for a term which exceeds that of any one government. But the Slovak provision fails entirely to recognize this. Instead it establishes an irreconcilable tension between the President with the power to check the actions of the government, and the parliament which may, at one and the same time, remove the President at the behest of the government. 7 3. Article 106 which gives the parliament this power is itself fundamentally flawed. It casts the grounds for the President's removal in such broad terms that it is difficult to attribute any precise meaning to them. In fact, the form of words used resembles the definition of treason contained in some other Central European constitutions. But article 107 of the Slovak Constitution deals separately with treason, leaving the scope of 7 For an earlier analysis of a similar effect see Hollander, P. "The New Slovak Constitution: A Critique", in East European Constitutional Review (Fall 1992). �SLOVAKIA 79 Article 106 quite unclear. Further, Article 106 provides no indication as to how the parliament should proceed in determining whether the President meets the grounds for dismissal set down. To prevent the parliament from engaging in a political witchhunt, one might have expected that any charges against the President would have been referred to an independent body, for example the Constitutional Court, for determination. But no such procedure is set down and no such independent body was called upon during the recent fracas. 4. By failing to make it clear which of the President's powers should be exercised independently and which should be exercised upon governmental advice, the constitution provides an avenue for Presidents with pretentions to greater power to interfere significantly in the day-to-day affairs of state. This is bound to be a source of irritation to an elected government and, when combined with personal animosity between leaders and a marked lack of respect for the institutions of government, sets the scene for just the kind of escalating political conflict which Slovakia has witnessed. 5. Article 83(4), which allows the National Council of the Slovak Republic to hold closed sessions in circumstances defined by law or where three-fifths of the deputies agree that sessions be held in secret, is a flat denial of fundamental democratic principle and should never have been countenacted. Its effect, when combined with Article 106, is to permit a President to be removed from office in secret without the opportunity to defend himself or herself against the allegations made and to deprive the courts, the media and the public of any opportunity to asses the validity of such allegations and, therefore, to hold the President or parliament responsible for their actions. �80 SLOVAKIA Conclusion Very little that is good has come out of the recent battle over Presidential power. The intensity of the conflict has left the principal protagonists bruised, Slovak politics is more divided than at any time since 1989, and the flaws in the constitution are more clearly and dangerously exposed than ever before. But there has been one hopeful sign. Not long after the President delivered his defence to parliament, two of the major opposition parties called a protest rally. Over 30,000 people attended, making it the biggest since the revolutionary rallies of 1989. In his speach to the rally Jan Carnogursky, the leader of the Christian Democratic Movement, declared that neither he, nor any of the participants, should let the current government "steal the Slovak nation from its people." The implication of his remark was that the new Slovakia should be identified not only as a national, but also as a democratic and constitutional entity. The many people at the rally took the point. Part of the problem with the entire fabric of Slovak constitutionalism and politics has been that the people themselves have taken so little interest in it. Perhaps this rally might mark the beginning of a new, more active and more democratic awareness. � 70 SLOVAKIA The Battle Over Presidential Power In Slovakia Spencer Zifcak On the 5th May, 1995 the National Council of the Slovak Republic, the country's parliament, passed a motion of no confidence in the President, Mr. Michal Kovac. This motion was passed 80 votes to 40 with 30 abstentions. It was a clear victory - but Mr. Kovac stayed put. Kovac declared that the parliament's vote was unconstitutional and meaningless, indicating to the press and the public that he would not, under any circumstances, be forced to resign. The Prime Minister, Vladimir Meciar, responded by saying that the President had acted contrary to the interest of the state and of the democratically-elected parliament. He renewed his calls for Mr. Kovac to vacate his office. This was a test of strength, he asserted, between the will of the democratically-elected government and a President who had lost both his mandate and authority. The two then traded further insults in bitter personal exchanges that would make most western observers blanch. It was these vitriolic exchanges that captured the attention of the press and the public. It is a sad fact of the recent Slovak political life that invective has tended to replace debate as the "modus vivendi" of political and journalistic discourse. Beneath these exchanges, however, lay more fundamental political and constitutional issues. For the impasse that was reached in May would not have occured had the institutional and constitutional structure of Slovakia been different. Without the �SLOVAKIA 71 clear appreciation of these latter difficulties, therefore, the political brawling that has recently taken place cannot be seen in its proper perspective. In the remainder of this article, I will examine this flawed constitutional framework with a view to casting a clearer light on current political development. The Curious Constitutional Relationship between President, Government and Parliament. The Slovak Constitution establishes a parliamentary form of government. 1 That is, it provides that the government is drawn from the parliament which is directly elected by the people. The government is then responsible to the parliament and through the parliament to the people. The government, headed by the Prime Minister, is designated as the principal repository of state power. It is the government, therefore, which has stewardship of the affairs of state. The President is the head of state. In this role he/she performs a number of important but essentially residual functions. Unlike the parliament, however, the President is not elected directly. He or she is elected for a five year term by the parliament and requires a three-fifths majority of the parliament in order to assume the position. The President appoints and recalls the Prime Minister, the government and heads of important state authorities. He or she convenes sessions of the parliament and may dissolve it under certain specified conditions. The President signs all laws and may return them to the parliament for comment, thus exercising a limited form of veto. But here the similarities in the well-understood relationship between President, government and parliament end. For the position of the President in Slovakia also possesses some rather 1 See further Shugart M. "Of Presidents and Parliaments" East European Constitutional Review (Winter, 1993), pp. 30-32. �72 SLOVAKIA unusual features which, for example, set it apart from its counterparts in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Unlike the constitutions of Hungary and the Czech Republic, the Slovak Constitution does not distinguish clearly between the powers its President exercises independently and those which he or she must exercise upon government advice. From a purely textual reading, it would appear that, with the notable exeption of declaring war, the President may exercise each and every one of his or her other powers independently of the recommendation of the government of the day. Potentially, therefore, the Presidency may assume considerable political importance. The strength of the office is also enhanced by a number of other constitutional provisions. For example, the President may submit reports on the state of the nation and other serious political issues to the parliament and may also submit bills and other decrees for its consideration. More extraordinarily, however, the President has the right not only to attend sessions of the parliament but also to attend sessions of the government, to chair them and to demand reports from the government and its members as he or she sees fit. 2 This confuses the position of President and Prime Minister in a parliamentary system and injects an immediate element of conflict between them. Although the President's position in relation to the government is a strong one, his or her position in relation to the parliament is weak. The President may disolve the parliament only if the Government' s programme is rejected by the parliament three times within six months of it assuming office. Once the government's programme is accepted, however, the parliament may not be disolved until the time of the next election. More importantly, the parliament may remove the President from office at any time during his or her term. So, the President may be recalled if he or 2 This latter provision is contained in Article 102(q) of the Constitution and, as far as I am aware, has no other counterpart in the Central European region. �SLOVAKIA 73 she "undertakes activities directed against the sovereignty and integrity of the Slovak Republic or if his (or her) activities undermine the democratic order of the Slovak Republic." 3 The votes of three-fifths of the members of parliament are needed to remove the President from office. Again, this provision is inconsistent with traditional understanding of parliamentary democracy. According to these understandings, the Presidency exists to guard the constitution, to act as a counterweight to the abuse of governmental power and provide the means through which governmental and parliamentary crises may be resolved. It is incompatible with each of these roles for the President to be removable on broadly defined grounds at the will of either the government or parliament. It is against this somewhat strange constitutional backround that the present political turmoil is best understood. Presidential and Prime Ministerial Power In 1993 a row erupted between Prime Minister Meciar and his foreign minister Milan Knazko. Meciar accused Knazko of treachery in that he had persuaded some members of the governing coalition to vote against Meciar' s preferred candidate for the Presidency. Knazko denied the charges and counterattacked, saying that Meciar conducted government in an authoritarian manner and ought to consult more widely with the parliament and the public. Meciar then advised the new President, Mr. Kovac, to recall Mr. Knazko from his ministerial post. At first, Kovac cavilled at this request, preferring instead to refer the matter to the Constitutional Court. More specifically, the President petitioned the Court to determine whether he was under a duty to follow the Prime Minister's advice when appointing and 3 Article 106 of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic. �74 SLOVAKIA recalling ministers. Undeterred, Meciar threatened to resign unless Knazko was removed. To defuse the situation, Kovac then recalled Knazko from office before the Court had rolled on his petition. The Court's decision appeared in June and favoured the President. After an extensive examination of the relevant constitutional provisions and an exploration of the political and constitutional history of the office of President, the Court decided that the President was not obliged to follow the Prime Minister's recomendations.4 The Court remarked that the Constitution had created a Presidency possessing considerable power. Further, it observed that article 111, which provides that the President appoints and recalls ministers on the Prime Minister's recomendation, was cast in discretionary rather then imperative terms. For these and other reasons it determined that the President exercised his powers of appointment and recall independently. This decission had no impact in the Knazko case but ignited new fires in November, 1993 when Prime Minister Meciar submitted a new cabinet for the President's approval. Meciar submitted seven names as a package, indicating to the President that he must appoint every person nominated or appoint no one at all. Kovac, however, took exception to the appointment of Ivan Lexa as minister for privatisation on the grounds that Lexa was unqualified for the position and that a conflict of interest rendered him unfit to hold the post. He refused to appoint him, calling the Prime Minister's bluff and provoking a hostile governmental response. Three months later, Meciar' s government come to an end. The Prime Minister proposed to amend privatisation laws in a manner that would have concentrated all power over privati- • Decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic, Volume 1, C.5. �SLOVAKIA 75 sation in his own hands and slowed the privatisation program significantly. President Kovac publicly criticised the Prime Minister, warning that his dictatorial style could produce significant problems for Slovak democracy. With Kovac's tacit approval, a number of opposition parties then banded together to pass a vote of no confidence in the government. Meciar resigned and Kovac installed the new government led by Jozef Moravcik five days afterwards. New elections were held in September, 1994 and, despite his setback, Meciar' s HZDS emerged with the largest single block of votes. HZDS deputies were infuriated, however, when President Kovac failed immediately to appoint Meciar as Prime Minister, prefering instead to allow the new parliamentary deputies to explore a number of different governmental configurations. A Meciar-led coalition was finally appointed however and parliament reconvened on November 3. After its first formal session, the governing parties reconvened parliament immediately for a second sitting which took place throughout the night. During that evening, the new coalition partners moved a vote of no confidence in two former Moravcfk government ministers and dismissed a swath of senior governmental officials including members of the boards of Slovak Radio and television, members of the National Property Fund and the chairman and vice chairman of the Supreme Auditing Office. 5 The coalition also attempted to introduce retrospective amendments to privatisation laws instituted by the previous government but this initiative met with a Presidential veto a few days later. The relationship between the Prime Minister and the President had sunk to an all-time low and it was simply a matter of time before their political and personal animosity would be rekindled. 5 For further details of these disturbing parliamentary developments see "Slovakia" East European Constitutional Review (Winter, 1995), pp. 30-32. �76 SLOVAKIA The Parliament's Vote of No Confidence in the President On May, 5 1995 and without notice, HZDS deputies in the parliament moved a vote of no confidence in President Kovac. The HZDS statement which accompanied the motion declared that after two years in office, the President "is not capable of carrying out his duties because he is causing a polarisation of society, his actions are not impartial and he has failed to respect the seriousness of the democratic decisions approved by the parliament, and, thus, the will of the majority of Slovak people." The motion of no confidence was based on a confidential report produced by OKO, the parliamentary committee responsible for overseeing the operation of the state intelligence services (SIS). This committee was headed by Ivan Lexa, whose appointment as privatisation minister the President had rejected one year before. The contents of the report are not known. Nor is the content of the parliamentary discussion about it. This is because the government and some members of the opposition parties voted ' to close the session of parliament at which the report was considered. The Constitution permits the closure of parliament if three-fifths of the deputies vote in favor of doing so. 6 For one day, democracy in Slovakia was suspended. In any event, the parliament voted in favor of the motion of no confidence but failed to achieve the three-fifths majority that was required to remove the President from office. The President was not given a copy of the report and it was not until six days later that he was permitted to enter parliament to deliver his defence. As he stood to address the parliament, every member of the governing coalition rose and left the chamber leaving the parliament in tatters. In his address, the President denied the 6 Article 83(4). �SLOVAKIA 77 rumoured charges against him, which included the allegation that he had requested the SIS to produce confidential security reports on his political opponents. He criticized the Meciar government's propensity to concentrate power in its own hands. He argued that the parliament's resolution conformed neither with parliamentary standing orders nor with the terms of the constitution. He concluded by reaffirming that he would not be driven from his position. The following day, the Prime Minister was on the attack again asserting that the President's mandate had concluded with his own re-election. In the light of the parliament's vote of no confidence, therefore, the only principled position the President could take was to resign. Constitutional Travail It is clear from this account of events that the marriage between former political allies Kovac and Meciar has broken down irretrievably. But to say this is to tell only half the relevant story. The constitutional problematic is just as important and far more interesting. In conclusion, therefore, let me draw out this salient points. 1. The constitution itself established the preconditions for the current political debacle. It juxtaposes a strong government with a strong presidency, leaving it quite unclear, therefore, how the respective roles of President and Prime Minister should properly be reconciled. In certain key respects, the constitutional text is uncertain or indefinite. The problem of whether and when the President should exercise his or her designated constitutional functions independently provides the clearest and most pressing example of this textual ambiguity. The lack of clarity in these two respects is aggravated by the absence of established constitutional conventions governing the relationship between �78 SLOVAKIA the two offices in question. In the absence of either mutual respect or good will between the protagonists, the political traditions that are now being established are likely to create even greater conflict and uncertainty in the future. 2. The stability of the Presidency and hence the effective operation of the separation of powers is undermined completely by the parliament's power to remove the President from office. Such a provision does not exist in other comparable constitutions in the region and this for good reason. Symbolically, the role of the President is to unify the nation and to protect its democratic institutions. In practice, the President can cause a government to think before it acts precipitously, either to misuse or enhance its own power or to deny other institutions and individuals the capacity to exercise theirs. It is in recognition of the fact that the President represents the continuity and certainty of constitutional values, that the office holder is, in most cases, elected for a term which exceeds that of any one government. But the Slovak provision fails entirely to recognize this. Instead it establishes an irreconcilable tension between the President with the power to check the actions of the government, and the parliament which may, at one and the same time, remove the President at the behest of the government. 7 3. Article 106 which gives the parliament this power is itself fundamentally flawed. It casts the grounds for the President's removal in such broad terms that it is difficult to attribute any precise meaning to them. In fact, the form of words used resembles the definition of treason contained in some other Central European constitutions. But article 107 of the Slovak Constitution deals separately with treason, leaving the scope of 7 For an earlier analysis of a similar effect see Hollander, P. "The New Slovak Constitution: A Critique", in East European Constitutional Review (Fall 1992). �SLOVAKIA 79 Article 106 quite unclear. Further, Article 106 provides no indication as to how the parliament should proceed in determining whether the President meets the grounds for dismissal set down. To prevent the parliament from engaging in a political witchhunt, one might have expected that any charges against the President would have been referred to an independent body, for example the Constitutional Court, for determination. But no such procedure is set down and no such independent body was called upon during the recent fracas. 4. By failing to make it clear which of the President's powers should be exercised independently and which should be exercised upon governmental advice, the constitution provides an avenue for Presidents with pretentions to greater power to interfere significantly in the day-to-day affairs of state. This is bound to be a source of irritation to an elected government and, when combined with personal animosity between leaders and a marked lack of respect for the institutions of government, sets the scene for just the kind of escalating political conflict which Slovakia has witnessed. 5. Article 83(4), which allows the National Council of the Slovak Republic to hold closed sessions in circumstances defined by law or where three-fifths of the deputies agree that sessions be held in secret, is a flat denial of fundamental democratic principle and should never have been countenacted. Its effect, when combined with Article 106, is to permit a President to be removed from office in secret without the opportunity to defend himself or herself against the allegations made and to deprive the courts, the media and the public of any opportunity to asses the validity of such allegations and, therefore, to hold the President or parliament responsible for their actions. �80 SLOVAKIA Conclusion Very little that is good has come out of the recent battle over Presidential power. The intensity of the conflict has left the principal protagonists bruised, Slovak politics is more divided than at any time since 1989, and the flaws in the constitution are more clearly and dangerously exposed than ever before. But there has been one hopeful sign. Not long after the President delivered his defence to parliament, two of the major opposition parties called a protest rally. Over 30,000 people attended, making it the biggest since the revolutionary rallies of 1989. In his speach to the rally Jan Carnogursky, the leader of the Christian Democratic Movement, declared that neither he, nor any of the participants, should let the current government "steal the Slovak nation from its people." The implication of his remark was that the new Slovakia should be identified not only as a national, but also as a democratic and constitutional entity. The many people at the rally took the point. Part of the problem with the entire fabric of Slovak constitutionalism and politics has been that the people themselves have taken so little interest in it. Perhaps this rally might mark the beginning of a new, more active and more democratic awareness. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1998, Vol. 36 Description An account of the resource Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 70 SLOVAKIA The Battle Over Presidential Power In Slovakia Spencer Zifcak On the 5th May, 1995 the National Council of the Slovak Republic, the country's parliament, passed a motion of no confidence in the President, Mr. Michal Kovac. This motion was passed 80 votes to 40 with 30 abstentions. It was a clear victory - but Mr. Kovac stayed put. Kovac declared that the parliament's vote was unconstitutional and meaningless, indicating to the press and the public that he would not, under any circumstances, be forced to resign. The Prime Minister, Vladimir Meciar, responded by saying that the President had acted contrary to the interest of the state and of the democratically-elected parliament. He renewed his calls for Mr. Kovac to vacate his office. This was a test of strength, he asserted, between the will of the democratically-elected government and a President who had lost both his mandate and authority. The two then traded further insults in bitter personal exchanges that would make most western observers blanch. It was these vitriolic exchanges that captured the attention of the press and the public. It is a sad fact of the recent Slovak political life that invective has tended to replace debate as the "modus vivendi" of political and journalistic discourse. Beneath these exchanges, however, lay more fundamental political and constitutional issues. For the impasse that was reached in May would not have occured had the institutional and constitutional structure of Slovakia been different. Without the SLOVAKIA 71 clear appreciation of these latter difficulties, therefore, the political brawling that has recently taken place cannot be seen in its proper perspective. In the remainder of this article, I will examine this flawed constitutional framework with a view to casting a clearer light on current political development. The Curious Constitutional Relationship between President, Government and Parliament. The Slovak Constitution establishes a parliamentary form of government. 1 That is, it provides that the government is drawn from the parliament which is directly elected by the people. The government is then responsible to the parliament and through the parliament to the people. The government, headed by the Prime Minister, is designated as the principal repository of state power. It is the government, therefore, which has stewardship of the affairs of state. The President is the head of state. In this role he/she performs a number of important but essentially residual functions. Unlike the parliament, however, the President is not elected directly. He or she is elected for a five year term by the parliament and requires a three-fifths majority of the parliament in order to assume the position. The President appoints and recalls the Prime Minister, the government and heads of important state authorities. He or she convenes sessions of the parliament and may dissolve it under certain specified conditions. The President signs all laws and may return them to the parliament for comment, thus exercising a limited form of veto. But here the similarities in the well-understood relationship between President, government and parliament end. For the position of the President in Slovakia also possesses some rather 1 See further Shugart M. "Of Presidents and Parliaments" East European Constitutional Review (Winter, 1993), pp. 30-32. 72 SLOVAKIA unusual features which, for example, set it apart from its counterparts in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Unlike the constitutions of Hungary and the Czech Republic, the Slovak Constitution does not distinguish clearly between the powers its President exercises independently and those which he or she must exercise upon government advice. From a purely textual reading, it would appear that, with the notable exeption of declaring war, the President may exercise each and every one of his or her other powers independently of the recommendation of the government of the day. Potentially, therefore, the Presidency may assume considerable political importance. The strength of the office is also enhanced by a number of other constitutional provisions. For example, the President may submit reports on the state of the nation and other serious political issues to the parliament and may also submit bills and other decrees for its consideration. More extraordinarily, however, the President has the right not only to attend sessions of the parliament but also to attend sessions of the government, to chair them and to demand reports from the government and its members as he or she sees fit. 2 This confuses the position of President and Prime Minister in a parliamentary system and injects an immediate element of conflict between them. Although the President's position in relation to the government is a strong one, his or her position in relation to the parliament is weak. The President may disolve the parliament only if the Government' s programme is rejected by the parliament three times within six months of it assuming office. Once the government's programme is accepted, however, the parliament may not be disolved until the time of the next election. More importantly, the parliament may remove the President from office at any time during his or her term. So, the President may be recalled if he or 2 This latter provision is contained in Article 102(q) of the Constitution and, as far as I am aware, has no other counterpart in the Central European region. SLOVAKIA 73 she "undertakes activities directed against the sovereignty and integrity of the Slovak Republic or if his (or her) activities undermine the democratic order of the Slovak Republic." 3 The votes of three-fifths of the members of parliament are needed to remove the President from office. Again, this provision is inconsistent with traditional understanding of parliamentary democracy. According to these understandings, the Presidency exists to guard the constitution, to act as a counterweight to the abuse of governmental power and provide the means through which governmental and parliamentary crises may be resolved. It is incompatible with each of these roles for the President to be removable on broadly defined grounds at the will of either the government or parliament. It is against this somewhat strange constitutional backround that the present political turmoil is best understood. Presidential and Prime Ministerial Power In 1993 a row erupted between Prime Minister Meciar and his foreign minister Milan Knazko. Meciar accused Knazko of treachery in that he had persuaded some members of the governing coalition to vote against Meciar' s preferred candidate for the Presidency. Knazko denied the charges and counterattacked, saying that Meciar conducted government in an authoritarian manner and ought to consult more widely with the parliament and the public. Meciar then advised the new President, Mr. Kovac, to recall Mr. Knazko from his ministerial post. At first, Kovac cavilled at this request, preferring instead to refer the matter to the Constitutional Court. More specifically, the President petitioned the Court to determine whether he was under a duty to follow the Prime Minister's advice when appointing and 3 Article 106 of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic. 74 SLOVAKIA recalling ministers. Undeterred, Meciar threatened to resign unless Knazko was removed. To defuse the situation, Kovac then recalled Knazko from office before the Court had rolled on his petition. The Court's decision appeared in June and favoured the President. After an extensive examination of the relevant constitutional provisions and an exploration of the political and constitutional history of the office of President, the Court decided that the President was not obliged to follow the Prime Minister's recomendations.4 The Court remarked that the Constitution had created a Presidency possessing considerable power. Further, it observed that article 111, which provides that the President appoints and recalls ministers on the Prime Minister's recomendation, was cast in discretionary rather then imperative terms. For these and other reasons it determined that the President exercised his powers of appointment and recall independently. This decission had no impact in the Knazko case but ignited new fires in November, 1993 when Prime Minister Meciar submitted a new cabinet for the President's approval. Meciar submitted seven names as a package, indicating to the President that he must appoint every person nominated or appoint no one at all. Kovac, however, took exception to the appointment of Ivan Lexa as minister for privatisation on the grounds that Lexa was unqualified for the position and that a conflict of interest rendered him unfit to hold the post. He refused to appoint him, calling the Prime Minister's bluff and provoking a hostile governmental response. Three months later, Meciar' s government come to an end. The Prime Minister proposed to amend privatisation laws in a manner that would have concentrated all power over privati- • Decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic, Volume 1, C.5. SLOVAKIA 75 sation in his own hands and slowed the privatisation program significantly. President Kovac publicly criticised the Prime Minister, warning that his dictatorial style could produce significant problems for Slovak democracy. With Kovac's tacit approval, a number of opposition parties then banded together to pass a vote of no confidence in the government. Meciar resigned and Kovac installed the new government led by Jozef Moravcik five days afterwards. New elections were held in September, 1994 and, despite his setback, Meciar' s HZDS emerged with the largest single block of votes. HZDS deputies were infuriated, however, when President Kovac failed immediately to appoint Meciar as Prime Minister, prefering instead to allow the new parliamentary deputies to explore a number of different governmental configurations. A Meciar-led coalition was finally appointed however and parliament reconvened on November 3. After its first formal session, the governing parties reconvened parliament immediately for a second sitting which took place throughout the night. During that evening, the new coalition partners moved a vote of no confidence in two former Moravcfk government ministers and dismissed a swath of senior governmental officials including members of the boards of Slovak Radio and television, members of the National Property Fund and the chairman and vice chairman of the Supreme Auditing Office. 5 The coalition also attempted to introduce retrospective amendments to privatisation laws instituted by the previous government but this initiative met with a Presidential veto a few days later. The relationship between the Prime Minister and the President had sunk to an all-time low and it was simply a matter of time before their political and personal animosity would be rekindled. 5 For further details of these disturbing parliamentary developments see "Slovakia" East European Constitutional Review (Winter, 1995), pp. 30-32. 76 SLOVAKIA The Parliament's Vote of No Confidence in the President On May, 5 1995 and without notice, HZDS deputies in the parliament moved a vote of no confidence in President Kovac. The HZDS statement which accompanied the motion declared that after two years in office, the President "is not capable of carrying out his duties because he is causing a polarisation of society, his actions are not impartial and he has failed to respect the seriousness of the democratic decisions approved by the parliament, and, thus, the will of the majority of Slovak people." The motion of no confidence was based on a confidential report produced by OKO, the parliamentary committee responsible for overseeing the operation of the state intelligence services (SIS). This committee was headed by Ivan Lexa, whose appointment as privatisation minister the President had rejected one year before. The contents of the report are not known. Nor is the content of the parliamentary discussion about it. This is because the government and some members of the opposition parties voted ' to close the session of parliament at which the report was considered. The Constitution permits the closure of parliament if three-fifths of the deputies vote in favor of doing so. 6 For one day, democracy in Slovakia was suspended. In any event, the parliament voted in favor of the motion of no confidence but failed to achieve the three-fifths majority that was required to remove the President from office. The President was not given a copy of the report and it was not until six days later that he was permitted to enter parliament to deliver his defence. As he stood to address the parliament, every member of the governing coalition rose and left the chamber leaving the parliament in tatters. In his address, the President denied the 6 Article 83(4). SLOVAKIA 77 rumoured charges against him, which included the allegation that he had requested the SIS to produce confidential security reports on his political opponents. He criticized the Meciar government's propensity to concentrate power in its own hands. He argued that the parliament's resolution conformed neither with parliamentary standing orders nor with the terms of the constitution. He concluded by reaffirming that he would not be driven from his position. The following day, the Prime Minister was on the attack again asserting that the President's mandate had concluded with his own re-election. In the light of the parliament's vote of no confidence, therefore, the only principled position the President could take was to resign. Constitutional Travail It is clear from this account of events that the marriage between former political allies Kovac and Meciar has broken down irretrievably. But to say this is to tell only half the relevant story. The constitutional problematic is just as important and far more interesting. In conclusion, therefore, let me draw out this salient points. 1. The constitution itself established the preconditions for the current political debacle. It juxtaposes a strong government with a strong presidency, leaving it quite unclear, therefore, how the respective roles of President and Prime Minister should properly be reconciled. In certain key respects, the constitutional text is uncertain or indefinite. The problem of whether and when the President should exercise his or her designated constitutional functions independently provides the clearest and most pressing example of this textual ambiguity. The lack of clarity in these two respects is aggravated by the absence of established constitutional conventions governing the relationship between 78 SLOVAKIA the two offices in question. In the absence of either mutual respect or good will between the protagonists, the political traditions that are now being established are likely to create even greater conflict and uncertainty in the future. 2. The stability of the Presidency and hence the effective operation of the separation of powers is undermined completely by the parliament's power to remove the President from office. Such a provision does not exist in other comparable constitutions in the region and this for good reason. Symbolically, the role of the President is to unify the nation and to protect its democratic institutions. In practice, the President can cause a government to think before it acts precipitously, either to misuse or enhance its own power or to deny other institutions and individuals the capacity to exercise theirs. It is in recognition of the fact that the President represents the continuity and certainty of constitutional values, that the office holder is, in most cases, elected for a term which exceeds that of any one government. But the Slovak provision fails entirely to recognize this. Instead it establishes an irreconcilable tension between the President with the power to check the actions of the government, and the parliament which may, at one and the same time, remove the President at the behest of the government. 7 3. Article 106 which gives the parliament this power is itself fundamentally flawed. It casts the grounds for the President's removal in such broad terms that it is difficult to attribute any precise meaning to them. In fact, the form of words used resembles the definition of treason contained in some other Central European constitutions. But article 107 of the Slovak Constitution deals separately with treason, leaving the scope of 7 For an earlier analysis of a similar effect see Hollander, P. "The New Slovak Constitution: A Critique", in East European Constitutional Review (Fall 1992). SLOVAKIA 79 Article 106 quite unclear. Further, Article 106 provides no indication as to how the parliament should proceed in determining whether the President meets the grounds for dismissal set down. To prevent the parliament from engaging in a political witchhunt, one might have expected that any charges against the President would have been referred to an independent body, for example the Constitutional Court, for determination. But no such procedure is set down and no such independent body was called upon during the recent fracas. 4. By failing to make it clear which of the President's powers should be exercised independently and which should be exercised upon governmental advice, the constitution provides an avenue for Presidents with pretentions to greater power to interfere significantly in the day-to-day affairs of state. This is bound to be a source of irritation to an elected government and, when combined with personal animosity between leaders and a marked lack of respect for the institutions of government, sets the scene for just the kind of escalating political conflict which Slovakia has witnessed. 5. Article 83(4), which allows the National Council of the Slovak Republic to hold closed sessions in circumstances defined by law or where three-fifths of the deputies agree that sessions be held in secret, is a flat denial of fundamental democratic principle and should never have been countenacted. Its effect, when combined with Article 106, is to permit a President to be removed from office in secret without the opportunity to defend himself or herself against the allegations made and to deprive the courts, the media and the public of any opportunity to asses the validity of such allegations and, therefore, to hold the President or parliament responsible for their actions. 80 SLOVAKIA Conclusion Very little that is good has come out of the recent battle over Presidential power. The intensity of the conflict has left the principal protagonists bruised, Slovak politics is more divided than at any time since 1989, and the flaws in the constitution are more clearly and dangerously exposed than ever before. But there has been one hopeful sign. Not long after the President delivered his defence to parliament, two of the major opposition parties called a protest rally. Over 30,000 people attended, making it the biggest since the revolutionary rallies of 1989. In his speach to the rally Jan Carnogursky, the leader of the Christian Democratic Movement, declared that neither he, nor any of the participants, should let the current government "steal the Slovak nation from its people." The implication of his remark was that the new Slovakia should be identified not only as a national, but also as a democratic and constitutional entity. The many people at the rally took the point. Part of the problem with the entire fabric of Slovak constitutionalism and politics has been that the people themselves have taken so little interest in it. Perhaps this rally might mark the beginning of a new, more active and more democratic awareness.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Battle Over Presidential Power in Slovakia Description An account of the resource Spencer Žifčák Slovakia, Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998 pp. 70-80 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Zifcak, Spencer, 1950- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/04d889eb437b60c6ff07a9e7ed381a70.pdf b0af527f0b6ff4be550df0241e33abc7 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 81 The Cleveland and Pittsburgh Documents Stanislav J. Kirschbaum In the two centuries since the beginning of the French Revolution and the fall of Communism in Central Europe, Slovak political life has centered around the attainment of three political objectives: autonomy, federation, and independence. The first two are linked to the question of the relations between the Czechs and the Slovaks in a common state while the third reflects the teleological objectives of the principle of selfdetermination whose origins go back to the French Revolution but whose implementation was proposed only on the morrow of the First World War. It was to implement this principle that Central Europe was reorganized from the break-up of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, and Romanov empires. Each one of these objectives was preceded by a series of declarations, memoranda, resolutions, pacts, and agreements that paved the way for their implementation. It is a singularity of Slovak history that there are very few such documents in this two-centuries span; Jorg K. Hoensch presents 57 that are linked to the objective of autonomy,' Karol Rebro puts together 27 that he L See Jorg K. Hoensch, Hrsg. Dokumente zur A utonomiepolitik der Slowakischen Vo/kspartei Hlinkas. Miinchen: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1984, pp. 71-257 . Hoen sch also includes three additional documents that deal with �82 SLOVAKIA associates with the drive to federalization,2 while Jaroslav Chovanec and Peter Mozolfk offer 32 documents that deal with or are connected to independence. 3 The difference in the numbers is explained by the fact that many of the documents that were chosen are specific to the objective sought; nevertheless, there are two that appear in all three volumes: the Cleveland Agreement and the Pittsburgh Pact. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate their importance in the attainment of Slovak political objectives in the twentieth century. It is their link to the three objectives that explains their interest. Still, one Slovak historian, Anton Spiesz, 4 and one Western scholar, Hoensch,5 have seen fit not to mention either; in all other works, they find their place in the history of the nation. Both documents share four principal characteristics. First, they embody the essence of Slovak political activity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely the attainment of selfdetermination; second, both seek the same objective: the creation of a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks at the end of the Great War; third, they are laconic texts, in some respects even imprecise in their content; and fourth, they are linked to Slovaks living not in Slovakia, but in the United States. It is the differences between them, the reasons for these differences, and 2 independence, thus bringing the total to 60 documents. Karol Rebro, The Road to Federation. Bratislava: Tatrapress, 1970, pp. 64-130. It should be noted that Rebro includes also the text of the Treaty of Protection of 1939 between Slovakia and Germany, thus bringing the total to 28 . 1 Jaroslav Chovanec a Peter Mozolik, Historicke a statopnivne korene samostatnosti Slovenskej republiky. Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Procom, 1994, pp. 67-216. The two authors include six additional documents that pertain to Slovak history prior to the nineteenth century. •- Anton Spiesz, Dejiny Slo venska. Na ceste k sebauvedomeniu. Brati slava : Yydavatefstvo Respekt, I 992. 1 Jorg K. Hoensch, Geschichte der Tschechoslowakischen Republik 1918 bis 1965. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1966. �SLOVAKIA 83 the impact that they had that make them so interesting and that have also made them the object not only of political but also scholarly controversy. Until the international context of a world war offered the Slovaks the possibility of leaving Austria-Hungary, the main Slovak objective, shared by American Slovaks, was the attainment of a form of self-determination through self-administration. From the time of the French Revolution, three proposals embodied this objective. The first is Ignac Martinovic's democratic constitution, which he worked out at the time of the French Revolution, and which included the nationality principle; its application would have turned Slovakia into an independent administrative unit called Slavonica. As Slovak Marxist historians write: "It is in fact the first proposal to include Slovakia as an independent national administrative unit within the framework of Hungary. 116 The second is the Ziadosti slovenskeho naroda (The Demands of the Slovak Nation), worked out in May 1848; the Slovak nation demanded the recognition and guarantee of national identity; the transformation of Hungary into a state composed of equal nations, each with its own parliament and equal representation in the Hungarian Diet; and the use of Slovak in all Slovak county offices. In addition, it insisted on democratic rights, including universal and equal suffrage, the total abolition of serfdom, and the return of the land to the peasants from whom it had been taken away. 7 The third is the Memorandum slovenskeho naroda (Memorandum of the Slovak Nation) adopted in Turciansky Svaty Martin in June 1861; it sought equal rights with the Magyars, the recognition of their national individuality by law, the formation of a North Hungarian Slovak ~ Dejiny S/ovenska II. Bratislava: Veda, Vydavatefstvo Slovenskej akademie vied, I 987, p. 48 I. 1 • For the text in English, see Rebro, pp. 64-67, in Slovak, Chovanec and Mozolfk, pp. 74-77, and in German, Hoensch, pp. 71 -74. �84 SLOVAKIA District (Okolie in Slovak), Slovak as the official language of adminstration of this district, a Slovak Academy of Law and a chair of Slavonic studies in Pest, and the repeal of all Hungarian laws that infringed on the principles of the equality of the nationalities. 8 In the words of Slovak historians, the memorandum "became the basic Slovak constitutional programme even if it was not worked out in detail and contained merely basic principles about a certain Slovak autonomy within the framework of Hungary." 9 American Slovaks were familiar with Slovak objectives in Hungary, since most were immigrants to the United States, forced out by Budapest's policy of Magyarization and Hungary's slow economic development. Their main organization, the Slovak League of America, prepared a memorandum in May 1914 on the occasion of an earlier visit by Hungarian Count Mihaly Karolyi in the United States. The memorandum reiterated the demands of the 1861 Memorandum, thus in effect seeking a solution in Austria-Hungary. But it became the object of some controversy 10 as it underwent certain changes before it was · published in its final version on 2 September 1914 as the Memorandum o krivdach a JX)iiadavkach slovenskfch (Memorandum on Slovak Injustices and Demands). 11 No specific conFor the text in English, see Rebro, pp. 73-76, in Slovak, Chovanec and Mozolik, pp. 81-89, and in German, Hoensch, pp. 92-99. 9 • R. Marsina et. al., Slovenske dejiny. Martin: Matica slovenska, 1992, p. 173. n This is described in Konstantfn Culen, Pittsburghska dohoda . Bratislava: Knfhtlaciarell Andreja uc. spol., 1937, pp. 20-32. 11 • The original and modified versions are found in ibid., pp. 42-52. According to Ivan Markovic: "It was a political error and an indication of insufficient political foresight on the part of the Slovak League to publish this memorandum." See Ivan Markovic, Slovaci v zahranicnej revolucii. Bratislava: no publisher, no date; lecture given on 16 April 1923, p. 13. As for its publication date, Milan Getting writes that it was published on 24 September. See Milan Getting, Americkf Slovaci a vjvin ceskoslovenskej myslienky v rokoch 1914-1918. Pittsburgh: Slovenska Telocvicna Jednota & �SLOVAKIA 85 stitutional solution was put forth for Slovakia, but there was a demand for full self-administration and self-determination. In the discussions around this document the idea of Czecho-Slovak unity had also been mentioned. 12 This document opened the way for Slovak American organizations thereafter to examine a number of options that would be the object of debate for some time: 13 Slovakia in a federated Slavic state in Austria-Hungary; a Slovak-Polish union ; a Slovak-Russian union ; autonomy in a reorganized Hungary; and the creation of a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks. 14 Clearly, the objective had been redefined and had become one of national emancipation. The Cleveland Agreement _ With the outbreak of war, American Slovaks opted for cooperation with the Czechs in their struggle for national emancipation. But their approaches differed. The latter directed their efforts at the creation of a Czech state. However, according to Chovanec and Mozolfk, "the representatives of the Slovak organizations in the United States fought against the attempts of their Czech partners to attach the Slovaks as a sort of appendage to the basic Czech anti-Habsburg programme." 15 The Slovaks were seeking a solution that was in the spirit of previous Slovak demands and that would ensure national development. After months of discussions, 16 an attempt was made to create a common front and a meeting was organized in Cleveland on 22 Sokol v Amerike, 1933, p. 40. Ibid., p. 40. 13. See Markovit, p. 13. 14 • Some of these options are examined in Stanislav Matou~ek, Vznik a vfvoj spolecneho statu Cechu a Slovakii . Praha: Academia, 1980, pp. 57-60. u. Chovanec a Mozolfk, p. 19. "' For more on these discussions, see Marian Mark Stolarik, "The Role of American Slovaks in the Creation of Czecho-Slovakia, 1914-19 I 8," Slovak Studies, VIII ( 1968), pp. 23-26. ll �86 SLOVAKIA October 1915 between representatives of Czech and Slovak American organizations. Cubomfr Liptak writes that "[t]he decision of American Slovaks to support the struggle for the creation of a common state with the Czechs - and its worth is found here - was taken after long and often bitter discussions in which the advantages and disadvantages of such a solution were weighed, including the possibilities and limits of Slovak activity." 17 The Czechs proposed a text that was only slightly modified by the Slovaks present. It has since become known as the Cleveland Agreement. Short and imprecise as it is, this text is, perhaps because of these characteristics, the object of some controversy. Composed of five points, its only two concrete proposals are found in points one and three on the independence of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and secret universal suffrage. It is the second point that has historians trying to figure out what the authors had in mind when they proposed "a union of the Czech and Slovak nations in a federative union of states with complete national autonomy for Slovakia, with its own parliament, its own state administration, complete cultural freedom, that is to say with the full right to use the Slovak language, its own financial and political administration, and an official Slovak state language." 18 Was this a federal proposal, if so, what kind, and if not, what was it, given its language? There are two schools of thought on this question. One rejects outright the affirmation that this was federal solution for a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks. Stanislav Matousek suggests that what was proposed was a union within a federalized monarchy. He bases his argument not only on the phrase 11 • 1& Cubomir Liptak, Slovensko v 20. storoci. Bratislava: Vydavatet'stvo politickej literatury, 1968, p. 64. Rebro, p. 80. Stol~rik, on the other hand, translates "vo federatfvnom zviizku ~t~tov" as "in a federal state." StolMik, p. 55. �SLOVAKIA 87 "in a federative union of states" ( vo federativnom sviizku stitov), but also on the reference to Slovakia's autonomy. According to him, such a reference would not have been necessary if a federation between the Czechs and Slovaks had been envisaged; it would have been assumed for both nations. He also suggests that the authors based their understanding of federalism on their American experience. 19 The latter is also the view of some Slovak historians.'.!) Finally, to strengthen this approach, Viliam Plevza shows that reactions in the months that followed support this interpretation? Others, on the other hand, recognize the document as proposing a federal arrangement between the two nations. Rebro writes that "[t]he Cleveland Agreement represents a clear federative model of two equal nations on the basis of partnership." 22 Josef Kalvoda understands the text to mean that "[b]oth the Czechs and Slovaks were to have autonomy in the federative state to be established after the war."n Konstantin Culen indicates that the agreement "announced the federalization of the future republic". 24 Ivan Markovic and Marian Mark Stolarik perceive it as expressing a federal solution for two nationally autonomous entities. 75 Not surprisingly, some historians pass no judgment and limit themselves simply to quoting or using directly the text of the agreement. 26 Such use of the text is 19 • Matousek, pp. 61-62. n Marsina et al., p. 197. 21 • Viliam Plevza, Ceskos/ovenska statnosf a sl ovenska otazka v politike KSC. Bratislava: Praca, 1971 , pp. 49-50. n Rebro, p. 22. 21. Josef Kalvoda, The Genesis of Czechoslovakia. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1986, p. 70. ll Culen, p. 81 . 21 Markovit, p. 25; Stolarik, p. 26. li Among those who pass no judgment are Chovanec and Mozolik, p. 19, Liptak, p. 63, Franti~ek Bokes, Dejiny S/ovenska a Slovakov od najstarsfch cias po os/obodenie. Bratislava: Slovenska akademia vied a umen1, 1946, p. 350 and �88 SLOVAKIA interpreted by at least one author as a tacit acknowledgement of this interpretation.Zl Of the two, the second interpretation seems more acceptable than the first for a number of reasons. First of all, the language of the agreement suggests that its authors were not experts in political and constitutional terminology; otherwise the language would have been precise. This allows us to infer that a federation of the two nations was the objective as this was the reason for the meeting: to decide on the framework of an arrangement between them. Those who make the claim that the authors were influenced by American federalism project their own expertise and historical experience on men of a generation that had recently emigrated to the United States and whose education was not likely to have included constitutional law and political science or specialized knowledge of the American constitution. Secondly, the reference to Slovak autonomy must be seen as understandable given the Slovak political struggle in Hungary and the demands made in the documents of 1848 and 1861. For most Slovaks, this was their main point of reference in the national struggle. It is unlikely that the document would have obtained the support from American Slovaks that it did obtain had it not included a specific reference to autonomy.28 Thirdly, subsequent events indicate that American Slovaks understood that their nation would enter into a common state with the Czechs in a federal arrangement. Dusan Kovac\ Slovaci - Cesi - Dejiny. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press, 1997, p. 65. n. Plevza considers Liptak as belonging to those who accept the federal interpretation. See Plevza, p. 49n. 2& It is interesting to note that Albert Mamatey, President of the Slovak League in America, who would be present when the agreement was signed the next day, wrote on 21 October 1915 in Narodne noviny that the League "is for [Slovak] independence regardless of the greater state organization in which we find ourselves." Quoted in Getting, p. 63. �SLOVAKIA 89 The agreement was generally well received, but Slovak Marxist historians also note that "[i]n France, the periodical Ceskoslovenska samostatnosf, as the "organ of political emigration" presented the Cleveland agreement in the spirit of Czechoslovakism - as the attainment of Czechoslovak national unity. This point of view resulted in protests because American Slovaks had begun to support all of the activities of the external struggle on the principle of two equal nations as outlined in the Cleveland agreement. "29 Slovak Americans were not unaware of Czech objectives, and in particular the role that Czechoslovak unity was playing in these objectives. They knew that they had to counter this. In addition, Frantisek Bokes writes that the agreement "did not eliminate distrust and the possibility of misunderstanding between Czechs and Slovaks. "D This uncertainty resulted in the Slovak League of America sending in April 1916 two representatives to Europe, Stefan Osusky and Gustav Kosfk, "to meet Professor [T.G.] Masaryk and to explain the Slovak program to the British and French foreign ministries."31 Nevertheless, as Culen writes: "from this meeting [in Cleveland] on, Czechs and Slovaks begin to appear together throughout the United States. "32 Such behaviour again strongly points to a Slovak understanding of what the agreement meant to them and also their determination to achieve their objective, a federation of the two nations. However, it must aso be pointed out that some American Slovaks saw the agreement as having brought forth "Czechoslovak unity" 33 . Equally interesting is that fact that 29 • Dejiny S/ovenska JI, p. 429. Italics added. Bokes, p. 35 I. 3 1. Kalvoda, p. 83. For an analysis of the Osusky-Ko§ik mission to Europe, see Stolarik, pp. 28-30. See also the interview with Osusky in ibid., pp. 59-61. :u Culen, p. 83. n Getting, p. 66. :n �90 SLOVAKIA Masaryk, despite his later behaviour, is said to have approved of it.34 The Pittsburgh Pact A series of developments soon made it clear that the Cleveland Agreement would have to be revisited, if not revised. In the first place, there was vigorous debate on the question of Czechoslovak unity and the nature of the future state in Slovak publications in the United States and abroad throughout 1916 and 1917. 35 Furthermore, according to Stolarik, in 1916 American Slovaks had "split into Slovak and Czechoslovak camps. "36 Secondly, there was the evolution of the Czech agenda and its transformation into a Czechoslovak one. 37 The creation of a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks had to be seen as embodying the principle of self-determination, as inferred from President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points38 and, above all, had to be sold to the Allied Powers. The second development put American Slovaks in a very difficult position; while they did not want to give up their objective, they needed Czech support to achieve it and they also had to ensure that their mutual project of a common state did not fail because of their demands or because of serious disputes with Ibid., p. 84. Rebro also writes that Masaryk "tried to find comprise formulations that would not contradict his own conceptions. But he could not simply refuse the terms of the Cleveland agreement because they were supported by the moral, financial and first of all voluntary help of the Slovaks abroad." Rebro, pp. 24-25. 35. Getting, pp. 85-86. 36. Stolarik, p. 22. n. For more on this see Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia. The Struggle for Survival. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 144-152. 31!. On the question of the role of the principle of self-determination in the Fourteen Points, see Dov Ronen, The Challenge of Ethnic Conflict, Democracy and Self-Determination in Central Europe. London: Frank Cass, 1997, pp. 48-53 . 34. �SLOVAKIA 91 the Czechs. For Masaryk, the best solution to this dilemma was Czechoslovakism, that is to say the fusion of the Czechs and Slovaks into one nation. This was a concept that not only had historical roots (it was first proposed in 1848), but that could easily be proposed within the framework of the principle of selfdetermination. In addition, as the English historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote, "Masaryk knew little of the Slovaks; others knew even less. That was his strength in dealing with the allied leaders. "39 What Masaryk also had to do was to overcome the suspicions and disagreements that had arisen between Czechs and Slovaks in the United States and bring the latter to accept the necessity for a common front that would persuade the Allied Powers to create the new state.'° He achieved this with the document called the Pittsburgh Pact (also called the Pittsburgh Agreement) which he himself signed on two occasions, the hand-written copy on 31 May 1918, and the calligraphic copy on 14 November, the day he was elected president of Czecho-Slovakia in Prague by the Revolutionary National Assembly. The Pittsburgh document is composed of six resolutions approved by the representatives of the Slovak League of America, the Czech National Alliance, the Federation of Czech Catholics, and the Czecho-Slovak National Council in the person of Masaryk himself. Of importance to Slovakia is the acknowledgement of its own institutions, namely a state administration, a parliament, and a judiciary and the status of the Slovak language as the official language in the schools, in the public offices and in public life generally. In addition to approving a union of the two nations in an independent state, the document specifies that the state shall be a republic and that its constitution shall be 39 • CJ. A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1967, p. 258. Stolarik also points out that "[t]he attitude of American Slovaks towards the Czechs changed radically in 1917." Stolarik, p. 32. �92 SLOVAKIA democratic. There is reference to "the organization of the cooperation between Czechs and Slovaks," but the most important point refers to the relegation of the "detailed provisions" to the "liberated Czechs and Slovaks and to their duly accredited representatives. 1141 The most important difference between the Cleveland and Pittsburgh texts is found in the political objectives each proposes; there was a shift from a federal solution to the autonomy of Slovakia. The Pittsburgh document not only leaves out any direct reference to the type of arrangement there would be between the Czechs and Slovaks as the Cleveland Agreement had done, but it also gives the responsibility of finding an arrangement to the "liberated Czechs and Slovaks and to their duly accredited representatives." Simply put, the agreement avoids the issue of the future constitutional make-up of the common state. It should also be noted that there is no direct use of the term autonomy; while this is clearly evident in the enumeration of the powers Slovakia would exercise, its non-mention is not without significance. It is linked directly to the avoidance of defining the future constitutional set-up of Czecho-Slovakia. Why did Masaryk, the author of the Pittsburgh Pact, propose such a text and why did the American Slovaks accept it? Aware of the differences of opinion there existed between the Czechs and Slovaks in the United States, Masaryk came to the United States in order to find a common ground and eliminate any argument that might put his cause in doubt. 42 In addition, as a •1. ~ Joseph M. Kirschbaum, Slovakia . Nation at the Crossroads of Central Europe. New York, Robert A Speller & Sons Publisher, Inc., 1960, p. 326. Stolarik, translates "pravoplatnym predstavitefom" as "legal representatives" which is more correct. Stolarik, p. 56. Catholic American Slovaks, under the leadership of Jozef Hu~k. editor of Jednota , the publication of the First Catholic Slovak Union, the largest single Slovak organization in the United States, were distrustful of Masaryk. For more on Hu~ek's role, especially with regards to the Pittsburgh document, see �SLOVAKIA 93 Slovak historian writes: "The need for legitimacy brought forth the Pittsburgh Pact. When Masaryk left for the United States at the end of April 1918, he went there with the clear objective of trying to overcome the President Wilson's mistrust of the plan to destroy Austria-Hungary. One of the arguments had to be a newly documented unity of the objectives of the Czech and Slovak citizens of the United States. "43 But Masaryk had a second, less evident objective: the acceptance of a document that would not put anything in his way in the achievement of the policy of Czechoslovakism. The Pittsburgh text, unlike the Cleveland one, made this possible, as Marxist historians point out: "Masaryk formulated the union of the Czechs and Slovaks in one state on the basis of equality but side-stepped the original -demand on the Slovak side, that is to say a federal constitutional organization linked to the recognition of two independent nations - the Czechs and the Slovaks. "44 The result was that "he changed the aim of the resistance movement abroad [by] leaving out the sentences about the federal structure of the Czechoslovak Republic."45 American Slovaks accepted Masaryk's text for two reasons: first they accepted his argument about the need for a document that he could show President Wilson that would convince the American president and the American public of Czech and Slovak American support for his objectives. The search for such support from the American people was made even more forcefully with the Washington Declaration of October 1918 which addressed the link between democracy and the new state: "Another document that was meant to mobilize the American public in favour of the Czecho-Slovak cause was the declaration StolArik, pp. 47-50. Koviic, p. 66 . .._ Dejiny, p. 464. -0. 4.i. Rebro, p. 25. �94 SLOVAKIA of sovereignty known as the Washington Declaration. Both documents [the Pittsburgh Pact and the Washington Declaration] fulfilled their objectives. "46 The second reason is linked to the person of Masaryk himself. He was the president of the Czecho-Slovak National Council, the leader of the resistance movement who was received by the heads of state and government of the Allied Powers; American Slovaks had reason to trust him. In addition, the text of the Pittsburgh document did not suggest the absence of equality between the Czechs and Slovaks. Little did they suspect that he had very definite ideas about their nation which he had expressed as early as 1915 in a memorandum to the Foreign Office: "The Slovaks are Bohemians in spite of their using their dialect as their literary language. The Slovaks strive also for independence and accept the programme of union with Bohemia. "47 In addition, Masaryk also reflected an attitude toward the Slovaks that was prevalent among the Czechs: "at that time, no one among the Czechs understood the Slovak_ problem in its full importance and implication nor thought about the constitutional position of Slovakia in a Czecho-Slovak state, about the way of respecting Slovak individuality in a unitary state, not to say anything of a federation. Concrete approaches did not correspond to the sentimental-patriarchal feelings of the Czech public. "48 There was no Slovak leader, at home or abroad, who could counter Masaryk's influence and articulate properly and forcefully Slovak demands. Milan R. Stefanik was the most influential Slovak, but he was ill placed to represent the Slovaks. 46 Kovlit, p. 66. For more on the Washington Declaration, see J.B. Kozak, T.G. Masaryk a vznik Washingtonske deklarace v ffjnu 1918. Praha: Melantrich, 1968 . ~- Quoted in R. W. Seton-Watson, Masaryk in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943, p. 125. In the United States, Hu~k was one American Slovak who was suspicious of Masaryk's motives. See Stollirik, p. 47. • Chovanec a Mozolik, p. 20. �SLOVAKIA 95 As Jaroslav Sole writes about him: "The first Slovak in the struggle against the Habsburgs was a Czechoslovak -this was not only a definite paradox from the Slovak point of view, but also one of the formative conditions of the Czech approach!. "49 Masaryk had come to Pittsburgh to tell the Slovaks that he needed their support to achieve an aim that was also theirs, national emancipation. The Pittsburgh Pact, as had the Cleveland Agreement, helped to attain this objective; but that was all. There was nothing else as far as he was concerned, as later events would show. Much ink has flowed about the Pittsburgh Pact, especially about its binding character.:xi Two days before Masaryk signed the calligraphic copy, on 12 November 1918, the Revolutionary National Assembly in Prague had ratified all of the commitments that he had made during the war. Despite this ratification, the literature stresses the non-binding character of the Pittsburgh document based on one of its paragraphs. As Seton-Watson writes: "the final clause made the whole arrangement contingent upon its endorsement by constitutionally elected representatives of both Czechs and Slovaks at home after the war. "51 It was such a legal-constitutional argument that justified not only the Czechoslovak government's refusal to honour the clauses of the Pittsburgh document but also Masaryk's own repudiation of it as "a local understanding between American Czechs and Slovaks upon the policy they were prepared to advocate." 52 There was 111 - Jaroslav Sole, Slovensko v ceskej politike. Banska Bystrica: M.O. Enterprise, 1993, p. 43 . n Vavro Srobar went so far as to claim that the Czechoslovak Republic gave the Slovaks rights that went beyond the autonomy provisions of the Pittsburgh Pact. See Plevza, p. 75. 5 '- R.W. Seton-Watson, A History of Czechs and Slovaks. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965, p. 306. 52 Thomas G. Masaryk, The Making of a State. Memories and Observations /914-1918, An English version, arranged and prepared with an introduction �96 SLOVAKIA also a political reason according to Stolarik: "Masaryk rejected the Pittsburgh Agreement partly because all Slovaks did not support it. "53 Whatever the legal justifications, it was an error on the part of Masaryk to ignore the Pittsburgh Pact's political ramification and importance. Masaryk was not unaware of the meaning of both documents, and not just for the Slovaks in the United States. As Seton-Watson wrote shortly after the creation of Czecho-Slovakia: if the Pittsburgh document was in no sense a treaty, it may fairly be taken as representing the mental attitude and political aspiration of most Czechs and Slovaks in America and (what is more important) of the chief shaper of Czechoslovak policy at the supreme crisis in 1918. To this extent it has, not a legal, but a moral, value. Moreover it may safely be claimed that in the first days of the new Republic it coincided with the general feeling in the "historic lands", that the Slovaks were fully entitled to make their own terms of union. The course of events, however, inevitably gave a different tum to the question. 54 The failure to honour it, indeed the failure of the Czechoslovak government to heed the demands of the Slovak People's Party during the two decades of interwar Czechoslovakia to implement it, 55 was, in the end, paid at the price of the First Czechoslovak Republic. by Henry Wickham Steed. New York: Frederick A Stokes Co., 1927, p. 220 . Masaryk also wrote a letter to Andrej Hlinka declaring the pact a "falsum ;" the text of the letter is found in Joseph M. Kirschbaum, pp. 238-240. n Stolarik, p. 54. Italics in the original. " R.W. Seton-Watson, The New Slovakia . Prague: Fr. Borovy, 1924, p. 21. 51 This is examined in detail in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, pp. I 55- I 83. �SLOVAKIA 97 Conclusion Both documents represent important milestones in the history of the Slovak search for self-determination in the twentieth century. Their chronology is important in this respect. The Pittsburgh Pact does indicate a retreat in political objectives when compared to those proposed in the Cleveland Agreement. But it also represents a willingness on the part of the Slovaks to accept autonomy if historical and international conditions made only that option possible; what was important was to have an opportunity to leave Hungary and proceed with national development. If the Cleveland Agreement was repudiated, it also served notice of an alternative. The drive to federalization in 1968 came as a result of the experience with autonomy, from the failure to implement it in 1918- I938 to the experience of its implementation in 1938-1939 and 1945-1968. Slovak independence in 1993 was achieved as a result of the experience with the federal system since 1968. Ultimately, both documents succumbed to the Czech agenda in Czechoslovakia and its failure to accommodate properly and adequately their objectives, thus making Slovak independence the only option left. Put another way: If neither document was acceptable, then neither was what they had in common, a state of the Czechs and Slovaks. In this sense, these two documents were also precursors of Slovak independence. � SLOVAKIA 81 The Cleveland and Pittsburgh Documents Stanislav J. Kirschbaum In the two centuries since the beginning of the French Revolution and the fall of Communism in Central Europe, Slovak political life has centered around the attainment of three political objectives: autonomy, federation, and independence. The first two are linked to the question of the relations between the Czechs and the Slovaks in a common state while the third reflects the teleological objectives of the principle of selfdetermination whose origins go back to the French Revolution but whose implementation was proposed only on the morrow of the First World War. It was to implement this principle that Central Europe was reorganized from the break-up of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, and Romanov empires. Each one of these objectives was preceded by a series of declarations, memoranda, resolutions, pacts, and agreements that paved the way for their implementation. It is a singularity of Slovak history that there are very few such documents in this two-centuries span; Jorg K. Hoensch presents 57 that are linked to the objective of autonomy,' Karol Rebro puts together 27 that he L See Jorg K. Hoensch, Hrsg. Dokumente zur A utonomiepolitik der Slowakischen Vo/kspartei Hlinkas. Miinchen: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1984, pp. 71-257 . Hoen sch also includes three additional documents that deal with �82 SLOVAKIA associates with the drive to federalization,2 while Jaroslav Chovanec and Peter Mozolfk offer 32 documents that deal with or are connected to independence. 3 The difference in the numbers is explained by the fact that many of the documents that were chosen are specific to the objective sought; nevertheless, there are two that appear in all three volumes: the Cleveland Agreement and the Pittsburgh Pact. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate their importance in the attainment of Slovak political objectives in the twentieth century. It is their link to the three objectives that explains their interest. Still, one Slovak historian, Anton Spiesz, 4 and one Western scholar, Hoensch,5 have seen fit not to mention either; in all other works, they find their place in the history of the nation. Both documents share four principal characteristics. First, they embody the essence of Slovak political activity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely the attainment of selfdetermination; second, both seek the same objective: the creation of a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks at the end of the Great War; third, they are laconic texts, in some respects even imprecise in their content; and fourth, they are linked to Slovaks living not in Slovakia, but in the United States. It is the differences between them, the reasons for these differences, and 2 independence, thus bringing the total to 60 documents. Karol Rebro, The Road to Federation. Bratislava: Tatrapress, 1970, pp. 64-130. It should be noted that Rebro includes also the text of the Treaty of Protection of 1939 between Slovakia and Germany, thus bringing the total to 28 . 1 Jaroslav Chovanec a Peter Mozolik, Historicke a statopnivne korene samostatnosti Slovenskej republiky. Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Procom, 1994, pp. 67-216. The two authors include six additional documents that pertain to Slovak history prior to the nineteenth century. •- Anton Spiesz, Dejiny Slo venska. Na ceste k sebauvedomeniu. Brati slava : Yydavatefstvo Respekt, I 992. 1 Jorg K. Hoensch, Geschichte der Tschechoslowakischen Republik 1918 bis 1965. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1966. �SLOVAKIA 83 the impact that they had that make them so interesting and that have also made them the object not only of political but also scholarly controversy. Until the international context of a world war offered the Slovaks the possibility of leaving Austria-Hungary, the main Slovak objective, shared by American Slovaks, was the attainment of a form of self-determination through self-administration. From the time of the French Revolution, three proposals embodied this objective. The first is Ignac Martinovic's democratic constitution, which he worked out at the time of the French Revolution, and which included the nationality principle; its application would have turned Slovakia into an independent administrative unit called Slavonica. As Slovak Marxist historians write: "It is in fact the first proposal to include Slovakia as an independent national administrative unit within the framework of Hungary. 116 The second is the Ziadosti slovenskeho naroda (The Demands of the Slovak Nation), worked out in May 1848; the Slovak nation demanded the recognition and guarantee of national identity; the transformation of Hungary into a state composed of equal nations, each with its own parliament and equal representation in the Hungarian Diet; and the use of Slovak in all Slovak county offices. In addition, it insisted on democratic rights, including universal and equal suffrage, the total abolition of serfdom, and the return of the land to the peasants from whom it had been taken away. 7 The third is the Memorandum slovenskeho naroda (Memorandum of the Slovak Nation) adopted in Turciansky Svaty Martin in June 1861; it sought equal rights with the Magyars, the recognition of their national individuality by law, the formation of a North Hungarian Slovak ~ Dejiny S/ovenska II. Bratislava: Veda, Vydavatefstvo Slovenskej akademie vied, I 987, p. 48 I. 1 • For the text in English, see Rebro, pp. 64-67, in Slovak, Chovanec and Mozolfk, pp. 74-77, and in German, Hoensch, pp. 71 -74. �84 SLOVAKIA District (Okolie in Slovak), Slovak as the official language of adminstration of this district, a Slovak Academy of Law and a chair of Slavonic studies in Pest, and the repeal of all Hungarian laws that infringed on the principles of the equality of the nationalities. 8 In the words of Slovak historians, the memorandum "became the basic Slovak constitutional programme even if it was not worked out in detail and contained merely basic principles about a certain Slovak autonomy within the framework of Hungary." 9 American Slovaks were familiar with Slovak objectives in Hungary, since most were immigrants to the United States, forced out by Budapest's policy of Magyarization and Hungary's slow economic development. Their main organization, the Slovak League of America, prepared a memorandum in May 1914 on the occasion of an earlier visit by Hungarian Count Mihaly Karolyi in the United States. The memorandum reiterated the demands of the 1861 Memorandum, thus in effect seeking a solution in Austria-Hungary. But it became the object of some controversy 10 as it underwent certain changes before it was · published in its final version on 2 September 1914 as the Memorandum o krivdach a JX)iiadavkach slovenskfch (Memorandum on Slovak Injustices and Demands). 11 No specific conFor the text in English, see Rebro, pp. 73-76, in Slovak, Chovanec and Mozolik, pp. 81-89, and in German, Hoensch, pp. 92-99. 9 • R. Marsina et. al., Slovenske dejiny. Martin: Matica slovenska, 1992, p. 173. n This is described in Konstantfn Culen, Pittsburghska dohoda . Bratislava: Knfhtlaciarell Andreja uc. spol., 1937, pp. 20-32. 11 • The original and modified versions are found in ibid., pp. 42-52. According to Ivan Markovic: "It was a political error and an indication of insufficient political foresight on the part of the Slovak League to publish this memorandum." See Ivan Markovic, Slovaci v zahranicnej revolucii. Bratislava: no publisher, no date; lecture given on 16 April 1923, p. 13. As for its publication date, Milan Getting writes that it was published on 24 September. See Milan Getting, Americkf Slovaci a vjvin ceskoslovenskej myslienky v rokoch 1914-1918. Pittsburgh: Slovenska Telocvicna Jednota & �SLOVAKIA 85 stitutional solution was put forth for Slovakia, but there was a demand for full self-administration and self-determination. In the discussions around this document the idea of Czecho-Slovak unity had also been mentioned. 12 This document opened the way for Slovak American organizations thereafter to examine a number of options that would be the object of debate for some time: 13 Slovakia in a federated Slavic state in Austria-Hungary; a Slovak-Polish union ; a Slovak-Russian union ; autonomy in a reorganized Hungary; and the creation of a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks. 14 Clearly, the objective had been redefined and had become one of national emancipation. The Cleveland Agreement _ With the outbreak of war, American Slovaks opted for cooperation with the Czechs in their struggle for national emancipation. But their approaches differed. The latter directed their efforts at the creation of a Czech state. However, according to Chovanec and Mozolfk, "the representatives of the Slovak organizations in the United States fought against the attempts of their Czech partners to attach the Slovaks as a sort of appendage to the basic Czech anti-Habsburg programme." 15 The Slovaks were seeking a solution that was in the spirit of previous Slovak demands and that would ensure national development. After months of discussions, 16 an attempt was made to create a common front and a meeting was organized in Cleveland on 22 Sokol v Amerike, 1933, p. 40. Ibid., p. 40. 13. See Markovit, p. 13. 14 • Some of these options are examined in Stanislav Matou~ek, Vznik a vfvoj spolecneho statu Cechu a Slovakii . Praha: Academia, 1980, pp. 57-60. u. Chovanec a Mozolfk, p. 19. "' For more on these discussions, see Marian Mark Stolarik, "The Role of American Slovaks in the Creation of Czecho-Slovakia, 1914-19 I 8," Slovak Studies, VIII ( 1968), pp. 23-26. ll �86 SLOVAKIA October 1915 between representatives of Czech and Slovak American organizations. Cubomfr Liptak writes that "[t]he decision of American Slovaks to support the struggle for the creation of a common state with the Czechs - and its worth is found here - was taken after long and often bitter discussions in which the advantages and disadvantages of such a solution were weighed, including the possibilities and limits of Slovak activity." 17 The Czechs proposed a text that was only slightly modified by the Slovaks present. It has since become known as the Cleveland Agreement. Short and imprecise as it is, this text is, perhaps because of these characteristics, the object of some controversy. Composed of five points, its only two concrete proposals are found in points one and three on the independence of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and secret universal suffrage. It is the second point that has historians trying to figure out what the authors had in mind when they proposed "a union of the Czech and Slovak nations in a federative union of states with complete national autonomy for Slovakia, with its own parliament, its own state administration, complete cultural freedom, that is to say with the full right to use the Slovak language, its own financial and political administration, and an official Slovak state language." 18 Was this a federal proposal, if so, what kind, and if not, what was it, given its language? There are two schools of thought on this question. One rejects outright the affirmation that this was federal solution for a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks. Stanislav Matousek suggests that what was proposed was a union within a federalized monarchy. He bases his argument not only on the phrase 11 • 1& Cubomir Liptak, Slovensko v 20. storoci. Bratislava: Vydavatet'stvo politickej literatury, 1968, p. 64. Rebro, p. 80. Stol~rik, on the other hand, translates "vo federatfvnom zviizku ~t~tov" as "in a federal state." StolMik, p. 55. �SLOVAKIA 87 "in a federative union of states" ( vo federativnom sviizku stitov), but also on the reference to Slovakia's autonomy. According to him, such a reference would not have been necessary if a federation between the Czechs and Slovaks had been envisaged; it would have been assumed for both nations. He also suggests that the authors based their understanding of federalism on their American experience. 19 The latter is also the view of some Slovak historians.'.!) Finally, to strengthen this approach, Viliam Plevza shows that reactions in the months that followed support this interpretation? Others, on the other hand, recognize the document as proposing a federal arrangement between the two nations. Rebro writes that "[t]he Cleveland Agreement represents a clear federative model of two equal nations on the basis of partnership." 22 Josef Kalvoda understands the text to mean that "[b]oth the Czechs and Slovaks were to have autonomy in the federative state to be established after the war."n Konstantin Culen indicates that the agreement "announced the federalization of the future republic". 24 Ivan Markovic and Marian Mark Stolarik perceive it as expressing a federal solution for two nationally autonomous entities. 75 Not surprisingly, some historians pass no judgment and limit themselves simply to quoting or using directly the text of the agreement. 26 Such use of the text is 19 • Matousek, pp. 61-62. n Marsina et al., p. 197. 21 • Viliam Plevza, Ceskos/ovenska statnosf a sl ovenska otazka v politike KSC. Bratislava: Praca, 1971 , pp. 49-50. n Rebro, p. 22. 21. Josef Kalvoda, The Genesis of Czechoslovakia. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1986, p. 70. ll Culen, p. 81 . 21 Markovit, p. 25; Stolarik, p. 26. li Among those who pass no judgment are Chovanec and Mozolik, p. 19, Liptak, p. 63, Franti~ek Bokes, Dejiny S/ovenska a Slovakov od najstarsfch cias po os/obodenie. Bratislava: Slovenska akademia vied a umen1, 1946, p. 350 and �88 SLOVAKIA interpreted by at least one author as a tacit acknowledgement of this interpretation.Zl Of the two, the second interpretation seems more acceptable than the first for a number of reasons. First of all, the language of the agreement suggests that its authors were not experts in political and constitutional terminology; otherwise the language would have been precise. This allows us to infer that a federation of the two nations was the objective as this was the reason for the meeting: to decide on the framework of an arrangement between them. Those who make the claim that the authors were influenced by American federalism project their own expertise and historical experience on men of a generation that had recently emigrated to the United States and whose education was not likely to have included constitutional law and political science or specialized knowledge of the American constitution. Secondly, the reference to Slovak autonomy must be seen as understandable given the Slovak political struggle in Hungary and the demands made in the documents of 1848 and 1861. For most Slovaks, this was their main point of reference in the national struggle. It is unlikely that the document would have obtained the support from American Slovaks that it did obtain had it not included a specific reference to autonomy.28 Thirdly, subsequent events indicate that American Slovaks understood that their nation would enter into a common state with the Czechs in a federal arrangement. Dusan Kovac\ Slovaci - Cesi - Dejiny. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press, 1997, p. 65. n. Plevza considers Liptak as belonging to those who accept the federal interpretation. See Plevza, p. 49n. 2& It is interesting to note that Albert Mamatey, President of the Slovak League in America, who would be present when the agreement was signed the next day, wrote on 21 October 1915 in Narodne noviny that the League "is for [Slovak] independence regardless of the greater state organization in which we find ourselves." Quoted in Getting, p. 63. �SLOVAKIA 89 The agreement was generally well received, but Slovak Marxist historians also note that "[i]n France, the periodical Ceskoslovenska samostatnosf, as the "organ of political emigration" presented the Cleveland agreement in the spirit of Czechoslovakism - as the attainment of Czechoslovak national unity. This point of view resulted in protests because American Slovaks had begun to support all of the activities of the external struggle on the principle of two equal nations as outlined in the Cleveland agreement. "29 Slovak Americans were not unaware of Czech objectives, and in particular the role that Czechoslovak unity was playing in these objectives. They knew that they had to counter this. In addition, Frantisek Bokes writes that the agreement "did not eliminate distrust and the possibility of misunderstanding between Czechs and Slovaks. "D This uncertainty resulted in the Slovak League of America sending in April 1916 two representatives to Europe, Stefan Osusky and Gustav Kosfk, "to meet Professor [T.G.] Masaryk and to explain the Slovak program to the British and French foreign ministries."31 Nevertheless, as Culen writes: "from this meeting [in Cleveland] on, Czechs and Slovaks begin to appear together throughout the United States. "32 Such behaviour again strongly points to a Slovak understanding of what the agreement meant to them and also their determination to achieve their objective, a federation of the two nations. However, it must aso be pointed out that some American Slovaks saw the agreement as having brought forth "Czechoslovak unity" 33 . Equally interesting is that fact that 29 • Dejiny S/ovenska JI, p. 429. Italics added. Bokes, p. 35 I. 3 1. Kalvoda, p. 83. For an analysis of the Osusky-Ko§ik mission to Europe, see Stolarik, pp. 28-30. See also the interview with Osusky in ibid., pp. 59-61. :u Culen, p. 83. n Getting, p. 66. :n �90 SLOVAKIA Masaryk, despite his later behaviour, is said to have approved of it.34 The Pittsburgh Pact A series of developments soon made it clear that the Cleveland Agreement would have to be revisited, if not revised. In the first place, there was vigorous debate on the question of Czechoslovak unity and the nature of the future state in Slovak publications in the United States and abroad throughout 1916 and 1917. 35 Furthermore, according to Stolarik, in 1916 American Slovaks had "split into Slovak and Czechoslovak camps. "36 Secondly, there was the evolution of the Czech agenda and its transformation into a Czechoslovak one. 37 The creation of a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks had to be seen as embodying the principle of self-determination, as inferred from President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points38 and, above all, had to be sold to the Allied Powers. The second development put American Slovaks in a very difficult position; while they did not want to give up their objective, they needed Czech support to achieve it and they also had to ensure that their mutual project of a common state did not fail because of their demands or because of serious disputes with Ibid., p. 84. Rebro also writes that Masaryk "tried to find comprise formulations that would not contradict his own conceptions. But he could not simply refuse the terms of the Cleveland agreement because they were supported by the moral, financial and first of all voluntary help of the Slovaks abroad." Rebro, pp. 24-25. 35. Getting, pp. 85-86. 36. Stolarik, p. 22. n. For more on this see Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia. The Struggle for Survival. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 144-152. 31!. On the question of the role of the principle of self-determination in the Fourteen Points, see Dov Ronen, The Challenge of Ethnic Conflict, Democracy and Self-Determination in Central Europe. London: Frank Cass, 1997, pp. 48-53 . 34. �SLOVAKIA 91 the Czechs. For Masaryk, the best solution to this dilemma was Czechoslovakism, that is to say the fusion of the Czechs and Slovaks into one nation. This was a concept that not only had historical roots (it was first proposed in 1848), but that could easily be proposed within the framework of the principle of selfdetermination. In addition, as the English historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote, "Masaryk knew little of the Slovaks; others knew even less. That was his strength in dealing with the allied leaders. "39 What Masaryk also had to do was to overcome the suspicions and disagreements that had arisen between Czechs and Slovaks in the United States and bring the latter to accept the necessity for a common front that would persuade the Allied Powers to create the new state.'° He achieved this with the document called the Pittsburgh Pact (also called the Pittsburgh Agreement) which he himself signed on two occasions, the hand-written copy on 31 May 1918, and the calligraphic copy on 14 November, the day he was elected president of Czecho-Slovakia in Prague by the Revolutionary National Assembly. The Pittsburgh document is composed of six resolutions approved by the representatives of the Slovak League of America, the Czech National Alliance, the Federation of Czech Catholics, and the Czecho-Slovak National Council in the person of Masaryk himself. Of importance to Slovakia is the acknowledgement of its own institutions, namely a state administration, a parliament, and a judiciary and the status of the Slovak language as the official language in the schools, in the public offices and in public life generally. In addition to approving a union of the two nations in an independent state, the document specifies that the state shall be a republic and that its constitution shall be 39 • CJ. A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1967, p. 258. Stolarik also points out that "[t]he attitude of American Slovaks towards the Czechs changed radically in 1917." Stolarik, p. 32. �92 SLOVAKIA democratic. There is reference to "the organization of the cooperation between Czechs and Slovaks," but the most important point refers to the relegation of the "detailed provisions" to the "liberated Czechs and Slovaks and to their duly accredited representatives. 1141 The most important difference between the Cleveland and Pittsburgh texts is found in the political objectives each proposes; there was a shift from a federal solution to the autonomy of Slovakia. The Pittsburgh document not only leaves out any direct reference to the type of arrangement there would be between the Czechs and Slovaks as the Cleveland Agreement had done, but it also gives the responsibility of finding an arrangement to the "liberated Czechs and Slovaks and to their duly accredited representatives." Simply put, the agreement avoids the issue of the future constitutional make-up of the common state. It should also be noted that there is no direct use of the term autonomy; while this is clearly evident in the enumeration of the powers Slovakia would exercise, its non-mention is not without significance. It is linked directly to the avoidance of defining the future constitutional set-up of Czecho-Slovakia. Why did Masaryk, the author of the Pittsburgh Pact, propose such a text and why did the American Slovaks accept it? Aware of the differences of opinion there existed between the Czechs and Slovaks in the United States, Masaryk came to the United States in order to find a common ground and eliminate any argument that might put his cause in doubt. 42 In addition, as a •1. ~ Joseph M. Kirschbaum, Slovakia . Nation at the Crossroads of Central Europe. New York, Robert A Speller & Sons Publisher, Inc., 1960, p. 326. Stolarik, translates "pravoplatnym predstavitefom" as "legal representatives" which is more correct. Stolarik, p. 56. Catholic American Slovaks, under the leadership of Jozef Hu~k. editor of Jednota , the publication of the First Catholic Slovak Union, the largest single Slovak organization in the United States, were distrustful of Masaryk. For more on Hu~ek's role, especially with regards to the Pittsburgh document, see �SLOVAKIA 93 Slovak historian writes: "The need for legitimacy brought forth the Pittsburgh Pact. When Masaryk left for the United States at the end of April 1918, he went there with the clear objective of trying to overcome the President Wilson's mistrust of the plan to destroy Austria-Hungary. One of the arguments had to be a newly documented unity of the objectives of the Czech and Slovak citizens of the United States. "43 But Masaryk had a second, less evident objective: the acceptance of a document that would not put anything in his way in the achievement of the policy of Czechoslovakism. The Pittsburgh text, unlike the Cleveland one, made this possible, as Marxist historians point out: "Masaryk formulated the union of the Czechs and Slovaks in one state on the basis of equality but side-stepped the original -demand on the Slovak side, that is to say a federal constitutional organization linked to the recognition of two independent nations - the Czechs and the Slovaks. "44 The result was that "he changed the aim of the resistance movement abroad [by] leaving out the sentences about the federal structure of the Czechoslovak Republic."45 American Slovaks accepted Masaryk's text for two reasons: first they accepted his argument about the need for a document that he could show President Wilson that would convince the American president and the American public of Czech and Slovak American support for his objectives. The search for such support from the American people was made even more forcefully with the Washington Declaration of October 1918 which addressed the link between democracy and the new state: "Another document that was meant to mobilize the American public in favour of the Czecho-Slovak cause was the declaration StolArik, pp. 47-50. Koviic, p. 66 . .._ Dejiny, p. 464. -0. 4.i. Rebro, p. 25. �94 SLOVAKIA of sovereignty known as the Washington Declaration. Both documents [the Pittsburgh Pact and the Washington Declaration] fulfilled their objectives. "46 The second reason is linked to the person of Masaryk himself. He was the president of the Czecho-Slovak National Council, the leader of the resistance movement who was received by the heads of state and government of the Allied Powers; American Slovaks had reason to trust him. In addition, the text of the Pittsburgh document did not suggest the absence of equality between the Czechs and Slovaks. Little did they suspect that he had very definite ideas about their nation which he had expressed as early as 1915 in a memorandum to the Foreign Office: "The Slovaks are Bohemians in spite of their using their dialect as their literary language. The Slovaks strive also for independence and accept the programme of union with Bohemia. "47 In addition, Masaryk also reflected an attitude toward the Slovaks that was prevalent among the Czechs: "at that time, no one among the Czechs understood the Slovak_ problem in its full importance and implication nor thought about the constitutional position of Slovakia in a Czecho-Slovak state, about the way of respecting Slovak individuality in a unitary state, not to say anything of a federation. Concrete approaches did not correspond to the sentimental-patriarchal feelings of the Czech public. "48 There was no Slovak leader, at home or abroad, who could counter Masaryk's influence and articulate properly and forcefully Slovak demands. Milan R. Stefanik was the most influential Slovak, but he was ill placed to represent the Slovaks. 46 Kovlit, p. 66. For more on the Washington Declaration, see J.B. Kozak, T.G. Masaryk a vznik Washingtonske deklarace v ffjnu 1918. Praha: Melantrich, 1968 . ~- Quoted in R. W. Seton-Watson, Masaryk in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943, p. 125. In the United States, Hu~k was one American Slovak who was suspicious of Masaryk's motives. See Stollirik, p. 47. • Chovanec a Mozolik, p. 20. �SLOVAKIA 95 As Jaroslav Sole writes about him: "The first Slovak in the struggle against the Habsburgs was a Czechoslovak -this was not only a definite paradox from the Slovak point of view, but also one of the formative conditions of the Czech approach!. "49 Masaryk had come to Pittsburgh to tell the Slovaks that he needed their support to achieve an aim that was also theirs, national emancipation. The Pittsburgh Pact, as had the Cleveland Agreement, helped to attain this objective; but that was all. There was nothing else as far as he was concerned, as later events would show. Much ink has flowed about the Pittsburgh Pact, especially about its binding character.:xi Two days before Masaryk signed the calligraphic copy, on 12 November 1918, the Revolutionary National Assembly in Prague had ratified all of the commitments that he had made during the war. Despite this ratification, the literature stresses the non-binding character of the Pittsburgh document based on one of its paragraphs. As Seton-Watson writes: "the final clause made the whole arrangement contingent upon its endorsement by constitutionally elected representatives of both Czechs and Slovaks at home after the war. "51 It was such a legal-constitutional argument that justified not only the Czechoslovak government's refusal to honour the clauses of the Pittsburgh document but also Masaryk's own repudiation of it as "a local understanding between American Czechs and Slovaks upon the policy they were prepared to advocate." 52 There was 111 - Jaroslav Sole, Slovensko v ceskej politike. Banska Bystrica: M.O. Enterprise, 1993, p. 43 . n Vavro Srobar went so far as to claim that the Czechoslovak Republic gave the Slovaks rights that went beyond the autonomy provisions of the Pittsburgh Pact. See Plevza, p. 75. 5 '- R.W. Seton-Watson, A History of Czechs and Slovaks. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965, p. 306. 52 Thomas G. Masaryk, The Making of a State. Memories and Observations /914-1918, An English version, arranged and prepared with an introduction �96 SLOVAKIA also a political reason according to Stolarik: "Masaryk rejected the Pittsburgh Agreement partly because all Slovaks did not support it. "53 Whatever the legal justifications, it was an error on the part of Masaryk to ignore the Pittsburgh Pact's political ramification and importance. Masaryk was not unaware of the meaning of both documents, and not just for the Slovaks in the United States. As Seton-Watson wrote shortly after the creation of Czecho-Slovakia: if the Pittsburgh document was in no sense a treaty, it may fairly be taken as representing the mental attitude and political aspiration of most Czechs and Slovaks in America and (what is more important) of the chief shaper of Czechoslovak policy at the supreme crisis in 1918. To this extent it has, not a legal, but a moral, value. Moreover it may safely be claimed that in the first days of the new Republic it coincided with the general feeling in the "historic lands", that the Slovaks were fully entitled to make their own terms of union. The course of events, however, inevitably gave a different tum to the question. 54 The failure to honour it, indeed the failure of the Czechoslovak government to heed the demands of the Slovak People's Party during the two decades of interwar Czechoslovakia to implement it, 55 was, in the end, paid at the price of the First Czechoslovak Republic. by Henry Wickham Steed. New York: Frederick A Stokes Co., 1927, p. 220 . Masaryk also wrote a letter to Andrej Hlinka declaring the pact a "falsum ;" the text of the letter is found in Joseph M. Kirschbaum, pp. 238-240. n Stolarik, p. 54. Italics in the original. " R.W. Seton-Watson, The New Slovakia . Prague: Fr. Borovy, 1924, p. 21. 51 This is examined in detail in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, pp. I 55- I 83. �SLOVAKIA 97 Conclusion Both documents represent important milestones in the history of the Slovak search for self-determination in the twentieth century. Their chronology is important in this respect. The Pittsburgh Pact does indicate a retreat in political objectives when compared to those proposed in the Cleveland Agreement. But it also represents a willingness on the part of the Slovaks to accept autonomy if historical and international conditions made only that option possible; what was important was to have an opportunity to leave Hungary and proceed with national development. If the Cleveland Agreement was repudiated, it also served notice of an alternative. The drive to federalization in 1968 came as a result of the experience with autonomy, from the failure to implement it in 1918- I938 to the experience of its implementation in 1938-1939 and 1945-1968. Slovak independence in 1993 was achieved as a result of the experience with the federal system since 1968. Ultimately, both documents succumbed to the Czech agenda in Czechoslovakia and its failure to accommodate properly and adequately their objectives, thus making Slovak independence the only option left. Put another way: If neither document was acceptable, then neither was what they had in common, a state of the Czechs and Slovaks. In this sense, these two documents were also precursors of Slovak independence. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1998, Vol. 36 Description An account of the resource Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 81 The Cleveland and Pittsburgh Documents Stanislav J. Kirschbaum In the two centuries since the beginning of the French Revolution and the fall of Communism in Central Europe, Slovak political life has centered around the attainment of three political objectives: autonomy, federation, and independence. The first two are linked to the question of the relations between the Czechs and the Slovaks in a common state while the third reflects the teleological objectives of the principle of selfdetermination whose origins go back to the French Revolution but whose implementation was proposed only on the morrow of the First World War. It was to implement this principle that Central Europe was reorganized from the break-up of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, and Romanov empires. Each one of these objectives was preceded by a series of declarations, memoranda, resolutions, pacts, and agreements that paved the way for their implementation. It is a singularity of Slovak history that there are very few such documents in this two-centuries span; Jorg K. Hoensch presents 57 that are linked to the objective of autonomy,' Karol Rebro puts together 27 that he L See Jorg K. Hoensch, Hrsg. Dokumente zur A utonomiepolitik der Slowakischen Vo/kspartei Hlinkas. Miinchen: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1984, pp. 71-257 . Hoen sch also includes three additional documents that deal with 82 SLOVAKIA associates with the drive to federalization,2 while Jaroslav Chovanec and Peter Mozolfk offer 32 documents that deal with or are connected to independence. 3 The difference in the numbers is explained by the fact that many of the documents that were chosen are specific to the objective sought; nevertheless, there are two that appear in all three volumes: the Cleveland Agreement and the Pittsburgh Pact. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate their importance in the attainment of Slovak political objectives in the twentieth century. It is their link to the three objectives that explains their interest. Still, one Slovak historian, Anton Spiesz, 4 and one Western scholar, Hoensch,5 have seen fit not to mention either; in all other works, they find their place in the history of the nation. Both documents share four principal characteristics. First, they embody the essence of Slovak political activity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely the attainment of selfdetermination; second, both seek the same objective: the creation of a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks at the end of the Great War; third, they are laconic texts, in some respects even imprecise in their content; and fourth, they are linked to Slovaks living not in Slovakia, but in the United States. It is the differences between them, the reasons for these differences, and 2 independence, thus bringing the total to 60 documents. Karol Rebro, The Road to Federation. Bratislava: Tatrapress, 1970, pp. 64-130. It should be noted that Rebro includes also the text of the Treaty of Protection of 1939 between Slovakia and Germany, thus bringing the total to 28 . 1 Jaroslav Chovanec a Peter Mozolik, Historicke a statopnivne korene samostatnosti Slovenskej republiky. Bratislava: Vydavatel'stvo Procom, 1994, pp. 67-216. The two authors include six additional documents that pertain to Slovak history prior to the nineteenth century. •- Anton Spiesz, Dejiny Slo venska. Na ceste k sebauvedomeniu. Brati slava : Yydavatefstvo Respekt, I 992. 1 Jorg K. Hoensch, Geschichte der Tschechoslowakischen Republik 1918 bis 1965. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1966. SLOVAKIA 83 the impact that they had that make them so interesting and that have also made them the object not only of political but also scholarly controversy. Until the international context of a world war offered the Slovaks the possibility of leaving Austria-Hungary, the main Slovak objective, shared by American Slovaks, was the attainment of a form of self-determination through self-administration. From the time of the French Revolution, three proposals embodied this objective. The first is Ignac Martinovic's democratic constitution, which he worked out at the time of the French Revolution, and which included the nationality principle; its application would have turned Slovakia into an independent administrative unit called Slavonica. As Slovak Marxist historians write: "It is in fact the first proposal to include Slovakia as an independent national administrative unit within the framework of Hungary. 116 The second is the Ziadosti slovenskeho naroda (The Demands of the Slovak Nation), worked out in May 1848; the Slovak nation demanded the recognition and guarantee of national identity; the transformation of Hungary into a state composed of equal nations, each with its own parliament and equal representation in the Hungarian Diet; and the use of Slovak in all Slovak county offices. In addition, it insisted on democratic rights, including universal and equal suffrage, the total abolition of serfdom, and the return of the land to the peasants from whom it had been taken away. 7 The third is the Memorandum slovenskeho naroda (Memorandum of the Slovak Nation) adopted in Turciansky Svaty Martin in June 1861; it sought equal rights with the Magyars, the recognition of their national individuality by law, the formation of a North Hungarian Slovak ~ Dejiny S/ovenska II. Bratislava: Veda, Vydavatefstvo Slovenskej akademie vied, I 987, p. 48 I. 1 • For the text in English, see Rebro, pp. 64-67, in Slovak, Chovanec and Mozolfk, pp. 74-77, and in German, Hoensch, pp. 71 -74. 84 SLOVAKIA District (Okolie in Slovak), Slovak as the official language of adminstration of this district, a Slovak Academy of Law and a chair of Slavonic studies in Pest, and the repeal of all Hungarian laws that infringed on the principles of the equality of the nationalities. 8 In the words of Slovak historians, the memorandum "became the basic Slovak constitutional programme even if it was not worked out in detail and contained merely basic principles about a certain Slovak autonomy within the framework of Hungary." 9 American Slovaks were familiar with Slovak objectives in Hungary, since most were immigrants to the United States, forced out by Budapest's policy of Magyarization and Hungary's slow economic development. Their main organization, the Slovak League of America, prepared a memorandum in May 1914 on the occasion of an earlier visit by Hungarian Count Mihaly Karolyi in the United States. The memorandum reiterated the demands of the 1861 Memorandum, thus in effect seeking a solution in Austria-Hungary. But it became the object of some controversy 10 as it underwent certain changes before it was · published in its final version on 2 September 1914 as the Memorandum o krivdach a JX)iiadavkach slovenskfch (Memorandum on Slovak Injustices and Demands). 11 No specific conFor the text in English, see Rebro, pp. 73-76, in Slovak, Chovanec and Mozolik, pp. 81-89, and in German, Hoensch, pp. 92-99. 9 • R. Marsina et. al., Slovenske dejiny. Martin: Matica slovenska, 1992, p. 173. n This is described in Konstantfn Culen, Pittsburghska dohoda . Bratislava: Knfhtlaciarell Andreja uc. spol., 1937, pp. 20-32. 11 • The original and modified versions are found in ibid., pp. 42-52. According to Ivan Markovic: "It was a political error and an indication of insufficient political foresight on the part of the Slovak League to publish this memorandum." See Ivan Markovic, Slovaci v zahranicnej revolucii. Bratislava: no publisher, no date; lecture given on 16 April 1923, p. 13. As for its publication date, Milan Getting writes that it was published on 24 September. See Milan Getting, Americkf Slovaci a vjvin ceskoslovenskej myslienky v rokoch 1914-1918. Pittsburgh: Slovenska Telocvicna Jednota & SLOVAKIA 85 stitutional solution was put forth for Slovakia, but there was a demand for full self-administration and self-determination. In the discussions around this document the idea of Czecho-Slovak unity had also been mentioned. 12 This document opened the way for Slovak American organizations thereafter to examine a number of options that would be the object of debate for some time: 13 Slovakia in a federated Slavic state in Austria-Hungary; a Slovak-Polish union ; a Slovak-Russian union ; autonomy in a reorganized Hungary; and the creation of a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks. 14 Clearly, the objective had been redefined and had become one of national emancipation. The Cleveland Agreement _ With the outbreak of war, American Slovaks opted for cooperation with the Czechs in their struggle for national emancipation. But their approaches differed. The latter directed their efforts at the creation of a Czech state. However, according to Chovanec and Mozolfk, "the representatives of the Slovak organizations in the United States fought against the attempts of their Czech partners to attach the Slovaks as a sort of appendage to the basic Czech anti-Habsburg programme." 15 The Slovaks were seeking a solution that was in the spirit of previous Slovak demands and that would ensure national development. After months of discussions, 16 an attempt was made to create a common front and a meeting was organized in Cleveland on 22 Sokol v Amerike, 1933, p. 40. Ibid., p. 40. 13. See Markovit, p. 13. 14 • Some of these options are examined in Stanislav Matou~ek, Vznik a vfvoj spolecneho statu Cechu a Slovakii . Praha: Academia, 1980, pp. 57-60. u. Chovanec a Mozolfk, p. 19. "' For more on these discussions, see Marian Mark Stolarik, "The Role of American Slovaks in the Creation of Czecho-Slovakia, 1914-19 I 8," Slovak Studies, VIII ( 1968), pp. 23-26. ll 86 SLOVAKIA October 1915 between representatives of Czech and Slovak American organizations. Cubomfr Liptak writes that "[t]he decision of American Slovaks to support the struggle for the creation of a common state with the Czechs - and its worth is found here - was taken after long and often bitter discussions in which the advantages and disadvantages of such a solution were weighed, including the possibilities and limits of Slovak activity." 17 The Czechs proposed a text that was only slightly modified by the Slovaks present. It has since become known as the Cleveland Agreement. Short and imprecise as it is, this text is, perhaps because of these characteristics, the object of some controversy. Composed of five points, its only two concrete proposals are found in points one and three on the independence of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and secret universal suffrage. It is the second point that has historians trying to figure out what the authors had in mind when they proposed "a union of the Czech and Slovak nations in a federative union of states with complete national autonomy for Slovakia, with its own parliament, its own state administration, complete cultural freedom, that is to say with the full right to use the Slovak language, its own financial and political administration, and an official Slovak state language." 18 Was this a federal proposal, if so, what kind, and if not, what was it, given its language? There are two schools of thought on this question. One rejects outright the affirmation that this was federal solution for a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks. Stanislav Matousek suggests that what was proposed was a union within a federalized monarchy. He bases his argument not only on the phrase 11 • 1& Cubomir Liptak, Slovensko v 20. storoci. Bratislava: Vydavatet'stvo politickej literatury, 1968, p. 64. Rebro, p. 80. Stol~rik, on the other hand, translates "vo federatfvnom zviizku ~t~tov" as "in a federal state." StolMik, p. 55. SLOVAKIA 87 "in a federative union of states" ( vo federativnom sviizku stitov), but also on the reference to Slovakia's autonomy. According to him, such a reference would not have been necessary if a federation between the Czechs and Slovaks had been envisaged; it would have been assumed for both nations. He also suggests that the authors based their understanding of federalism on their American experience. 19 The latter is also the view of some Slovak historians.'.!) Finally, to strengthen this approach, Viliam Plevza shows that reactions in the months that followed support this interpretation? Others, on the other hand, recognize the document as proposing a federal arrangement between the two nations. Rebro writes that "[t]he Cleveland Agreement represents a clear federative model of two equal nations on the basis of partnership." 22 Josef Kalvoda understands the text to mean that "[b]oth the Czechs and Slovaks were to have autonomy in the federative state to be established after the war."n Konstantin Culen indicates that the agreement "announced the federalization of the future republic". 24 Ivan Markovic and Marian Mark Stolarik perceive it as expressing a federal solution for two nationally autonomous entities. 75 Not surprisingly, some historians pass no judgment and limit themselves simply to quoting or using directly the text of the agreement. 26 Such use of the text is 19 • Matousek, pp. 61-62. n Marsina et al., p. 197. 21 • Viliam Plevza, Ceskos/ovenska statnosf a sl ovenska otazka v politike KSC. Bratislava: Praca, 1971 , pp. 49-50. n Rebro, p. 22. 21. Josef Kalvoda, The Genesis of Czechoslovakia. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1986, p. 70. ll Culen, p. 81 . 21 Markovit, p. 25; Stolarik, p. 26. li Among those who pass no judgment are Chovanec and Mozolik, p. 19, Liptak, p. 63, Franti~ek Bokes, Dejiny S/ovenska a Slovakov od najstarsfch cias po os/obodenie. Bratislava: Slovenska akademia vied a umen1, 1946, p. 350 and 88 SLOVAKIA interpreted by at least one author as a tacit acknowledgement of this interpretation.Zl Of the two, the second interpretation seems more acceptable than the first for a number of reasons. First of all, the language of the agreement suggests that its authors were not experts in political and constitutional terminology; otherwise the language would have been precise. This allows us to infer that a federation of the two nations was the objective as this was the reason for the meeting: to decide on the framework of an arrangement between them. Those who make the claim that the authors were influenced by American federalism project their own expertise and historical experience on men of a generation that had recently emigrated to the United States and whose education was not likely to have included constitutional law and political science or specialized knowledge of the American constitution. Secondly, the reference to Slovak autonomy must be seen as understandable given the Slovak political struggle in Hungary and the demands made in the documents of 1848 and 1861. For most Slovaks, this was their main point of reference in the national struggle. It is unlikely that the document would have obtained the support from American Slovaks that it did obtain had it not included a specific reference to autonomy.28 Thirdly, subsequent events indicate that American Slovaks understood that their nation would enter into a common state with the Czechs in a federal arrangement. Dusan Kovac\ Slovaci - Cesi - Dejiny. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press, 1997, p. 65. n. Plevza considers Liptak as belonging to those who accept the federal interpretation. See Plevza, p. 49n. 2& It is interesting to note that Albert Mamatey, President of the Slovak League in America, who would be present when the agreement was signed the next day, wrote on 21 October 1915 in Narodne noviny that the League "is for [Slovak] independence regardless of the greater state organization in which we find ourselves." Quoted in Getting, p. 63. SLOVAKIA 89 The agreement was generally well received, but Slovak Marxist historians also note that "[i]n France, the periodical Ceskoslovenska samostatnosf, as the "organ of political emigration" presented the Cleveland agreement in the spirit of Czechoslovakism - as the attainment of Czechoslovak national unity. This point of view resulted in protests because American Slovaks had begun to support all of the activities of the external struggle on the principle of two equal nations as outlined in the Cleveland agreement. "29 Slovak Americans were not unaware of Czech objectives, and in particular the role that Czechoslovak unity was playing in these objectives. They knew that they had to counter this. In addition, Frantisek Bokes writes that the agreement "did not eliminate distrust and the possibility of misunderstanding between Czechs and Slovaks. "D This uncertainty resulted in the Slovak League of America sending in April 1916 two representatives to Europe, Stefan Osusky and Gustav Kosfk, "to meet Professor [T.G.] Masaryk and to explain the Slovak program to the British and French foreign ministries."31 Nevertheless, as Culen writes: "from this meeting [in Cleveland] on, Czechs and Slovaks begin to appear together throughout the United States. "32 Such behaviour again strongly points to a Slovak understanding of what the agreement meant to them and also their determination to achieve their objective, a federation of the two nations. However, it must aso be pointed out that some American Slovaks saw the agreement as having brought forth "Czechoslovak unity" 33 . Equally interesting is that fact that 29 • Dejiny S/ovenska JI, p. 429. Italics added. Bokes, p. 35 I. 3 1. Kalvoda, p. 83. For an analysis of the Osusky-Ko§ik mission to Europe, see Stolarik, pp. 28-30. See also the interview with Osusky in ibid., pp. 59-61. :u Culen, p. 83. n Getting, p. 66. :n 90 SLOVAKIA Masaryk, despite his later behaviour, is said to have approved of it.34 The Pittsburgh Pact A series of developments soon made it clear that the Cleveland Agreement would have to be revisited, if not revised. In the first place, there was vigorous debate on the question of Czechoslovak unity and the nature of the future state in Slovak publications in the United States and abroad throughout 1916 and 1917. 35 Furthermore, according to Stolarik, in 1916 American Slovaks had "split into Slovak and Czechoslovak camps. "36 Secondly, there was the evolution of the Czech agenda and its transformation into a Czechoslovak one. 37 The creation of a common state of the Czechs and Slovaks had to be seen as embodying the principle of self-determination, as inferred from President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points38 and, above all, had to be sold to the Allied Powers. The second development put American Slovaks in a very difficult position; while they did not want to give up their objective, they needed Czech support to achieve it and they also had to ensure that their mutual project of a common state did not fail because of their demands or because of serious disputes with Ibid., p. 84. Rebro also writes that Masaryk "tried to find comprise formulations that would not contradict his own conceptions. But he could not simply refuse the terms of the Cleveland agreement because they were supported by the moral, financial and first of all voluntary help of the Slovaks abroad." Rebro, pp. 24-25. 35. Getting, pp. 85-86. 36. Stolarik, p. 22. n. For more on this see Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia. The Struggle for Survival. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 144-152. 31!. On the question of the role of the principle of self-determination in the Fourteen Points, see Dov Ronen, The Challenge of Ethnic Conflict, Democracy and Self-Determination in Central Europe. London: Frank Cass, 1997, pp. 48-53 . 34. SLOVAKIA 91 the Czechs. For Masaryk, the best solution to this dilemma was Czechoslovakism, that is to say the fusion of the Czechs and Slovaks into one nation. This was a concept that not only had historical roots (it was first proposed in 1848), but that could easily be proposed within the framework of the principle of selfdetermination. In addition, as the English historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote, "Masaryk knew little of the Slovaks; others knew even less. That was his strength in dealing with the allied leaders. "39 What Masaryk also had to do was to overcome the suspicions and disagreements that had arisen between Czechs and Slovaks in the United States and bring the latter to accept the necessity for a common front that would persuade the Allied Powers to create the new state.'° He achieved this with the document called the Pittsburgh Pact (also called the Pittsburgh Agreement) which he himself signed on two occasions, the hand-written copy on 31 May 1918, and the calligraphic copy on 14 November, the day he was elected president of Czecho-Slovakia in Prague by the Revolutionary National Assembly. The Pittsburgh document is composed of six resolutions approved by the representatives of the Slovak League of America, the Czech National Alliance, the Federation of Czech Catholics, and the Czecho-Slovak National Council in the person of Masaryk himself. Of importance to Slovakia is the acknowledgement of its own institutions, namely a state administration, a parliament, and a judiciary and the status of the Slovak language as the official language in the schools, in the public offices and in public life generally. In addition to approving a union of the two nations in an independent state, the document specifies that the state shall be a republic and that its constitution shall be 39 • CJ. A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1967, p. 258. Stolarik also points out that "[t]he attitude of American Slovaks towards the Czechs changed radically in 1917." Stolarik, p. 32. 92 SLOVAKIA democratic. There is reference to "the organization of the cooperation between Czechs and Slovaks," but the most important point refers to the relegation of the "detailed provisions" to the "liberated Czechs and Slovaks and to their duly accredited representatives. 1141 The most important difference between the Cleveland and Pittsburgh texts is found in the political objectives each proposes; there was a shift from a federal solution to the autonomy of Slovakia. The Pittsburgh document not only leaves out any direct reference to the type of arrangement there would be between the Czechs and Slovaks as the Cleveland Agreement had done, but it also gives the responsibility of finding an arrangement to the "liberated Czechs and Slovaks and to their duly accredited representatives." Simply put, the agreement avoids the issue of the future constitutional make-up of the common state. It should also be noted that there is no direct use of the term autonomy; while this is clearly evident in the enumeration of the powers Slovakia would exercise, its non-mention is not without significance. It is linked directly to the avoidance of defining the future constitutional set-up of Czecho-Slovakia. Why did Masaryk, the author of the Pittsburgh Pact, propose such a text and why did the American Slovaks accept it? Aware of the differences of opinion there existed between the Czechs and Slovaks in the United States, Masaryk came to the United States in order to find a common ground and eliminate any argument that might put his cause in doubt. 42 In addition, as a •1. ~ Joseph M. Kirschbaum, Slovakia . Nation at the Crossroads of Central Europe. New York, Robert A Speller & Sons Publisher, Inc., 1960, p. 326. Stolarik, translates "pravoplatnym predstavitefom" as "legal representatives" which is more correct. Stolarik, p. 56. Catholic American Slovaks, under the leadership of Jozef Hu~k. editor of Jednota , the publication of the First Catholic Slovak Union, the largest single Slovak organization in the United States, were distrustful of Masaryk. For more on Hu~ek's role, especially with regards to the Pittsburgh document, see SLOVAKIA 93 Slovak historian writes: "The need for legitimacy brought forth the Pittsburgh Pact. When Masaryk left for the United States at the end of April 1918, he went there with the clear objective of trying to overcome the President Wilson's mistrust of the plan to destroy Austria-Hungary. One of the arguments had to be a newly documented unity of the objectives of the Czech and Slovak citizens of the United States. "43 But Masaryk had a second, less evident objective: the acceptance of a document that would not put anything in his way in the achievement of the policy of Czechoslovakism. The Pittsburgh text, unlike the Cleveland one, made this possible, as Marxist historians point out: "Masaryk formulated the union of the Czechs and Slovaks in one state on the basis of equality but side-stepped the original -demand on the Slovak side, that is to say a federal constitutional organization linked to the recognition of two independent nations - the Czechs and the Slovaks. "44 The result was that "he changed the aim of the resistance movement abroad [by] leaving out the sentences about the federal structure of the Czechoslovak Republic."45 American Slovaks accepted Masaryk's text for two reasons: first they accepted his argument about the need for a document that he could show President Wilson that would convince the American president and the American public of Czech and Slovak American support for his objectives. The search for such support from the American people was made even more forcefully with the Washington Declaration of October 1918 which addressed the link between democracy and the new state: "Another document that was meant to mobilize the American public in favour of the Czecho-Slovak cause was the declaration StolArik, pp. 47-50. Koviic, p. 66 . .._ Dejiny, p. 464. -0. 4.i. Rebro, p. 25. 94 SLOVAKIA of sovereignty known as the Washington Declaration. Both documents [the Pittsburgh Pact and the Washington Declaration] fulfilled their objectives. "46 The second reason is linked to the person of Masaryk himself. He was the president of the Czecho-Slovak National Council, the leader of the resistance movement who was received by the heads of state and government of the Allied Powers; American Slovaks had reason to trust him. In addition, the text of the Pittsburgh document did not suggest the absence of equality between the Czechs and Slovaks. Little did they suspect that he had very definite ideas about their nation which he had expressed as early as 1915 in a memorandum to the Foreign Office: "The Slovaks are Bohemians in spite of their using their dialect as their literary language. The Slovaks strive also for independence and accept the programme of union with Bohemia. "47 In addition, Masaryk also reflected an attitude toward the Slovaks that was prevalent among the Czechs: "at that time, no one among the Czechs understood the Slovak_ problem in its full importance and implication nor thought about the constitutional position of Slovakia in a Czecho-Slovak state, about the way of respecting Slovak individuality in a unitary state, not to say anything of a federation. Concrete approaches did not correspond to the sentimental-patriarchal feelings of the Czech public. "48 There was no Slovak leader, at home or abroad, who could counter Masaryk's influence and articulate properly and forcefully Slovak demands. Milan R. Stefanik was the most influential Slovak, but he was ill placed to represent the Slovaks. 46 Kovlit, p. 66. For more on the Washington Declaration, see J.B. Kozak, T.G. Masaryk a vznik Washingtonske deklarace v ffjnu 1918. Praha: Melantrich, 1968 . ~- Quoted in R. W. Seton-Watson, Masaryk in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943, p. 125. In the United States, Hu~k was one American Slovak who was suspicious of Masaryk's motives. See Stollirik, p. 47. • Chovanec a Mozolik, p. 20. SLOVAKIA 95 As Jaroslav Sole writes about him: "The first Slovak in the struggle against the Habsburgs was a Czechoslovak -this was not only a definite paradox from the Slovak point of view, but also one of the formative conditions of the Czech approach!. "49 Masaryk had come to Pittsburgh to tell the Slovaks that he needed their support to achieve an aim that was also theirs, national emancipation. The Pittsburgh Pact, as had the Cleveland Agreement, helped to attain this objective; but that was all. There was nothing else as far as he was concerned, as later events would show. Much ink has flowed about the Pittsburgh Pact, especially about its binding character.:xi Two days before Masaryk signed the calligraphic copy, on 12 November 1918, the Revolutionary National Assembly in Prague had ratified all of the commitments that he had made during the war. Despite this ratification, the literature stresses the non-binding character of the Pittsburgh document based on one of its paragraphs. As Seton-Watson writes: "the final clause made the whole arrangement contingent upon its endorsement by constitutionally elected representatives of both Czechs and Slovaks at home after the war. "51 It was such a legal-constitutional argument that justified not only the Czechoslovak government's refusal to honour the clauses of the Pittsburgh document but also Masaryk's own repudiation of it as "a local understanding between American Czechs and Slovaks upon the policy they were prepared to advocate." 52 There was 111 - Jaroslav Sole, Slovensko v ceskej politike. Banska Bystrica: M.O. Enterprise, 1993, p. 43 . n Vavro Srobar went so far as to claim that the Czechoslovak Republic gave the Slovaks rights that went beyond the autonomy provisions of the Pittsburgh Pact. See Plevza, p. 75. 5 '- R.W. Seton-Watson, A History of Czechs and Slovaks. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965, p. 306. 52 Thomas G. Masaryk, The Making of a State. Memories and Observations /914-1918, An English version, arranged and prepared with an introduction 96 SLOVAKIA also a political reason according to Stolarik: "Masaryk rejected the Pittsburgh Agreement partly because all Slovaks did not support it. "53 Whatever the legal justifications, it was an error on the part of Masaryk to ignore the Pittsburgh Pact's political ramification and importance. Masaryk was not unaware of the meaning of both documents, and not just for the Slovaks in the United States. As Seton-Watson wrote shortly after the creation of Czecho-Slovakia: if the Pittsburgh document was in no sense a treaty, it may fairly be taken as representing the mental attitude and political aspiration of most Czechs and Slovaks in America and (what is more important) of the chief shaper of Czechoslovak policy at the supreme crisis in 1918. To this extent it has, not a legal, but a moral, value. Moreover it may safely be claimed that in the first days of the new Republic it coincided with the general feeling in the "historic lands", that the Slovaks were fully entitled to make their own terms of union. The course of events, however, inevitably gave a different tum to the question. 54 The failure to honour it, indeed the failure of the Czechoslovak government to heed the demands of the Slovak People's Party during the two decades of interwar Czechoslovakia to implement it, 55 was, in the end, paid at the price of the First Czechoslovak Republic. by Henry Wickham Steed. New York: Frederick A Stokes Co., 1927, p. 220 . Masaryk also wrote a letter to Andrej Hlinka declaring the pact a "falsum ;" the text of the letter is found in Joseph M. Kirschbaum, pp. 238-240. n Stolarik, p. 54. Italics in the original. " R.W. Seton-Watson, The New Slovakia . Prague: Fr. Borovy, 1924, p. 21. 51 This is examined in detail in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, pp. I 55- I 83. SLOVAKIA 97 Conclusion Both documents represent important milestones in the history of the Slovak search for self-determination in the twentieth century. Their chronology is important in this respect. The Pittsburgh Pact does indicate a retreat in political objectives when compared to those proposed in the Cleveland Agreement. But it also represents a willingness on the part of the Slovaks to accept autonomy if historical and international conditions made only that option possible; what was important was to have an opportunity to leave Hungary and proceed with national development. If the Cleveland Agreement was repudiated, it also served notice of an alternative. The drive to federalization in 1968 came as a result of the experience with autonomy, from the failure to implement it in 1918- I938 to the experience of its implementation in 1938-1939 and 1945-1968. Slovak independence in 1993 was achieved as a result of the experience with the federal system since 1968. Ultimately, both documents succumbed to the Czech agenda in Czechoslovakia and its failure to accommodate properly and adequately their objectives, thus making Slovak independence the only option left. Put another way: If neither document was acceptable, then neither was what they had in common, a state of the Czechs and Slovaks. In this sense, these two documents were also precursors of Slovak independence.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Cleveland and Pittsburgh Documents Description An account of the resource Stanislav J. Kirschbaum Slovakia, Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998 pp. 81-97 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kirschbaum, Stanislav J., 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 SNK https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/6e729b4ce6b09bc6074d5be831d93e6a.pdf 7070c82f3b46098fb3ada5a17d8baf87 PDF Text Text 98 SLOVAKIA Une oraison de messe: Monument culture) ., europeen Stefan Polakovic Une oraison de messe: Monument culture/? Et de /'Europe? Eh, oui! Seulement pour le comprendre, nous devons descendre dans les entrailles memes de l'histoire de l'Europe. Avant de pouvoir qualifier un phenomene d'europeen, il nous faut savoir ce que nous entendons par "Europe". Et l'on ne comprendra rien a l'Europe, tant qu' on ne saura rien sur ses origines et sa formation. Elements constitutifs de /'Europe 11 fut un temps ou cette Europe que nous connaissons a l'heure actuelle n'existait pas. C'est a Charlemagne que nous devons son existence. A partir du V-eme siecle, apres la destruction de l'Europe Romaine par les tribus germaniques, il n'y eut plus qu'un tas de debris administratifs, juridiques et sociaux. C'est precisement a ce moment la que commence l'ouvre grandiose de Charlemagne pour reconstruire et fonder une nouvelle Europe. �SLOVAKIA 99 Dans une Europe ou regnait un desordre general, il introduisit l'ordre avant tout, en creant un nouveau systeme d'organization politique connu comme feodal qui dura pendant mil ans. Cet ordre s'appuyait sur le principe que le roi etat le seul proprietaire de toutes les terres. Pendant la royaute il y avait une noblesse superieure a laquelle le roi concedait l'usage des terres en fief (du latin: feudum, d'ou: feodal). Plus bas se trouvait la noblesse inferieure, les habitants des villes (artisans, marchands et bourgeois) et encore plus en dessous au bas de la pyramide politique, se trouvaient les paysans (90% de la population). A vec le systeme feodal nacquit en Europe la sfirete juridique, !'administration de la justice et, par consequent, la rennaissance ·de la vie economique. Grace au systeme feodal I'Europe a pu se relever du desastre general. Par la fondation d'une nouvelle politique, Charlemagne contribua ace que l'Europe se retrouve. L'introduction des ecoles constitua un autre element qui favorisa la naissance de I'Europe. Pour commencer, il ordonna l'ouverture d'ecoles gratuites dans les cathedrales, monasteres et paroisses, destinees avant tout a la formation des foncionnaires d'Etat. Sur !'initiative de Charlemagne, prenant probablement exemple sur l' Academie de Bizance, fut creee l"'Accademia Palatina", qui fut, posterieurement, d'une enorme importance pour !'evolution et la formation de l'Europe, car en peu de temps les Ecoles Superieures se sont transformees en Universites. Sans universites, l'Europe ne serait ce qu 'elle est. L'Europe doit aux universites son developpement scientifique, les progres technologiques et economiques et, surtout, !'evolution politique. En effet, c'est grace aux universites que les peuples europeens ont commence a envisager, plus tard, une reforme du systeme feodal pour le remplacer, a partir de la Revolution Fran~aise, par un systeme democratique. Systeme �100 SLOVAKIA democratique qui fut implante pour la premiere fois aux EtatsU nis en 1776, seize ans avant la Revolution Fran~aise. De plus, Charlemagne encouragea les arts en general: architecture, peinture, sculpture. Lors de ses voyages en Italie il admira ses basiliques et ses eglises. Grace a son appui surgit ce que nous connaissons comme rennaissance artistique carolingienne. 11 voulut voir la floraison des arts dans son empire. 11 fit construire la "CAPELLA PALATINA" a Aix-la-Chapelle, qui est une imitation de la Basilique de Saint Vital a Ravenne. Sous Charlemagne, les architectes commencerent a remplacer dans leurs constructions le bois par la pierre. On vit l 'Europe entiere se couvrir de cathedrales de style roman. En peu de temps le style roman arriva jusqu'au centre de l'Europe grace aux moines benedictins. En effet, on trouve en Slovaquie, centre geographique de l'Europe des eglises romanes contruites en pierre peu apres la mort de Charlemagne. Une fois commence, l'art europeen ne connut pas d'interruption jusqu'a nos jours. L'art europeen occupe une place predominante dans l'histoire de l'art. Autre phenomene, sans lequel la constitution de l'Europe n'aurait pu se produire, ce sont ses nations et leurs cultures qui ont surgi a l'abri du feodalisme, l'education, les arts et la religion chretienne. Par "nation" je n'entends pas ici "Etat-nation", mais les communautes spirituelles des gens unis principalement par les liens d'une langue, d'une culture et d'une histoire communes, merne si elles n'ont pas un Etat propre (i. e.: les Kurdes). Comme dit Ernest Renan, lors de sa conference prononcee a la Sorbonne en 1880, a cause "des complications de l'histoire". Pour la meme raison, pendant des siecles, plusieurs nations europeennes n 'ont pu reconstituer leurs propres Etats apres les avoir perdus, comme par exemple les Slovaques, Croates, Slovenes, Lituaniens, Lettons, Estoniens, Finlandais, etc. �SLOVAKIA 101 La nation se developpe a partir d'une tribu lorsque les conditions sont favorables. La condition fondamentale est la possesion d'un territoire ou elle pourra deployer sa richesse spirituelle et fortifier son unite ontologique en toute tranquillite. En l'etat nomade, aucune nation ne put se constituer ni se consolider, comme nous le confirme l'auteur gitan espagnol Juan Ramirez Heredia dans son livre "Nosotros, los Gitanos", en decrivant la tragedie de son peuple: "Pelerins perpetuels, exiles volontaires, fugitifs toujours en route, marchant sans reJXJs depuis des siecles sans decider ou s' etablir'. Beaucoup de tribuns et nations embryonnaires de souche celtique, germanique et slave ont disparu, absorbees par des cultures superieures. Certains processus ethnogenetiques ont pu reussir avec une cartaine facilite grace au fait qu'ils se developpaient a l'abri d'un Etat, tandis que d'autres, etant donne les "complications de l'histoire" mentionnees plus haut, croissaient plus lentement. Quoiqu ' il en fut, en Europe existent actuellement les nations suivantes: Du groupe Celtique: Bretons, Irlandais, Gallois et Ecossais; Du groupe Latin: Italiens, Fran~ais, Espagnols, Catalans, Portugais, Roumains et Rhetoromans (en Suisse); Du groupe Germanique: Allemands, Suedois, Norvegiens, Danois, Hollandais, Flamands et Anglais; Du groupe Slave: Russes, Bielorusses, Ukrainiens, Bulgares, Serbes, Croates, Slovenes, Slovaques, Tcheques, Polonais, Macedoniens et Lusitiens (en Allemagne). D'origine non indo-europeenne nous avons les Magyars, Lituaniens, Estoniens, Lettons, Finlandais et Basques. �102 SLOVAKIA Demierement, certaines de ces nations ont pu reconstruire leur ancien Etat. Entin, la religion chretienne fait partie des elements constitutifs de !'Europe. Le christianisme s 'epanouit non seulement grace a la force de la parole, mais avant tout, grace a la force de l'exemple. Suivant l'exemple de la population des anciennes provinces romaines, les tribus germaniques qui s'y infiltrerent ont accepte le bapteme et ont change leurs coutumes. ll est vrai que le changement fut lent, mais grace a ce changement nous assistons, deja au IX-eme siecle, a la creation d'ouvres d'art, de peuples autrefois barbares, inspirees par la doctrine chretienne. L'esprit du christianisme a marque profondement tous les peuples europeens. La vie du peuple commun (la grande majorite etaient des paysans) s'est adaptee en general aux commandements de la morale chretienne. Nous avons comme preuve les exemples de saintete et les traditions, chansons, legendes et contes populaires de toutes les nations europeennes. Apres la chute de !'Empire Romain il y avait en Europe une seule organisation qui resista a la debacle generale et ce fut celle de l'Eglise. Les eveques etaient la seule autorite qui maintenait un peu d' ordre juridique en appliquant le droit canon et le droit romain. En dehors de cela, l'Eglise encourageait la fondation de monasteres qui se sont transformes en centres d'aide et de civilisation. Par exemple celui de MARMOUTIER-SUR-LOIRE, en France, qui a ere fonde en 375. Plus tard, au VI-eme siecle, Saint Benoit introduisit une regle commune a tous les monasteres. Les monasteres benedictins ont contribue a la bonne marche de la vie economique et sociale, et de par leur oeuvre, l 'heridite de Rome fut sauvee. �SLOVAKIA 103 Les bibliotheques des grands couvents benedictins ont transmis a l 'Europe des ouvres litteraires qui autrement auraient disparu. 11 est vrai qu' au temps ou nacquit Charlemagne, les territoires des anciennes provinces romaines etaient deja christianisees. Sa propre tribu, les Francs, suivant l'exemple de leur roi Clovis (496), accepta le christianisme. Mais au temps de Charlemagne il fallait christianiser la Germanie, ou etaient installees plusieurs tribus germaniques, parmi lesquelles la plus puissante etait celle des Saxons. Et derriere, les tribus germaniques se trouvaient les tribus slaves qui ont occupe les territoires du Nord de l'Europe, derriere la ligne qui commence a l'embourchure de l'Elbe pour aboutir, en passant par Trieste, aux Balkans. Un peu d'histoire des Slovaques Parmi ces tribus slaves, se trouvaient les ancetres des Slovaques d'aujourd'hui. C'est parmi eux que surgit l'oraison que nous avons qualifiee de "monument culturel europeen". A partir du IV-eme siecle, les anciens Slovaques penetrerent dans le Bassin du Danube et occuperent les territoires sur le Danube, la Morava, V ah, Nitra, Hron et Tisa. Deux cents ans apres, ils ont ete subjugues par les A vars qui, venant des steppes russes, se sont infiltres dans le Bassin du Danube (576). Par suite de cette occupation, les ancetres des Slovaques ont perdu contact avec les tribus slaves du Nord. Cette separation geographique, ajoutee a la difference de langue et de moeurs (les A vars etaient des nomades qui s' adonnaient au pillage des territoires allemands tandis que les anciens Slovaques etaient des agriculteurs etablis et des artisans) contribuait a la formation d'un refus et d'une conscience de differences qui se manifestait, �104 SLOVAKIA d'apres le chroniqueur franc Fredegaire, par de continuelles rebellions contre les Avars. En 624, au moment d'une de ces rebellions, arriva en ces territoires un marchand franc nomme Samo qui se mit a la tete des Slaves. Il battit les A vars et organisa le premier Etat protoslovaque dans ces regions. Sous le regne du roi Samo la population connut trente ans de paix, ce qui contribua a la consolidation d'une conscience ethnique embryonnaire. Nous en trouvons des traces dans l 'oraison mentionnee. En 796, Charlemagne se decida aen terminer avec les A vars. Avec l' aide des anciens Slovaques, Charlemagne detruisit l' empire primitif des A vars, de sorte que ce peuple disparut de l'histoire de !'Europe. Le contact de Charlemagne avec les anciens Slovaques est d' un symbolisme tres profond pour l'histoire de l'Europe car, grace acette rencontre, les nations slaves ont commence a entrer dans l'histoire de l'Europe. Les protagonistes de cet evement historique etaient les anciens Slovaques. Les premiers et les seuls d'entre les Slaves a avoir connu Charlemagne de son vivant. Les Slovaques en sont restes tres impressionnes. La preuve en est qu'ils ont commence autiliser le nom propre de Charlemagne "Karl" pour designer le roi (kni/). Cette designation slovaque fut plus tard acceptee par les autres nations slaves (Tcheques et Polonais) voisines des Slovaques et les Magyars (kinily) l'adopterent egalement apres !'occupation des territoires slovaques. C'est la deuxieme fois, apres "Caesar", que le nom propre d'un commandant militaire devient titre pour l'autorite supreme de l'Etat. La presence de Charlemagne sur les frontieres slovaques se fit sentir sous deux aspects: premierement, fidele a sa conception d'Etat, Charlemagne se considerait souverain feodal des territoires slovaques apres la defaite des A vars. Deuxiemement, comme proprietaire feodal preoccupe par la christianisation de �SLOVAKIA 105 ses terres, en 798 il donna l'ordre personnel a l'archeveque de Salzbourg d'envoyer des missionnaires dans les regions recemment annexees a son Empire ("lpse imperator praecepit Amoni archiepiscoJXJ pergere in partes Sclavomm"). Evidemment, Charlemagne ne savait pas que le christianisme avait ete preche parmi les anciens Slovaques par les missions italienne, irlandaise et anglo-saxonne. C'est ainsi qu'apres d'autres missionnaires, les territoires des anciens Slovaques ont ete evangelises par des moines bavarois avec un tel succes que, probablement deja en 824 fut consacree, par l'archeveque de Salzbourg, la premiere eglise batie en pierres, a Nitra siege du prince slovaque Pribina. La presence des missionnaires bavarois suscitait chez la noblesse slovaque une mefiance politique, parce qu'ils essayaient de renforcer leurs pretensions politiques sur les terres ou ils prechaient l 'Evangile. 11 est fort probable egalement, que la noblesse slovaque ait res:u des nouvelles sur la brutalite germanique envers les Slaves du Nord. D'autant plus que la noblesse ne put oublier la domination avare et craignait de tomber a nouveau sous la souverainete etrangere. C'est probablement pour cela qu'un autre prince slovaque, Mojmfr, chassa Pribine de Nitra, le considerant germanophile (sa femme etait allemande). Mojmfr unifia les deux principautes slovaques en un seul etat connu dans l'histoire comme "Grande Moravie". Ces changements deplurent au roi bavarois, Ludwig (neveu de Charlemagne) et en 846 il penetra dans les territoires slovaques, deposa Mojmfr et installa Rastislav. Mais Rastislav, a son tour, ne reconnaissait pas la souverainete feodale de Ludwig. C'est la raison pour laquelle il s' adressa a l 'empereur bizantin Michel III en le priant de lui envoyer des missionnaires qui connussent la langue du peuple (861). 11 y avait a Bizance, en ce temps la, deux freres: �106 SLOVAKIA Constantin et Methode, qui dominaient la langue paleoslave. Ils se rendirent en 863 en territoire slovaque. Pour reussir dans cette mission, Constantin crea !'alphabet dit 'glagolique', adapte aux sons de la langue slave a laquelle ils traduisirent les textes fondamentaux de la Bible. En s'installant au royaume de Rastislav, ils constaterent que les messes etaient deja celebrees en latin d' apres la liturgie romaine. Ils se sont decide a maintenir la liturgie romaine mais, en meme temps ils traduisirent les textes remains (latins) a la langue du peuple. Et nous voici en presence de l'une de ces oraisons de messe dont nous avons dit qu'elle est un "monument culturel europeen". "Vingtieme oraison de Kiev' On la nomme "vingtieme" parce qu'elle se trouve sur la vingtieme feuille de la collection connue comme "Collection de Kiev" (en Ukraine). Voici le texte paleoslave de cette oraison: "Cesarstve nasemu, Gospodi, milostjo Tvojejo prizri. I ne otdai nasego tuiim I ne obrati nas v plen narodom poganskym". En fran~ais: "Veillez, Seigneur, sur notre royaume avec Votre grace. Et ne livrez pas ce qui est notre aux etrangers et ne nous convertissez pas en proie des nations pa·iennes". Nous avons deja dit que les anciens Slovaques recevaient le christianisme des le VII-eme siecle et, par consequent, il y eut probablement parmi les pretres slovaques un grand nombre d'entre aux qui dominait bien le latin. En effet, avant sa mort, �SLOVAKIA 107 Saint Methode dit de Saint Gorazd, son disciple slovaque qu "'il est bien instruit dans Jes livres latins". En examinant le texte, les philologues slovaques ont trouve le texte latin, correspondant a toutes les oraisons de la Collection Kiev, sauf celui de la vingtieme oraison. Ils en sont restes perplexes. Mais a tort, car le sujet de cette oraison fait reference aux besoins particuliers du royaume slovaque. 11 est done bien naturel qu' ils n 'aient pas trouve le texte dans les missels de l'Eglise universelle car nous savons que chaque pays a ses propres oraisons de messe. La "vingtieme" oraison est, d'apres son contenu, une oraison "propre" au royaume slovaque. Nous pouvons legitimement nous demander quand a-t-elle ete ecrite. Sans encourir en erreur, nous pouvons en toute quietude affirmer qu'elle a ete ecrite avant l'arrivee de Saint Cyrille et de Saint Methode car, peu apres leur arrivee, elle fut traduite au paleoslovaque. Je dis "paleoslovaque" parce que, d'apres les philologues, dans le texte on trouve deja des elements qui la distinguent de la langue paleoslave. Et c 'est bien comprehensible car les anciens Slovaques se trouverent isoles des Slaves du Nord pendant plus de trois siecles (a cause des Avars et egalement a cause du royaume de Samo). D'autre part, elle a pu etre ecrite apres la formation de la Principaute slovaque (836) ou, au plus tard, apres la deposition de Mojmir par Ludwig (846). L'auteur de l'oraison a du etre membre de la haute noblesse slovaque car il semble tres bien verse en questions politiques. Comme enfant il a du ecouter ses parents parler des cruautes des Avars et par sa propre experience il se rendait compte des velleites politiques du roi bavarois. L'auteur re~ut une tres bonne formation latine car il a parfaitement saisi la construction des oraisons de messe latine qui excellent par leur brievete, leur contenu condense, leur clarte des concepts et la cadence poetique. �108 SLOVAKIA De plus il devait avoir une position elevees dans la hierarchie latine en Slovaquie, qui seule pouvait autoriser l'usage public d'une oraison de messe. Le texte latin a du etre le suivant: "Regnum nostrum, Domine, gratia Tua respice. Et _ne tradas nostra alienis nee nos convertas in praedam JXJpulorum paganorum". A la premiere lecture, on s' aper~oit de la maturite politique de cette oraison car d'un cote elle fait allusion a la destitution du prince Mojmir (ne tradas nostra aliensis) et de l'autre elle fait allusion aux nouvelles sur l'apparition des avant-gardes Magyars sur la frontiere orientale du royaume (nee nos convertas in praedam JXJpulorum paganorum). Faisant reference a la demiere partie de l' oraison, le philologue slovaque Eugen Pauliny ecrit que "derriere cette oraison on entend le bruit des sabots de envahisseurs magyars". Ou'y-a-t-il d'Europeen dans cette oraison? Avant tout, il nous faut rappeler que l'Europe ne serait ce qu 'elle est sans ses nations qui sont toutes ses enfants, nes a I' abri de sa formation. Parmi celles-ci, la nation slovaque etait presente quand Charlemagne posait les fondations de !'Europe, meme si les Slovaques sont aujourd'hui peu connus pour leur histoire politique mouvementee. La nation slovaque a brille trop peu de temps et s 'etait eclipsee pendant mil ans. L'Europe ne peut nier !'existence d'aucune de ses nations sans se trahir. C'est pour cela qu'elle a reconu !'existence de la nation slovaque en acceptant la Republique Slovaque comme un de ses members. Une des lumieres qui nous parvient de tres loin et qui temoigne du sens europeen des Slovaques, c'est precisement la vingtieme oraison de Kiev. �SLOVAKIA 109 Les anciens Slovaques consideraient leur pays comme une propriete inalienable. C'est un point de vue commun a toutes les nations europeennes. Ils etaient preoccupes de voir leur pays assujetti anouveau comme au temps des A vars. Et voici que les Francs veulent s'emparer de leurs terres au titre de la divulgation de l'Evangile! Et, sur la frontiere orientale se trouvait apres les Avars, un autre peuple mongolien: les Magyars! En effet, l'oraison est une expression d'angoisse d'une communaute nationale, menacee de deux cotes, qui n'aspire a autre chose qu'a vivre en paix avec tous. C'est pour ces raisons que l 'oraison est dirigee a Dieu, pour implorer sa protection. Elle n'invoque pas les foudres divines pour aneantir les ennemis, ce que prouve que l'esprit de christianisme etait deja bien enracine parmi les Slovaques. Sous un autre aspect, cette oraison est un resume d'un traite embryonnaire des droits ethniques. En effet, nous pouvons y lire, sans exagerer, le droit a la terre propre, le droit a la liberte, le droit a la vie et le droit a l'autodetermination. Il s'agit des valeurs humaines "to which the Jaws of nature and of nature's God entide them" comme l'ont exprime les fondateurs des Etats-Unis, le 4 Juillet 1776, presque mil ans apres. L' oraison anticipe ce qu' a Helsinki I'Europe reconna1tra comme droits ethniques legitimes. Il s' agit, en effet, du premier document europeen qui devance les siecles a venir de l'histoire de l'Europe: !'existence des communautes nationales conscientes de leurs droits. Il y a un autre aspect tres important: cette oraison exprime, pour la premiere fois dans l'histoire de l'Europe, la conscience nationale d ' un groupe ethnique. Mais il l'exprime comme quelque chose de pur, d'humain et de noble. En effet, l'aspect bumain du national devrait devenir un tresor commun a toutes les nations pour eviter la deformation du national et pour etablir une base ferme pour cohabitation pacifique des peuples. �110 SLOVAKIA Ou'y-a-t-il de culture/? Tous les grands auteurs qui se sont occupes du phenomene "nation" sont unanimes: la culture est une forme de spiritualite. A son tour, la spiritualite est une forme de culture; quelque chose d ' inseparable de l'homme concret. C'est pour cela que la culture d 'un people pauvre qui vit sa spiritualite est superieure a celle d 'un people riche drape dans des valeurs materielles. Et comme "la culture cache beaucoup plus que ce qu' elle reveJe" (Edward T. Hall), son secret indique que sa derniere raison d'etre est d'une nature transcendante. Probablement c'est a cet aspect que fait allusion Aleksandr Soljeni tsyne lorsqu 'il dit, a l 'occasion du Prix Nobel, que Jes nations et Jeurs cultures sont Jes differents visages de Dieu. L 'Europe est le resultat de la culture de ses nations. La beaute d' un pre est le resultat de la multiplicite des aspeces de fleurs. S' il n'y avait au monde qu ' un seul type de fleurs, le monde nous paraitrait tres pauvre en beaute. La beaute de l'Europe est due ala multiplicite de cultures qui surgirent du meme sol spirituel duquel elles recevaient leur nourriture. Dans une roseraie il y a beaucoup de rosiers qui tous produisent des roses, mais les roses different par leurs parfums. La multiplicite des cultures europeennes represente la richesse spirituelle de l'Europe car chaque culture nationale contient quelque chose de propre, ce qui est la consequence de son individualite. L'europeite de cultures se doit a ce qu 'elles sont enracinees dans les fondements de l 'Europe. La beaute humaine de cette oraison de messe depasse les chroniques germaniques d'une maniere extraordinaire. Elle contient le desir de justice comme fondement de la coexistence pacifique des peoples sans en blesser aucun. Apres plus de mil ans, un ecrivain slovaque (Vladimir Mimic) en interpretant le sens de l'histoire des Slovaques a pu �SLOVAKIA 111 dire que "etre Slovaque, cela signifie etre frere de tous Jes hommes, ce qui constitue le noble heritage de notre histoire". La culture d'un peuple depend aussi de la richesse de sa litterature. La vingtieme oraison de messe represente un des monuments litteraires slovaques du IX-eme siecle, parce qu'elle est ecrite dans une langue qui etait non seulement une langue liturgique mais, par l'oeuvre de Saint Cyrille et de Saint Methode, elle s' est convertie en langue litteraire de la Grande Moravie, qui etait aussi employee dans la jurisprudence et dans !'administration publique. Surles qualites grammaticales de cette langue, l 'eminent philologue slovaque Eugen Pauliny ecrivit: "il s' agissait d' une Jangue polie et culti vee. La richesse des formes de construction grammaticales, J'elaboration de la syntaxe, la ch11te et la variete du tresor verbal, placent la Jangue paleoslovaque a la hauteur des Jangues culturelles de ce temps-la: le grec et le Jatin". C' est pour ces raison que la vingtieme oraison de la Collection de Kiev appartient au tresor spirituel de !'Europe. Elle ne peut s' en desinteresser. L'histoire postirieure des Slovaques En 907, lors de la bataille de Bratislava (Capitale contemporaine de la Slovaquie) sous une attaque commune des Francs et des Magyars, le royaume de la Grande Mora vie s' est ecroule. On suppose que la grande majorite de la noblesse a perdu la vie sur le champ de bataille. Les territoires slovaques ont ete partiellement occupes par les Magyars et, pendant mil ans, la Slovaquie a fait partie du royaume connu sous le nom de HONGRIE. Les Slovaques ont perdu leur royaume, mais ils n'ont pas perdu leur vie grace aune circonstance providentielle. �112 SLOVAKIA Ernest Renan, dans sa conference de 1880, se demandait comment la "couronne de Saint Etienne (le premier roi hongrois) ne put assimiler Jes Slovaques" (ii parlait des Slaves, parce qu'apres l'an 1201 un autre peuple slave - le croate - faisait partie de la Hongrie). La raison en est tres simple. Le roi n 'a pas pu introduire la langue slovaque comme langue officielle du royaume, malgre ses valeurs litteraires et administratives, tout simplement parce qu'il s'agissait de la langue d' un peuple subjugue. Et ii ne pu recourir a la langue magyar parce qu 'elle n 'existait pas. Les Magyars etaient des nomades qui ont ete ecrasees en 955 sur la Lech par l'Empereur Otto I-er. Ce n 'est qu ' apres cette defaite qu' ils deciderent de s 'etablir et d' abandonner le pillage. Par consequent, Saint Etiene introduisit en Hongrie le latin comme langue officielle, ce qui a dure jusqu'en 1840. A cause de cette mesure aussi bien la culture slovaque que celle des Magyars s 'est limitee a la culture populaire. En effet, il n'y a pas eu d'oeuvres litteraires slovaques ou magyares pendant des ciecles. Elles n'apparurent qu'a la fin du XVIII-eme siecle. II y a des preuves irrefutables permettant d'affirmer que les Magyars re~urent leur civilisation des anciens Slovaques. Bien evidement, les historiens magyars essayent de les minimiser. C'est par les Slovaques que les Magyars ont appris a cultiver la terre. Les termes magyars ayant trait a }'agriculture sont d' origine slovaque. Les slovaques nobles qui survecurent au desastre ont contribue a l 'organisation de l'Etat. En effet, les noms des foncionnaires de la cour royale sont d'origine slovaque (roi = kral - kiraly, prefet = span - ispan; cour = dvor - udvar, courtisan = dvomik - udvamok). II y a egalement des preuves demontrant que l' ordre juridique de la Grande Moravie fut transplante en Hongrie. En effet, juge en magyar se dit kenez du mot slovaque knaz. Les �SLOVAKIA 113 Magyars disaient, en ce temps la, qu'ils iraient "ad pravdam" lorsqu 'ils prenaient la decision de s 'adresser au tribunal pour regler leurs droits. "Pravda" signifie en slovaque "droit". La terminologie de la religion est aussi d' origine slovaque (bapteme =krstit' - keresztelni; pa'ien =pohan - pogany, enfer =peklo - pokol; frere = brat - banit). Au debut les Magyars n'avaient pas de terme magyar pour la "grace" divine, ils utilisaient le mot slovaque "milost"'. Naturellement, la science magyare contemporaine fait !'impossible pour effacer cette dependance culturelle des anciens Slovaques. Pendant des siecles, les deux communautes nationales cohabitaient en paix, contribuant par leur travail et leur sang au progres de la Hongrie. Le changement se produisit a un moment historique de !'Europe lorsque !es nations se sont reveillees et ont pris conscience de leurs identites differentes les unes des autres. Des le XVII-eme siecle, nous assistons en Europe a un phenomene generalise. Dans les Etats ou, pendant des siecles, cohabitaient deux ou trois nations, la nation qui detenait le pouvoir politique commern;a a faire pression pour faire dispara1tre les langues qui n'etaient pas la sienne. Ce fut aussi le cas de la Hongrie. Les Magyars decha1nerent une persecution contre tout ce qui etait slovaque. En 1872, pour eviler la formation de I'intelligentsia, ils fermerent les dernieres ecoles de l'enseignement secondaire et, plus tard, les ecoles furent magyarisees. La revolution de 1918 a sauve les Slovaques de la mort ethnique. En 1918, les Slovaques s'unirent aux Tcheques pour former un Etat commun. Mais le mot Tcheco-Slovaquie (c'etait le nom du nouvel Etat dans le Traite de Versailles) fut changee en "Tchecoslovaquie" par les Tcheques qui lancerent la theorie selon laquelle les Slovaques n 'etaient qu 'une tribu tcheque. �I 14 SLOVAKIA Ni Masaryk, ni Benes (President et Ministre des Affaires Etrangeres) ne se rendaient compte qu'une nation n'est pas un troupeau de brebis qu'ont peut envoyer dans n'importe quel bercail. 11 est vrai que les Slovaques et les Tcheques sont deux nations voisines, mais ils n'avaient jamais vecu dans le meme Etat. Leur histoire s'est deroulee d'une maniere differente, leurs langues et leurs cultures populaires ont des caracteristiques differentes et, par consequent, leurs personnalites ethniques sont differentes. Les Tcheques ont fait leur possible pendant soixante-dix ans pour tchequiser les Slovaques. La resistance slovaque fut telle qu'ils n'y reussirent pas. Ils firent, cependant, grand tort a la conscience d'identite nationale slovaque. A nouveau, la revolution de 1989 sauva les Slovaques d'un embrassement suffoquant du point de vue national, politique et economique. Le I-er Janvier 1993 apparut, sur la carte geographique de !'Europe, la Republique slovaque desireuse de participer a la vie economique, politique et culturelle de !'Europe, sans intermediaires. Bibliographie Bartek, Henrich: Les debuts du christianisme chez Jes Slovaques (en slovaque). Slobodne Slovensko, Vol. X, 5. Bro, Bertrand: La beaute sauvera le monde, Cerf, Paris, 1990. Carrere d'Encausse, Helene: La gloire des nations, Fayard, Paris, 1990. The Celts, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Chadwick, Nora: England, 1970. �SLOVAKIA Dejiny Slovenska: Delort, Robert: Hall, Edward T.: Herrn, Gerhard: Heer, Friedrich: Krajcovic, Rudolf: Lacko, Michal: Martini, Alberto: Montanelli, lndro: Pauliny, Eugen: Ratkos, Peter: Simons, Gerald: Veiter, Theodor: 115 L'histoire de la Slovaquie, Vol. I, Bratislava, 1986. LeMoyen-Age, Edita, Lausanne, 1972. The Silent Language, Anchor, New York, 1973. Die Kellen, Econ Verlag, Diisseldorf, 1975. Das heilige romische Reich, Heyne Verlag, Miinchen, 1967. Le temoignage de l'histoire sur le Slovaque, Matica slovenska, Martin, 1977 (en slovaque ). Saint Cyrill and Methodius, Slovensky ustav, Rome 1969. Le Moyen-Age Europeen, Fabbri, Milano, 1963. Storia d'Italia, Rizzoli, Milano, 1959. La litterature et la langue culturelle de la Grande Mora vie, SA V, Bratislava, 1964 (en slovaque). Les sources de l'histoire de la Grande Moravie, SAY, Bratislava, 1961 (en slovaque). Orfgenes de Europa , Time-Life Int. , Amsterdam, 1968. Nationalitiittenfrage und Volksgroppenrecht, Braumiiller, Vienne, 1984. �� 98 SLOVAKIA Une oraison de messe: Monument culture) ., europeen Stefan Polakovic Une oraison de messe: Monument culture/? Et de /'Europe? Eh, oui! Seulement pour le comprendre, nous devons descendre dans les entrailles memes de l'histoire de l'Europe. Avant de pouvoir qualifier un phenomene d'europeen, il nous faut savoir ce que nous entendons par "Europe". Et l'on ne comprendra rien a l'Europe, tant qu' on ne saura rien sur ses origines et sa formation. Elements constitutifs de /'Europe 11 fut un temps ou cette Europe que nous connaissons a l'heure actuelle n'existait pas. C'est a Charlemagne que nous devons son existence. A partir du V-eme siecle, apres la destruction de l'Europe Romaine par les tribus germaniques, il n'y eut plus qu'un tas de debris administratifs, juridiques et sociaux. C'est precisement a ce moment la que commence l'ouvre grandiose de Charlemagne pour reconstruire et fonder une nouvelle Europe. �SLOVAKIA 99 Dans une Europe ou regnait un desordre general, il introduisit l'ordre avant tout, en creant un nouveau systeme d'organization politique connu comme feodal qui dura pendant mil ans. Cet ordre s'appuyait sur le principe que le roi etat le seul proprietaire de toutes les terres. Pendant la royaute il y avait une noblesse superieure a laquelle le roi concedait l'usage des terres en fief (du latin: feudum, d'ou: feodal). Plus bas se trouvait la noblesse inferieure, les habitants des villes (artisans, marchands et bourgeois) et encore plus en dessous au bas de la pyramide politique, se trouvaient les paysans (90% de la population). A vec le systeme feodal nacquit en Europe la sfirete juridique, !'administration de la justice et, par consequent, la rennaissance ·de la vie economique. Grace au systeme feodal I'Europe a pu se relever du desastre general. Par la fondation d'une nouvelle politique, Charlemagne contribua ace que l'Europe se retrouve. L'introduction des ecoles constitua un autre element qui favorisa la naissance de I'Europe. Pour commencer, il ordonna l'ouverture d'ecoles gratuites dans les cathedrales, monasteres et paroisses, destinees avant tout a la formation des foncionnaires d'Etat. Sur !'initiative de Charlemagne, prenant probablement exemple sur l' Academie de Bizance, fut creee l"'Accademia Palatina", qui fut, posterieurement, d'une enorme importance pour !'evolution et la formation de l'Europe, car en peu de temps les Ecoles Superieures se sont transformees en Universites. Sans universites, l'Europe ne serait ce qu 'elle est. L'Europe doit aux universites son developpement scientifique, les progres technologiques et economiques et, surtout, !'evolution politique. En effet, c'est grace aux universites que les peuples europeens ont commence a envisager, plus tard, une reforme du systeme feodal pour le remplacer, a partir de la Revolution Fran~aise, par un systeme democratique. Systeme �100 SLOVAKIA democratique qui fut implante pour la premiere fois aux EtatsU nis en 1776, seize ans avant la Revolution Fran~aise. De plus, Charlemagne encouragea les arts en general: architecture, peinture, sculpture. Lors de ses voyages en Italie il admira ses basiliques et ses eglises. Grace a son appui surgit ce que nous connaissons comme rennaissance artistique carolingienne. 11 voulut voir la floraison des arts dans son empire. 11 fit construire la "CAPELLA PALATINA" a Aix-la-Chapelle, qui est une imitation de la Basilique de Saint Vital a Ravenne. Sous Charlemagne, les architectes commencerent a remplacer dans leurs constructions le bois par la pierre. On vit l 'Europe entiere se couvrir de cathedrales de style roman. En peu de temps le style roman arriva jusqu'au centre de l'Europe grace aux moines benedictins. En effet, on trouve en Slovaquie, centre geographique de l'Europe des eglises romanes contruites en pierre peu apres la mort de Charlemagne. Une fois commence, l'art europeen ne connut pas d'interruption jusqu'a nos jours. L'art europeen occupe une place predominante dans l'histoire de l'art. Autre phenomene, sans lequel la constitution de l'Europe n'aurait pu se produire, ce sont ses nations et leurs cultures qui ont surgi a l'abri du feodalisme, l'education, les arts et la religion chretienne. Par "nation" je n'entends pas ici "Etat-nation", mais les communautes spirituelles des gens unis principalement par les liens d'une langue, d'une culture et d'une histoire communes, merne si elles n'ont pas un Etat propre (i. e.: les Kurdes). Comme dit Ernest Renan, lors de sa conference prononcee a la Sorbonne en 1880, a cause "des complications de l'histoire". Pour la meme raison, pendant des siecles, plusieurs nations europeennes n 'ont pu reconstituer leurs propres Etats apres les avoir perdus, comme par exemple les Slovaques, Croates, Slovenes, Lituaniens, Lettons, Estoniens, Finlandais, etc. �SLOVAKIA 101 La nation se developpe a partir d'une tribu lorsque les conditions sont favorables. La condition fondamentale est la possesion d'un territoire ou elle pourra deployer sa richesse spirituelle et fortifier son unite ontologique en toute tranquillite. En l'etat nomade, aucune nation ne put se constituer ni se consolider, comme nous le confirme l'auteur gitan espagnol Juan Ramirez Heredia dans son livre "Nosotros, los Gitanos", en decrivant la tragedie de son peuple: "Pelerins perpetuels, exiles volontaires, fugitifs toujours en route, marchant sans reJXJs depuis des siecles sans decider ou s' etablir'. Beaucoup de tribuns et nations embryonnaires de souche celtique, germanique et slave ont disparu, absorbees par des cultures superieures. Certains processus ethnogenetiques ont pu reussir avec une cartaine facilite grace au fait qu'ils se developpaient a l'abri d'un Etat, tandis que d'autres, etant donne les "complications de l'histoire" mentionnees plus haut, croissaient plus lentement. Quoiqu ' il en fut, en Europe existent actuellement les nations suivantes: Du groupe Celtique: Bretons, Irlandais, Gallois et Ecossais; Du groupe Latin: Italiens, Fran~ais, Espagnols, Catalans, Portugais, Roumains et Rhetoromans (en Suisse); Du groupe Germanique: Allemands, Suedois, Norvegiens, Danois, Hollandais, Flamands et Anglais; Du groupe Slave: Russes, Bielorusses, Ukrainiens, Bulgares, Serbes, Croates, Slovenes, Slovaques, Tcheques, Polonais, Macedoniens et Lusitiens (en Allemagne). D'origine non indo-europeenne nous avons les Magyars, Lituaniens, Estoniens, Lettons, Finlandais et Basques. �102 SLOVAKIA Demierement, certaines de ces nations ont pu reconstruire leur ancien Etat. Entin, la religion chretienne fait partie des elements constitutifs de !'Europe. Le christianisme s 'epanouit non seulement grace a la force de la parole, mais avant tout, grace a la force de l'exemple. Suivant l'exemple de la population des anciennes provinces romaines, les tribus germaniques qui s'y infiltrerent ont accepte le bapteme et ont change leurs coutumes. ll est vrai que le changement fut lent, mais grace a ce changement nous assistons, deja au IX-eme siecle, a la creation d'ouvres d'art, de peuples autrefois barbares, inspirees par la doctrine chretienne. L'esprit du christianisme a marque profondement tous les peuples europeens. La vie du peuple commun (la grande majorite etaient des paysans) s'est adaptee en general aux commandements de la morale chretienne. Nous avons comme preuve les exemples de saintete et les traditions, chansons, legendes et contes populaires de toutes les nations europeennes. Apres la chute de !'Empire Romain il y avait en Europe une seule organisation qui resista a la debacle generale et ce fut celle de l'Eglise. Les eveques etaient la seule autorite qui maintenait un peu d' ordre juridique en appliquant le droit canon et le droit romain. En dehors de cela, l'Eglise encourageait la fondation de monasteres qui se sont transformes en centres d'aide et de civilisation. Par exemple celui de MARMOUTIER-SUR-LOIRE, en France, qui a ere fonde en 375. Plus tard, au VI-eme siecle, Saint Benoit introduisit une regle commune a tous les monasteres. Les monasteres benedictins ont contribue a la bonne marche de la vie economique et sociale, et de par leur oeuvre, l 'heridite de Rome fut sauvee. �SLOVAKIA 103 Les bibliotheques des grands couvents benedictins ont transmis a l 'Europe des ouvres litteraires qui autrement auraient disparu. 11 est vrai qu' au temps ou nacquit Charlemagne, les territoires des anciennes provinces romaines etaient deja christianisees. Sa propre tribu, les Francs, suivant l'exemple de leur roi Clovis (496), accepta le christianisme. Mais au temps de Charlemagne il fallait christianiser la Germanie, ou etaient installees plusieurs tribus germaniques, parmi lesquelles la plus puissante etait celle des Saxons. Et derriere, les tribus germaniques se trouvaient les tribus slaves qui ont occupe les territoires du Nord de l'Europe, derriere la ligne qui commence a l'embourchure de l'Elbe pour aboutir, en passant par Trieste, aux Balkans. Un peu d'histoire des Slovaques Parmi ces tribus slaves, se trouvaient les ancetres des Slovaques d'aujourd'hui. C'est parmi eux que surgit l'oraison que nous avons qualifiee de "monument culturel europeen". A partir du IV-eme siecle, les anciens Slovaques penetrerent dans le Bassin du Danube et occuperent les territoires sur le Danube, la Morava, V ah, Nitra, Hron et Tisa. Deux cents ans apres, ils ont ete subjugues par les A vars qui, venant des steppes russes, se sont infiltres dans le Bassin du Danube (576). Par suite de cette occupation, les ancetres des Slovaques ont perdu contact avec les tribus slaves du Nord. Cette separation geographique, ajoutee a la difference de langue et de moeurs (les A vars etaient des nomades qui s' adonnaient au pillage des territoires allemands tandis que les anciens Slovaques etaient des agriculteurs etablis et des artisans) contribuait a la formation d'un refus et d'une conscience de differences qui se manifestait, �104 SLOVAKIA d'apres le chroniqueur franc Fredegaire, par de continuelles rebellions contre les Avars. En 624, au moment d'une de ces rebellions, arriva en ces territoires un marchand franc nomme Samo qui se mit a la tete des Slaves. Il battit les A vars et organisa le premier Etat protoslovaque dans ces regions. Sous le regne du roi Samo la population connut trente ans de paix, ce qui contribua a la consolidation d'une conscience ethnique embryonnaire. Nous en trouvons des traces dans l 'oraison mentionnee. En 796, Charlemagne se decida aen terminer avec les A vars. Avec l' aide des anciens Slovaques, Charlemagne detruisit l' empire primitif des A vars, de sorte que ce peuple disparut de l'histoire de !'Europe. Le contact de Charlemagne avec les anciens Slovaques est d' un symbolisme tres profond pour l'histoire de l'Europe car, grace acette rencontre, les nations slaves ont commence a entrer dans l'histoire de l'Europe. Les protagonistes de cet evement historique etaient les anciens Slovaques. Les premiers et les seuls d'entre les Slaves a avoir connu Charlemagne de son vivant. Les Slovaques en sont restes tres impressionnes. La preuve en est qu'ils ont commence autiliser le nom propre de Charlemagne "Karl" pour designer le roi (kni/). Cette designation slovaque fut plus tard acceptee par les autres nations slaves (Tcheques et Polonais) voisines des Slovaques et les Magyars (kinily) l'adopterent egalement apres !'occupation des territoires slovaques. C'est la deuxieme fois, apres "Caesar", que le nom propre d'un commandant militaire devient titre pour l'autorite supreme de l'Etat. La presence de Charlemagne sur les frontieres slovaques se fit sentir sous deux aspects: premierement, fidele a sa conception d'Etat, Charlemagne se considerait souverain feodal des territoires slovaques apres la defaite des A vars. Deuxiemement, comme proprietaire feodal preoccupe par la christianisation de �SLOVAKIA 105 ses terres, en 798 il donna l'ordre personnel a l'archeveque de Salzbourg d'envoyer des missionnaires dans les regions recemment annexees a son Empire ("lpse imperator praecepit Amoni archiepiscoJXJ pergere in partes Sclavomm"). Evidemment, Charlemagne ne savait pas que le christianisme avait ete preche parmi les anciens Slovaques par les missions italienne, irlandaise et anglo-saxonne. C'est ainsi qu'apres d'autres missionnaires, les territoires des anciens Slovaques ont ete evangelises par des moines bavarois avec un tel succes que, probablement deja en 824 fut consacree, par l'archeveque de Salzbourg, la premiere eglise batie en pierres, a Nitra siege du prince slovaque Pribina. La presence des missionnaires bavarois suscitait chez la noblesse slovaque une mefiance politique, parce qu'ils essayaient de renforcer leurs pretensions politiques sur les terres ou ils prechaient l 'Evangile. 11 est fort probable egalement, que la noblesse slovaque ait res:u des nouvelles sur la brutalite germanique envers les Slaves du Nord. D'autant plus que la noblesse ne put oublier la domination avare et craignait de tomber a nouveau sous la souverainete etrangere. C'est probablement pour cela qu'un autre prince slovaque, Mojmfr, chassa Pribine de Nitra, le considerant germanophile (sa femme etait allemande). Mojmfr unifia les deux principautes slovaques en un seul etat connu dans l'histoire comme "Grande Moravie". Ces changements deplurent au roi bavarois, Ludwig (neveu de Charlemagne) et en 846 il penetra dans les territoires slovaques, deposa Mojmfr et installa Rastislav. Mais Rastislav, a son tour, ne reconnaissait pas la souverainete feodale de Ludwig. C'est la raison pour laquelle il s' adressa a l 'empereur bizantin Michel III en le priant de lui envoyer des missionnaires qui connussent la langue du peuple (861). 11 y avait a Bizance, en ce temps la, deux freres: �106 SLOVAKIA Constantin et Methode, qui dominaient la langue paleoslave. Ils se rendirent en 863 en territoire slovaque. Pour reussir dans cette mission, Constantin crea !'alphabet dit 'glagolique', adapte aux sons de la langue slave a laquelle ils traduisirent les textes fondamentaux de la Bible. En s'installant au royaume de Rastislav, ils constaterent que les messes etaient deja celebrees en latin d' apres la liturgie romaine. Ils se sont decide a maintenir la liturgie romaine mais, en meme temps ils traduisirent les textes remains (latins) a la langue du peuple. Et nous voici en presence de l'une de ces oraisons de messe dont nous avons dit qu'elle est un "monument culturel europeen". "Vingtieme oraison de Kiev' On la nomme "vingtieme" parce qu'elle se trouve sur la vingtieme feuille de la collection connue comme "Collection de Kiev" (en Ukraine). Voici le texte paleoslave de cette oraison: "Cesarstve nasemu, Gospodi, milostjo Tvojejo prizri. I ne otdai nasego tuiim I ne obrati nas v plen narodom poganskym". En fran~ais: "Veillez, Seigneur, sur notre royaume avec Votre grace. Et ne livrez pas ce qui est notre aux etrangers et ne nous convertissez pas en proie des nations pa·iennes". Nous avons deja dit que les anciens Slovaques recevaient le christianisme des le VII-eme siecle et, par consequent, il y eut probablement parmi les pretres slovaques un grand nombre d'entre aux qui dominait bien le latin. En effet, avant sa mort, �SLOVAKIA 107 Saint Methode dit de Saint Gorazd, son disciple slovaque qu "'il est bien instruit dans Jes livres latins". En examinant le texte, les philologues slovaques ont trouve le texte latin, correspondant a toutes les oraisons de la Collection Kiev, sauf celui de la vingtieme oraison. Ils en sont restes perplexes. Mais a tort, car le sujet de cette oraison fait reference aux besoins particuliers du royaume slovaque. 11 est done bien naturel qu' ils n 'aient pas trouve le texte dans les missels de l'Eglise universelle car nous savons que chaque pays a ses propres oraisons de messe. La "vingtieme" oraison est, d'apres son contenu, une oraison "propre" au royaume slovaque. Nous pouvons legitimement nous demander quand a-t-elle ete ecrite. Sans encourir en erreur, nous pouvons en toute quietude affirmer qu'elle a ete ecrite avant l'arrivee de Saint Cyrille et de Saint Methode car, peu apres leur arrivee, elle fut traduite au paleoslovaque. Je dis "paleoslovaque" parce que, d'apres les philologues, dans le texte on trouve deja des elements qui la distinguent de la langue paleoslave. Et c 'est bien comprehensible car les anciens Slovaques se trouverent isoles des Slaves du Nord pendant plus de trois siecles (a cause des Avars et egalement a cause du royaume de Samo). D'autre part, elle a pu etre ecrite apres la formation de la Principaute slovaque (836) ou, au plus tard, apres la deposition de Mojmir par Ludwig (846). L'auteur de l'oraison a du etre membre de la haute noblesse slovaque car il semble tres bien verse en questions politiques. Comme enfant il a du ecouter ses parents parler des cruautes des Avars et par sa propre experience il se rendait compte des velleites politiques du roi bavarois. L'auteur re~ut une tres bonne formation latine car il a parfaitement saisi la construction des oraisons de messe latine qui excellent par leur brievete, leur contenu condense, leur clarte des concepts et la cadence poetique. �108 SLOVAKIA De plus il devait avoir une position elevees dans la hierarchie latine en Slovaquie, qui seule pouvait autoriser l'usage public d'une oraison de messe. Le texte latin a du etre le suivant: "Regnum nostrum, Domine, gratia Tua respice. Et _ne tradas nostra alienis nee nos convertas in praedam JXJpulorum paganorum". A la premiere lecture, on s' aper~oit de la maturite politique de cette oraison car d'un cote elle fait allusion a la destitution du prince Mojmir (ne tradas nostra aliensis) et de l'autre elle fait allusion aux nouvelles sur l'apparition des avant-gardes Magyars sur la frontiere orientale du royaume (nee nos convertas in praedam JXJpulorum paganorum). Faisant reference a la demiere partie de l' oraison, le philologue slovaque Eugen Pauliny ecrit que "derriere cette oraison on entend le bruit des sabots de envahisseurs magyars". Ou'y-a-t-il d'Europeen dans cette oraison? Avant tout, il nous faut rappeler que l'Europe ne serait ce qu 'elle est sans ses nations qui sont toutes ses enfants, nes a I' abri de sa formation. Parmi celles-ci, la nation slovaque etait presente quand Charlemagne posait les fondations de !'Europe, meme si les Slovaques sont aujourd'hui peu connus pour leur histoire politique mouvementee. La nation slovaque a brille trop peu de temps et s 'etait eclipsee pendant mil ans. L'Europe ne peut nier !'existence d'aucune de ses nations sans se trahir. C'est pour cela qu'elle a reconu !'existence de la nation slovaque en acceptant la Republique Slovaque comme un de ses members. Une des lumieres qui nous parvient de tres loin et qui temoigne du sens europeen des Slovaques, c'est precisement la vingtieme oraison de Kiev. �SLOVAKIA 109 Les anciens Slovaques consideraient leur pays comme une propriete inalienable. C'est un point de vue commun a toutes les nations europeennes. Ils etaient preoccupes de voir leur pays assujetti anouveau comme au temps des A vars. Et voici que les Francs veulent s'emparer de leurs terres au titre de la divulgation de l'Evangile! Et, sur la frontiere orientale se trouvait apres les Avars, un autre peuple mongolien: les Magyars! En effet, l'oraison est une expression d'angoisse d'une communaute nationale, menacee de deux cotes, qui n'aspire a autre chose qu'a vivre en paix avec tous. C'est pour ces raisons que l 'oraison est dirigee a Dieu, pour implorer sa protection. Elle n'invoque pas les foudres divines pour aneantir les ennemis, ce que prouve que l'esprit de christianisme etait deja bien enracine parmi les Slovaques. Sous un autre aspect, cette oraison est un resume d'un traite embryonnaire des droits ethniques. En effet, nous pouvons y lire, sans exagerer, le droit a la terre propre, le droit a la liberte, le droit a la vie et le droit a l'autodetermination. Il s'agit des valeurs humaines "to which the Jaws of nature and of nature's God entide them" comme l'ont exprime les fondateurs des Etats-Unis, le 4 Juillet 1776, presque mil ans apres. L' oraison anticipe ce qu' a Helsinki I'Europe reconna1tra comme droits ethniques legitimes. Il s' agit, en effet, du premier document europeen qui devance les siecles a venir de l'histoire de l'Europe: !'existence des communautes nationales conscientes de leurs droits. Il y a un autre aspect tres important: cette oraison exprime, pour la premiere fois dans l'histoire de l'Europe, la conscience nationale d ' un groupe ethnique. Mais il l'exprime comme quelque chose de pur, d'humain et de noble. En effet, l'aspect bumain du national devrait devenir un tresor commun a toutes les nations pour eviter la deformation du national et pour etablir une base ferme pour cohabitation pacifique des peuples. �110 SLOVAKIA Ou'y-a-t-il de culture/? Tous les grands auteurs qui se sont occupes du phenomene "nation" sont unanimes: la culture est une forme de spiritualite. A son tour, la spiritualite est une forme de culture; quelque chose d ' inseparable de l'homme concret. C'est pour cela que la culture d 'un people pauvre qui vit sa spiritualite est superieure a celle d 'un people riche drape dans des valeurs materielles. Et comme "la culture cache beaucoup plus que ce qu' elle reveJe" (Edward T. Hall), son secret indique que sa derniere raison d'etre est d'une nature transcendante. Probablement c'est a cet aspect que fait allusion Aleksandr Soljeni tsyne lorsqu 'il dit, a l 'occasion du Prix Nobel, que Jes nations et Jeurs cultures sont Jes differents visages de Dieu. L 'Europe est le resultat de la culture de ses nations. La beaute d' un pre est le resultat de la multiplicite des aspeces de fleurs. S' il n'y avait au monde qu ' un seul type de fleurs, le monde nous paraitrait tres pauvre en beaute. La beaute de l'Europe est due ala multiplicite de cultures qui surgirent du meme sol spirituel duquel elles recevaient leur nourriture. Dans une roseraie il y a beaucoup de rosiers qui tous produisent des roses, mais les roses different par leurs parfums. La multiplicite des cultures europeennes represente la richesse spirituelle de l'Europe car chaque culture nationale contient quelque chose de propre, ce qui est la consequence de son individualite. L'europeite de cultures se doit a ce qu 'elles sont enracinees dans les fondements de l 'Europe. La beaute humaine de cette oraison de messe depasse les chroniques germaniques d'une maniere extraordinaire. Elle contient le desir de justice comme fondement de la coexistence pacifique des peoples sans en blesser aucun. Apres plus de mil ans, un ecrivain slovaque (Vladimir Mimic) en interpretant le sens de l'histoire des Slovaques a pu �SLOVAKIA 111 dire que "etre Slovaque, cela signifie etre frere de tous Jes hommes, ce qui constitue le noble heritage de notre histoire". La culture d'un peuple depend aussi de la richesse de sa litterature. La vingtieme oraison de messe represente un des monuments litteraires slovaques du IX-eme siecle, parce qu'elle est ecrite dans une langue qui etait non seulement une langue liturgique mais, par l'oeuvre de Saint Cyrille et de Saint Methode, elle s' est convertie en langue litteraire de la Grande Moravie, qui etait aussi employee dans la jurisprudence et dans !'administration publique. Surles qualites grammaticales de cette langue, l 'eminent philologue slovaque Eugen Pauliny ecrivit: "il s' agissait d' une Jangue polie et culti vee. La richesse des formes de construction grammaticales, J'elaboration de la syntaxe, la ch11te et la variete du tresor verbal, placent la Jangue paleoslovaque a la hauteur des Jangues culturelles de ce temps-la: le grec et le Jatin". C' est pour ces raison que la vingtieme oraison de la Collection de Kiev appartient au tresor spirituel de !'Europe. Elle ne peut s' en desinteresser. L'histoire postirieure des Slovaques En 907, lors de la bataille de Bratislava (Capitale contemporaine de la Slovaquie) sous une attaque commune des Francs et des Magyars, le royaume de la Grande Mora vie s' est ecroule. On suppose que la grande majorite de la noblesse a perdu la vie sur le champ de bataille. Les territoires slovaques ont ete partiellement occupes par les Magyars et, pendant mil ans, la Slovaquie a fait partie du royaume connu sous le nom de HONGRIE. Les Slovaques ont perdu leur royaume, mais ils n'ont pas perdu leur vie grace aune circonstance providentielle. �112 SLOVAKIA Ernest Renan, dans sa conference de 1880, se demandait comment la "couronne de Saint Etienne (le premier roi hongrois) ne put assimiler Jes Slovaques" (ii parlait des Slaves, parce qu'apres l'an 1201 un autre peuple slave - le croate - faisait partie de la Hongrie). La raison en est tres simple. Le roi n 'a pas pu introduire la langue slovaque comme langue officielle du royaume, malgre ses valeurs litteraires et administratives, tout simplement parce qu'il s'agissait de la langue d' un peuple subjugue. Et ii ne pu recourir a la langue magyar parce qu 'elle n 'existait pas. Les Magyars etaient des nomades qui ont ete ecrasees en 955 sur la Lech par l'Empereur Otto I-er. Ce n 'est qu ' apres cette defaite qu' ils deciderent de s 'etablir et d' abandonner le pillage. Par consequent, Saint Etiene introduisit en Hongrie le latin comme langue officielle, ce qui a dure jusqu'en 1840. A cause de cette mesure aussi bien la culture slovaque que celle des Magyars s 'est limitee a la culture populaire. En effet, il n'y a pas eu d'oeuvres litteraires slovaques ou magyares pendant des ciecles. Elles n'apparurent qu'a la fin du XVIII-eme siecle. II y a des preuves irrefutables permettant d'affirmer que les Magyars re~urent leur civilisation des anciens Slovaques. Bien evidement, les historiens magyars essayent de les minimiser. C'est par les Slovaques que les Magyars ont appris a cultiver la terre. Les termes magyars ayant trait a }'agriculture sont d' origine slovaque. Les slovaques nobles qui survecurent au desastre ont contribue a l 'organisation de l'Etat. En effet, les noms des foncionnaires de la cour royale sont d'origine slovaque (roi = kral - kiraly, prefet = span - ispan; cour = dvor - udvar, courtisan = dvomik - udvamok). II y a egalement des preuves demontrant que l' ordre juridique de la Grande Moravie fut transplante en Hongrie. En effet, juge en magyar se dit kenez du mot slovaque knaz. Les �SLOVAKIA 113 Magyars disaient, en ce temps la, qu'ils iraient "ad pravdam" lorsqu 'ils prenaient la decision de s 'adresser au tribunal pour regler leurs droits. "Pravda" signifie en slovaque "droit". La terminologie de la religion est aussi d' origine slovaque (bapteme =krstit' - keresztelni; pa'ien =pohan - pogany, enfer =peklo - pokol; frere = brat - banit). Au debut les Magyars n'avaient pas de terme magyar pour la "grace" divine, ils utilisaient le mot slovaque "milost"'. Naturellement, la science magyare contemporaine fait !'impossible pour effacer cette dependance culturelle des anciens Slovaques. Pendant des siecles, les deux communautes nationales cohabitaient en paix, contribuant par leur travail et leur sang au progres de la Hongrie. Le changement se produisit a un moment historique de !'Europe lorsque !es nations se sont reveillees et ont pris conscience de leurs identites differentes les unes des autres. Des le XVII-eme siecle, nous assistons en Europe a un phenomene generalise. Dans les Etats ou, pendant des siecles, cohabitaient deux ou trois nations, la nation qui detenait le pouvoir politique commern;a a faire pression pour faire dispara1tre les langues qui n'etaient pas la sienne. Ce fut aussi le cas de la Hongrie. Les Magyars decha1nerent une persecution contre tout ce qui etait slovaque. En 1872, pour eviler la formation de I'intelligentsia, ils fermerent les dernieres ecoles de l'enseignement secondaire et, plus tard, les ecoles furent magyarisees. La revolution de 1918 a sauve les Slovaques de la mort ethnique. En 1918, les Slovaques s'unirent aux Tcheques pour former un Etat commun. Mais le mot Tcheco-Slovaquie (c'etait le nom du nouvel Etat dans le Traite de Versailles) fut changee en "Tchecoslovaquie" par les Tcheques qui lancerent la theorie selon laquelle les Slovaques n 'etaient qu 'une tribu tcheque. �I 14 SLOVAKIA Ni Masaryk, ni Benes (President et Ministre des Affaires Etrangeres) ne se rendaient compte qu'une nation n'est pas un troupeau de brebis qu'ont peut envoyer dans n'importe quel bercail. 11 est vrai que les Slovaques et les Tcheques sont deux nations voisines, mais ils n'avaient jamais vecu dans le meme Etat. Leur histoire s'est deroulee d'une maniere differente, leurs langues et leurs cultures populaires ont des caracteristiques differentes et, par consequent, leurs personnalites ethniques sont differentes. Les Tcheques ont fait leur possible pendant soixante-dix ans pour tchequiser les Slovaques. La resistance slovaque fut telle qu'ils n'y reussirent pas. Ils firent, cependant, grand tort a la conscience d'identite nationale slovaque. A nouveau, la revolution de 1989 sauva les Slovaques d'un embrassement suffoquant du point de vue national, politique et economique. Le I-er Janvier 1993 apparut, sur la carte geographique de !'Europe, la Republique slovaque desireuse de participer a la vie economique, politique et culturelle de !'Europe, sans intermediaires. Bibliographie Bartek, Henrich: Les debuts du christianisme chez Jes Slovaques (en slovaque). Slobodne Slovensko, Vol. X, 5. Bro, Bertrand: La beaute sauvera le monde, Cerf, Paris, 1990. Carrere d'Encausse, Helene: La gloire des nations, Fayard, Paris, 1990. The Celts, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Chadwick, Nora: England, 1970. �SLOVAKIA Dejiny Slovenska: Delort, Robert: Hall, Edward T.: Herrn, Gerhard: Heer, Friedrich: Krajcovic, Rudolf: Lacko, Michal: Martini, Alberto: Montanelli, lndro: Pauliny, Eugen: Ratkos, Peter: Simons, Gerald: Veiter, Theodor: 115 L'histoire de la Slovaquie, Vol. I, Bratislava, 1986. LeMoyen-Age, Edita, Lausanne, 1972. The Silent Language, Anchor, New York, 1973. Die Kellen, Econ Verlag, Diisseldorf, 1975. Das heilige romische Reich, Heyne Verlag, Miinchen, 1967. Le temoignage de l'histoire sur le Slovaque, Matica slovenska, Martin, 1977 (en slovaque ). Saint Cyrill and Methodius, Slovensky ustav, Rome 1969. Le Moyen-Age Europeen, Fabbri, Milano, 1963. Storia d'Italia, Rizzoli, Milano, 1959. La litterature et la langue culturelle de la Grande Mora vie, SA V, Bratislava, 1964 (en slovaque). Les sources de l'histoire de la Grande Moravie, SAY, Bratislava, 1961 (en slovaque). Orfgenes de Europa , Time-Life Int. , Amsterdam, 1968. Nationalitiittenfrage und Volksgroppenrecht, Braumiiller, Vienne, 1984. �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1998, Vol. 36 Description An account of the resource Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 98 SLOVAKIA Une oraison de messe: Monument culture) ., europeen Stefan Polakovic Une oraison de messe: Monument culture/? Et de /'Europe? Eh, oui! Seulement pour le comprendre, nous devons descendre dans les entrailles memes de l'histoire de l'Europe. Avant de pouvoir qualifier un phenomene d'europeen, il nous faut savoir ce que nous entendons par "Europe". Et l'on ne comprendra rien a l'Europe, tant qu' on ne saura rien sur ses origines et sa formation. Elements constitutifs de /'Europe 11 fut un temps ou cette Europe que nous connaissons a l'heure actuelle n'existait pas. C'est a Charlemagne que nous devons son existence. A partir du V-eme siecle, apres la destruction de l'Europe Romaine par les tribus germaniques, il n'y eut plus qu'un tas de debris administratifs, juridiques et sociaux. C'est precisement a ce moment la que commence l'ouvre grandiose de Charlemagne pour reconstruire et fonder une nouvelle Europe. SLOVAKIA 99 Dans une Europe ou regnait un desordre general, il introduisit l'ordre avant tout, en creant un nouveau systeme d'organization politique connu comme feodal qui dura pendant mil ans. Cet ordre s'appuyait sur le principe que le roi etat le seul proprietaire de toutes les terres. Pendant la royaute il y avait une noblesse superieure a laquelle le roi concedait l'usage des terres en fief (du latin: feudum, d'ou: feodal). Plus bas se trouvait la noblesse inferieure, les habitants des villes (artisans, marchands et bourgeois) et encore plus en dessous au bas de la pyramide politique, se trouvaient les paysans (90% de la population). A vec le systeme feodal nacquit en Europe la sfirete juridique, !'administration de la justice et, par consequent, la rennaissance ·de la vie economique. Grace au systeme feodal I'Europe a pu se relever du desastre general. Par la fondation d'une nouvelle politique, Charlemagne contribua ace que l'Europe se retrouve. L'introduction des ecoles constitua un autre element qui favorisa la naissance de I'Europe. Pour commencer, il ordonna l'ouverture d'ecoles gratuites dans les cathedrales, monasteres et paroisses, destinees avant tout a la formation des foncionnaires d'Etat. Sur !'initiative de Charlemagne, prenant probablement exemple sur l' Academie de Bizance, fut creee l"'Accademia Palatina", qui fut, posterieurement, d'une enorme importance pour !'evolution et la formation de l'Europe, car en peu de temps les Ecoles Superieures se sont transformees en Universites. Sans universites, l'Europe ne serait ce qu 'elle est. L'Europe doit aux universites son developpement scientifique, les progres technologiques et economiques et, surtout, !'evolution politique. En effet, c'est grace aux universites que les peuples europeens ont commence a envisager, plus tard, une reforme du systeme feodal pour le remplacer, a partir de la Revolution Fran~aise, par un systeme democratique. Systeme 100 SLOVAKIA democratique qui fut implante pour la premiere fois aux EtatsU nis en 1776, seize ans avant la Revolution Fran~aise. De plus, Charlemagne encouragea les arts en general: architecture, peinture, sculpture. Lors de ses voyages en Italie il admira ses basiliques et ses eglises. Grace a son appui surgit ce que nous connaissons comme rennaissance artistique carolingienne. 11 voulut voir la floraison des arts dans son empire. 11 fit construire la "CAPELLA PALATINA" a Aix-la-Chapelle, qui est une imitation de la Basilique de Saint Vital a Ravenne. Sous Charlemagne, les architectes commencerent a remplacer dans leurs constructions le bois par la pierre. On vit l 'Europe entiere se couvrir de cathedrales de style roman. En peu de temps le style roman arriva jusqu'au centre de l'Europe grace aux moines benedictins. En effet, on trouve en Slovaquie, centre geographique de l'Europe des eglises romanes contruites en pierre peu apres la mort de Charlemagne. Une fois commence, l'art europeen ne connut pas d'interruption jusqu'a nos jours. L'art europeen occupe une place predominante dans l'histoire de l'art. Autre phenomene, sans lequel la constitution de l'Europe n'aurait pu se produire, ce sont ses nations et leurs cultures qui ont surgi a l'abri du feodalisme, l'education, les arts et la religion chretienne. Par "nation" je n'entends pas ici "Etat-nation", mais les communautes spirituelles des gens unis principalement par les liens d'une langue, d'une culture et d'une histoire communes, merne si elles n'ont pas un Etat propre (i. e.: les Kurdes). Comme dit Ernest Renan, lors de sa conference prononcee a la Sorbonne en 1880, a cause "des complications de l'histoire". Pour la meme raison, pendant des siecles, plusieurs nations europeennes n 'ont pu reconstituer leurs propres Etats apres les avoir perdus, comme par exemple les Slovaques, Croates, Slovenes, Lituaniens, Lettons, Estoniens, Finlandais, etc. SLOVAKIA 101 La nation se developpe a partir d'une tribu lorsque les conditions sont favorables. La condition fondamentale est la possesion d'un territoire ou elle pourra deployer sa richesse spirituelle et fortifier son unite ontologique en toute tranquillite. En l'etat nomade, aucune nation ne put se constituer ni se consolider, comme nous le confirme l'auteur gitan espagnol Juan Ramirez Heredia dans son livre "Nosotros, los Gitanos", en decrivant la tragedie de son peuple: "Pelerins perpetuels, exiles volontaires, fugitifs toujours en route, marchant sans reJXJs depuis des siecles sans decider ou s' etablir'. Beaucoup de tribuns et nations embryonnaires de souche celtique, germanique et slave ont disparu, absorbees par des cultures superieures. Certains processus ethnogenetiques ont pu reussir avec une cartaine facilite grace au fait qu'ils se developpaient a l'abri d'un Etat, tandis que d'autres, etant donne les "complications de l'histoire" mentionnees plus haut, croissaient plus lentement. Quoiqu ' il en fut, en Europe existent actuellement les nations suivantes: Du groupe Celtique: Bretons, Irlandais, Gallois et Ecossais; Du groupe Latin: Italiens, Fran~ais, Espagnols, Catalans, Portugais, Roumains et Rhetoromans (en Suisse); Du groupe Germanique: Allemands, Suedois, Norvegiens, Danois, Hollandais, Flamands et Anglais; Du groupe Slave: Russes, Bielorusses, Ukrainiens, Bulgares, Serbes, Croates, Slovenes, Slovaques, Tcheques, Polonais, Macedoniens et Lusitiens (en Allemagne). D'origine non indo-europeenne nous avons les Magyars, Lituaniens, Estoniens, Lettons, Finlandais et Basques. 102 SLOVAKIA Demierement, certaines de ces nations ont pu reconstruire leur ancien Etat. Entin, la religion chretienne fait partie des elements constitutifs de !'Europe. Le christianisme s 'epanouit non seulement grace a la force de la parole, mais avant tout, grace a la force de l'exemple. Suivant l'exemple de la population des anciennes provinces romaines, les tribus germaniques qui s'y infiltrerent ont accepte le bapteme et ont change leurs coutumes. ll est vrai que le changement fut lent, mais grace a ce changement nous assistons, deja au IX-eme siecle, a la creation d'ouvres d'art, de peuples autrefois barbares, inspirees par la doctrine chretienne. L'esprit du christianisme a marque profondement tous les peuples europeens. La vie du peuple commun (la grande majorite etaient des paysans) s'est adaptee en general aux commandements de la morale chretienne. Nous avons comme preuve les exemples de saintete et les traditions, chansons, legendes et contes populaires de toutes les nations europeennes. Apres la chute de !'Empire Romain il y avait en Europe une seule organisation qui resista a la debacle generale et ce fut celle de l'Eglise. Les eveques etaient la seule autorite qui maintenait un peu d' ordre juridique en appliquant le droit canon et le droit romain. En dehors de cela, l'Eglise encourageait la fondation de monasteres qui se sont transformes en centres d'aide et de civilisation. Par exemple celui de MARMOUTIER-SUR-LOIRE, en France, qui a ere fonde en 375. Plus tard, au VI-eme siecle, Saint Benoit introduisit une regle commune a tous les monasteres. Les monasteres benedictins ont contribue a la bonne marche de la vie economique et sociale, et de par leur oeuvre, l 'heridite de Rome fut sauvee. SLOVAKIA 103 Les bibliotheques des grands couvents benedictins ont transmis a l 'Europe des ouvres litteraires qui autrement auraient disparu. 11 est vrai qu' au temps ou nacquit Charlemagne, les territoires des anciennes provinces romaines etaient deja christianisees. Sa propre tribu, les Francs, suivant l'exemple de leur roi Clovis (496), accepta le christianisme. Mais au temps de Charlemagne il fallait christianiser la Germanie, ou etaient installees plusieurs tribus germaniques, parmi lesquelles la plus puissante etait celle des Saxons. Et derriere, les tribus germaniques se trouvaient les tribus slaves qui ont occupe les territoires du Nord de l'Europe, derriere la ligne qui commence a l'embourchure de l'Elbe pour aboutir, en passant par Trieste, aux Balkans. Un peu d'histoire des Slovaques Parmi ces tribus slaves, se trouvaient les ancetres des Slovaques d'aujourd'hui. C'est parmi eux que surgit l'oraison que nous avons qualifiee de "monument culturel europeen". A partir du IV-eme siecle, les anciens Slovaques penetrerent dans le Bassin du Danube et occuperent les territoires sur le Danube, la Morava, V ah, Nitra, Hron et Tisa. Deux cents ans apres, ils ont ete subjugues par les A vars qui, venant des steppes russes, se sont infiltres dans le Bassin du Danube (576). Par suite de cette occupation, les ancetres des Slovaques ont perdu contact avec les tribus slaves du Nord. Cette separation geographique, ajoutee a la difference de langue et de moeurs (les A vars etaient des nomades qui s' adonnaient au pillage des territoires allemands tandis que les anciens Slovaques etaient des agriculteurs etablis et des artisans) contribuait a la formation d'un refus et d'une conscience de differences qui se manifestait, 104 SLOVAKIA d'apres le chroniqueur franc Fredegaire, par de continuelles rebellions contre les Avars. En 624, au moment d'une de ces rebellions, arriva en ces territoires un marchand franc nomme Samo qui se mit a la tete des Slaves. Il battit les A vars et organisa le premier Etat protoslovaque dans ces regions. Sous le regne du roi Samo la population connut trente ans de paix, ce qui contribua a la consolidation d'une conscience ethnique embryonnaire. Nous en trouvons des traces dans l 'oraison mentionnee. En 796, Charlemagne se decida aen terminer avec les A vars. Avec l' aide des anciens Slovaques, Charlemagne detruisit l' empire primitif des A vars, de sorte que ce peuple disparut de l'histoire de !'Europe. Le contact de Charlemagne avec les anciens Slovaques est d' un symbolisme tres profond pour l'histoire de l'Europe car, grace acette rencontre, les nations slaves ont commence a entrer dans l'histoire de l'Europe. Les protagonistes de cet evement historique etaient les anciens Slovaques. Les premiers et les seuls d'entre les Slaves a avoir connu Charlemagne de son vivant. Les Slovaques en sont restes tres impressionnes. La preuve en est qu'ils ont commence autiliser le nom propre de Charlemagne "Karl" pour designer le roi (kni/). Cette designation slovaque fut plus tard acceptee par les autres nations slaves (Tcheques et Polonais) voisines des Slovaques et les Magyars (kinily) l'adopterent egalement apres !'occupation des territoires slovaques. C'est la deuxieme fois, apres "Caesar", que le nom propre d'un commandant militaire devient titre pour l'autorite supreme de l'Etat. La presence de Charlemagne sur les frontieres slovaques se fit sentir sous deux aspects: premierement, fidele a sa conception d'Etat, Charlemagne se considerait souverain feodal des territoires slovaques apres la defaite des A vars. Deuxiemement, comme proprietaire feodal preoccupe par la christianisation de SLOVAKIA 105 ses terres, en 798 il donna l'ordre personnel a l'archeveque de Salzbourg d'envoyer des missionnaires dans les regions recemment annexees a son Empire ("lpse imperator praecepit Amoni archiepiscoJXJ pergere in partes Sclavomm"). Evidemment, Charlemagne ne savait pas que le christianisme avait ete preche parmi les anciens Slovaques par les missions italienne, irlandaise et anglo-saxonne. C'est ainsi qu'apres d'autres missionnaires, les territoires des anciens Slovaques ont ete evangelises par des moines bavarois avec un tel succes que, probablement deja en 824 fut consacree, par l'archeveque de Salzbourg, la premiere eglise batie en pierres, a Nitra siege du prince slovaque Pribina. La presence des missionnaires bavarois suscitait chez la noblesse slovaque une mefiance politique, parce qu'ils essayaient de renforcer leurs pretensions politiques sur les terres ou ils prechaient l 'Evangile. 11 est fort probable egalement, que la noblesse slovaque ait res:u des nouvelles sur la brutalite germanique envers les Slaves du Nord. D'autant plus que la noblesse ne put oublier la domination avare et craignait de tomber a nouveau sous la souverainete etrangere. C'est probablement pour cela qu'un autre prince slovaque, Mojmfr, chassa Pribine de Nitra, le considerant germanophile (sa femme etait allemande). Mojmfr unifia les deux principautes slovaques en un seul etat connu dans l'histoire comme "Grande Moravie". Ces changements deplurent au roi bavarois, Ludwig (neveu de Charlemagne) et en 846 il penetra dans les territoires slovaques, deposa Mojmfr et installa Rastislav. Mais Rastislav, a son tour, ne reconnaissait pas la souverainete feodale de Ludwig. C'est la raison pour laquelle il s' adressa a l 'empereur bizantin Michel III en le priant de lui envoyer des missionnaires qui connussent la langue du peuple (861). 11 y avait a Bizance, en ce temps la, deux freres: 106 SLOVAKIA Constantin et Methode, qui dominaient la langue paleoslave. Ils se rendirent en 863 en territoire slovaque. Pour reussir dans cette mission, Constantin crea !'alphabet dit 'glagolique', adapte aux sons de la langue slave a laquelle ils traduisirent les textes fondamentaux de la Bible. En s'installant au royaume de Rastislav, ils constaterent que les messes etaient deja celebrees en latin d' apres la liturgie romaine. Ils se sont decide a maintenir la liturgie romaine mais, en meme temps ils traduisirent les textes remains (latins) a la langue du peuple. Et nous voici en presence de l'une de ces oraisons de messe dont nous avons dit qu'elle est un "monument culturel europeen". "Vingtieme oraison de Kiev' On la nomme "vingtieme" parce qu'elle se trouve sur la vingtieme feuille de la collection connue comme "Collection de Kiev" (en Ukraine). Voici le texte paleoslave de cette oraison: "Cesarstve nasemu, Gospodi, milostjo Tvojejo prizri. I ne otdai nasego tuiim I ne obrati nas v plen narodom poganskym". En fran~ais: "Veillez, Seigneur, sur notre royaume avec Votre grace. Et ne livrez pas ce qui est notre aux etrangers et ne nous convertissez pas en proie des nations pa·iennes". Nous avons deja dit que les anciens Slovaques recevaient le christianisme des le VII-eme siecle et, par consequent, il y eut probablement parmi les pretres slovaques un grand nombre d'entre aux qui dominait bien le latin. En effet, avant sa mort, SLOVAKIA 107 Saint Methode dit de Saint Gorazd, son disciple slovaque qu "'il est bien instruit dans Jes livres latins". En examinant le texte, les philologues slovaques ont trouve le texte latin, correspondant a toutes les oraisons de la Collection Kiev, sauf celui de la vingtieme oraison. Ils en sont restes perplexes. Mais a tort, car le sujet de cette oraison fait reference aux besoins particuliers du royaume slovaque. 11 est done bien naturel qu' ils n 'aient pas trouve le texte dans les missels de l'Eglise universelle car nous savons que chaque pays a ses propres oraisons de messe. La "vingtieme" oraison est, d'apres son contenu, une oraison "propre" au royaume slovaque. Nous pouvons legitimement nous demander quand a-t-elle ete ecrite. Sans encourir en erreur, nous pouvons en toute quietude affirmer qu'elle a ete ecrite avant l'arrivee de Saint Cyrille et de Saint Methode car, peu apres leur arrivee, elle fut traduite au paleoslovaque. Je dis "paleoslovaque" parce que, d'apres les philologues, dans le texte on trouve deja des elements qui la distinguent de la langue paleoslave. Et c 'est bien comprehensible car les anciens Slovaques se trouverent isoles des Slaves du Nord pendant plus de trois siecles (a cause des Avars et egalement a cause du royaume de Samo). D'autre part, elle a pu etre ecrite apres la formation de la Principaute slovaque (836) ou, au plus tard, apres la deposition de Mojmir par Ludwig (846). L'auteur de l'oraison a du etre membre de la haute noblesse slovaque car il semble tres bien verse en questions politiques. Comme enfant il a du ecouter ses parents parler des cruautes des Avars et par sa propre experience il se rendait compte des velleites politiques du roi bavarois. L'auteur re~ut une tres bonne formation latine car il a parfaitement saisi la construction des oraisons de messe latine qui excellent par leur brievete, leur contenu condense, leur clarte des concepts et la cadence poetique. 108 SLOVAKIA De plus il devait avoir une position elevees dans la hierarchie latine en Slovaquie, qui seule pouvait autoriser l'usage public d'une oraison de messe. Le texte latin a du etre le suivant: "Regnum nostrum, Domine, gratia Tua respice. Et _ne tradas nostra alienis nee nos convertas in praedam JXJpulorum paganorum". A la premiere lecture, on s' aper~oit de la maturite politique de cette oraison car d'un cote elle fait allusion a la destitution du prince Mojmir (ne tradas nostra aliensis) et de l'autre elle fait allusion aux nouvelles sur l'apparition des avant-gardes Magyars sur la frontiere orientale du royaume (nee nos convertas in praedam JXJpulorum paganorum). Faisant reference a la demiere partie de l' oraison, le philologue slovaque Eugen Pauliny ecrit que "derriere cette oraison on entend le bruit des sabots de envahisseurs magyars". Ou'y-a-t-il d'Europeen dans cette oraison? Avant tout, il nous faut rappeler que l'Europe ne serait ce qu 'elle est sans ses nations qui sont toutes ses enfants, nes a I' abri de sa formation. Parmi celles-ci, la nation slovaque etait presente quand Charlemagne posait les fondations de !'Europe, meme si les Slovaques sont aujourd'hui peu connus pour leur histoire politique mouvementee. La nation slovaque a brille trop peu de temps et s 'etait eclipsee pendant mil ans. L'Europe ne peut nier !'existence d'aucune de ses nations sans se trahir. C'est pour cela qu'elle a reconu !'existence de la nation slovaque en acceptant la Republique Slovaque comme un de ses members. Une des lumieres qui nous parvient de tres loin et qui temoigne du sens europeen des Slovaques, c'est precisement la vingtieme oraison de Kiev. SLOVAKIA 109 Les anciens Slovaques consideraient leur pays comme une propriete inalienable. C'est un point de vue commun a toutes les nations europeennes. Ils etaient preoccupes de voir leur pays assujetti anouveau comme au temps des A vars. Et voici que les Francs veulent s'emparer de leurs terres au titre de la divulgation de l'Evangile! Et, sur la frontiere orientale se trouvait apres les Avars, un autre peuple mongolien: les Magyars! En effet, l'oraison est une expression d'angoisse d'une communaute nationale, menacee de deux cotes, qui n'aspire a autre chose qu'a vivre en paix avec tous. C'est pour ces raisons que l 'oraison est dirigee a Dieu, pour implorer sa protection. Elle n'invoque pas les foudres divines pour aneantir les ennemis, ce que prouve que l'esprit de christianisme etait deja bien enracine parmi les Slovaques. Sous un autre aspect, cette oraison est un resume d'un traite embryonnaire des droits ethniques. En effet, nous pouvons y lire, sans exagerer, le droit a la terre propre, le droit a la liberte, le droit a la vie et le droit a l'autodetermination. Il s'agit des valeurs humaines "to which the Jaws of nature and of nature's God entide them" comme l'ont exprime les fondateurs des Etats-Unis, le 4 Juillet 1776, presque mil ans apres. L' oraison anticipe ce qu' a Helsinki I'Europe reconna1tra comme droits ethniques legitimes. Il s' agit, en effet, du premier document europeen qui devance les siecles a venir de l'histoire de l'Europe: !'existence des communautes nationales conscientes de leurs droits. Il y a un autre aspect tres important: cette oraison exprime, pour la premiere fois dans l'histoire de l'Europe, la conscience nationale d ' un groupe ethnique. Mais il l'exprime comme quelque chose de pur, d'humain et de noble. En effet, l'aspect bumain du national devrait devenir un tresor commun a toutes les nations pour eviter la deformation du national et pour etablir une base ferme pour cohabitation pacifique des peuples. 110 SLOVAKIA Ou'y-a-t-il de culture/? Tous les grands auteurs qui se sont occupes du phenomene "nation" sont unanimes: la culture est une forme de spiritualite. A son tour, la spiritualite est une forme de culture; quelque chose d ' inseparable de l'homme concret. C'est pour cela que la culture d 'un people pauvre qui vit sa spiritualite est superieure a celle d 'un people riche drape dans des valeurs materielles. Et comme "la culture cache beaucoup plus que ce qu' elle reveJe" (Edward T. Hall), son secret indique que sa derniere raison d'etre est d'une nature transcendante. Probablement c'est a cet aspect que fait allusion Aleksandr Soljeni tsyne lorsqu 'il dit, a l 'occasion du Prix Nobel, que Jes nations et Jeurs cultures sont Jes differents visages de Dieu. L 'Europe est le resultat de la culture de ses nations. La beaute d' un pre est le resultat de la multiplicite des aspeces de fleurs. S' il n'y avait au monde qu ' un seul type de fleurs, le monde nous paraitrait tres pauvre en beaute. La beaute de l'Europe est due ala multiplicite de cultures qui surgirent du meme sol spirituel duquel elles recevaient leur nourriture. Dans une roseraie il y a beaucoup de rosiers qui tous produisent des roses, mais les roses different par leurs parfums. La multiplicite des cultures europeennes represente la richesse spirituelle de l'Europe car chaque culture nationale contient quelque chose de propre, ce qui est la consequence de son individualite. L'europeite de cultures se doit a ce qu 'elles sont enracinees dans les fondements de l 'Europe. La beaute humaine de cette oraison de messe depasse les chroniques germaniques d'une maniere extraordinaire. Elle contient le desir de justice comme fondement de la coexistence pacifique des peoples sans en blesser aucun. Apres plus de mil ans, un ecrivain slovaque (Vladimir Mimic) en interpretant le sens de l'histoire des Slovaques a pu SLOVAKIA 111 dire que "etre Slovaque, cela signifie etre frere de tous Jes hommes, ce qui constitue le noble heritage de notre histoire". La culture d'un peuple depend aussi de la richesse de sa litterature. La vingtieme oraison de messe represente un des monuments litteraires slovaques du IX-eme siecle, parce qu'elle est ecrite dans une langue qui etait non seulement une langue liturgique mais, par l'oeuvre de Saint Cyrille et de Saint Methode, elle s' est convertie en langue litteraire de la Grande Moravie, qui etait aussi employee dans la jurisprudence et dans !'administration publique. Surles qualites grammaticales de cette langue, l 'eminent philologue slovaque Eugen Pauliny ecrivit: "il s' agissait d' une Jangue polie et culti vee. La richesse des formes de construction grammaticales, J'elaboration de la syntaxe, la ch11te et la variete du tresor verbal, placent la Jangue paleoslovaque a la hauteur des Jangues culturelles de ce temps-la: le grec et le Jatin". C' est pour ces raison que la vingtieme oraison de la Collection de Kiev appartient au tresor spirituel de !'Europe. Elle ne peut s' en desinteresser. L'histoire postirieure des Slovaques En 907, lors de la bataille de Bratislava (Capitale contemporaine de la Slovaquie) sous une attaque commune des Francs et des Magyars, le royaume de la Grande Mora vie s' est ecroule. On suppose que la grande majorite de la noblesse a perdu la vie sur le champ de bataille. Les territoires slovaques ont ete partiellement occupes par les Magyars et, pendant mil ans, la Slovaquie a fait partie du royaume connu sous le nom de HONGRIE. Les Slovaques ont perdu leur royaume, mais ils n'ont pas perdu leur vie grace aune circonstance providentielle. 112 SLOVAKIA Ernest Renan, dans sa conference de 1880, se demandait comment la "couronne de Saint Etienne (le premier roi hongrois) ne put assimiler Jes Slovaques" (ii parlait des Slaves, parce qu'apres l'an 1201 un autre peuple slave - le croate - faisait partie de la Hongrie). La raison en est tres simple. Le roi n 'a pas pu introduire la langue slovaque comme langue officielle du royaume, malgre ses valeurs litteraires et administratives, tout simplement parce qu'il s'agissait de la langue d' un peuple subjugue. Et ii ne pu recourir a la langue magyar parce qu 'elle n 'existait pas. Les Magyars etaient des nomades qui ont ete ecrasees en 955 sur la Lech par l'Empereur Otto I-er. Ce n 'est qu ' apres cette defaite qu' ils deciderent de s 'etablir et d' abandonner le pillage. Par consequent, Saint Etiene introduisit en Hongrie le latin comme langue officielle, ce qui a dure jusqu'en 1840. A cause de cette mesure aussi bien la culture slovaque que celle des Magyars s 'est limitee a la culture populaire. En effet, il n'y a pas eu d'oeuvres litteraires slovaques ou magyares pendant des ciecles. Elles n'apparurent qu'a la fin du XVIII-eme siecle. II y a des preuves irrefutables permettant d'affirmer que les Magyars re~urent leur civilisation des anciens Slovaques. Bien evidement, les historiens magyars essayent de les minimiser. C'est par les Slovaques que les Magyars ont appris a cultiver la terre. Les termes magyars ayant trait a }'agriculture sont d' origine slovaque. Les slovaques nobles qui survecurent au desastre ont contribue a l 'organisation de l'Etat. En effet, les noms des foncionnaires de la cour royale sont d'origine slovaque (roi = kral - kiraly, prefet = span - ispan; cour = dvor - udvar, courtisan = dvomik - udvamok). II y a egalement des preuves demontrant que l' ordre juridique de la Grande Moravie fut transplante en Hongrie. En effet, juge en magyar se dit kenez du mot slovaque knaz. Les SLOVAKIA 113 Magyars disaient, en ce temps la, qu'ils iraient "ad pravdam" lorsqu 'ils prenaient la decision de s 'adresser au tribunal pour regler leurs droits. "Pravda" signifie en slovaque "droit". La terminologie de la religion est aussi d' origine slovaque (bapteme =krstit' - keresztelni; pa'ien =pohan - pogany, enfer =peklo - pokol; frere = brat - banit). Au debut les Magyars n'avaient pas de terme magyar pour la "grace" divine, ils utilisaient le mot slovaque "milost"'. Naturellement, la science magyare contemporaine fait !'impossible pour effacer cette dependance culturelle des anciens Slovaques. Pendant des siecles, les deux communautes nationales cohabitaient en paix, contribuant par leur travail et leur sang au progres de la Hongrie. Le changement se produisit a un moment historique de !'Europe lorsque !es nations se sont reveillees et ont pris conscience de leurs identites differentes les unes des autres. Des le XVII-eme siecle, nous assistons en Europe a un phenomene generalise. Dans les Etats ou, pendant des siecles, cohabitaient deux ou trois nations, la nation qui detenait le pouvoir politique commern;a a faire pression pour faire dispara1tre les langues qui n'etaient pas la sienne. Ce fut aussi le cas de la Hongrie. Les Magyars decha1nerent une persecution contre tout ce qui etait slovaque. En 1872, pour eviler la formation de I'intelligentsia, ils fermerent les dernieres ecoles de l'enseignement secondaire et, plus tard, les ecoles furent magyarisees. La revolution de 1918 a sauve les Slovaques de la mort ethnique. En 1918, les Slovaques s'unirent aux Tcheques pour former un Etat commun. Mais le mot Tcheco-Slovaquie (c'etait le nom du nouvel Etat dans le Traite de Versailles) fut changee en "Tchecoslovaquie" par les Tcheques qui lancerent la theorie selon laquelle les Slovaques n 'etaient qu 'une tribu tcheque. I 14 SLOVAKIA Ni Masaryk, ni Benes (President et Ministre des Affaires Etrangeres) ne se rendaient compte qu'une nation n'est pas un troupeau de brebis qu'ont peut envoyer dans n'importe quel bercail. 11 est vrai que les Slovaques et les Tcheques sont deux nations voisines, mais ils n'avaient jamais vecu dans le meme Etat. Leur histoire s'est deroulee d'une maniere differente, leurs langues et leurs cultures populaires ont des caracteristiques differentes et, par consequent, leurs personnalites ethniques sont differentes. Les Tcheques ont fait leur possible pendant soixante-dix ans pour tchequiser les Slovaques. La resistance slovaque fut telle qu'ils n'y reussirent pas. Ils firent, cependant, grand tort a la conscience d'identite nationale slovaque. A nouveau, la revolution de 1989 sauva les Slovaques d'un embrassement suffoquant du point de vue national, politique et economique. Le I-er Janvier 1993 apparut, sur la carte geographique de !'Europe, la Republique slovaque desireuse de participer a la vie economique, politique et culturelle de !'Europe, sans intermediaires. Bibliographie Bartek, Henrich: Les debuts du christianisme chez Jes Slovaques (en slovaque). Slobodne Slovensko, Vol. X, 5. Bro, Bertrand: La beaute sauvera le monde, Cerf, Paris, 1990. Carrere d'Encausse, Helene: La gloire des nations, Fayard, Paris, 1990. The Celts, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Chadwick, Nora: England, 1970. SLOVAKIA Dejiny Slovenska: Delort, Robert: Hall, Edward T.: Herrn, Gerhard: Heer, Friedrich: Krajcovic, Rudolf: Lacko, Michal: Martini, Alberto: Montanelli, lndro: Pauliny, Eugen: Ratkos, Peter: Simons, Gerald: Veiter, Theodor: 115 L'histoire de la Slovaquie, Vol. I, Bratislava, 1986. LeMoyen-Age, Edita, Lausanne, 1972. The Silent Language, Anchor, New York, 1973. Die Kellen, Econ Verlag, Diisseldorf, 1975. Das heilige romische Reich, Heyne Verlag, Miinchen, 1967. Le temoignage de l'histoire sur le Slovaque, Matica slovenska, Martin, 1977 (en slovaque ). Saint Cyrill and Methodius, Slovensky ustav, Rome 1969. Le Moyen-Age Europeen, Fabbri, Milano, 1963. Storia d'Italia, Rizzoli, Milano, 1959. La litterature et la langue culturelle de la Grande Mora vie, SA V, Bratislava, 1964 (en slovaque). Les sources de l'histoire de la Grande Moravie, SAY, Bratislava, 1961 (en slovaque). Orfgenes de Europa , Time-Life Int. , Amsterdam, 1968. Nationalitiittenfrage und Volksgroppenrecht, Braumiiller, Vienne, 1984.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Une oraison de messe: Monument culturel européen Description An account of the resource Štefan Polakovič Slovakia, Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998 pp. 98-115 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Polakovič, Štefan, 1912-1999 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/4653fcdcf869d030fcb7bdc00a736285.pdf 4593de865f9ba5d2f75a228dac130ad5 PDF Text Text REVIEWS ��SLOVAKIA 119 Paul Robert Magocsi (with cartographic design by Geoffrey J. Matthews). Historical Atlas of East Central Europe. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1995, 218 pages. GEORGE J. DEMKO Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire The Historical Atlas of East Central Europe is a truly outstanding and valuable book. The combination of professionally and accurately rendered maps, and the accompanying text that is written with authority, accuracy and clarity represent a rich source of information on an important part of the world. The atlas is comprised of 50 sections, each with maps (in color) and related explanatory text. The themes are varied and arranged chronologically starting from A.D. 400 to the present. The final section incorporates the most recent political changes that have occurred in the region. The themes begin with the geographic zones and continue with subjects such as ecclesiastical jurisdiction, population and migrations to recent industrial development. Some of the themes are quite innovative and useful such as "Education and Culture through the 18th Century" and "Ethnolinguistic Distribution in 1900". There are also 28 tables containing quite valuable information on such topics as the estimated deaths of Jews in the region by 1945, and the size of Catholic and Orthodox populations in East Central Europe in 1900. For bibliophiles there is also an excellent bibliography with an especially useful and rare list of atlases and maps relevant to the region. There are, of course, some issues with which one might quibble. For example, the region is very broadly defined as "the lands between the linguistic frontier of the German and Italianspeaking peoples on the west and the political boundaries of the former Soviet Union on the east. The north-south parameters are the Baltic and Mediterranean seas" (P. XI) . These boundaries �120 SLOVAKIA were defined by the editors of the series to which this volume belongs (a multivolume History of East Central Europe published by the University of Washington Press). The author has expanded on the original boundaries to include the eastern part of Germany, Bavaria, Austria, northeastern Italy, historic Poland, Lithuania, Western Ukraine, Moldova and western Anatolia in Turkey! Certainly the author has erred on the conservative side by using such an inclusive and extensive set of bounding definitions. Given the fact that there are almost as many definitions of East Central Europe as there are "specialists" on the region, and that any defined region would have many important interactions with surrounding areas, the decision is an excellent one providing a very comprehensive perspective on an illdefined region, or rather a region on which a consensus would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. It is also possible to argue for themes that are important but omitted. For example, the omission of a section on emigration from this important region to the US and Canada (as well as other countries) is regrettable. This topic would have been particularly interesting for the Slovak and Polish areas. Also, the map of geographic zones is really a map of physiographic zones. A map of the "socio/cultural/linguistic regions" of the East Central Europe would have been much more useful and very interesting. In sum, Magocsi's Historical Atlas of East Central Europe is a wonderful and fascinating addition to our educational sources on one of the most troubled and dynamic parts of the world. The cartography is first-rate, and attention to detail is commendable. Anyone, scholar, politican, or interested layperson should add this volume to his/her bookshelf. It is valuable, useful, visually pleasing and reasonably priced. �SLOVAKIA 121 Anton Spiesz. Dejiny Slovenska na ceste k sebauvedomeniu. Bratislava: Perfekt, 1992. Pp. 195. Gregory C. Ference Salisbury State University Salisbury, Maryland The late Anton Spiesz wrote a large number of books prior to the volume under review, most of which concentrated on economic history. Dejiny Slovenska na ceste k sebauvedomeniu, however, cannot be counted among this genre. Although economics play a prominent role in this book, it is best characterized as a historical survey of Slovakia. As such the first part of the title would have sufficed; na ceste k sebauvedomeniu misleads the reader, who is hard pressed to find anything about Slovak national awareness prior to chapter six where Spiesz introduced the issue of nationalism. Even though he began the story 200,000 years ago with the first evidence of humans on Slovak territory, the author quickly traversed the millennia. Evidently Spiesz started to write hi s book before the demise of Communism, as at times Marxist rhetoric appears in the study. In an apparent attempt to correct this problem, the author revised the text in several sections to distance himself from this outdated verbiage. Rather than soften the issue, however, it caused the book to become unwieldy in places. Although Spiesz intended it as a general overview of Slovak history, the book assumed too much. Spiesz sometimes failed to properly introduce people, or to explain events or documents, such as the Zilina Agreement of 1938, only mentioning them. Another fault was the author's penchant for lists, whether they were of animals in ancient Slovakia, manufactured goods from the mid-nineteenth century, or pedagogists. �122 SLOVAKIA The book also suffers from some major errors regarding dates. For example, Hungary proclaimed its independence in March 1849, not in 1848, Ladislav the Posthumous acceded to the throne in 1444 rather than in 1453, and the American Slovak organizations of Zivena and the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union were founded in 1891 and 1892, not in 1894 and 1890 as Spiesz noted. Furthermore, in his treatment of the impact of Slovaks in the United States on politics, Spiesz incorrectly stated that both men and women enjoyed equal rights and the franchise before the First World War, and he over emphasized the establishment and role of socialist organizations among American Slovaks. The last chapters are Spiesz's best, providing balanced coverage on how the Communists subverted the political system and the Slovaks in their takeover of Czechoslovakia. He also exploded the Communist myth that the Slovak National Uprising was one of the greatest moments in Slovak history. In the latter instance, the author painted a very brutal picture in which countless innocent people were murdered by the insurgents. Spiesz could have finished his volume on a high note, b~t his final chapter, "From the Building of Socialism to its Bankruptcy," destroyed the seemingly solid effort found in its several preceding sections. Claiming that a historian cannot write effectively and objectively about events unless a period of at least thirty years has elapsed, he merely gave a thumbnail sketch of the period from 1960 to 1989 which included the tumultuous events of the "Prague Spring" and the "Velvet Revolution." An attack on Gustav Husak undeservedly received the most coverage in this four-page chapter. Here, Spiesz appeared to place himself on a soapbox in an attempt to further disavow his connections with the former regime. The author might instead have covered the fast-paced events after 1989 through the date of publication in order to give the reader a sense of closure. �SLOVAKIA 123 Finally, the book has no index which, though not unusual for European publications, would in this case have been indispensable, since Spiesz covered so much in so few pages. On the whole, this book would be appropriate only for someone with at least a rudimentary knowledge of Slovak history. Richard Marsina a kolektfv. Slovenske dejiny. Martin: Matica slovenska, 1993, 334 pp. R. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN Tallahassee, Rorida This works represents the first general attempt since the collapse of the communist system in 1989 to reevaluate the history of the Slovak people. As such, it offers surprisingly little that is new or original. Indeed, were it not for the fact that Slovenske dejiny condemns the excesses of communist dictatorship, many of its conclusions would be politicaly acceptable to the deceased Husak regime. The early portion of the book deals with events and developments from which various schools ot thought concerning Slovak historiography have traditionally drawn common conclusions: Slovakia was settled by man since the dawn of history, the Slovaks retained a sense of identity in the Hungarian kingdom, there were embryonic tendencies towards statehood in earlier times, and so on. A subtle change of interpretation may be found in the treatment of the national awakening, specifically concerning the leaders of the 1848 revolution. Earlier Marxist interpretation of the 1848 events portrayed Cudovft Stur and his colleagues as conterrevolutionaries for siding with the Habsburgs against the Hungarians. Later, Slovak historiography during Alexander Dubcek' s tenure as First Secretary of the Slovak �124 SLOVAKIA Communist Party reversed this trend, portraying the Slovak leaders as socially progressive figures. This interpretation was continued throughout the Husak regime. Slovenske dejiny, by contrast, depicts the Slovak leaders in a strictly national rather than a social context. The work concedes that they initially attempted to cooperate with Hungarian leader Lajos Kossuth on questions of social reform, but indicates that a breakdown of relations occured concerning Hungary's national question. One significant, and, in retrospect, surprising change of interpretation concerns the circumstances surrounding the Czecho-Slovak merger of 1918. Communist historiography traditionally regarded the merger as a "bourgeois swindle", in which the Slovak people were treated as colonial subjects until the victory of the working class under Communist leadership rectified relations between two nationalities. Given the pressures of Magyarization at the turn of the century, however, Slovenske dejiny treats pro-Czech sentiment as a positive force. The activities of T. G. Masaryk and the Czecho-Slovak emigres, the exploits of the Czechoslovak Legion on foreign battlefields, and even the career of the extreme Czechophile Vavro Srobar are all cast in a heroic light. No mention is made of the previously lauded Slovak Soviet Republic which was founded on the bayonets of Bela Kun's Hungarian Red Army. This work conveys the impression that, if Czecho-Slovak union in 1918 was not the best of all possible worlds, it was at least a step in the right direction. Slovenske dejiny is critical of Czech centralism in the interwar period, but regards the cultural emancipation of the Slovaks and their economic advancement as positive features. Honorable mention is given to Milan Hodfa's appointment as the first Slovak prime minister of Czechoslovakia. His career might have been given more attention. In spite of a long history of personal opportunism, Hodfa's ideas concerning Central European federalism are still worth studying today. �SLOVAKIA 125 While the work hails the attainment of Slovak autonomy in 1938, subsequent developments are portrayed as negative. Advocates of the rehabilitation of Monsignor Jozef Tiso are particularly bound to be disappointed: the Slovak Republic continues to be regarded as a Nazi puppet state, and the deportation of the Jews is treated in the same simplistic manner, which does not inquire deeper into the divisions of policy among Slovak leaders themselves. The 1944 uprising, correspondingly, is still regarded as a heroic event, notwithstanding the surrounding circumstances or tragic consequences. Surprisingly little attention is given to subsequent developments, perhaps out of sense of caution. It must be noted that, although the book was published in 1993, it was prepared during the previous year, at a time when many Czechs and Slovaks still hoped to maintain a federal republic. It reflects history written during a time of transition, and all the limitations found therein. This work's most revealing feature is a lack of vindictive malice towards the Czechs, a phenomenon which helped assure that the "Velvet Divorce" would not become another Balkanstyle bloodbath. A more comprehensive history, however, remains to be written. Katarina Sultajerova. Compiled by. Najstarsie rody na Slovensku, Martin: Slovenska genealogicko-heraldicka spolocnosr pri Matici slovenskej, 1994, 128 pp. DUNCAN B. GARDINER Lakewood, Ohio This collection of articles is essentialy a scholarly primer of the earliest documented Slovak aristocracy. It consists of papers delivered at the October, 1993 Symposium on the Oldest Line- �126 SLOVAKIA ages in Slovakia, which was co-sponsored by the State Regional Archives in Bratislava, the Archives Section of the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and by the Slovak Ministries of Culture and the Interior. Jozef Novak, author of the two-volume Rodove erby na Slovensku ( 1986), wrote the preface and the lead article "Genealogia ako historicka disciplfna" , which discuses the importance of genealogy in understanding the early history of Slovakia. He recommends making heraldy and genealogy more valuable to historians by broadening genealogical studies to the geographic spread of a family over time, to the bibliography of published literature on a lineage, and to biographies of prominent individuals in the family. Novak also emphasises the importance of thorough source documentation. Roman Zelenay, the late State Secretary of the Slovak Ministry of Culture, wrote "Genealogicke met6dy vfskumu najstarsfch rodov". He discussed traditional Slovak naming customs dating to the Great Moravian period, showing that despite the lack of surnames, it is possible to establish genealogical betwe~n individuals by analyzing the system by which first names were given. The Battle of Mohacs ( 1526) disrupted the Slovak social order and this earlier naming system with it, a fact which makes post-Mohacs genealogies based on onomastics quite different. Milan Majtan, historian and author of Nazvy obcf na Slovensku za ostatnfch 200 rokov (1972), discusses the historical development of personal and family names in Slovakia in "Vfvin JXJmemivania osob na Slovensku", giving examples of proto-Slavic, pre-Christian and Christian naming traditions. Majtan cites copious examples from a range of early manuscript sources. In "Struktura sl'achty na Slovensku v 9 . - 13. storoci'', Richard Marsina relates that the upper aristocracy in Slovakia consisted of Magyars and Magyarized Slovaks. Therefore, the �SLOVAKIA 127 genealogist and historian must look to the lesser nobility within each of the old countries to study the prominent Slovak lineages. Vincent Mucska's "Anonymovo dielo ako genealogickf pramen'""' takes a critical look at the twelfth-century "gesta". He dismisses it as a source of concrete historic or genealogical fact. "Panovnicka dynastia v JO. - 11. storocl" by Ladislav Vrtel' chronicles in some detail the families of the two sons of Takson, a granson of Arpad, the first Magyar leader, showing their quite different fates. Nine more articles, written by wel-known historians, deal with the earliest aristocratic families of individual counties: Saris and Uz by Ferdinand Ulicny; Spis by Ivan Chalupecky; Turiec, Liptov and Orava by Jan Benko; Trencfn by Richard Marsina; Bratislava by Vincent Sedlak; Nitra by Jan Lukacka; Zvolen by Maria Durk ova; and Malohont by Leon Sokolovsky. Each article is in Slovak with a short summary in English or, in several cases, German. The English summaries are readable, but the number of typographical and gramatical errors show that a native English-speaking editor was needed. Short biographies of the authors would have been most useful. The articles are based both on original research and the literature in the field in a number of languages: Polish, German, French, Hungarian, Latin. The Genealogical-Heraldic Society has single-handedly placed Slovakia on the genealogical map by publishing the Hlas, a twice-yearly journal of genealogy and heraldry and by organizing local genealogy groups, not only in Martin, but also in Bratislava, Kosice, and Trencfn. The founding of this society is connected with the fact that the authors of the Slovenskf biografickf slovmk (6 vols., Matica slovenska, 1986 - 1994), aware that the 19th-century Slovak intelligentsia was related by a complex series of intermarriages, have wanted to investigate �128 SLOVAKIA their genealogies for some time. This volume is an admirable contribution to that effort. Dejiny SJXJlocnosti Jeiisovej na Slovensku: 1561 - 1988. Emil Krapka, S. J. and Vojtech Mikula, S. J. - editors: Cambridge, Ontario: Dobra kniha, 1990, 526 pp. and 24 pp. of color illustrations. GERALD J. SABO, S. J. John Carroll University University Heights, Ohio This is a historical survey of the Jesuits and their activities in the Slovak area, part of the 1990 celebration of the Society of Jesus on the 450th anniversary of its papal approval. As noted on the bibliographic page, this monograph was prepared between the fall of 1986 and that of 198 8, before the so-called "Velvet Revolution" of November 1989. Its two editors and eight authors have presented much interesting material to a Slovak-reading public which lacked substantive, accurate information on a religious order important in Slovak history and culture since the sixteenth century. In the main body are a good number of black and white illustrations, supplemented with sixty-four color ones for Slovakia and ten related to Slovak Jesuit activity in Canada. This extensive history is probably unique among such writing, and given the circumstances under which it was realised, all those involved deserve much praise and gratitude. The monograph is divided into five major parts. The first four comprise the Jesuits' history from 1561 with their first establishment in Tmava and on through 1988. The first part of the history covers the time period through 1615, the second, through the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773, the third, the �SLOVAKIA 129 order's suppression and its effect in the Slovak portion of the Hungarian Kingdom, and the fourth, the context of the Society's universal restoration and its work among Slovaks at home and beyond from 1853 through 1988. The second and fourth parts together comprise two-thirds of the entire work. A major part usually begins with the larger European and Church background in which the Slovak events arose and evolved, and then Slovakrelated material is divided according to geographical locations and pastoral/apostolic activity. The fifth and final part of this history includes a chronological summary of important events among Jesuits of this area, an explanation of religious and Jesuit terminology, a substantial bibliography on the Society at large and in the Slovak area, name and place indexes, and summaries in Slovak, English, German, French, and Magyar. Twice in this history, Jesuits suffered dramatically at the hands of civil authorities. In 1773, Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa was finally impelled to supress legally the Society of Jesus in her realm from fear that if she did not do so, her daughter Marie Antoinette would not be allowed to marry the future French King, Louis XVI. Louis was a Bourbon, member of a royal family that strove mightily to eradicate throughout their European and foreign realms that "least" Society of Jesus for its greater loyalty to Church than state. Yet the Jesuits came back and thrived, just as they do today after their far more brutal suppression and persecution under the Communists between April, 1950 and the revolution of November, 1989. At present, Slovakia is a democratic, sovereign country, and publications such as the Dejiny need to showcase its role in European history and culture. Yet certain features of the Dejiny significantly limit its valuable effect and should be remedied. Prepared for a wide-ranging public conversant in Slovak, this work would also be of great interest to many others, whether general readers or scholars, who do not read Slovak, yet for �130 SLOVAKIA whom the summaries in languages other then Slovak are woefully inadequate. For this much wider audience, the Dejiny should be translated into English, the current lingua franca. Further, the lack of any documentation in notes is a serious limitation, yet nowadays such material could be collected within a reasonable time. This data is needed to provide crucial scholarship about Jesuits in Slovak territory and beyond which is available nowhere else. The activities of these Jesuits, mostly Slovak yet also of other nationalities, have remained hidden from appreciation even in Jesuit publications. For instance, in English-language studies of the Jesuits, the activities and influence of the universities in Trnava and Kosice - cities often disguised behind their German or Magyar names - are briefly mentioned, if that. No mention at all is made of the Slovak Benedikt Szollosi, compiler of the first Catholic hymnal Cantus catholici with songs in Latin and "Cultural Slovak". No more fortunate has been the Slovak Martin Szentivanyi, whose varied writings, encyclopedic studies, and very able directorship of the Trnava University press contributed significantly to Slovak history, culture, and language development. Also unknown among English readers is the Slovak Samuel Timon, whose writings made him a pioneer in scholarly Slovak historiography. Nor is Jesuit history in Slovak territory better known in other Western languages. For instance, nearly fourty years ago the Magyar Jesuit Laszl6 Lukacs wrote in German about the Jesuit Antonio Possevino's papal mission to establish a network of seminaries and schools in northern Europe in the late sixteenth century, but nothing was said about any Slovak area plans or effects. The Dejiny, though, discusses Posse vino's mission and its effects in re-establishing Jesuits there, as well as many other points not found outside of Slovaklanguage publications. Yet how is a general reader or scholar to appreciate the important Jesuit role and contributions to Slovak �SLOVAKIA 131 history, culture, and society, if he is unable to read this history, or is even unaware that it exists? Clearly, the Dejiny cannot remain a hidden Slovak treasure. Indeed, the Slovak Jesuits have an obligation to make the Dejiny with proper documentation known and accessible to a non-Slovak-reading public. They must present themselves before the world and not simply in the Slovak heart of Europe. Otherwise, a part of Slovakia, its culture, history, people, and achievements will remain concealed behind a language that few in today's world will bother to learn even for reading. James Ramon Felak. "At the Price of the Republic." Hlinka's Slovak People's Party,1929-1938. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994, xiv & 263 p. STANISLAV J. KIRSCHBAUM York University, Glendon College Czechoslovakia is a state that broke up twice in its seventyfour year history: the fust time it was under the pressure of international events and on the eve of a world war, the second in the aftermath of democratic elections. The fust break-up has been mired in controversy, due not only to the circumstances surrounding it, but above all to the responsibility that is often ascribed to the Slovak People's Party (SPP) for bringing about that outcome. James Felak's study looks at this party, in particular during the decade that precedes the fust break-up. There are very few studies of Slovak politics in the first Czechoslovak Republic (CSR), fewer still that offer an in depth examination of the role and policies of the main parties that influenced and shaped inter-war Slovak political life. The handful of monographs that have been written on Slovakia in the first �132 SLOVAKIA CSR, or indeed on the first CSR itself, have generally looked at how the "Slovak question" has contributed to, been responsible for, or unable to prevent its break-up. It would not be inaccurate to say that most take a position for (the Czechoslovak and Marxist approach) or against (the nationalist Slovak approach) the first CSR; very few seek to examine the question from the dynamics of Czech-Slovak relations as did Carol Skalnik Leff in National Conflict in Czechoslovakia. The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987 (1988), or from the challenges a multinational state faces when dealing with its constituent nations and national minorities. Felak's study fills some of the gaps in our knowledge of Slovak inter-war political life, but, regretfully, it does little to advance our understanding of it. Of the seven chapters that present the Hlinka Slovak People's Party, five offer a relatively detailed examination of its policies for the decade that begins with the Depression. The first chapter presents a rapid and, unfortunately, superficial overview of Slovak nationalism until 1929 whereas the second outlines in detail the party's ideology and programme. The remaining chapters are divided according to certain events that mark a change of fortune or direction for the party. The author looks in depth at some of the more important ones, such as the Tuka affair of 1929, the 1929 and 1935 elections, the 1931 Slovak orthography dispute, the 1933 Pribina celebrations, the different party congresses, in particular the Youth Congress of 1932 and that of 1936, and the 1938 Pittsburgh Pact celebration, all of which marked Slovak political life. Equally useful and interesting are his descriptions of the SPP platform at different times and the relations with other Czech and Slovak political parties and formations. As for the various leading personalities, Andrej Hlinka, Vojtech Tuka, Karol Sidor, and Jozef Tiso, among others, the author seeks to give a sense of their role and importance in the development of SPP policies. In sum, most of the �SLOVAKIA 133 book offers a detailed examination of the role of the SPP in an important decade in Slovak political life and is in this respect a contribution to the existing literature. The main problem with this study lies in its approach to the subject. This is due not only to too great a reliance on certain earlier studies, but above all to the indiscriminate use of police reports as authoritative sources of political analysis. In fairness to the author, he makes an attempt to present a balanced approach on the "Slovak question". Yet the language he uses clearly indicates that he identifies with and accepts generally the interpretations of those authors who have a Czechoslovak view ?f Slovak history, a view that is mostly negative toward the Slovaks and uncritically favourable toward Czechoslovakia. For example he refers to Slovakia as "relatively underdeveloped, politically, economically, socially, culturally, and nationally" (p. 17) or describes Hlinka as having a "parochial, clerical mentality that resembled that of a Slovak peasant." (p. 25) In addition, like earlier authors, his examination of Prague policies toward Slovakia and toward the SPP, is at best cursory and certainly not critical. On occasion one gets the feeling from his presentation that there was a specific Prague-SPP dynamic, yet there is little analysis of the reasons for and the consequences of Prague policies, only of the SPP reactions and actions. For example, Prague exercized censorship on the SPP press to such an extent that in 1938, when the government was considering the possibility of a coaliton with the SPP, one of that party's conditions was the lifting of that censorship. Equally problematic is the reliance on police reports as a research source. The fact that the Prague government felt it necessary to have police spies within the SPP is in itself a fact worth examining, not to say anything of the accuracy of these reports. The emphasis that Felak places on factional struggles within the SPP comes mostly from these reports. That the police �134 SLOVAKIA spies reported such struggles is not in the least bit surprising; it was in the government's interest to be able to neutralize an opposition party that Pelak on many occasions describes as the most important one in Slovakia. Also, there is nothing surprising about factional differences; this is a fact of life in political parties in all democratic states. But in this case, the factionalism represented the dilemmas the SPP faced in its twin objectives: the autonomy of Slovakia and the integrity and security of Czechoslovakia. The failure of Prague to have understood this and to have dealt with it adequately was paid, in the end, "at the price of the republic." For all its richness about the SPP, Felak's examination of its policies is nevertheless incomplete; on the other hand, it has the merit of provoking additional questions and showing the way for further study. Hope Dies Last, The Autobiogra]Xly of Alexander Dubcek. Edited and translated by Jin Hochman. New York: Kodansha America, Inc., 1993. 354 pp. ROBERT K. EV ANSON Uni versify of Missouri Kansas City The automobile accident of September 1, 1992, which led to Alexander Dubcek's death nine weeks later, robbed Slovakia of one of its most distinguished political leaders. Whether Dubcek could have played a vital role in shaping the politics of an independent Slovakia will never be known. What is certain, and what we are reminded of in this fascinating autobiography excellently edited and translated by Jin Hochman - is that he did establish for himself a place of lasting historical importance. �SLOVAKIA 135 It seems necessary to say this because, as Dubcek himself was aware, there is insufficient appreciation among many of today's young Slovaks and Czechs of what he and his fellow "reform Communists" attempted to do in the 1960s. It remains for historians to sort out the difficult issue of just how much impact the Prague Spring had on the subsequent course of Czechoslovak politics that ended ultimately in the demise of the country's neo-Stalinist regime twenty-one years later, but clearly the impact was significant.The Prague Spring, which Dubcek more than anyone else helped to shape, set an example for democratic aspirations that resurfaced in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. It also was an obvious model for some of Gorbachev's policies in -the 1980s. The Soviet suppression of the reform movement also created deep wounds of alienation among Czechs and Slovaks towards the USSR and the post-1968 regime that never healed. Ironically, both Dubcek and the Soviets were correct in their 1968 dialogue, Dubcek in warning the Soviets of the need to better understand how many Czechs and Slovaks viewed the old regime as an unnatural entity, and the Soviets in recognizing the degree to which Dubcek's reform movement threatened the very foundations of Leninist rule in Eastern Europe. Dubcek's autobiography begins appropriately with his early years, and an examination of that period of his life teaches us a great deal about why he acted as he did in his maturity. It is difficult not to admire the man, and this book, which is not egregiously self-serving, merely strengthens that attitude. Several aspects of character and personality come to mind - decency, courage, political shrewdness, and a trust and idealism that were at once his greatest strengths and his greatest weaknesses. We find him as a teenager in Kirghizia defending young Muslims against bullying by his fellow Czechs and Slovaks, and after World War Two pressing relentlessly for the release from the Soviet Gulag of a physician who had treated the injured Dubcek �136 SLOVAKIA during the Uprising; it was a small moral step to his passionate commitment to the complete rehabilitation of all political prisoners in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. In 1952, in the wake of the Shinsky trial and at the height of the terror, he cast aside a Soviet-censored version of a speech and instead delivered a ringing eulogy at the funeral of fellow Communist Karol Smidke, who had been a victim of the persecution. He stood up for the reforms in the face of immense Soviet pressure throughout 1968, acted honorably after his abduction to Moscow following the Soviet and allied invasion, refused to take the safety of exile because he thought his proper place was with his people, and sent off a stream of letters of protest long after his removal from power at considerable personal risk. Dubcek also was a very clever and careful political tactician. Some of the most fascinating passages in his book concern the way he built alliances in his ultimately successful effort to bring down Communist Party First Secretary Antonin Novotny in 1967. I would like to have read even more details about conversations he had with various political figures in this process, as well as about the way he blunted Novotny's efforts to consign him to political oblivion in 1962, but there still is plenty to captivate anyone with a taste for Prague-style Kremlinology. The period of the early 1960s is especially interesting in this book, because Dubcek discusses the first signs of the movement against neo-Stalinism and Prague centralism, including his election over Novotny's opposition to the position of Slovak Communist Party First Secretary in April, 1963. This event represented a stinging defeat for Novotny, because Dubcek already had established himself as the leading advocate for sweeping rehabilitation of the victims of the purges of so-called "Slovak bourgeois nationalists" in the early 1950s. As such, he had become the major opponent of Prague centralism in the Party leadership. �SLOVAKIA 137 While Dubcek was never foolhardy, he could be surprisingly bold. An interesting illustration of this was his successful ploy with Jin Hendrych, the number two man in the Party hierarchy in 1967 and, until then, a staunch Novotny loyalist. Sensing that Hendrych was beginning to vacillate in his commitment to Novotny, Dubcek walked into his office that late November and said that Novotny's days as First Secretary clearly were numbered, and that Hendrych might consider getting on the bandwagon or he too would fall. As an added enticement, he invited the startled Hendrych to consider whether he would like Novotny's job as First Secretary! The amusing climax of this story is that shortly thereafter, Leonid Brezhnev came to Prague to assess Novotny's prospects and naturally sought out Hendrych's opinion. Reportedly, Brezhnev barely got inside the door when Hendrych told him he was "willing" to serve as First Secretary. While Hendrych never got the chance - Dubcek succeeded Novotny - his abandonment of Novotny may have persuaded Brezhnev of the futility of a rescue operation. The most painful reading in this book is the period of the mounting Soviet hostility to the Prague Spring and the ultimate invasion and subsequent period of "normalization." It is impossible not to become angry all over again when one reads of the treatment Dubcek and his comrades received at the hands of their Soviet kidnappers, as well as the incredible pettiness and maliciousness of their successors in Prague and Bratislava. While Dubcek does not cast a great deal of new light on the events of 1968, he minces no words in assessing various political figures and spares no criticism of his worst tormentors. Thus we learn that Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin was as cold in private as in public and capable of extreme rudeness. He and his Soviet comrades are rightly dismissed by Dubcek as "gangsters" and "thugs." Novotny is confirmed as hopelessly ignorant of Slovak affairs, as well as contemptuous toward Slovak national �138 SLOVAKIA feelings, one of the keys to his ultimate demise. Dubcek also brands Vasil Bifak, Alois Indra, and the other conspirators of 1968 as "traitors." No one comes across worse, however, than Gustav Husak, who presided over the restoration of neo-Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. His shabby treatment of Dubcek after 1968, despite Dubcek's pivotal role in bringing about his political resurrection, is a sad counter to the courage he displayed when fighting for his own rehabilitation in the early 1960s. Despite the claims that he "protected" the ousted reformers from "hardliners" in the Party, Husak comes across here as a man incapable of normal feelings and as a complete opportunist. Naturally Dubcek was bitter about Husak, but the tone of his evaluations of Husak and other political figures is in fact measured and convincing. No discussion of Dubcek's political career would be complete without addressing his failure to discern the danger of a Soviet invasion in 1968. Part of the answer may lie in his family background. He was born in 1921 to a pair of committed socialists who were so enamored of the Soviet experiment that they were willing to relocate to Central Asia to help build a new society. At the same time, his parents had the good sense to return to Czechoslovakia when the dangers of remaining in the Soviet Union became obvious. Nonetheless, Dubcek never abandoned the socialist idealism he inherited from them. While he certainly understood the evils of Stalinism and the incompatibility of the Soviet-type system with Czech and Slovak traditions, he had a blind spot that served him poorly in 1968. Specifically, despite all the Soviet expressions of alarm about what he and his fellow reformers were doing, he could not bring himself to believe the USSR would intervene. There is no question Dubcek had evolved into a democrat and was aware of what he was doing. He writes that the Action Program put forth by Party reformers in 1968 "was a plan for a gradual return to �SLOVAKIA 139 the concept of democratic socialism ... " He acknowledges that his regime was rejecting various aspects of Leninism - he believed that the Communist Party could win popular support in competitive elections, once it had embraced democracy, and thus he downplayed the Soviet concern that his reforms were jeopardizing "the leading role of the party." At the same time, he knew he had to avoid making any references to multi-party democracy for fear of alarming them unnecessarily. He also believed that "socialism could function better in a market-oriented environment, with significant elements of private enterprise." He writes that of course he recalled what happened to Hungary in 1956, but he had made clear to the Soviets his determination that Czechoslovakia would remain loyal to its Soviet bloc allies, so the situations were not comparable. Perhaps it was due to his conviction that what he and his colleagues were doing would benefit socialism by strengthening the Communist Party's legitimacy among the people, and by bringing the country closer to the original ideals of socialism, that he could not believe that the Soviet leadership would not, however reluctantly, allow him to proceed. (In a postscript, Jiff Hochman notes Dubcek's inclination to believe in people's good intentions.) In fairness, it is difficult to fault Dubcek very much had he opted for concessions, it seems unlikely that the Soviet leadership would have accepted anything short of a complete abandonment of the democratization process to which he had committed his country. Still, his discussion of how he assessed the Soviet mindset at the time is not entirely satisfactory. Alexander Dubcek's autobiography is a thoughtful and wellwritten account of the life of a man of extraordinary moral and political qualities. It is indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in the Czechoslovak political experience. �140 SLOVAKIA Paul Robert Magocsi. The Rusyns of Slovakia: An Historical Survey. New York: East European Monographs, Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1993, x, 185 pp., Maps, Notes, Bibliography, Index. KEITH P. DYRUD Concordia College St. Paul,MN The Rusyns of Slovakia: An Historical Survey is essentially a revision of an earlier work by Prof. Magocsi, The RusynUkrainians of Czechoslovakia: An Historical Survey (Vienna, 1981 ). But there is an additional twist to this revision. The "Preface" says: ''This volume is a translation of an introductory historical survey published in the newly codified Rusyn literary language as well as in Slovak by the Rusyn Renaissance Society in Presov." Prof. Magocsi played a leading role in the formation of the national movement that spawned the Rusyn Renaissance Society and the First World Congress of Rusyns that sponsored the codification of the Rusyn literary language. The professor, however, is modest. His name does not once appear in the text in connection with that activity; however, he is pictured with other leaders of the First World Congress of Rusyns (122). The contents of the book should be familiar to those have read the author's earlier works. Magocsi traces the Rusyns' history from their first settlement in eastern Slovakia to the present. He partially assumes and partially attempts to demonstrate that the Rusyns of eastern Slovakia form a distinct nationality. Magocsi documents the cooperation that existed between the Rusyns and the Slovaks while they were dominated by Hungary prior to 1914, but he is critical of the "slovakization" of the Rusyns between the world wars, and he also identifies the �SLOVAKIA 141 Ukrainian movement as a threat to the Rusyn national identity that the book clearly endorses. During the inter-war yars slovakization was a greater threat to the Rusyns than "ukrainianization", but after the Second World War, official government support for the Ukrainian identity led to a decline of any national consciousness. Many Rusyns identified themselves as Slovaks to avoid the Ukrainian label. After the "Velvet Revolution" of November 1989, the Rusyns in the Presov region were again free to publicly promote their own national identity as separate from either Slovak or Ukrainian. In this effort, the Rusyns received support from both the Prague and the Bratislava governments. Magocsi suggests that this support for the Rusyns harkens back to "the historical friendship and attention on the part of Czechs and Slovaks toward their Rusyn brethren ... " (126). It could also suggest that the number of people identifying themselves as Rusyns is now very small and the Rusyn movement is not likely to become a major competitor to the Slovak identity in eastern Slovakia. In fact the major problem with Prof. Magocsi 's interpretation of the Rusyn movement in estem Slovakia is his confidence that the small number of Rusyns can develop a national identity. He is dissatisfied with the 1991 census figures that identify fewer than 33,000 "Rusnak/Russian/Rusyn/Ukrainian" people in the Presov region, with just under 17,000 of them unambiguously identifying themselves as "Rusyn" ( 126). According to Magocsi, that number could potentially be as high as 130 000 (2 - 3). Many readers of Magocsi's first book: The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus', 1848 - 1948 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978) were persuaded by his convincing argument that the Rusyns in Subcarpathia did, at least, "shape" a national identity during the inter-war years. But in that era, he was dealing with a larger critical mass of Rusyns. In eastern Slovakia, that critical mass does not seem to exist. With the Slovaks claiming �142 SLOVAKIA most of those 130,000 potential Rusyns, and the Ukrainians competing for the rest, it does not seem likely that the critical mass will develop. In the meantime, those who do identify themselves as Rusyns can read their history in their own "newly codified language". And those who identify themselves as Slovaks can also read the translation in their language just as Rusyns in North America can read it in English. Ukraine and Ukrainians throughout the World: A Demographic and Sociological Guide to the Homeland and Its Diaspora. Edited by Ann Lencyk Pawliczko. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press for the Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1994, xxxvi, 508 pp. PAUL R. MAGOCSI University of Toronto The goal of this volume is to provide brief factual data on Ukrainians wherever they may live in the world. The newlyindependent country of Ukraine has within its borders only 64 percent of the estimated 58.7 million inhabitants who inhabit various parts of the globe. Therefore, a history or description of the Ukrainian people as a whole must be concerned with many other places than Ukraine. This book in fact deals primarily with the estimated 21.2 million Ukrainians living outside Ukraine. The approach is comprehensive, with an effort to say something about communities, however small they may be, in places like Luxembourg, Ireland, Tunisia and New Zealand as well as in the more known countries of Ukrainian immigrant settlement like the United States, Canada, and Australia. �SLOVAKIA 143 The editor, Ann Lencyk Pawliczko, felt the need to trace the political and cultural history of Ukraine (pp. 37 - 84), which is the least satisfactory portion of this otherwise encyclopedic compendium. The rest of the volume consists of entries by 28 authors on the various countries where Ukrainians live. Each entry begins with a general overview of a specific country followed by a history of its Ukrainian community. Many entries include statistical charts and each ends with a list of further readings. Slovak readers will likely be interested in the entry called "Ukrainian-Ruthenians in the Slovak Republic", written by Vasyl Markus (pp. 157 - 166). While the author recognizes the enormous cultural achievements made by the Ukrainians in Slovakia after World War II, he does not attribute the achievements to the favorable policies of the former Czechoslovak Communist government that lavished extensive funding on the group, but rather to the efforts of the local Ukrainian-oriented intelligentsia. He claimes that the official census figures (30,800 Rusyns and Ukrainians in 1991) are far below the 110,000 to 120,000 that supposedly live in northeastern Slovakia. Markus argues the statistical discrepancy exists because of manipulation by Slovak census takers and a policy of "denationalization" carried out by both the former Communist and post-1989 governments in Slovakia. He does not mention the real reason for the numerical differences. Since the 1950s thousands of "Ukrainians-Ruthenians" voluntarily opted to identify as Slovaks in protest against Communist government decrees that banned the Rusyn national identity and required people to call themselves Ukrainian. The author also indirectly blames Slovak governments for responding favorably since 1989 to the Rusyn national revival and for allowing people in the 1991 census to identify with the Rusyn nationality (16,937 Rusyns as opposed to 13,847 Ukrainians) and with the Rusyn language (49,099 Rusyn speakers as opposed to 9,480 Ukrainian speakers) - the latter �144 SLOVAKIA figures are not provided by Markus. The otherwise democratic policies of present-day Slovakia are described as promoting "political Ruthenianism" a phenomenon that is "influenced by outside anti-Ukrainian forces" and that is intent on de-Ukrainianizing the local population. Fortunately, the rest of this volume maintains a less biased tone in describing Ukrainian communities in other countries. Nina Trnka: Slovak-English I English-Slovak Dictionary, N. Y., Hippocrene Books, 1992, 360 pp. JOHN M. KOCHIK Scottsdale, Anizona Any contribution to the field of Slovak reference materials is always welcome. Attempts at popularization are encouradged only to the extent that a work demonstrates quality. Standards, of course, should always be high to reflect the expertise of the _ contributor. The backcover boasts "You are holding the only SlovakEnglish/English-Slovak Dictionary available in North America". What about Smejkalova et al.? The book is intended for "students and travelers", and claims to be "concise". For all its advertising pretense, its format is disappointing. It looks like a thesis. It lacks an Introduction which it sorely needs for efficient use. It omits a separating page (175) between the two major divisions for facile access, wherein an appropriate blank page or second title page would suffice. Pronunciation (pages i through iii) is confusing. The list of consonants is incomplete, not accounting for - among others important palatals d', I, ii, ( used in too many words to be ignored. As immediate as page one, there is no knowing how ''t~' �SLOVAKIA 145 in "akost' must be pronounced according to her presentation. Questions arise as to "studi'ia" (123) and "studna" (353 - see "well")? Why then "anP' (2) gives [a-nyi], or "odev" (71) [odyef]? How then distinguish cited "Javica" (44) from un-cited "/avica" - "left hand"? Equating long "6" with "6" in Pronunciation is erroneous, being that the latter "6" is diphotong [.u.o]. The remarks in Pronunciation are unclear and inadequate. The uninitiated will render Slovak pronunciation ludicrous. Examples provided are ambiguous for articulation of varietes of vowel "a", because speakers of American-English are inconsistent in their renditions of "a" in cited forms "ma-ma, fast, rat, grass, pad". To present digraph "ch" as aspirated [kh] in "khaki" (sic!) is not true for the guttural [)c]. And, to state that Slovak "r' is approximated by labial untrilled "r' of "red" - bellies the trilled "r' performed by the tongue. Transcription in Pronunciation is defective, since the symbols given are arbitrary, not in accord either with the conventions of Slovak texts or even the International Phonetic System. A hard look at the symbols presented defies logic. Examples follow. Since Standard Slovak (i. e. spisovna slovencina) utilizes digraph "dz" as the phone in medzi and other words - to employ "dz' as a symbol for English pronunciation of th [b] of "they" is incomprehensible! In like manner, use of [s] for [0] of "thank" produces comic theatrical effect as in [Sank you] for [Sank you]! Moreover, to present the nasal-guttural -ng [ri] of "long" as underlined [g] can be misinterpreted into a humorous exagerated liaison of oft-quoted misquoted "LoNGJsland" with defined [NGJ]. �146 SLOVAKIA Further examination into the deficiencies given in Pronunciation would require a complete revision after careful editing. So far only the unavoidable pitfalls have been critiqued. Editorial work appears lax or nonexistent as evidenced by "thruth" (sic! page ii), presumably "truth". And, "heith" (sic! page 158) following vyska and page 244, apparently meant to be "height"). In both citings of "heith", consistency seems to demonstrate persistent misspelling. There is an unexpected thrust from V (350) into W (351) without a notification-heading W. As for word-selection, it might be hoped that high-frequency was a criterion for efficiency. On the contrary, superfluous are words among others like "elephant" (222), "volcano" (350), "yacht" (358), "zebra" (359) - scarcely indigenous to Slovakia! Yet the word kamzik (36?) "chamois" (198?) indigenous to the Tatras finds no listing in either section. Why "warden" (351) is given makes one wonder of its sociological implications. Why is "warrant" (351) so important to find place here? Surely one expects utilitarian vocabulary in such a work. As for semantics, a first-hand impression might be that if several meanings are provided without explanation or definition - an indiscriminate interchange might be possible. Not so for automat (3) "slot-machine, snack-bar, machine-gun". Thus also for "minister" (268) "minister, vyslanec, duchovnf" mean different things. Each having a distinct, specific meaning. It is most unlikely that "students and travelers" will discern clearly which term fits which circumstance. Cross-references are not provided for necessary clarification. See "warm" (351) ...srdecnf... for which neither "cordial" (206?) nor "sincerely" (315) are given on expected pages in parentheses. In similar manner, aktiv (1) "meeting, gathering" makes no reference or distinction from "meeting" (266) schodza, stretnutie. �SLOVAKIA 147 Perusal of the text will result in startling revelations. For instance, pronunciation of odJXJr (72) gives [od-por], whereas in fact it is [ot-por], a morphophonetic alternation called regressive assimilation. Where the voiced d automatically becomes unvoiced/devoiced t, in harmony with unvoiced p which sets the condition for the process. The same phenomenon occurs in other instances like odstup (72) to [ot-stup], bezplatny (6) to [bes-platnee], modlitba and prosba for "prayer" (289) not given in the text as [mod-lit-ba] and [proz-ba]. Interesting to note is that word-final voiced consonants are given as de-voiced as in smrad (116) [smrat]. However, no account has been made of v as a semi-vowel [IJ.] in such words as pravda (92) [prau.da], rovno (105) [rouno], domov (18) [domo.1J.]; instead, Czech ussage [domof] (18) is presented. Two outstanding examples given: [svatba] (125) for svadba and ['strukh] (101) for pstruh are unintelligible. For all the effort involved in the production of this Dictionary, it is unfortunate that it should fall short of the desired quality expected. In spite of the good intentions of the contributor, the end result is full of inconsistencies and inadequacies. � REVIEWS ��SLOVAKIA 119 Paul Robert Magocsi (with cartographic design by Geoffrey J. Matthews). Historical Atlas of East Central Europe. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1995, 218 pages. GEORGE J. DEMKO Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire The Historical Atlas of East Central Europe is a truly outstanding and valuable book. The combination of professionally and accurately rendered maps, and the accompanying text that is written with authority, accuracy and clarity represent a rich source of information on an important part of the world. The atlas is comprised of 50 sections, each with maps (in color) and related explanatory text. The themes are varied and arranged chronologically starting from A.D. 400 to the present. The final section incorporates the most recent political changes that have occurred in the region. The themes begin with the geographic zones and continue with subjects such as ecclesiastical jurisdiction, population and migrations to recent industrial development. Some of the themes are quite innovative and useful such as "Education and Culture through the 18th Century" and "Ethnolinguistic Distribution in 1900". There are also 28 tables containing quite valuable information on such topics as the estimated deaths of Jews in the region by 1945, and the size of Catholic and Orthodox populations in East Central Europe in 1900. For bibliophiles there is also an excellent bibliography with an especially useful and rare list of atlases and maps relevant to the region. There are, of course, some issues with which one might quibble. For example, the region is very broadly defined as "the lands between the linguistic frontier of the German and Italianspeaking peoples on the west and the political boundaries of the former Soviet Union on the east. The north-south parameters are the Baltic and Mediterranean seas" (P. XI) . These boundaries �120 SLOVAKIA were defined by the editors of the series to which this volume belongs (a multivolume History of East Central Europe published by the University of Washington Press). The author has expanded on the original boundaries to include the eastern part of Germany, Bavaria, Austria, northeastern Italy, historic Poland, Lithuania, Western Ukraine, Moldova and western Anatolia in Turkey! Certainly the author has erred on the conservative side by using such an inclusive and extensive set of bounding definitions. Given the fact that there are almost as many definitions of East Central Europe as there are "specialists" on the region, and that any defined region would have many important interactions with surrounding areas, the decision is an excellent one providing a very comprehensive perspective on an illdefined region, or rather a region on which a consensus would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. It is also possible to argue for themes that are important but omitted. For example, the omission of a section on emigration from this important region to the US and Canada (as well as other countries) is regrettable. This topic would have been particularly interesting for the Slovak and Polish areas. Also, the map of geographic zones is really a map of physiographic zones. A map of the "socio/cultural/linguistic regions" of the East Central Europe would have been much more useful and very interesting. In sum, Magocsi's Historical Atlas of East Central Europe is a wonderful and fascinating addition to our educational sources on one of the most troubled and dynamic parts of the world. The cartography is first-rate, and attention to detail is commendable. Anyone, scholar, politican, or interested layperson should add this volume to his/her bookshelf. It is valuable, useful, visually pleasing and reasonably priced. �SLOVAKIA 121 Anton Spiesz. Dejiny Slovenska na ceste k sebauvedomeniu. Bratislava: Perfekt, 1992. Pp. 195. Gregory C. Ference Salisbury State University Salisbury, Maryland The late Anton Spiesz wrote a large number of books prior to the volume under review, most of which concentrated on economic history. Dejiny Slovenska na ceste k sebauvedomeniu, however, cannot be counted among this genre. Although economics play a prominent role in this book, it is best characterized as a historical survey of Slovakia. As such the first part of the title would have sufficed; na ceste k sebauvedomeniu misleads the reader, who is hard pressed to find anything about Slovak national awareness prior to chapter six where Spiesz introduced the issue of nationalism. Even though he began the story 200,000 years ago with the first evidence of humans on Slovak territory, the author quickly traversed the millennia. Evidently Spiesz started to write hi s book before the demise of Communism, as at times Marxist rhetoric appears in the study. In an apparent attempt to correct this problem, the author revised the text in several sections to distance himself from this outdated verbiage. Rather than soften the issue, however, it caused the book to become unwieldy in places. Although Spiesz intended it as a general overview of Slovak history, the book assumed too much. Spiesz sometimes failed to properly introduce people, or to explain events or documents, such as the Zilina Agreement of 1938, only mentioning them. Another fault was the author's penchant for lists, whether they were of animals in ancient Slovakia, manufactured goods from the mid-nineteenth century, or pedagogists. �122 SLOVAKIA The book also suffers from some major errors regarding dates. For example, Hungary proclaimed its independence in March 1849, not in 1848, Ladislav the Posthumous acceded to the throne in 1444 rather than in 1453, and the American Slovak organizations of Zivena and the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union were founded in 1891 and 1892, not in 1894 and 1890 as Spiesz noted. Furthermore, in his treatment of the impact of Slovaks in the United States on politics, Spiesz incorrectly stated that both men and women enjoyed equal rights and the franchise before the First World War, and he over emphasized the establishment and role of socialist organizations among American Slovaks. The last chapters are Spiesz's best, providing balanced coverage on how the Communists subverted the political system and the Slovaks in their takeover of Czechoslovakia. He also exploded the Communist myth that the Slovak National Uprising was one of the greatest moments in Slovak history. In the latter instance, the author painted a very brutal picture in which countless innocent people were murdered by the insurgents. Spiesz could have finished his volume on a high note, b~t his final chapter, "From the Building of Socialism to its Bankruptcy," destroyed the seemingly solid effort found in its several preceding sections. Claiming that a historian cannot write effectively and objectively about events unless a period of at least thirty years has elapsed, he merely gave a thumbnail sketch of the period from 1960 to 1989 which included the tumultuous events of the "Prague Spring" and the "Velvet Revolution." An attack on Gustav Husak undeservedly received the most coverage in this four-page chapter. Here, Spiesz appeared to place himself on a soapbox in an attempt to further disavow his connections with the former regime. The author might instead have covered the fast-paced events after 1989 through the date of publication in order to give the reader a sense of closure. �SLOVAKIA 123 Finally, the book has no index which, though not unusual for European publications, would in this case have been indispensable, since Spiesz covered so much in so few pages. On the whole, this book would be appropriate only for someone with at least a rudimentary knowledge of Slovak history. Richard Marsina a kolektfv. Slovenske dejiny. Martin: Matica slovenska, 1993, 334 pp. R. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN Tallahassee, Rorida This works represents the first general attempt since the collapse of the communist system in 1989 to reevaluate the history of the Slovak people. As such, it offers surprisingly little that is new or original. Indeed, were it not for the fact that Slovenske dejiny condemns the excesses of communist dictatorship, many of its conclusions would be politicaly acceptable to the deceased Husak regime. The early portion of the book deals with events and developments from which various schools ot thought concerning Slovak historiography have traditionally drawn common conclusions: Slovakia was settled by man since the dawn of history, the Slovaks retained a sense of identity in the Hungarian kingdom, there were embryonic tendencies towards statehood in earlier times, and so on. A subtle change of interpretation may be found in the treatment of the national awakening, specifically concerning the leaders of the 1848 revolution. Earlier Marxist interpretation of the 1848 events portrayed Cudovft Stur and his colleagues as conterrevolutionaries for siding with the Habsburgs against the Hungarians. Later, Slovak historiography during Alexander Dubcek' s tenure as First Secretary of the Slovak �124 SLOVAKIA Communist Party reversed this trend, portraying the Slovak leaders as socially progressive figures. This interpretation was continued throughout the Husak regime. Slovenske dejiny, by contrast, depicts the Slovak leaders in a strictly national rather than a social context. The work concedes that they initially attempted to cooperate with Hungarian leader Lajos Kossuth on questions of social reform, but indicates that a breakdown of relations occured concerning Hungary's national question. One significant, and, in retrospect, surprising change of interpretation concerns the circumstances surrounding the Czecho-Slovak merger of 1918. Communist historiography traditionally regarded the merger as a "bourgeois swindle", in which the Slovak people were treated as colonial subjects until the victory of the working class under Communist leadership rectified relations between two nationalities. Given the pressures of Magyarization at the turn of the century, however, Slovenske dejiny treats pro-Czech sentiment as a positive force. The activities of T. G. Masaryk and the Czecho-Slovak emigres, the exploits of the Czechoslovak Legion on foreign battlefields, and even the career of the extreme Czechophile Vavro Srobar are all cast in a heroic light. No mention is made of the previously lauded Slovak Soviet Republic which was founded on the bayonets of Bela Kun's Hungarian Red Army. This work conveys the impression that, if Czecho-Slovak union in 1918 was not the best of all possible worlds, it was at least a step in the right direction. Slovenske dejiny is critical of Czech centralism in the interwar period, but regards the cultural emancipation of the Slovaks and their economic advancement as positive features. Honorable mention is given to Milan Hodfa's appointment as the first Slovak prime minister of Czechoslovakia. His career might have been given more attention. In spite of a long history of personal opportunism, Hodfa's ideas concerning Central European federalism are still worth studying today. �SLOVAKIA 125 While the work hails the attainment of Slovak autonomy in 1938, subsequent developments are portrayed as negative. Advocates of the rehabilitation of Monsignor Jozef Tiso are particularly bound to be disappointed: the Slovak Republic continues to be regarded as a Nazi puppet state, and the deportation of the Jews is treated in the same simplistic manner, which does not inquire deeper into the divisions of policy among Slovak leaders themselves. The 1944 uprising, correspondingly, is still regarded as a heroic event, notwithstanding the surrounding circumstances or tragic consequences. Surprisingly little attention is given to subsequent developments, perhaps out of sense of caution. It must be noted that, although the book was published in 1993, it was prepared during the previous year, at a time when many Czechs and Slovaks still hoped to maintain a federal republic. It reflects history written during a time of transition, and all the limitations found therein. This work's most revealing feature is a lack of vindictive malice towards the Czechs, a phenomenon which helped assure that the "Velvet Divorce" would not become another Balkanstyle bloodbath. A more comprehensive history, however, remains to be written. Katarina Sultajerova. Compiled by. Najstarsie rody na Slovensku, Martin: Slovenska genealogicko-heraldicka spolocnosr pri Matici slovenskej, 1994, 128 pp. DUNCAN B. GARDINER Lakewood, Ohio This collection of articles is essentialy a scholarly primer of the earliest documented Slovak aristocracy. It consists of papers delivered at the October, 1993 Symposium on the Oldest Line- �126 SLOVAKIA ages in Slovakia, which was co-sponsored by the State Regional Archives in Bratislava, the Archives Section of the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and by the Slovak Ministries of Culture and the Interior. Jozef Novak, author of the two-volume Rodove erby na Slovensku ( 1986), wrote the preface and the lead article "Genealogia ako historicka disciplfna" , which discuses the importance of genealogy in understanding the early history of Slovakia. He recommends making heraldy and genealogy more valuable to historians by broadening genealogical studies to the geographic spread of a family over time, to the bibliography of published literature on a lineage, and to biographies of prominent individuals in the family. Novak also emphasises the importance of thorough source documentation. Roman Zelenay, the late State Secretary of the Slovak Ministry of Culture, wrote "Genealogicke met6dy vfskumu najstarsfch rodov". He discussed traditional Slovak naming customs dating to the Great Moravian period, showing that despite the lack of surnames, it is possible to establish genealogical betwe~n individuals by analyzing the system by which first names were given. The Battle of Mohacs ( 1526) disrupted the Slovak social order and this earlier naming system with it, a fact which makes post-Mohacs genealogies based on onomastics quite different. Milan Majtan, historian and author of Nazvy obcf na Slovensku za ostatnfch 200 rokov (1972), discusses the historical development of personal and family names in Slovakia in "Vfvin JXJmemivania osob na Slovensku", giving examples of proto-Slavic, pre-Christian and Christian naming traditions. Majtan cites copious examples from a range of early manuscript sources. In "Struktura sl'achty na Slovensku v 9 . - 13. storoci'', Richard Marsina relates that the upper aristocracy in Slovakia consisted of Magyars and Magyarized Slovaks. Therefore, the �SLOVAKIA 127 genealogist and historian must look to the lesser nobility within each of the old countries to study the prominent Slovak lineages. Vincent Mucska's "Anonymovo dielo ako genealogickf pramen'""' takes a critical look at the twelfth-century "gesta". He dismisses it as a source of concrete historic or genealogical fact. "Panovnicka dynastia v JO. - 11. storocl" by Ladislav Vrtel' chronicles in some detail the families of the two sons of Takson, a granson of Arpad, the first Magyar leader, showing their quite different fates. Nine more articles, written by wel-known historians, deal with the earliest aristocratic families of individual counties: Saris and Uz by Ferdinand Ulicny; Spis by Ivan Chalupecky; Turiec, Liptov and Orava by Jan Benko; Trencfn by Richard Marsina; Bratislava by Vincent Sedlak; Nitra by Jan Lukacka; Zvolen by Maria Durk ova; and Malohont by Leon Sokolovsky. Each article is in Slovak with a short summary in English or, in several cases, German. The English summaries are readable, but the number of typographical and gramatical errors show that a native English-speaking editor was needed. Short biographies of the authors would have been most useful. The articles are based both on original research and the literature in the field in a number of languages: Polish, German, French, Hungarian, Latin. The Genealogical-Heraldic Society has single-handedly placed Slovakia on the genealogical map by publishing the Hlas, a twice-yearly journal of genealogy and heraldry and by organizing local genealogy groups, not only in Martin, but also in Bratislava, Kosice, and Trencfn. The founding of this society is connected with the fact that the authors of the Slovenskf biografickf slovmk (6 vols., Matica slovenska, 1986 - 1994), aware that the 19th-century Slovak intelligentsia was related by a complex series of intermarriages, have wanted to investigate �128 SLOVAKIA their genealogies for some time. This volume is an admirable contribution to that effort. Dejiny SJXJlocnosti Jeiisovej na Slovensku: 1561 - 1988. Emil Krapka, S. J. and Vojtech Mikula, S. J. - editors: Cambridge, Ontario: Dobra kniha, 1990, 526 pp. and 24 pp. of color illustrations. GERALD J. SABO, S. J. John Carroll University University Heights, Ohio This is a historical survey of the Jesuits and their activities in the Slovak area, part of the 1990 celebration of the Society of Jesus on the 450th anniversary of its papal approval. As noted on the bibliographic page, this monograph was prepared between the fall of 1986 and that of 198 8, before the so-called "Velvet Revolution" of November 1989. Its two editors and eight authors have presented much interesting material to a Slovak-reading public which lacked substantive, accurate information on a religious order important in Slovak history and culture since the sixteenth century. In the main body are a good number of black and white illustrations, supplemented with sixty-four color ones for Slovakia and ten related to Slovak Jesuit activity in Canada. This extensive history is probably unique among such writing, and given the circumstances under which it was realised, all those involved deserve much praise and gratitude. The monograph is divided into five major parts. The first four comprise the Jesuits' history from 1561 with their first establishment in Tmava and on through 1988. The first part of the history covers the time period through 1615, the second, through the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773, the third, the �SLOVAKIA 129 order's suppression and its effect in the Slovak portion of the Hungarian Kingdom, and the fourth, the context of the Society's universal restoration and its work among Slovaks at home and beyond from 1853 through 1988. The second and fourth parts together comprise two-thirds of the entire work. A major part usually begins with the larger European and Church background in which the Slovak events arose and evolved, and then Slovakrelated material is divided according to geographical locations and pastoral/apostolic activity. The fifth and final part of this history includes a chronological summary of important events among Jesuits of this area, an explanation of religious and Jesuit terminology, a substantial bibliography on the Society at large and in the Slovak area, name and place indexes, and summaries in Slovak, English, German, French, and Magyar. Twice in this history, Jesuits suffered dramatically at the hands of civil authorities. In 1773, Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa was finally impelled to supress legally the Society of Jesus in her realm from fear that if she did not do so, her daughter Marie Antoinette would not be allowed to marry the future French King, Louis XVI. Louis was a Bourbon, member of a royal family that strove mightily to eradicate throughout their European and foreign realms that "least" Society of Jesus for its greater loyalty to Church than state. Yet the Jesuits came back and thrived, just as they do today after their far more brutal suppression and persecution under the Communists between April, 1950 and the revolution of November, 1989. At present, Slovakia is a democratic, sovereign country, and publications such as the Dejiny need to showcase its role in European history and culture. Yet certain features of the Dejiny significantly limit its valuable effect and should be remedied. Prepared for a wide-ranging public conversant in Slovak, this work would also be of great interest to many others, whether general readers or scholars, who do not read Slovak, yet for �130 SLOVAKIA whom the summaries in languages other then Slovak are woefully inadequate. For this much wider audience, the Dejiny should be translated into English, the current lingua franca. Further, the lack of any documentation in notes is a serious limitation, yet nowadays such material could be collected within a reasonable time. This data is needed to provide crucial scholarship about Jesuits in Slovak territory and beyond which is available nowhere else. The activities of these Jesuits, mostly Slovak yet also of other nationalities, have remained hidden from appreciation even in Jesuit publications. For instance, in English-language studies of the Jesuits, the activities and influence of the universities in Trnava and Kosice - cities often disguised behind their German or Magyar names - are briefly mentioned, if that. No mention at all is made of the Slovak Benedikt Szollosi, compiler of the first Catholic hymnal Cantus catholici with songs in Latin and "Cultural Slovak". No more fortunate has been the Slovak Martin Szentivanyi, whose varied writings, encyclopedic studies, and very able directorship of the Trnava University press contributed significantly to Slovak history, culture, and language development. Also unknown among English readers is the Slovak Samuel Timon, whose writings made him a pioneer in scholarly Slovak historiography. Nor is Jesuit history in Slovak territory better known in other Western languages. For instance, nearly fourty years ago the Magyar Jesuit Laszl6 Lukacs wrote in German about the Jesuit Antonio Possevino's papal mission to establish a network of seminaries and schools in northern Europe in the late sixteenth century, but nothing was said about any Slovak area plans or effects. The Dejiny, though, discusses Posse vino's mission and its effects in re-establishing Jesuits there, as well as many other points not found outside of Slovaklanguage publications. Yet how is a general reader or scholar to appreciate the important Jesuit role and contributions to Slovak �SLOVAKIA 131 history, culture, and society, if he is unable to read this history, or is even unaware that it exists? Clearly, the Dejiny cannot remain a hidden Slovak treasure. Indeed, the Slovak Jesuits have an obligation to make the Dejiny with proper documentation known and accessible to a non-Slovak-reading public. They must present themselves before the world and not simply in the Slovak heart of Europe. Otherwise, a part of Slovakia, its culture, history, people, and achievements will remain concealed behind a language that few in today's world will bother to learn even for reading. James Ramon Felak. "At the Price of the Republic." Hlinka's Slovak People's Party,1929-1938. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994, xiv & 263 p. STANISLAV J. KIRSCHBAUM York University, Glendon College Czechoslovakia is a state that broke up twice in its seventyfour year history: the fust time it was under the pressure of international events and on the eve of a world war, the second in the aftermath of democratic elections. The fust break-up has been mired in controversy, due not only to the circumstances surrounding it, but above all to the responsibility that is often ascribed to the Slovak People's Party (SPP) for bringing about that outcome. James Felak's study looks at this party, in particular during the decade that precedes the fust break-up. There are very few studies of Slovak politics in the first Czechoslovak Republic (CSR), fewer still that offer an in depth examination of the role and policies of the main parties that influenced and shaped inter-war Slovak political life. The handful of monographs that have been written on Slovakia in the first �132 SLOVAKIA CSR, or indeed on the first CSR itself, have generally looked at how the "Slovak question" has contributed to, been responsible for, or unable to prevent its break-up. It would not be inaccurate to say that most take a position for (the Czechoslovak and Marxist approach) or against (the nationalist Slovak approach) the first CSR; very few seek to examine the question from the dynamics of Czech-Slovak relations as did Carol Skalnik Leff in National Conflict in Czechoslovakia. The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987 (1988), or from the challenges a multinational state faces when dealing with its constituent nations and national minorities. Felak's study fills some of the gaps in our knowledge of Slovak inter-war political life, but, regretfully, it does little to advance our understanding of it. Of the seven chapters that present the Hlinka Slovak People's Party, five offer a relatively detailed examination of its policies for the decade that begins with the Depression. The first chapter presents a rapid and, unfortunately, superficial overview of Slovak nationalism until 1929 whereas the second outlines in detail the party's ideology and programme. The remaining chapters are divided according to certain events that mark a change of fortune or direction for the party. The author looks in depth at some of the more important ones, such as the Tuka affair of 1929, the 1929 and 1935 elections, the 1931 Slovak orthography dispute, the 1933 Pribina celebrations, the different party congresses, in particular the Youth Congress of 1932 and that of 1936, and the 1938 Pittsburgh Pact celebration, all of which marked Slovak political life. Equally useful and interesting are his descriptions of the SPP platform at different times and the relations with other Czech and Slovak political parties and formations. As for the various leading personalities, Andrej Hlinka, Vojtech Tuka, Karol Sidor, and Jozef Tiso, among others, the author seeks to give a sense of their role and importance in the development of SPP policies. In sum, most of the �SLOVAKIA 133 book offers a detailed examination of the role of the SPP in an important decade in Slovak political life and is in this respect a contribution to the existing literature. The main problem with this study lies in its approach to the subject. This is due not only to too great a reliance on certain earlier studies, but above all to the indiscriminate use of police reports as authoritative sources of political analysis. In fairness to the author, he makes an attempt to present a balanced approach on the "Slovak question". Yet the language he uses clearly indicates that he identifies with and accepts generally the interpretations of those authors who have a Czechoslovak view ?f Slovak history, a view that is mostly negative toward the Slovaks and uncritically favourable toward Czechoslovakia. For example he refers to Slovakia as "relatively underdeveloped, politically, economically, socially, culturally, and nationally" (p. 17) or describes Hlinka as having a "parochial, clerical mentality that resembled that of a Slovak peasant." (p. 25) In addition, like earlier authors, his examination of Prague policies toward Slovakia and toward the SPP, is at best cursory and certainly not critical. On occasion one gets the feeling from his presentation that there was a specific Prague-SPP dynamic, yet there is little analysis of the reasons for and the consequences of Prague policies, only of the SPP reactions and actions. For example, Prague exercized censorship on the SPP press to such an extent that in 1938, when the government was considering the possibility of a coaliton with the SPP, one of that party's conditions was the lifting of that censorship. Equally problematic is the reliance on police reports as a research source. The fact that the Prague government felt it necessary to have police spies within the SPP is in itself a fact worth examining, not to say anything of the accuracy of these reports. The emphasis that Felak places on factional struggles within the SPP comes mostly from these reports. That the police �134 SLOVAKIA spies reported such struggles is not in the least bit surprising; it was in the government's interest to be able to neutralize an opposition party that Pelak on many occasions describes as the most important one in Slovakia. Also, there is nothing surprising about factional differences; this is a fact of life in political parties in all democratic states. But in this case, the factionalism represented the dilemmas the SPP faced in its twin objectives: the autonomy of Slovakia and the integrity and security of Czechoslovakia. The failure of Prague to have understood this and to have dealt with it adequately was paid, in the end, "at the price of the republic." For all its richness about the SPP, Felak's examination of its policies is nevertheless incomplete; on the other hand, it has the merit of provoking additional questions and showing the way for further study. Hope Dies Last, The Autobiogra]Xly of Alexander Dubcek. Edited and translated by Jin Hochman. New York: Kodansha America, Inc., 1993. 354 pp. ROBERT K. EV ANSON Uni versify of Missouri Kansas City The automobile accident of September 1, 1992, which led to Alexander Dubcek's death nine weeks later, robbed Slovakia of one of its most distinguished political leaders. Whether Dubcek could have played a vital role in shaping the politics of an independent Slovakia will never be known. What is certain, and what we are reminded of in this fascinating autobiography excellently edited and translated by Jin Hochman - is that he did establish for himself a place of lasting historical importance. �SLOVAKIA 135 It seems necessary to say this because, as Dubcek himself was aware, there is insufficient appreciation among many of today's young Slovaks and Czechs of what he and his fellow "reform Communists" attempted to do in the 1960s. It remains for historians to sort out the difficult issue of just how much impact the Prague Spring had on the subsequent course of Czechoslovak politics that ended ultimately in the demise of the country's neo-Stalinist regime twenty-one years later, but clearly the impact was significant.The Prague Spring, which Dubcek more than anyone else helped to shape, set an example for democratic aspirations that resurfaced in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. It also was an obvious model for some of Gorbachev's policies in -the 1980s. The Soviet suppression of the reform movement also created deep wounds of alienation among Czechs and Slovaks towards the USSR and the post-1968 regime that never healed. Ironically, both Dubcek and the Soviets were correct in their 1968 dialogue, Dubcek in warning the Soviets of the need to better understand how many Czechs and Slovaks viewed the old regime as an unnatural entity, and the Soviets in recognizing the degree to which Dubcek's reform movement threatened the very foundations of Leninist rule in Eastern Europe. Dubcek's autobiography begins appropriately with his early years, and an examination of that period of his life teaches us a great deal about why he acted as he did in his maturity. It is difficult not to admire the man, and this book, which is not egregiously self-serving, merely strengthens that attitude. Several aspects of character and personality come to mind - decency, courage, political shrewdness, and a trust and idealism that were at once his greatest strengths and his greatest weaknesses. We find him as a teenager in Kirghizia defending young Muslims against bullying by his fellow Czechs and Slovaks, and after World War Two pressing relentlessly for the release from the Soviet Gulag of a physician who had treated the injured Dubcek �136 SLOVAKIA during the Uprising; it was a small moral step to his passionate commitment to the complete rehabilitation of all political prisoners in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. In 1952, in the wake of the Shinsky trial and at the height of the terror, he cast aside a Soviet-censored version of a speech and instead delivered a ringing eulogy at the funeral of fellow Communist Karol Smidke, who had been a victim of the persecution. He stood up for the reforms in the face of immense Soviet pressure throughout 1968, acted honorably after his abduction to Moscow following the Soviet and allied invasion, refused to take the safety of exile because he thought his proper place was with his people, and sent off a stream of letters of protest long after his removal from power at considerable personal risk. Dubcek also was a very clever and careful political tactician. Some of the most fascinating passages in his book concern the way he built alliances in his ultimately successful effort to bring down Communist Party First Secretary Antonin Novotny in 1967. I would like to have read even more details about conversations he had with various political figures in this process, as well as about the way he blunted Novotny's efforts to consign him to political oblivion in 1962, but there still is plenty to captivate anyone with a taste for Prague-style Kremlinology. The period of the early 1960s is especially interesting in this book, because Dubcek discusses the first signs of the movement against neo-Stalinism and Prague centralism, including his election over Novotny's opposition to the position of Slovak Communist Party First Secretary in April, 1963. This event represented a stinging defeat for Novotny, because Dubcek already had established himself as the leading advocate for sweeping rehabilitation of the victims of the purges of so-called "Slovak bourgeois nationalists" in the early 1950s. As such, he had become the major opponent of Prague centralism in the Party leadership. �SLOVAKIA 137 While Dubcek was never foolhardy, he could be surprisingly bold. An interesting illustration of this was his successful ploy with Jin Hendrych, the number two man in the Party hierarchy in 1967 and, until then, a staunch Novotny loyalist. Sensing that Hendrych was beginning to vacillate in his commitment to Novotny, Dubcek walked into his office that late November and said that Novotny's days as First Secretary clearly were numbered, and that Hendrych might consider getting on the bandwagon or he too would fall. As an added enticement, he invited the startled Hendrych to consider whether he would like Novotny's job as First Secretary! The amusing climax of this story is that shortly thereafter, Leonid Brezhnev came to Prague to assess Novotny's prospects and naturally sought out Hendrych's opinion. Reportedly, Brezhnev barely got inside the door when Hendrych told him he was "willing" to serve as First Secretary. While Hendrych never got the chance - Dubcek succeeded Novotny - his abandonment of Novotny may have persuaded Brezhnev of the futility of a rescue operation. The most painful reading in this book is the period of the mounting Soviet hostility to the Prague Spring and the ultimate invasion and subsequent period of "normalization." It is impossible not to become angry all over again when one reads of the treatment Dubcek and his comrades received at the hands of their Soviet kidnappers, as well as the incredible pettiness and maliciousness of their successors in Prague and Bratislava. While Dubcek does not cast a great deal of new light on the events of 1968, he minces no words in assessing various political figures and spares no criticism of his worst tormentors. Thus we learn that Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin was as cold in private as in public and capable of extreme rudeness. He and his Soviet comrades are rightly dismissed by Dubcek as "gangsters" and "thugs." Novotny is confirmed as hopelessly ignorant of Slovak affairs, as well as contemptuous toward Slovak national �138 SLOVAKIA feelings, one of the keys to his ultimate demise. Dubcek also brands Vasil Bifak, Alois Indra, and the other conspirators of 1968 as "traitors." No one comes across worse, however, than Gustav Husak, who presided over the restoration of neo-Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. His shabby treatment of Dubcek after 1968, despite Dubcek's pivotal role in bringing about his political resurrection, is a sad counter to the courage he displayed when fighting for his own rehabilitation in the early 1960s. Despite the claims that he "protected" the ousted reformers from "hardliners" in the Party, Husak comes across here as a man incapable of normal feelings and as a complete opportunist. Naturally Dubcek was bitter about Husak, but the tone of his evaluations of Husak and other political figures is in fact measured and convincing. No discussion of Dubcek's political career would be complete without addressing his failure to discern the danger of a Soviet invasion in 1968. Part of the answer may lie in his family background. He was born in 1921 to a pair of committed socialists who were so enamored of the Soviet experiment that they were willing to relocate to Central Asia to help build a new society. At the same time, his parents had the good sense to return to Czechoslovakia when the dangers of remaining in the Soviet Union became obvious. Nonetheless, Dubcek never abandoned the socialist idealism he inherited from them. While he certainly understood the evils of Stalinism and the incompatibility of the Soviet-type system with Czech and Slovak traditions, he had a blind spot that served him poorly in 1968. Specifically, despite all the Soviet expressions of alarm about what he and his fellow reformers were doing, he could not bring himself to believe the USSR would intervene. There is no question Dubcek had evolved into a democrat and was aware of what he was doing. He writes that the Action Program put forth by Party reformers in 1968 "was a plan for a gradual return to �SLOVAKIA 139 the concept of democratic socialism ... " He acknowledges that his regime was rejecting various aspects of Leninism - he believed that the Communist Party could win popular support in competitive elections, once it had embraced democracy, and thus he downplayed the Soviet concern that his reforms were jeopardizing "the leading role of the party." At the same time, he knew he had to avoid making any references to multi-party democracy for fear of alarming them unnecessarily. He also believed that "socialism could function better in a market-oriented environment, with significant elements of private enterprise." He writes that of course he recalled what happened to Hungary in 1956, but he had made clear to the Soviets his determination that Czechoslovakia would remain loyal to its Soviet bloc allies, so the situations were not comparable. Perhaps it was due to his conviction that what he and his colleagues were doing would benefit socialism by strengthening the Communist Party's legitimacy among the people, and by bringing the country closer to the original ideals of socialism, that he could not believe that the Soviet leadership would not, however reluctantly, allow him to proceed. (In a postscript, Jiff Hochman notes Dubcek's inclination to believe in people's good intentions.) In fairness, it is difficult to fault Dubcek very much had he opted for concessions, it seems unlikely that the Soviet leadership would have accepted anything short of a complete abandonment of the democratization process to which he had committed his country. Still, his discussion of how he assessed the Soviet mindset at the time is not entirely satisfactory. Alexander Dubcek's autobiography is a thoughtful and wellwritten account of the life of a man of extraordinary moral and political qualities. It is indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in the Czechoslovak political experience. �140 SLOVAKIA Paul Robert Magocsi. The Rusyns of Slovakia: An Historical Survey. New York: East European Monographs, Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1993, x, 185 pp., Maps, Notes, Bibliography, Index. KEITH P. DYRUD Concordia College St. Paul,MN The Rusyns of Slovakia: An Historical Survey is essentially a revision of an earlier work by Prof. Magocsi, The RusynUkrainians of Czechoslovakia: An Historical Survey (Vienna, 1981 ). But there is an additional twist to this revision. The "Preface" says: ''This volume is a translation of an introductory historical survey published in the newly codified Rusyn literary language as well as in Slovak by the Rusyn Renaissance Society in Presov." Prof. Magocsi played a leading role in the formation of the national movement that spawned the Rusyn Renaissance Society and the First World Congress of Rusyns that sponsored the codification of the Rusyn literary language. The professor, however, is modest. His name does not once appear in the text in connection with that activity; however, he is pictured with other leaders of the First World Congress of Rusyns (122). The contents of the book should be familiar to those have read the author's earlier works. Magocsi traces the Rusyns' history from their first settlement in eastern Slovakia to the present. He partially assumes and partially attempts to demonstrate that the Rusyns of eastern Slovakia form a distinct nationality. Magocsi documents the cooperation that existed between the Rusyns and the Slovaks while they were dominated by Hungary prior to 1914, but he is critical of the "slovakization" of the Rusyns between the world wars, and he also identifies the �SLOVAKIA 141 Ukrainian movement as a threat to the Rusyn national identity that the book clearly endorses. During the inter-war yars slovakization was a greater threat to the Rusyns than "ukrainianization", but after the Second World War, official government support for the Ukrainian identity led to a decline of any national consciousness. Many Rusyns identified themselves as Slovaks to avoid the Ukrainian label. After the "Velvet Revolution" of November 1989, the Rusyns in the Presov region were again free to publicly promote their own national identity as separate from either Slovak or Ukrainian. In this effort, the Rusyns received support from both the Prague and the Bratislava governments. Magocsi suggests that this support for the Rusyns harkens back to "the historical friendship and attention on the part of Czechs and Slovaks toward their Rusyn brethren ... " (126). It could also suggest that the number of people identifying themselves as Rusyns is now very small and the Rusyn movement is not likely to become a major competitor to the Slovak identity in eastern Slovakia. In fact the major problem with Prof. Magocsi 's interpretation of the Rusyn movement in estem Slovakia is his confidence that the small number of Rusyns can develop a national identity. He is dissatisfied with the 1991 census figures that identify fewer than 33,000 "Rusnak/Russian/Rusyn/Ukrainian" people in the Presov region, with just under 17,000 of them unambiguously identifying themselves as "Rusyn" ( 126). According to Magocsi, that number could potentially be as high as 130 000 (2 - 3). Many readers of Magocsi's first book: The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus', 1848 - 1948 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978) were persuaded by his convincing argument that the Rusyns in Subcarpathia did, at least, "shape" a national identity during the inter-war years. But in that era, he was dealing with a larger critical mass of Rusyns. In eastern Slovakia, that critical mass does not seem to exist. With the Slovaks claiming �142 SLOVAKIA most of those 130,000 potential Rusyns, and the Ukrainians competing for the rest, it does not seem likely that the critical mass will develop. In the meantime, those who do identify themselves as Rusyns can read their history in their own "newly codified language". And those who identify themselves as Slovaks can also read the translation in their language just as Rusyns in North America can read it in English. Ukraine and Ukrainians throughout the World: A Demographic and Sociological Guide to the Homeland and Its Diaspora. Edited by Ann Lencyk Pawliczko. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press for the Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1994, xxxvi, 508 pp. PAUL R. MAGOCSI University of Toronto The goal of this volume is to provide brief factual data on Ukrainians wherever they may live in the world. The newlyindependent country of Ukraine has within its borders only 64 percent of the estimated 58.7 million inhabitants who inhabit various parts of the globe. Therefore, a history or description of the Ukrainian people as a whole must be concerned with many other places than Ukraine. This book in fact deals primarily with the estimated 21.2 million Ukrainians living outside Ukraine. The approach is comprehensive, with an effort to say something about communities, however small they may be, in places like Luxembourg, Ireland, Tunisia and New Zealand as well as in the more known countries of Ukrainian immigrant settlement like the United States, Canada, and Australia. �SLOVAKIA 143 The editor, Ann Lencyk Pawliczko, felt the need to trace the political and cultural history of Ukraine (pp. 37 - 84), which is the least satisfactory portion of this otherwise encyclopedic compendium. The rest of the volume consists of entries by 28 authors on the various countries where Ukrainians live. Each entry begins with a general overview of a specific country followed by a history of its Ukrainian community. Many entries include statistical charts and each ends with a list of further readings. Slovak readers will likely be interested in the entry called "Ukrainian-Ruthenians in the Slovak Republic", written by Vasyl Markus (pp. 157 - 166). While the author recognizes the enormous cultural achievements made by the Ukrainians in Slovakia after World War II, he does not attribute the achievements to the favorable policies of the former Czechoslovak Communist government that lavished extensive funding on the group, but rather to the efforts of the local Ukrainian-oriented intelligentsia. He claimes that the official census figures (30,800 Rusyns and Ukrainians in 1991) are far below the 110,000 to 120,000 that supposedly live in northeastern Slovakia. Markus argues the statistical discrepancy exists because of manipulation by Slovak census takers and a policy of "denationalization" carried out by both the former Communist and post-1989 governments in Slovakia. He does not mention the real reason for the numerical differences. Since the 1950s thousands of "Ukrainians-Ruthenians" voluntarily opted to identify as Slovaks in protest against Communist government decrees that banned the Rusyn national identity and required people to call themselves Ukrainian. The author also indirectly blames Slovak governments for responding favorably since 1989 to the Rusyn national revival and for allowing people in the 1991 census to identify with the Rusyn nationality (16,937 Rusyns as opposed to 13,847 Ukrainians) and with the Rusyn language (49,099 Rusyn speakers as opposed to 9,480 Ukrainian speakers) - the latter �144 SLOVAKIA figures are not provided by Markus. The otherwise democratic policies of present-day Slovakia are described as promoting "political Ruthenianism" a phenomenon that is "influenced by outside anti-Ukrainian forces" and that is intent on de-Ukrainianizing the local population. Fortunately, the rest of this volume maintains a less biased tone in describing Ukrainian communities in other countries. Nina Trnka: Slovak-English I English-Slovak Dictionary, N. Y., Hippocrene Books, 1992, 360 pp. JOHN M. KOCHIK Scottsdale, Anizona Any contribution to the field of Slovak reference materials is always welcome. Attempts at popularization are encouradged only to the extent that a work demonstrates quality. Standards, of course, should always be high to reflect the expertise of the _ contributor. The backcover boasts "You are holding the only SlovakEnglish/English-Slovak Dictionary available in North America". What about Smejkalova et al.? The book is intended for "students and travelers", and claims to be "concise". For all its advertising pretense, its format is disappointing. It looks like a thesis. It lacks an Introduction which it sorely needs for efficient use. It omits a separating page (175) between the two major divisions for facile access, wherein an appropriate blank page or second title page would suffice. Pronunciation (pages i through iii) is confusing. The list of consonants is incomplete, not accounting for - among others important palatals d', I, ii, ( used in too many words to be ignored. As immediate as page one, there is no knowing how ''t~' �SLOVAKIA 145 in "akost' must be pronounced according to her presentation. Questions arise as to "studi'ia" (123) and "studna" (353 - see "well")? Why then "anP' (2) gives [a-nyi], or "odev" (71) [odyef]? How then distinguish cited "Javica" (44) from un-cited "/avica" - "left hand"? Equating long "6" with "6" in Pronunciation is erroneous, being that the latter "6" is diphotong [.u.o]. The remarks in Pronunciation are unclear and inadequate. The uninitiated will render Slovak pronunciation ludicrous. Examples provided are ambiguous for articulation of varietes of vowel "a", because speakers of American-English are inconsistent in their renditions of "a" in cited forms "ma-ma, fast, rat, grass, pad". To present digraph "ch" as aspirated [kh] in "khaki" (sic!) is not true for the guttural [)c]. And, to state that Slovak "r' is approximated by labial untrilled "r' of "red" - bellies the trilled "r' performed by the tongue. Transcription in Pronunciation is defective, since the symbols given are arbitrary, not in accord either with the conventions of Slovak texts or even the International Phonetic System. A hard look at the symbols presented defies logic. Examples follow. Since Standard Slovak (i. e. spisovna slovencina) utilizes digraph "dz" as the phone in medzi and other words - to employ "dz' as a symbol for English pronunciation of th [b] of "they" is incomprehensible! In like manner, use of [s] for [0] of "thank" produces comic theatrical effect as in [Sank you] for [Sank you]! Moreover, to present the nasal-guttural -ng [ri] of "long" as underlined [g] can be misinterpreted into a humorous exagerated liaison of oft-quoted misquoted "LoNGJsland" with defined [NGJ]. �146 SLOVAKIA Further examination into the deficiencies given in Pronunciation would require a complete revision after careful editing. So far only the unavoidable pitfalls have been critiqued. Editorial work appears lax or nonexistent as evidenced by "thruth" (sic! page ii), presumably "truth". And, "heith" (sic! page 158) following vyska and page 244, apparently meant to be "height"). In both citings of "heith", consistency seems to demonstrate persistent misspelling. There is an unexpected thrust from V (350) into W (351) without a notification-heading W. As for word-selection, it might be hoped that high-frequency was a criterion for efficiency. On the contrary, superfluous are words among others like "elephant" (222), "volcano" (350), "yacht" (358), "zebra" (359) - scarcely indigenous to Slovakia! Yet the word kamzik (36?) "chamois" (198?) indigenous to the Tatras finds no listing in either section. Why "warden" (351) is given makes one wonder of its sociological implications. Why is "warrant" (351) so important to find place here? Surely one expects utilitarian vocabulary in such a work. As for semantics, a first-hand impression might be that if several meanings are provided without explanation or definition - an indiscriminate interchange might be possible. Not so for automat (3) "slot-machine, snack-bar, machine-gun". Thus also for "minister" (268) "minister, vyslanec, duchovnf" mean different things. Each having a distinct, specific meaning. It is most unlikely that "students and travelers" will discern clearly which term fits which circumstance. Cross-references are not provided for necessary clarification. See "warm" (351) ...srdecnf... for which neither "cordial" (206?) nor "sincerely" (315) are given on expected pages in parentheses. In similar manner, aktiv (1) "meeting, gathering" makes no reference or distinction from "meeting" (266) schodza, stretnutie. �SLOVAKIA 147 Perusal of the text will result in startling revelations. For instance, pronunciation of odJXJr (72) gives [od-por], whereas in fact it is [ot-por], a morphophonetic alternation called regressive assimilation. Where the voiced d automatically becomes unvoiced/devoiced t, in harmony with unvoiced p which sets the condition for the process. The same phenomenon occurs in other instances like odstup (72) to [ot-stup], bezplatny (6) to [bes-platnee], modlitba and prosba for "prayer" (289) not given in the text as [mod-lit-ba] and [proz-ba]. Interesting to note is that word-final voiced consonants are given as de-voiced as in smrad (116) [smrat]. However, no account has been made of v as a semi-vowel [IJ.] in such words as pravda (92) [prau.da], rovno (105) [rouno], domov (18) [domo.1J.]; instead, Czech ussage [domof] (18) is presented. Two outstanding examples given: [svatba] (125) for svadba and ['strukh] (101) for pstruh are unintelligible. For all the effort involved in the production of this Dictionary, it is unfortunate that it should fall short of the desired quality expected. In spite of the good intentions of the contributor, the end result is full of inconsistencies and inadequacies. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1998, Vol. 36 Description An account of the resource Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document REVIEWS SLOVAKIA 119 Paul Robert Magocsi (with cartographic design by Geoffrey J. Matthews). Historical Atlas of East Central Europe. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1995, 218 pages. GEORGE J. DEMKO Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire The Historical Atlas of East Central Europe is a truly outstanding and valuable book. The combination of professionally and accurately rendered maps, and the accompanying text that is written with authority, accuracy and clarity represent a rich source of information on an important part of the world. The atlas is comprised of 50 sections, each with maps (in color) and related explanatory text. The themes are varied and arranged chronologically starting from A.D. 400 to the present. The final section incorporates the most recent political changes that have occurred in the region. The themes begin with the geographic zones and continue with subjects such as ecclesiastical jurisdiction, population and migrations to recent industrial development. Some of the themes are quite innovative and useful such as "Education and Culture through the 18th Century" and "Ethnolinguistic Distribution in 1900". There are also 28 tables containing quite valuable information on such topics as the estimated deaths of Jews in the region by 1945, and the size of Catholic and Orthodox populations in East Central Europe in 1900. For bibliophiles there is also an excellent bibliography with an especially useful and rare list of atlases and maps relevant to the region. There are, of course, some issues with which one might quibble. For example, the region is very broadly defined as "the lands between the linguistic frontier of the German and Italianspeaking peoples on the west and the political boundaries of the former Soviet Union on the east. The north-south parameters are the Baltic and Mediterranean seas" (P. XI) . These boundaries 120 SLOVAKIA were defined by the editors of the series to which this volume belongs (a multivolume History of East Central Europe published by the University of Washington Press). The author has expanded on the original boundaries to include the eastern part of Germany, Bavaria, Austria, northeastern Italy, historic Poland, Lithuania, Western Ukraine, Moldova and western Anatolia in Turkey! Certainly the author has erred on the conservative side by using such an inclusive and extensive set of bounding definitions. Given the fact that there are almost as many definitions of East Central Europe as there are "specialists" on the region, and that any defined region would have many important interactions with surrounding areas, the decision is an excellent one providing a very comprehensive perspective on an illdefined region, or rather a region on which a consensus would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. It is also possible to argue for themes that are important but omitted. For example, the omission of a section on emigration from this important region to the US and Canada (as well as other countries) is regrettable. This topic would have been particularly interesting for the Slovak and Polish areas. Also, the map of geographic zones is really a map of physiographic zones. A map of the "socio/cultural/linguistic regions" of the East Central Europe would have been much more useful and very interesting. In sum, Magocsi's Historical Atlas of East Central Europe is a wonderful and fascinating addition to our educational sources on one of the most troubled and dynamic parts of the world. The cartography is first-rate, and attention to detail is commendable. Anyone, scholar, politican, or interested layperson should add this volume to his/her bookshelf. It is valuable, useful, visually pleasing and reasonably priced. SLOVAKIA 121 Anton Spiesz. Dejiny Slovenska na ceste k sebauvedomeniu. Bratislava: Perfekt, 1992. Pp. 195. Gregory C. Ference Salisbury State University Salisbury, Maryland The late Anton Spiesz wrote a large number of books prior to the volume under review, most of which concentrated on economic history. Dejiny Slovenska na ceste k sebauvedomeniu, however, cannot be counted among this genre. Although economics play a prominent role in this book, it is best characterized as a historical survey of Slovakia. As such the first part of the title would have sufficed; na ceste k sebauvedomeniu misleads the reader, who is hard pressed to find anything about Slovak national awareness prior to chapter six where Spiesz introduced the issue of nationalism. Even though he began the story 200,000 years ago with the first evidence of humans on Slovak territory, the author quickly traversed the millennia. Evidently Spiesz started to write hi s book before the demise of Communism, as at times Marxist rhetoric appears in the study. In an apparent attempt to correct this problem, the author revised the text in several sections to distance himself from this outdated verbiage. Rather than soften the issue, however, it caused the book to become unwieldy in places. Although Spiesz intended it as a general overview of Slovak history, the book assumed too much. Spiesz sometimes failed to properly introduce people, or to explain events or documents, such as the Zilina Agreement of 1938, only mentioning them. Another fault was the author's penchant for lists, whether they were of animals in ancient Slovakia, manufactured goods from the mid-nineteenth century, or pedagogists. 122 SLOVAKIA The book also suffers from some major errors regarding dates. For example, Hungary proclaimed its independence in March 1849, not in 1848, Ladislav the Posthumous acceded to the throne in 1444 rather than in 1453, and the American Slovak organizations of Zivena and the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union were founded in 1891 and 1892, not in 1894 and 1890 as Spiesz noted. Furthermore, in his treatment of the impact of Slovaks in the United States on politics, Spiesz incorrectly stated that both men and women enjoyed equal rights and the franchise before the First World War, and he over emphasized the establishment and role of socialist organizations among American Slovaks. The last chapters are Spiesz's best, providing balanced coverage on how the Communists subverted the political system and the Slovaks in their takeover of Czechoslovakia. He also exploded the Communist myth that the Slovak National Uprising was one of the greatest moments in Slovak history. In the latter instance, the author painted a very brutal picture in which countless innocent people were murdered by the insurgents. Spiesz could have finished his volume on a high note, b~t his final chapter, "From the Building of Socialism to its Bankruptcy," destroyed the seemingly solid effort found in its several preceding sections. Claiming that a historian cannot write effectively and objectively about events unless a period of at least thirty years has elapsed, he merely gave a thumbnail sketch of the period from 1960 to 1989 which included the tumultuous events of the "Prague Spring" and the "Velvet Revolution." An attack on Gustav Husak undeservedly received the most coverage in this four-page chapter. Here, Spiesz appeared to place himself on a soapbox in an attempt to further disavow his connections with the former regime. The author might instead have covered the fast-paced events after 1989 through the date of publication in order to give the reader a sense of closure. SLOVAKIA 123 Finally, the book has no index which, though not unusual for European publications, would in this case have been indispensable, since Spiesz covered so much in so few pages. On the whole, this book would be appropriate only for someone with at least a rudimentary knowledge of Slovak history. Richard Marsina a kolektfv. Slovenske dejiny. Martin: Matica slovenska, 1993, 334 pp. R. VLADIMIR BAUMGARTEN Tallahassee, Rorida This works represents the first general attempt since the collapse of the communist system in 1989 to reevaluate the history of the Slovak people. As such, it offers surprisingly little that is new or original. Indeed, were it not for the fact that Slovenske dejiny condemns the excesses of communist dictatorship, many of its conclusions would be politicaly acceptable to the deceased Husak regime. The early portion of the book deals with events and developments from which various schools ot thought concerning Slovak historiography have traditionally drawn common conclusions: Slovakia was settled by man since the dawn of history, the Slovaks retained a sense of identity in the Hungarian kingdom, there were embryonic tendencies towards statehood in earlier times, and so on. A subtle change of interpretation may be found in the treatment of the national awakening, specifically concerning the leaders of the 1848 revolution. Earlier Marxist interpretation of the 1848 events portrayed Cudovft Stur and his colleagues as conterrevolutionaries for siding with the Habsburgs against the Hungarians. Later, Slovak historiography during Alexander Dubcek' s tenure as First Secretary of the Slovak 124 SLOVAKIA Communist Party reversed this trend, portraying the Slovak leaders as socially progressive figures. This interpretation was continued throughout the Husak regime. Slovenske dejiny, by contrast, depicts the Slovak leaders in a strictly national rather than a social context. The work concedes that they initially attempted to cooperate with Hungarian leader Lajos Kossuth on questions of social reform, but indicates that a breakdown of relations occured concerning Hungary's national question. One significant, and, in retrospect, surprising change of interpretation concerns the circumstances surrounding the Czecho-Slovak merger of 1918. Communist historiography traditionally regarded the merger as a "bourgeois swindle", in which the Slovak people were treated as colonial subjects until the victory of the working class under Communist leadership rectified relations between two nationalities. Given the pressures of Magyarization at the turn of the century, however, Slovenske dejiny treats pro-Czech sentiment as a positive force. The activities of T. G. Masaryk and the Czecho-Slovak emigres, the exploits of the Czechoslovak Legion on foreign battlefields, and even the career of the extreme Czechophile Vavro Srobar are all cast in a heroic light. No mention is made of the previously lauded Slovak Soviet Republic which was founded on the bayonets of Bela Kun's Hungarian Red Army. This work conveys the impression that, if Czecho-Slovak union in 1918 was not the best of all possible worlds, it was at least a step in the right direction. Slovenske dejiny is critical of Czech centralism in the interwar period, but regards the cultural emancipation of the Slovaks and their economic advancement as positive features. Honorable mention is given to Milan Hodfa's appointment as the first Slovak prime minister of Czechoslovakia. His career might have been given more attention. In spite of a long history of personal opportunism, Hodfa's ideas concerning Central European federalism are still worth studying today. SLOVAKIA 125 While the work hails the attainment of Slovak autonomy in 1938, subsequent developments are portrayed as negative. Advocates of the rehabilitation of Monsignor Jozef Tiso are particularly bound to be disappointed: the Slovak Republic continues to be regarded as a Nazi puppet state, and the deportation of the Jews is treated in the same simplistic manner, which does not inquire deeper into the divisions of policy among Slovak leaders themselves. The 1944 uprising, correspondingly, is still regarded as a heroic event, notwithstanding the surrounding circumstances or tragic consequences. Surprisingly little attention is given to subsequent developments, perhaps out of sense of caution. It must be noted that, although the book was published in 1993, it was prepared during the previous year, at a time when many Czechs and Slovaks still hoped to maintain a federal republic. It reflects history written during a time of transition, and all the limitations found therein. This work's most revealing feature is a lack of vindictive malice towards the Czechs, a phenomenon which helped assure that the "Velvet Divorce" would not become another Balkanstyle bloodbath. A more comprehensive history, however, remains to be written. Katarina Sultajerova. Compiled by. Najstarsie rody na Slovensku, Martin: Slovenska genealogicko-heraldicka spolocnosr pri Matici slovenskej, 1994, 128 pp. DUNCAN B. GARDINER Lakewood, Ohio This collection of articles is essentialy a scholarly primer of the earliest documented Slovak aristocracy. It consists of papers delivered at the October, 1993 Symposium on the Oldest Line- 126 SLOVAKIA ages in Slovakia, which was co-sponsored by the State Regional Archives in Bratislava, the Archives Section of the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and by the Slovak Ministries of Culture and the Interior. Jozef Novak, author of the two-volume Rodove erby na Slovensku ( 1986), wrote the preface and the lead article "Genealogia ako historicka disciplfna" , which discuses the importance of genealogy in understanding the early history of Slovakia. He recommends making heraldy and genealogy more valuable to historians by broadening genealogical studies to the geographic spread of a family over time, to the bibliography of published literature on a lineage, and to biographies of prominent individuals in the family. Novak also emphasises the importance of thorough source documentation. Roman Zelenay, the late State Secretary of the Slovak Ministry of Culture, wrote "Genealogicke met6dy vfskumu najstarsfch rodov". He discussed traditional Slovak naming customs dating to the Great Moravian period, showing that despite the lack of surnames, it is possible to establish genealogical betwe~n individuals by analyzing the system by which first names were given. The Battle of Mohacs ( 1526) disrupted the Slovak social order and this earlier naming system with it, a fact which makes post-Mohacs genealogies based on onomastics quite different. Milan Majtan, historian and author of Nazvy obcf na Slovensku za ostatnfch 200 rokov (1972), discusses the historical development of personal and family names in Slovakia in "Vfvin JXJmemivania osob na Slovensku", giving examples of proto-Slavic, pre-Christian and Christian naming traditions. Majtan cites copious examples from a range of early manuscript sources. In "Struktura sl'achty na Slovensku v 9 . - 13. storoci'', Richard Marsina relates that the upper aristocracy in Slovakia consisted of Magyars and Magyarized Slovaks. Therefore, the SLOVAKIA 127 genealogist and historian must look to the lesser nobility within each of the old countries to study the prominent Slovak lineages. Vincent Mucska's "Anonymovo dielo ako genealogickf pramen'""' takes a critical look at the twelfth-century "gesta". He dismisses it as a source of concrete historic or genealogical fact. "Panovnicka dynastia v JO. - 11. storocl" by Ladislav Vrtel' chronicles in some detail the families of the two sons of Takson, a granson of Arpad, the first Magyar leader, showing their quite different fates. Nine more articles, written by wel-known historians, deal with the earliest aristocratic families of individual counties: Saris and Uz by Ferdinand Ulicny; Spis by Ivan Chalupecky; Turiec, Liptov and Orava by Jan Benko; Trencfn by Richard Marsina; Bratislava by Vincent Sedlak; Nitra by Jan Lukacka; Zvolen by Maria Durk ova; and Malohont by Leon Sokolovsky. Each article is in Slovak with a short summary in English or, in several cases, German. The English summaries are readable, but the number of typographical and gramatical errors show that a native English-speaking editor was needed. Short biographies of the authors would have been most useful. The articles are based both on original research and the literature in the field in a number of languages: Polish, German, French, Hungarian, Latin. The Genealogical-Heraldic Society has single-handedly placed Slovakia on the genealogical map by publishing the Hlas, a twice-yearly journal of genealogy and heraldry and by organizing local genealogy groups, not only in Martin, but also in Bratislava, Kosice, and Trencfn. The founding of this society is connected with the fact that the authors of the Slovenskf biografickf slovmk (6 vols., Matica slovenska, 1986 - 1994), aware that the 19th-century Slovak intelligentsia was related by a complex series of intermarriages, have wanted to investigate 128 SLOVAKIA their genealogies for some time. This volume is an admirable contribution to that effort. Dejiny SJXJlocnosti Jeiisovej na Slovensku: 1561 - 1988. Emil Krapka, S. J. and Vojtech Mikula, S. J. - editors: Cambridge, Ontario: Dobra kniha, 1990, 526 pp. and 24 pp. of color illustrations. GERALD J. SABO, S. J. John Carroll University University Heights, Ohio This is a historical survey of the Jesuits and their activities in the Slovak area, part of the 1990 celebration of the Society of Jesus on the 450th anniversary of its papal approval. As noted on the bibliographic page, this monograph was prepared between the fall of 1986 and that of 198 8, before the so-called "Velvet Revolution" of November 1989. Its two editors and eight authors have presented much interesting material to a Slovak-reading public which lacked substantive, accurate information on a religious order important in Slovak history and culture since the sixteenth century. In the main body are a good number of black and white illustrations, supplemented with sixty-four color ones for Slovakia and ten related to Slovak Jesuit activity in Canada. This extensive history is probably unique among such writing, and given the circumstances under which it was realised, all those involved deserve much praise and gratitude. The monograph is divided into five major parts. The first four comprise the Jesuits' history from 1561 with their first establishment in Tmava and on through 1988. The first part of the history covers the time period through 1615, the second, through the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773, the third, the SLOVAKIA 129 order's suppression and its effect in the Slovak portion of the Hungarian Kingdom, and the fourth, the context of the Society's universal restoration and its work among Slovaks at home and beyond from 1853 through 1988. The second and fourth parts together comprise two-thirds of the entire work. A major part usually begins with the larger European and Church background in which the Slovak events arose and evolved, and then Slovakrelated material is divided according to geographical locations and pastoral/apostolic activity. The fifth and final part of this history includes a chronological summary of important events among Jesuits of this area, an explanation of religious and Jesuit terminology, a substantial bibliography on the Society at large and in the Slovak area, name and place indexes, and summaries in Slovak, English, German, French, and Magyar. Twice in this history, Jesuits suffered dramatically at the hands of civil authorities. In 1773, Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa was finally impelled to supress legally the Society of Jesus in her realm from fear that if she did not do so, her daughter Marie Antoinette would not be allowed to marry the future French King, Louis XVI. Louis was a Bourbon, member of a royal family that strove mightily to eradicate throughout their European and foreign realms that "least" Society of Jesus for its greater loyalty to Church than state. Yet the Jesuits came back and thrived, just as they do today after their far more brutal suppression and persecution under the Communists between April, 1950 and the revolution of November, 1989. At present, Slovakia is a democratic, sovereign country, and publications such as the Dejiny need to showcase its role in European history and culture. Yet certain features of the Dejiny significantly limit its valuable effect and should be remedied. Prepared for a wide-ranging public conversant in Slovak, this work would also be of great interest to many others, whether general readers or scholars, who do not read Slovak, yet for 130 SLOVAKIA whom the summaries in languages other then Slovak are woefully inadequate. For this much wider audience, the Dejiny should be translated into English, the current lingua franca. Further, the lack of any documentation in notes is a serious limitation, yet nowadays such material could be collected within a reasonable time. This data is needed to provide crucial scholarship about Jesuits in Slovak territory and beyond which is available nowhere else. The activities of these Jesuits, mostly Slovak yet also of other nationalities, have remained hidden from appreciation even in Jesuit publications. For instance, in English-language studies of the Jesuits, the activities and influence of the universities in Trnava and Kosice - cities often disguised behind their German or Magyar names - are briefly mentioned, if that. No mention at all is made of the Slovak Benedikt Szollosi, compiler of the first Catholic hymnal Cantus catholici with songs in Latin and "Cultural Slovak". No more fortunate has been the Slovak Martin Szentivanyi, whose varied writings, encyclopedic studies, and very able directorship of the Trnava University press contributed significantly to Slovak history, culture, and language development. Also unknown among English readers is the Slovak Samuel Timon, whose writings made him a pioneer in scholarly Slovak historiography. Nor is Jesuit history in Slovak territory better known in other Western languages. For instance, nearly fourty years ago the Magyar Jesuit Laszl6 Lukacs wrote in German about the Jesuit Antonio Possevino's papal mission to establish a network of seminaries and schools in northern Europe in the late sixteenth century, but nothing was said about any Slovak area plans or effects. The Dejiny, though, discusses Posse vino's mission and its effects in re-establishing Jesuits there, as well as many other points not found outside of Slovaklanguage publications. Yet how is a general reader or scholar to appreciate the important Jesuit role and contributions to Slovak SLOVAKIA 131 history, culture, and society, if he is unable to read this history, or is even unaware that it exists? Clearly, the Dejiny cannot remain a hidden Slovak treasure. Indeed, the Slovak Jesuits have an obligation to make the Dejiny with proper documentation known and accessible to a non-Slovak-reading public. They must present themselves before the world and not simply in the Slovak heart of Europe. Otherwise, a part of Slovakia, its culture, history, people, and achievements will remain concealed behind a language that few in today's world will bother to learn even for reading. James Ramon Felak. "At the Price of the Republic." Hlinka's Slovak People's Party,1929-1938. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994, xiv & 263 p. STANISLAV J. KIRSCHBAUM York University, Glendon College Czechoslovakia is a state that broke up twice in its seventyfour year history: the fust time it was under the pressure of international events and on the eve of a world war, the second in the aftermath of democratic elections. The fust break-up has been mired in controversy, due not only to the circumstances surrounding it, but above all to the responsibility that is often ascribed to the Slovak People's Party (SPP) for bringing about that outcome. James Felak's study looks at this party, in particular during the decade that precedes the fust break-up. There are very few studies of Slovak politics in the first Czechoslovak Republic (CSR), fewer still that offer an in depth examination of the role and policies of the main parties that influenced and shaped inter-war Slovak political life. The handful of monographs that have been written on Slovakia in the first 132 SLOVAKIA CSR, or indeed on the first CSR itself, have generally looked at how the "Slovak question" has contributed to, been responsible for, or unable to prevent its break-up. It would not be inaccurate to say that most take a position for (the Czechoslovak and Marxist approach) or against (the nationalist Slovak approach) the first CSR; very few seek to examine the question from the dynamics of Czech-Slovak relations as did Carol Skalnik Leff in National Conflict in Czechoslovakia. The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987 (1988), or from the challenges a multinational state faces when dealing with its constituent nations and national minorities. Felak's study fills some of the gaps in our knowledge of Slovak inter-war political life, but, regretfully, it does little to advance our understanding of it. Of the seven chapters that present the Hlinka Slovak People's Party, five offer a relatively detailed examination of its policies for the decade that begins with the Depression. The first chapter presents a rapid and, unfortunately, superficial overview of Slovak nationalism until 1929 whereas the second outlines in detail the party's ideology and programme. The remaining chapters are divided according to certain events that mark a change of fortune or direction for the party. The author looks in depth at some of the more important ones, such as the Tuka affair of 1929, the 1929 and 1935 elections, the 1931 Slovak orthography dispute, the 1933 Pribina celebrations, the different party congresses, in particular the Youth Congress of 1932 and that of 1936, and the 1938 Pittsburgh Pact celebration, all of which marked Slovak political life. Equally useful and interesting are his descriptions of the SPP platform at different times and the relations with other Czech and Slovak political parties and formations. As for the various leading personalities, Andrej Hlinka, Vojtech Tuka, Karol Sidor, and Jozef Tiso, among others, the author seeks to give a sense of their role and importance in the development of SPP policies. In sum, most of the SLOVAKIA 133 book offers a detailed examination of the role of the SPP in an important decade in Slovak political life and is in this respect a contribution to the existing literature. The main problem with this study lies in its approach to the subject. This is due not only to too great a reliance on certain earlier studies, but above all to the indiscriminate use of police reports as authoritative sources of political analysis. In fairness to the author, he makes an attempt to present a balanced approach on the "Slovak question". Yet the language he uses clearly indicates that he identifies with and accepts generally the interpretations of those authors who have a Czechoslovak view ?f Slovak history, a view that is mostly negative toward the Slovaks and uncritically favourable toward Czechoslovakia. For example he refers to Slovakia as "relatively underdeveloped, politically, economically, socially, culturally, and nationally" (p. 17) or describes Hlinka as having a "parochial, clerical mentality that resembled that of a Slovak peasant." (p. 25) In addition, like earlier authors, his examination of Prague policies toward Slovakia and toward the SPP, is at best cursory and certainly not critical. On occasion one gets the feeling from his presentation that there was a specific Prague-SPP dynamic, yet there is little analysis of the reasons for and the consequences of Prague policies, only of the SPP reactions and actions. For example, Prague exercized censorship on the SPP press to such an extent that in 1938, when the government was considering the possibility of a coaliton with the SPP, one of that party's conditions was the lifting of that censorship. Equally problematic is the reliance on police reports as a research source. The fact that the Prague government felt it necessary to have police spies within the SPP is in itself a fact worth examining, not to say anything of the accuracy of these reports. The emphasis that Felak places on factional struggles within the SPP comes mostly from these reports. That the police 134 SLOVAKIA spies reported such struggles is not in the least bit surprising; it was in the government's interest to be able to neutralize an opposition party that Pelak on many occasions describes as the most important one in Slovakia. Also, there is nothing surprising about factional differences; this is a fact of life in political parties in all democratic states. But in this case, the factionalism represented the dilemmas the SPP faced in its twin objectives: the autonomy of Slovakia and the integrity and security of Czechoslovakia. The failure of Prague to have understood this and to have dealt with it adequately was paid, in the end, "at the price of the republic." For all its richness about the SPP, Felak's examination of its policies is nevertheless incomplete; on the other hand, it has the merit of provoking additional questions and showing the way for further study. Hope Dies Last, The Autobiogra]Xly of Alexander Dubcek. Edited and translated by Jin Hochman. New York: Kodansha America, Inc., 1993. 354 pp. ROBERT K. EV ANSON Uni versify of Missouri Kansas City The automobile accident of September 1, 1992, which led to Alexander Dubcek's death nine weeks later, robbed Slovakia of one of its most distinguished political leaders. Whether Dubcek could have played a vital role in shaping the politics of an independent Slovakia will never be known. What is certain, and what we are reminded of in this fascinating autobiography excellently edited and translated by Jin Hochman - is that he did establish for himself a place of lasting historical importance. SLOVAKIA 135 It seems necessary to say this because, as Dubcek himself was aware, there is insufficient appreciation among many of today's young Slovaks and Czechs of what he and his fellow "reform Communists" attempted to do in the 1960s. It remains for historians to sort out the difficult issue of just how much impact the Prague Spring had on the subsequent course of Czechoslovak politics that ended ultimately in the demise of the country's neo-Stalinist regime twenty-one years later, but clearly the impact was significant.The Prague Spring, which Dubcek more than anyone else helped to shape, set an example for democratic aspirations that resurfaced in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. It also was an obvious model for some of Gorbachev's policies in -the 1980s. The Soviet suppression of the reform movement also created deep wounds of alienation among Czechs and Slovaks towards the USSR and the post-1968 regime that never healed. Ironically, both Dubcek and the Soviets were correct in their 1968 dialogue, Dubcek in warning the Soviets of the need to better understand how many Czechs and Slovaks viewed the old regime as an unnatural entity, and the Soviets in recognizing the degree to which Dubcek's reform movement threatened the very foundations of Leninist rule in Eastern Europe. Dubcek's autobiography begins appropriately with his early years, and an examination of that period of his life teaches us a great deal about why he acted as he did in his maturity. It is difficult not to admire the man, and this book, which is not egregiously self-serving, merely strengthens that attitude. Several aspects of character and personality come to mind - decency, courage, political shrewdness, and a trust and idealism that were at once his greatest strengths and his greatest weaknesses. We find him as a teenager in Kirghizia defending young Muslims against bullying by his fellow Czechs and Slovaks, and after World War Two pressing relentlessly for the release from the Soviet Gulag of a physician who had treated the injured Dubcek 136 SLOVAKIA during the Uprising; it was a small moral step to his passionate commitment to the complete rehabilitation of all political prisoners in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. In 1952, in the wake of the Shinsky trial and at the height of the terror, he cast aside a Soviet-censored version of a speech and instead delivered a ringing eulogy at the funeral of fellow Communist Karol Smidke, who had been a victim of the persecution. He stood up for the reforms in the face of immense Soviet pressure throughout 1968, acted honorably after his abduction to Moscow following the Soviet and allied invasion, refused to take the safety of exile because he thought his proper place was with his people, and sent off a stream of letters of protest long after his removal from power at considerable personal risk. Dubcek also was a very clever and careful political tactician. Some of the most fascinating passages in his book concern the way he built alliances in his ultimately successful effort to bring down Communist Party First Secretary Antonin Novotny in 1967. I would like to have read even more details about conversations he had with various political figures in this process, as well as about the way he blunted Novotny's efforts to consign him to political oblivion in 1962, but there still is plenty to captivate anyone with a taste for Prague-style Kremlinology. The period of the early 1960s is especially interesting in this book, because Dubcek discusses the first signs of the movement against neo-Stalinism and Prague centralism, including his election over Novotny's opposition to the position of Slovak Communist Party First Secretary in April, 1963. This event represented a stinging defeat for Novotny, because Dubcek already had established himself as the leading advocate for sweeping rehabilitation of the victims of the purges of so-called "Slovak bourgeois nationalists" in the early 1950s. As such, he had become the major opponent of Prague centralism in the Party leadership. SLOVAKIA 137 While Dubcek was never foolhardy, he could be surprisingly bold. An interesting illustration of this was his successful ploy with Jin Hendrych, the number two man in the Party hierarchy in 1967 and, until then, a staunch Novotny loyalist. Sensing that Hendrych was beginning to vacillate in his commitment to Novotny, Dubcek walked into his office that late November and said that Novotny's days as First Secretary clearly were numbered, and that Hendrych might consider getting on the bandwagon or he too would fall. As an added enticement, he invited the startled Hendrych to consider whether he would like Novotny's job as First Secretary! The amusing climax of this story is that shortly thereafter, Leonid Brezhnev came to Prague to assess Novotny's prospects and naturally sought out Hendrych's opinion. Reportedly, Brezhnev barely got inside the door when Hendrych told him he was "willing" to serve as First Secretary. While Hendrych never got the chance - Dubcek succeeded Novotny - his abandonment of Novotny may have persuaded Brezhnev of the futility of a rescue operation. The most painful reading in this book is the period of the mounting Soviet hostility to the Prague Spring and the ultimate invasion and subsequent period of "normalization." It is impossible not to become angry all over again when one reads of the treatment Dubcek and his comrades received at the hands of their Soviet kidnappers, as well as the incredible pettiness and maliciousness of their successors in Prague and Bratislava. While Dubcek does not cast a great deal of new light on the events of 1968, he minces no words in assessing various political figures and spares no criticism of his worst tormentors. Thus we learn that Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin was as cold in private as in public and capable of extreme rudeness. He and his Soviet comrades are rightly dismissed by Dubcek as "gangsters" and "thugs." Novotny is confirmed as hopelessly ignorant of Slovak affairs, as well as contemptuous toward Slovak national 138 SLOVAKIA feelings, one of the keys to his ultimate demise. Dubcek also brands Vasil Bifak, Alois Indra, and the other conspirators of 1968 as "traitors." No one comes across worse, however, than Gustav Husak, who presided over the restoration of neo-Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. His shabby treatment of Dubcek after 1968, despite Dubcek's pivotal role in bringing about his political resurrection, is a sad counter to the courage he displayed when fighting for his own rehabilitation in the early 1960s. Despite the claims that he "protected" the ousted reformers from "hardliners" in the Party, Husak comes across here as a man incapable of normal feelings and as a complete opportunist. Naturally Dubcek was bitter about Husak, but the tone of his evaluations of Husak and other political figures is in fact measured and convincing. No discussion of Dubcek's political career would be complete without addressing his failure to discern the danger of a Soviet invasion in 1968. Part of the answer may lie in his family background. He was born in 1921 to a pair of committed socialists who were so enamored of the Soviet experiment that they were willing to relocate to Central Asia to help build a new society. At the same time, his parents had the good sense to return to Czechoslovakia when the dangers of remaining in the Soviet Union became obvious. Nonetheless, Dubcek never abandoned the socialist idealism he inherited from them. While he certainly understood the evils of Stalinism and the incompatibility of the Soviet-type system with Czech and Slovak traditions, he had a blind spot that served him poorly in 1968. Specifically, despite all the Soviet expressions of alarm about what he and his fellow reformers were doing, he could not bring himself to believe the USSR would intervene. There is no question Dubcek had evolved into a democrat and was aware of what he was doing. He writes that the Action Program put forth by Party reformers in 1968 "was a plan for a gradual return to SLOVAKIA 139 the concept of democratic socialism ... " He acknowledges that his regime was rejecting various aspects of Leninism - he believed that the Communist Party could win popular support in competitive elections, once it had embraced democracy, and thus he downplayed the Soviet concern that his reforms were jeopardizing "the leading role of the party." At the same time, he knew he had to avoid making any references to multi-party democracy for fear of alarming them unnecessarily. He also believed that "socialism could function better in a market-oriented environment, with significant elements of private enterprise." He writes that of course he recalled what happened to Hungary in 1956, but he had made clear to the Soviets his determination that Czechoslovakia would remain loyal to its Soviet bloc allies, so the situations were not comparable. Perhaps it was due to his conviction that what he and his colleagues were doing would benefit socialism by strengthening the Communist Party's legitimacy among the people, and by bringing the country closer to the original ideals of socialism, that he could not believe that the Soviet leadership would not, however reluctantly, allow him to proceed. (In a postscript, Jiff Hochman notes Dubcek's inclination to believe in people's good intentions.) In fairness, it is difficult to fault Dubcek very much had he opted for concessions, it seems unlikely that the Soviet leadership would have accepted anything short of a complete abandonment of the democratization process to which he had committed his country. Still, his discussion of how he assessed the Soviet mindset at the time is not entirely satisfactory. Alexander Dubcek's autobiography is a thoughtful and wellwritten account of the life of a man of extraordinary moral and political qualities. It is indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in the Czechoslovak political experience. 140 SLOVAKIA Paul Robert Magocsi. The Rusyns of Slovakia: An Historical Survey. New York: East European Monographs, Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1993, x, 185 pp., Maps, Notes, Bibliography, Index. KEITH P. DYRUD Concordia College St. Paul,MN The Rusyns of Slovakia: An Historical Survey is essentially a revision of an earlier work by Prof. Magocsi, The RusynUkrainians of Czechoslovakia: An Historical Survey (Vienna, 1981 ). But there is an additional twist to this revision. The "Preface" says: ''This volume is a translation of an introductory historical survey published in the newly codified Rusyn literary language as well as in Slovak by the Rusyn Renaissance Society in Presov." Prof. Magocsi played a leading role in the formation of the national movement that spawned the Rusyn Renaissance Society and the First World Congress of Rusyns that sponsored the codification of the Rusyn literary language. The professor, however, is modest. His name does not once appear in the text in connection with that activity; however, he is pictured with other leaders of the First World Congress of Rusyns (122). The contents of the book should be familiar to those have read the author's earlier works. Magocsi traces the Rusyns' history from their first settlement in eastern Slovakia to the present. He partially assumes and partially attempts to demonstrate that the Rusyns of eastern Slovakia form a distinct nationality. Magocsi documents the cooperation that existed between the Rusyns and the Slovaks while they were dominated by Hungary prior to 1914, but he is critical of the "slovakization" of the Rusyns between the world wars, and he also identifies the SLOVAKIA 141 Ukrainian movement as a threat to the Rusyn national identity that the book clearly endorses. During the inter-war yars slovakization was a greater threat to the Rusyns than "ukrainianization", but after the Second World War, official government support for the Ukrainian identity led to a decline of any national consciousness. Many Rusyns identified themselves as Slovaks to avoid the Ukrainian label. After the "Velvet Revolution" of November 1989, the Rusyns in the Presov region were again free to publicly promote their own national identity as separate from either Slovak or Ukrainian. In this effort, the Rusyns received support from both the Prague and the Bratislava governments. Magocsi suggests that this support for the Rusyns harkens back to "the historical friendship and attention on the part of Czechs and Slovaks toward their Rusyn brethren ... " (126). It could also suggest that the number of people identifying themselves as Rusyns is now very small and the Rusyn movement is not likely to become a major competitor to the Slovak identity in eastern Slovakia. In fact the major problem with Prof. Magocsi 's interpretation of the Rusyn movement in estem Slovakia is his confidence that the small number of Rusyns can develop a national identity. He is dissatisfied with the 1991 census figures that identify fewer than 33,000 "Rusnak/Russian/Rusyn/Ukrainian" people in the Presov region, with just under 17,000 of them unambiguously identifying themselves as "Rusyn" ( 126). According to Magocsi, that number could potentially be as high as 130 000 (2 - 3). Many readers of Magocsi's first book: The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus', 1848 - 1948 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978) were persuaded by his convincing argument that the Rusyns in Subcarpathia did, at least, "shape" a national identity during the inter-war years. But in that era, he was dealing with a larger critical mass of Rusyns. In eastern Slovakia, that critical mass does not seem to exist. With the Slovaks claiming 142 SLOVAKIA most of those 130,000 potential Rusyns, and the Ukrainians competing for the rest, it does not seem likely that the critical mass will develop. In the meantime, those who do identify themselves as Rusyns can read their history in their own "newly codified language". And those who identify themselves as Slovaks can also read the translation in their language just as Rusyns in North America can read it in English. Ukraine and Ukrainians throughout the World: A Demographic and Sociological Guide to the Homeland and Its Diaspora. Edited by Ann Lencyk Pawliczko. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press for the Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1994, xxxvi, 508 pp. PAUL R. MAGOCSI University of Toronto The goal of this volume is to provide brief factual data on Ukrainians wherever they may live in the world. The newlyindependent country of Ukraine has within its borders only 64 percent of the estimated 58.7 million inhabitants who inhabit various parts of the globe. Therefore, a history or description of the Ukrainian people as a whole must be concerned with many other places than Ukraine. This book in fact deals primarily with the estimated 21.2 million Ukrainians living outside Ukraine. The approach is comprehensive, with an effort to say something about communities, however small they may be, in places like Luxembourg, Ireland, Tunisia and New Zealand as well as in the more known countries of Ukrainian immigrant settlement like the United States, Canada, and Australia. SLOVAKIA 143 The editor, Ann Lencyk Pawliczko, felt the need to trace the political and cultural history of Ukraine (pp. 37 - 84), which is the least satisfactory portion of this otherwise encyclopedic compendium. The rest of the volume consists of entries by 28 authors on the various countries where Ukrainians live. Each entry begins with a general overview of a specific country followed by a history of its Ukrainian community. Many entries include statistical charts and each ends with a list of further readings. Slovak readers will likely be interested in the entry called "Ukrainian-Ruthenians in the Slovak Republic", written by Vasyl Markus (pp. 157 - 166). While the author recognizes the enormous cultural achievements made by the Ukrainians in Slovakia after World War II, he does not attribute the achievements to the favorable policies of the former Czechoslovak Communist government that lavished extensive funding on the group, but rather to the efforts of the local Ukrainian-oriented intelligentsia. He claimes that the official census figures (30,800 Rusyns and Ukrainians in 1991) are far below the 110,000 to 120,000 that supposedly live in northeastern Slovakia. Markus argues the statistical discrepancy exists because of manipulation by Slovak census takers and a policy of "denationalization" carried out by both the former Communist and post-1989 governments in Slovakia. He does not mention the real reason for the numerical differences. Since the 1950s thousands of "Ukrainians-Ruthenians" voluntarily opted to identify as Slovaks in protest against Communist government decrees that banned the Rusyn national identity and required people to call themselves Ukrainian. The author also indirectly blames Slovak governments for responding favorably since 1989 to the Rusyn national revival and for allowing people in the 1991 census to identify with the Rusyn nationality (16,937 Rusyns as opposed to 13,847 Ukrainians) and with the Rusyn language (49,099 Rusyn speakers as opposed to 9,480 Ukrainian speakers) - the latter 144 SLOVAKIA figures are not provided by Markus. The otherwise democratic policies of present-day Slovakia are described as promoting "political Ruthenianism" a phenomenon that is "influenced by outside anti-Ukrainian forces" and that is intent on de-Ukrainianizing the local population. Fortunately, the rest of this volume maintains a less biased tone in describing Ukrainian communities in other countries. Nina Trnka: Slovak-English I English-Slovak Dictionary, N. Y., Hippocrene Books, 1992, 360 pp. JOHN M. KOCHIK Scottsdale, Anizona Any contribution to the field of Slovak reference materials is always welcome. Attempts at popularization are encouradged only to the extent that a work demonstrates quality. Standards, of course, should always be high to reflect the expertise of the _ contributor. The backcover boasts "You are holding the only SlovakEnglish/English-Slovak Dictionary available in North America". What about Smejkalova et al.? The book is intended for "students and travelers", and claims to be "concise". For all its advertising pretense, its format is disappointing. It looks like a thesis. It lacks an Introduction which it sorely needs for efficient use. It omits a separating page (175) between the two major divisions for facile access, wherein an appropriate blank page or second title page would suffice. Pronunciation (pages i through iii) is confusing. The list of consonants is incomplete, not accounting for - among others important palatals d', I, ii, ( used in too many words to be ignored. As immediate as page one, there is no knowing how ''t~' SLOVAKIA 145 in "akost' must be pronounced according to her presentation. Questions arise as to "studi'ia" (123) and "studna" (353 - see "well")? Why then "anP' (2) gives [a-nyi], or "odev" (71) [odyef]? How then distinguish cited "Javica" (44) from un-cited "/avica" - "left hand"? Equating long "6" with "6" in Pronunciation is erroneous, being that the latter "6" is diphotong [.u.o]. The remarks in Pronunciation are unclear and inadequate. The uninitiated will render Slovak pronunciation ludicrous. Examples provided are ambiguous for articulation of varietes of vowel "a", because speakers of American-English are inconsistent in their renditions of "a" in cited forms "ma-ma, fast, rat, grass, pad". To present digraph "ch" as aspirated [kh] in "khaki" (sic!) is not true for the guttural [)c]. And, to state that Slovak "r' is approximated by labial untrilled "r' of "red" - bellies the trilled "r' performed by the tongue. Transcription in Pronunciation is defective, since the symbols given are arbitrary, not in accord either with the conventions of Slovak texts or even the International Phonetic System. A hard look at the symbols presented defies logic. Examples follow. Since Standard Slovak (i. e. spisovna slovencina) utilizes digraph "dz" as the phone in medzi and other words - to employ "dz' as a symbol for English pronunciation of th [b] of "they" is incomprehensible! In like manner, use of [s] for [0] of "thank" produces comic theatrical effect as in [Sank you] for [Sank you]! Moreover, to present the nasal-guttural -ng [ri] of "long" as underlined [g] can be misinterpreted into a humorous exagerated liaison of oft-quoted misquoted "LoNGJsland" with defined [NGJ]. 146 SLOVAKIA Further examination into the deficiencies given in Pronunciation would require a complete revision after careful editing. So far only the unavoidable pitfalls have been critiqued. Editorial work appears lax or nonexistent as evidenced by "thruth" (sic! page ii), presumably "truth". And, "heith" (sic! page 158) following vyska and page 244, apparently meant to be "height"). In both citings of "heith", consistency seems to demonstrate persistent misspelling. There is an unexpected thrust from V (350) into W (351) without a notification-heading W. As for word-selection, it might be hoped that high-frequency was a criterion for efficiency. On the contrary, superfluous are words among others like "elephant" (222), "volcano" (350), "yacht" (358), "zebra" (359) - scarcely indigenous to Slovakia! Yet the word kamzik (36?) "chamois" (198?) indigenous to the Tatras finds no listing in either section. Why "warden" (351) is given makes one wonder of its sociological implications. Why is "warrant" (351) so important to find place here? Surely one expects utilitarian vocabulary in such a work. As for semantics, a first-hand impression might be that if several meanings are provided without explanation or definition - an indiscriminate interchange might be possible. Not so for automat (3) "slot-machine, snack-bar, machine-gun". Thus also for "minister" (268) "minister, vyslanec, duchovnf" mean different things. Each having a distinct, specific meaning. It is most unlikely that "students and travelers" will discern clearly which term fits which circumstance. Cross-references are not provided for necessary clarification. See "warm" (351) ...srdecnf... for which neither "cordial" (206?) nor "sincerely" (315) are given on expected pages in parentheses. In similar manner, aktiv (1) "meeting, gathering" makes no reference or distinction from "meeting" (266) schodza, stretnutie. SLOVAKIA 147 Perusal of the text will result in startling revelations. For instance, pronunciation of odJXJr (72) gives [od-por], whereas in fact it is [ot-por], a morphophonetic alternation called regressive assimilation. Where the voiced d automatically becomes unvoiced/devoiced t, in harmony with unvoiced p which sets the condition for the process. The same phenomenon occurs in other instances like odstup (72) to [ot-stup], bezplatny (6) to [bes-platnee], modlitba and prosba for "prayer" (289) not given in the text as [mod-lit-ba] and [proz-ba]. Interesting to note is that word-final voiced consonants are given as de-voiced as in smrad (116) [smrat]. However, no account has been made of v as a semi-vowel [IJ.] in such words as pravda (92) [prau.da], rovno (105) [rouno], domov (18) [domo.1J.]; instead, Czech ussage [domof] (18) is presented. Two outstanding examples given: [svatba] (125) for svadba and ['strukh] (101) for pstruh are unintelligible. For all the effort involved in the production of this Dictionary, it is unfortunate that it should fall short of the desired quality expected. In spite of the good intentions of the contributor, the end result is full of inconsistencies and inadequacies.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Book Reviews, Slovakia, Vol. 36 (No. 66-67) Description An account of the resource includes:<br /><ul><li>Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (George J. Demko), p. 119</li> <li>Anton Špiesz, Dejiny Slovenska na cesta k sebauvedomeniu (Gregory C. Ference), p. 121</li> <li>Richard Marsina a kolektív, Slovenské dejiny (R. Vladimír Baumgarten), p. 123</li> <li>Katarína Šultajerová, comp., Najstaršie rody na Slovensku (Duncan B. Gardiner), p. 125</li> <li>Emil Krapka and Vojtech Mikula, eds., Dejiny Spoločnosti Ježišovej na Slovensku: 1561-1988 (Gerald J. Sabo), p. 128</li> <li>James Ramon Felak, "At the Price of the Republic." Hlinka' s Slovak People's Party, 1929-1938 (Stanislav J. Kirschbaum), p. 131</li> <li>Jiří Hochman, ed., Hope Dies Last: The Autobiography of Alexander Dubček (Robert K. Evanson), p. 134</li> <li>Paul Robert Magocsi, The Rusyns of Slovakia: An Historical Survey (Keith P. Dyrud), p. 140</li> <li>Ann Lensyk Pawliczko, ed., Ukraine and Ukrainians throughout the World: A Demographic and Sociological Guide to the Homeland and Its Disapora (Paul R. Magocsi), p. 142</li> <li>Nina Trnka, Slovak-English/English-Slovak Dictionary (John M. Kochik), p. 144</li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Baumgarten, R. Vladimir Demko, George J., 1933- Dyrud, Keith P. 1940- Evanson, Robert Kent, 1944- Ference, Gregory Curtis, 1957- Gardiner, Duncan B., 1940- Kirschbaum, Stanislav J., 1942- Kochik, John Michael Magocsi, Paul Robert, 1945- Sabo, Gerald J., 1945–2020 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 LCNAF LCNAF+dates name SNK https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/87da2d2d23b263fabccfae7eb79587b3.pdf 0b569feae6c5e2f174c2b5c8a09e6ca6 PDF Text Text 148 SLOVAKIA CONTRIBUTORS DAVID M. CROWE is Professor of History at Elon College in North Carolina. He is a specialist in the history of Eastern Europe and his most recent books include A History of the Gypsies in Eastern Europe and Russia (1994) and The Baltic States and the Great Powers: Foreign Relations, 1938-1940 (1993). JAN CHRYZOSTOM CARDINAL KOREC, S.J., is Roman Catholic Bishop of Nitra, Slovakia. Secretly ordained as a Bishop at the tender age of 28 in 1950, he helped create an underground Church during the Communist regime that ruled his homeland from 1948 to 1989. Arrested by the secret police in 1960, he was sentenced to 12 years in jail for his religious activities. Persecuted for many years, and forced to work as a manual labourer, Cardinal Korec outlasted his tormentors and is now working hard to rejuvenate the Roman Catholic Church in Slovakia. STEFAN POLAKOVIC received his Ph.D. from the Lateran University in Rome and was a Professor of Philosophy at the Slovak University in Bratislava during the first Slovak Republic. After the collapse of the Republic, he emigrated to Argentina where he became a successful business entrepreneur. Meanwhile, he published many books and articles pertaining to Slovak national identity and independence, he continued with such activities after the war, and still publishes, whether in the new Slovak Republic, or abroad. �SLOVAKIA 149 M. MARK STOLARIK is Professor of History and holder of the Chair in Slovak History and Culture at the University of Ottawa. He specializes in the history of Slovak immigration to North America and has published widely in the field, including Growing Up on the South Side: Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1880-1976 (Lewisburg, PA 1976) and Immigration and Urbanization: The Slovak Experience, 1870-1918 (New York, 1989). SPENCER ZIFCAK is Associate Professor of Law and Legal Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. In 1995 he was Visiting Professor at the UNESCO Centre for Human Rights Education at Comenius University in Bratislava. He has written extensively in the general fields of Constitutional and Administrative Law and, more recently, on the role of Constitutional Courts in Central Europe. STANISLAV J. KIRSCHBAUM is Professor of International Studies and Political Science at York University, Glendon College, in Toronto, Canada. A specialist on Slovak and Central European politics, he is the author of A History of Slovakia. The Struggle for Survival (New York, 1995, 1996), A Historical Dictionary of Slovakia (Lanham, MD, 1998), and many other books and articles. �150 SLOVAKIA GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts of articles should be sent to the editor. Articles should not normally exceed twenty-five pages in length, and should be submitted in triplicate, typed double-spaced, numbered consecutively, and placed at the end of the paper. Text and format should adhere to Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writer.s . Proper ortography and diacritical marks must be supplied for all foreign words. Manuscripts will not be returned unless specifically requested and postage is provided. Books for review are to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book reviews are not encouraged. Individuals who wish to review books should request them from the editor. They should send a 'curriculum vitae' with their request. ��THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA Organized in 1907 EDWARD J. BEHUNCIK, K.S .G., Honorary President Dr. LUDWIG J. PAVLO President JOSEPH J. TALAFOUS, Esq. Vice-President JOHN A. HOLY Secretary-Treasurer ANNE Z. SAROSY Vice-President MICHAL BUCKO Vice-President Executive Board Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, John A Holy, Daniel F. Tanzone, Dr. John Karch, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner, Thomas M. Hricik, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., George J. Kostelnik, Rita M. Simalchik, David G. Balzek, Frank Rudzik Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATE[ WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $ 8.00 per issue � 148 SLOVAKIA CONTRIBUTORS DAVID M. CROWE is Professor of History at Elon College in North Carolina. He is a specialist in the history of Eastern Europe and his most recent books include A History of the Gypsies in Eastern Europe and Russia (1994) and The Baltic States and the Great Powers: Foreign Relations, 1938-1940 (1993). JAN CHRYZOSTOM CARDINAL KOREC, S.J., is Roman Catholic Bishop of Nitra, Slovakia. Secretly ordained as a Bishop at the tender age of 28 in 1950, he helped create an underground Church during the Communist regime that ruled his homeland from 1948 to 1989. Arrested by the secret police in 1960, he was sentenced to 12 years in jail for his religious activities. Persecuted for many years, and forced to work as a manual labourer, Cardinal Korec outlasted his tormentors and is now working hard to rejuvenate the Roman Catholic Church in Slovakia. STEFAN POLAKOVIC received his Ph.D. from the Lateran University in Rome and was a Professor of Philosophy at the Slovak University in Bratislava during the first Slovak Republic. After the collapse of the Republic, he emigrated to Argentina where he became a successful business entrepreneur. Meanwhile, he published many books and articles pertaining to Slovak national identity and independence, he continued with such activities after the war, and still publishes, whether in the new Slovak Republic, or abroad. �SLOVAKIA 149 M. MARK STOLARIK is Professor of History and holder of the Chair in Slovak History and Culture at the University of Ottawa. He specializes in the history of Slovak immigration to North America and has published widely in the field, including Growing Up on the South Side: Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1880-1976 (Lewisburg, PA 1976) and Immigration and Urbanization: The Slovak Experience, 1870-1918 (New York, 1989). SPENCER ZIFCAK is Associate Professor of Law and Legal Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. In 1995 he was Visiting Professor at the UNESCO Centre for Human Rights Education at Comenius University in Bratislava. He has written extensively in the general fields of Constitutional and Administrative Law and, more recently, on the role of Constitutional Courts in Central Europe. STANISLAV J. KIRSCHBAUM is Professor of International Studies and Political Science at York University, Glendon College, in Toronto, Canada. A specialist on Slovak and Central European politics, he is the author of A History of Slovakia. The Struggle for Survival (New York, 1995, 1996), A Historical Dictionary of Slovakia (Lanham, MD, 1998), and many other books and articles. �150 SLOVAKIA GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts of articles should be sent to the editor. Articles should not normally exceed twenty-five pages in length, and should be submitted in triplicate, typed double-spaced, numbered consecutively, and placed at the end of the paper. Text and format should adhere to Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writer.s . Proper ortography and diacritical marks must be supplied for all foreign words. Manuscripts will not be returned unless specifically requested and postage is provided. Books for review are to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book reviews are not encouraged. Individuals who wish to review books should request them from the editor. They should send a 'curriculum vitae' with their request. ��THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA Organized in 1907 EDWARD J. BEHUNCIK, K.S .G., Honorary President Dr. LUDWIG J. PAVLO President JOSEPH J. TALAFOUS, Esq. Vice-President JOHN A. HOLY Secretary-Treasurer ANNE Z. SAROSY Vice-President MICHAL BUCKO Vice-President Executive Board Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, John A Holy, Daniel F. Tanzone, Dr. John Karch, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner, Thomas M. Hricik, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., George J. Kostelnik, Rita M. Simalchik, David G. Balzek, Frank Rudzik Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATE[ WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $ 8.00 per issue � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1998, Vol. 36 Description An account of the resource Vol. 36 (No. 66-67), 1998. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Slovak League of America Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 148 SLOVAKIA CONTRIBUTORS DAVID M. CROWE is Professor of History at Elon College in North Carolina. He is a specialist in the history of Eastern Europe and his most recent books include A History of the Gypsies in Eastern Europe and Russia (1994) and The Baltic States and the Great Powers: Foreign Relations, 1938-1940 (1993). JAN CHRYZOSTOM CARDINAL KOREC, S.J., is Roman Catholic Bishop of Nitra, Slovakia. Secretly ordained as a Bishop at the tender age of 28 in 1950, he helped create an underground Church during the Communist regime that ruled his homeland from 1948 to 1989. Arrested by the secret police in 1960, he was sentenced to 12 years in jail for his religious activities. Persecuted for many years, and forced to work as a manual labourer, Cardinal Korec outlasted his tormentors and is now working hard to rejuvenate the Roman Catholic Church in Slovakia. STEFAN POLAKOVIC received his Ph.D. from the Lateran University in Rome and was a Professor of Philosophy at the Slovak University in Bratislava during the first Slovak Republic. After the collapse of the Republic, he emigrated to Argentina where he became a successful business entrepreneur. Meanwhile, he published many books and articles pertaining to Slovak national identity and independence, he continued with such activities after the war, and still publishes, whether in the new Slovak Republic, or abroad. SLOVAKIA 149 M. MARK STOLARIK is Professor of History and holder of the Chair in Slovak History and Culture at the University of Ottawa. He specializes in the history of Slovak immigration to North America and has published widely in the field, including Growing Up on the South Side: Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1880-1976 (Lewisburg, PA 1976) and Immigration and Urbanization: The Slovak Experience, 1870-1918 (New York, 1989). SPENCER ZIFCAK is Associate Professor of Law and Legal Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. In 1995 he was Visiting Professor at the UNESCO Centre for Human Rights Education at Comenius University in Bratislava. He has written extensively in the general fields of Constitutional and Administrative Law and, more recently, on the role of Constitutional Courts in Central Europe. STANISLAV J. KIRSCHBAUM is Professor of International Studies and Political Science at York University, Glendon College, in Toronto, Canada. A specialist on Slovak and Central European politics, he is the author of A History of Slovakia. The Struggle for Survival (New York, 1995, 1996), A Historical Dictionary of Slovakia (Lanham, MD, 1998), and many other books and articles. 150 SLOVAKIA GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts of articles should be sent to the editor. Articles should not normally exceed twenty-five pages in length, and should be submitted in triplicate, typed double-spaced, numbered consecutively, and placed at the end of the paper. Text and format should adhere to Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writer.s . Proper ortography and diacritical marks must be supplied for all foreign words. Manuscripts will not be returned unless specifically requested and postage is provided. Books for review are to be sent to the editor. Unsolicited book reviews are not encouraged. Individuals who wish to review books should request them from the editor. They should send a 'curriculum vitae' with their request. THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA Organized in 1907 EDWARD J. BEHUNCIK, K.S .G., Honorary President Dr. LUDWIG J. PAVLO President JOSEPH J. TALAFOUS, Esq. Vice-President JOHN A. HOLY Secretary-Treasurer ANNE Z. SAROSY Vice-President MICHAL BUCKO Vice-President Executive Board Dr. Ludwig J. Pavlo, John A Holy, Daniel F. Tanzone, Dr. John Karch, Dr. L. P. Hinterbuchner, Thomas M. Hricik, Mary Ann S. Johanek, Esq., George J. Kostelnik, Rita M. Simalchik, David G. Balzek, Frank Rudzik Milan Cuba Youth Director SLOVAK FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS AFFILIATE[ WITH THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK LADIES ASSOCIATION Beachwood, Ohio FIRST CATHOLIC SLOVAK UNION OF THE U.S. AND CANADA Independence, Ohio SLOVAK CATHOLIC SOKOL Passaic, New Jersey NATIONAL SLOVAK SOCIETY OF THE U.S.A. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania LADIES PENNSYLVANIA SLOVAK CATHOLIC UNION Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania SLOVAK NEWSPAPERMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA THE SLOVAK GARDEN, INC. Winter Park, Florida SLOVAKIA $ 8.00 per issue  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Back Matter, Slovakia, Vol. 36 (No. 66-67) Description An account of the resource includes Contributors; Guidelines for Manuscripts Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/adb2438bee25c23f9619366e4ab6014c.pdf b40d2ab3ed191610cc63071ca3dde090 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA ��SLOVAKIA VOLUME XXXV NUMBERS 64-65 1991-1992 A scholarly annual devoted to the history, literature, and culture of the Slovaks the world over. Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Editorial Board DA YID P. DANIEL Bratislava, Slcvakia MICHAEL NOV AK American Enterprise Institute ROBERT K. EV ANSON University of Missouri PETER PETRO University of British Columbia LOUISE B. HAMMER Indiana University NORMAL. RUDINSKY Oregon State University Slovak League Advisory Board DANIEL F. T ANZONE EDWARD J. BEHUNCIK DRAGA DIVINSKA JOHN. A HOLY JOSEPH C. KRAJSA Publisher Slovak League of America 870 Rifle Camp Road West Paterson, NJ 07424 Inquiries regarding subscriptions should be sent to the above address. The cost of a single issue is U.S. $7.00 Manuscripts for possible spublication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia, 22 Bren- Maur Road, Nepean, Ontario, Canada K2J 327. ��Table of Contents ARTICLES Slovak Emigrants in Canada as Reflected in Diplomatic Documents (1920- I 938) Elena Jakesova .... ................. ...... .. ................. ... ... ........ .................... 7 Carpatho-Rusyns: Their Current Status and Future Perspectives Paul R. Magocsi .. ... ..... ... ............... ..... .. ... ................ .. ......... .. ..... ... . 36 SYMPOSIUM A Century and a half of Czech-Slovak Relations: A Slovak Perspective Edited by Stanis/av J. Kirschbaum .... .... .................................. .......... 61 Czech-Slovak Relations from the 1840's to 1914 Edita Bosak ... ......................... ................... ..... .. ... .............. ...... .... 63 Relations Between Slovaks and Czechs in the first CSR Susan Mikula .................... .... ... .... .. .. .............................. ... ........... 78 The Czech Question in Slovakia in the Post-War Years Stanislav J. Kirschbaum ......... ... ..... ..... .... ..................... ... ....... .. ..... .967 Slovak-Czech Relations: An Assessment Carol Skalnik Leff ............ .............. .... ..... ... .. ............. ... ................ 109 REVIEW ESSAY Marxist Historians in Search of Slovak History: Milan Podrimavsky et. al., Dejiny Slovenska, m M. Mark Stolarik .......... ...... .............. .... ......................... ...... .... .... .119 �4 SLOVAKIA REVIEWS Hugolfn Gavlovic , Valaska Skala, edited by Gerald J. Sabo Jan F. Frjdeckj .. ..... .. .. ... ..... ..... .. .... ... ..... ........ ..... ... .. .... ..... ... ....... 125 Max Domarus , ed., Hitler, Speeches and Proclamations Brian L . Villa .... .. .............. .. ... ....... .. ... .. ..... ............. ... ................ ..126 Jozef Jablonicky, Povstanie bez legiend Stanislav J. Kirschbaum .. .... .. ..... .... .............. ... .. ... .. .. ............ .. ....... .128 Bohus Chnoupek, A Breaking of Seals R. Vladimir Baumgarten . .. .... .... ...... .. ........ ..... ......... ..... ..... .. .... ...... .130 Jan Smolec et.al., Proces s dr. J. Tisom: Spomienky James R . Pelak ................................................... ...... ... .. ...... ........ 132 Athanasius Pekar, History of the Church in Carpathian Rus' Keith P. Dyrud ............................................................................ .134 Volodymyr Fedynysynec', Our Peaceful Rusyn Way Patricia A. Krafcik ....... ...... ... ............................. .... .......... .. ..... ..... .136 Norma Rudinsky, Incipient Feminists and That Alluring Land Maria Furimsky-Lackova .......... ..... .. ............... ....... ........... ........ .. ... 138 Jan Simko, English-Slovak Dictionary Louise B. Hammer................................... ... ...... .. ............... ...... .... .141 Contributors ...... ......................... .... ...... ... .. ..... ... ... .. .. .... .. .. ... ........ .. .... 145 Guidelines for Manuscripts .......... .. ........... ....... ........ ... .... ... ..... ...... ........ 148 �ARTICLES �� SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA ��SLOVAKIA VOLUME XXXV NUMBERS 64-65 1991-1992 A scholarly annual devoted to the history, literature, and culture of the Slovaks the world over. Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Editorial Board DA YID P. DANIEL Bratislava, Slcvakia MICHAEL NOV AK American Enterprise Institute ROBERT K. EV ANSON University of Missouri PETER PETRO University of British Columbia LOUISE B. HAMMER Indiana University NORMAL. RUDINSKY Oregon State University Slovak League Advisory Board DANIEL F. T ANZONE EDWARD J. BEHUNCIK DRAGA DIVINSKA JOHN. A HOLY JOSEPH C. KRAJSA Publisher Slovak League of America 870 Rifle Camp Road West Paterson, NJ 07424 Inquiries regarding subscriptions should be sent to the above address. The cost of a single issue is U.S. $7.00 Manuscripts for possible spublication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia, 22 Bren- Maur Road, Nepean, Ontario, Canada K2J 327. ��Table of Contents ARTICLES Slovak Emigrants in Canada as Reflected in Diplomatic Documents (1920- I 938) Elena Jakesova .... ................. ...... .. ................. ... ... ........ .................... 7 Carpatho-Rusyns: Their Current Status and Future Perspectives Paul R. Magocsi .. ... ..... ... ............... ..... .. ... ................ .. ......... .. ..... ... . 36 SYMPOSIUM A Century and a half of Czech-Slovak Relations: A Slovak Perspective Edited by Stanis/av J. Kirschbaum .... .... .................................. .......... 61 Czech-Slovak Relations from the 1840's to 1914 Edita Bosak ... ......................... ................... ..... .. ... .............. ...... .... 63 Relations Between Slovaks and Czechs in the first CSR Susan Mikula .................... .... ... .... .. .. .............................. ... ........... 78 The Czech Question in Slovakia in the Post-War Years Stanislav J. Kirschbaum ......... ... ..... ..... .... ..................... ... ....... .. ..... .967 Slovak-Czech Relations: An Assessment Carol Skalnik Leff ............ .............. .... ..... ... .. ............. ... ................ 109 REVIEW ESSAY Marxist Historians in Search of Slovak History: Milan Podrimavsky et. al., Dejiny Slovenska, m M. Mark Stolarik .......... ...... .............. .... ......................... ...... .... .... .119 �4 SLOVAKIA REVIEWS Hugolfn Gavlovic , Valaska Skala, edited by Gerald J. Sabo Jan F. Frjdeckj .. ..... .. .. ... ..... ..... .. .... ... ..... ........ ..... ... .. .... ..... ... ....... 125 Max Domarus , ed., Hitler, Speeches and Proclamations Brian L . Villa .... .. .............. .. ... ....... .. ... .. ..... ............. ... ................ ..126 Jozef Jablonicky, Povstanie bez legiend Stanislav J. Kirschbaum .. .... .. ..... .... .............. ... .. ... .. .. ............ .. ....... .128 Bohus Chnoupek, A Breaking of Seals R. Vladimir Baumgarten . .. .... .... ...... .. ........ ..... ......... ..... ..... .. .... ...... .130 Jan Smolec et.al., Proces s dr. J. Tisom: Spomienky James R . Pelak ................................................... ...... ... .. ...... ........ 132 Athanasius Pekar, History of the Church in Carpathian Rus' Keith P. Dyrud ............................................................................ .134 Volodymyr Fedynysynec', Our Peaceful Rusyn Way Patricia A. Krafcik ....... ...... ... ............................. .... .......... .. ..... ..... .136 Norma Rudinsky, Incipient Feminists and That Alluring Land Maria Furimsky-Lackova .......... ..... .. ............... ....... ........... ........ .. ... 138 Jan Simko, English-Slovak Dictionary Louise B. Hammer................................... ... ...... .. ............... ...... .... .141 Contributors ...... ......................... .... ...... ... .. ..... ... ... .. .. .... .. .. ... ........ .. .... 145 Guidelines for Manuscripts .......... .. ........... ....... ........ ... .... ... ..... ...... ........ 148 �ARTICLES �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1991-92, Vol. 35 Description An account of the resource Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Slovak League of America Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available 1991-92 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA Published By THE SLOVAK LEAGUE OF AMERICA SLOVAKIA VOLUME XXXV NUMBERS 64-65 1991-1992 A scholarly annual devoted to the history, literature, and culture of the Slovaks the world over. Editor M. MARK STOLARIK University of Ottawa Editorial Board DA YID P. DANIEL Bratislava, Slcvakia MICHAEL NOV AK American Enterprise Institute ROBERT K. EV ANSON University of Missouri PETER PETRO University of British Columbia LOUISE B. HAMMER Indiana University NORMAL. RUDINSKY Oregon State University Slovak League Advisory Board DANIEL F. T ANZONE EDWARD J. BEHUNCIK DRAGA DIVINSKA JOHN. A HOLY JOSEPH C. KRAJSA Publisher Slovak League of America 870 Rifle Camp Road West Paterson, NJ 07424 Inquiries regarding subscriptions should be sent to the above address. The cost of a single issue is U.S. $7.00 Manuscripts for possible spublication and books for review should be sent to M. Mark Stolarik, Editor, Slovakia, 22 Bren- Maur Road, Nepean, Ontario, Canada K2J 327. Table of Contents ARTICLES Slovak Emigrants in Canada as Reflected in Diplomatic Documents (1920- I 938) Elena Jakesova .... ................. ...... .. ................. ... ... ........ .................... 7 Carpatho-Rusyns: Their Current Status and Future Perspectives Paul R. Magocsi .. ... ..... ... ............... ..... .. ... ................ .. ......... .. ..... ... . 36 SYMPOSIUM A Century and a half of Czech-Slovak Relations: A Slovak Perspective Edited by Stanis/av J. Kirschbaum .... .... .................................. .......... 61 Czech-Slovak Relations from the 1840's to 1914 Edita Bosak ... ......................... ................... ..... .. ... .............. ...... .... 63 Relations Between Slovaks and Czechs in the first CSR Susan Mikula .................... .... ... .... .. .. .............................. ... ........... 78 The Czech Question in Slovakia in the Post-War Years Stanislav J. Kirschbaum ......... ... ..... ..... .... ..................... ... ....... .. ..... .967 Slovak-Czech Relations: An Assessment Carol Skalnik Leff ............ .............. .... ..... ... .. ............. ... ................ 109 REVIEW ESSAY Marxist Historians in Search of Slovak History: Milan Podrimavsky et. al., Dejiny Slovenska, m M. Mark Stolarik .......... ...... .............. .... ......................... ...... .... .... .119 4 SLOVAKIA REVIEWS Hugolfn Gavlovic , Valaska Skala, edited by Gerald J. Sabo Jan F. Frjdeckj .. ..... .. .. ... ..... ..... .. .... ... ..... ........ ..... ... .. .... ..... ... ....... 125 Max Domarus , ed., Hitler, Speeches and Proclamations Brian L . Villa .... .. .............. .. ... ....... .. ... .. ..... ............. ... ................ ..126 Jozef Jablonicky, Povstanie bez legiend Stanislav J. Kirschbaum .. .... .. ..... .... .............. ... .. ... .. .. ............ .. ....... .128 Bohus Chnoupek, A Breaking of Seals R. Vladimir Baumgarten . .. .... .... ...... .. ........ ..... ......... ..... ..... .. .... ...... .130 Jan Smolec et.al., Proces s dr. J. Tisom: Spomienky James R . Pelak ................................................... ...... ... .. ...... ........ 132 Athanasius Pekar, History of the Church in Carpathian Rus' Keith P. Dyrud ............................................................................ .134 Volodymyr Fedynysynec', Our Peaceful Rusyn Way Patricia A. Krafcik ....... ...... ... ............................. .... .......... .. ..... ..... .136 Norma Rudinsky, Incipient Feminists and That Alluring Land Maria Furimsky-Lackova .......... ..... .. ............... ....... ........... ........ .. ... 138 Jan Simko, English-Slovak Dictionary Louise B. Hammer................................... ... ...... .. ............... ...... .... .141 Contributors ...... ......................... .... ...... ... .. ..... ... ... .. .. .... .. .. ... ........ .. .... 145 Guidelines for Manuscripts .......... .. ........... ....... ........ ... .... ... ..... ...... ........ 148 ARTICLES  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Front Matter, Slovakia, Vol. 35 (No. 64-65) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991-92 https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/2f686333d61a0f6f7c6836ec8b30d0b2.pdf 6871f9d1450242f7d5e2d428d3686255 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 7 Slovak Emigrants in Canada as Reflected in Diplomatic Documents (1920 - 1938) ELENA JAKESOVA Slovak emigration to Canada - not taking into account the European continental migration - can be considered one of the strongest and most significant of all of the Slovak migrations during the inter-war period. Great numbers of Slovaks moved to Canada across the Antlantic to earn some money, especially in the second half of the 1920s. 1 The inter-war years, however, represented only its second stage, because Slovaks had started to leave for the United States as early as the 1870s. The 1920s witnessed only a change in destination. The United States of America, which in 1920 contained about 620,000 Slovaks, halted that mass emigration. When the continuity of the traditional emigration had been broken partly in the year 1921, and definitely in the year 1924, the search for an alternative solution of the problem did not take long. The immigrants saw in Canada's common frontier with the United States the possibility of emigration south in the future. Therefore, Canada became in the second half of the twenties "the second chance", a kind of alternative destination of the Slovak emigrants in spite of the fact that in comparison with the USA there 1 Shipping companies transported from Slovakia to Canada in 1922 110 persons, in 1923 2029 , in 1924 2832, in 1925 2134 , in 1926 6066 , in 1927 6301 , in 1928 8184 , in 1929 4116 , in 1930 3586, in 1931 730, in 1932 522, in 1933 673 , in 1934 851, in 1935 742 , in 1936 716. Statistical Handbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Vol. 4, Prague, 1932) and in Statistical Yearbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Prague 1934 , 1935, 1936, 1937) . �8 SLOVAKIA were not many reasons to look for opportunities for employment on its territory. In the period up to World War I, Canada attracted only about 5,000 Slovaks. 2 As early as the beginning of the 1920s it appeared that Canada could become the alternative overseas country of destination of Slovak emigrants. That alternative began to attract not only applicants for emigration passports in Slovakia but also Czecho-Slovak diplomats, and their representatives in Canada. In elucidating the development of the stated tendency, and its impact, we chose a series of diplomatic documents, representing the activities of the Czechoslovak consulate in Montreal in the years 1920-1938 as the basis of the following essay . The most significant are those documents which give special attention to the process of emigration. The subjects of the correspondence of the Czechoslovak Consulate in Montreal were the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Social Welfare in Prague, and the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization in Ottawa.3 The Goals of this essay are limited. I will focus only on those aspects of the topic falling into the competence, tasks and activities of the Czechoslovak representatives in Canada. In consequence of the pro-emigration attitudes of the Czechoslovak government, two basic trends will coincide: Canadian immigration policy, and the development of the Slovak community in Canada. Slovak nationals represented the vast majority of all the people involved in the process of Czechoslovak emigration, especialy in the second half of the 2 Message of the Austro-Hungarian Consulate General in Montreal, IO December, I 902 to Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna . Haus-Hof-und Staatsarchiv Wien, F 15, File 62, deliv . 27 December, 1902. 3 sources: Archives of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs , Prague (hereinafter only AFMZV), Political reports - Montreal (1920- I 938) (hereinafter PZ-M) , and Section II. National Archives, Prague (hereinafter SUA) , Fund of Ministry of Social Welfare (hereinafter MSP), Ministry of International Affairs - Old registers of 19191944 (hereinafter MV) . Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa (hereinafter PAC) , Immigration Branch (RG 76) , Vol. 198 Consul General of Czechoslovakia, Montreal , Quebec (1922-1940) (File 80671) , Vol. 251 Czechoslovakia, Passports (1924-1939) (File 183211), Vol. 616 Czechoslovaks (File 916207) . �SLOVAKIA 9 1920s .4 This fact accounted for the basis for the final ethnic identification of the newly-formed community in the Canadian environment, and, at the same time, determined the attitudes, and activities of the Czechoslovak Representatives in Canada. The first diplomatic contacts between Czechoslovakia and Canada were established on the consular level in Montreal in November of 1920. Bohuslav K. Ryznar was appointed the first Czechoslovak Consul. The Consulate was subordinated to the Czechoslovak Embassy in London, which corresponded with the arrangements of the relations between London and Ottawa. Despite the urgent request of B . K . Ryznar to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, the functional designation of the Consulate in Montreal was not changed in the years 1920-1922 . He stressed the fact that "Canada is absolutely a self-governing country, and does not pay any taxes , duties or other allowances to the British Empire to be used by the army or navy. There is no British soldier, and no British warship in the whole territory of the Dominion .. ."5 B. K. Ryznar submitted several arguments to support his request for changing the Montreal office's rank to Consulate General. He suggested that the Governor General of Canada, the federal government, and the ministries in Ottawa entered into contacts only with accredited diplomats on the level of Consuls General. 6 Therefore, lower consular rankings resulted in the absence of contacts and information which, to a great extent, limited the possibility of diplomatic activity. Despite the Consul's assurances that eventual installation of a Consul General would not increase the budget, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague strictly refused the request.7 4 comparing the number of emigrants from Czechoslovakia to Canada during the years 1922-1932 with the number of emigrants from Slovakia for the same period, we have found that 83% were Slovaks, and only 17% were Czechs . If we compared it with the number of inhabitants , the difference would be even more extreme . Statistical Handbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Vol. 4, Prague , 1932). 5AFMZV, PZ-M, year I 921, No. 19, 27 . 6. 1921. 6With the addition that of all European countries, only Czechoslovakia and Portugal had their Consulates in Canada. AFMZV , PZ-M, year 1921 , No . 9, 17 . 2. 1921 . 7AFMZV , PZ-M, year 1921, No. 10 (B . ve .). �SLOVAKIA In reply to the refusal , the Consul Ryznar again reminded the Ministry of the difficulties connected with the execution of his mission : "The situation looks as if the Prague centre has to seek information on the territory from Brittany to the foot of the Urals, and from Cadiz to Hamerfest, without any auxiliary offices and means" .8 These basic arguments - i. e. the inferior position of the representation , and the large size of Canada - were, for a certain period, the most effective tool in the hands of the Czechoslovak Consul in Canada to be used whenever he was obliged to take a stand , or to characterize some generally valid phenomenon. The taking of such an attitude was under those circumstances understandable. The presence and activity of the first Czechoslovak Consul in Canada represented but the first stage of the Czechoslovak diplomatic activity in Canada, aimed at the gradual acquisition and transmission to the Czechoslovak Government of essential information on anything he considered important, including the care for his own nationals, with special attention paid to immigrants coming to the country. Taking into account the goal of the present essay , it is important to stress first of all the Consul's investigation of the state of the regional community of his fellow-countrymen. This all formed a part of the information sent at the beginning of 1920 to the Political Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague. He characterized it as follows : 11 ••• a colony of Czechoslovak nationals representing over five thousand persons living in the whole Dominion , i. e. an area equal to the extent of the United States of North America ... , it is , however, insufficiently organized, and could not be used as a decisive element to support any political faction .. . Also the interest of the Czechoslovak farmers settled in the province of Saskatchewan are quite different from those of the miners in Nova Scotia, living apart a distance of about four thousand kilometers. It will be very difficult to unify them and to make them act together" _9 It is obvious that recognizing the small numbers in the community provoked both interested parties to consider the further possibi8AFMZV , PZ-M,year 1921 , No . 19, 27. 6. 1921. 9AFMZV , PZ-M , year 1921, No . 2, File No . 10/21. �SLOVAK.IA 11 lities of its growth. These appeared already in 1921 in connection with the increasing interest in emigration from Czechoslovakia, and also with the growing threat of the limitation of immigration by the US Government. Therefore, the future Canadian immigration policy , and especially its relation to Central Europe, became the primary area of interest of the Czechoslovak Consulate in Montreal. The formulation dealing with the diffusion and disorganization of the colony had the hidden agenda of the further activity of the Czechoslovak Consulate - i.e. co-operation with the community in order to unify it as far as its organization is concerned, and, in this way, to shape its future direction. A matter of question, however, was - by which means and in what manner should it be done? The organizational and political attitudes chosen by the consular authorities in relationship to the Slovak community is the principal topic of this essay. The diplomatic communiques themselves contained certain signals in answer to the question because there the community was referred to as a colony of Czechoslovak nationals, without more detailed ethnic identification. Despite the fact that the first impression acquired by the Czechoslovak side from the trends in Canadian immigration policy was not in any way favourable - "the Canadian authorities obstructed the immigrants" 10 - the Consul reported to Prague at the beginning of 1921 that the consular office succeeded in finding some indications of change. Public debates began to mould opinions that, with respect to the growing need for cheap labour, it was necessary to retain the principle of a priority in the selection of immigrants, i. e. not to prefer Britons as the representatives of the "mother country" of Canada, but to permit a bit of benevolence in the selection of the immigrants. 11 It was decided by the Consulate to seize the opportunity immediately. The federal Department of Immigration and Colonization in IOAFMZV, Sec . II ., Reg . 531, File No . 514, 4.2.1921. 11 AFMZV, PZ-M, year 1921, No . 19, an article published in The Montreal Daily Star, 4. 6. 1921 , "Repudiation , Annexation or Population". �12 SLOVAKIA Ottawal 2 was asked in November of 1922 to provide statistical data on the number of Czechoslovak immigrants in Canada, and, at the same time, to inform the Consulate about the willingness of the Canadian government to accept the immigration and settlement of Czechoslovak nationals in Canada,13 This initiative of the Czechoslovak Consul was premature. The department took a very reserved attitude. Its Secretary, F. C. Blair, provided only the requested statistical data, and completely omitted the problem connected with the possibility of immigration from Czechoslovakia. 14 It is, therefore, clear that it was only the Czechoslovak side which initiated and tried to recommend its own citizens as suitable potential immigrants to Canada. Despite the fact that this effort had been ignored, the Consul Ryznar was not discouraged. He went on searching for some sign of permissivness in the Canadian immigration policy towards the Continent and concretely to Central Europe. He tried to convince the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs and also the Ministry of Social Welfare, that he was doing his best to search for possibilities for Slovak applicants for emigration to countries other than to the USA. The Consul constantly tried to find some solution and began to consider the most attractive the idea of the Canadian immigration officials - i. e. to attract peasants, who, unlike the British colonists coming mainly from towns, and again settled in towns in Canada, would be able and willing to farm in Canada, to cutlivate the virgin land, and to revive the economy of the country.15 He saw such a solution in Central Europe. Ryznar had been so encouraged with the possibility of Slovak immigration that he decided at the beginning of 1923 to send another letter to F. C. Blair. He did so in order to get some information about the new policy of settlement being enforced by certain political 12The Department of Immigration and Colonization, an independent Department of the Federal Government, came into existence in 1917 through its separation from the Ministry of the Interior. 13 PAC, RG 76 , Vol. 198, File 80671 , 11. I 1. 1922. 14 PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 28 . 11.1922. 15 AFMZV, PZ-M, year 1922, No. 7, 4.12 . 1922. �SLOVAKIA 13 circles . His primary goal was, however, again to remind the Canadian government of Czechoslovakia, and its peasantry applying for immigration visas. He stressed in his letter that he had been urged by his own government, and primarily by the Ministry of Social Welfare, which was greatly interested in the possibility of immigration of its citizens to Canada. In another letter he told of the intention of the above-mentioned Ministry to subscribe to the most significant Canadian newspaper in order to receive information on the programme of the settlement of the country, and at the same time to find missing information for numerous applicants for emigration, i.e. the citizens of Czechoslovakia.16 His efforts to attract the attention of the highest authorities of the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization brought some results in the end. The Czechoslovak Ministry of Social Welfare was finally put on the list of the addresses of the immigration press being issued by the Department of Immigration and Colonization. 17 Above all, those institutions realised that Czechoslovakia was offering a certain part of its peasantry with the assurance that they certainly would be very suitable future colonists . The explanation of the following could be found in the activity of the Czechoslovak Consulate: when in the autumn of 1923 a great need for a cheap labor force emerged in Canada in connection with the logging of old wood in forests, and its preparation for further processing in sawmills, representing in itself very heavy manual work, the citizens of British or French origin did not want to do it. Therefore, the Department of Immigration and Colonization met the demands of some entrepreneurial circles and agreed with the submitted proposal to obtain suitable lumberjacks in Central Europe . The Minister of Immigration and Colonization personally suggested that sort of labour force be sought in Czechoslovakia. He explained it in the following manner: "based on the information received, applicants for emigration from Czechoslovakia are said to have some experience with agricultural work, and also the prerequisites for 16pAc, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671 , 27 . 2. 1923. 17PAC , RG 76 , Vol. 198 , File 80671 , 7. 3. 1923. �14 SLOVAKIA managing methods used in Canadian agriculture in order to become true Canadian farmers in the end" .1 8 The Consulate was very proud of the results of its diplomatic mission. It interpreted its work in the following, quite inadequate, manner: "The Canadian immigration authorities prefer Czechoslovak nationals because of their good physical condition, honesty and industriousness. They find them excellent colonists , and they would be very glad to receive them" _19 In fact the Canadian authorities permitted workers at the end of 1923 in Czechoslovakia for the Canadian lumbering industry only, with only some five hundred, 20 later increased to a thousand workers. 21 Most of those people were obtained in Slovakia as can be seen in the statistical data of the shipping companies concerning the transporting of over two thousand persons from Slovakia to Canada during that same year.22 Immediately after the arrival of the first post-war contingent of Slovak immigrants, they faced numerous problems . The consulate in February 1924 issued the following message: "Most of those (i. e. immigrants) devoted themselves in the winter season to cutting wood. The living standards in those camps, hundreds of miles from civilization, situated in vast forests , are hardly enviable .. . They work from early morning till late at night. They eat food prepared in a common kitchen and pay for it through the reduction of their salaries. The employer provides workers with clothes and other requisites paid for in the above-mentioned manner. It is obvious that our fellows , knowing neither the language nor the customs , are in an endless wilderness thrown at the mercy of dishonest officials, and some problems had to be solved through the consular authorities with the director or owner of the company in order to ensure their protection" .23 18 PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 3. 11. 1923. 19.-;;:,UA, , MSP, Reg. 3894, No. 2028 , 2. 6. 1923. 20PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616, File 916207, pt. 1, 18. 10. 1923. 21SUA, MSP, Reg. 3899, File 847, 20. 2. 1924. 22 Statistical Handbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Vol. 3, Prague, 1928). 23SUA, MSP, Reg. 3899, File 847 , 20.2. 1924. �SLOVAKIA 15 In addition to the difficult position of a part of the Slovak immigrants in lumber camps, there were also other problems . The Canadian authorities offered, in fact only seasonal work. That meant that in the spring of the year 1924, when the season had ended, the immigrants were on their own. A part of them started to drift to Montreal, and other cities, especially those near the American border. It was clear in the end that the first group of post-war immigrants had come to Canada with a clear goal: to get around the restrictive immigration measures imposed by the American authorities, and to get to the United States via Canada,24 where their relatives and friends were already settled. Numerous requests of the immigrants to solve this problem were a heavy burden for the Czechoslovak consular officials .25 All their efforts, however, were useless. At least a one-year stay of the immigrant in Canada was a necessary precondition to receiving a visa to the USA. The situation of the Slovak lumberjacks was very difficult to resolve. The Czechoslovak Consulate tried to avoid growing difficulties caused partly by its own activity. The Czechoslovak authorities were immediately asked to inform passport offices about issuing emigration visas to Canada only to those applicants willing to settle permanently in Canada. 26 In order to stop the growth of further complications, the Consulate again addressed the Department of Immigration and Colonization in Ottawa to provide it with the form, or the text of the agreement usually concluded between the employer and employee.27 The letter also expressed the Government's interest in receiving more detailed information about living conditions of the 1mmigrants in Canada. The highest Canadian authorities answered the letter immediately. They informed the Consulate that neither an agreement form, nor any legislative criteria, existed in Canada for concluding contracts. As far as the securing of certain living standards for immigrants was concerned, living conditions were different in various 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27PAC, RG 76 , Vol. 198 , File 80671 , 16. 4.1924 . �16 SLOVAKIA parts of the country and what was offered was generally considered sufficient. 28 It was too late and quite useless to ask those questions. We know that the Canadian government authorities cared for the problems of their own poorest workers even less than for the Czechoslovak ones, and there was no motivation to help the immigrants, coming without any financial means, and at their own risk. It follows from the above that, at the beginning of 1924, the activity of the Consulate had to orient itself to immigration from Czechoslovakia. It had to decide what to do with people coming from Slovakia with the intention of going to the United States. The chance to get there was only minimal. While the Czechoslovak Consulate was asking the questions, the Slovak League of America, as the cover organization of Slovak immigrants in the USA, took the initiative. Many Slovak immigrants in Canada turned to it with requests for help, because the CanadianSlovak community itself was small in number, lost over the huge territory, and therefore could not support them. In the summer of 1924, the Slovak League sent its delegate to Canada to investigate the situation. Upon his arrival the delegate confirmed the fact that the immigrants had come to Canada with the goal of getting into the USA. At the same time he informed the American-Slovak public that "the prisons on the frontier are full of our people caught when they tried to get to the USA illegally" .29 After receiving that information, the executive of the Slovak League decided to publish information about the hopeless situation of most of the Slovak immigrants in Canada in magazines in Slovakia. 30 Thus a short article published later in numerous Slovak magazines came into being. The text of it was more than meaningful: "The representative of the Slovak League of America who had been sent to Canada reported about a sad group there. Over 12,000 of them are living there and suffer awfully. They cannot find work, and when they get 28PAC , RG 76, Vol. 198 , File 80212 , 25 . 4. 1924. 29 Minutes of the session of the delegates of the Slovak organizations in America organized by the executive of the Slovak League , held in Pittsburgh, Pa ., 18 . December of 1924. In: Slovak v Amerike, 51, No. 37, 2. 3. 1925, p. 3. 3oIbid. �SLOVAKIA 17 it, they have to work in the Canadian virgin forests and are paid only a pittance. Their feet and hands are frost-bitten and some of them even went mad" _31 The disclosure of the irresponsibility of the Czechoslovak and Canadian authorities who had prepared and organized the immigration , upset not only American Slovaks and people in Slovakia, it also affected diplomatic relations between Czechoslovakia and Canada. The Department of Immigration and Colonization in Ottawa was probably informed directly through the British Ambassador in Prague . A letter was immediately sent to the Czechoslovak Consul in Montreal containing - a slightly paraphrased - "anxiety about the fact that the published information on the situation in Canada does not correspond with reality" _32 At the same time Ottawa asked the Consul to inform it about the Slovak League of America. They were mostly interested in whether the organization had a branch in Canada consisting of the proper members, and finally asked the Consul about the alleged problem, i. e. whether he was really informed about a greater number of Slovak immigrants in Canada who had not found work.33 In his answer B. K. Ryznar suggested to the Minister W. J. Egan that the Slovak League of America was a strong organization with half a million members. He assured him, however, that the organization had not had any branch in Canada. 34 As he had not ment to destroy his previous efforts in the field of creating premises for acceptance of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, he to a certain extent negated the arguments of the above-mentioned article, and assured Ottawa that there were not many unemployed Slovaks in Canada. In order not to minimize his duties and problems connected with the execution of his mission, Ryznar mentioned in his letter having heard only about the complaints of the immigrants concerning irregular practices applied by the employers and the labour 3 IE. g. Sloven ska domovina, 7, No. 6, 5. 2. I 925, p. 2. 32 As in Note 29 . 33PAC , RG 76, Vol. 616 , File 916207, pt . I, 10. 2. 1925 . 34Toe Slovak League of America had but one subsidiary in Canada, at Fort William , Ontario, founded in 1916, havi ng one hundred and fifty members. �18 SLOVAKIA agencies, and their attempts to misuse them. His attitude to the whole problem was contrary to the facts .35 The above-mentioned problem had been disturbing to both interested parties, and therefore the Department in Ottawa decided to inform the Czechoslovak authorities in order to elucidate somehow the problems of unemployment and basic social care provided to the Slovak immigrants. The information was , however, only general , covering but the job opportunities offered by Canada to the immigrants . Job opportunities were represented principally by seasonal work for agricultural workers. The number of needed seasonal workers was very difficult to determine ahead of time. The Department cleared up only the problem of the salaries offered. They assured the Czechoslovak authorities that the minimum monthly salary had to be 25 dollars , at the same time admitting even higher wages in case of additional seasonal work.36 But the Czechoslovak authorities wanted to make the problem clear. Therefore, they sent a delegate on a mission to Eastern Canada. He could only confirm the well-known facts about the difficulties of a part of the new Slovak immigrants. The most serious of them represented unemployment on the one hand, and unpaid salaries for work done on the other. The employers, for various reasons, often refused to pay the immigrants. They were sure that it was quite impossible to claim their salaries through the courts, as no service contracts had been concluded with the immigrants. 37 Together with the arrival of a greater number of immigrants, and especially when the lumbering season had ended, a tendency appeared during 1924 among groups of immigrants settling in Montreal to be near the residence of the Czechoslovak Consulate. Growing unemployment was the motive for their concentration. The officials saw the reasons for immigrants remaining in the big cities in their apparent aversion to working on farms, and in their false illusions of 35PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616, File 916207, pt . I, 14.2.1925. 36 PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616, File 916207, pt. I, 26.3.1925. 37SUA, MSP, Reg . 3803, No . 10219, 2.5. 1925. �SLOVAKIA 19 better salaries in cities. The immigrants hoped to find in Montreal an advanced industry, as was the case in cities of the United States .38 Social dislocation, therefore, became the decisive experience of the people. This motivated them during the summer 1924 to support each other through a co-operative association. 39 The forming of the ethnically homogenous Slovak group in Montreal, welded together by common problems, could not be ignored by the Czechoslovak Consul. He reported to Prague in detail about the two Slovaks in Montreal, who strove to establish a "Slovak Benefit Society". He added, however, that their task was very difficult, because of the small and ever-changing number of the Slovaks in Montreal, as most of them were looking for work, and their stay in the city was temporary .40 He also reported on the activity of the Slovak League of America, aimed at the organization of Slovak immigrants in Canada. The League sent its delegate to Montreal to investigate the situation. According to the Consul there was no response to the efforts of that Slovak-American organization in Canada. His opinion was, that the representative of the Slovak League "had not been accepted positively by his fellow-countrymen" _41 It is clear that the associative efforts of the Slovak immigrants were from the very beginning followed very carefully by the Consulate. The fact that the Slovak immigrants had decided to go their own way inspired the Consulate General to act in accordance with its original intention to organize the whole community in Canada, representing several thousand. At the beginning the Consulate tried to control the activity of the newly-formed association of Slovaks in Montreal. The Consul Ryznar, as soon as he arrived in 1920, decided to enter in a most decisive manner into the life of the community. But there was little hope of realizing that because of the originally small 38 Jbid. 39The association was founded by Gabriel Kurdel and F. Capkovic , at the end of 1924, in the first Slovak restaurant in Montreal , named "Tatra" . It was opened by F. Capkovic in the spring of I 924 . From the letter of G . Kurdel to the author dated 8. 12. 1974. (Personal archives of the author) . 40 AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1924, No. 8, 8. 9. 1924. 41 Ibid. �20 SLOVAKIA number of the Slovak immigrants scattered across the vast Canadian lanscape. That all prevented him from managing the situation. Therefore, in his diplomatic agenda, he prudently suggested that the Slovak inhabitants in Canada were not organized as they could not be organized. But, as it is known from the diplomatic agenda of the former Austro-Hungarian Consuls General in Canada, the truth was just opposite. The Slovaks in Canada did organize already at the tum of the 19th and 20th centuries but not in their own associations. They were establishing in Canada numerous branches of American-Slovak associations. This resulted in subordinating them to centres in the USA, thus connecting more tightly the Canadian Slovaks with American ones, rather than the Slovaks living across Canada. With respect to the above-mentioned facts, the Czechoslovak Consul did not consider uniting the Canadian-Slovak community possible. This made him believe in the end that the Slovaks in Canada were not organized at all. The alternative of establishing new associations after World War I was impossible. In 1922 the Consul expressed his attitude in the following manner: "there are not suitable conditions here for establishing Czechoslovak associations" .42 It follows that he really intended to establish not only new associations, but also to make those already existing acquire the status of Czechoslovak ones, i. e. to conform to the Czechoslovak stateforming conception, and to manifest it in concrete organizational forms of their foreign enclave. When it was necessary to explain the reasons preventing him from realizing his plans, the Consul stressed the fact that there was a conflict between his intentions and the Slovak attitude represented by the strong pro-Hungarian orientation of the greatest concentration of the pre-war Slovak immigrants in Fort William, Ontario.43 About six hundred to one thousand and two hundred Slovaks were living there. The pro-Hungarian tendencies of that nationally and organizationally unified group of the Slovak immigrants coming mostly from 4 2SuA . MSP, Reg . 3894, No . 2313, 26. 6. 1922. 43 AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1922, File 36 d, 25.4. 1922. �SLOVAKIA 21 the Orava region - which was in the period before the World War I known as an area nearly untouched by the process of magyarization - "were explained" very simply: those Slovaks had attended Hungarian schools and immigrated to Canada from Hungarian lands. We must add, however, that he, himself, doubted his statements about the pro-Hungarian manifestations of the Fort William Slovaks with the confession about getting his information "second hand" . Later on, he made use of his statements about magyarized Slovaks as a serious obstacle to the enforcement of the Czechoslovak philosophy. He said that the pro-Hungarian tendencies were permanently supported both by former Austro-Hungarian and new Hungarian Consuls in Canada during his journeys across Canada where the Hungarians had lived together with the Slovaks.44 The Czechoslovak Consul made use of that fact. He remarked that he himself as a Consul had not been able to travel along the consular "region" by permission of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs even after his three years' stay in Canada.45 In such a way he brought forward both the "principal", and other, i.e. "technical" cause of his temporary failure in relation to the Slovak community in Canada. We must say, however, that arguments such as the long distances between Montreal and individual Slovak settlements, the absence of contact with them, or surviving pro-Hungarian emotions among regional inhabitants, as well as the existence of no chance to change it, also survived. They could never be used to characterize the newly-forming associations of Slovak immigrants. The consul chose quite a different explanation. As he himself noted in the consular report, he had evaluated the activity of "the Czechoslovak citizens coming from Slovakia". In relationship to the existing foreign-political conception of the unitary Czechoslovak state, and the officialy-accepted theory of the Czechoslovak nation as well, he started to characterize the new associative tendencies of Montreal's Slovaks as the activation of anti-Czech 44 AFMZ, PZ-M , year 1924, No . 6. 11. 11. 1924. 4SAFMZ, PZ-M , year 1923, No. 13. 13 . 12. 1923 . �22 SLOVAKIA ideas, and the spreading of treasonous ideas brought apparently by Slovak immigrants and spread among fellow-countrymen. 46 Characterization of the associative tendencies of the Slovak immigrants in Montreal as anti-Czech, or even treasonous, was naive , and in the end turned against the Consulate itself. The Consulate had immediately to respond, and to eliminate the manifestations of the Slovak separatists represented, and replace them with the associative efforts of helpless immigrants. The Consul was supposed to initiate an unifying processes and make the Slovak immigrants accept their organization with those Czech immigrants who had settled in Montreal long before. It was, however, very difficult to find a proper way to solve the problem. There were only a few Czech immigrants living in Montreal. 47 They were mostly older inhabitants, and besides, they were on a higher social level, with other interests and needs. The Slovaks, meanwhile, were not in the least interested in any sort of social activity, or even "making policy". Therefore even the old traditional and experienced way of ideologically influencing the community, as it was suggested by the Czechoslovak authorities - i. e. to issue a newspaper - was considered inappropriate, and even useless. Migrating Slovaks searching all the time for jobs would not accept any newspaper _48 The following "solution" proved the most suitable one: the Canadian public was informed through an article published in The Montreal Daily Star in December of 1924 about the organization of "the Czechoslovak citizens in order to establish an independent association of Czechoslovak immigrants" .49 When, at the beginning of 1925, B. K. Ryznar finished his diplomatic mission to Canada (from January 1923 he was Consul General) the Montreal Slovak community was already officialy represented by the Czechoslovak 46 AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1924, No. 8. 8.9.1924. 47 Before World War I, thirteen Czech families and one Slovak family lived in Montreal. In: Rybnfcek, A.: "Vzpomfnky starousadlfka." I:udove zvesti, 26, No. 40 , I 9. 10. 1961, p. 14. 48 AFMZ, PZ-M , year 1924, No . 12. 11. 11 . 1924. 4 9"Society formed to aid Czechs . New body will assist immigrants to prosper here". The Montreal Daily Star, 16. 12. 1924 . PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616 , File 916207, pt. I . �SLOVAKIA 23 Benefit Society. An internal conflict existed, however, concerning its name, emerging from time to time with greater or less intensity ,50 as the roots of a sort of natural alliance were missing.51 The beginning of 1925, connected with the end of B. K. Ryznar's diplomatic mission, and the coming of the new Consul General F. V. Kveton, represented a break in the immigration policy of Canada. Thanks to favourable economic-political decisions of the Canadian Government to end the policy of favouring immigrants from Great Britain, psychologically and physically not sufficiently prepared to do hard agricultural work in the Canadian wilderness, resulted in the recruitment of immigrants - mainly peasants - from the Central European region. It was the poor state of the Canadian economy at the beginning of 1925 as mentioned by the federal Parliament of Canada,52 which resulted in the above-mentioned changes in immigration policy. That new alternative was, despite the poor economic situation of Canada, evaluated by the Czechoslovak authorities with great satisfaction. It seemed that the arrival of immigrants would be greatly simplified for the immigrants comming from some "selected European countries, including the Czechoslovak Republic" .53 New workers were expected to revive the Canadian economy. They, however, misunderstood each other. The Canadian politicians saw the solution in further cultivation of land and farms left by the British colonists , thus solving the urgent need for agricultural workers. In fact, most of the applicants for emigration from the 50From a letter of G. Kurdel to the author dated 8. 12. 1974. 51 Canadian immigration policy allowed from Czechoslovakia only agricultural workers. Therefore, the intelligentsia had no place among immigrants (with some few exceptions). It meant that the Slovak community had no natural leaders. Some did develop. Gabriel Kurdel was the most significant one. In connection with the newlyfounded association in Montreal, G. Kurdel in his memoires said that he had informed the new Consul General Kv~ton about existing conflicts in the association. The Consul agreed with the change of the name of the association to a Slovak one. But, according to his memoirs, when he submitted his proposal to the leaders of the association, represented by Czech fellow-countrymen, they commented on it as follows: "It is nonsense". In: Memoirs of G. Kurdel. Phone record from 26. 10. 1977. No. SLK 3023. Archives of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Toronto. 52AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1925, No. 5. 7.2.1925. • 53~.:.UA, , MSP, Reg. 3894, File 847, 20. 2. 1924. �24 SLOVAKIA Central European region, including Slovakia, were poor people unable to participate in the Canadian programme of immigration of farming families with some capital. They could only saturate the secondary needs of the workforces , i.e. the agricultural workers on farms. The second alternative attracted primarily those applicants for emigration from Slovakia who were rejected by the United States. The number of those interested was very large. According to officials of the Ministry of Social Welfare in Prague, it was nearly impossible to control the situation. The quota permitted annualy by the Canadian side could not be exceeded. The Canadians succeeded in keeping it low .54 In this way the number of Slovaks in Canada was by the end of the year 1930 increased to some 30 ,000 - 40,000 persons. 55 Czechoslobvak representatives in Montreal protested by means of a Memorandum to Minister Egan aginst the recruitment of workers without appropriate legislative requisites. The Consul stressed in the Memorandum that, according to Czechoslovak emigration law, each of the emigrants should, before their departure , be furnished with a -valid contract with the name of the employer, the location , sort of work, the duration of the employment, as well as the offered wage. 56 In response to the Memorandum, the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization considered it its duty to inform the Ministry of Social Welfare in Prague only of the fact that an immigrant - agricultural worker - was to be paid 25 dollars per month with board and lodging.57 Further disputes and legally-unsolved problems were on both sides consulted usually in the following manner: in further similar inter-governmental agreements concerning the emigration and immi- 54Approximately 6,000 to 7,000 persons. 55 Archives of the President's Office, D. 12331/38. Secret message of CS . Consul General dr. F. Pavl~sek to Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague about the situation among Slovaks in Canada, dated 17. 3. 1937. In: Bielik, F.: Sloven ske vys(ahovaleccvo. Dokumency III. Martin, MS 1976, doc. No. 375 . 56PAC, RG. 76, Vol. 616, File 916207 , pt. 1, 23 . 5. 1925 . 57 PAC, RG. 76, Vol. 616, File 916207 , pt. 1, 23 . 5. 1925 . �SLOVAKIA 25 gration , proper attention should be paid to the solution of the problem of concrete labour contracts.58 From the above-mentioned it follows that the period of activity of Consul General F. V. Kveton (during the years 1925-1929) reflected a considerable increase in the community, not only in Montreal or Toronto, but also in other Canadian regions. This was connected with new organizations of the immigration process. The immigrants were placed primarily on the Praires of Canada, with the organizational centre located in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Consul General F. V. Kveton visited that region in 1926. On his journey across Canada he discovered an increase in Slovak colonists despite the fact that he had intended to investigate mainly the Czech settlements. He came to the conclusion that "the Czechoslovak colony" in Canada was in fact the Slovak community. He stressed that fact in his report . Fort William was, according to him , the most significant and stable Slovak city. He estimated that some 1,100 to 1,200 Slovak souls were concentrated there with their own Catholic parish, and a nice church. He said that the Slovaks were working mainly in the port, loading and unloading the ships transporting goods across Lake Ontario, i. e. the inland Canadian "sea". In order to verify known opinions of his diplomatic predecessor concerning the pro-Hungarian orientation of Fort William Slovaks, he asked not only the old inhabitants , but post-war ones too. He came to the following conclusion: the community as a whole takes an autonomous attitude towards the solution of the problem of the constitutional position of Slovakia within the Czechoslovak Republic. The city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, as the destination place of his journey, was characterized as the biggest Czech settlement in Canada, with some four hundred souls, represented primarily by tailors and shoemakers. The Consul General stressed , however, the other function of Winnipeg. It was used as the "winter station" to retire in after the agricultural season on farms was over. His own opinions shifted into a different position because of having obtained new facts about the community. The Consul started 58s(JA, MV, Reg. 1015, No. 6980/1925. �26 SLOVAKIA to respond to the demands of older emigrants concerning education and national culture. He explained his attempt to the Czechoslovak authorities by the need to preserve national consciousness. He asked for the delivery of Slovak books for Montreal and Fort William, and above all, for a Slovak teacher for approximately two hundred school-aged children in Fort William.59 Thanks to the new consular representative, the Czechoslovak authorities were in 1926 forced to return to the problem of the social position of the Slovak immigrants. At first they started to investigate the chances of immigrants to obtain farms. Ottawa was asked questions about the place to obtain certain capital loans if an immigrant intended to do private farming.6() The federal Ministry did not intend to answer the question. The Consul was asked to address the responsible institutions, and first of all the Secretary of the Association of Canadian Bankers 61 who had offered him information on the existence of credit permitted by the Government in 1926 to be used exclusively for the purchase of agricultural land, the construction of houses, and affiliated buildings, for the purchase of cattle, irrigation systems, construction, etc.62 Despite a positive answer, no references were found in the archives referring to the use of that aid by Slovak immigrants. Because of those circumstances, the arrival of the two delegates from Czechoslovakia was a matter of question. They were invited by the Canadian Pacific Railway to investigate local conditions for settlement of independent families with some capital. Research has shown that there were only a few solvent families leaving Slovakia for Canada. Therefore, the information offered by the host company was quite useless for ordinary Slovak immigrants.63 Another delegate of the Ministry of Social Welfare offered to the interested Ministries information about his journey to Canada in the spring 1927 . He considered the position of Slovak agricultural workers as gene59S(JA, MSP, Reg. 3894, No. 6588. 6()PAC, RG . 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 10. 6. 1926. 61PAC, RG . 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, I 7. 6. 1926. 62SCJA, MSP, Reg . 3965, 2782/26. 63SCJA, MV, Reg . 1015, 498/1927. �SLOVAKIA 27 rally bad. He presented the following facts: they were working without any contract between them and their employers, and thrown on the mercy of the farmers. Above all, they were working without any health or accident insurance. No such insurance existed in Canada. Only Railways and larger industries had their own insurance systems. The afflicted immigrant could be protected only through a benefit society of fellow-countrymen, or by Canadian charity institutions. 64 When the Consulate had intervened in the Canadian Department it was offered a long list of the agencies and associations entitled to protecting the interests of immigrants in Canada.65 During the following year quite different opinions appeared among fellow-countrymen, evaluating the situation of Slovak immigrants. Some of them had strongly criticized their position because they had to be regularly aided through the Slovak League of America. Others were satisfied, pointing to those individuals living in Canada for a long time who became rich. The most objective evaluation, however, resulted from the latest information gathered during the years 1924-1927. It was as follows: "Fellow-countrymen are not for the time being doing well" _66 Evidence about it was provided by the Czechoslovak Consulate in Canada in a document published in Slovak newspapers. The title of the mentioned article was "Information for Those Emigrating to Canada" .67 It analysed the social conditions of Slovak immigrants in Canada, considered them to be insufficient, thus preventing others from making the decision to leave for Canada to work. The intention to get through Canada to the USA was considered nonsense. There were many profiteers promising to get people secretly over the borders to the USA, extorting their last money. The Consulate warned people because the promises had been false. Those profiteers were interested only in their hard-earned money. 64 SUA, MV, Reg . 1015, No . 27464/1927, 11.4. 1927. 65 S0A, MSP, Reg . 3965 , File 6849/1927, 28. 12. 1927. 66 Kopac, A.: "Ako sa zije na~fm v Kanade?", I:udova politika, 3, 1927, p. 3. 67 Narodnie noviny, 58., No . 50, 29. 4. 1927 , p. 3. No . 207, 15. 9. �28 SLOVAKIA Despite those facts, the Consul Kveton sent in the summer of 1928 an optimistic report to Prague about enough job opportunities, and that there was no unemployment among the immigrants. 68 He was, however, undoubtly conscious of the fact that critical situations were emerging after seasonal work was over, i.e. during the longlasting winter. It was almost the same by the end of the year 1928 . The unemployed started, as usual, to concentrate in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and other cities. That concentration resulted in great associative activity. Consular reports paid special attention primarily to the activity of the Slovak League of America, which had succeeded in establishing its subsidiaries in Canada in the years 1927 and 1928 (in Toronto and Montreal, and a year before also in Winnipeg). For most Slovak immigrants in Canada membership in those organizations was quite necessary, because they had been aiding them in case of illnesses, or accidents. However, the activity of the Slovak League did not correspond with the above-mentioned intentions of the Czechoslovak Consulate. The Committee for Emigration was immediately addressed with urgent demands for the Government to provide some financial aid to the co-operative association in Montreal to cover its activities. 69 Such procedures did not surprise anybody. Once again the original arguments were used about the Slovaks looking for locations with older settlements of their fellow-countrymen, and gradually losing their interest in the idea of the so-called Czechoslovak nationality _?O That private opinion of the informer was in strong contradiction with the tendencies of the Slovak League being known with its identification with the Slovak autonomy programme during the inter-war years. The League was popular among the immigrants, especially for its co-operative function. The situation, however, got worse as the years went on. Unemployment was increasing, and as a result, a new phenomenon ap68S(JA , MSP, Reg. 3965, 30.11.1928 . 69S(JA, MSP, Reg . 3966, No . 21443, 28 .6.1928 . 7oIbid. �SLOVAKIA 29 peared in the diplomatic agenda as early as the winter of 1929-1930 . It concerned the deportation of Czechoslovak nationals from Canada. According to existing Canadian law a man who, during the first five years of his arrival in Canada applied for, or was provided with some public finacial aid, was considered an undesirable person, not able to conform to Canadian conditions. Such a person was to be deported to his mother country .7 1 The situation between the two countries worsened. There were frequent controversies between them. Many of the persons to be deported by the Canadians were ill or even incapacitated, either physically or psychically, and there were also criminals among them. Finally, the Czechoslovak authorities refused to accept those individuals who had not had, after a ten years' stay in Canada, re-established their Czechoslovak citizenship, or had not requested an extension of the validity of the right of domicle abroad. It is very difficult to find an accurate count of such persons,72 but they were often mentioned in diplomatic reports. It is obvious that this situation resulted from the economic crisis which broke out in 1929. The Depression affected the immigrants as never before. Besides increasing unemployment, the crisis meant also a significant reduction of the immigration quota for Czechoslovakia to two thousand people a year. This uncompromising procedure of the immigration authorities irritated the Czechoslovak Consulate so much that the Consul addressed Ottawa with an open protest. It follows from his report, sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, that he was discussing the problem with Deputy Minister Egan in Ottawa. The Consul considered the quota unfair, and even offensive, for Czechoslovakia. The reaction of the Canadian Minister to that invective was related the Czechoslovak Minister of Foreign Affairs as follows: the Deputy Minister said that "if only the immigrants from Bohemia and Moravia were concerned, 71SuA , MSP, Reg. 4029, No. 4310-36. 72 PAC, RG 76 , Vol. 251 , File 183211. �30 SLOVAKIA the whole situation would have been quite different, but there was only a minimum percentage of immigrants coming those regions" .73 At the beginning of 1930 K. Kveton was ending his diplomatic mission in Montreal , and was replaced by the new Consul-General, K. Moser. The attitude of the Canadian public and the immigration authorities as well, towards the immigration policy became even more hostile . Finally, in August of 1930 immigration from Czechoslovakia was halted. Public opinion accused the Government of having caused both the crisis, and the unemployment, too, due to its rather "benevolent" immigration policy, mainly in the second half of the 1920s. According to this opinion, the labour market was saturated, resulting in unexpected problems. No improvement in the field of employment occured even after spring work had started. The situation was the same even during the harvest. Farmers were so cutting back on wages that it became quite unprofitable to travel for work to the prairie provincies. Therefore the new Consul Moser reported to Prague in June of 1930 that: "don't let the emigrants come here under these circumstances, as they would only have travel expenses and _a temporary stay here" .74 Thus the hot issue of a part of the diplomatic agenda, represented by the immigration policy, disappeared from it at the beginning of the 1930s. A natural consequence of that was only sporadic contacts between the Czechoslovak Consulate and the Federal Department for Immigration and Colonization. Due to the restriction of immigration, the Federal Department had given up its original position, and importance as well, and beginning with the year 1936 started to function as the Immigration Branch of the Federal Department of Mines and Resources. Unemployment and deportations represented the most serious problem of the period of the economic crisis. Therefo- 73 SUA, MSP, Reg. 3990, 6. 2. 1929. It is necessary to add that the Canadian Government limited or stopped immigration from the entire continent of Europe, of course except for families with some capital, or wives and children of those already settled in Canada, In: an article "Immigration from Europe is Stopped" . The Gazette, Montreal, 16. 8. 1930. 74<'1, .:>UA, MSP, Reg . 3990, No. 6921, 3. 6. 1930. �SLOVAKIA 31 re, the Czechoslovak Consulate paid special attention to the internal i.e. social, associative, and political life of the Slovak community. When in 1930 the Director of the Czechoslovak Institute of Foreign Affairs in Prague V. Tlapak went on a study-tour to Canada, he could only confirm the well-known facts about numerous unemployed immigrants who would like to return to their native land, if only they could. Many of them did not earn enough money to pay the travel expences for the journey back home . He found many examples of those who worked only to cover their daily food costs.7 5 The first to sense the impact of the Depression were farm workers . Having come to Canada in the second half of the 1920s, these people were not accepted in Canada with special favour. The crisis made their position quite unbearable. The Federal Government, trying to solve the situation as best as it would, created a programme of emergency works. Nearly every province "drew" the unemployed from the cities and organized in the country so-called labour camps. Especially the young unemployed did such beneficial work as reconstruction of roads, cultivation of natural parks, etc. No Slovaks took part in it, according to diplomatic reports. In January of 1932 Consul Moser reported to Prague that unemployment was not decreasing at all, but on the contrary, it was gradually increasing. 76 Not only the immigamts who were agricultural workers had problems. Even some better-situated individuals had problems. In spite of the fact that some of the immigrants had succeded in getting land, they had to leave the farms as they were not able to pay off the mortgage.77 Deportations became the accompanying phenomenon of unemployment. Canada resorted to that unpleasant measure in order to shake off the burden of the persons who were not able to care for themselves.7 8 There were many Slovak immigrants among them. Consul General Moser, in his effort to somehow protect the interests 75 SDA, MSP , Reg . 4019, No . 3751/30, 29.11.1930. 76AFMzv, PZ-M, year 1932, No. 3, 27 .. 1. 1932. 77 SUA, MSP , Reg . 3990, No. 4105 - 32. 78 vystehovalecky zpravodaj Ministerstva socialnf pece , Vol. 2, 20. 5. 1932 , p. 19 . �32 SLOVAKIA of the immigrants, sent a complaint to Ottawa in August of 1932, stressing the fact that Canada was deporting immigrants too late, because most of them were in such a bad situation that they could not wait the two-to-three months for the departure. Therefore, he asked the Department to deport them as early as possible.79 The Department in Ottawa answered that they had a huge list of those waiting for deportation, and in any case could not make the deportation process quicker, especially due to the limited capacity of the ships departing from Montreal. 80 Even in January 1934 the consular materials contained information about unemployed immigrants who, for three years, had hopelessly waited for deportation. Therefore, some of them illegaly left for the USA, only to be caught, and in such way to be more quickly deported (after a two-to-three months stay in prison) to Czechoslovakia.81 By the end of 1935 the Consul suggested that things were going better and visits to the Consulate were rare. At the same time he reported that numerous immigrants had succeded in finding some work in construction, mines and forests, while others had returned to Czechosloyakia. 82 It does not mean, however, that he automatically considered an improvement in the field of employment a symptom of the restoration of the immigration process, or the release of the restrictions imposed on immigration policy. The only exception was that concerning the possibility of immigration of some peasant families with a capital of $1,000 - $2,000. Even under those circumstances the Consul considered the immigration of well-off individuals more than disputable. He reasoned in the following way: If the applicant for immigration to Canada sells in Czechoslovakia his whole property to get the necessary financial means, it will be enough only to invest in uncultivated land. Very hard work will follow the purchase, with the results coming in most cases too late. 79PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, I. 8. 1932. 80PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 20. 8.1932. 8lx, .:>UA, MSP, Reg. 4029, 12. I. 1934. 82X' .:>UA, MSP, Reg. 4029, 27.1.1936. �SLOVAKIA 33 This will make the immigrant fail , which often will result in his deportation. 83 It has been stated already that no other event influenced the Slovak community so much as the Depression. The immigration process of the second half of the 1920s was practically halted and the number of immigrants in the community was relatively stabilized (representing some 30,000 Slovaks, and about 1,000 Czechs). During the period preceding the crisis , the community was insufficiently organized. It was lacking in leaders, preachers, teachers, and schools. During the crisis the community was more active, and even more radical. Some new associations were founded. Ethnic consciousness was also activated. This resulted in a rapid decrease in their interest and willingness to co-operate in so-called Czechoslovak: associations. The activity of the benefit society in Montreal was nearly halted. 84 The Consulate notified Prague of the revival of autonomist tendencies, illustrating it with the fact that the First Slovak Benefit Society came into existence in Western Canada. More seriously, he considered the fact that there were being established numerous subsidiaries of the American-Slovak: associations with centers situated in the USA. He noticed, however, the great disappointment among the Canadian members because their funds had been delivered to the USA, thus not sufficiently meeting their needs. Finally, some of the members met in Winnipeg, Manitoba to reach a decision about leaving the American-Slovak: Association in order to found their own Canadian-Slovak: one. 85 The newly established Canadian Slovak League, together with the newspaper Slovak v Kanade, were by Consul Moser characterized as the principal representatives of the autonomist flow in the Slovak community, with the addition, that the same opinion was shared by the First Catholic Slovak Union in Canada. When F. Pavlasek took up his consular mission in Canada, he came to the conclusion that Slovaks were against the Czechs because 83SDA , MSP, Reg. 4029, 19. 8.1936. 84AFMZV, Section II., Reg . 492, No . 6787, I. 10. 1932. 85 SDA, MSP , Reg . 4029 . Periodical Report of the Immigration Branch , IV . quart. 1932. �34 SLOVAKIA of their motto "Slovakia for the Slovaks" .86 According to the new Consul General, the immigrants transfered from Slovakia to Canada many of Andrej Hlinka's ideas. Their attitudes were enforced both due to the American Slovak influences, and the agitation about the Pittsburgh Agreement. The fact that the Slovaks represented the poorest layers of the inhabitants of Canada, and belonged often to the unemployed, resulted in some being attracted to Marxism. The Consul discovered that in Montreal some four hundred persons were concentrating around the Slovak newspaper Robotnfcke slovo. The Consul Pavlasek characterized the group as quite compatible and devoted to their common ideal. At the same time he stressed the fact that the magazine was doing well and had a lot of symphatizers, in spite of the fact that many of them were not organized in the Association at all .87 Finally, in 1934 he characterized the community as politically split between the autonomists, autonomist communists, and those loyal to democratic Czechoslovakia. He considered it the result of the differentiation process which occured during the Depression. The autonomist communists were originally Czechoslovaks but had split in 1936 into Czechs and Slovaks. He tried to contact the different groups . "At first I tried to attract the conservative Catholic associations (the parish of Saints Cyril and Methodius) but without any success ... When I saw that the door for my activity among autonomists was shut for a certain period, I turned to less radical workers in order to build up co-operation between them and a middle democratic group. The result, however, was much the same ... 11 88 The Consul came to the conclusion that comunists triumphed during the crisis because they had exploited unemployment for establishing new associations. Among them were Czechoslovak Worker Education Clubs, the Slovak Workmen's Association, The International Workmen's Association, etc. They had numerous sym86AFMZV, Section II ., Reg. 531, 18.7.1934. 87 Ibid. 88 As in Note 55. �SLOVAKIA 35 pathizers among the common people. They improved the financial state of their associations, and a quality newspaper as well. In other words, they were very succesfuI. 89 The Consul Pavlasek stressed the intensity of communist propaganda among their fellow-countrymen in 1936. At the same time he noticed the fact that the propaganda could not be discounted, and in spite of the fact that it had been the result of a long-term Depression, it was spreading very rapidly, and fellow-countrymen were accepting it.90 Already in 1937 the Consul Pavlasek.was very pessimistic: "The position of this office is extremely difficult, because we have nobody to lean on. There are only a few Czechs here, and they are mostly assimilated, and a majority of them have withdrawn from public life due to permanent attacks". The fact that the Slovak community rejected Czechoslovakism nearly 'en bloc', he characterized as follows: "loyal Czechoslovak thinking, ever respecting the democracy and the Czechoslovak national unity, represents in some colonies but a minority", at the same time he added that the Czechs had arrived in Canada already before World War I, and they had been living there for two or three generations. They had been greatly assimililated, because the second generation had been educated in the Canadian manner. Finally, he expressed his "sad" conclusion that he himself, as well as the Consulate, were permanently attacked by the autonomists, and communists as well. It meant that the Consulate was to a great extent isolated from the Slovak community as a whole, in spite of the latter's internal ideological differentiation. In other words, the Consulate's mission was unsuccesful - it failed completely to unify the Czecho-Slovak nationals in Canada. Therefore, its arguments, formulated in 1937, suggesting that "everything must be done to keep the consciousness of Czechoslovak national unity in spite of the protests and demonstrations of the autonomist circles", were in vain.9 1 89SuA , MSP , Reg. 4029 , 25 . 10. 1935 . 90SuA, MSP, Reg . 4029 , 13.5 . 1937 . 91 As in note 88. � SLOVAKIA 7 Slovak Emigrants in Canada as Reflected in Diplomatic Documents (1920 - 1938) ELENA JAKESOVA Slovak emigration to Canada - not taking into account the European continental migration - can be considered one of the strongest and most significant of all of the Slovak migrations during the inter-war period. Great numbers of Slovaks moved to Canada across the Antlantic to earn some money, especially in the second half of the 1920s. 1 The inter-war years, however, represented only its second stage, because Slovaks had started to leave for the United States as early as the 1870s. The 1920s witnessed only a change in destination. The United States of America, which in 1920 contained about 620,000 Slovaks, halted that mass emigration. When the continuity of the traditional emigration had been broken partly in the year 1921, and definitely in the year 1924, the search for an alternative solution of the problem did not take long. The immigrants saw in Canada's common frontier with the United States the possibility of emigration south in the future. Therefore, Canada became in the second half of the twenties "the second chance", a kind of alternative destination of the Slovak emigrants in spite of the fact that in comparison with the USA there 1 Shipping companies transported from Slovakia to Canada in 1922 110 persons, in 1923 2029 , in 1924 2832, in 1925 2134 , in 1926 6066 , in 1927 6301 , in 1928 8184 , in 1929 4116 , in 1930 3586, in 1931 730, in 1932 522, in 1933 673 , in 1934 851, in 1935 742 , in 1936 716. Statistical Handbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Vol. 4, Prague, 1932) and in Statistical Yearbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Prague 1934 , 1935, 1936, 1937) . �8 SLOVAKIA were not many reasons to look for opportunities for employment on its territory. In the period up to World War I, Canada attracted only about 5,000 Slovaks. 2 As early as the beginning of the 1920s it appeared that Canada could become the alternative overseas country of destination of Slovak emigrants. That alternative began to attract not only applicants for emigration passports in Slovakia but also Czecho-Slovak diplomats, and their representatives in Canada. In elucidating the development of the stated tendency, and its impact, we chose a series of diplomatic documents, representing the activities of the Czechoslovak consulate in Montreal in the years 1920-1938 as the basis of the following essay . The most significant are those documents which give special attention to the process of emigration. The subjects of the correspondence of the Czechoslovak Consulate in Montreal were the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Social Welfare in Prague, and the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization in Ottawa.3 The Goals of this essay are limited. I will focus only on those aspects of the topic falling into the competence, tasks and activities of the Czechoslovak representatives in Canada. In consequence of the pro-emigration attitudes of the Czechoslovak government, two basic trends will coincide: Canadian immigration policy, and the development of the Slovak community in Canada. Slovak nationals represented the vast majority of all the people involved in the process of Czechoslovak emigration, especialy in the second half of the 2 Message of the Austro-Hungarian Consulate General in Montreal, IO December, I 902 to Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna . Haus-Hof-und Staatsarchiv Wien, F 15, File 62, deliv . 27 December, 1902. 3 sources: Archives of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs , Prague (hereinafter only AFMZV), Political reports - Montreal (1920- I 938) (hereinafter PZ-M) , and Section II. National Archives, Prague (hereinafter SUA) , Fund of Ministry of Social Welfare (hereinafter MSP), Ministry of International Affairs - Old registers of 19191944 (hereinafter MV) . Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa (hereinafter PAC) , Immigration Branch (RG 76) , Vol. 198 Consul General of Czechoslovakia, Montreal , Quebec (1922-1940) (File 80671) , Vol. 251 Czechoslovakia, Passports (1924-1939) (File 183211), Vol. 616 Czechoslovaks (File 916207) . �SLOVAKIA 9 1920s .4 This fact accounted for the basis for the final ethnic identification of the newly-formed community in the Canadian environment, and, at the same time, determined the attitudes, and activities of the Czechoslovak Representatives in Canada. The first diplomatic contacts between Czechoslovakia and Canada were established on the consular level in Montreal in November of 1920. Bohuslav K. Ryznar was appointed the first Czechoslovak Consul. The Consulate was subordinated to the Czechoslovak Embassy in London, which corresponded with the arrangements of the relations between London and Ottawa. Despite the urgent request of B . K . Ryznar to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, the functional designation of the Consulate in Montreal was not changed in the years 1920-1922 . He stressed the fact that "Canada is absolutely a self-governing country, and does not pay any taxes , duties or other allowances to the British Empire to be used by the army or navy. There is no British soldier, and no British warship in the whole territory of the Dominion .. ."5 B. K. Ryznar submitted several arguments to support his request for changing the Montreal office's rank to Consulate General. He suggested that the Governor General of Canada, the federal government, and the ministries in Ottawa entered into contacts only with accredited diplomats on the level of Consuls General. 6 Therefore, lower consular rankings resulted in the absence of contacts and information which, to a great extent, limited the possibility of diplomatic activity. Despite the Consul's assurances that eventual installation of a Consul General would not increase the budget, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague strictly refused the request.7 4 comparing the number of emigrants from Czechoslovakia to Canada during the years 1922-1932 with the number of emigrants from Slovakia for the same period, we have found that 83% were Slovaks, and only 17% were Czechs . If we compared it with the number of inhabitants , the difference would be even more extreme . Statistical Handbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Vol. 4, Prague , 1932). 5AFMZV, PZ-M, year I 921, No. 19, 27 . 6. 1921. 6With the addition that of all European countries, only Czechoslovakia and Portugal had their Consulates in Canada. AFMZV , PZ-M, year 1921 , No . 9, 17 . 2. 1921 . 7AFMZV , PZ-M, year 1921, No. 10 (B . ve .). �SLOVAKIA In reply to the refusal , the Consul Ryznar again reminded the Ministry of the difficulties connected with the execution of his mission : "The situation looks as if the Prague centre has to seek information on the territory from Brittany to the foot of the Urals, and from Cadiz to Hamerfest, without any auxiliary offices and means" .8 These basic arguments - i. e. the inferior position of the representation , and the large size of Canada - were, for a certain period, the most effective tool in the hands of the Czechoslovak Consul in Canada to be used whenever he was obliged to take a stand , or to characterize some generally valid phenomenon. The taking of such an attitude was under those circumstances understandable. The presence and activity of the first Czechoslovak Consul in Canada represented but the first stage of the Czechoslovak diplomatic activity in Canada, aimed at the gradual acquisition and transmission to the Czechoslovak Government of essential information on anything he considered important, including the care for his own nationals, with special attention paid to immigrants coming to the country. Taking into account the goal of the present essay , it is important to stress first of all the Consul's investigation of the state of the regional community of his fellow-countrymen. This all formed a part of the information sent at the beginning of 1920 to the Political Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague. He characterized it as follows : 11 ••• a colony of Czechoslovak nationals representing over five thousand persons living in the whole Dominion , i. e. an area equal to the extent of the United States of North America ... , it is , however, insufficiently organized, and could not be used as a decisive element to support any political faction .. . Also the interest of the Czechoslovak farmers settled in the province of Saskatchewan are quite different from those of the miners in Nova Scotia, living apart a distance of about four thousand kilometers. It will be very difficult to unify them and to make them act together" _9 It is obvious that recognizing the small numbers in the community provoked both interested parties to consider the further possibi8AFMZV , PZ-M,year 1921 , No . 19, 27. 6. 1921. 9AFMZV , PZ-M , year 1921, No . 2, File No . 10/21. �SLOVAK.IA 11 lities of its growth. These appeared already in 1921 in connection with the increasing interest in emigration from Czechoslovakia, and also with the growing threat of the limitation of immigration by the US Government. Therefore, the future Canadian immigration policy , and especially its relation to Central Europe, became the primary area of interest of the Czechoslovak Consulate in Montreal. The formulation dealing with the diffusion and disorganization of the colony had the hidden agenda of the further activity of the Czechoslovak Consulate - i.e. co-operation with the community in order to unify it as far as its organization is concerned, and, in this way, to shape its future direction. A matter of question, however, was - by which means and in what manner should it be done? The organizational and political attitudes chosen by the consular authorities in relationship to the Slovak community is the principal topic of this essay. The diplomatic communiques themselves contained certain signals in answer to the question because there the community was referred to as a colony of Czechoslovak nationals, without more detailed ethnic identification. Despite the fact that the first impression acquired by the Czechoslovak side from the trends in Canadian immigration policy was not in any way favourable - "the Canadian authorities obstructed the immigrants" 10 - the Consul reported to Prague at the beginning of 1921 that the consular office succeeded in finding some indications of change. Public debates began to mould opinions that, with respect to the growing need for cheap labour, it was necessary to retain the principle of a priority in the selection of immigrants, i. e. not to prefer Britons as the representatives of the "mother country" of Canada, but to permit a bit of benevolence in the selection of the immigrants. 11 It was decided by the Consulate to seize the opportunity immediately. The federal Department of Immigration and Colonization in IOAFMZV, Sec . II ., Reg . 531, File No . 514, 4.2.1921. 11 AFMZV, PZ-M, year 1921, No . 19, an article published in The Montreal Daily Star, 4. 6. 1921 , "Repudiation , Annexation or Population". �12 SLOVAKIA Ottawal 2 was asked in November of 1922 to provide statistical data on the number of Czechoslovak immigrants in Canada, and, at the same time, to inform the Consulate about the willingness of the Canadian government to accept the immigration and settlement of Czechoslovak nationals in Canada,13 This initiative of the Czechoslovak Consul was premature. The department took a very reserved attitude. Its Secretary, F. C. Blair, provided only the requested statistical data, and completely omitted the problem connected with the possibility of immigration from Czechoslovakia. 14 It is, therefore, clear that it was only the Czechoslovak side which initiated and tried to recommend its own citizens as suitable potential immigrants to Canada. Despite the fact that this effort had been ignored, the Consul Ryznar was not discouraged. He went on searching for some sign of permissivness in the Canadian immigration policy towards the Continent and concretely to Central Europe. He tried to convince the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs and also the Ministry of Social Welfare, that he was doing his best to search for possibilities for Slovak applicants for emigration to countries other than to the USA. The Consul constantly tried to find some solution and began to consider the most attractive the idea of the Canadian immigration officials - i. e. to attract peasants, who, unlike the British colonists coming mainly from towns, and again settled in towns in Canada, would be able and willing to farm in Canada, to cutlivate the virgin land, and to revive the economy of the country.15 He saw such a solution in Central Europe. Ryznar had been so encouraged with the possibility of Slovak immigration that he decided at the beginning of 1923 to send another letter to F. C. Blair. He did so in order to get some information about the new policy of settlement being enforced by certain political 12The Department of Immigration and Colonization, an independent Department of the Federal Government, came into existence in 1917 through its separation from the Ministry of the Interior. 13 PAC, RG 76 , Vol. 198, File 80671 , 11. I 1. 1922. 14 PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 28 . 11.1922. 15 AFMZV, PZ-M, year 1922, No. 7, 4.12 . 1922. �SLOVAKIA 13 circles . His primary goal was, however, again to remind the Canadian government of Czechoslovakia, and its peasantry applying for immigration visas. He stressed in his letter that he had been urged by his own government, and primarily by the Ministry of Social Welfare, which was greatly interested in the possibility of immigration of its citizens to Canada. In another letter he told of the intention of the above-mentioned Ministry to subscribe to the most significant Canadian newspaper in order to receive information on the programme of the settlement of the country, and at the same time to find missing information for numerous applicants for emigration, i.e. the citizens of Czechoslovakia.16 His efforts to attract the attention of the highest authorities of the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization brought some results in the end. The Czechoslovak Ministry of Social Welfare was finally put on the list of the addresses of the immigration press being issued by the Department of Immigration and Colonization. 17 Above all, those institutions realised that Czechoslovakia was offering a certain part of its peasantry with the assurance that they certainly would be very suitable future colonists . The explanation of the following could be found in the activity of the Czechoslovak Consulate: when in the autumn of 1923 a great need for a cheap labor force emerged in Canada in connection with the logging of old wood in forests, and its preparation for further processing in sawmills, representing in itself very heavy manual work, the citizens of British or French origin did not want to do it. Therefore, the Department of Immigration and Colonization met the demands of some entrepreneurial circles and agreed with the submitted proposal to obtain suitable lumberjacks in Central Europe . The Minister of Immigration and Colonization personally suggested that sort of labour force be sought in Czechoslovakia. He explained it in the following manner: "based on the information received, applicants for emigration from Czechoslovakia are said to have some experience with agricultural work, and also the prerequisites for 16pAc, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671 , 27 . 2. 1923. 17PAC , RG 76 , Vol. 198 , File 80671 , 7. 3. 1923. �14 SLOVAKIA managing methods used in Canadian agriculture in order to become true Canadian farmers in the end" .1 8 The Consulate was very proud of the results of its diplomatic mission. It interpreted its work in the following, quite inadequate, manner: "The Canadian immigration authorities prefer Czechoslovak nationals because of their good physical condition, honesty and industriousness. They find them excellent colonists , and they would be very glad to receive them" _19 In fact the Canadian authorities permitted workers at the end of 1923 in Czechoslovakia for the Canadian lumbering industry only, with only some five hundred, 20 later increased to a thousand workers. 21 Most of those people were obtained in Slovakia as can be seen in the statistical data of the shipping companies concerning the transporting of over two thousand persons from Slovakia to Canada during that same year.22 Immediately after the arrival of the first post-war contingent of Slovak immigrants, they faced numerous problems . The consulate in February 1924 issued the following message: "Most of those (i. e. immigrants) devoted themselves in the winter season to cutting wood. The living standards in those camps, hundreds of miles from civilization, situated in vast forests , are hardly enviable .. . They work from early morning till late at night. They eat food prepared in a common kitchen and pay for it through the reduction of their salaries. The employer provides workers with clothes and other requisites paid for in the above-mentioned manner. It is obvious that our fellows , knowing neither the language nor the customs , are in an endless wilderness thrown at the mercy of dishonest officials, and some problems had to be solved through the consular authorities with the director or owner of the company in order to ensure their protection" .23 18 PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 3. 11. 1923. 19.-;;:,UA, , MSP, Reg. 3894, No. 2028 , 2. 6. 1923. 20PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616, File 916207, pt. 1, 18. 10. 1923. 21SUA, MSP, Reg. 3899, File 847, 20. 2. 1924. 22 Statistical Handbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Vol. 3, Prague, 1928). 23SUA, MSP, Reg. 3899, File 847 , 20.2. 1924. �SLOVAKIA 15 In addition to the difficult position of a part of the Slovak immigrants in lumber camps, there were also other problems . The Canadian authorities offered, in fact only seasonal work. That meant that in the spring of the year 1924, when the season had ended, the immigrants were on their own. A part of them started to drift to Montreal, and other cities, especially those near the American border. It was clear in the end that the first group of post-war immigrants had come to Canada with a clear goal: to get around the restrictive immigration measures imposed by the American authorities, and to get to the United States via Canada,24 where their relatives and friends were already settled. Numerous requests of the immigrants to solve this problem were a heavy burden for the Czechoslovak consular officials .25 All their efforts, however, were useless. At least a one-year stay of the immigrant in Canada was a necessary precondition to receiving a visa to the USA. The situation of the Slovak lumberjacks was very difficult to resolve. The Czechoslovak Consulate tried to avoid growing difficulties caused partly by its own activity. The Czechoslovak authorities were immediately asked to inform passport offices about issuing emigration visas to Canada only to those applicants willing to settle permanently in Canada. 26 In order to stop the growth of further complications, the Consulate again addressed the Department of Immigration and Colonization in Ottawa to provide it with the form, or the text of the agreement usually concluded between the employer and employee.27 The letter also expressed the Government's interest in receiving more detailed information about living conditions of the 1mmigrants in Canada. The highest Canadian authorities answered the letter immediately. They informed the Consulate that neither an agreement form, nor any legislative criteria, existed in Canada for concluding contracts. As far as the securing of certain living standards for immigrants was concerned, living conditions were different in various 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27PAC, RG 76 , Vol. 198 , File 80671 , 16. 4.1924 . �16 SLOVAKIA parts of the country and what was offered was generally considered sufficient. 28 It was too late and quite useless to ask those questions. We know that the Canadian government authorities cared for the problems of their own poorest workers even less than for the Czechoslovak ones, and there was no motivation to help the immigrants, coming without any financial means, and at their own risk. It follows from the above that, at the beginning of 1924, the activity of the Consulate had to orient itself to immigration from Czechoslovakia. It had to decide what to do with people coming from Slovakia with the intention of going to the United States. The chance to get there was only minimal. While the Czechoslovak Consulate was asking the questions, the Slovak League of America, as the cover organization of Slovak immigrants in the USA, took the initiative. Many Slovak immigrants in Canada turned to it with requests for help, because the CanadianSlovak community itself was small in number, lost over the huge territory, and therefore could not support them. In the summer of 1924, the Slovak League sent its delegate to Canada to investigate the situation. Upon his arrival the delegate confirmed the fact that the immigrants had come to Canada with the goal of getting into the USA. At the same time he informed the American-Slovak public that "the prisons on the frontier are full of our people caught when they tried to get to the USA illegally" .29 After receiving that information, the executive of the Slovak League decided to publish information about the hopeless situation of most of the Slovak immigrants in Canada in magazines in Slovakia. 30 Thus a short article published later in numerous Slovak magazines came into being. The text of it was more than meaningful: "The representative of the Slovak League of America who had been sent to Canada reported about a sad group there. Over 12,000 of them are living there and suffer awfully. They cannot find work, and when they get 28PAC , RG 76, Vol. 198 , File 80212 , 25 . 4. 1924. 29 Minutes of the session of the delegates of the Slovak organizations in America organized by the executive of the Slovak League , held in Pittsburgh, Pa ., 18 . December of 1924. In: Slovak v Amerike, 51, No. 37, 2. 3. 1925, p. 3. 3oIbid. �SLOVAKIA 17 it, they have to work in the Canadian virgin forests and are paid only a pittance. Their feet and hands are frost-bitten and some of them even went mad" _31 The disclosure of the irresponsibility of the Czechoslovak and Canadian authorities who had prepared and organized the immigration , upset not only American Slovaks and people in Slovakia, it also affected diplomatic relations between Czechoslovakia and Canada. The Department of Immigration and Colonization in Ottawa was probably informed directly through the British Ambassador in Prague . A letter was immediately sent to the Czechoslovak Consul in Montreal containing - a slightly paraphrased - "anxiety about the fact that the published information on the situation in Canada does not correspond with reality" _32 At the same time Ottawa asked the Consul to inform it about the Slovak League of America. They were mostly interested in whether the organization had a branch in Canada consisting of the proper members, and finally asked the Consul about the alleged problem, i. e. whether he was really informed about a greater number of Slovak immigrants in Canada who had not found work.33 In his answer B. K. Ryznar suggested to the Minister W. J. Egan that the Slovak League of America was a strong organization with half a million members. He assured him, however, that the organization had not had any branch in Canada. 34 As he had not ment to destroy his previous efforts in the field of creating premises for acceptance of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, he to a certain extent negated the arguments of the above-mentioned article, and assured Ottawa that there were not many unemployed Slovaks in Canada. In order not to minimize his duties and problems connected with the execution of his mission, Ryznar mentioned in his letter having heard only about the complaints of the immigrants concerning irregular practices applied by the employers and the labour 3 IE. g. Sloven ska domovina, 7, No. 6, 5. 2. I 925, p. 2. 32 As in Note 29 . 33PAC , RG 76, Vol. 616 , File 916207, pt . I, 10. 2. 1925 . 34Toe Slovak League of America had but one subsidiary in Canada, at Fort William , Ontario, founded in 1916, havi ng one hundred and fifty members. �18 SLOVAKIA agencies, and their attempts to misuse them. His attitude to the whole problem was contrary to the facts .35 The above-mentioned problem had been disturbing to both interested parties, and therefore the Department in Ottawa decided to inform the Czechoslovak authorities in order to elucidate somehow the problems of unemployment and basic social care provided to the Slovak immigrants. The information was , however, only general , covering but the job opportunities offered by Canada to the immigrants . Job opportunities were represented principally by seasonal work for agricultural workers. The number of needed seasonal workers was very difficult to determine ahead of time. The Department cleared up only the problem of the salaries offered. They assured the Czechoslovak authorities that the minimum monthly salary had to be 25 dollars , at the same time admitting even higher wages in case of additional seasonal work.36 But the Czechoslovak authorities wanted to make the problem clear. Therefore, they sent a delegate on a mission to Eastern Canada. He could only confirm the well-known facts about the difficulties of a part of the new Slovak immigrants. The most serious of them represented unemployment on the one hand, and unpaid salaries for work done on the other. The employers, for various reasons, often refused to pay the immigrants. They were sure that it was quite impossible to claim their salaries through the courts, as no service contracts had been concluded with the immigrants. 37 Together with the arrival of a greater number of immigrants, and especially when the lumbering season had ended, a tendency appeared during 1924 among groups of immigrants settling in Montreal to be near the residence of the Czechoslovak Consulate. Growing unemployment was the motive for their concentration. The officials saw the reasons for immigrants remaining in the big cities in their apparent aversion to working on farms, and in their false illusions of 35PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616, File 916207, pt . I, 14.2.1925. 36 PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616, File 916207, pt. I, 26.3.1925. 37SUA, MSP, Reg . 3803, No . 10219, 2.5. 1925. �SLOVAKIA 19 better salaries in cities. The immigrants hoped to find in Montreal an advanced industry, as was the case in cities of the United States .38 Social dislocation, therefore, became the decisive experience of the people. This motivated them during the summer 1924 to support each other through a co-operative association. 39 The forming of the ethnically homogenous Slovak group in Montreal, welded together by common problems, could not be ignored by the Czechoslovak Consul. He reported to Prague in detail about the two Slovaks in Montreal, who strove to establish a "Slovak Benefit Society". He added, however, that their task was very difficult, because of the small and ever-changing number of the Slovaks in Montreal, as most of them were looking for work, and their stay in the city was temporary .40 He also reported on the activity of the Slovak League of America, aimed at the organization of Slovak immigrants in Canada. The League sent its delegate to Montreal to investigate the situation. According to the Consul there was no response to the efforts of that Slovak-American organization in Canada. His opinion was, that the representative of the Slovak League "had not been accepted positively by his fellow-countrymen" _41 It is clear that the associative efforts of the Slovak immigrants were from the very beginning followed very carefully by the Consulate. The fact that the Slovak immigrants had decided to go their own way inspired the Consulate General to act in accordance with its original intention to organize the whole community in Canada, representing several thousand. At the beginning the Consulate tried to control the activity of the newly-formed association of Slovaks in Montreal. The Consul Ryznar, as soon as he arrived in 1920, decided to enter in a most decisive manner into the life of the community. But there was little hope of realizing that because of the originally small 38 Jbid. 39The association was founded by Gabriel Kurdel and F. Capkovic , at the end of 1924, in the first Slovak restaurant in Montreal , named "Tatra" . It was opened by F. Capkovic in the spring of I 924 . From the letter of G . Kurdel to the author dated 8. 12. 1974. (Personal archives of the author) . 40 AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1924, No. 8, 8. 9. 1924. 41 Ibid. �20 SLOVAKIA number of the Slovak immigrants scattered across the vast Canadian lanscape. That all prevented him from managing the situation. Therefore, in his diplomatic agenda, he prudently suggested that the Slovak inhabitants in Canada were not organized as they could not be organized. But, as it is known from the diplomatic agenda of the former Austro-Hungarian Consuls General in Canada, the truth was just opposite. The Slovaks in Canada did organize already at the tum of the 19th and 20th centuries but not in their own associations. They were establishing in Canada numerous branches of American-Slovak associations. This resulted in subordinating them to centres in the USA, thus connecting more tightly the Canadian Slovaks with American ones, rather than the Slovaks living across Canada. With respect to the above-mentioned facts, the Czechoslovak Consul did not consider uniting the Canadian-Slovak community possible. This made him believe in the end that the Slovaks in Canada were not organized at all. The alternative of establishing new associations after World War I was impossible. In 1922 the Consul expressed his attitude in the following manner: "there are not suitable conditions here for establishing Czechoslovak associations" .42 It follows that he really intended to establish not only new associations, but also to make those already existing acquire the status of Czechoslovak ones, i. e. to conform to the Czechoslovak stateforming conception, and to manifest it in concrete organizational forms of their foreign enclave. When it was necessary to explain the reasons preventing him from realizing his plans, the Consul stressed the fact that there was a conflict between his intentions and the Slovak attitude represented by the strong pro-Hungarian orientation of the greatest concentration of the pre-war Slovak immigrants in Fort William, Ontario.43 About six hundred to one thousand and two hundred Slovaks were living there. The pro-Hungarian tendencies of that nationally and organizationally unified group of the Slovak immigrants coming mostly from 4 2SuA . MSP, Reg . 3894, No . 2313, 26. 6. 1922. 43 AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1922, File 36 d, 25.4. 1922. �SLOVAKIA 21 the Orava region - which was in the period before the World War I known as an area nearly untouched by the process of magyarization - "were explained" very simply: those Slovaks had attended Hungarian schools and immigrated to Canada from Hungarian lands. We must add, however, that he, himself, doubted his statements about the pro-Hungarian manifestations of the Fort William Slovaks with the confession about getting his information "second hand" . Later on, he made use of his statements about magyarized Slovaks as a serious obstacle to the enforcement of the Czechoslovak philosophy. He said that the pro-Hungarian tendencies were permanently supported both by former Austro-Hungarian and new Hungarian Consuls in Canada during his journeys across Canada where the Hungarians had lived together with the Slovaks.44 The Czechoslovak Consul made use of that fact. He remarked that he himself as a Consul had not been able to travel along the consular "region" by permission of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs even after his three years' stay in Canada.45 In such a way he brought forward both the "principal", and other, i.e. "technical" cause of his temporary failure in relation to the Slovak community in Canada. We must say, however, that arguments such as the long distances between Montreal and individual Slovak settlements, the absence of contact with them, or surviving pro-Hungarian emotions among regional inhabitants, as well as the existence of no chance to change it, also survived. They could never be used to characterize the newly-forming associations of Slovak immigrants. The consul chose quite a different explanation. As he himself noted in the consular report, he had evaluated the activity of "the Czechoslovak citizens coming from Slovakia". In relationship to the existing foreign-political conception of the unitary Czechoslovak state, and the officialy-accepted theory of the Czechoslovak nation as well, he started to characterize the new associative tendencies of Montreal's Slovaks as the activation of anti-Czech 44 AFMZ, PZ-M , year 1924, No . 6. 11. 11. 1924. 4SAFMZ, PZ-M , year 1923, No. 13. 13 . 12. 1923 . �22 SLOVAKIA ideas, and the spreading of treasonous ideas brought apparently by Slovak immigrants and spread among fellow-countrymen. 46 Characterization of the associative tendencies of the Slovak immigrants in Montreal as anti-Czech, or even treasonous, was naive , and in the end turned against the Consulate itself. The Consulate had immediately to respond, and to eliminate the manifestations of the Slovak separatists represented, and replace them with the associative efforts of helpless immigrants. The Consul was supposed to initiate an unifying processes and make the Slovak immigrants accept their organization with those Czech immigrants who had settled in Montreal long before. It was, however, very difficult to find a proper way to solve the problem. There were only a few Czech immigrants living in Montreal. 47 They were mostly older inhabitants, and besides, they were on a higher social level, with other interests and needs. The Slovaks, meanwhile, were not in the least interested in any sort of social activity, or even "making policy". Therefore even the old traditional and experienced way of ideologically influencing the community, as it was suggested by the Czechoslovak authorities - i. e. to issue a newspaper - was considered inappropriate, and even useless. Migrating Slovaks searching all the time for jobs would not accept any newspaper _48 The following "solution" proved the most suitable one: the Canadian public was informed through an article published in The Montreal Daily Star in December of 1924 about the organization of "the Czechoslovak citizens in order to establish an independent association of Czechoslovak immigrants" .49 When, at the beginning of 1925, B. K. Ryznar finished his diplomatic mission to Canada (from January 1923 he was Consul General) the Montreal Slovak community was already officialy represented by the Czechoslovak 46 AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1924, No. 8. 8.9.1924. 47 Before World War I, thirteen Czech families and one Slovak family lived in Montreal. In: Rybnfcek, A.: "Vzpomfnky starousadlfka." I:udove zvesti, 26, No. 40 , I 9. 10. 1961, p. 14. 48 AFMZ, PZ-M , year 1924, No . 12. 11. 11 . 1924. 4 9"Society formed to aid Czechs . New body will assist immigrants to prosper here". The Montreal Daily Star, 16. 12. 1924 . PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616 , File 916207, pt. I . �SLOVAKIA 23 Benefit Society. An internal conflict existed, however, concerning its name, emerging from time to time with greater or less intensity ,50 as the roots of a sort of natural alliance were missing.51 The beginning of 1925, connected with the end of B. K. Ryznar's diplomatic mission, and the coming of the new Consul General F. V. Kveton, represented a break in the immigration policy of Canada. Thanks to favourable economic-political decisions of the Canadian Government to end the policy of favouring immigrants from Great Britain, psychologically and physically not sufficiently prepared to do hard agricultural work in the Canadian wilderness, resulted in the recruitment of immigrants - mainly peasants - from the Central European region. It was the poor state of the Canadian economy at the beginning of 1925 as mentioned by the federal Parliament of Canada,52 which resulted in the above-mentioned changes in immigration policy. That new alternative was, despite the poor economic situation of Canada, evaluated by the Czechoslovak authorities with great satisfaction. It seemed that the arrival of immigrants would be greatly simplified for the immigrants comming from some "selected European countries, including the Czechoslovak Republic" .53 New workers were expected to revive the Canadian economy. They, however, misunderstood each other. The Canadian politicians saw the solution in further cultivation of land and farms left by the British colonists , thus solving the urgent need for agricultural workers. In fact, most of the applicants for emigration from the 50From a letter of G. Kurdel to the author dated 8. 12. 1974. 51 Canadian immigration policy allowed from Czechoslovakia only agricultural workers. Therefore, the intelligentsia had no place among immigrants (with some few exceptions). It meant that the Slovak community had no natural leaders. Some did develop. Gabriel Kurdel was the most significant one. In connection with the newlyfounded association in Montreal, G. Kurdel in his memoires said that he had informed the new Consul General Kv~ton about existing conflicts in the association. The Consul agreed with the change of the name of the association to a Slovak one. But, according to his memoirs, when he submitted his proposal to the leaders of the association, represented by Czech fellow-countrymen, they commented on it as follows: "It is nonsense". In: Memoirs of G. Kurdel. Phone record from 26. 10. 1977. No. SLK 3023. Archives of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Toronto. 52AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1925, No. 5. 7.2.1925. • 53~.:.UA, , MSP, Reg. 3894, File 847, 20. 2. 1924. �24 SLOVAKIA Central European region, including Slovakia, were poor people unable to participate in the Canadian programme of immigration of farming families with some capital. They could only saturate the secondary needs of the workforces , i.e. the agricultural workers on farms. The second alternative attracted primarily those applicants for emigration from Slovakia who were rejected by the United States. The number of those interested was very large. According to officials of the Ministry of Social Welfare in Prague, it was nearly impossible to control the situation. The quota permitted annualy by the Canadian side could not be exceeded. The Canadians succeeded in keeping it low .54 In this way the number of Slovaks in Canada was by the end of the year 1930 increased to some 30 ,000 - 40,000 persons. 55 Czechoslobvak representatives in Montreal protested by means of a Memorandum to Minister Egan aginst the recruitment of workers without appropriate legislative requisites. The Consul stressed in the Memorandum that, according to Czechoslovak emigration law, each of the emigrants should, before their departure , be furnished with a -valid contract with the name of the employer, the location , sort of work, the duration of the employment, as well as the offered wage. 56 In response to the Memorandum, the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization considered it its duty to inform the Ministry of Social Welfare in Prague only of the fact that an immigrant - agricultural worker - was to be paid 25 dollars per month with board and lodging.57 Further disputes and legally-unsolved problems were on both sides consulted usually in the following manner: in further similar inter-governmental agreements concerning the emigration and immi- 54Approximately 6,000 to 7,000 persons. 55 Archives of the President's Office, D. 12331/38. Secret message of CS . Consul General dr. F. Pavl~sek to Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague about the situation among Slovaks in Canada, dated 17. 3. 1937. In: Bielik, F.: Sloven ske vys(ahovaleccvo. Dokumency III. Martin, MS 1976, doc. No. 375 . 56PAC, RG. 76, Vol. 616, File 916207 , pt. 1, 23 . 5. 1925 . 57 PAC, RG. 76, Vol. 616, File 916207 , pt. 1, 23 . 5. 1925 . �SLOVAKIA 25 gration , proper attention should be paid to the solution of the problem of concrete labour contracts.58 From the above-mentioned it follows that the period of activity of Consul General F. V. Kveton (during the years 1925-1929) reflected a considerable increase in the community, not only in Montreal or Toronto, but also in other Canadian regions. This was connected with new organizations of the immigration process. The immigrants were placed primarily on the Praires of Canada, with the organizational centre located in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Consul General F. V. Kveton visited that region in 1926. On his journey across Canada he discovered an increase in Slovak colonists despite the fact that he had intended to investigate mainly the Czech settlements. He came to the conclusion that "the Czechoslovak colony" in Canada was in fact the Slovak community. He stressed that fact in his report . Fort William was, according to him , the most significant and stable Slovak city. He estimated that some 1,100 to 1,200 Slovak souls were concentrated there with their own Catholic parish, and a nice church. He said that the Slovaks were working mainly in the port, loading and unloading the ships transporting goods across Lake Ontario, i. e. the inland Canadian "sea". In order to verify known opinions of his diplomatic predecessor concerning the pro-Hungarian orientation of Fort William Slovaks, he asked not only the old inhabitants , but post-war ones too. He came to the following conclusion: the community as a whole takes an autonomous attitude towards the solution of the problem of the constitutional position of Slovakia within the Czechoslovak Republic. The city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, as the destination place of his journey, was characterized as the biggest Czech settlement in Canada, with some four hundred souls, represented primarily by tailors and shoemakers. The Consul General stressed , however, the other function of Winnipeg. It was used as the "winter station" to retire in after the agricultural season on farms was over. His own opinions shifted into a different position because of having obtained new facts about the community. The Consul started 58s(JA, MV, Reg. 1015, No. 6980/1925. �26 SLOVAKIA to respond to the demands of older emigrants concerning education and national culture. He explained his attempt to the Czechoslovak authorities by the need to preserve national consciousness. He asked for the delivery of Slovak books for Montreal and Fort William, and above all, for a Slovak teacher for approximately two hundred school-aged children in Fort William.59 Thanks to the new consular representative, the Czechoslovak authorities were in 1926 forced to return to the problem of the social position of the Slovak immigrants. At first they started to investigate the chances of immigrants to obtain farms. Ottawa was asked questions about the place to obtain certain capital loans if an immigrant intended to do private farming.6() The federal Ministry did not intend to answer the question. The Consul was asked to address the responsible institutions, and first of all the Secretary of the Association of Canadian Bankers 61 who had offered him information on the existence of credit permitted by the Government in 1926 to be used exclusively for the purchase of agricultural land, the construction of houses, and affiliated buildings, for the purchase of cattle, irrigation systems, construction, etc.62 Despite a positive answer, no references were found in the archives referring to the use of that aid by Slovak immigrants. Because of those circumstances, the arrival of the two delegates from Czechoslovakia was a matter of question. They were invited by the Canadian Pacific Railway to investigate local conditions for settlement of independent families with some capital. Research has shown that there were only a few solvent families leaving Slovakia for Canada. Therefore, the information offered by the host company was quite useless for ordinary Slovak immigrants.63 Another delegate of the Ministry of Social Welfare offered to the interested Ministries information about his journey to Canada in the spring 1927 . He considered the position of Slovak agricultural workers as gene59S(JA, MSP, Reg. 3894, No. 6588. 6()PAC, RG . 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 10. 6. 1926. 61PAC, RG . 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, I 7. 6. 1926. 62SCJA, MSP, Reg . 3965, 2782/26. 63SCJA, MV, Reg . 1015, 498/1927. �SLOVAKIA 27 rally bad. He presented the following facts: they were working without any contract between them and their employers, and thrown on the mercy of the farmers. Above all, they were working without any health or accident insurance. No such insurance existed in Canada. Only Railways and larger industries had their own insurance systems. The afflicted immigrant could be protected only through a benefit society of fellow-countrymen, or by Canadian charity institutions. 64 When the Consulate had intervened in the Canadian Department it was offered a long list of the agencies and associations entitled to protecting the interests of immigrants in Canada.65 During the following year quite different opinions appeared among fellow-countrymen, evaluating the situation of Slovak immigrants. Some of them had strongly criticized their position because they had to be regularly aided through the Slovak League of America. Others were satisfied, pointing to those individuals living in Canada for a long time who became rich. The most objective evaluation, however, resulted from the latest information gathered during the years 1924-1927. It was as follows: "Fellow-countrymen are not for the time being doing well" _66 Evidence about it was provided by the Czechoslovak Consulate in Canada in a document published in Slovak newspapers. The title of the mentioned article was "Information for Those Emigrating to Canada" .67 It analysed the social conditions of Slovak immigrants in Canada, considered them to be insufficient, thus preventing others from making the decision to leave for Canada to work. The intention to get through Canada to the USA was considered nonsense. There were many profiteers promising to get people secretly over the borders to the USA, extorting their last money. The Consulate warned people because the promises had been false. Those profiteers were interested only in their hard-earned money. 64 SUA, MV, Reg . 1015, No . 27464/1927, 11.4. 1927. 65 S0A, MSP, Reg . 3965 , File 6849/1927, 28. 12. 1927. 66 Kopac, A.: "Ako sa zije na~fm v Kanade?", I:udova politika, 3, 1927, p. 3. 67 Narodnie noviny, 58., No . 50, 29. 4. 1927 , p. 3. No . 207, 15. 9. �28 SLOVAKIA Despite those facts, the Consul Kveton sent in the summer of 1928 an optimistic report to Prague about enough job opportunities, and that there was no unemployment among the immigrants. 68 He was, however, undoubtly conscious of the fact that critical situations were emerging after seasonal work was over, i.e. during the longlasting winter. It was almost the same by the end of the year 1928 . The unemployed started, as usual, to concentrate in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and other cities. That concentration resulted in great associative activity. Consular reports paid special attention primarily to the activity of the Slovak League of America, which had succeeded in establishing its subsidiaries in Canada in the years 1927 and 1928 (in Toronto and Montreal, and a year before also in Winnipeg). For most Slovak immigrants in Canada membership in those organizations was quite necessary, because they had been aiding them in case of illnesses, or accidents. However, the activity of the Slovak League did not correspond with the above-mentioned intentions of the Czechoslovak Consulate. The Committee for Emigration was immediately addressed with urgent demands for the Government to provide some financial aid to the co-operative association in Montreal to cover its activities. 69 Such procedures did not surprise anybody. Once again the original arguments were used about the Slovaks looking for locations with older settlements of their fellow-countrymen, and gradually losing their interest in the idea of the so-called Czechoslovak nationality _?O That private opinion of the informer was in strong contradiction with the tendencies of the Slovak League being known with its identification with the Slovak autonomy programme during the inter-war years. The League was popular among the immigrants, especially for its co-operative function. The situation, however, got worse as the years went on. Unemployment was increasing, and as a result, a new phenomenon ap68S(JA , MSP, Reg. 3965, 30.11.1928 . 69S(JA, MSP, Reg . 3966, No . 21443, 28 .6.1928 . 7oIbid. �SLOVAKIA 29 peared in the diplomatic agenda as early as the winter of 1929-1930 . It concerned the deportation of Czechoslovak nationals from Canada. According to existing Canadian law a man who, during the first five years of his arrival in Canada applied for, or was provided with some public finacial aid, was considered an undesirable person, not able to conform to Canadian conditions. Such a person was to be deported to his mother country .7 1 The situation between the two countries worsened. There were frequent controversies between them. Many of the persons to be deported by the Canadians were ill or even incapacitated, either physically or psychically, and there were also criminals among them. Finally, the Czechoslovak authorities refused to accept those individuals who had not had, after a ten years' stay in Canada, re-established their Czechoslovak citizenship, or had not requested an extension of the validity of the right of domicle abroad. It is very difficult to find an accurate count of such persons,72 but they were often mentioned in diplomatic reports. It is obvious that this situation resulted from the economic crisis which broke out in 1929. The Depression affected the immigrants as never before. Besides increasing unemployment, the crisis meant also a significant reduction of the immigration quota for Czechoslovakia to two thousand people a year. This uncompromising procedure of the immigration authorities irritated the Czechoslovak Consulate so much that the Consul addressed Ottawa with an open protest. It follows from his report, sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, that he was discussing the problem with Deputy Minister Egan in Ottawa. The Consul considered the quota unfair, and even offensive, for Czechoslovakia. The reaction of the Canadian Minister to that invective was related the Czechoslovak Minister of Foreign Affairs as follows: the Deputy Minister said that "if only the immigrants from Bohemia and Moravia were concerned, 71SuA , MSP, Reg. 4029, No. 4310-36. 72 PAC, RG 76 , Vol. 251 , File 183211. �30 SLOVAKIA the whole situation would have been quite different, but there was only a minimum percentage of immigrants coming those regions" .73 At the beginning of 1930 K. Kveton was ending his diplomatic mission in Montreal , and was replaced by the new Consul-General, K. Moser. The attitude of the Canadian public and the immigration authorities as well, towards the immigration policy became even more hostile . Finally, in August of 1930 immigration from Czechoslovakia was halted. Public opinion accused the Government of having caused both the crisis, and the unemployment, too, due to its rather "benevolent" immigration policy, mainly in the second half of the 1920s. According to this opinion, the labour market was saturated, resulting in unexpected problems. No improvement in the field of employment occured even after spring work had started. The situation was the same even during the harvest. Farmers were so cutting back on wages that it became quite unprofitable to travel for work to the prairie provincies. Therefore the new Consul Moser reported to Prague in June of 1930 that: "don't let the emigrants come here under these circumstances, as they would only have travel expenses and _a temporary stay here" .74 Thus the hot issue of a part of the diplomatic agenda, represented by the immigration policy, disappeared from it at the beginning of the 1930s. A natural consequence of that was only sporadic contacts between the Czechoslovak Consulate and the Federal Department for Immigration and Colonization. Due to the restriction of immigration, the Federal Department had given up its original position, and importance as well, and beginning with the year 1936 started to function as the Immigration Branch of the Federal Department of Mines and Resources. Unemployment and deportations represented the most serious problem of the period of the economic crisis. Therefo- 73 SUA, MSP, Reg. 3990, 6. 2. 1929. It is necessary to add that the Canadian Government limited or stopped immigration from the entire continent of Europe, of course except for families with some capital, or wives and children of those already settled in Canada, In: an article "Immigration from Europe is Stopped" . The Gazette, Montreal, 16. 8. 1930. 74<'1, .:>UA, MSP, Reg . 3990, No. 6921, 3. 6. 1930. �SLOVAKIA 31 re, the Czechoslovak Consulate paid special attention to the internal i.e. social, associative, and political life of the Slovak community. When in 1930 the Director of the Czechoslovak Institute of Foreign Affairs in Prague V. Tlapak went on a study-tour to Canada, he could only confirm the well-known facts about numerous unemployed immigrants who would like to return to their native land, if only they could. Many of them did not earn enough money to pay the travel expences for the journey back home . He found many examples of those who worked only to cover their daily food costs.7 5 The first to sense the impact of the Depression were farm workers . Having come to Canada in the second half of the 1920s, these people were not accepted in Canada with special favour. The crisis made their position quite unbearable. The Federal Government, trying to solve the situation as best as it would, created a programme of emergency works. Nearly every province "drew" the unemployed from the cities and organized in the country so-called labour camps. Especially the young unemployed did such beneficial work as reconstruction of roads, cultivation of natural parks, etc. No Slovaks took part in it, according to diplomatic reports. In January of 1932 Consul Moser reported to Prague that unemployment was not decreasing at all, but on the contrary, it was gradually increasing. 76 Not only the immigamts who were agricultural workers had problems. Even some better-situated individuals had problems. In spite of the fact that some of the immigrants had succeded in getting land, they had to leave the farms as they were not able to pay off the mortgage.77 Deportations became the accompanying phenomenon of unemployment. Canada resorted to that unpleasant measure in order to shake off the burden of the persons who were not able to care for themselves.7 8 There were many Slovak immigrants among them. Consul General Moser, in his effort to somehow protect the interests 75 SDA, MSP , Reg . 4019, No . 3751/30, 29.11.1930. 76AFMzv, PZ-M, year 1932, No. 3, 27 .. 1. 1932. 77 SUA, MSP , Reg . 3990, No. 4105 - 32. 78 vystehovalecky zpravodaj Ministerstva socialnf pece , Vol. 2, 20. 5. 1932 , p. 19 . �32 SLOVAKIA of the immigrants, sent a complaint to Ottawa in August of 1932, stressing the fact that Canada was deporting immigrants too late, because most of them were in such a bad situation that they could not wait the two-to-three months for the departure. Therefore, he asked the Department to deport them as early as possible.79 The Department in Ottawa answered that they had a huge list of those waiting for deportation, and in any case could not make the deportation process quicker, especially due to the limited capacity of the ships departing from Montreal. 80 Even in January 1934 the consular materials contained information about unemployed immigrants who, for three years, had hopelessly waited for deportation. Therefore, some of them illegaly left for the USA, only to be caught, and in such way to be more quickly deported (after a two-to-three months stay in prison) to Czechoslovakia.81 By the end of 1935 the Consul suggested that things were going better and visits to the Consulate were rare. At the same time he reported that numerous immigrants had succeded in finding some work in construction, mines and forests, while others had returned to Czechosloyakia. 82 It does not mean, however, that he automatically considered an improvement in the field of employment a symptom of the restoration of the immigration process, or the release of the restrictions imposed on immigration policy. The only exception was that concerning the possibility of immigration of some peasant families with a capital of $1,000 - $2,000. Even under those circumstances the Consul considered the immigration of well-off individuals more than disputable. He reasoned in the following way: If the applicant for immigration to Canada sells in Czechoslovakia his whole property to get the necessary financial means, it will be enough only to invest in uncultivated land. Very hard work will follow the purchase, with the results coming in most cases too late. 79PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, I. 8. 1932. 80PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 20. 8.1932. 8lx, .:>UA, MSP, Reg. 4029, 12. I. 1934. 82X' .:>UA, MSP, Reg. 4029, 27.1.1936. �SLOVAKIA 33 This will make the immigrant fail , which often will result in his deportation. 83 It has been stated already that no other event influenced the Slovak community so much as the Depression. The immigration process of the second half of the 1920s was practically halted and the number of immigrants in the community was relatively stabilized (representing some 30,000 Slovaks, and about 1,000 Czechs). During the period preceding the crisis , the community was insufficiently organized. It was lacking in leaders, preachers, teachers, and schools. During the crisis the community was more active, and even more radical. Some new associations were founded. Ethnic consciousness was also activated. This resulted in a rapid decrease in their interest and willingness to co-operate in so-called Czechoslovak: associations. The activity of the benefit society in Montreal was nearly halted. 84 The Consulate notified Prague of the revival of autonomist tendencies, illustrating it with the fact that the First Slovak Benefit Society came into existence in Western Canada. More seriously, he considered the fact that there were being established numerous subsidiaries of the American-Slovak: associations with centers situated in the USA. He noticed, however, the great disappointment among the Canadian members because their funds had been delivered to the USA, thus not sufficiently meeting their needs. Finally, some of the members met in Winnipeg, Manitoba to reach a decision about leaving the American-Slovak: Association in order to found their own Canadian-Slovak: one. 85 The newly established Canadian Slovak League, together with the newspaper Slovak v Kanade, were by Consul Moser characterized as the principal representatives of the autonomist flow in the Slovak community, with the addition, that the same opinion was shared by the First Catholic Slovak Union in Canada. When F. Pavlasek took up his consular mission in Canada, he came to the conclusion that Slovaks were against the Czechs because 83SDA , MSP, Reg. 4029, 19. 8.1936. 84AFMZV, Section II., Reg . 492, No . 6787, I. 10. 1932. 85 SDA, MSP , Reg . 4029 . Periodical Report of the Immigration Branch , IV . quart. 1932. �34 SLOVAKIA of their motto "Slovakia for the Slovaks" .86 According to the new Consul General, the immigrants transfered from Slovakia to Canada many of Andrej Hlinka's ideas. Their attitudes were enforced both due to the American Slovak influences, and the agitation about the Pittsburgh Agreement. The fact that the Slovaks represented the poorest layers of the inhabitants of Canada, and belonged often to the unemployed, resulted in some being attracted to Marxism. The Consul discovered that in Montreal some four hundred persons were concentrating around the Slovak newspaper Robotnfcke slovo. The Consul Pavlasek characterized the group as quite compatible and devoted to their common ideal. At the same time he stressed the fact that the magazine was doing well and had a lot of symphatizers, in spite of the fact that many of them were not organized in the Association at all .87 Finally, in 1934 he characterized the community as politically split between the autonomists, autonomist communists, and those loyal to democratic Czechoslovakia. He considered it the result of the differentiation process which occured during the Depression. The autonomist communists were originally Czechoslovaks but had split in 1936 into Czechs and Slovaks. He tried to contact the different groups . "At first I tried to attract the conservative Catholic associations (the parish of Saints Cyril and Methodius) but without any success ... When I saw that the door for my activity among autonomists was shut for a certain period, I turned to less radical workers in order to build up co-operation between them and a middle democratic group. The result, however, was much the same ... 11 88 The Consul came to the conclusion that comunists triumphed during the crisis because they had exploited unemployment for establishing new associations. Among them were Czechoslovak Worker Education Clubs, the Slovak Workmen's Association, The International Workmen's Association, etc. They had numerous sym86AFMZV, Section II ., Reg. 531, 18.7.1934. 87 Ibid. 88 As in Note 55. �SLOVAKIA 35 pathizers among the common people. They improved the financial state of their associations, and a quality newspaper as well. In other words, they were very succesfuI. 89 The Consul Pavlasek stressed the intensity of communist propaganda among their fellow-countrymen in 1936. At the same time he noticed the fact that the propaganda could not be discounted, and in spite of the fact that it had been the result of a long-term Depression, it was spreading very rapidly, and fellow-countrymen were accepting it.90 Already in 1937 the Consul Pavlasek.was very pessimistic: "The position of this office is extremely difficult, because we have nobody to lean on. There are only a few Czechs here, and they are mostly assimilated, and a majority of them have withdrawn from public life due to permanent attacks". The fact that the Slovak community rejected Czechoslovakism nearly 'en bloc', he characterized as follows: "loyal Czechoslovak thinking, ever respecting the democracy and the Czechoslovak national unity, represents in some colonies but a minority", at the same time he added that the Czechs had arrived in Canada already before World War I, and they had been living there for two or three generations. They had been greatly assimililated, because the second generation had been educated in the Canadian manner. Finally, he expressed his "sad" conclusion that he himself, as well as the Consulate, were permanently attacked by the autonomists, and communists as well. It meant that the Consulate was to a great extent isolated from the Slovak community as a whole, in spite of the latter's internal ideological differentiation. In other words, the Consulate's mission was unsuccesful - it failed completely to unify the Czecho-Slovak nationals in Canada. Therefore, its arguments, formulated in 1937, suggesting that "everything must be done to keep the consciousness of Czechoslovak national unity in spite of the protests and demonstrations of the autonomist circles", were in vain.9 1 89SuA , MSP , Reg. 4029 , 25 . 10. 1935 . 90SuA, MSP, Reg . 4029 , 13.5 . 1937 . 91 As in note 88. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1991-92, Vol. 35 Description An account of the resource Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Slovak League of America Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available 1991-92 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 7 Slovak Emigrants in Canada as Reflected in Diplomatic Documents (1920 - 1938) ELENA JAKESOVA Slovak emigration to Canada - not taking into account the European continental migration - can be considered one of the strongest and most significant of all of the Slovak migrations during the inter-war period. Great numbers of Slovaks moved to Canada across the Antlantic to earn some money, especially in the second half of the 1920s. 1 The inter-war years, however, represented only its second stage, because Slovaks had started to leave for the United States as early as the 1870s. The 1920s witnessed only a change in destination. The United States of America, which in 1920 contained about 620,000 Slovaks, halted that mass emigration. When the continuity of the traditional emigration had been broken partly in the year 1921, and definitely in the year 1924, the search for an alternative solution of the problem did not take long. The immigrants saw in Canada's common frontier with the United States the possibility of emigration south in the future. Therefore, Canada became in the second half of the twenties "the second chance", a kind of alternative destination of the Slovak emigrants in spite of the fact that in comparison with the USA there 1 Shipping companies transported from Slovakia to Canada in 1922 110 persons, in 1923 2029 , in 1924 2832, in 1925 2134 , in 1926 6066 , in 1927 6301 , in 1928 8184 , in 1929 4116 , in 1930 3586, in 1931 730, in 1932 522, in 1933 673 , in 1934 851, in 1935 742 , in 1936 716. Statistical Handbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Vol. 4, Prague, 1932) and in Statistical Yearbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Prague 1934 , 1935, 1936, 1937) . 8 SLOVAKIA were not many reasons to look for opportunities for employment on its territory. In the period up to World War I, Canada attracted only about 5,000 Slovaks. 2 As early as the beginning of the 1920s it appeared that Canada could become the alternative overseas country of destination of Slovak emigrants. That alternative began to attract not only applicants for emigration passports in Slovakia but also Czecho-Slovak diplomats, and their representatives in Canada. In elucidating the development of the stated tendency, and its impact, we chose a series of diplomatic documents, representing the activities of the Czechoslovak consulate in Montreal in the years 1920-1938 as the basis of the following essay . The most significant are those documents which give special attention to the process of emigration. The subjects of the correspondence of the Czechoslovak Consulate in Montreal were the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Social Welfare in Prague, and the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization in Ottawa.3 The Goals of this essay are limited. I will focus only on those aspects of the topic falling into the competence, tasks and activities of the Czechoslovak representatives in Canada. In consequence of the pro-emigration attitudes of the Czechoslovak government, two basic trends will coincide: Canadian immigration policy, and the development of the Slovak community in Canada. Slovak nationals represented the vast majority of all the people involved in the process of Czechoslovak emigration, especialy in the second half of the 2 Message of the Austro-Hungarian Consulate General in Montreal, IO December, I 902 to Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna . Haus-Hof-und Staatsarchiv Wien, F 15, File 62, deliv . 27 December, 1902. 3 sources: Archives of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs , Prague (hereinafter only AFMZV), Political reports - Montreal (1920- I 938) (hereinafter PZ-M) , and Section II. National Archives, Prague (hereinafter SUA) , Fund of Ministry of Social Welfare (hereinafter MSP), Ministry of International Affairs - Old registers of 19191944 (hereinafter MV) . Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa (hereinafter PAC) , Immigration Branch (RG 76) , Vol. 198 Consul General of Czechoslovakia, Montreal , Quebec (1922-1940) (File 80671) , Vol. 251 Czechoslovakia, Passports (1924-1939) (File 183211), Vol. 616 Czechoslovaks (File 916207) . SLOVAKIA 9 1920s .4 This fact accounted for the basis for the final ethnic identification of the newly-formed community in the Canadian environment, and, at the same time, determined the attitudes, and activities of the Czechoslovak Representatives in Canada. The first diplomatic contacts between Czechoslovakia and Canada were established on the consular level in Montreal in November of 1920. Bohuslav K. Ryznar was appointed the first Czechoslovak Consul. The Consulate was subordinated to the Czechoslovak Embassy in London, which corresponded with the arrangements of the relations between London and Ottawa. Despite the urgent request of B . K . Ryznar to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, the functional designation of the Consulate in Montreal was not changed in the years 1920-1922 . He stressed the fact that "Canada is absolutely a self-governing country, and does not pay any taxes , duties or other allowances to the British Empire to be used by the army or navy. There is no British soldier, and no British warship in the whole territory of the Dominion .. ."5 B. K. Ryznar submitted several arguments to support his request for changing the Montreal office's rank to Consulate General. He suggested that the Governor General of Canada, the federal government, and the ministries in Ottawa entered into contacts only with accredited diplomats on the level of Consuls General. 6 Therefore, lower consular rankings resulted in the absence of contacts and information which, to a great extent, limited the possibility of diplomatic activity. Despite the Consul's assurances that eventual installation of a Consul General would not increase the budget, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague strictly refused the request.7 4 comparing the number of emigrants from Czechoslovakia to Canada during the years 1922-1932 with the number of emigrants from Slovakia for the same period, we have found that 83% were Slovaks, and only 17% were Czechs . If we compared it with the number of inhabitants , the difference would be even more extreme . Statistical Handbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Vol. 4, Prague , 1932). 5AFMZV, PZ-M, year I 921, No. 19, 27 . 6. 1921. 6With the addition that of all European countries, only Czechoslovakia and Portugal had their Consulates in Canada. AFMZV , PZ-M, year 1921 , No . 9, 17 . 2. 1921 . 7AFMZV , PZ-M, year 1921, No. 10 (B . ve .). SLOVAKIA In reply to the refusal , the Consul Ryznar again reminded the Ministry of the difficulties connected with the execution of his mission : "The situation looks as if the Prague centre has to seek information on the territory from Brittany to the foot of the Urals, and from Cadiz to Hamerfest, without any auxiliary offices and means" .8 These basic arguments - i. e. the inferior position of the representation , and the large size of Canada - were, for a certain period, the most effective tool in the hands of the Czechoslovak Consul in Canada to be used whenever he was obliged to take a stand , or to characterize some generally valid phenomenon. The taking of such an attitude was under those circumstances understandable. The presence and activity of the first Czechoslovak Consul in Canada represented but the first stage of the Czechoslovak diplomatic activity in Canada, aimed at the gradual acquisition and transmission to the Czechoslovak Government of essential information on anything he considered important, including the care for his own nationals, with special attention paid to immigrants coming to the country. Taking into account the goal of the present essay , it is important to stress first of all the Consul's investigation of the state of the regional community of his fellow-countrymen. This all formed a part of the information sent at the beginning of 1920 to the Political Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague. He characterized it as follows : 11 ••• a colony of Czechoslovak nationals representing over five thousand persons living in the whole Dominion , i. e. an area equal to the extent of the United States of North America ... , it is , however, insufficiently organized, and could not be used as a decisive element to support any political faction .. . Also the interest of the Czechoslovak farmers settled in the province of Saskatchewan are quite different from those of the miners in Nova Scotia, living apart a distance of about four thousand kilometers. It will be very difficult to unify them and to make them act together" _9 It is obvious that recognizing the small numbers in the community provoked both interested parties to consider the further possibi8AFMZV , PZ-M,year 1921 , No . 19, 27. 6. 1921. 9AFMZV , PZ-M , year 1921, No . 2, File No . 10/21. SLOVAK.IA 11 lities of its growth. These appeared already in 1921 in connection with the increasing interest in emigration from Czechoslovakia, and also with the growing threat of the limitation of immigration by the US Government. Therefore, the future Canadian immigration policy , and especially its relation to Central Europe, became the primary area of interest of the Czechoslovak Consulate in Montreal. The formulation dealing with the diffusion and disorganization of the colony had the hidden agenda of the further activity of the Czechoslovak Consulate - i.e. co-operation with the community in order to unify it as far as its organization is concerned, and, in this way, to shape its future direction. A matter of question, however, was - by which means and in what manner should it be done? The organizational and political attitudes chosen by the consular authorities in relationship to the Slovak community is the principal topic of this essay. The diplomatic communiques themselves contained certain signals in answer to the question because there the community was referred to as a colony of Czechoslovak nationals, without more detailed ethnic identification. Despite the fact that the first impression acquired by the Czechoslovak side from the trends in Canadian immigration policy was not in any way favourable - "the Canadian authorities obstructed the immigrants" 10 - the Consul reported to Prague at the beginning of 1921 that the consular office succeeded in finding some indications of change. Public debates began to mould opinions that, with respect to the growing need for cheap labour, it was necessary to retain the principle of a priority in the selection of immigrants, i. e. not to prefer Britons as the representatives of the "mother country" of Canada, but to permit a bit of benevolence in the selection of the immigrants. 11 It was decided by the Consulate to seize the opportunity immediately. The federal Department of Immigration and Colonization in IOAFMZV, Sec . II ., Reg . 531, File No . 514, 4.2.1921. 11 AFMZV, PZ-M, year 1921, No . 19, an article published in The Montreal Daily Star, 4. 6. 1921 , "Repudiation , Annexation or Population". 12 SLOVAKIA Ottawal 2 was asked in November of 1922 to provide statistical data on the number of Czechoslovak immigrants in Canada, and, at the same time, to inform the Consulate about the willingness of the Canadian government to accept the immigration and settlement of Czechoslovak nationals in Canada,13 This initiative of the Czechoslovak Consul was premature. The department took a very reserved attitude. Its Secretary, F. C. Blair, provided only the requested statistical data, and completely omitted the problem connected with the possibility of immigration from Czechoslovakia. 14 It is, therefore, clear that it was only the Czechoslovak side which initiated and tried to recommend its own citizens as suitable potential immigrants to Canada. Despite the fact that this effort had been ignored, the Consul Ryznar was not discouraged. He went on searching for some sign of permissivness in the Canadian immigration policy towards the Continent and concretely to Central Europe. He tried to convince the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs and also the Ministry of Social Welfare, that he was doing his best to search for possibilities for Slovak applicants for emigration to countries other than to the USA. The Consul constantly tried to find some solution and began to consider the most attractive the idea of the Canadian immigration officials - i. e. to attract peasants, who, unlike the British colonists coming mainly from towns, and again settled in towns in Canada, would be able and willing to farm in Canada, to cutlivate the virgin land, and to revive the economy of the country.15 He saw such a solution in Central Europe. Ryznar had been so encouraged with the possibility of Slovak immigration that he decided at the beginning of 1923 to send another letter to F. C. Blair. He did so in order to get some information about the new policy of settlement being enforced by certain political 12The Department of Immigration and Colonization, an independent Department of the Federal Government, came into existence in 1917 through its separation from the Ministry of the Interior. 13 PAC, RG 76 , Vol. 198, File 80671 , 11. I 1. 1922. 14 PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 28 . 11.1922. 15 AFMZV, PZ-M, year 1922, No. 7, 4.12 . 1922. SLOVAKIA 13 circles . His primary goal was, however, again to remind the Canadian government of Czechoslovakia, and its peasantry applying for immigration visas. He stressed in his letter that he had been urged by his own government, and primarily by the Ministry of Social Welfare, which was greatly interested in the possibility of immigration of its citizens to Canada. In another letter he told of the intention of the above-mentioned Ministry to subscribe to the most significant Canadian newspaper in order to receive information on the programme of the settlement of the country, and at the same time to find missing information for numerous applicants for emigration, i.e. the citizens of Czechoslovakia.16 His efforts to attract the attention of the highest authorities of the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization brought some results in the end. The Czechoslovak Ministry of Social Welfare was finally put on the list of the addresses of the immigration press being issued by the Department of Immigration and Colonization. 17 Above all, those institutions realised that Czechoslovakia was offering a certain part of its peasantry with the assurance that they certainly would be very suitable future colonists . The explanation of the following could be found in the activity of the Czechoslovak Consulate: when in the autumn of 1923 a great need for a cheap labor force emerged in Canada in connection with the logging of old wood in forests, and its preparation for further processing in sawmills, representing in itself very heavy manual work, the citizens of British or French origin did not want to do it. Therefore, the Department of Immigration and Colonization met the demands of some entrepreneurial circles and agreed with the submitted proposal to obtain suitable lumberjacks in Central Europe . The Minister of Immigration and Colonization personally suggested that sort of labour force be sought in Czechoslovakia. He explained it in the following manner: "based on the information received, applicants for emigration from Czechoslovakia are said to have some experience with agricultural work, and also the prerequisites for 16pAc, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671 , 27 . 2. 1923. 17PAC , RG 76 , Vol. 198 , File 80671 , 7. 3. 1923. 14 SLOVAKIA managing methods used in Canadian agriculture in order to become true Canadian farmers in the end" .1 8 The Consulate was very proud of the results of its diplomatic mission. It interpreted its work in the following, quite inadequate, manner: "The Canadian immigration authorities prefer Czechoslovak nationals because of their good physical condition, honesty and industriousness. They find them excellent colonists , and they would be very glad to receive them" _19 In fact the Canadian authorities permitted workers at the end of 1923 in Czechoslovakia for the Canadian lumbering industry only, with only some five hundred, 20 later increased to a thousand workers. 21 Most of those people were obtained in Slovakia as can be seen in the statistical data of the shipping companies concerning the transporting of over two thousand persons from Slovakia to Canada during that same year.22 Immediately after the arrival of the first post-war contingent of Slovak immigrants, they faced numerous problems . The consulate in February 1924 issued the following message: "Most of those (i. e. immigrants) devoted themselves in the winter season to cutting wood. The living standards in those camps, hundreds of miles from civilization, situated in vast forests , are hardly enviable .. . They work from early morning till late at night. They eat food prepared in a common kitchen and pay for it through the reduction of their salaries. The employer provides workers with clothes and other requisites paid for in the above-mentioned manner. It is obvious that our fellows , knowing neither the language nor the customs , are in an endless wilderness thrown at the mercy of dishonest officials, and some problems had to be solved through the consular authorities with the director or owner of the company in order to ensure their protection" .23 18 PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 3. 11. 1923. 19.-;;:,UA, , MSP, Reg. 3894, No. 2028 , 2. 6. 1923. 20PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616, File 916207, pt. 1, 18. 10. 1923. 21SUA, MSP, Reg. 3899, File 847, 20. 2. 1924. 22 Statistical Handbook of the Czechoslovak Republic (Vol. 3, Prague, 1928). 23SUA, MSP, Reg. 3899, File 847 , 20.2. 1924. SLOVAKIA 15 In addition to the difficult position of a part of the Slovak immigrants in lumber camps, there were also other problems . The Canadian authorities offered, in fact only seasonal work. That meant that in the spring of the year 1924, when the season had ended, the immigrants were on their own. A part of them started to drift to Montreal, and other cities, especially those near the American border. It was clear in the end that the first group of post-war immigrants had come to Canada with a clear goal: to get around the restrictive immigration measures imposed by the American authorities, and to get to the United States via Canada,24 where their relatives and friends were already settled. Numerous requests of the immigrants to solve this problem were a heavy burden for the Czechoslovak consular officials .25 All their efforts, however, were useless. At least a one-year stay of the immigrant in Canada was a necessary precondition to receiving a visa to the USA. The situation of the Slovak lumberjacks was very difficult to resolve. The Czechoslovak Consulate tried to avoid growing difficulties caused partly by its own activity. The Czechoslovak authorities were immediately asked to inform passport offices about issuing emigration visas to Canada only to those applicants willing to settle permanently in Canada. 26 In order to stop the growth of further complications, the Consulate again addressed the Department of Immigration and Colonization in Ottawa to provide it with the form, or the text of the agreement usually concluded between the employer and employee.27 The letter also expressed the Government's interest in receiving more detailed information about living conditions of the 1mmigrants in Canada. The highest Canadian authorities answered the letter immediately. They informed the Consulate that neither an agreement form, nor any legislative criteria, existed in Canada for concluding contracts. As far as the securing of certain living standards for immigrants was concerned, living conditions were different in various 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27PAC, RG 76 , Vol. 198 , File 80671 , 16. 4.1924 . 16 SLOVAKIA parts of the country and what was offered was generally considered sufficient. 28 It was too late and quite useless to ask those questions. We know that the Canadian government authorities cared for the problems of their own poorest workers even less than for the Czechoslovak ones, and there was no motivation to help the immigrants, coming without any financial means, and at their own risk. It follows from the above that, at the beginning of 1924, the activity of the Consulate had to orient itself to immigration from Czechoslovakia. It had to decide what to do with people coming from Slovakia with the intention of going to the United States. The chance to get there was only minimal. While the Czechoslovak Consulate was asking the questions, the Slovak League of America, as the cover organization of Slovak immigrants in the USA, took the initiative. Many Slovak immigrants in Canada turned to it with requests for help, because the CanadianSlovak community itself was small in number, lost over the huge territory, and therefore could not support them. In the summer of 1924, the Slovak League sent its delegate to Canada to investigate the situation. Upon his arrival the delegate confirmed the fact that the immigrants had come to Canada with the goal of getting into the USA. At the same time he informed the American-Slovak public that "the prisons on the frontier are full of our people caught when they tried to get to the USA illegally" .29 After receiving that information, the executive of the Slovak League decided to publish information about the hopeless situation of most of the Slovak immigrants in Canada in magazines in Slovakia. 30 Thus a short article published later in numerous Slovak magazines came into being. The text of it was more than meaningful: "The representative of the Slovak League of America who had been sent to Canada reported about a sad group there. Over 12,000 of them are living there and suffer awfully. They cannot find work, and when they get 28PAC , RG 76, Vol. 198 , File 80212 , 25 . 4. 1924. 29 Minutes of the session of the delegates of the Slovak organizations in America organized by the executive of the Slovak League , held in Pittsburgh, Pa ., 18 . December of 1924. In: Slovak v Amerike, 51, No. 37, 2. 3. 1925, p. 3. 3oIbid. SLOVAKIA 17 it, they have to work in the Canadian virgin forests and are paid only a pittance. Their feet and hands are frost-bitten and some of them even went mad" _31 The disclosure of the irresponsibility of the Czechoslovak and Canadian authorities who had prepared and organized the immigration , upset not only American Slovaks and people in Slovakia, it also affected diplomatic relations between Czechoslovakia and Canada. The Department of Immigration and Colonization in Ottawa was probably informed directly through the British Ambassador in Prague . A letter was immediately sent to the Czechoslovak Consul in Montreal containing - a slightly paraphrased - "anxiety about the fact that the published information on the situation in Canada does not correspond with reality" _32 At the same time Ottawa asked the Consul to inform it about the Slovak League of America. They were mostly interested in whether the organization had a branch in Canada consisting of the proper members, and finally asked the Consul about the alleged problem, i. e. whether he was really informed about a greater number of Slovak immigrants in Canada who had not found work.33 In his answer B. K. Ryznar suggested to the Minister W. J. Egan that the Slovak League of America was a strong organization with half a million members. He assured him, however, that the organization had not had any branch in Canada. 34 As he had not ment to destroy his previous efforts in the field of creating premises for acceptance of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, he to a certain extent negated the arguments of the above-mentioned article, and assured Ottawa that there were not many unemployed Slovaks in Canada. In order not to minimize his duties and problems connected with the execution of his mission, Ryznar mentioned in his letter having heard only about the complaints of the immigrants concerning irregular practices applied by the employers and the labour 3 IE. g. Sloven ska domovina, 7, No. 6, 5. 2. I 925, p. 2. 32 As in Note 29 . 33PAC , RG 76, Vol. 616 , File 916207, pt . I, 10. 2. 1925 . 34Toe Slovak League of America had but one subsidiary in Canada, at Fort William , Ontario, founded in 1916, havi ng one hundred and fifty members. 18 SLOVAKIA agencies, and their attempts to misuse them. His attitude to the whole problem was contrary to the facts .35 The above-mentioned problem had been disturbing to both interested parties, and therefore the Department in Ottawa decided to inform the Czechoslovak authorities in order to elucidate somehow the problems of unemployment and basic social care provided to the Slovak immigrants. The information was , however, only general , covering but the job opportunities offered by Canada to the immigrants . Job opportunities were represented principally by seasonal work for agricultural workers. The number of needed seasonal workers was very difficult to determine ahead of time. The Department cleared up only the problem of the salaries offered. They assured the Czechoslovak authorities that the minimum monthly salary had to be 25 dollars , at the same time admitting even higher wages in case of additional seasonal work.36 But the Czechoslovak authorities wanted to make the problem clear. Therefore, they sent a delegate on a mission to Eastern Canada. He could only confirm the well-known facts about the difficulties of a part of the new Slovak immigrants. The most serious of them represented unemployment on the one hand, and unpaid salaries for work done on the other. The employers, for various reasons, often refused to pay the immigrants. They were sure that it was quite impossible to claim their salaries through the courts, as no service contracts had been concluded with the immigrants. 37 Together with the arrival of a greater number of immigrants, and especially when the lumbering season had ended, a tendency appeared during 1924 among groups of immigrants settling in Montreal to be near the residence of the Czechoslovak Consulate. Growing unemployment was the motive for their concentration. The officials saw the reasons for immigrants remaining in the big cities in their apparent aversion to working on farms, and in their false illusions of 35PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616, File 916207, pt . I, 14.2.1925. 36 PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616, File 916207, pt. I, 26.3.1925. 37SUA, MSP, Reg . 3803, No . 10219, 2.5. 1925. SLOVAKIA 19 better salaries in cities. The immigrants hoped to find in Montreal an advanced industry, as was the case in cities of the United States .38 Social dislocation, therefore, became the decisive experience of the people. This motivated them during the summer 1924 to support each other through a co-operative association. 39 The forming of the ethnically homogenous Slovak group in Montreal, welded together by common problems, could not be ignored by the Czechoslovak Consul. He reported to Prague in detail about the two Slovaks in Montreal, who strove to establish a "Slovak Benefit Society". He added, however, that their task was very difficult, because of the small and ever-changing number of the Slovaks in Montreal, as most of them were looking for work, and their stay in the city was temporary .40 He also reported on the activity of the Slovak League of America, aimed at the organization of Slovak immigrants in Canada. The League sent its delegate to Montreal to investigate the situation. According to the Consul there was no response to the efforts of that Slovak-American organization in Canada. His opinion was, that the representative of the Slovak League "had not been accepted positively by his fellow-countrymen" _41 It is clear that the associative efforts of the Slovak immigrants were from the very beginning followed very carefully by the Consulate. The fact that the Slovak immigrants had decided to go their own way inspired the Consulate General to act in accordance with its original intention to organize the whole community in Canada, representing several thousand. At the beginning the Consulate tried to control the activity of the newly-formed association of Slovaks in Montreal. The Consul Ryznar, as soon as he arrived in 1920, decided to enter in a most decisive manner into the life of the community. But there was little hope of realizing that because of the originally small 38 Jbid. 39The association was founded by Gabriel Kurdel and F. Capkovic , at the end of 1924, in the first Slovak restaurant in Montreal , named "Tatra" . It was opened by F. Capkovic in the spring of I 924 . From the letter of G . Kurdel to the author dated 8. 12. 1974. (Personal archives of the author) . 40 AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1924, No. 8, 8. 9. 1924. 41 Ibid. 20 SLOVAKIA number of the Slovak immigrants scattered across the vast Canadian lanscape. That all prevented him from managing the situation. Therefore, in his diplomatic agenda, he prudently suggested that the Slovak inhabitants in Canada were not organized as they could not be organized. But, as it is known from the diplomatic agenda of the former Austro-Hungarian Consuls General in Canada, the truth was just opposite. The Slovaks in Canada did organize already at the tum of the 19th and 20th centuries but not in their own associations. They were establishing in Canada numerous branches of American-Slovak associations. This resulted in subordinating them to centres in the USA, thus connecting more tightly the Canadian Slovaks with American ones, rather than the Slovaks living across Canada. With respect to the above-mentioned facts, the Czechoslovak Consul did not consider uniting the Canadian-Slovak community possible. This made him believe in the end that the Slovaks in Canada were not organized at all. The alternative of establishing new associations after World War I was impossible. In 1922 the Consul expressed his attitude in the following manner: "there are not suitable conditions here for establishing Czechoslovak associations" .42 It follows that he really intended to establish not only new associations, but also to make those already existing acquire the status of Czechoslovak ones, i. e. to conform to the Czechoslovak stateforming conception, and to manifest it in concrete organizational forms of their foreign enclave. When it was necessary to explain the reasons preventing him from realizing his plans, the Consul stressed the fact that there was a conflict between his intentions and the Slovak attitude represented by the strong pro-Hungarian orientation of the greatest concentration of the pre-war Slovak immigrants in Fort William, Ontario.43 About six hundred to one thousand and two hundred Slovaks were living there. The pro-Hungarian tendencies of that nationally and organizationally unified group of the Slovak immigrants coming mostly from 4 2SuA . MSP, Reg . 3894, No . 2313, 26. 6. 1922. 43 AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1922, File 36 d, 25.4. 1922. SLOVAKIA 21 the Orava region - which was in the period before the World War I known as an area nearly untouched by the process of magyarization - "were explained" very simply: those Slovaks had attended Hungarian schools and immigrated to Canada from Hungarian lands. We must add, however, that he, himself, doubted his statements about the pro-Hungarian manifestations of the Fort William Slovaks with the confession about getting his information "second hand" . Later on, he made use of his statements about magyarized Slovaks as a serious obstacle to the enforcement of the Czechoslovak philosophy. He said that the pro-Hungarian tendencies were permanently supported both by former Austro-Hungarian and new Hungarian Consuls in Canada during his journeys across Canada where the Hungarians had lived together with the Slovaks.44 The Czechoslovak Consul made use of that fact. He remarked that he himself as a Consul had not been able to travel along the consular "region" by permission of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs even after his three years' stay in Canada.45 In such a way he brought forward both the "principal", and other, i.e. "technical" cause of his temporary failure in relation to the Slovak community in Canada. We must say, however, that arguments such as the long distances between Montreal and individual Slovak settlements, the absence of contact with them, or surviving pro-Hungarian emotions among regional inhabitants, as well as the existence of no chance to change it, also survived. They could never be used to characterize the newly-forming associations of Slovak immigrants. The consul chose quite a different explanation. As he himself noted in the consular report, he had evaluated the activity of "the Czechoslovak citizens coming from Slovakia". In relationship to the existing foreign-political conception of the unitary Czechoslovak state, and the officialy-accepted theory of the Czechoslovak nation as well, he started to characterize the new associative tendencies of Montreal's Slovaks as the activation of anti-Czech 44 AFMZ, PZ-M , year 1924, No . 6. 11. 11. 1924. 4SAFMZ, PZ-M , year 1923, No. 13. 13 . 12. 1923 . 22 SLOVAKIA ideas, and the spreading of treasonous ideas brought apparently by Slovak immigrants and spread among fellow-countrymen. 46 Characterization of the associative tendencies of the Slovak immigrants in Montreal as anti-Czech, or even treasonous, was naive , and in the end turned against the Consulate itself. The Consulate had immediately to respond, and to eliminate the manifestations of the Slovak separatists represented, and replace them with the associative efforts of helpless immigrants. The Consul was supposed to initiate an unifying processes and make the Slovak immigrants accept their organization with those Czech immigrants who had settled in Montreal long before. It was, however, very difficult to find a proper way to solve the problem. There were only a few Czech immigrants living in Montreal. 47 They were mostly older inhabitants, and besides, they were on a higher social level, with other interests and needs. The Slovaks, meanwhile, were not in the least interested in any sort of social activity, or even "making policy". Therefore even the old traditional and experienced way of ideologically influencing the community, as it was suggested by the Czechoslovak authorities - i. e. to issue a newspaper - was considered inappropriate, and even useless. Migrating Slovaks searching all the time for jobs would not accept any newspaper _48 The following "solution" proved the most suitable one: the Canadian public was informed through an article published in The Montreal Daily Star in December of 1924 about the organization of "the Czechoslovak citizens in order to establish an independent association of Czechoslovak immigrants" .49 When, at the beginning of 1925, B. K. Ryznar finished his diplomatic mission to Canada (from January 1923 he was Consul General) the Montreal Slovak community was already officialy represented by the Czechoslovak 46 AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1924, No. 8. 8.9.1924. 47 Before World War I, thirteen Czech families and one Slovak family lived in Montreal. In: Rybnfcek, A.: "Vzpomfnky starousadlfka." I:udove zvesti, 26, No. 40 , I 9. 10. 1961, p. 14. 48 AFMZ, PZ-M , year 1924, No . 12. 11. 11 . 1924. 4 9"Society formed to aid Czechs . New body will assist immigrants to prosper here". The Montreal Daily Star, 16. 12. 1924 . PAC, RG 76, Vol. 616 , File 916207, pt. I . SLOVAKIA 23 Benefit Society. An internal conflict existed, however, concerning its name, emerging from time to time with greater or less intensity ,50 as the roots of a sort of natural alliance were missing.51 The beginning of 1925, connected with the end of B. K. Ryznar's diplomatic mission, and the coming of the new Consul General F. V. Kveton, represented a break in the immigration policy of Canada. Thanks to favourable economic-political decisions of the Canadian Government to end the policy of favouring immigrants from Great Britain, psychologically and physically not sufficiently prepared to do hard agricultural work in the Canadian wilderness, resulted in the recruitment of immigrants - mainly peasants - from the Central European region. It was the poor state of the Canadian economy at the beginning of 1925 as mentioned by the federal Parliament of Canada,52 which resulted in the above-mentioned changes in immigration policy. That new alternative was, despite the poor economic situation of Canada, evaluated by the Czechoslovak authorities with great satisfaction. It seemed that the arrival of immigrants would be greatly simplified for the immigrants comming from some "selected European countries, including the Czechoslovak Republic" .53 New workers were expected to revive the Canadian economy. They, however, misunderstood each other. The Canadian politicians saw the solution in further cultivation of land and farms left by the British colonists , thus solving the urgent need for agricultural workers. In fact, most of the applicants for emigration from the 50From a letter of G. Kurdel to the author dated 8. 12. 1974. 51 Canadian immigration policy allowed from Czechoslovakia only agricultural workers. Therefore, the intelligentsia had no place among immigrants (with some few exceptions). It meant that the Slovak community had no natural leaders. Some did develop. Gabriel Kurdel was the most significant one. In connection with the newlyfounded association in Montreal, G. Kurdel in his memoires said that he had informed the new Consul General Kv~ton about existing conflicts in the association. The Consul agreed with the change of the name of the association to a Slovak one. But, according to his memoirs, when he submitted his proposal to the leaders of the association, represented by Czech fellow-countrymen, they commented on it as follows: "It is nonsense". In: Memoirs of G. Kurdel. Phone record from 26. 10. 1977. No. SLK 3023. Archives of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Toronto. 52AFMZ, PZ-M, year 1925, No. 5. 7.2.1925. • 53~.:.UA, , MSP, Reg. 3894, File 847, 20. 2. 1924. 24 SLOVAKIA Central European region, including Slovakia, were poor people unable to participate in the Canadian programme of immigration of farming families with some capital. They could only saturate the secondary needs of the workforces , i.e. the agricultural workers on farms. The second alternative attracted primarily those applicants for emigration from Slovakia who were rejected by the United States. The number of those interested was very large. According to officials of the Ministry of Social Welfare in Prague, it was nearly impossible to control the situation. The quota permitted annualy by the Canadian side could not be exceeded. The Canadians succeeded in keeping it low .54 In this way the number of Slovaks in Canada was by the end of the year 1930 increased to some 30 ,000 - 40,000 persons. 55 Czechoslobvak representatives in Montreal protested by means of a Memorandum to Minister Egan aginst the recruitment of workers without appropriate legislative requisites. The Consul stressed in the Memorandum that, according to Czechoslovak emigration law, each of the emigrants should, before their departure , be furnished with a -valid contract with the name of the employer, the location , sort of work, the duration of the employment, as well as the offered wage. 56 In response to the Memorandum, the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization considered it its duty to inform the Ministry of Social Welfare in Prague only of the fact that an immigrant - agricultural worker - was to be paid 25 dollars per month with board and lodging.57 Further disputes and legally-unsolved problems were on both sides consulted usually in the following manner: in further similar inter-governmental agreements concerning the emigration and immi- 54Approximately 6,000 to 7,000 persons. 55 Archives of the President's Office, D. 12331/38. Secret message of CS . Consul General dr. F. Pavl~sek to Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague about the situation among Slovaks in Canada, dated 17. 3. 1937. In: Bielik, F.: Sloven ske vys(ahovaleccvo. Dokumency III. Martin, MS 1976, doc. No. 375 . 56PAC, RG. 76, Vol. 616, File 916207 , pt. 1, 23 . 5. 1925 . 57 PAC, RG. 76, Vol. 616, File 916207 , pt. 1, 23 . 5. 1925 . SLOVAKIA 25 gration , proper attention should be paid to the solution of the problem of concrete labour contracts.58 From the above-mentioned it follows that the period of activity of Consul General F. V. Kveton (during the years 1925-1929) reflected a considerable increase in the community, not only in Montreal or Toronto, but also in other Canadian regions. This was connected with new organizations of the immigration process. The immigrants were placed primarily on the Praires of Canada, with the organizational centre located in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Consul General F. V. Kveton visited that region in 1926. On his journey across Canada he discovered an increase in Slovak colonists despite the fact that he had intended to investigate mainly the Czech settlements. He came to the conclusion that "the Czechoslovak colony" in Canada was in fact the Slovak community. He stressed that fact in his report . Fort William was, according to him , the most significant and stable Slovak city. He estimated that some 1,100 to 1,200 Slovak souls were concentrated there with their own Catholic parish, and a nice church. He said that the Slovaks were working mainly in the port, loading and unloading the ships transporting goods across Lake Ontario, i. e. the inland Canadian "sea". In order to verify known opinions of his diplomatic predecessor concerning the pro-Hungarian orientation of Fort William Slovaks, he asked not only the old inhabitants , but post-war ones too. He came to the following conclusion: the community as a whole takes an autonomous attitude towards the solution of the problem of the constitutional position of Slovakia within the Czechoslovak Republic. The city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, as the destination place of his journey, was characterized as the biggest Czech settlement in Canada, with some four hundred souls, represented primarily by tailors and shoemakers. The Consul General stressed , however, the other function of Winnipeg. It was used as the "winter station" to retire in after the agricultural season on farms was over. His own opinions shifted into a different position because of having obtained new facts about the community. The Consul started 58s(JA, MV, Reg. 1015, No. 6980/1925. 26 SLOVAKIA to respond to the demands of older emigrants concerning education and national culture. He explained his attempt to the Czechoslovak authorities by the need to preserve national consciousness. He asked for the delivery of Slovak books for Montreal and Fort William, and above all, for a Slovak teacher for approximately two hundred school-aged children in Fort William.59 Thanks to the new consular representative, the Czechoslovak authorities were in 1926 forced to return to the problem of the social position of the Slovak immigrants. At first they started to investigate the chances of immigrants to obtain farms. Ottawa was asked questions about the place to obtain certain capital loans if an immigrant intended to do private farming.6() The federal Ministry did not intend to answer the question. The Consul was asked to address the responsible institutions, and first of all the Secretary of the Association of Canadian Bankers 61 who had offered him information on the existence of credit permitted by the Government in 1926 to be used exclusively for the purchase of agricultural land, the construction of houses, and affiliated buildings, for the purchase of cattle, irrigation systems, construction, etc.62 Despite a positive answer, no references were found in the archives referring to the use of that aid by Slovak immigrants. Because of those circumstances, the arrival of the two delegates from Czechoslovakia was a matter of question. They were invited by the Canadian Pacific Railway to investigate local conditions for settlement of independent families with some capital. Research has shown that there were only a few solvent families leaving Slovakia for Canada. Therefore, the information offered by the host company was quite useless for ordinary Slovak immigrants.63 Another delegate of the Ministry of Social Welfare offered to the interested Ministries information about his journey to Canada in the spring 1927 . He considered the position of Slovak agricultural workers as gene59S(JA, MSP, Reg. 3894, No. 6588. 6()PAC, RG . 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 10. 6. 1926. 61PAC, RG . 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, I 7. 6. 1926. 62SCJA, MSP, Reg . 3965, 2782/26. 63SCJA, MV, Reg . 1015, 498/1927. SLOVAKIA 27 rally bad. He presented the following facts: they were working without any contract between them and their employers, and thrown on the mercy of the farmers. Above all, they were working without any health or accident insurance. No such insurance existed in Canada. Only Railways and larger industries had their own insurance systems. The afflicted immigrant could be protected only through a benefit society of fellow-countrymen, or by Canadian charity institutions. 64 When the Consulate had intervened in the Canadian Department it was offered a long list of the agencies and associations entitled to protecting the interests of immigrants in Canada.65 During the following year quite different opinions appeared among fellow-countrymen, evaluating the situation of Slovak immigrants. Some of them had strongly criticized their position because they had to be regularly aided through the Slovak League of America. Others were satisfied, pointing to those individuals living in Canada for a long time who became rich. The most objective evaluation, however, resulted from the latest information gathered during the years 1924-1927. It was as follows: "Fellow-countrymen are not for the time being doing well" _66 Evidence about it was provided by the Czechoslovak Consulate in Canada in a document published in Slovak newspapers. The title of the mentioned article was "Information for Those Emigrating to Canada" .67 It analysed the social conditions of Slovak immigrants in Canada, considered them to be insufficient, thus preventing others from making the decision to leave for Canada to work. The intention to get through Canada to the USA was considered nonsense. There were many profiteers promising to get people secretly over the borders to the USA, extorting their last money. The Consulate warned people because the promises had been false. Those profiteers were interested only in their hard-earned money. 64 SUA, MV, Reg . 1015, No . 27464/1927, 11.4. 1927. 65 S0A, MSP, Reg . 3965 , File 6849/1927, 28. 12. 1927. 66 Kopac, A.: "Ako sa zije na~fm v Kanade?", I:udova politika, 3, 1927, p. 3. 67 Narodnie noviny, 58., No . 50, 29. 4. 1927 , p. 3. No . 207, 15. 9. 28 SLOVAKIA Despite those facts, the Consul Kveton sent in the summer of 1928 an optimistic report to Prague about enough job opportunities, and that there was no unemployment among the immigrants. 68 He was, however, undoubtly conscious of the fact that critical situations were emerging after seasonal work was over, i.e. during the longlasting winter. It was almost the same by the end of the year 1928 . The unemployed started, as usual, to concentrate in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and other cities. That concentration resulted in great associative activity. Consular reports paid special attention primarily to the activity of the Slovak League of America, which had succeeded in establishing its subsidiaries in Canada in the years 1927 and 1928 (in Toronto and Montreal, and a year before also in Winnipeg). For most Slovak immigrants in Canada membership in those organizations was quite necessary, because they had been aiding them in case of illnesses, or accidents. However, the activity of the Slovak League did not correspond with the above-mentioned intentions of the Czechoslovak Consulate. The Committee for Emigration was immediately addressed with urgent demands for the Government to provide some financial aid to the co-operative association in Montreal to cover its activities. 69 Such procedures did not surprise anybody. Once again the original arguments were used about the Slovaks looking for locations with older settlements of their fellow-countrymen, and gradually losing their interest in the idea of the so-called Czechoslovak nationality _?O That private opinion of the informer was in strong contradiction with the tendencies of the Slovak League being known with its identification with the Slovak autonomy programme during the inter-war years. The League was popular among the immigrants, especially for its co-operative function. The situation, however, got worse as the years went on. Unemployment was increasing, and as a result, a new phenomenon ap68S(JA , MSP, Reg. 3965, 30.11.1928 . 69S(JA, MSP, Reg . 3966, No . 21443, 28 .6.1928 . 7oIbid. SLOVAKIA 29 peared in the diplomatic agenda as early as the winter of 1929-1930 . It concerned the deportation of Czechoslovak nationals from Canada. According to existing Canadian law a man who, during the first five years of his arrival in Canada applied for, or was provided with some public finacial aid, was considered an undesirable person, not able to conform to Canadian conditions. Such a person was to be deported to his mother country .7 1 The situation between the two countries worsened. There were frequent controversies between them. Many of the persons to be deported by the Canadians were ill or even incapacitated, either physically or psychically, and there were also criminals among them. Finally, the Czechoslovak authorities refused to accept those individuals who had not had, after a ten years' stay in Canada, re-established their Czechoslovak citizenship, or had not requested an extension of the validity of the right of domicle abroad. It is very difficult to find an accurate count of such persons,72 but they were often mentioned in diplomatic reports. It is obvious that this situation resulted from the economic crisis which broke out in 1929. The Depression affected the immigrants as never before. Besides increasing unemployment, the crisis meant also a significant reduction of the immigration quota for Czechoslovakia to two thousand people a year. This uncompromising procedure of the immigration authorities irritated the Czechoslovak Consulate so much that the Consul addressed Ottawa with an open protest. It follows from his report, sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, that he was discussing the problem with Deputy Minister Egan in Ottawa. The Consul considered the quota unfair, and even offensive, for Czechoslovakia. The reaction of the Canadian Minister to that invective was related the Czechoslovak Minister of Foreign Affairs as follows: the Deputy Minister said that "if only the immigrants from Bohemia and Moravia were concerned, 71SuA , MSP, Reg. 4029, No. 4310-36. 72 PAC, RG 76 , Vol. 251 , File 183211. 30 SLOVAKIA the whole situation would have been quite different, but there was only a minimum percentage of immigrants coming those regions" .73 At the beginning of 1930 K. Kveton was ending his diplomatic mission in Montreal , and was replaced by the new Consul-General, K. Moser. The attitude of the Canadian public and the immigration authorities as well, towards the immigration policy became even more hostile . Finally, in August of 1930 immigration from Czechoslovakia was halted. Public opinion accused the Government of having caused both the crisis, and the unemployment, too, due to its rather "benevolent" immigration policy, mainly in the second half of the 1920s. According to this opinion, the labour market was saturated, resulting in unexpected problems. No improvement in the field of employment occured even after spring work had started. The situation was the same even during the harvest. Farmers were so cutting back on wages that it became quite unprofitable to travel for work to the prairie provincies. Therefore the new Consul Moser reported to Prague in June of 1930 that: "don't let the emigrants come here under these circumstances, as they would only have travel expenses and _a temporary stay here" .74 Thus the hot issue of a part of the diplomatic agenda, represented by the immigration policy, disappeared from it at the beginning of the 1930s. A natural consequence of that was only sporadic contacts between the Czechoslovak Consulate and the Federal Department for Immigration and Colonization. Due to the restriction of immigration, the Federal Department had given up its original position, and importance as well, and beginning with the year 1936 started to function as the Immigration Branch of the Federal Department of Mines and Resources. Unemployment and deportations represented the most serious problem of the period of the economic crisis. Therefo- 73 SUA, MSP, Reg. 3990, 6. 2. 1929. It is necessary to add that the Canadian Government limited or stopped immigration from the entire continent of Europe, of course except for families with some capital, or wives and children of those already settled in Canada, In: an article "Immigration from Europe is Stopped" . The Gazette, Montreal, 16. 8. 1930. 74<'1, .:>UA, MSP, Reg . 3990, No. 6921, 3. 6. 1930. SLOVAKIA 31 re, the Czechoslovak Consulate paid special attention to the internal i.e. social, associative, and political life of the Slovak community. When in 1930 the Director of the Czechoslovak Institute of Foreign Affairs in Prague V. Tlapak went on a study-tour to Canada, he could only confirm the well-known facts about numerous unemployed immigrants who would like to return to their native land, if only they could. Many of them did not earn enough money to pay the travel expences for the journey back home . He found many examples of those who worked only to cover their daily food costs.7 5 The first to sense the impact of the Depression were farm workers . Having come to Canada in the second half of the 1920s, these people were not accepted in Canada with special favour. The crisis made their position quite unbearable. The Federal Government, trying to solve the situation as best as it would, created a programme of emergency works. Nearly every province "drew" the unemployed from the cities and organized in the country so-called labour camps. Especially the young unemployed did such beneficial work as reconstruction of roads, cultivation of natural parks, etc. No Slovaks took part in it, according to diplomatic reports. In January of 1932 Consul Moser reported to Prague that unemployment was not decreasing at all, but on the contrary, it was gradually increasing. 76 Not only the immigamts who were agricultural workers had problems. Even some better-situated individuals had problems. In spite of the fact that some of the immigrants had succeded in getting land, they had to leave the farms as they were not able to pay off the mortgage.77 Deportations became the accompanying phenomenon of unemployment. Canada resorted to that unpleasant measure in order to shake off the burden of the persons who were not able to care for themselves.7 8 There were many Slovak immigrants among them. Consul General Moser, in his effort to somehow protect the interests 75 SDA, MSP , Reg . 4019, No . 3751/30, 29.11.1930. 76AFMzv, PZ-M, year 1932, No. 3, 27 .. 1. 1932. 77 SUA, MSP , Reg . 3990, No. 4105 - 32. 78 vystehovalecky zpravodaj Ministerstva socialnf pece , Vol. 2, 20. 5. 1932 , p. 19 . 32 SLOVAKIA of the immigrants, sent a complaint to Ottawa in August of 1932, stressing the fact that Canada was deporting immigrants too late, because most of them were in such a bad situation that they could not wait the two-to-three months for the departure. Therefore, he asked the Department to deport them as early as possible.79 The Department in Ottawa answered that they had a huge list of those waiting for deportation, and in any case could not make the deportation process quicker, especially due to the limited capacity of the ships departing from Montreal. 80 Even in January 1934 the consular materials contained information about unemployed immigrants who, for three years, had hopelessly waited for deportation. Therefore, some of them illegaly left for the USA, only to be caught, and in such way to be more quickly deported (after a two-to-three months stay in prison) to Czechoslovakia.81 By the end of 1935 the Consul suggested that things were going better and visits to the Consulate were rare. At the same time he reported that numerous immigrants had succeded in finding some work in construction, mines and forests, while others had returned to Czechosloyakia. 82 It does not mean, however, that he automatically considered an improvement in the field of employment a symptom of the restoration of the immigration process, or the release of the restrictions imposed on immigration policy. The only exception was that concerning the possibility of immigration of some peasant families with a capital of $1,000 - $2,000. Even under those circumstances the Consul considered the immigration of well-off individuals more than disputable. He reasoned in the following way: If the applicant for immigration to Canada sells in Czechoslovakia his whole property to get the necessary financial means, it will be enough only to invest in uncultivated land. Very hard work will follow the purchase, with the results coming in most cases too late. 79PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, I. 8. 1932. 80PAC, RG 76, Vol. 198, File 80671, 20. 8.1932. 8lx, .:>UA, MSP, Reg. 4029, 12. I. 1934. 82X' .:>UA, MSP, Reg. 4029, 27.1.1936. SLOVAKIA 33 This will make the immigrant fail , which often will result in his deportation. 83 It has been stated already that no other event influenced the Slovak community so much as the Depression. The immigration process of the second half of the 1920s was practically halted and the number of immigrants in the community was relatively stabilized (representing some 30,000 Slovaks, and about 1,000 Czechs). During the period preceding the crisis , the community was insufficiently organized. It was lacking in leaders, preachers, teachers, and schools. During the crisis the community was more active, and even more radical. Some new associations were founded. Ethnic consciousness was also activated. This resulted in a rapid decrease in their interest and willingness to co-operate in so-called Czechoslovak: associations. The activity of the benefit society in Montreal was nearly halted. 84 The Consulate notified Prague of the revival of autonomist tendencies, illustrating it with the fact that the First Slovak Benefit Society came into existence in Western Canada. More seriously, he considered the fact that there were being established numerous subsidiaries of the American-Slovak: associations with centers situated in the USA. He noticed, however, the great disappointment among the Canadian members because their funds had been delivered to the USA, thus not sufficiently meeting their needs. Finally, some of the members met in Winnipeg, Manitoba to reach a decision about leaving the American-Slovak: Association in order to found their own Canadian-Slovak: one. 85 The newly established Canadian Slovak League, together with the newspaper Slovak v Kanade, were by Consul Moser characterized as the principal representatives of the autonomist flow in the Slovak community, with the addition, that the same opinion was shared by the First Catholic Slovak Union in Canada. When F. Pavlasek took up his consular mission in Canada, he came to the conclusion that Slovaks were against the Czechs because 83SDA , MSP, Reg. 4029, 19. 8.1936. 84AFMZV, Section II., Reg . 492, No . 6787, I. 10. 1932. 85 SDA, MSP , Reg . 4029 . Periodical Report of the Immigration Branch , IV . quart. 1932. 34 SLOVAKIA of their motto "Slovakia for the Slovaks" .86 According to the new Consul General, the immigrants transfered from Slovakia to Canada many of Andrej Hlinka's ideas. Their attitudes were enforced both due to the American Slovak influences, and the agitation about the Pittsburgh Agreement. The fact that the Slovaks represented the poorest layers of the inhabitants of Canada, and belonged often to the unemployed, resulted in some being attracted to Marxism. The Consul discovered that in Montreal some four hundred persons were concentrating around the Slovak newspaper Robotnfcke slovo. The Consul Pavlasek characterized the group as quite compatible and devoted to their common ideal. At the same time he stressed the fact that the magazine was doing well and had a lot of symphatizers, in spite of the fact that many of them were not organized in the Association at all .87 Finally, in 1934 he characterized the community as politically split between the autonomists, autonomist communists, and those loyal to democratic Czechoslovakia. He considered it the result of the differentiation process which occured during the Depression. The autonomist communists were originally Czechoslovaks but had split in 1936 into Czechs and Slovaks. He tried to contact the different groups . "At first I tried to attract the conservative Catholic associations (the parish of Saints Cyril and Methodius) but without any success ... When I saw that the door for my activity among autonomists was shut for a certain period, I turned to less radical workers in order to build up co-operation between them and a middle democratic group. The result, however, was much the same ... 11 88 The Consul came to the conclusion that comunists triumphed during the crisis because they had exploited unemployment for establishing new associations. Among them were Czechoslovak Worker Education Clubs, the Slovak Workmen's Association, The International Workmen's Association, etc. They had numerous sym86AFMZV, Section II ., Reg. 531, 18.7.1934. 87 Ibid. 88 As in Note 55. SLOVAKIA 35 pathizers among the common people. They improved the financial state of their associations, and a quality newspaper as well. In other words, they were very succesfuI. 89 The Consul Pavlasek stressed the intensity of communist propaganda among their fellow-countrymen in 1936. At the same time he noticed the fact that the propaganda could not be discounted, and in spite of the fact that it had been the result of a long-term Depression, it was spreading very rapidly, and fellow-countrymen were accepting it.90 Already in 1937 the Consul Pavlasek.was very pessimistic: "The position of this office is extremely difficult, because we have nobody to lean on. There are only a few Czechs here, and they are mostly assimilated, and a majority of them have withdrawn from public life due to permanent attacks". The fact that the Slovak community rejected Czechoslovakism nearly 'en bloc', he characterized as follows: "loyal Czechoslovak thinking, ever respecting the democracy and the Czechoslovak national unity, represents in some colonies but a minority", at the same time he added that the Czechs had arrived in Canada already before World War I, and they had been living there for two or three generations. They had been greatly assimililated, because the second generation had been educated in the Canadian manner. Finally, he expressed his "sad" conclusion that he himself, as well as the Consulate, were permanently attacked by the autonomists, and communists as well. It meant that the Consulate was to a great extent isolated from the Slovak community as a whole, in spite of the latter's internal ideological differentiation. In other words, the Consulate's mission was unsuccesful - it failed completely to unify the Czecho-Slovak nationals in Canada. Therefore, its arguments, formulated in 1937, suggesting that "everything must be done to keep the consciousness of Czechoslovak national unity in spite of the protests and demonstrations of the autonomist circles", were in vain.9 1 89SuA , MSP , Reg. 4029 , 25 . 10. 1935 . 90SuA, MSP, Reg . 4029 , 13.5 . 1937 . 91 As in note 88.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Slovak Emigrants in Canada as Reflected in Diplomatic Documents (1920-1938) Description An account of the resource Elena Jakešová Slovakia, Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92 pp. 7-35 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jakešová, Elena, 1937- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991-92 LCNAF+dates https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/28dd9c150f56b57e1a28fba02d689b94.pdf 4815fd154d5ccf07abafc0563bd4d893 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 36 Carpatho-Rusyns: Their Current Status And Future Perspectives PAUL ROBERT MAGOSCI Who Are The Rusyns? In 1875, geographers from the old Hungarian Kingdom erected a monument in a remote region of their country that carried the following inscription: "Precise instruments have confirmed this point where the latitude and longitude lines meet as the center of Europe." 1 Just over a century later, in 1977, the former Soviet authorities, who had by then ruled the area, erected a second monument to mark the center of the continent that stretches from the Arctic shores of Norway in the north to the beaches of Crete in the south, and from the coast of Ireland in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east. The precise center where the monuments are located is near the village of Dilove (formerly Trebusany) in the foothills of the northcentral Carpathian Mountains that from time immemorial has been inhabited by an East Slavic people called Carpatho-Rusyns, or simply Rusyns (sometimes in English: Ruthenians). Thus, in geographic terms, the Rusyns are not a peripheral group, but rather one whose homeland - Carpathian Rus 1 - is located literally in the heart of Europe. According to present day international boundaries, Rusyns live in more or less compact territory within the boundaries of four 1For a description, see Fedor Korecki, "Stredok Evropi-na Homjici," Nova dumka , VIII (21] (Vukovar, Yugoslavia, 1979), pp . 101-102. �SLOVAKIA 37 countries: Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, and Romania. There is also a small group of Rusyns in Yugoslavia, descendants of immigrants who left the Carpathian homeland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Statistical data on Rusyns is, depending on the country, inadequate or completely unavailable. Therefore, we can only speak in theoretical terms when discussing numbers . In theory, the number of Rusyns could be as high as 1.2 million people: 977 ,000 in the Transcarpathian oblast (former Subcarpathian Rus') of the Ukraine; 130,000 in the Presov Region of northeastern Slovakia; 60,000 in the Lemko Region of southeastern Poland as well as in other parts of that country; and 30,000 in the Vojvodina (Backa) and the Croatian republic of former Yugoslavia.2 The Problem of Nomenclature It is important to keep in mind what is meant by the term Rusyn. Traditionally, the name Rusyn, or its local variant Rusnak, has been used by the East Slavic inhabitants of the Carpathian region to describe themselves. However, by the twentieth century, in particular its second half, the historic names Rusyn/Rusnak were replaced by others, such as Ukrainian in Soviet Transcarpathia and the Presov Region of Slovakia, or Lemko in Poland . There are also Rusyns who have given up identifying with any East Slavic group, and instead associate with the dominant nationality of the country in which 2Since World War II, Rusyns were recorded in official statistics only in Yugoslavia (21,000 in 1991) , Romania (1,000 in 1977), and most recently in Slovakia (17 ,000 in 1991) . "Vojvodina u tisloch i slovoch," Ruski kalendar 1992 (Novi Sad , 1991), p. 38; Anuarul statistic al Romaniei 1990 (Bucharest, 1990), p. 64; Czech and Slovak Federal Republic: Preliminary Results of Population and Housing Census (Prague, 1991), pp . 30-3 I. There are also unconfirmed reports that the final published version of the 1991 Czecho-Slovak statistics will indicate 49,000 persons in Slovakia who reported Rusyn as their mother tongue . As for the estimates given here, the figure for the Transcarpathian oblast refers to persons in that region who in the 1991 Ukrainian census were reported as Ukrainian (the term Rusyn when given by a respondant is recorded as Ukrainian). The estimates for Slovakia and Poland are from: Paul Robert Magocsi , The Rusyns of Slovakia (New York, 1993), p. 1-2 and 111-112; and his Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle , 1993) , p. 131. �38 SLOVAKIA they live, such as Polish in Poland or Slovak in Slovakia. These changes in national self-designation have in some cases come gradually , prompted either by intellectual conviction or by national assimilation, especially among families of nationally-mixed parentage. In the latter case, children often choose to identify - or are identified by their parents - with the dominant state nationality, Slovak or Polish. More often, however, the change in nomenclature has been the result of governmental decree in which the name Rusyn was banned from official usage, as was the case after 1945 in Soviet Transcarpathia and Poland and by the early 1950s in Czechoslovakia. The result is that today one can find within the same ethnolinguistic group, within the same village, in some cases even within the same family, people who will identify as a Rusyn, or a Lemko, or a Ukrainian, or a Slovak, or a Pole. Moreover, in the case of the East Slavic designations - Rusyn/Rusnak, Lemko, Ukrainian - some people consider these as synonyms, others as mutually-exclusive terms. In other words, some people will say that Rusyn is simply the older historic name for Ukrainian, and that Lemko is a regional name of Ukrainian, while others are convinced that the names Lemko or Rusnak are regional forms for Rusyn which, in tum, designates a people that is distinct from the Ukrainian and every other surrounding nationality. It should be noted that the estimated figure of 1.2 million Rusyns given above refers to all people of the same linguistic and ethnographic origin, regardless of how they designate themselves on documents such as internal identity papers, passports, or decennial censuses. Our concern here will be primarily with the present-day Rusyn movement or with that portion of the group (the precise numbers are unknown) that considers Rusyns to comprise a distinct people. Historical Background It is neither possible nor appropriate to provide here an extensive outline of Rusyn history. It is necessary, however, to keep a few historical factors in mind in order to comprehend the current �SLOVAKIA 39 situation. Rusyns never had their own state or political independence. Since the Middle Ages, the Rusyn homeland was ruled by Hungary and Poland or Austria. Nonetheless, during the past century and a half, they have at various times been recognized by neighboring or ruling states as having the right to a territorial entity whose existence was justified on the grounds that it was somehow of and for Rusyns and that it would have some degree of automony or self-rule. 3 The first experience in this regard came in late 1849, when in the wake of the failure of the Hungarian revolution, the Austrian government divided Hungary into five military and several civil districts. One of the civil districts (Ungvar/Uzhorod) was based in the Subcarpathian region and administered by local Rusyn political and cultural activists . This experiment was to last only a few months. Much more important was the period of political upheaval that followed World War I. At that time, in an effort to retain Rusyninhabited lands within Hungary, the new government in Budapest created, in December 1918, an autonomous Rusyn Land (Rus'ka Krajina) that continued to function even after a pro-Soviet Communist regime came to power in March 1919.4 Simultaneously, the recently-founded Czechoslovak government was also courting the Rusyns, offering them a self-governing province to be called Rusinsko (Rusinia), or Subcarpathian Rus' (Podkarpatska Rus), if they would join the Czechs and Slovaks in their new state. In May 1919, the Rusyns accepted the Czechoslovak offer. Most significantly, the Rusyn issue had reached the international political forum , so that "the fullest degree of self-government" for "Ruthene territory south of the Carpathians" was guaranteed by two international treaties at the Paris Peace Conference (St. Germain-en-Laye, September 10, 3 For further details on Rusyn political entities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Paul Robert Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus' 1848-1948 (Cambridge, Mass .: Harvard University Press, 1978) . pp 46-47, 93-95 , and 237-245. 4soviet-Marxist literature is fond of elaborating upon the 40 days of Soviet rule in Transcarpathia. Cf. Borys Spivak and Mychajlo Trojan, 40 nezabutnich dniv: z istoriji borot'by za vladu Rad na Zakarpatti v 1919 roci (Uzhorod: Karpaty, 1967). �40 SLOVAKIA 1919, and Trianon, June 4, 1920) and by the Czechoslovak constitution (February 29, 1920). For the next two decades the vast majority of Rusyns - approximately three-fourths the total number at the time - lived in Subcarpathian Rus, a territory that was Rusyn in name, that had its own Rusyn schools, and that had all the trappings of self-rule including a governor, a partially-elected diet, a national anthem, and a national theater. Finally, in late 1938, actual autonomy was granted to Subcarpathian Rus' (by then renamed Carpatho-Ukraine). Not only had autonomy been demanded by local politicians, it was also one of the provisions of the infamous Munich Pact, which led to the restructuring of Czechoslovakia. The Carpatho-Ukraine was to function for nearly half a year until the complete liquidation of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The twentieth century also witnessed three short-lived efforts at Rusyn independence. The first of these came in 1919, when after being unsuccessful in their bid to join fellow Rusyns south of the mountains, the Lernkos living in the former Austrian province of Galicia created an independent republic that functioned for sixteen months before its government was arrested in March 1920, by the authorities of Poland, which became the new ruler over Rusyn lands north of the Carpathians.5 At the same time, along the eastern edge of Subcarpathian territory a regional ethnic group known as Hutsuls established their own republic which lasted four months (FebruaryJune 1919) before being driven out by troops from Romania. The last unsuccessful attempt came two decades later, when the Carpatho-Ukrainian autonomous government declared symbolically its independence on the last day of Czechoslovakia's existence (March 15, 1939) before the province was invaded and reannexed to Hungary .6 The point is that although Rusyns may never have had their 5 On the little-known Lemko Republic and its relationship to political thought in the western Ukrainian lands, see Paul Robert Magocsi,"The Ukrainian Question Between Poland and Czechoslovakia: The Lernko Rusyn Republic (1918-1920) and Political Thought in Western Rus'-Ukraine," Nationalities Papers (New York, forthcoming) . 6 Ukrainian-oriented emigres from Carpatho-Ukraine have put great stress on the �SLOVAKIA 41 own state, they did have for a significant period of time in the twentieth century the experience - and therefore historical memory - of their own political entity, Subcarpathian Rus', which was recognized both by the state in which they lived (Czechoslovakia) and by the international community (Paris Peace Conference, League of Nations). Although the Rusyn homeland is located in the geographical center of Europe, it is at the same time along a cultural borderland. It is along that great divide between the Catholic West and Orthodox East, what Riccardo Picchio has classified in the broadest cultural terms as Slavia romana and Slavia orthodoxa.7 Located where they are, this division has had a profound effect on the Rusyn psyche. The very language or series of dialects that Rusyns speak reflect the influences of both cultural spheres. Thus, while their speech clearly belongs to the realm of East Slavic languages, much of their vocabulary, pronounciational stress, and even syntax is West Slavic. The cultural divide is most graphically evident in what is for traditional Rusyn culture the all-important factor of religion. Some Rusyns are Orthodox, but the majority, at least during the past two centuries, is Catholic, or more precisely Greek Catholic. These confessional differences reflect a whole mind-set that is either western - or eastern-oriented. The eastern mind-set tends to surrender the self to fate in the hope that the Christian God and his intercessors, Christ and the Virgin Mary, might somehow alleviate the burdens of this earthly life. In contrast, the western mind-set seems March I 5, I 939 declaration of independence, arguing that it revealed how the Ukrainian orientation had supposedly won the hearts and minds of the entire population even before the Soviets arrived in the region in late 1944 . Cf. Peter G. Stercho, Diplomacy of Double Morality: Europe's Crossroads in Carpatho- Ukraine , 1919-1939 (New York: Carpathian Research Centre , 1971) . This view is also being promoted in the Ukraine since the onset of the Gorbachev era. See the minutes of the RUCH meeting held in the former Carpathi-Ukrainian capitol of Chust to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of the one-day of independence: "4 sesija Velykoji Rady Ruchu," Visnyk Ruchu, no . 4 (Kiev, 1990). 7Riccardo Picchio, "Guidelines for the Comparative Study of the Language Question Among the Slavs," in Aspects of the Slavic Language Question, Vol.I, ed. Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt (New Haven , Conn .: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies, 1984), pp. 1-42. �42 SLOVAKIA to feel that if an individual receives education or political training, he or she can somehow put their lives in order and, therefore, be able to have some control over destiny . The east-west dichotomy in the Rusyn psyche also impinges on attitudes toward nationai identity. The eastern orientation tends to think in universalistic terms and be satisfied with viewing Rusyns as part of a single East Slavic Orthodox religious and cultural world. The western orientation - epitomized by the very distinctiveness of Greek Catholics from other Catholics - accepts the idea of national and linguistic particularity. Universalism versus particularism are attitudes that greatly influenced Rusyn political and cultural leaders , especially regarding the nationality question. Being a stateless people, Rusyns have had, at least until the second half of the twentieth century , to depend on their leaders, the intelligentsia, to determine the precise direction of their national revival . The Rusyn national revival began during the second half of the nineteenth century and culminated during the interwar years, by which time it had evolved into a comprehensive movement concerned with political, cultural, and social issues. Most of the nationalist intelligentsia did agree on one basic premise: that Rusyns are East Slavs and that their linguistic and cultural traditions were based in the east, albeit with pronounced western influences. What they could not agree upon, however, was whether Rusyns were a branch of the Russian nationality, or of the Ukrainian nationality, or whether they formed a distinct fourth East Slavic Rusyn nationality. Not surprisingly, debates about national and linguistic orientation quickly became caught up in local partisan politics. Politicians had their own agendas, and they more often than not made opportunistic use of the nationality question in order to promote party or other ideological interests. As for the nationalist intelligentsia, they easily fulfilled the precepts of all activists in the formative stages of national movements. Namely, they had no difficulty using history to formulate an ideology that was able to convince people they were either Russian, �SLOVAKIA 43 Ukrainian, or Rusyn. 8 The debate over the national orientation of the Rusyns was not yet resolved before the outbreak of World War II, despite the achievements during the interwar years of the Ukrainian orientation in the largest Rusyn territory , Subcarpathian Rus' (Carpath~Ukraine). In a sense, the year 1939 marked an end to the natural evolution of discussions about a Rusyn nationality. This is because beginning in that year and lasting for half a century, the nationality debate was effectively stifled by state intervention. This happened first under fascist regimes in Hungary(which reannexed Subcarpathian Rus'), in Slovakia (which retained the Presov Region), and in the Germanruled Generalgouvernement (which ruled the Lemko Region); and then as a result of Soviet rule after 1945, whether directly in Subcarpathian Rus' (renamed Transcarpathian Ukraine) or through proSoviet Communist governments in Poland and Czechoslovakia. As is well known, the Communist era with its anti-democratic approach to the nationality question was to last until the revolutions of 1989 and 1991. The only exception was the case of the small group of Rusyns in the Vojvodina region of Yugoslavia. Although a Communist regime was installed in their land as well, the Yugoslav government allowed the Vojvodinian Rusyns to decide their own national orientation. This was not to be the case for the Rusyns living in the Carpathian homeland. In short, the Soviet regime declared that further debate was unnecessary because the nationality question had supposedly been resolved long ago. Based on a decision made by the Communist party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine taken in December 8Generally, the Russian-oriented intelligentsia, or Russophiles, were Orthodox adherents or sympathizers who believed in the unity of Eastern Slavic Christian culture represented by three branches of the East Slavs - Great Russians , Belorussians, and Little Russians (including Carpatho-Rusyns) - all considered to be part of one common Russian (ob§cerusskiJ) nationality . The Ukrainian--0riented and Rusyn--0riented intelligentsias were western--0riented Greek Catholics who believed in various degrees of national and/or regional differentiation - the Ukrainophiles arguing for the unity of one people that stretched "from the Carpathians to the Caucasus"; the Rusynophiles arguing that the Rus' population in the Carpathians (from the Poprad to Tysa rivers) comprises a separate people. �44 SLOVAKIA 1925, all Rusyns , regardless what they may have called themselves, were declared to be Ukrainians. Any who opposed the Ukrainian viewpoint were accused of having "anti-historical" and, therefore, "anti-Soviet" opinions; they often were removed from their jobs; and they might even have been arrested as "counterrevolutionaries." Closely connected with these developments was the liquidation first in Soviet Transcarpathia (1949) and then in Czechoslovakia (1950) of the Greek Catholic Church, which by the mid-twentieth century had become the stronghold of the Rusyn orientation. When Communist regimes were established in Poland (1945) and Czechoslovakia (1948), they adapted the Soviet line and decreed that the Ru syn minorities within their borders were Ukrainians. They forbade Rusyn publications and the use of the name Rusyn in official documents. The situation was particularly bad in Poland. Not only were the Lemko Rusyns declared to be Ukrainians, they were forcibly deported en masse from their Carpathian homeland in 1947 and scattered throughout the former German lands of post-1945 western and northern Poland.9 It is ironic to note the advantages that accrued to the governments in question through their use - or, more properly, misuse - of the name Ukrainian. For example, by declaring that the population was Ukrainian, this allowed the Soviet Union to justify the annexation in 1945 of Subcarpathian Rus', a territory that throughout the war it had agreed should be returned to Czechoslovakia. Nationalist ideology could now conveniently serve Stalin's political designs on the international stage. In any case, how could the Soviet worker's state refuse the request of fellow "Ukrainian workers" in Transcarpathia who "voluntarily" were demanding to be united with the "Mother Ukraine"? 9 The actual deportations took place in two phases. Between 1945 and 1946, about 200,000 Lemko Rusyns "voluntarily" took up the offer to resettle eastward in the Ukraine in exchange for Poles who moved west within the new postwar boundaries of Poland . The remaining 80,000 Lemko Rusyns , mostly in the western Lemko region , were forcibly deported in 1947 . For details, see Kazimierz Pudlo , Lemkowie: process wrastania w ~rodowisko Dolnego Sl{lska, 1947-1985 (Wroclaw: Polskie Towarszystwo Ludoznawcze, 1987), esp . pp. 24-34. �SLOVAKIA 45 In neighboring Poland, identification of Lemkos as Ukrainians made it easier for the government to deport them, since the Communist Polish government argued that, as "Ukrainians," the Lemkos were helping the anti-Communist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) under Stepan Bandera, which was held up in the Carpathians and still fighting the Polish and Soviet authorities after the end of World War II. South of the mountains in Czechoslovakia, the administrative imposition of a Ukrainian identity beginning in 1952 proved to be advantageous to those Slovaks who had always claimed that "their Rusnaks" were really "Slovaks of the Greek Catholic faith. 1110 In essence, forced Ukrainianization (combined with the liquidation of the local Greek Catholic Church and forced collectivization of peasant land) led during the 1950s and 1960s to the most rapid degree of Slovakization and national assimilation that Rusyns had ever experienced. It is nonetheless true that during this same period, the Czechoslovak government provided extensive funding to create a wide range of cultural organizations that were Ukrainian in national form but socialist in content. A well-paid local Ukrainian intelligentsia was even able to attain several significant scholarly and literary achievements. However, this had little real effect upon the Rusyn peasant masses in Slovakia. For them, the choice was simple: if one could not be a Rusyn, better declare oneself a Slovak than a Ukrainian (which among other things was associated with the hated East). Once again Yugoslavia was the exception. The government there provided both funding and legal guarantees, while the local intelligentsia decided to adopt a Rusyn orientation and to develop the local speech into a sociologically-complete Rusyn literary language. In fact, Rusyns became one of the five official nationalities in the lO Beginning already in 1945, new Rusyn political and cultural organizations carried the name Ukrainian . However, despite their name, they paradoxically functioned using Russian or vernacular Rusyn as the language of instruction and communication. In 1952, a decree of the Communist Party of Slovakia initiated a policy of Ukrainianization that banned use of the term Rusyn and replaced Russian with Ukrainian as the language of instruction in schools . For details, see Pavel Macu, "National Assimilation: The Case of the Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia," East-Central Europe, II, 2 (Pittsburgh, 1975), pp. 101-131. �46 SLOVAKIA autonomous province of the Vojvodina. Yet Yugoslavia was the exception that proved the rule. And the rule was that after 1945, Rusyns ceased to exist. All Soviet, Czechoslovak, and Polish documents and publications referred to the population only as Ukrainian.1 1 Publications in the West, both by Ukrainian emigre and North American Soviet and East European specialists, also accepted the view that Rusyns did not exist, or to quote the New Columbia Encyclopedia (1975): "There is no ethnic or linguistic distinction between Ukrainians and Ruthenians [Rusyns] ." "The majority of the population [of Transcarpathia] is Ukrainian." 12 The Current Situation Then came the 1980s. The first signs of change came in Poland, where the Lemko Rusyns - both those who were dispersed in the "West" of that country as well as about 10,000 who had managed to return to the Carpathian homeland - began to gather at annual cultural festivals. These "unofficial" festivals received no government financial support, but by the same token they were not under any ideological control. As a result, the Lemkos began to revive the idea that they were neither Poles nor Ukrainians, but rather part of a distinct Slavic people closely related to Rusyns living south of the mountains in Slovakia. The Lemkos seemed to be acting in isolation and for several years that was , indeed, the case.1 3 Later came the changes brought about by the November 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. New initiative committees were founded that were often dominated by individuals who had not 11 Whereas the idea of a Rusyn nationality in the Carpathians was not recognized by schools and official circles in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, they have recognized the Rusyns (Rusnaks) of Yugoslavia as a distinct ethnic group with its own literary language . Cf. A.E. Suprun and A .M. Kaljuta, Vvedenie v slavjanskuju filologiju (Minsk: Vy§ej§aja §kola, 1981), pp . 137-139. 12 "Ruthenia," in the New Columbia Encyclopedia , ed. William H. Harris and Judith S. Levey, eds. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 2383. l3 On the Lemko-Rusyn revival, see the series of articles in the Carpatho-Rusyn American, X and XI (Fairview, NJ ., 1987-88). �SLOVAKIA 47 been associated with the Communist regime. At first, the initiative committees tried to transform (they would say democratize) the older Ukrainian organizations, but when that failed they established their own Rusyn organizations and publications. At the very same time, in neighboring Transcarpathia, the first Rusyn-oriented organization to exist anywhere in Carpathian Rus' since World War II was established in February 1990 in the oblast's administrative center of Uzhorod. Known as the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns (Tovarystvo Karpats'kych Rusyniv) and with branches throughout Transcarpathia, its goals were at first of a cultural and ecological nature - to promote and preserve knowledge of local history and customs. But before long, the Society moved on to political demands, in particular the recognition of Rusyn as a distinct nationality and the return of the autonomous status of Subcarpathian Rus', a status which they argued was illegally taken away in 1945. Before 1990 came to a close, a total of five new Rusyn organizations had come into existence where Rusyns live. Aside from the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns in Ukrainian Transcarpathia were the Rusyn Renaissance Society (Rusyns'ka Obroda) in Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia (est. March 1990); the Lemko Association (Stovarysynja Lemkiv) in Legnica, Poland (est. April 1990); the Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus' (Spolecnost pratel Podkarpatske Rusi) in Prague (est. October 1990); and the Ruska Matka (Rusyn Matka) in Ruski Kerestur, Yugoslavia (est. December 1990). By the spring of 1991, a sixth one was established, this time in Hungary: the Rusyn Organization in Hungary (Magyarorszagi Ruszinok Szervezete) in Budapest (est. May 1991). Most of these organizations have their own Rusyn-language newspaper or magazine, 14 or they have access to existing publications. All five organizations have put forth basically the same demands: that Rusyns be recognized as a distinct nationality; that a Rusyn literary language be codified and eventually be used in schools as a medium of instruction; and that 14 These include: Besida (Legnica, Poland, 1989-present); Otcyj chram (Uzhorod, 1990-91); Podkarpatski Rus (Prague, 1991-present); Rusyn (Medzilaborce , Czechoslovakia, 1990-present); Narodny novyntj (Pre§ov, 1991-present). �48 SLOVAKIA Rusyns be guaranteed full rights as a national minority in the countries where they live or, in the case of Transcarpathia, that Rusyns be recognized as the dominant indigenous nationality. As in all new or revived movements, the Rusyn orientation must first be able to make itself known to the constituency it purports to represent. This is inherently problematic, because with the exception of Yugoslavia, nowhere do Rusyns control the local media. Their message, or at least an awareness of their movement's existence, has been helped less by their own publications than by the fierce polemics that have filled the non-Rusyn press in Poland, former Czechoslovakia, and most especially former Soviet Transcarpathia. This is because from the moment the first Rusyn activity began, local pro-Ukrainian activists attacked the Rusyn orientation as "anachronistic," "ahistorical," "unenlightened," "in the service of American imperialists," and "treacherous" to the Ukrainian nation. 15 As a result, more attention of a semi-sensationalist journalistic nature was given the Rusyn problem than might otherwise have been the case. The Czech and Slovak press also paid much - although more rational - attention to the Rusyn-Ukrainian debate, especially in the context of the nationality question that concerned Czechoslovak society as a whole. Whatever latent isolation Rusyn leaders in their respective countries may have still felt was overcome in March 1991, when, at the initiative of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, the first World Congress of Rusyns was convened in Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia. Indeed, despite a history of interaction between Rusyn communities in the homeland as well as the immigration in America during the twentieth century, this was, in fact, the first time representatives from all countries where Rusyns live (Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, 15 The best (or worst) examples of the anti-Rusyn polemical attacks comes from scholars in the former Soviet Ukrainian intellectual establishment: Pavlo Cucka, "Kak rusiny stali ukraincami," Zakarpatskaja pravda (U:lhorod), September 12-16, 1989; Vasyl' Mel'nyk, "Neorusynstvo i joho interpretatory," Zakarpats'ka pravda (U:lhorod), August 18, 21, 22, 24, 1990; Jurij Balega, "Rusynstvo: ideolohy i pokrovyteli," ibid., September 6,7 ,9, 1990; and Oleksa Myfanyc, "To chto :le vony?: do idejnych vytokiv novitn'oho 'karpatorusynstva'," Literatuma Ukrajina (Kiev), January 17, 1991. �SLOVAKIA 49 Yugoslavia, the United States) gathered together in one place. The congress constituted itself as a permanent umbrella organization, and its very existence had an enormous impact on instilling Rusyn national pride in the over 300 persons who attended, not to mention innumerable others who read about it through the generally widespread press coverage.1 6 It is interesting to note that one week after the congress took place, Czechoslovakia conducted its decennial census in which people for the first time since World War II had the right to answer that they were of Rusyn nationality. Despite problems with the manner in which the nationality questionwas asked and subsequently classified, in Slovakia 17,000 persons responded they were Rusyns as compared to 14,000 Ukrainians. 17 This raises the question of numbers. Observers will legitimately ask just how many people identify as Rusyns? And even among those who do respond Rusyn, does use of such a term necessarily mean they are denying a possible simultaneous identification as Ukrainians? At this point, there is no way to know the precise answers to those questions. All we know is that in Slovakia, when given a chance in March 1991, of those people of East Slavic background who did not identify as Slovak and who had the choice between a Rusyn or Ukrainian identity, 55 percent chose Rusyn. As for the number of Rusyns in Poland and Ukrainian Transcarpathia, we simply do not know at this stage, nor do we have any indications, such as census data, scientific polling, or membership in political parties, that might help to provide a reasonable estimate. What we can be certain of, however, is that after forty years of Communist rule, Rusyns have not gone away. Today, there are Rusyn organizations, Rusyn publications, and a relatively wide range of writers, teachers, professionals, and peasants who continue to articulate in the press and at public manifestations their belonging 16 Information on the First World Congress as well as its official declaration are found in the Carpatho--Rusyn American , XIV, 2 and 3 (Fairview, NJ., 1991). pp . 7-9 and 8-9. 17 Mykola Mu§ynka, "Skil'ky rusyniv-ukrajinciv u Slovaccyni? ," Svoboda (Jersey City, NJ.), July 19, 1991. �50 SLOVAKIA to a distinct Rusyn people.1 8 Protection for Rusyns in the Future As with many minorities, the future of their survival depends on the willingness of the governments in the states where they live to provide them with adequate legal protection and perhaps financial assistance for their national development. In this regard, the Rusyns need to inform and constantly to remind the international community that they exist. In tum, Rusyns should be able to expect that the international community will monitor their status and, if necessary, put pressure on the governments of the Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia, in order to ensure that their national rights are protected. In fact, all four states in which Rusyns live have already ratified several agreements pertaining to national minorities at recent meetings of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Of particular importance for Rusyns were the decisions reached in·June 1990 at the Copenhagen meeting of the CSCE .. At Copenhagen it was agreed that "to belong to a national minority is a matter of a person's individual choice and no disadvantage may arise from the exercise of such choice." Moreover, "persons belonging to national minorities can exercise and enjoy their rights individually as well as in community with other members of their group. 1119 This means that regardless how scholars or governments might define Rusyns, if there are individuals and/or groups who call themselves by that name and who believe they constitute a distinct natio18 Among the best known of these to date are: in Transcarpathia , the writers Volodymyr Fedyny§ynec', Ivan Petrovcij, and Vasylij Socka, and the political activists Mychajlo Tomcanij, Petro Hodma§, and Vasyl' Zajac; in Czechoslovakia, the head of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, Vasyl' Turok, and the advisor to the Slovak government on nationality affairs, Ivan Bicko, and the editor Aleksander Zozuljak; in Poland, the poets Petro Trochanovskij and Olena Due , and the head of the Lemko Association , Andrij Kopca; and in Yugoslavia, the director of the Ruske Slovo publishing house, Ljubomir Medje§i, and the writers Djura Papharhaj and Natalja Duda§. 19 Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (Copenhagen, 1990), pp. 40--41, paragraphs 32 and 32.6. �SLOVAKIA 51 nality , they have a right to do so and to be recognized as Rusyns by the governments of the countries in which they live. The Copenhagen agreement also recognized the role of non-governmental organizations in promoting the interests of national minorities, and it called on the participating states to assure that the teaching of history and culture in the educational establishments "will also take account of the history and culture of national minorities. 1120 At a follow-up CSCE meeting in Geneva (July 1991), member states accepted the provisions of a special report which guaranteed the right of national minorities to participate in non-governmental organizations outside their country of residence. The report reaffirmed as well the principle that individuals or organizations representing national minorities be allowed "unimpeded contacts ... across frontiers ... with persons with whom they share a common ethnic or national origin." 21 Finally, at the most recent CSCE meeting held in Moscow (September-October 1991), member states reaffirmed the agreements reached at all previous meetings and agreed further that "commitments undertaken in the field of the human dimension of the CSCE [including those pertaining to national minorities] are matters of direct legitimate concern to all participating States and do not belong exclusively to the internal affairs of the State concemed." 22 Before looking specifically at what Rusyns need in each country to protect and guarantee their future existence, it is necessary to clarify the issue of international boundaries. In the Carpathian homeland, Rusyns live within the borders of three states, and at least until late 1992 there was discussion in the Czech , Slovak, and Transcarpathian press about certain political activists who demanded the return of Ukraine's Transcarpathian oblast (historic Subcarpathian Rus') to Czechoslovakia. 23 There was even talk that Transcarpathia 20 Ibid., p. 41 , paragraph 34. 21 Report of the CSCE Meeting of Experts on National Minorities (Geneva , 1991) , p. 10 . 22 Document of the Moscow Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (Moscow, 1991 ), p. 2. 23 The Republican party in Czechoslovakia led by Dr. Miroslav SIMek had as one of its goals the "return of Subcarpathian Rus"' to Czechoslovakia. "Zpl!t do Ceskoslovenska," Republika (Prague), October 18-24, 1990; "Rozhovor s pi'edsedou SPR- �52 SLOVAKIA might be returned to Hungary or divided between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In fact, most of these propositions were little more than the speculations of individuals that were blown out of proportion by political rivals and by journalists seeking to report a good story .24 The Czecho--Slovak federal government publicly declared that it "cannot be concerned with the fate" of Transcarpathia.25 With the end of Czechoslovakia in December 1992, the question of unification has become moot. As for the Rusyn organizations that have come into existence in 1990, none of them nor the World Congress of Rusyns that met in 1991 has ever voiced any demand for border changes. On the contrary, all the new organizations as well as· the vast majority of Rusyn spokespersons wherever they live warn against tampering with existing international boundaries. On the other hand, the Society of Carpatho--Rusyns in Transcarpathia has called openly for the return of the status of automony that Subcarpathian Rus' did enjoy during the interwar years. 26 In order to determine the views of the local population, the society, joined by other minority organizations, called for a question on Transcarpathian autonomy to be added to the referendum on Ukrainian indeRS, Ph Dr. Miroslavem Shidkem," ibid., August, 1991. The head of the National Socialist party, C. Cejka, stated that Czechoslovak jurisdiction still applies to Subcarpathian Rus' . "NSS chtc!jf Podkarpatskou Rus, "Lidova demokracie (Prague), September 3, 1991. 24 Jaromfr Hoi'ec of the Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus' in Prague and wellknown publicist has written about the recent political activism in Transcarpathia in numerous articles in the Czech press, which imply that the local population would be sympathetic to re-unification with Czechoslovakia. Cf. his recent articles in Lidova demokracie (Prague): "Freedom for Subcarpathian Rus"' (September 7, 1991); "Czechs in Subcarpathia" (September 18, 1991); and "Subcarpathia Calls For an Independent Republic" (September 20, 1991). The Hungarian press has also followed closely the demands for Transcarpathian autonomy: "Ruszin koztlirsaslig Klirplitaljlin, "Magyar hfrlap (Budapest), September 10, 1991; "A ruszinok kovetelese: Jegyen Klirplitalja koztlirsaslig! , "Nap/6 (Debrecen), September 3, 1991. 25 The quote is attributed to Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, Jiff Dienstbier, in "Svobodu pro Podkarpatskou Rus," Lidova demokracie, September 9, 1991. 26 The text of the declaration, which was sent to the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev , to the Supreme Soviets of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR, and to the United Nations, appeared first in the Society's newspaper, Otey} chram (SeptemberOctober, 1990) . It is available in English translation in the Carpatho-Rusyn American, XIV, 1 (Fairview , NJ., 1991), pp 4-5 . �SLOVAKIA 53 pendence that was held on December 1, 1991 .27 There was a large voter tum-out, with 92.6 percent favoring Ukrainian independence and 78 percent self-rule for Transcarpathia. 28 The issue of Transcarpathian autonomy elicited great interest in neighboring countries, although this is, in fact, an internal issue for whatever kind of government and state structure is finally established in what until recently was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In short, Transcarpathia has been and should for the foreseeable future remain a part of Ukraine. However, as a sovereign member of the international community, Ukraine must, in tum, guarantee the individual and corporate rights of Rusyns - or those citizens of Ukraine who wish to call themselves Rusyns. It is true that the Ukrainian government has already provided guarantees for national minorities living on its territory: Russians, Jews, Poles, Germans, Tatars, etc. To this list must be added Rusyns. This would mean that the "official," or one might say traditional, Ukrainian view of the Rusyns has to change. Namely, Ukrainian authorities must accept the fact that within its boundaries, primarily in its Transcarpathian oblast, there are people who define themselves as Rusyns in the sense of a nationality distinct from Ukrainians. Such people should have the right to declare themselves in their passports and internal documents as Rusyns, and the state census bureau should publish data on the number of persons who identify as Rusyns and not simply classify them - as has been done until now - as Ukrainians. 29 If such guarantees are 27 "Rezoljucija mityngu Tovarystva Karpats'kych Rusyniv z pytannja nacional'noho vidrod!ennja rusyns'koho narodu i vidnovlennja statusu Pidkarpats'koho kraju , Mukacevo, 01.09.1991," Molod' Zakarpattja (Uzhorod), September 14, 1991, p. 4. 28 Paul Robert Magocsi, "Rusyns Regain Their Autonomy," Ukrainian Canadian Herald (Toronto), March 16, 1992, p. 7. 29 Soviet guidelines used by the State Committee for Statistics in order to classify answers in the census reports were determined largely on recommendations from authorities in individual republics as well as from the Institute of Ethnography and the Institute of Linguistics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. SeeSJovari nacional'nostej i jazykov dlja kodirovanija otvetov na 8 i 9 voprosy perepisnych Jistov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyj komitet SSSR po statistike, 1988). It is interesting to note that a recent report by the Institute of Ethnography (No. 14110/2171, dated February 6, 1990) stated: "It is theoretically possible to con- �54 SLOVAKIA provided, there is no reason why Rusyns in Transcarpathia could not remain Rusyns as well as function as full-fledged citizens of a sovereign and democratic Ukrainian state. Indeed, independent Ukraine has recently become a member of the Conference in Security and Cooperation in Europe, which obliges it to accept and implement the principles of the Copenhagen and other agreements on national minorities outlined above. Following the trend that has taken hold in the former Soviet Union, it would seem desirable that the new Ukrainian state become a decentralized entity in which each of its component regions would have a large degree of automony in economic and cultural matters .30 Thus, questions such as what language might be taught in elementary schools, or what kind of national orientation should be adopted by regional cultural and educational institutions, or what amount of funding might be given to Rusyn-oriented groups, are all decisions that would be made by the people's assembly in Uzhorod and not in Kiev. Of course, it goes without saying that the free movement of peoples across borders with neighboring Rusyn regions in Slovakia and Poland must be guaranteed. Fortunately, this possibility exists already, albeit with a waiting time at border crossings that every day of the week averages between 15 and 20 hours. As for neighboring Slovakia, the situation of Rusyns, especially since the November 1989 Velvet Revolution, is much better than in either Ukrainian Transcarpathia or Poland. Initially, the Slovak government (generally through its Ministry of Culture) and the former Czecho-Slovak federal government (through allotment of discretionary funds) provided only ad hoc grants to the new Rusyn organizations and publications. Normal budgetary allotments of the Slovak government intended for its East Slavic Rusyn/Ukrainian elude that Rusyns can be considered at the same level as Russians , Ukrainians , and Belorussians, and that they are not a part of any of those groups ." (document in the author's possession) . 30 Discussions regarding the restructuring of the Ukraine have been going on for the past few years . Neighbouring Galicia as well as Transcarpathia feel confident that each could do much better economically if it were independent of the centre in Kiev . Cf. Ivan Hrancak, "Vidnovleni haluzky karpats'koho kraju : Ukrajina federatyvna?," No vyny Zakarpattja (Uzhorod), February 6, 1991 . �SLOVAKIA 55 minority continued to go to the Union of Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia (SRUC), that is, to the Ukrainian-oriented cultural organization that is the direct descendant (still with largely the same leadership) as the formerly Communist-dominated Cultural Union of Ukrainian Workers (KSUT). Slovak government funding through other ministries also supported in Presov several Ukrainian university departments and institutes at Safarik University , a Ukrainian radio station, and a Ukrainian publishing house, as well as the Museum of Ukrainian Culture (recently renamed the Aleksander Pavlovy Regional Museum) in Svidnik. As of 1993 , two Rusyn-oriented organizations also receive a normal budgetary allotment. These include the Aleksander Duchnovyc Theater (formerly the Ukrainian National Theater) which is of a Rusyn orientation and the Rusyn Renasissance Society (Rusyns'ka Obroda), both based in Presov. The Slovak government now recognizes that there are two clearly-defined national orientations - Rusyn and Ukrainian - and that if support for national minorities is to continue in Slovakia, then funding should be provided to Rusyn as well as Ukrainian organizations. But how should the government divide a financial allotment among its East Slavic minority, which until recently has been designated only as Ukrainian? The Slovak government has opted for what seems the most reasonable solution. It has accepted the percentages revealed in the results of the 1991 census, and, therefore, has provided roughly 50 percent financial support to Rusyn cultural organizations and media and 50 percent to Ukrainian cultural organizations, schools, and its media. The question of schools in Slovakia is particularly problematic, because beginning in the 1960s the language of instruction in the vast majority of Rusyn-inhabited villages was changed - at the request of parents themselves - from Ukrainian to Slovak. Moreover, as part of a consolidation process during the past two decades, many small elementary schools in Rusyn-inhabited villages were closed. Even if private or public elementary schools will be reopened in Rusyn villages, it is likely that Slovak will be the language of instruction. The Slovak ministry of education, however, should �56 SLOVAKIA provide teachers and textbooks in Rusyn or in Ukrainian for those villages that may submit such requests. Most important, the standard Slovak-language history textbooks used throughout Slovakia should include an adequate discussion of the history and culture of Rusyns and other minorities which will be of benefit to all students. This would be in keeping with the CSCE agreement reached in Copenhagen, which - along with other "international treaties on human rights and freedoms" - are, according to the new consitution of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, "universally binding on its territory and supercede its own laws."31 The Rusyns, or Lemko Rusyns of Poland perhaps need the most help. Not only is the majority of Lemko Rusyns scattered throughout the western and northern regions of Poland, but their fledgling pro-Rusyn organization, the Lemko Association with its amateur theatrical troupe, and the older Lemkovyna folk ensemble receive no financial support at all from the Polish government, either in the form of an annual budgetary allotment or ad hoc grants. Whatever government funds assigned to national minority cultural activity are given, they invariably go to the Union of Ukrainians in Poland (Ob'jednannja Ukrajinciv Pollsci), the direct descendant of the Communist-dominated Ukrainian Socio-Cultural Society (USKT). Support for the new Union of Ukrainians must continue, especially since most Ukrainians in Poland are not originally from nor do they live in the Carpathian region. On the otherhand, Lemko Rusyns must also be recognized as a distinct national minority and receive a fair share of funding. How to determine what is a "fair share" will, of course, be difficult, since Poland does not even have nationality as a category on its decennial census questionnaires. Perhaps a referendum attached to the next national vote could include a question that lists all the national groups in Poland and asks the respondent to which one he/she would wish to assign a portion of their taxes for cultural 31 Cf. Section 2 of the Constitutional Act of January 9, 1991, instituting the charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms as a Constitutional Act of the Federal Assembly of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic . �SLOVAK.IA 57 activity. This would be somewhat similar to municipalities in Canada that ask their residents to indicate whether they want their tax dollars to be assigned to public schools or to separate (Catholic) schools. Whatever the mechanism decided upon, in keeping with its commitments as a member state of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Polish government is obliged to recognize Lernko Rusyns as a distinct national minority and to provide funding for Lernko cultural organizations and Lernko-language schools in those communities that demand them. Lastly, we turn to the situation in Yugoslavia. Ever since World War II, the Yugoslav policy of equality for its six component republics and support for the national minorities that live within them has encouraged the Croatian Republic and, in particular, the Vojvodina Autonomous Region of the Serbian Republic to finance liberally Rusyn cultural and educational activity. It is to be expected that when the republics of Yugoslavia sort out their present difficulties, the republics of Croatia and, in particular, Serbia will continue their judicious support and protection of their respective Rusyn minorities. Conclusion The Rusyns are one example of the many groups who suffered under the totalitarian regimes imposed on East Central Europe during the past four decades. Now that those regimes no longer exist, there is a real opportunity to correct past injustices and to assure the future survival of the Rusyns. It is, after all, in the interest of all four countries where Rusyns live - Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia - to become part of the larger European community. The way in which those countries resolve the Rusyn issue will, in part, determine to what degree they are ready for membership in the new Europe. ��SYMPOSIUM �� SLOVAKIA 36 Carpatho-Rusyns: Their Current Status And Future Perspectives PAUL ROBERT MAGOSCI Who Are The Rusyns? In 1875, geographers from the old Hungarian Kingdom erected a monument in a remote region of their country that carried the following inscription: "Precise instruments have confirmed this point where the latitude and longitude lines meet as the center of Europe." 1 Just over a century later, in 1977, the former Soviet authorities, who had by then ruled the area, erected a second monument to mark the center of the continent that stretches from the Arctic shores of Norway in the north to the beaches of Crete in the south, and from the coast of Ireland in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east. The precise center where the monuments are located is near the village of Dilove (formerly Trebusany) in the foothills of the northcentral Carpathian Mountains that from time immemorial has been inhabited by an East Slavic people called Carpatho-Rusyns, or simply Rusyns (sometimes in English: Ruthenians). Thus, in geographic terms, the Rusyns are not a peripheral group, but rather one whose homeland - Carpathian Rus 1 - is located literally in the heart of Europe. According to present day international boundaries, Rusyns live in more or less compact territory within the boundaries of four 1For a description, see Fedor Korecki, "Stredok Evropi-na Homjici," Nova dumka , VIII (21] (Vukovar, Yugoslavia, 1979), pp . 101-102. �SLOVAKIA 37 countries: Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, and Romania. There is also a small group of Rusyns in Yugoslavia, descendants of immigrants who left the Carpathian homeland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Statistical data on Rusyns is, depending on the country, inadequate or completely unavailable. Therefore, we can only speak in theoretical terms when discussing numbers . In theory, the number of Rusyns could be as high as 1.2 million people: 977 ,000 in the Transcarpathian oblast (former Subcarpathian Rus') of the Ukraine; 130,000 in the Presov Region of northeastern Slovakia; 60,000 in the Lemko Region of southeastern Poland as well as in other parts of that country; and 30,000 in the Vojvodina (Backa) and the Croatian republic of former Yugoslavia.2 The Problem of Nomenclature It is important to keep in mind what is meant by the term Rusyn. Traditionally, the name Rusyn, or its local variant Rusnak, has been used by the East Slavic inhabitants of the Carpathian region to describe themselves. However, by the twentieth century, in particular its second half, the historic names Rusyn/Rusnak were replaced by others, such as Ukrainian in Soviet Transcarpathia and the Presov Region of Slovakia, or Lemko in Poland . There are also Rusyns who have given up identifying with any East Slavic group, and instead associate with the dominant nationality of the country in which 2Since World War II, Rusyns were recorded in official statistics only in Yugoslavia (21,000 in 1991) , Romania (1,000 in 1977), and most recently in Slovakia (17 ,000 in 1991) . "Vojvodina u tisloch i slovoch," Ruski kalendar 1992 (Novi Sad , 1991), p. 38; Anuarul statistic al Romaniei 1990 (Bucharest, 1990), p. 64; Czech and Slovak Federal Republic: Preliminary Results of Population and Housing Census (Prague, 1991), pp . 30-3 I. There are also unconfirmed reports that the final published version of the 1991 Czecho-Slovak statistics will indicate 49,000 persons in Slovakia who reported Rusyn as their mother tongue . As for the estimates given here, the figure for the Transcarpathian oblast refers to persons in that region who in the 1991 Ukrainian census were reported as Ukrainian (the term Rusyn when given by a respondant is recorded as Ukrainian). The estimates for Slovakia and Poland are from: Paul Robert Magocsi , The Rusyns of Slovakia (New York, 1993), p. 1-2 and 111-112; and his Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle , 1993) , p. 131. �38 SLOVAKIA they live, such as Polish in Poland or Slovak in Slovakia. These changes in national self-designation have in some cases come gradually , prompted either by intellectual conviction or by national assimilation, especially among families of nationally-mixed parentage. In the latter case, children often choose to identify - or are identified by their parents - with the dominant state nationality, Slovak or Polish. More often, however, the change in nomenclature has been the result of governmental decree in which the name Rusyn was banned from official usage, as was the case after 1945 in Soviet Transcarpathia and Poland and by the early 1950s in Czechoslovakia. The result is that today one can find within the same ethnolinguistic group, within the same village, in some cases even within the same family, people who will identify as a Rusyn, or a Lemko, or a Ukrainian, or a Slovak, or a Pole. Moreover, in the case of the East Slavic designations - Rusyn/Rusnak, Lemko, Ukrainian - some people consider these as synonyms, others as mutually-exclusive terms. In other words, some people will say that Rusyn is simply the older historic name for Ukrainian, and that Lemko is a regional name of Ukrainian, while others are convinced that the names Lemko or Rusnak are regional forms for Rusyn which, in tum, designates a people that is distinct from the Ukrainian and every other surrounding nationality. It should be noted that the estimated figure of 1.2 million Rusyns given above refers to all people of the same linguistic and ethnographic origin, regardless of how they designate themselves on documents such as internal identity papers, passports, or decennial censuses. Our concern here will be primarily with the present-day Rusyn movement or with that portion of the group (the precise numbers are unknown) that considers Rusyns to comprise a distinct people. Historical Background It is neither possible nor appropriate to provide here an extensive outline of Rusyn history. It is necessary, however, to keep a few historical factors in mind in order to comprehend the current �SLOVAKIA 39 situation. Rusyns never had their own state or political independence. Since the Middle Ages, the Rusyn homeland was ruled by Hungary and Poland or Austria. Nonetheless, during the past century and a half, they have at various times been recognized by neighboring or ruling states as having the right to a territorial entity whose existence was justified on the grounds that it was somehow of and for Rusyns and that it would have some degree of automony or self-rule. 3 The first experience in this regard came in late 1849, when in the wake of the failure of the Hungarian revolution, the Austrian government divided Hungary into five military and several civil districts. One of the civil districts (Ungvar/Uzhorod) was based in the Subcarpathian region and administered by local Rusyn political and cultural activists . This experiment was to last only a few months. Much more important was the period of political upheaval that followed World War I. At that time, in an effort to retain Rusyninhabited lands within Hungary, the new government in Budapest created, in December 1918, an autonomous Rusyn Land (Rus'ka Krajina) that continued to function even after a pro-Soviet Communist regime came to power in March 1919.4 Simultaneously, the recently-founded Czechoslovak government was also courting the Rusyns, offering them a self-governing province to be called Rusinsko (Rusinia), or Subcarpathian Rus' (Podkarpatska Rus), if they would join the Czechs and Slovaks in their new state. In May 1919, the Rusyns accepted the Czechoslovak offer. Most significantly, the Rusyn issue had reached the international political forum , so that "the fullest degree of self-government" for "Ruthene territory south of the Carpathians" was guaranteed by two international treaties at the Paris Peace Conference (St. Germain-en-Laye, September 10, 3 For further details on Rusyn political entities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Paul Robert Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus' 1848-1948 (Cambridge, Mass .: Harvard University Press, 1978) . pp 46-47, 93-95 , and 237-245. 4soviet-Marxist literature is fond of elaborating upon the 40 days of Soviet rule in Transcarpathia. Cf. Borys Spivak and Mychajlo Trojan, 40 nezabutnich dniv: z istoriji borot'by za vladu Rad na Zakarpatti v 1919 roci (Uzhorod: Karpaty, 1967). �40 SLOVAKIA 1919, and Trianon, June 4, 1920) and by the Czechoslovak constitution (February 29, 1920). For the next two decades the vast majority of Rusyns - approximately three-fourths the total number at the time - lived in Subcarpathian Rus, a territory that was Rusyn in name, that had its own Rusyn schools, and that had all the trappings of self-rule including a governor, a partially-elected diet, a national anthem, and a national theater. Finally, in late 1938, actual autonomy was granted to Subcarpathian Rus' (by then renamed Carpatho-Ukraine). Not only had autonomy been demanded by local politicians, it was also one of the provisions of the infamous Munich Pact, which led to the restructuring of Czechoslovakia. The Carpatho-Ukraine was to function for nearly half a year until the complete liquidation of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The twentieth century also witnessed three short-lived efforts at Rusyn independence. The first of these came in 1919, when after being unsuccessful in their bid to join fellow Rusyns south of the mountains, the Lernkos living in the former Austrian province of Galicia created an independent republic that functioned for sixteen months before its government was arrested in March 1920, by the authorities of Poland, which became the new ruler over Rusyn lands north of the Carpathians.5 At the same time, along the eastern edge of Subcarpathian territory a regional ethnic group known as Hutsuls established their own republic which lasted four months (FebruaryJune 1919) before being driven out by troops from Romania. The last unsuccessful attempt came two decades later, when the Carpatho-Ukrainian autonomous government declared symbolically its independence on the last day of Czechoslovakia's existence (March 15, 1939) before the province was invaded and reannexed to Hungary .6 The point is that although Rusyns may never have had their 5 On the little-known Lemko Republic and its relationship to political thought in the western Ukrainian lands, see Paul Robert Magocsi,"The Ukrainian Question Between Poland and Czechoslovakia: The Lernko Rusyn Republic (1918-1920) and Political Thought in Western Rus'-Ukraine," Nationalities Papers (New York, forthcoming) . 6 Ukrainian-oriented emigres from Carpatho-Ukraine have put great stress on the �SLOVAKIA 41 own state, they did have for a significant period of time in the twentieth century the experience - and therefore historical memory - of their own political entity, Subcarpathian Rus', which was recognized both by the state in which they lived (Czechoslovakia) and by the international community (Paris Peace Conference, League of Nations). Although the Rusyn homeland is located in the geographical center of Europe, it is at the same time along a cultural borderland. It is along that great divide between the Catholic West and Orthodox East, what Riccardo Picchio has classified in the broadest cultural terms as Slavia romana and Slavia orthodoxa.7 Located where they are, this division has had a profound effect on the Rusyn psyche. The very language or series of dialects that Rusyns speak reflect the influences of both cultural spheres. Thus, while their speech clearly belongs to the realm of East Slavic languages, much of their vocabulary, pronounciational stress, and even syntax is West Slavic. The cultural divide is most graphically evident in what is for traditional Rusyn culture the all-important factor of religion. Some Rusyns are Orthodox, but the majority, at least during the past two centuries, is Catholic, or more precisely Greek Catholic. These confessional differences reflect a whole mind-set that is either western - or eastern-oriented. The eastern mind-set tends to surrender the self to fate in the hope that the Christian God and his intercessors, Christ and the Virgin Mary, might somehow alleviate the burdens of this earthly life. In contrast, the western mind-set seems March I 5, I 939 declaration of independence, arguing that it revealed how the Ukrainian orientation had supposedly won the hearts and minds of the entire population even before the Soviets arrived in the region in late 1944 . Cf. Peter G. Stercho, Diplomacy of Double Morality: Europe's Crossroads in Carpatho- Ukraine , 1919-1939 (New York: Carpathian Research Centre , 1971) . This view is also being promoted in the Ukraine since the onset of the Gorbachev era. See the minutes of the RUCH meeting held in the former Carpathi-Ukrainian capitol of Chust to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of the one-day of independence: "4 sesija Velykoji Rady Ruchu," Visnyk Ruchu, no . 4 (Kiev, 1990). 7Riccardo Picchio, "Guidelines for the Comparative Study of the Language Question Among the Slavs," in Aspects of the Slavic Language Question, Vol.I, ed. Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt (New Haven , Conn .: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies, 1984), pp. 1-42. �42 SLOVAKIA to feel that if an individual receives education or political training, he or she can somehow put their lives in order and, therefore, be able to have some control over destiny . The east-west dichotomy in the Rusyn psyche also impinges on attitudes toward nationai identity. The eastern orientation tends to think in universalistic terms and be satisfied with viewing Rusyns as part of a single East Slavic Orthodox religious and cultural world. The western orientation - epitomized by the very distinctiveness of Greek Catholics from other Catholics - accepts the idea of national and linguistic particularity. Universalism versus particularism are attitudes that greatly influenced Rusyn political and cultural leaders , especially regarding the nationality question. Being a stateless people, Rusyns have had, at least until the second half of the twentieth century , to depend on their leaders, the intelligentsia, to determine the precise direction of their national revival . The Rusyn national revival began during the second half of the nineteenth century and culminated during the interwar years, by which time it had evolved into a comprehensive movement concerned with political, cultural, and social issues. Most of the nationalist intelligentsia did agree on one basic premise: that Rusyns are East Slavs and that their linguistic and cultural traditions were based in the east, albeit with pronounced western influences. What they could not agree upon, however, was whether Rusyns were a branch of the Russian nationality, or of the Ukrainian nationality, or whether they formed a distinct fourth East Slavic Rusyn nationality. Not surprisingly, debates about national and linguistic orientation quickly became caught up in local partisan politics. Politicians had their own agendas, and they more often than not made opportunistic use of the nationality question in order to promote party or other ideological interests. As for the nationalist intelligentsia, they easily fulfilled the precepts of all activists in the formative stages of national movements. Namely, they had no difficulty using history to formulate an ideology that was able to convince people they were either Russian, �SLOVAKIA 43 Ukrainian, or Rusyn. 8 The debate over the national orientation of the Rusyns was not yet resolved before the outbreak of World War II, despite the achievements during the interwar years of the Ukrainian orientation in the largest Rusyn territory , Subcarpathian Rus' (Carpath~Ukraine). In a sense, the year 1939 marked an end to the natural evolution of discussions about a Rusyn nationality. This is because beginning in that year and lasting for half a century, the nationality debate was effectively stifled by state intervention. This happened first under fascist regimes in Hungary(which reannexed Subcarpathian Rus'), in Slovakia (which retained the Presov Region), and in the Germanruled Generalgouvernement (which ruled the Lemko Region); and then as a result of Soviet rule after 1945, whether directly in Subcarpathian Rus' (renamed Transcarpathian Ukraine) or through proSoviet Communist governments in Poland and Czechoslovakia. As is well known, the Communist era with its anti-democratic approach to the nationality question was to last until the revolutions of 1989 and 1991. The only exception was the case of the small group of Rusyns in the Vojvodina region of Yugoslavia. Although a Communist regime was installed in their land as well, the Yugoslav government allowed the Vojvodinian Rusyns to decide their own national orientation. This was not to be the case for the Rusyns living in the Carpathian homeland. In short, the Soviet regime declared that further debate was unnecessary because the nationality question had supposedly been resolved long ago. Based on a decision made by the Communist party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine taken in December 8Generally, the Russian-oriented intelligentsia, or Russophiles, were Orthodox adherents or sympathizers who believed in the unity of Eastern Slavic Christian culture represented by three branches of the East Slavs - Great Russians , Belorussians, and Little Russians (including Carpatho-Rusyns) - all considered to be part of one common Russian (ob§cerusskiJ) nationality . The Ukrainian--0riented and Rusyn--0riented intelligentsias were western--0riented Greek Catholics who believed in various degrees of national and/or regional differentiation - the Ukrainophiles arguing for the unity of one people that stretched "from the Carpathians to the Caucasus"; the Rusynophiles arguing that the Rus' population in the Carpathians (from the Poprad to Tysa rivers) comprises a separate people. �44 SLOVAKIA 1925, all Rusyns , regardless what they may have called themselves, were declared to be Ukrainians. Any who opposed the Ukrainian viewpoint were accused of having "anti-historical" and, therefore, "anti-Soviet" opinions; they often were removed from their jobs; and they might even have been arrested as "counterrevolutionaries." Closely connected with these developments was the liquidation first in Soviet Transcarpathia (1949) and then in Czechoslovakia (1950) of the Greek Catholic Church, which by the mid-twentieth century had become the stronghold of the Rusyn orientation. When Communist regimes were established in Poland (1945) and Czechoslovakia (1948), they adapted the Soviet line and decreed that the Ru syn minorities within their borders were Ukrainians. They forbade Rusyn publications and the use of the name Rusyn in official documents. The situation was particularly bad in Poland. Not only were the Lemko Rusyns declared to be Ukrainians, they were forcibly deported en masse from their Carpathian homeland in 1947 and scattered throughout the former German lands of post-1945 western and northern Poland.9 It is ironic to note the advantages that accrued to the governments in question through their use - or, more properly, misuse - of the name Ukrainian. For example, by declaring that the population was Ukrainian, this allowed the Soviet Union to justify the annexation in 1945 of Subcarpathian Rus', a territory that throughout the war it had agreed should be returned to Czechoslovakia. Nationalist ideology could now conveniently serve Stalin's political designs on the international stage. In any case, how could the Soviet worker's state refuse the request of fellow "Ukrainian workers" in Transcarpathia who "voluntarily" were demanding to be united with the "Mother Ukraine"? 9 The actual deportations took place in two phases. Between 1945 and 1946, about 200,000 Lemko Rusyns "voluntarily" took up the offer to resettle eastward in the Ukraine in exchange for Poles who moved west within the new postwar boundaries of Poland . The remaining 80,000 Lemko Rusyns , mostly in the western Lemko region , were forcibly deported in 1947 . For details, see Kazimierz Pudlo , Lemkowie: process wrastania w ~rodowisko Dolnego Sl{lska, 1947-1985 (Wroclaw: Polskie Towarszystwo Ludoznawcze, 1987), esp . pp. 24-34. �SLOVAKIA 45 In neighboring Poland, identification of Lemkos as Ukrainians made it easier for the government to deport them, since the Communist Polish government argued that, as "Ukrainians," the Lemkos were helping the anti-Communist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) under Stepan Bandera, which was held up in the Carpathians and still fighting the Polish and Soviet authorities after the end of World War II. South of the mountains in Czechoslovakia, the administrative imposition of a Ukrainian identity beginning in 1952 proved to be advantageous to those Slovaks who had always claimed that "their Rusnaks" were really "Slovaks of the Greek Catholic faith. 1110 In essence, forced Ukrainianization (combined with the liquidation of the local Greek Catholic Church and forced collectivization of peasant land) led during the 1950s and 1960s to the most rapid degree of Slovakization and national assimilation that Rusyns had ever experienced. It is nonetheless true that during this same period, the Czechoslovak government provided extensive funding to create a wide range of cultural organizations that were Ukrainian in national form but socialist in content. A well-paid local Ukrainian intelligentsia was even able to attain several significant scholarly and literary achievements. However, this had little real effect upon the Rusyn peasant masses in Slovakia. For them, the choice was simple: if one could not be a Rusyn, better declare oneself a Slovak than a Ukrainian (which among other things was associated with the hated East). Once again Yugoslavia was the exception. The government there provided both funding and legal guarantees, while the local intelligentsia decided to adopt a Rusyn orientation and to develop the local speech into a sociologically-complete Rusyn literary language. In fact, Rusyns became one of the five official nationalities in the lO Beginning already in 1945, new Rusyn political and cultural organizations carried the name Ukrainian . However, despite their name, they paradoxically functioned using Russian or vernacular Rusyn as the language of instruction and communication. In 1952, a decree of the Communist Party of Slovakia initiated a policy of Ukrainianization that banned use of the term Rusyn and replaced Russian with Ukrainian as the language of instruction in schools . For details, see Pavel Macu, "National Assimilation: The Case of the Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia," East-Central Europe, II, 2 (Pittsburgh, 1975), pp. 101-131. �46 SLOVAKIA autonomous province of the Vojvodina. Yet Yugoslavia was the exception that proved the rule. And the rule was that after 1945, Rusyns ceased to exist. All Soviet, Czechoslovak, and Polish documents and publications referred to the population only as Ukrainian.1 1 Publications in the West, both by Ukrainian emigre and North American Soviet and East European specialists, also accepted the view that Rusyns did not exist, or to quote the New Columbia Encyclopedia (1975): "There is no ethnic or linguistic distinction between Ukrainians and Ruthenians [Rusyns] ." "The majority of the population [of Transcarpathia] is Ukrainian." 12 The Current Situation Then came the 1980s. The first signs of change came in Poland, where the Lemko Rusyns - both those who were dispersed in the "West" of that country as well as about 10,000 who had managed to return to the Carpathian homeland - began to gather at annual cultural festivals. These "unofficial" festivals received no government financial support, but by the same token they were not under any ideological control. As a result, the Lemkos began to revive the idea that they were neither Poles nor Ukrainians, but rather part of a distinct Slavic people closely related to Rusyns living south of the mountains in Slovakia. The Lemkos seemed to be acting in isolation and for several years that was , indeed, the case.1 3 Later came the changes brought about by the November 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. New initiative committees were founded that were often dominated by individuals who had not 11 Whereas the idea of a Rusyn nationality in the Carpathians was not recognized by schools and official circles in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, they have recognized the Rusyns (Rusnaks) of Yugoslavia as a distinct ethnic group with its own literary language . Cf. A.E. Suprun and A .M. Kaljuta, Vvedenie v slavjanskuju filologiju (Minsk: Vy§ej§aja §kola, 1981), pp . 137-139. 12 "Ruthenia," in the New Columbia Encyclopedia , ed. William H. Harris and Judith S. Levey, eds. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 2383. l3 On the Lemko-Rusyn revival, see the series of articles in the Carpatho-Rusyn American, X and XI (Fairview, NJ ., 1987-88). �SLOVAKIA 47 been associated with the Communist regime. At first, the initiative committees tried to transform (they would say democratize) the older Ukrainian organizations, but when that failed they established their own Rusyn organizations and publications. At the very same time, in neighboring Transcarpathia, the first Rusyn-oriented organization to exist anywhere in Carpathian Rus' since World War II was established in February 1990 in the oblast's administrative center of Uzhorod. Known as the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns (Tovarystvo Karpats'kych Rusyniv) and with branches throughout Transcarpathia, its goals were at first of a cultural and ecological nature - to promote and preserve knowledge of local history and customs. But before long, the Society moved on to political demands, in particular the recognition of Rusyn as a distinct nationality and the return of the autonomous status of Subcarpathian Rus', a status which they argued was illegally taken away in 1945. Before 1990 came to a close, a total of five new Rusyn organizations had come into existence where Rusyns live. Aside from the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns in Ukrainian Transcarpathia were the Rusyn Renaissance Society (Rusyns'ka Obroda) in Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia (est. March 1990); the Lemko Association (Stovarysynja Lemkiv) in Legnica, Poland (est. April 1990); the Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus' (Spolecnost pratel Podkarpatske Rusi) in Prague (est. October 1990); and the Ruska Matka (Rusyn Matka) in Ruski Kerestur, Yugoslavia (est. December 1990). By the spring of 1991, a sixth one was established, this time in Hungary: the Rusyn Organization in Hungary (Magyarorszagi Ruszinok Szervezete) in Budapest (est. May 1991). Most of these organizations have their own Rusyn-language newspaper or magazine, 14 or they have access to existing publications. All five organizations have put forth basically the same demands: that Rusyns be recognized as a distinct nationality; that a Rusyn literary language be codified and eventually be used in schools as a medium of instruction; and that 14 These include: Besida (Legnica, Poland, 1989-present); Otcyj chram (Uzhorod, 1990-91); Podkarpatski Rus (Prague, 1991-present); Rusyn (Medzilaborce , Czechoslovakia, 1990-present); Narodny novyntj (Pre§ov, 1991-present). �48 SLOVAKIA Rusyns be guaranteed full rights as a national minority in the countries where they live or, in the case of Transcarpathia, that Rusyns be recognized as the dominant indigenous nationality. As in all new or revived movements, the Rusyn orientation must first be able to make itself known to the constituency it purports to represent. This is inherently problematic, because with the exception of Yugoslavia, nowhere do Rusyns control the local media. Their message, or at least an awareness of their movement's existence, has been helped less by their own publications than by the fierce polemics that have filled the non-Rusyn press in Poland, former Czechoslovakia, and most especially former Soviet Transcarpathia. This is because from the moment the first Rusyn activity began, local pro-Ukrainian activists attacked the Rusyn orientation as "anachronistic," "ahistorical," "unenlightened," "in the service of American imperialists," and "treacherous" to the Ukrainian nation. 15 As a result, more attention of a semi-sensationalist journalistic nature was given the Rusyn problem than might otherwise have been the case. The Czech and Slovak press also paid much - although more rational - attention to the Rusyn-Ukrainian debate, especially in the context of the nationality question that concerned Czechoslovak society as a whole. Whatever latent isolation Rusyn leaders in their respective countries may have still felt was overcome in March 1991, when, at the initiative of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, the first World Congress of Rusyns was convened in Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia. Indeed, despite a history of interaction between Rusyn communities in the homeland as well as the immigration in America during the twentieth century, this was, in fact, the first time representatives from all countries where Rusyns live (Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, 15 The best (or worst) examples of the anti-Rusyn polemical attacks comes from scholars in the former Soviet Ukrainian intellectual establishment: Pavlo Cucka, "Kak rusiny stali ukraincami," Zakarpatskaja pravda (U:lhorod), September 12-16, 1989; Vasyl' Mel'nyk, "Neorusynstvo i joho interpretatory," Zakarpats'ka pravda (U:lhorod), August 18, 21, 22, 24, 1990; Jurij Balega, "Rusynstvo: ideolohy i pokrovyteli," ibid., September 6,7 ,9, 1990; and Oleksa Myfanyc, "To chto :le vony?: do idejnych vytokiv novitn'oho 'karpatorusynstva'," Literatuma Ukrajina (Kiev), January 17, 1991. �SLOVAKIA 49 Yugoslavia, the United States) gathered together in one place. The congress constituted itself as a permanent umbrella organization, and its very existence had an enormous impact on instilling Rusyn national pride in the over 300 persons who attended, not to mention innumerable others who read about it through the generally widespread press coverage.1 6 It is interesting to note that one week after the congress took place, Czechoslovakia conducted its decennial census in which people for the first time since World War II had the right to answer that they were of Rusyn nationality. Despite problems with the manner in which the nationality questionwas asked and subsequently classified, in Slovakia 17,000 persons responded they were Rusyns as compared to 14,000 Ukrainians. 17 This raises the question of numbers. Observers will legitimately ask just how many people identify as Rusyns? And even among those who do respond Rusyn, does use of such a term necessarily mean they are denying a possible simultaneous identification as Ukrainians? At this point, there is no way to know the precise answers to those questions. All we know is that in Slovakia, when given a chance in March 1991, of those people of East Slavic background who did not identify as Slovak and who had the choice between a Rusyn or Ukrainian identity, 55 percent chose Rusyn. As for the number of Rusyns in Poland and Ukrainian Transcarpathia, we simply do not know at this stage, nor do we have any indications, such as census data, scientific polling, or membership in political parties, that might help to provide a reasonable estimate. What we can be certain of, however, is that after forty years of Communist rule, Rusyns have not gone away. Today, there are Rusyn organizations, Rusyn publications, and a relatively wide range of writers, teachers, professionals, and peasants who continue to articulate in the press and at public manifestations their belonging 16 Information on the First World Congress as well as its official declaration are found in the Carpatho--Rusyn American , XIV, 2 and 3 (Fairview, NJ., 1991). pp . 7-9 and 8-9. 17 Mykola Mu§ynka, "Skil'ky rusyniv-ukrajinciv u Slovaccyni? ," Svoboda (Jersey City, NJ.), July 19, 1991. �50 SLOVAKIA to a distinct Rusyn people.1 8 Protection for Rusyns in the Future As with many minorities, the future of their survival depends on the willingness of the governments in the states where they live to provide them with adequate legal protection and perhaps financial assistance for their national development. In this regard, the Rusyns need to inform and constantly to remind the international community that they exist. In tum, Rusyns should be able to expect that the international community will monitor their status and, if necessary, put pressure on the governments of the Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia, in order to ensure that their national rights are protected. In fact, all four states in which Rusyns live have already ratified several agreements pertaining to national minorities at recent meetings of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Of particular importance for Rusyns were the decisions reached in·June 1990 at the Copenhagen meeting of the CSCE .. At Copenhagen it was agreed that "to belong to a national minority is a matter of a person's individual choice and no disadvantage may arise from the exercise of such choice." Moreover, "persons belonging to national minorities can exercise and enjoy their rights individually as well as in community with other members of their group. 1119 This means that regardless how scholars or governments might define Rusyns, if there are individuals and/or groups who call themselves by that name and who believe they constitute a distinct natio18 Among the best known of these to date are: in Transcarpathia , the writers Volodymyr Fedyny§ynec', Ivan Petrovcij, and Vasylij Socka, and the political activists Mychajlo Tomcanij, Petro Hodma§, and Vasyl' Zajac; in Czechoslovakia, the head of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, Vasyl' Turok, and the advisor to the Slovak government on nationality affairs, Ivan Bicko, and the editor Aleksander Zozuljak; in Poland, the poets Petro Trochanovskij and Olena Due , and the head of the Lemko Association , Andrij Kopca; and in Yugoslavia, the director of the Ruske Slovo publishing house, Ljubomir Medje§i, and the writers Djura Papharhaj and Natalja Duda§. 19 Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (Copenhagen, 1990), pp. 40--41, paragraphs 32 and 32.6. �SLOVAKIA 51 nality , they have a right to do so and to be recognized as Rusyns by the governments of the countries in which they live. The Copenhagen agreement also recognized the role of non-governmental organizations in promoting the interests of national minorities, and it called on the participating states to assure that the teaching of history and culture in the educational establishments "will also take account of the history and culture of national minorities. 1120 At a follow-up CSCE meeting in Geneva (July 1991), member states accepted the provisions of a special report which guaranteed the right of national minorities to participate in non-governmental organizations outside their country of residence. The report reaffirmed as well the principle that individuals or organizations representing national minorities be allowed "unimpeded contacts ... across frontiers ... with persons with whom they share a common ethnic or national origin." 21 Finally, at the most recent CSCE meeting held in Moscow (September-October 1991), member states reaffirmed the agreements reached at all previous meetings and agreed further that "commitments undertaken in the field of the human dimension of the CSCE [including those pertaining to national minorities] are matters of direct legitimate concern to all participating States and do not belong exclusively to the internal affairs of the State concemed." 22 Before looking specifically at what Rusyns need in each country to protect and guarantee their future existence, it is necessary to clarify the issue of international boundaries. In the Carpathian homeland, Rusyns live within the borders of three states, and at least until late 1992 there was discussion in the Czech , Slovak, and Transcarpathian press about certain political activists who demanded the return of Ukraine's Transcarpathian oblast (historic Subcarpathian Rus') to Czechoslovakia. 23 There was even talk that Transcarpathia 20 Ibid., p. 41 , paragraph 34. 21 Report of the CSCE Meeting of Experts on National Minorities (Geneva , 1991) , p. 10 . 22 Document of the Moscow Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (Moscow, 1991 ), p. 2. 23 The Republican party in Czechoslovakia led by Dr. Miroslav SIMek had as one of its goals the "return of Subcarpathian Rus"' to Czechoslovakia. "Zpl!t do Ceskoslovenska," Republika (Prague), October 18-24, 1990; "Rozhovor s pi'edsedou SPR- �52 SLOVAKIA might be returned to Hungary or divided between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In fact, most of these propositions were little more than the speculations of individuals that were blown out of proportion by political rivals and by journalists seeking to report a good story .24 The Czecho--Slovak federal government publicly declared that it "cannot be concerned with the fate" of Transcarpathia.25 With the end of Czechoslovakia in December 1992, the question of unification has become moot. As for the Rusyn organizations that have come into existence in 1990, none of them nor the World Congress of Rusyns that met in 1991 has ever voiced any demand for border changes. On the contrary, all the new organizations as well as· the vast majority of Rusyn spokespersons wherever they live warn against tampering with existing international boundaries. On the other hand, the Society of Carpatho--Rusyns in Transcarpathia has called openly for the return of the status of automony that Subcarpathian Rus' did enjoy during the interwar years. 26 In order to determine the views of the local population, the society, joined by other minority organizations, called for a question on Transcarpathian autonomy to be added to the referendum on Ukrainian indeRS, Ph Dr. Miroslavem Shidkem," ibid., August, 1991. The head of the National Socialist party, C. Cejka, stated that Czechoslovak jurisdiction still applies to Subcarpathian Rus' . "NSS chtc!jf Podkarpatskou Rus, "Lidova demokracie (Prague), September 3, 1991. 24 Jaromfr Hoi'ec of the Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus' in Prague and wellknown publicist has written about the recent political activism in Transcarpathia in numerous articles in the Czech press, which imply that the local population would be sympathetic to re-unification with Czechoslovakia. Cf. his recent articles in Lidova demokracie (Prague): "Freedom for Subcarpathian Rus"' (September 7, 1991); "Czechs in Subcarpathia" (September 18, 1991); and "Subcarpathia Calls For an Independent Republic" (September 20, 1991). The Hungarian press has also followed closely the demands for Transcarpathian autonomy: "Ruszin koztlirsaslig Klirplitaljlin, "Magyar hfrlap (Budapest), September 10, 1991; "A ruszinok kovetelese: Jegyen Klirplitalja koztlirsaslig! , "Nap/6 (Debrecen), September 3, 1991. 25 The quote is attributed to Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, Jiff Dienstbier, in "Svobodu pro Podkarpatskou Rus," Lidova demokracie, September 9, 1991. 26 The text of the declaration, which was sent to the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev , to the Supreme Soviets of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR, and to the United Nations, appeared first in the Society's newspaper, Otey} chram (SeptemberOctober, 1990) . It is available in English translation in the Carpatho-Rusyn American, XIV, 1 (Fairview , NJ., 1991), pp 4-5 . �SLOVAKIA 53 pendence that was held on December 1, 1991 .27 There was a large voter tum-out, with 92.6 percent favoring Ukrainian independence and 78 percent self-rule for Transcarpathia. 28 The issue of Transcarpathian autonomy elicited great interest in neighboring countries, although this is, in fact, an internal issue for whatever kind of government and state structure is finally established in what until recently was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In short, Transcarpathia has been and should for the foreseeable future remain a part of Ukraine. However, as a sovereign member of the international community, Ukraine must, in tum, guarantee the individual and corporate rights of Rusyns - or those citizens of Ukraine who wish to call themselves Rusyns. It is true that the Ukrainian government has already provided guarantees for national minorities living on its territory: Russians, Jews, Poles, Germans, Tatars, etc. To this list must be added Rusyns. This would mean that the "official," or one might say traditional, Ukrainian view of the Rusyns has to change. Namely, Ukrainian authorities must accept the fact that within its boundaries, primarily in its Transcarpathian oblast, there are people who define themselves as Rusyns in the sense of a nationality distinct from Ukrainians. Such people should have the right to declare themselves in their passports and internal documents as Rusyns, and the state census bureau should publish data on the number of persons who identify as Rusyns and not simply classify them - as has been done until now - as Ukrainians. 29 If such guarantees are 27 "Rezoljucija mityngu Tovarystva Karpats'kych Rusyniv z pytannja nacional'noho vidrod!ennja rusyns'koho narodu i vidnovlennja statusu Pidkarpats'koho kraju , Mukacevo, 01.09.1991," Molod' Zakarpattja (Uzhorod), September 14, 1991, p. 4. 28 Paul Robert Magocsi, "Rusyns Regain Their Autonomy," Ukrainian Canadian Herald (Toronto), March 16, 1992, p. 7. 29 Soviet guidelines used by the State Committee for Statistics in order to classify answers in the census reports were determined largely on recommendations from authorities in individual republics as well as from the Institute of Ethnography and the Institute of Linguistics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. SeeSJovari nacional'nostej i jazykov dlja kodirovanija otvetov na 8 i 9 voprosy perepisnych Jistov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyj komitet SSSR po statistike, 1988). It is interesting to note that a recent report by the Institute of Ethnography (No. 14110/2171, dated February 6, 1990) stated: "It is theoretically possible to con- �54 SLOVAKIA provided, there is no reason why Rusyns in Transcarpathia could not remain Rusyns as well as function as full-fledged citizens of a sovereign and democratic Ukrainian state. Indeed, independent Ukraine has recently become a member of the Conference in Security and Cooperation in Europe, which obliges it to accept and implement the principles of the Copenhagen and other agreements on national minorities outlined above. Following the trend that has taken hold in the former Soviet Union, it would seem desirable that the new Ukrainian state become a decentralized entity in which each of its component regions would have a large degree of automony in economic and cultural matters .30 Thus, questions such as what language might be taught in elementary schools, or what kind of national orientation should be adopted by regional cultural and educational institutions, or what amount of funding might be given to Rusyn-oriented groups, are all decisions that would be made by the people's assembly in Uzhorod and not in Kiev. Of course, it goes without saying that the free movement of peoples across borders with neighboring Rusyn regions in Slovakia and Poland must be guaranteed. Fortunately, this possibility exists already, albeit with a waiting time at border crossings that every day of the week averages between 15 and 20 hours. As for neighboring Slovakia, the situation of Rusyns, especially since the November 1989 Velvet Revolution, is much better than in either Ukrainian Transcarpathia or Poland. Initially, the Slovak government (generally through its Ministry of Culture) and the former Czecho-Slovak federal government (through allotment of discretionary funds) provided only ad hoc grants to the new Rusyn organizations and publications. Normal budgetary allotments of the Slovak government intended for its East Slavic Rusyn/Ukrainian elude that Rusyns can be considered at the same level as Russians , Ukrainians , and Belorussians, and that they are not a part of any of those groups ." (document in the author's possession) . 30 Discussions regarding the restructuring of the Ukraine have been going on for the past few years . Neighbouring Galicia as well as Transcarpathia feel confident that each could do much better economically if it were independent of the centre in Kiev . Cf. Ivan Hrancak, "Vidnovleni haluzky karpats'koho kraju : Ukrajina federatyvna?," No vyny Zakarpattja (Uzhorod), February 6, 1991 . �SLOVAKIA 55 minority continued to go to the Union of Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia (SRUC), that is, to the Ukrainian-oriented cultural organization that is the direct descendant (still with largely the same leadership) as the formerly Communist-dominated Cultural Union of Ukrainian Workers (KSUT). Slovak government funding through other ministries also supported in Presov several Ukrainian university departments and institutes at Safarik University , a Ukrainian radio station, and a Ukrainian publishing house, as well as the Museum of Ukrainian Culture (recently renamed the Aleksander Pavlovy Regional Museum) in Svidnik. As of 1993 , two Rusyn-oriented organizations also receive a normal budgetary allotment. These include the Aleksander Duchnovyc Theater (formerly the Ukrainian National Theater) which is of a Rusyn orientation and the Rusyn Renasissance Society (Rusyns'ka Obroda), both based in Presov. The Slovak government now recognizes that there are two clearly-defined national orientations - Rusyn and Ukrainian - and that if support for national minorities is to continue in Slovakia, then funding should be provided to Rusyn as well as Ukrainian organizations. But how should the government divide a financial allotment among its East Slavic minority, which until recently has been designated only as Ukrainian? The Slovak government has opted for what seems the most reasonable solution. It has accepted the percentages revealed in the results of the 1991 census, and, therefore, has provided roughly 50 percent financial support to Rusyn cultural organizations and media and 50 percent to Ukrainian cultural organizations, schools, and its media. The question of schools in Slovakia is particularly problematic, because beginning in the 1960s the language of instruction in the vast majority of Rusyn-inhabited villages was changed - at the request of parents themselves - from Ukrainian to Slovak. Moreover, as part of a consolidation process during the past two decades, many small elementary schools in Rusyn-inhabited villages were closed. Even if private or public elementary schools will be reopened in Rusyn villages, it is likely that Slovak will be the language of instruction. The Slovak ministry of education, however, should �56 SLOVAKIA provide teachers and textbooks in Rusyn or in Ukrainian for those villages that may submit such requests. Most important, the standard Slovak-language history textbooks used throughout Slovakia should include an adequate discussion of the history and culture of Rusyns and other minorities which will be of benefit to all students. This would be in keeping with the CSCE agreement reached in Copenhagen, which - along with other "international treaties on human rights and freedoms" - are, according to the new consitution of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, "universally binding on its territory and supercede its own laws."31 The Rusyns, or Lemko Rusyns of Poland perhaps need the most help. Not only is the majority of Lemko Rusyns scattered throughout the western and northern regions of Poland, but their fledgling pro-Rusyn organization, the Lemko Association with its amateur theatrical troupe, and the older Lemkovyna folk ensemble receive no financial support at all from the Polish government, either in the form of an annual budgetary allotment or ad hoc grants. Whatever government funds assigned to national minority cultural activity are given, they invariably go to the Union of Ukrainians in Poland (Ob'jednannja Ukrajinciv Pollsci), the direct descendant of the Communist-dominated Ukrainian Socio-Cultural Society (USKT). Support for the new Union of Ukrainians must continue, especially since most Ukrainians in Poland are not originally from nor do they live in the Carpathian region. On the otherhand, Lemko Rusyns must also be recognized as a distinct national minority and receive a fair share of funding. How to determine what is a "fair share" will, of course, be difficult, since Poland does not even have nationality as a category on its decennial census questionnaires. Perhaps a referendum attached to the next national vote could include a question that lists all the national groups in Poland and asks the respondent to which one he/she would wish to assign a portion of their taxes for cultural 31 Cf. Section 2 of the Constitutional Act of January 9, 1991, instituting the charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms as a Constitutional Act of the Federal Assembly of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic . �SLOVAK.IA 57 activity. This would be somewhat similar to municipalities in Canada that ask their residents to indicate whether they want their tax dollars to be assigned to public schools or to separate (Catholic) schools. Whatever the mechanism decided upon, in keeping with its commitments as a member state of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Polish government is obliged to recognize Lernko Rusyns as a distinct national minority and to provide funding for Lernko cultural organizations and Lernko-language schools in those communities that demand them. Lastly, we turn to the situation in Yugoslavia. Ever since World War II, the Yugoslav policy of equality for its six component republics and support for the national minorities that live within them has encouraged the Croatian Republic and, in particular, the Vojvodina Autonomous Region of the Serbian Republic to finance liberally Rusyn cultural and educational activity. It is to be expected that when the republics of Yugoslavia sort out their present difficulties, the republics of Croatia and, in particular, Serbia will continue their judicious support and protection of their respective Rusyn minorities. Conclusion The Rusyns are one example of the many groups who suffered under the totalitarian regimes imposed on East Central Europe during the past four decades. Now that those regimes no longer exist, there is a real opportunity to correct past injustices and to assure the future survival of the Rusyns. It is, after all, in the interest of all four countries where Rusyns live - Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia - to become part of the larger European community. The way in which those countries resolve the Rusyn issue will, in part, determine to what degree they are ready for membership in the new Europe. ��SYMPOSIUM �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1991-92, Vol. 35 Description An account of the resource Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Slovak League of America Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available 1991-92 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 36 Carpatho-Rusyns: Their Current Status And Future Perspectives PAUL ROBERT MAGOSCI Who Are The Rusyns? In 1875, geographers from the old Hungarian Kingdom erected a monument in a remote region of their country that carried the following inscription: "Precise instruments have confirmed this point where the latitude and longitude lines meet as the center of Europe." 1 Just over a century later, in 1977, the former Soviet authorities, who had by then ruled the area, erected a second monument to mark the center of the continent that stretches from the Arctic shores of Norway in the north to the beaches of Crete in the south, and from the coast of Ireland in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east. The precise center where the monuments are located is near the village of Dilove (formerly Trebusany) in the foothills of the northcentral Carpathian Mountains that from time immemorial has been inhabited by an East Slavic people called Carpatho-Rusyns, or simply Rusyns (sometimes in English: Ruthenians). Thus, in geographic terms, the Rusyns are not a peripheral group, but rather one whose homeland - Carpathian Rus 1 - is located literally in the heart of Europe. According to present day international boundaries, Rusyns live in more or less compact territory within the boundaries of four 1For a description, see Fedor Korecki, "Stredok Evropi-na Homjici," Nova dumka , VIII (21] (Vukovar, Yugoslavia, 1979), pp . 101-102. SLOVAKIA 37 countries: Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, and Romania. There is also a small group of Rusyns in Yugoslavia, descendants of immigrants who left the Carpathian homeland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Statistical data on Rusyns is, depending on the country, inadequate or completely unavailable. Therefore, we can only speak in theoretical terms when discussing numbers . In theory, the number of Rusyns could be as high as 1.2 million people: 977 ,000 in the Transcarpathian oblast (former Subcarpathian Rus') of the Ukraine; 130,000 in the Presov Region of northeastern Slovakia; 60,000 in the Lemko Region of southeastern Poland as well as in other parts of that country; and 30,000 in the Vojvodina (Backa) and the Croatian republic of former Yugoslavia.2 The Problem of Nomenclature It is important to keep in mind what is meant by the term Rusyn. Traditionally, the name Rusyn, or its local variant Rusnak, has been used by the East Slavic inhabitants of the Carpathian region to describe themselves. However, by the twentieth century, in particular its second half, the historic names Rusyn/Rusnak were replaced by others, such as Ukrainian in Soviet Transcarpathia and the Presov Region of Slovakia, or Lemko in Poland . There are also Rusyns who have given up identifying with any East Slavic group, and instead associate with the dominant nationality of the country in which 2Since World War II, Rusyns were recorded in official statistics only in Yugoslavia (21,000 in 1991) , Romania (1,000 in 1977), and most recently in Slovakia (17 ,000 in 1991) . "Vojvodina u tisloch i slovoch," Ruski kalendar 1992 (Novi Sad , 1991), p. 38; Anuarul statistic al Romaniei 1990 (Bucharest, 1990), p. 64; Czech and Slovak Federal Republic: Preliminary Results of Population and Housing Census (Prague, 1991), pp . 30-3 I. There are also unconfirmed reports that the final published version of the 1991 Czecho-Slovak statistics will indicate 49,000 persons in Slovakia who reported Rusyn as their mother tongue . As for the estimates given here, the figure for the Transcarpathian oblast refers to persons in that region who in the 1991 Ukrainian census were reported as Ukrainian (the term Rusyn when given by a respondant is recorded as Ukrainian). The estimates for Slovakia and Poland are from: Paul Robert Magocsi , The Rusyns of Slovakia (New York, 1993), p. 1-2 and 111-112; and his Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle , 1993) , p. 131. 38 SLOVAKIA they live, such as Polish in Poland or Slovak in Slovakia. These changes in national self-designation have in some cases come gradually , prompted either by intellectual conviction or by national assimilation, especially among families of nationally-mixed parentage. In the latter case, children often choose to identify - or are identified by their parents - with the dominant state nationality, Slovak or Polish. More often, however, the change in nomenclature has been the result of governmental decree in which the name Rusyn was banned from official usage, as was the case after 1945 in Soviet Transcarpathia and Poland and by the early 1950s in Czechoslovakia. The result is that today one can find within the same ethnolinguistic group, within the same village, in some cases even within the same family, people who will identify as a Rusyn, or a Lemko, or a Ukrainian, or a Slovak, or a Pole. Moreover, in the case of the East Slavic designations - Rusyn/Rusnak, Lemko, Ukrainian - some people consider these as synonyms, others as mutually-exclusive terms. In other words, some people will say that Rusyn is simply the older historic name for Ukrainian, and that Lemko is a regional name of Ukrainian, while others are convinced that the names Lemko or Rusnak are regional forms for Rusyn which, in tum, designates a people that is distinct from the Ukrainian and every other surrounding nationality. It should be noted that the estimated figure of 1.2 million Rusyns given above refers to all people of the same linguistic and ethnographic origin, regardless of how they designate themselves on documents such as internal identity papers, passports, or decennial censuses. Our concern here will be primarily with the present-day Rusyn movement or with that portion of the group (the precise numbers are unknown) that considers Rusyns to comprise a distinct people. Historical Background It is neither possible nor appropriate to provide here an extensive outline of Rusyn history. It is necessary, however, to keep a few historical factors in mind in order to comprehend the current SLOVAKIA 39 situation. Rusyns never had their own state or political independence. Since the Middle Ages, the Rusyn homeland was ruled by Hungary and Poland or Austria. Nonetheless, during the past century and a half, they have at various times been recognized by neighboring or ruling states as having the right to a territorial entity whose existence was justified on the grounds that it was somehow of and for Rusyns and that it would have some degree of automony or self-rule. 3 The first experience in this regard came in late 1849, when in the wake of the failure of the Hungarian revolution, the Austrian government divided Hungary into five military and several civil districts. One of the civil districts (Ungvar/Uzhorod) was based in the Subcarpathian region and administered by local Rusyn political and cultural activists . This experiment was to last only a few months. Much more important was the period of political upheaval that followed World War I. At that time, in an effort to retain Rusyninhabited lands within Hungary, the new government in Budapest created, in December 1918, an autonomous Rusyn Land (Rus'ka Krajina) that continued to function even after a pro-Soviet Communist regime came to power in March 1919.4 Simultaneously, the recently-founded Czechoslovak government was also courting the Rusyns, offering them a self-governing province to be called Rusinsko (Rusinia), or Subcarpathian Rus' (Podkarpatska Rus), if they would join the Czechs and Slovaks in their new state. In May 1919, the Rusyns accepted the Czechoslovak offer. Most significantly, the Rusyn issue had reached the international political forum , so that "the fullest degree of self-government" for "Ruthene territory south of the Carpathians" was guaranteed by two international treaties at the Paris Peace Conference (St. Germain-en-Laye, September 10, 3 For further details on Rusyn political entities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Paul Robert Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus' 1848-1948 (Cambridge, Mass .: Harvard University Press, 1978) . pp 46-47, 93-95 , and 237-245. 4soviet-Marxist literature is fond of elaborating upon the 40 days of Soviet rule in Transcarpathia. Cf. Borys Spivak and Mychajlo Trojan, 40 nezabutnich dniv: z istoriji borot'by za vladu Rad na Zakarpatti v 1919 roci (Uzhorod: Karpaty, 1967). 40 SLOVAKIA 1919, and Trianon, June 4, 1920) and by the Czechoslovak constitution (February 29, 1920). For the next two decades the vast majority of Rusyns - approximately three-fourths the total number at the time - lived in Subcarpathian Rus, a territory that was Rusyn in name, that had its own Rusyn schools, and that had all the trappings of self-rule including a governor, a partially-elected diet, a national anthem, and a national theater. Finally, in late 1938, actual autonomy was granted to Subcarpathian Rus' (by then renamed Carpatho-Ukraine). Not only had autonomy been demanded by local politicians, it was also one of the provisions of the infamous Munich Pact, which led to the restructuring of Czechoslovakia. The Carpatho-Ukraine was to function for nearly half a year until the complete liquidation of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The twentieth century also witnessed three short-lived efforts at Rusyn independence. The first of these came in 1919, when after being unsuccessful in their bid to join fellow Rusyns south of the mountains, the Lernkos living in the former Austrian province of Galicia created an independent republic that functioned for sixteen months before its government was arrested in March 1920, by the authorities of Poland, which became the new ruler over Rusyn lands north of the Carpathians.5 At the same time, along the eastern edge of Subcarpathian territory a regional ethnic group known as Hutsuls established their own republic which lasted four months (FebruaryJune 1919) before being driven out by troops from Romania. The last unsuccessful attempt came two decades later, when the Carpatho-Ukrainian autonomous government declared symbolically its independence on the last day of Czechoslovakia's existence (March 15, 1939) before the province was invaded and reannexed to Hungary .6 The point is that although Rusyns may never have had their 5 On the little-known Lemko Republic and its relationship to political thought in the western Ukrainian lands, see Paul Robert Magocsi,"The Ukrainian Question Between Poland and Czechoslovakia: The Lernko Rusyn Republic (1918-1920) and Political Thought in Western Rus'-Ukraine," Nationalities Papers (New York, forthcoming) . 6 Ukrainian-oriented emigres from Carpatho-Ukraine have put great stress on the SLOVAKIA 41 own state, they did have for a significant period of time in the twentieth century the experience - and therefore historical memory - of their own political entity, Subcarpathian Rus', which was recognized both by the state in which they lived (Czechoslovakia) and by the international community (Paris Peace Conference, League of Nations). Although the Rusyn homeland is located in the geographical center of Europe, it is at the same time along a cultural borderland. It is along that great divide between the Catholic West and Orthodox East, what Riccardo Picchio has classified in the broadest cultural terms as Slavia romana and Slavia orthodoxa.7 Located where they are, this division has had a profound effect on the Rusyn psyche. The very language or series of dialects that Rusyns speak reflect the influences of both cultural spheres. Thus, while their speech clearly belongs to the realm of East Slavic languages, much of their vocabulary, pronounciational stress, and even syntax is West Slavic. The cultural divide is most graphically evident in what is for traditional Rusyn culture the all-important factor of religion. Some Rusyns are Orthodox, but the majority, at least during the past two centuries, is Catholic, or more precisely Greek Catholic. These confessional differences reflect a whole mind-set that is either western - or eastern-oriented. The eastern mind-set tends to surrender the self to fate in the hope that the Christian God and his intercessors, Christ and the Virgin Mary, might somehow alleviate the burdens of this earthly life. In contrast, the western mind-set seems March I 5, I 939 declaration of independence, arguing that it revealed how the Ukrainian orientation had supposedly won the hearts and minds of the entire population even before the Soviets arrived in the region in late 1944 . Cf. Peter G. Stercho, Diplomacy of Double Morality: Europe's Crossroads in Carpatho- Ukraine , 1919-1939 (New York: Carpathian Research Centre , 1971) . This view is also being promoted in the Ukraine since the onset of the Gorbachev era. See the minutes of the RUCH meeting held in the former Carpathi-Ukrainian capitol of Chust to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of the one-day of independence: "4 sesija Velykoji Rady Ruchu," Visnyk Ruchu, no . 4 (Kiev, 1990). 7Riccardo Picchio, "Guidelines for the Comparative Study of the Language Question Among the Slavs," in Aspects of the Slavic Language Question, Vol.I, ed. Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt (New Haven , Conn .: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies, 1984), pp. 1-42. 42 SLOVAKIA to feel that if an individual receives education or political training, he or she can somehow put their lives in order and, therefore, be able to have some control over destiny . The east-west dichotomy in the Rusyn psyche also impinges on attitudes toward nationai identity. The eastern orientation tends to think in universalistic terms and be satisfied with viewing Rusyns as part of a single East Slavic Orthodox religious and cultural world. The western orientation - epitomized by the very distinctiveness of Greek Catholics from other Catholics - accepts the idea of national and linguistic particularity. Universalism versus particularism are attitudes that greatly influenced Rusyn political and cultural leaders , especially regarding the nationality question. Being a stateless people, Rusyns have had, at least until the second half of the twentieth century , to depend on their leaders, the intelligentsia, to determine the precise direction of their national revival . The Rusyn national revival began during the second half of the nineteenth century and culminated during the interwar years, by which time it had evolved into a comprehensive movement concerned with political, cultural, and social issues. Most of the nationalist intelligentsia did agree on one basic premise: that Rusyns are East Slavs and that their linguistic and cultural traditions were based in the east, albeit with pronounced western influences. What they could not agree upon, however, was whether Rusyns were a branch of the Russian nationality, or of the Ukrainian nationality, or whether they formed a distinct fourth East Slavic Rusyn nationality. Not surprisingly, debates about national and linguistic orientation quickly became caught up in local partisan politics. Politicians had their own agendas, and they more often than not made opportunistic use of the nationality question in order to promote party or other ideological interests. As for the nationalist intelligentsia, they easily fulfilled the precepts of all activists in the formative stages of national movements. Namely, they had no difficulty using history to formulate an ideology that was able to convince people they were either Russian, SLOVAKIA 43 Ukrainian, or Rusyn. 8 The debate over the national orientation of the Rusyns was not yet resolved before the outbreak of World War II, despite the achievements during the interwar years of the Ukrainian orientation in the largest Rusyn territory , Subcarpathian Rus' (Carpath~Ukraine). In a sense, the year 1939 marked an end to the natural evolution of discussions about a Rusyn nationality. This is because beginning in that year and lasting for half a century, the nationality debate was effectively stifled by state intervention. This happened first under fascist regimes in Hungary(which reannexed Subcarpathian Rus'), in Slovakia (which retained the Presov Region), and in the Germanruled Generalgouvernement (which ruled the Lemko Region); and then as a result of Soviet rule after 1945, whether directly in Subcarpathian Rus' (renamed Transcarpathian Ukraine) or through proSoviet Communist governments in Poland and Czechoslovakia. As is well known, the Communist era with its anti-democratic approach to the nationality question was to last until the revolutions of 1989 and 1991. The only exception was the case of the small group of Rusyns in the Vojvodina region of Yugoslavia. Although a Communist regime was installed in their land as well, the Yugoslav government allowed the Vojvodinian Rusyns to decide their own national orientation. This was not to be the case for the Rusyns living in the Carpathian homeland. In short, the Soviet regime declared that further debate was unnecessary because the nationality question had supposedly been resolved long ago. Based on a decision made by the Communist party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine taken in December 8Generally, the Russian-oriented intelligentsia, or Russophiles, were Orthodox adherents or sympathizers who believed in the unity of Eastern Slavic Christian culture represented by three branches of the East Slavs - Great Russians , Belorussians, and Little Russians (including Carpatho-Rusyns) - all considered to be part of one common Russian (ob§cerusskiJ) nationality . The Ukrainian--0riented and Rusyn--0riented intelligentsias were western--0riented Greek Catholics who believed in various degrees of national and/or regional differentiation - the Ukrainophiles arguing for the unity of one people that stretched "from the Carpathians to the Caucasus"; the Rusynophiles arguing that the Rus' population in the Carpathians (from the Poprad to Tysa rivers) comprises a separate people. 44 SLOVAKIA 1925, all Rusyns , regardless what they may have called themselves, were declared to be Ukrainians. Any who opposed the Ukrainian viewpoint were accused of having "anti-historical" and, therefore, "anti-Soviet" opinions; they often were removed from their jobs; and they might even have been arrested as "counterrevolutionaries." Closely connected with these developments was the liquidation first in Soviet Transcarpathia (1949) and then in Czechoslovakia (1950) of the Greek Catholic Church, which by the mid-twentieth century had become the stronghold of the Rusyn orientation. When Communist regimes were established in Poland (1945) and Czechoslovakia (1948), they adapted the Soviet line and decreed that the Ru syn minorities within their borders were Ukrainians. They forbade Rusyn publications and the use of the name Rusyn in official documents. The situation was particularly bad in Poland. Not only were the Lemko Rusyns declared to be Ukrainians, they were forcibly deported en masse from their Carpathian homeland in 1947 and scattered throughout the former German lands of post-1945 western and northern Poland.9 It is ironic to note the advantages that accrued to the governments in question through their use - or, more properly, misuse - of the name Ukrainian. For example, by declaring that the population was Ukrainian, this allowed the Soviet Union to justify the annexation in 1945 of Subcarpathian Rus', a territory that throughout the war it had agreed should be returned to Czechoslovakia. Nationalist ideology could now conveniently serve Stalin's political designs on the international stage. In any case, how could the Soviet worker's state refuse the request of fellow "Ukrainian workers" in Transcarpathia who "voluntarily" were demanding to be united with the "Mother Ukraine"? 9 The actual deportations took place in two phases. Between 1945 and 1946, about 200,000 Lemko Rusyns "voluntarily" took up the offer to resettle eastward in the Ukraine in exchange for Poles who moved west within the new postwar boundaries of Poland . The remaining 80,000 Lemko Rusyns , mostly in the western Lemko region , were forcibly deported in 1947 . For details, see Kazimierz Pudlo , Lemkowie: process wrastania w ~rodowisko Dolnego Sl{lska, 1947-1985 (Wroclaw: Polskie Towarszystwo Ludoznawcze, 1987), esp . pp. 24-34. SLOVAKIA 45 In neighboring Poland, identification of Lemkos as Ukrainians made it easier for the government to deport them, since the Communist Polish government argued that, as "Ukrainians," the Lemkos were helping the anti-Communist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) under Stepan Bandera, which was held up in the Carpathians and still fighting the Polish and Soviet authorities after the end of World War II. South of the mountains in Czechoslovakia, the administrative imposition of a Ukrainian identity beginning in 1952 proved to be advantageous to those Slovaks who had always claimed that "their Rusnaks" were really "Slovaks of the Greek Catholic faith. 1110 In essence, forced Ukrainianization (combined with the liquidation of the local Greek Catholic Church and forced collectivization of peasant land) led during the 1950s and 1960s to the most rapid degree of Slovakization and national assimilation that Rusyns had ever experienced. It is nonetheless true that during this same period, the Czechoslovak government provided extensive funding to create a wide range of cultural organizations that were Ukrainian in national form but socialist in content. A well-paid local Ukrainian intelligentsia was even able to attain several significant scholarly and literary achievements. However, this had little real effect upon the Rusyn peasant masses in Slovakia. For them, the choice was simple: if one could not be a Rusyn, better declare oneself a Slovak than a Ukrainian (which among other things was associated with the hated East). Once again Yugoslavia was the exception. The government there provided both funding and legal guarantees, while the local intelligentsia decided to adopt a Rusyn orientation and to develop the local speech into a sociologically-complete Rusyn literary language. In fact, Rusyns became one of the five official nationalities in the lO Beginning already in 1945, new Rusyn political and cultural organizations carried the name Ukrainian . However, despite their name, they paradoxically functioned using Russian or vernacular Rusyn as the language of instruction and communication. In 1952, a decree of the Communist Party of Slovakia initiated a policy of Ukrainianization that banned use of the term Rusyn and replaced Russian with Ukrainian as the language of instruction in schools . For details, see Pavel Macu, "National Assimilation: The Case of the Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia," East-Central Europe, II, 2 (Pittsburgh, 1975), pp. 101-131. 46 SLOVAKIA autonomous province of the Vojvodina. Yet Yugoslavia was the exception that proved the rule. And the rule was that after 1945, Rusyns ceased to exist. All Soviet, Czechoslovak, and Polish documents and publications referred to the population only as Ukrainian.1 1 Publications in the West, both by Ukrainian emigre and North American Soviet and East European specialists, also accepted the view that Rusyns did not exist, or to quote the New Columbia Encyclopedia (1975): "There is no ethnic or linguistic distinction between Ukrainians and Ruthenians [Rusyns] ." "The majority of the population [of Transcarpathia] is Ukrainian." 12 The Current Situation Then came the 1980s. The first signs of change came in Poland, where the Lemko Rusyns - both those who were dispersed in the "West" of that country as well as about 10,000 who had managed to return to the Carpathian homeland - began to gather at annual cultural festivals. These "unofficial" festivals received no government financial support, but by the same token they were not under any ideological control. As a result, the Lemkos began to revive the idea that they were neither Poles nor Ukrainians, but rather part of a distinct Slavic people closely related to Rusyns living south of the mountains in Slovakia. The Lemkos seemed to be acting in isolation and for several years that was , indeed, the case.1 3 Later came the changes brought about by the November 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. New initiative committees were founded that were often dominated by individuals who had not 11 Whereas the idea of a Rusyn nationality in the Carpathians was not recognized by schools and official circles in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, they have recognized the Rusyns (Rusnaks) of Yugoslavia as a distinct ethnic group with its own literary language . Cf. A.E. Suprun and A .M. Kaljuta, Vvedenie v slavjanskuju filologiju (Minsk: Vy§ej§aja §kola, 1981), pp . 137-139. 12 "Ruthenia," in the New Columbia Encyclopedia , ed. William H. Harris and Judith S. Levey, eds. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 2383. l3 On the Lemko-Rusyn revival, see the series of articles in the Carpatho-Rusyn American, X and XI (Fairview, NJ ., 1987-88). SLOVAKIA 47 been associated with the Communist regime. At first, the initiative committees tried to transform (they would say democratize) the older Ukrainian organizations, but when that failed they established their own Rusyn organizations and publications. At the very same time, in neighboring Transcarpathia, the first Rusyn-oriented organization to exist anywhere in Carpathian Rus' since World War II was established in February 1990 in the oblast's administrative center of Uzhorod. Known as the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns (Tovarystvo Karpats'kych Rusyniv) and with branches throughout Transcarpathia, its goals were at first of a cultural and ecological nature - to promote and preserve knowledge of local history and customs. But before long, the Society moved on to political demands, in particular the recognition of Rusyn as a distinct nationality and the return of the autonomous status of Subcarpathian Rus', a status which they argued was illegally taken away in 1945. Before 1990 came to a close, a total of five new Rusyn organizations had come into existence where Rusyns live. Aside from the Society of Carpatho-Rusyns in Ukrainian Transcarpathia were the Rusyn Renaissance Society (Rusyns'ka Obroda) in Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia (est. March 1990); the Lemko Association (Stovarysynja Lemkiv) in Legnica, Poland (est. April 1990); the Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus' (Spolecnost pratel Podkarpatske Rusi) in Prague (est. October 1990); and the Ruska Matka (Rusyn Matka) in Ruski Kerestur, Yugoslavia (est. December 1990). By the spring of 1991, a sixth one was established, this time in Hungary: the Rusyn Organization in Hungary (Magyarorszagi Ruszinok Szervezete) in Budapest (est. May 1991). Most of these organizations have their own Rusyn-language newspaper or magazine, 14 or they have access to existing publications. All five organizations have put forth basically the same demands: that Rusyns be recognized as a distinct nationality; that a Rusyn literary language be codified and eventually be used in schools as a medium of instruction; and that 14 These include: Besida (Legnica, Poland, 1989-present); Otcyj chram (Uzhorod, 1990-91); Podkarpatski Rus (Prague, 1991-present); Rusyn (Medzilaborce , Czechoslovakia, 1990-present); Narodny novyntj (Pre§ov, 1991-present). 48 SLOVAKIA Rusyns be guaranteed full rights as a national minority in the countries where they live or, in the case of Transcarpathia, that Rusyns be recognized as the dominant indigenous nationality. As in all new or revived movements, the Rusyn orientation must first be able to make itself known to the constituency it purports to represent. This is inherently problematic, because with the exception of Yugoslavia, nowhere do Rusyns control the local media. Their message, or at least an awareness of their movement's existence, has been helped less by their own publications than by the fierce polemics that have filled the non-Rusyn press in Poland, former Czechoslovakia, and most especially former Soviet Transcarpathia. This is because from the moment the first Rusyn activity began, local pro-Ukrainian activists attacked the Rusyn orientation as "anachronistic," "ahistorical," "unenlightened," "in the service of American imperialists," and "treacherous" to the Ukrainian nation. 15 As a result, more attention of a semi-sensationalist journalistic nature was given the Rusyn problem than might otherwise have been the case. The Czech and Slovak press also paid much - although more rational - attention to the Rusyn-Ukrainian debate, especially in the context of the nationality question that concerned Czechoslovak society as a whole. Whatever latent isolation Rusyn leaders in their respective countries may have still felt was overcome in March 1991, when, at the initiative of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, the first World Congress of Rusyns was convened in Medzilaborce, Czechoslovakia. Indeed, despite a history of interaction between Rusyn communities in the homeland as well as the immigration in America during the twentieth century, this was, in fact, the first time representatives from all countries where Rusyns live (Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, 15 The best (or worst) examples of the anti-Rusyn polemical attacks comes from scholars in the former Soviet Ukrainian intellectual establishment: Pavlo Cucka, "Kak rusiny stali ukraincami," Zakarpatskaja pravda (U:lhorod), September 12-16, 1989; Vasyl' Mel'nyk, "Neorusynstvo i joho interpretatory," Zakarpats'ka pravda (U:lhorod), August 18, 21, 22, 24, 1990; Jurij Balega, "Rusynstvo: ideolohy i pokrovyteli," ibid., September 6,7 ,9, 1990; and Oleksa Myfanyc, "To chto :le vony?: do idejnych vytokiv novitn'oho 'karpatorusynstva'," Literatuma Ukrajina (Kiev), January 17, 1991. SLOVAKIA 49 Yugoslavia, the United States) gathered together in one place. The congress constituted itself as a permanent umbrella organization, and its very existence had an enormous impact on instilling Rusyn national pride in the over 300 persons who attended, not to mention innumerable others who read about it through the generally widespread press coverage.1 6 It is interesting to note that one week after the congress took place, Czechoslovakia conducted its decennial census in which people for the first time since World War II had the right to answer that they were of Rusyn nationality. Despite problems with the manner in which the nationality questionwas asked and subsequently classified, in Slovakia 17,000 persons responded they were Rusyns as compared to 14,000 Ukrainians. 17 This raises the question of numbers. Observers will legitimately ask just how many people identify as Rusyns? And even among those who do respond Rusyn, does use of such a term necessarily mean they are denying a possible simultaneous identification as Ukrainians? At this point, there is no way to know the precise answers to those questions. All we know is that in Slovakia, when given a chance in March 1991, of those people of East Slavic background who did not identify as Slovak and who had the choice between a Rusyn or Ukrainian identity, 55 percent chose Rusyn. As for the number of Rusyns in Poland and Ukrainian Transcarpathia, we simply do not know at this stage, nor do we have any indications, such as census data, scientific polling, or membership in political parties, that might help to provide a reasonable estimate. What we can be certain of, however, is that after forty years of Communist rule, Rusyns have not gone away. Today, there are Rusyn organizations, Rusyn publications, and a relatively wide range of writers, teachers, professionals, and peasants who continue to articulate in the press and at public manifestations their belonging 16 Information on the First World Congress as well as its official declaration are found in the Carpatho--Rusyn American , XIV, 2 and 3 (Fairview, NJ., 1991). pp . 7-9 and 8-9. 17 Mykola Mu§ynka, "Skil'ky rusyniv-ukrajinciv u Slovaccyni? ," Svoboda (Jersey City, NJ.), July 19, 1991. 50 SLOVAKIA to a distinct Rusyn people.1 8 Protection for Rusyns in the Future As with many minorities, the future of their survival depends on the willingness of the governments in the states where they live to provide them with adequate legal protection and perhaps financial assistance for their national development. In this regard, the Rusyns need to inform and constantly to remind the international community that they exist. In tum, Rusyns should be able to expect that the international community will monitor their status and, if necessary, put pressure on the governments of the Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia, in order to ensure that their national rights are protected. In fact, all four states in which Rusyns live have already ratified several agreements pertaining to national minorities at recent meetings of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Of particular importance for Rusyns were the decisions reached in·June 1990 at the Copenhagen meeting of the CSCE .. At Copenhagen it was agreed that "to belong to a national minority is a matter of a person's individual choice and no disadvantage may arise from the exercise of such choice." Moreover, "persons belonging to national minorities can exercise and enjoy their rights individually as well as in community with other members of their group. 1119 This means that regardless how scholars or governments might define Rusyns, if there are individuals and/or groups who call themselves by that name and who believe they constitute a distinct natio18 Among the best known of these to date are: in Transcarpathia , the writers Volodymyr Fedyny§ynec', Ivan Petrovcij, and Vasylij Socka, and the political activists Mychajlo Tomcanij, Petro Hodma§, and Vasyl' Zajac; in Czechoslovakia, the head of the Rusyn Renaissance Society, Vasyl' Turok, and the advisor to the Slovak government on nationality affairs, Ivan Bicko, and the editor Aleksander Zozuljak; in Poland, the poets Petro Trochanovskij and Olena Due , and the head of the Lemko Association , Andrij Kopca; and in Yugoslavia, the director of the Ruske Slovo publishing house, Ljubomir Medje§i, and the writers Djura Papharhaj and Natalja Duda§. 19 Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (Copenhagen, 1990), pp. 40--41, paragraphs 32 and 32.6. SLOVAKIA 51 nality , they have a right to do so and to be recognized as Rusyns by the governments of the countries in which they live. The Copenhagen agreement also recognized the role of non-governmental organizations in promoting the interests of national minorities, and it called on the participating states to assure that the teaching of history and culture in the educational establishments "will also take account of the history and culture of national minorities. 1120 At a follow-up CSCE meeting in Geneva (July 1991), member states accepted the provisions of a special report which guaranteed the right of national minorities to participate in non-governmental organizations outside their country of residence. The report reaffirmed as well the principle that individuals or organizations representing national minorities be allowed "unimpeded contacts ... across frontiers ... with persons with whom they share a common ethnic or national origin." 21 Finally, at the most recent CSCE meeting held in Moscow (September-October 1991), member states reaffirmed the agreements reached at all previous meetings and agreed further that "commitments undertaken in the field of the human dimension of the CSCE [including those pertaining to national minorities] are matters of direct legitimate concern to all participating States and do not belong exclusively to the internal affairs of the State concemed." 22 Before looking specifically at what Rusyns need in each country to protect and guarantee their future existence, it is necessary to clarify the issue of international boundaries. In the Carpathian homeland, Rusyns live within the borders of three states, and at least until late 1992 there was discussion in the Czech , Slovak, and Transcarpathian press about certain political activists who demanded the return of Ukraine's Transcarpathian oblast (historic Subcarpathian Rus') to Czechoslovakia. 23 There was even talk that Transcarpathia 20 Ibid., p. 41 , paragraph 34. 21 Report of the CSCE Meeting of Experts on National Minorities (Geneva , 1991) , p. 10 . 22 Document of the Moscow Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (Moscow, 1991 ), p. 2. 23 The Republican party in Czechoslovakia led by Dr. Miroslav SIMek had as one of its goals the "return of Subcarpathian Rus"' to Czechoslovakia. "Zpl!t do Ceskoslovenska," Republika (Prague), October 18-24, 1990; "Rozhovor s pi'edsedou SPR- 52 SLOVAKIA might be returned to Hungary or divided between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In fact, most of these propositions were little more than the speculations of individuals that were blown out of proportion by political rivals and by journalists seeking to report a good story .24 The Czecho--Slovak federal government publicly declared that it "cannot be concerned with the fate" of Transcarpathia.25 With the end of Czechoslovakia in December 1992, the question of unification has become moot. As for the Rusyn organizations that have come into existence in 1990, none of them nor the World Congress of Rusyns that met in 1991 has ever voiced any demand for border changes. On the contrary, all the new organizations as well as· the vast majority of Rusyn spokespersons wherever they live warn against tampering with existing international boundaries. On the other hand, the Society of Carpatho--Rusyns in Transcarpathia has called openly for the return of the status of automony that Subcarpathian Rus' did enjoy during the interwar years. 26 In order to determine the views of the local population, the society, joined by other minority organizations, called for a question on Transcarpathian autonomy to be added to the referendum on Ukrainian indeRS, Ph Dr. Miroslavem Shidkem," ibid., August, 1991. The head of the National Socialist party, C. Cejka, stated that Czechoslovak jurisdiction still applies to Subcarpathian Rus' . "NSS chtc!jf Podkarpatskou Rus, "Lidova demokracie (Prague), September 3, 1991. 24 Jaromfr Hoi'ec of the Society of Friends of Subcarpathian Rus' in Prague and wellknown publicist has written about the recent political activism in Transcarpathia in numerous articles in the Czech press, which imply that the local population would be sympathetic to re-unification with Czechoslovakia. Cf. his recent articles in Lidova demokracie (Prague): "Freedom for Subcarpathian Rus"' (September 7, 1991); "Czechs in Subcarpathia" (September 18, 1991); and "Subcarpathia Calls For an Independent Republic" (September 20, 1991). The Hungarian press has also followed closely the demands for Transcarpathian autonomy: "Ruszin koztlirsaslig Klirplitaljlin, "Magyar hfrlap (Budapest), September 10, 1991; "A ruszinok kovetelese: Jegyen Klirplitalja koztlirsaslig! , "Nap/6 (Debrecen), September 3, 1991. 25 The quote is attributed to Czechoslovakia's foreign minister, Jiff Dienstbier, in "Svobodu pro Podkarpatskou Rus," Lidova demokracie, September 9, 1991. 26 The text of the declaration, which was sent to the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev , to the Supreme Soviets of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR, and to the United Nations, appeared first in the Society's newspaper, Otey} chram (SeptemberOctober, 1990) . It is available in English translation in the Carpatho-Rusyn American, XIV, 1 (Fairview , NJ., 1991), pp 4-5 . SLOVAKIA 53 pendence that was held on December 1, 1991 .27 There was a large voter tum-out, with 92.6 percent favoring Ukrainian independence and 78 percent self-rule for Transcarpathia. 28 The issue of Transcarpathian autonomy elicited great interest in neighboring countries, although this is, in fact, an internal issue for whatever kind of government and state structure is finally established in what until recently was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In short, Transcarpathia has been and should for the foreseeable future remain a part of Ukraine. However, as a sovereign member of the international community, Ukraine must, in tum, guarantee the individual and corporate rights of Rusyns - or those citizens of Ukraine who wish to call themselves Rusyns. It is true that the Ukrainian government has already provided guarantees for national minorities living on its territory: Russians, Jews, Poles, Germans, Tatars, etc. To this list must be added Rusyns. This would mean that the "official," or one might say traditional, Ukrainian view of the Rusyns has to change. Namely, Ukrainian authorities must accept the fact that within its boundaries, primarily in its Transcarpathian oblast, there are people who define themselves as Rusyns in the sense of a nationality distinct from Ukrainians. Such people should have the right to declare themselves in their passports and internal documents as Rusyns, and the state census bureau should publish data on the number of persons who identify as Rusyns and not simply classify them - as has been done until now - as Ukrainians. 29 If such guarantees are 27 "Rezoljucija mityngu Tovarystva Karpats'kych Rusyniv z pytannja nacional'noho vidrod!ennja rusyns'koho narodu i vidnovlennja statusu Pidkarpats'koho kraju , Mukacevo, 01.09.1991," Molod' Zakarpattja (Uzhorod), September 14, 1991, p. 4. 28 Paul Robert Magocsi, "Rusyns Regain Their Autonomy," Ukrainian Canadian Herald (Toronto), March 16, 1992, p. 7. 29 Soviet guidelines used by the State Committee for Statistics in order to classify answers in the census reports were determined largely on recommendations from authorities in individual republics as well as from the Institute of Ethnography and the Institute of Linguistics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. SeeSJovari nacional'nostej i jazykov dlja kodirovanija otvetov na 8 i 9 voprosy perepisnych Jistov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyj komitet SSSR po statistike, 1988). It is interesting to note that a recent report by the Institute of Ethnography (No. 14110/2171, dated February 6, 1990) stated: "It is theoretically possible to con- 54 SLOVAKIA provided, there is no reason why Rusyns in Transcarpathia could not remain Rusyns as well as function as full-fledged citizens of a sovereign and democratic Ukrainian state. Indeed, independent Ukraine has recently become a member of the Conference in Security and Cooperation in Europe, which obliges it to accept and implement the principles of the Copenhagen and other agreements on national minorities outlined above. Following the trend that has taken hold in the former Soviet Union, it would seem desirable that the new Ukrainian state become a decentralized entity in which each of its component regions would have a large degree of automony in economic and cultural matters .30 Thus, questions such as what language might be taught in elementary schools, or what kind of national orientation should be adopted by regional cultural and educational institutions, or what amount of funding might be given to Rusyn-oriented groups, are all decisions that would be made by the people's assembly in Uzhorod and not in Kiev. Of course, it goes without saying that the free movement of peoples across borders with neighboring Rusyn regions in Slovakia and Poland must be guaranteed. Fortunately, this possibility exists already, albeit with a waiting time at border crossings that every day of the week averages between 15 and 20 hours. As for neighboring Slovakia, the situation of Rusyns, especially since the November 1989 Velvet Revolution, is much better than in either Ukrainian Transcarpathia or Poland. Initially, the Slovak government (generally through its Ministry of Culture) and the former Czecho-Slovak federal government (through allotment of discretionary funds) provided only ad hoc grants to the new Rusyn organizations and publications. Normal budgetary allotments of the Slovak government intended for its East Slavic Rusyn/Ukrainian elude that Rusyns can be considered at the same level as Russians , Ukrainians , and Belorussians, and that they are not a part of any of those groups ." (document in the author's possession) . 30 Discussions regarding the restructuring of the Ukraine have been going on for the past few years . Neighbouring Galicia as well as Transcarpathia feel confident that each could do much better economically if it were independent of the centre in Kiev . Cf. Ivan Hrancak, "Vidnovleni haluzky karpats'koho kraju : Ukrajina federatyvna?," No vyny Zakarpattja (Uzhorod), February 6, 1991 . SLOVAKIA 55 minority continued to go to the Union of Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia (SRUC), that is, to the Ukrainian-oriented cultural organization that is the direct descendant (still with largely the same leadership) as the formerly Communist-dominated Cultural Union of Ukrainian Workers (KSUT). Slovak government funding through other ministries also supported in Presov several Ukrainian university departments and institutes at Safarik University , a Ukrainian radio station, and a Ukrainian publishing house, as well as the Museum of Ukrainian Culture (recently renamed the Aleksander Pavlovy Regional Museum) in Svidnik. As of 1993 , two Rusyn-oriented organizations also receive a normal budgetary allotment. These include the Aleksander Duchnovyc Theater (formerly the Ukrainian National Theater) which is of a Rusyn orientation and the Rusyn Renasissance Society (Rusyns'ka Obroda), both based in Presov. The Slovak government now recognizes that there are two clearly-defined national orientations - Rusyn and Ukrainian - and that if support for national minorities is to continue in Slovakia, then funding should be provided to Rusyn as well as Ukrainian organizations. But how should the government divide a financial allotment among its East Slavic minority, which until recently has been designated only as Ukrainian? The Slovak government has opted for what seems the most reasonable solution. It has accepted the percentages revealed in the results of the 1991 census, and, therefore, has provided roughly 50 percent financial support to Rusyn cultural organizations and media and 50 percent to Ukrainian cultural organizations, schools, and its media. The question of schools in Slovakia is particularly problematic, because beginning in the 1960s the language of instruction in the vast majority of Rusyn-inhabited villages was changed - at the request of parents themselves - from Ukrainian to Slovak. Moreover, as part of a consolidation process during the past two decades, many small elementary schools in Rusyn-inhabited villages were closed. Even if private or public elementary schools will be reopened in Rusyn villages, it is likely that Slovak will be the language of instruction. The Slovak ministry of education, however, should 56 SLOVAKIA provide teachers and textbooks in Rusyn or in Ukrainian for those villages that may submit such requests. Most important, the standard Slovak-language history textbooks used throughout Slovakia should include an adequate discussion of the history and culture of Rusyns and other minorities which will be of benefit to all students. This would be in keeping with the CSCE agreement reached in Copenhagen, which - along with other "international treaties on human rights and freedoms" - are, according to the new consitution of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, "universally binding on its territory and supercede its own laws."31 The Rusyns, or Lemko Rusyns of Poland perhaps need the most help. Not only is the majority of Lemko Rusyns scattered throughout the western and northern regions of Poland, but their fledgling pro-Rusyn organization, the Lemko Association with its amateur theatrical troupe, and the older Lemkovyna folk ensemble receive no financial support at all from the Polish government, either in the form of an annual budgetary allotment or ad hoc grants. Whatever government funds assigned to national minority cultural activity are given, they invariably go to the Union of Ukrainians in Poland (Ob'jednannja Ukrajinciv Pollsci), the direct descendant of the Communist-dominated Ukrainian Socio-Cultural Society (USKT). Support for the new Union of Ukrainians must continue, especially since most Ukrainians in Poland are not originally from nor do they live in the Carpathian region. On the otherhand, Lemko Rusyns must also be recognized as a distinct national minority and receive a fair share of funding. How to determine what is a "fair share" will, of course, be difficult, since Poland does not even have nationality as a category on its decennial census questionnaires. Perhaps a referendum attached to the next national vote could include a question that lists all the national groups in Poland and asks the respondent to which one he/she would wish to assign a portion of their taxes for cultural 31 Cf. Section 2 of the Constitutional Act of January 9, 1991, instituting the charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms as a Constitutional Act of the Federal Assembly of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic . SLOVAK.IA 57 activity. This would be somewhat similar to municipalities in Canada that ask their residents to indicate whether they want their tax dollars to be assigned to public schools or to separate (Catholic) schools. Whatever the mechanism decided upon, in keeping with its commitments as a member state of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Polish government is obliged to recognize Lernko Rusyns as a distinct national minority and to provide funding for Lernko cultural organizations and Lernko-language schools in those communities that demand them. Lastly, we turn to the situation in Yugoslavia. Ever since World War II, the Yugoslav policy of equality for its six component republics and support for the national minorities that live within them has encouraged the Croatian Republic and, in particular, the Vojvodina Autonomous Region of the Serbian Republic to finance liberally Rusyn cultural and educational activity. It is to be expected that when the republics of Yugoslavia sort out their present difficulties, the republics of Croatia and, in particular, Serbia will continue their judicious support and protection of their respective Rusyn minorities. Conclusion The Rusyns are one example of the many groups who suffered under the totalitarian regimes imposed on East Central Europe during the past four decades. Now that those regimes no longer exist, there is a real opportunity to correct past injustices and to assure the future survival of the Rusyns. It is, after all, in the interest of all four countries where Rusyns live - Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia - to become part of the larger European community. The way in which those countries resolve the Rusyn issue will, in part, determine to what degree they are ready for membership in the new Europe. SYMPOSIUM  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Carpatho-Rusyns: Their Current Status and Future Perspectives Description An account of the resource Paul Robert Magosci Slovakia, Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92 pp. 36-57 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Magocsi, Paul Robert, 1945- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991-92 SNK https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/519648dadecc38cef230b824faf0ad73.pdf eba3066bdd46cab2fc8fde4fea24b341 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 61 A Century and a half of Czech-Slovak Relations A Slovak Perspective STANISLAV J . KIRSCHBAUM In the fall of 1991, when two American and two Canadian academics agreed to participate in a roundtable on Czech-Slovak relations a year later at the annual Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, none could foresee that the end of an historical period would be at hand. By the time the roundtable took place in Phoenix in November 1992, it was clear that the common state of the Czechs and Slovaks would soon be dissolved; the Federal Parliament of Czechoslovakia passed a law approving the dissolution shortly thereafter. On 1 January 1993, two new states appeared in Central Europe, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. A study of Czech-Slovak relations had thus ceased to be an examination of one of the main issues in the common state. It had become a question of the historical record. As long as the Slovaks lived in a common state with the Czechs, Western scholars specializing in Slovak history and Slovak politics fully knew under what handicap they had to labour. Western scholarship tended to favour the Czech perception, as Stanley Z. Pech noted two decades ago: Although Western specialists in Eastern European history have usually regarded it as their task to make the West familiar with the entire ethnic panorama of the polyglot region, they have in practice often been selective in the favours they have bestowed on each nation. They have incorporated in their work, in modified form, the outlook and the preju- �62 SLOVAKIA dices of the nations which they "adopted". To give the most conspicuous examples, they viewed Slovak history through Czech eyes and Ukrainian history through Polish (or Russian) eyes. In so doing, they have in fact created a second-class status for certain nations . The history of the Slovaks in the West has usually been presented from the point of view of "Czechoslovakism" and has appeared as hardly more than a postscript to Czech history .1 There is no theme that has enjoyed such a one-sided approach as that of Czech-Slovak relations , in particular in their common state. The following papers do not seek so much to redress the balance as to offer a Slovak perspective on a question that also has a Czech one and that is likely to be debated for some time. They are not exhaustive examinations, rather they are interpretative essays of three important periods, the first on seven decades preceding the creation of the common state in 1918 written by Edita Bosak, the second on the first two decades of Czechoslovakia, which were characterized by a democratic regime, written by Susan Mikula and the third on the post-war decades of communist rule and the three years that preceded the dissolution of the state written by Stanislav J. Kirschbaum. In each, the theme is the Slovak definition of and response to what might be termed the "Czech question " in Slovak political life. Carol Skalnik Leff offers a commentary of the three papers . Each text was revised by its author and edited for publication by the writer of this introduction. 1stanley Z. Pech, "New Avenues in East European History", Canadian Slavonic Papers, X (1), 1968, pp. 14-15. � SLOVAKIA 61 A Century and a half of Czech-Slovak Relations A Slovak Perspective STANISLAV J . KIRSCHBAUM In the fall of 1991, when two American and two Canadian academics agreed to participate in a roundtable on Czech-Slovak relations a year later at the annual Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, none could foresee that the end of an historical period would be at hand. By the time the roundtable took place in Phoenix in November 1992, it was clear that the common state of the Czechs and Slovaks would soon be dissolved; the Federal Parliament of Czechoslovakia passed a law approving the dissolution shortly thereafter. On 1 January 1993, two new states appeared in Central Europe, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. A study of Czech-Slovak relations had thus ceased to be an examination of one of the main issues in the common state. It had become a question of the historical record. As long as the Slovaks lived in a common state with the Czechs, Western scholars specializing in Slovak history and Slovak politics fully knew under what handicap they had to labour. Western scholarship tended to favour the Czech perception, as Stanley Z. Pech noted two decades ago: Although Western specialists in Eastern European history have usually regarded it as their task to make the West familiar with the entire ethnic panorama of the polyglot region, they have in practice often been selective in the favours they have bestowed on each nation. They have incorporated in their work, in modified form, the outlook and the preju- �62 SLOVAKIA dices of the nations which they "adopted". To give the most conspicuous examples, they viewed Slovak history through Czech eyes and Ukrainian history through Polish (or Russian) eyes. In so doing, they have in fact created a second-class status for certain nations . The history of the Slovaks in the West has usually been presented from the point of view of "Czechoslovakism" and has appeared as hardly more than a postscript to Czech history .1 There is no theme that has enjoyed such a one-sided approach as that of Czech-Slovak relations , in particular in their common state. The following papers do not seek so much to redress the balance as to offer a Slovak perspective on a question that also has a Czech one and that is likely to be debated for some time. They are not exhaustive examinations, rather they are interpretative essays of three important periods, the first on seven decades preceding the creation of the common state in 1918 written by Edita Bosak, the second on the first two decades of Czechoslovakia, which were characterized by a democratic regime, written by Susan Mikula and the third on the post-war decades of communist rule and the three years that preceded the dissolution of the state written by Stanislav J. Kirschbaum. In each, the theme is the Slovak definition of and response to what might be termed the "Czech question " in Slovak political life. Carol Skalnik Leff offers a commentary of the three papers . Each text was revised by its author and edited for publication by the writer of this introduction. 1stanley Z. Pech, "New Avenues in East European History", Canadian Slavonic Papers, X (1), 1968, pp. 14-15. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1991-92, Vol. 35 Description An account of the resource Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Slovak League of America Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available 1991-92 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 61 A Century and a half of Czech-Slovak Relations A Slovak Perspective STANISLAV J . KIRSCHBAUM In the fall of 1991, when two American and two Canadian academics agreed to participate in a roundtable on Czech-Slovak relations a year later at the annual Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, none could foresee that the end of an historical period would be at hand. By the time the roundtable took place in Phoenix in November 1992, it was clear that the common state of the Czechs and Slovaks would soon be dissolved; the Federal Parliament of Czechoslovakia passed a law approving the dissolution shortly thereafter. On 1 January 1993, two new states appeared in Central Europe, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. A study of Czech-Slovak relations had thus ceased to be an examination of one of the main issues in the common state. It had become a question of the historical record. As long as the Slovaks lived in a common state with the Czechs, Western scholars specializing in Slovak history and Slovak politics fully knew under what handicap they had to labour. Western scholarship tended to favour the Czech perception, as Stanley Z. Pech noted two decades ago: Although Western specialists in Eastern European history have usually regarded it as their task to make the West familiar with the entire ethnic panorama of the polyglot region, they have in practice often been selective in the favours they have bestowed on each nation. They have incorporated in their work, in modified form, the outlook and the preju- 62 SLOVAKIA dices of the nations which they "adopted". To give the most conspicuous examples, they viewed Slovak history through Czech eyes and Ukrainian history through Polish (or Russian) eyes. In so doing, they have in fact created a second-class status for certain nations . The history of the Slovaks in the West has usually been presented from the point of view of "Czechoslovakism" and has appeared as hardly more than a postscript to Czech history .1 There is no theme that has enjoyed such a one-sided approach as that of Czech-Slovak relations , in particular in their common state. The following papers do not seek so much to redress the balance as to offer a Slovak perspective on a question that also has a Czech one and that is likely to be debated for some time. They are not exhaustive examinations, rather they are interpretative essays of three important periods, the first on seven decades preceding the creation of the common state in 1918 written by Edita Bosak, the second on the first two decades of Czechoslovakia, which were characterized by a democratic regime, written by Susan Mikula and the third on the post-war decades of communist rule and the three years that preceded the dissolution of the state written by Stanislav J. Kirschbaum. In each, the theme is the Slovak definition of and response to what might be termed the "Czech question " in Slovak political life. Carol Skalnik Leff offers a commentary of the three papers . Each text was revised by its author and edited for publication by the writer of this introduction. 1stanley Z. Pech, "New Avenues in East European History", Canadian Slavonic Papers, X (1), 1968, pp. 14-15.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Century and a half of Czech-Slovak Relations: A Slovak Perspective Description An account of the resource Stanislav J. Kirschbaum Slovakia, Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92 pp. 61-62 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kirschbaum, Stanislav J., 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991-92 SNK https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/17bbd2b0b0b6b263fdc0f1514dbbc107.pdf 428431437c9616138dea7efadf8399e7 PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 63 Czech-Slovak Relations From the 1840s to 1914 EDITA BOSAK Czech-Slovak relations were a constant but also a fundamental problem in the history of the Czech :md Slovak people, particularly from their political union in 1918 until the creation of two separate states in 1993. Their common state had been created out of the framework of the Austro-Hungarian Empire where the differences between the two peoples were already quite marked and also grossly underestimated . Since the arrival of the Magyars in today's Hungary in the late 9th century, the Slovaks had experienced a distinctly different development from the Czechs. Almost one thousand years of Hungarian rule had marked their economic activities , social life, degree of devotion to religion, mentality, tradition, and history. Even with the initial euphoria that followed the creation of the common state on 28 October 1918, these fundamental differences, which had not been fully considered, could not be erased. Not only were they cultural-linguistic but also religious. Our purpose is to examine how these differences were perceived prior to 1914 and what attempts were made to establish political relations between the two nations. The emergence of the Czech and Slovak national movements in the early nineteenth century helped to create a feeling of Slav solidarity. However, in the 1840s, the acceptance by most Slovak intellectuals of the central Slovak dialect as the Slovak literary language caused a permanent literary rift between the two peoples. The Slovaks were facing the first large scale attempts by the Magyars to assimilate the non-Magyars in Hungary. By 1844, �64 SLOVAKIA Magyar was made the official language of the country. The Slovak Lutherans were especially threatened because their close ties with the Czech Protestants were construed by official circles as evidence of treason, that is to say, collaboration with a foreign power. Thus they had to re-evaluate their position , especially since the Czechs were quite indifferent to the political and cultural situation of the Slovaks, embroiled as they were with their own national struggle with the Germans in Bohemia and Moravia. Assistance of any kind was not forthcoming . Nevertheless, the Czechs were considering creating a "Czechoslovak" literary language, yet refused to allow the modern Czech literary language to adopt any Slovak characteristics in order that the Slovaks might be able to identify with it. The Czechs were convinced that all concessions had to come from the Slovaks. However, as the idea that they were a nation of Slavs distinct from the Czechs grew among the Slovaks , there arose an incompatibility with the idea of being Czechoslovak and using only Czech as the literary medium. In the final analysis, a new Slovak literary language was the only recourse available to the Slovaks. Unfortunately, this step hardly fulfilled the expectations of L'udovit Stur and his followers that the Slovaks would become unified. The fact is that religious differences played an important role. The Slovaks were for the greater part Roman Catholics. But about one quarter was Lutheran and it was this group which tended to have the Czech ties that dated as far back as the sixteenth century and which used the Kralicka Bible for both literary and religious purposes . This split in Slovak society profoundly influenced the development of Czech-Slovak relations. The introduction of Sturovcina as the new Slovak literary language was called, remained a bone of contention between the Czechs and Slovaks for many decades . In the post-1849 period, CzechSlovak reciprocity almost completely disappeared. Controversy over the language split and political circumstances drove the two further apart. There were, however, some leading Czechs who continued to believe and to advocate the idea of Czechoslovakism, that is , the cultural ethnic and linguistic unity of both peoples as fellow Slavs. For instance, Karel Havlicek maintained that �SLOVAKIA 65 the Czechoslav lands, Bohemia, Moravia, a part of Silesia and Slovakia in Hungary were for a Jong time one nation as far as literary and spiritual life goes, and the greater part of them belonged to one state. Well-known individuals in Bohemia as well as in Moravia, and likewise in Slovakia had always worked towards the complete union of these lands comprising one nation, and considered themselves members of one tribe, which is verified by the names and works of men from all these Jands. 2 But there were other leading lights among the Czechs like the Old Czech Party leader Frantisek L. Rieger who accused the Slovaks of having "tom away" from the Czech nation. From 1849 to 1868 there was next to no political interest in Slovak affairs. In the 1870's, 1880's and 1890's literary contact was sporadic and minimal. The continuity of Czech-Slovak relations was maintained by a few Czech writers and persons involved in cultural activities. The closure of the three Slovak gymnazia forced Slovak students to go abroad to study, especially to Moravia which was geographically closer to Upper Hungary, as Slovakia was called . Conditions were difficult and the students were not always well received, as Vavro Srobar comments in his biography, Z mojho iivota (From My Own Life), concerning his own experience with Czech professors. Contact was not always amicable on the day-today level. Students found it difficult to learn Czech and soon discovered that academically they were far behind the Czech students. It was the work of such writers as Bozena Nemcova, Adolf Heyduk, Rudolf Pokorny, and Jozef Holecek who kept the Czech public informed on who and what the Slovaks were and under what conditions they were surviving in Hungary. However, only a tiny segment of the intelligentsia had any interest of a genuine nature in 211 Ceskoslovanska zeme, Cechy, Morava, cast Slezska a Slovenska v Uhi'fch jsou jiz davno v literarnfm a du~evnfm zivote jednfm narodem, a vet~f cast jejich byla jiz i jednfm statem. Znamej~f duchove jak z Cech, tak z Moravy, tak i ze Slovenska odjakziva smerovali k uplnemu spojenf techto zernf jednoho naroda, a povafovali sebe vzdy za osudy jednoho kmene, na co svedcf jmena a spisy najznamenitej~fch muz0 v~ech tech krajin". Karel Havlfcek Borovsky, Politicke spisy, Vol. III, ed. Dr. Zdenek Tobolka, Prague: Jan Laichter, 1902, p. 178. �66 SLOVAKIA the Slovaks. The overall view of the Slovaks tended to be a rather sentimental and romantic one. For example, the short time spent by Bozena Nemcova in Slovakia produced a collection of fairytales Slovensk6 pohadky a povesti (Slovak Stories and Tales), two novels with Slovak themes Pohorska vesnice (Mountain Villages) and Chyie pod horami (Shanties At the Foothills), and a monograph Krajov a lesov na Zvolensku (Lands and Forests of Zvolen) . Throughout her life, she remained in regular correspondence with Gustav K. Zechenter, the minister and poet Samuel Chalupka, and the poet Samuel Tomasik, author of the Slovak hymn "Hej, Slovaci!" Of the other early Czech Slovakophiles, R. Pokorny wrote Potulky po Slovensku (Wandering About Slovakia), Literama shoda ceskoslovenska (Czechoslovak Literary Agreement); A. Heyduk Cymbal a Husle (Cymbal and Violin); and J. Holecek Podejme ruku Slovakum (Let's Give Our Hand To the Slovaks). Heyduk's verses were sentimental, and the description of daily Slovak life was highly coloured but Holecek, as a journalist, pointed out to the Czechs the political importance of the Slovaks for them, that is, a union of Czech and Slovak forces in opposition to German pressure in the Czech Lands. This was to become one of the major arguments in favour of Czech-Slovak reciprocity in the late 1890's. Pokorny, too , did some foundation work in re-establishing Czech-Slovak contact by setting-up the "Knihovna ceskoslovenska" (Czechoslovak Library). Its purpose was to publish the work of Slovak literary figures but due to financial stress, it closed in 1881 after having published only two works . One can see that Czech society at large actually had very little contact with the Slovaks or even knowledge about them until the 1890's. Pavel Sochan, a Slovak artist, described the situation as follows : the circle of Slovak friends was then very limited among the Czechs , whereas among the Mora vi ans we had many sincere friends . Even intelligent Czechs considered Slovaks as "tinkers" and Slovakia as the "land of tinkers" .3 3Pavel Sochan, "Zalozenie spolku 'Detvan' v Prahe roku 1882" in Stanislav Meciar ed., Detvan 50 rokov v Prahe, Turc. Sv. Martin: Slovensky akademicky spolok �SLOVAKIA 67 At official functions, Czech academics often mistook the Slovaks for Bulgarians or Russians, for the Slovak language seemed very foreign sounding and unintelligible to their ears . They knew nothing of Slovak literature or her poets and writers. It was a very small Czech literary group which expressed any interest in the life of their brother Slavs. As the nineteenth century was coming to a close, the political situation of both the Czechs and the Slovaks required a new approach. What was needed was a realistic and systematic education effort of the Czech public with the existential struggle of the Slovaks in Hungary if aid was to be obtained for them. They had to become acquainted with Slovak culture, folklore and way of life . On the other hand, the Slovaks had to be awakened, educated, and shown that the Czechs were to be trusted and that they no longer held any grudges over the language issue. It was Karel Kalal, a Czech schoolteacher, who took on this role of arousing the Czechs in the 1890's and early 1900's to the plight of the Slovaks. Initially , his attitude vis-a-vis Slovak conditions was na"ively romantic and sentimental but by the twentieth century he became much more realistic in his comprehension, and his writing improved. Although his efforts were crowned with some success, the language question remained a thorn in the flesh of the Czechs. The Czechs were involved with the process of establishing their own separate identity from that of the Germans and yet they refused to see or accept the same nationalism in the Slovaks. They continued to see Czech-Slovak reciprocity in terms of one language, that is Czech. Kalal was just as stubborn a supporter of the Czechoslovak language. He represented a threat to the existence of the Slovak language and was often attacked for his articles by the Martin group. This language question was one of the basic problems hindering any "Detvan", 1932, pp . 8-9 . The original Slovak text is : " ...kruh slovenskych priatefov bol vtedy medzi Cechmi vefmi obmedzeny, kdezto medzi Moravanmi mali sme vefa uprimnych priatefov. I inteligentnf Cesi pokladali Slovakov za "dratenfkov" a Slovensko za "zeme drateru'lru ". �68 SLOVAKIA great Slovak moves towards the Czechs. The intellectual group centred in Turciansky Svaty Martin never ceased to defend the cultural-linguistic uniqueness of the Slovak nation from that of the Czech. The Slovak language and the idea of a distinct nation were the only weapons which they had at their disposal to fight Magyarisation. As it was, denationalisation of the younger generation, via mainly the school system, continued to increase. Another literary figure very active in attempting to bring about a rapprochement between the Czechs and the Slovaks was Jaroslav Vlcek . Born in Slovakia of mixed Czech-Slovak parentage, Vlcek spent his formative years on Slovak soil and received his early schooling there. While studying in Prague, he helped establish a student university club, Detvan, in 1882, for Slovak students studying there. During his student days, Vlcek wrote articles on a regular basis for the Slovak magazine Oral (Eagle) on Czech literature titled "Listy z Ciech" ("Letters from the Czech lands"), and in the Czech magazine Ruch a kvety (Activity and Flowers) on Slovak literature. His first major work Literatura na Slovensku (Literature in Slovakia) appeared in 1881. In 1883 he published a daring article in Slovanskf sbomfk (Slavonic Magazine) called "Slovensko za poslednfch peti let", (Slovakia in the Last Five Years) in which he disclosed the practices of the governing Magyar circles in Slovakia. In 1890, Vlcek published Dejiny literatlfry slovenske (The History of Slovak Literature). Vlcek was the first head of Detvan and he maintained an active interest in the club through the years canvassing to get support for it. The purpose of Detvan was to bring together Slovak students, to entertain and to educate them by having them give papers on Slovak literature, history and the contemporary conditions. The most important figures in the first decade of Detvan's existence were Vlcek, P. Sochan, Cyril Krcmery, St. Daxner, Ladislav Nadasi, Jan Slabej, Matej Bencur, M. Ursfny, Dusan Makovicky, J. Smetanay, and Srobar. Almost all of them were, at one time or another, to take part in the Slovak national awakening. Detvan organised Slovak evenings open to the Czech public whenever there was a significant Slovak celebration in order that the Czech public might come to �SLOVAKIA 69 know that the Slovaks were more than just a land of tinkers, that they had their own history, their great men, and that they were now in need of a helping hand from their brothers to stave off the process of Magyarisation. This club collaborated on similar ventures with the other Czech and Moravian clubs, with the Slovak club Tatran in Vienna and with the Slovak Club in Budapest. They canvassed in Bohemia and Slovakia for funds to help Slovak students to come to study in Prague. During Srobar's presidency, Detvan came to have the greatest contact with the average Czech living in Prague. Srobar had been influenced by the realist philosophy (political program) which Tomas G. Masaryk (later to become the first President of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918) expounded in his university classes. He came to believe that the political passivity favoured by the Martin group was not beneficial to the Slovak nation, that the Slovaks must abandon their fatalistic policy and stop expecting salvation from the east, from their Russian brothers. Upon returning home he became active in politics and ran for the Hungarian Parliament. In 1891 and 1895 the Czechs organised two large provincial exhibitions. The stand on the ethnographic exhibition was of the greatest importance, for the Slovaks had two rooms devoted to their culture, under the title "Part of the Czechoslav nation". Czech attendance at this exhibition was large and press coverage thorough, giving the Czech public its first opportunity to become acquainted with Slovak culture on a grand scale. Following the excitement and goodwill engendered by the Ethnographic Exhibition, the Ceskoslovanska Jednota (Czechoslavonic Unit), was formed on 7 May 1896 with the well-known Slavist, Professor Frantisek Pastrnek, as chairman. According to its constitution, its purpose was the "...cultivation of Czechoslav interests and the support of the poor young Slav people" .4 The vehicle via which this was to be carried out was: "a) to publish, to promote, 4Literami archiv pamatnik narodnfho pfsemnictvf, Rotnagl Collection. "Ucel spolku je pestovati kultumi zajmy ceskoslovanske a podporovati chudou mladez slovanskou" . �70 SLOVAKIA to collect, to buy literary works and to found libraries; b) to grant stipends and to support Slav students studying in Prague ... ; c) public lectures and discussions, excluding political ones; d) to sponsor social entertainment" .5 This organisation was created to act as a defense mechanism in areas culturally endangered by Germans, for example Moravia, Silesia and to help these Czechs outside of Bohemia to maintain their identity (Lower Austria, Vienna). As far as the Slovaks were concerned, the aim was to maintain contact, to acquaint the Czech nation with the Slovak culture, to give Slovak students financial support in Prague, and to establish Czech libraries in Slovakia. The organisation did not really become deeply involved with the Slovak situation until 1909. Detvan members Srobar, Smetanay and K. Salva, a publisher in Rufomberok, were directly connected with Jednota as trustees for Slovakia. Meanwhile, in Martin , the representatives of the Slovak National Party remained determined to uphold the programme of Shir and the concept of "Okolie", come what may . Any acceptance of the idea of a single nation called Czechoslovak was out of the question for it meant the refutation of the Slovak language. The language separation was regarded as a tragedy by the Czechs but for the ardent Slovak nationalists, it meant arising from the dead. 6 According to Elie Kedourie, "the test ... , by which a nation is known to exist is that of language. A group speaking the same language is known as a nation, and a nation ought to constitute a state" .7 To the Martin nationalists, acceptance of the Czech idea of two branches of one nation , of being completely identical peoples, despite the patent social, economic, linguistic and cultural differences which one thousand years of a different history had imposed upon them, was simply not possible. It meant a denial of their nationhood which their awakened distinct national consciousness forbade. Thus the writings of such ardent Czech Slovakophiles as Kalal were not always well 5Ibid. , Third regulation of Constitution . 6Stefan Jan~ak. tivot Dr. Pavla Blahu, Tmava: Spolok sv. Vojtecha, 1947, I, p. 41. 7Elie Kedourie, Nationalism , London: Hutchinson & Co., 1974, p. 68. �SLOVAKIA 71 received in the Martin circle. In their publication Narodnie noviny (National News), they made it clear that the Czechs were not being made familiar with true Slovak conditions: The Czech public only misleads itself, when "the friends " of the Slovaks come to it with these sorts of things. He who is a friend of the Slovaks and understands their situation would not now refer to the written language .. . From amongst the professionals of our Czech brothers none took a deep interest in the Slovaks, thus rose K. Kalal, as an "expert" on Slovak affairs.8 Masaryk, too, often came under fire by the older generation of Slovak political leaders, represented by Svetozar Hurban Vajansky a leading nationalist, poet and editor of Narodnie noviny. Masaryk was accused of anti-clericalism, immorality in the sense of disrespect for tradition and ethics, misrepresentation of the economic situation in Slovakia, that is that poverty was not on a national scale but existed only in certain regions of the country which were not conducive to crop growing due to geography , such as Orava and Eastern Slovakia, and finally, for having turned some of the young people away from their own party, the Slovak National Party. Vajansky felt the young simply did not fully comprehend the gravity of the domestic situation, that there were no alternatives to the tactics used, and that unity amongst all Slovaks in the face of the onslaught of Magyarisation was vital. The older generation was convinced that writing in newspapers, facing stiff fines and longterm jail sentences for these articles, nonparticipation in the government and steadfastness in their religious affiliations were the only avenues open to them in stemming Magyarisation. They believed in co-operation amongst the Slavs, for example the Czechs as their closest brethren, but not at the expense 8Narodnie noviny, 1901, No. 64. Original text reads: "c'.:eske obecenstvo Jen myli sa, keel' "priatelia" Slovakov prichodia mu s takymito vecmi. Kto je priatefom Slovakov a rozumie ich polofoniu , teraz nebude sa tyka{ otazky ich spisovneho jazyka ... U bratov c'.:echov z povolanych fudf nikto nev~fmal si de,kJadnej~ie Slovakov , tak povstal K. Kalal , ako "znalec" vo veciach slovenskych". �72 SLOVAKIA of their national language , with the resulting loss of their separate identity. This was something which the Czechs never came to understand fully and which created so much ill-feeling after 1918. At the tum of the century, the student club Detvan in Prague lost a good deal of its drive with the departure of many of its most active students , especially Srobar, who returned to Slovakia to establish himself in a medical practice in 1899 in Rufomberok. His departure left a gap which was to be filled later by a young Slovak from Kosariska, Milan Rastislav Stefanik. In the summer of 1897 Srobar and four other young , progressive-thinking, Slovak students dissatisfied with the tum of events at the Martin celebrations, went to Bystricka to speak with Masaryk. He had already had a great influence upon the Slovak students in Prague, and Srobar had taken very much to heart the realist philosophy which Masaryk expounded, that is "drobna praca", small work amongst the people themselves. 9 At this meeting the basic foundation for a liberaldemocratic thinking review called Hlas (Voice) was laid . Its adherents, called Hlasists, were represented by Srobar, Pavel Blaho and A. Stefanek, journalists, and the lawyer Ivan Derer, all of whom were to play prominent roles in the government of Czechoslovakia after World War I. They believed in progressive thinking, democracy, reason and non-intervention of the Roman Catholic Church in the daily life of the peasants. They were ardent Czechoslovaks, devoted to the idea of Czechoslovak unity (Ceskoslovenska jednota). Most of their support came from the organisation Jednota in Prague. The first copy of Hlas was published in 1898 in Skalica 911 Drobna praca" was developed in depth in a series of lectures by Masaryk in 1898. These can be found in Jak pracovat?, ZUrich: Konfrontation SA, 1977, pp. 16-27. Masaryk wanted students to take the knowledge they had acquired in school and by going into the countryside to pass it on to the common man in a practical fashion thus helping him to better himself and to educate himself. At the same time Masaryk believed that such endeavours would lead to greater opportunities for both. They would "be coming into contact with people and learning to work together" (p.57), thus promoting a better understanding between each other and furthering their national goal. �SLOVAKIA 73 under the editorship of Blaho. Most of the young people involved were former Detvan members. Due to financial problems, it appeared for the last time in 1904. It had not been able to build-up a wide enough reading public. Their open Czechoslovak program was regarded with suspicion by the majority of the Slovak intellectuals and others who might have bought a copy. Albeit short-lived, Hlas had a tremendous impact on Slovak political, social and cultural life. It was instrumental in establishing the idea of a union of the Czechs and Slovaks on cultural and national lines. It stressed the need to educate the peasants to think and make their own decisions and especially to free themselves from the influence of the clergy. Education was not only the means of building an awareness of the Slovak identity and political activity but also the means of bringing about change in such areas as the temperance movement. From 1909 to 1914, the progressive young Slovaks again concentrated themselves around a monthly review, Prudy. Once more, its appearance was due to the initiative of Detvan members, for example Bohdan Pavlu. It described its program as being an open platform upon which all were welcome to come and express their views. Most of the members were former Hlasists. One can see that the motivation for Czech-Slovak reciprocity from the Slovak side tended to be initiated by those people who had actually studied in the Czech Lands. One can understand why Narodnie novinytried to discourage students from continuing their higher education there. For the Martinites, to go to Bohemia meant returning as a Czechophile as a foregone conclusion It should be pointed out that although Czech political opinion may have softened vis-a-vis the Slovaks after Rieger, there was never any question of political support.IO As far as the Young 10In several speeches both in Prague and Budapest Rieger made it very clear that the relationship between the Czechs and the Slovaks was not a legal one. The Czechs had no legal right to interfere in Slovak affairs , and moreover, had not been requested to do so by Slovak political leaders. See Jozef Jablonicky, "Prfspevok k cesko-slovenskym vzt'ahom od konca 19. stor. do roku 1914", in Historicke stlfdie, �74 SLOVAKIA Czech Party was concerned, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia formed one unit as an historic state. Newly formed Czech political parties did not include the question of the Slovaks in their program. They upheld Rieger's stand that the Slovak question is a causa finita. 11 The only political leader to have a divergent view was Masaryk. He believed that Slovakia was a part of contemporary Czech politics. The span of time during which his influence was particularly significant to Slovak affairs was from 1896 to 1902. From then on he stopped travelling to Bystricka and turned his attention to Bohemian politics and dualism. His newspapers Cas and Nasa doba continued to publish articles on Slovakia. By the early 1900's the articles were losing their romantic style in describing Slovak conditions while such journals as Osveta and Slovanskj piehled concentrated on the culture and literature of Slovakia. This political stand of non-intervention continued even after the particularly unpleasant incident at Cernova in 1907 when the local Hungarian authorities opened fire upon unarmed Slovak villagers who had not wanted their new church to be consecrated by the Magyar clergy but wanted their own priest Andrej Hlinka, who had built it, to be the officiating personage. Although Czech Slovakophiles were able to get much propaganda out of the incident, the Czech political position remained the same. Czech politicans had no wish to threaten the Czech program based on Bohemia's Historic State Rights, nor to interfere in the internal matters of another state, Hungary. Contact between the Czechs and the Slovaks was very much on a limited literary and cultural level. In 1911, the Czechoslovak Unity under the direction Professor Fr. Bfly published Slovenska citanka, an encyclopedia on Slovak culture and literature. From 1907 to 1910 Nase Slovensko (Our Slovakia), an annual journal was published to acquaint the Czech public with the Slovaks. From 1908 until the break out of war, Jednota organised annual meetings of Czech and Slovak intellectuals at the Moravian health spa Luhacovice. Initially 26 individuals came together, but by 1914 IV, 1958, p. 8. 11 Ibid., p. 22. �SLOVAKIA 75 their number had grown to 300. 12 It should be noted that those who were active were the small number of Hlasists, the young generation mostly educated in Bohemia, Milan Hodza, a member of the Hungarian Parliament and representative of the Agrarian idea in Slovakia, and a few of the old guard from Martin; and from the Czechs, it was predominantly members of the Jednota. It is here that one begins to have some suggestion of possible discourse on political aspects. The actual meetings were held in secret and there appear to be no known official minutes. That something along political lines was being aired in these circles emerges in a letter from R . Pilat to the American Slovak, Milan Getting, in the summer of 1913 where he suggests that: " .. .it is high time that work was carried out on achieving the future program of a union of Czechs and Slovaks in a political sense". 13 He appears to have a premonition of the coming war and he adds confidentially that "preparations from the Czech side are on the way, in the event of the defeat of Austria, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia would be united with Slovakia in one state" .14 On 4 April 1914, Frantisek Votruba a well-known Czech publicist living in Slovakia presented at a major political rally in Prague a resolution of protest against Magyar oppression of its nationalities, along with a demand for the revision of the Ausgleich and the terms of dualism.1 5 This is indicative of the fact that most Slovaks still thought in terms of a resolution of their problems within the terms of the present state rather than outside of it with the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. Some mention must be made of the interests of industry, ban12 Ibid., p. 20. 13 v . Kumek , "0 cinnosti a vyznamu Ceskoslovenske jednoty pi'ed vznikem CSR", Historicky casopis 10 (1962), pp . 366-7 in Miroslav Peknfk, "Slovenska politika v Uhorsku a kry~talizacia jej politickych koncepcif pred vznikom I. svetovej voj ny" , Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, Bratislava: SA V, 1992, pp . 44. 14 M. Getting, Americkf Slovaci a vyvin ceskoslovenskej myslienky v rokoch 1914-18, Pittsburg: n. p., 1933 , p. 12 in Peknfk , p. 44. 15Slo vensky tyidennfk 12 , 4 . April 1914, No. 15 , p. 3 in Peknfk, p. 44. �76 SLOVAKIA king and investment in Slovakia by the Slovaks. With gradual economic growth in the 1870's and 1880's, the Tatra Bank was established in 1886 in Turciansky Svaty Martin. Shortly afterwards , there were bank officials and small investors , soon followed by branches in three other towns . By 1909, there were many similar banks throughout Slovakia. However, Czech investment was very small in Slovakia. Czech Slovakophiles extolled the virtues of Slovak resources, the untapped wealth, and so forth in such publications as Slovenska cftanka but it was not really significant. Similarly, there was very little movement of Slovak labour to Bohemia and Moravia except for the tinkers who wandered far to earn their bread. The largest manufacturing concern, Ceskoslovenska-Kolben-Danek (C-K-D) factory, had not a single employee recorded as coming from Slovakia in the period 1871-1920.16 In the decades that preceded the Great War, the idea of a union of the Czechs and the Slovaks was proposed initially by intellectuals rather than politicians as the only alternative to a situation which could no longer be tolerated. The general Czech and Slovak population knew very little of each other. The Czechs did not recognize the Slovak language and tended to mistake Slovaks for Yugoslavs as late as 1918.1 7 They had greater personal contact with other Europeans than with the Slovaks. Similarly, the educated Slovaks were much more at home in Vienna and Budapest. In fact, the peasants and workers migrated to these two cities as a general rule rather than to the Czech Lands. In addition, there was no truly unified Czech-Slovak club or association upon which Czechoslovak unity could be built. Ceskoslovanska Jednota had been founded by a minority, based on an idea rather than as the result of a political and economic evolutionary process. Thus, much of the misunderstanding which resulted after 16F . W. Carter, "C-K-D Employees, Prague 1871-1920: Some Aspects of Their Geographical Distribution", Journal of Historical Geography, I (I), 1975, p. 95. 17Jan Hajda, "The Role of Intelligentsia in Society" in Miloslav Rechcigl, ed., The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p. 311. �SLOVAKIA 77 1918 can be attributed to a mutual lack of awareness. The Czech intelligentsia sought to change basic Slovak society along the lines of their own but they did not take into account the growth and differentiation of the other. The "Anketa" carried out by Pnfdy in 1914 and finally published in 1919 clearly showed that those who welcomed political cooperation with the Czechs were the former Hlasists and Pnidists, the liberal-progressive streams in the Slovak National Party. Tampering with the Slovak language was out of the question . Co-operation was still relatively limited as Stefanek, an ardent supporter of CzechSlovak relations, remarked: In my view, the Czech political parties should work more systematically and their leaders should above all else know Slovakia personally and all their pronouncements on our behalf in the Austrian parliament and in delegations should be founded on their own views . As far as I am aware, other than Prof. Dr. Masaryk, Dr. Herben and Klofac and a few Agrarian politicians, no one has been to Slovakia, not even Dr. Hajn, nor Dr. Fiedler, Dr. Korner, Dr. Fort and many more excellent Czech politicians who through their own personal contact could accomplish much good . Slovakia still remains terra incognita even for Czech politicians, for university professors, writers , in short for the "cream" of the Czech nation. On the other hand we gladly recognize the good work of Czech politicans.18 I 811 Anketa", Prudy V , 9-10 (1913/ 1914- 1919), p. 11 . � SLOVAKIA 63 Czech-Slovak Relations From the 1840s to 1914 EDITA BOSAK Czech-Slovak relations were a constant but also a fundamental problem in the history of the Czech :md Slovak people, particularly from their political union in 1918 until the creation of two separate states in 1993. Their common state had been created out of the framework of the Austro-Hungarian Empire where the differences between the two peoples were already quite marked and also grossly underestimated . Since the arrival of the Magyars in today's Hungary in the late 9th century, the Slovaks had experienced a distinctly different development from the Czechs. Almost one thousand years of Hungarian rule had marked their economic activities , social life, degree of devotion to religion, mentality, tradition, and history. Even with the initial euphoria that followed the creation of the common state on 28 October 1918, these fundamental differences, which had not been fully considered, could not be erased. Not only were they cultural-linguistic but also religious. Our purpose is to examine how these differences were perceived prior to 1914 and what attempts were made to establish political relations between the two nations. The emergence of the Czech and Slovak national movements in the early nineteenth century helped to create a feeling of Slav solidarity. However, in the 1840s, the acceptance by most Slovak intellectuals of the central Slovak dialect as the Slovak literary language caused a permanent literary rift between the two peoples. The Slovaks were facing the first large scale attempts by the Magyars to assimilate the non-Magyars in Hungary. By 1844, �64 SLOVAKIA Magyar was made the official language of the country. The Slovak Lutherans were especially threatened because their close ties with the Czech Protestants were construed by official circles as evidence of treason, that is to say, collaboration with a foreign power. Thus they had to re-evaluate their position , especially since the Czechs were quite indifferent to the political and cultural situation of the Slovaks, embroiled as they were with their own national struggle with the Germans in Bohemia and Moravia. Assistance of any kind was not forthcoming . Nevertheless, the Czechs were considering creating a "Czechoslovak" literary language, yet refused to allow the modern Czech literary language to adopt any Slovak characteristics in order that the Slovaks might be able to identify with it. The Czechs were convinced that all concessions had to come from the Slovaks. However, as the idea that they were a nation of Slavs distinct from the Czechs grew among the Slovaks , there arose an incompatibility with the idea of being Czechoslovak and using only Czech as the literary medium. In the final analysis, a new Slovak literary language was the only recourse available to the Slovaks. Unfortunately, this step hardly fulfilled the expectations of L'udovit Stur and his followers that the Slovaks would become unified. The fact is that religious differences played an important role. The Slovaks were for the greater part Roman Catholics. But about one quarter was Lutheran and it was this group which tended to have the Czech ties that dated as far back as the sixteenth century and which used the Kralicka Bible for both literary and religious purposes . This split in Slovak society profoundly influenced the development of Czech-Slovak relations. The introduction of Sturovcina as the new Slovak literary language was called, remained a bone of contention between the Czechs and Slovaks for many decades . In the post-1849 period, CzechSlovak reciprocity almost completely disappeared. Controversy over the language split and political circumstances drove the two further apart. There were, however, some leading Czechs who continued to believe and to advocate the idea of Czechoslovakism, that is , the cultural ethnic and linguistic unity of both peoples as fellow Slavs. For instance, Karel Havlicek maintained that �SLOVAKIA 65 the Czechoslav lands, Bohemia, Moravia, a part of Silesia and Slovakia in Hungary were for a Jong time one nation as far as literary and spiritual life goes, and the greater part of them belonged to one state. Well-known individuals in Bohemia as well as in Moravia, and likewise in Slovakia had always worked towards the complete union of these lands comprising one nation, and considered themselves members of one tribe, which is verified by the names and works of men from all these Jands. 2 But there were other leading lights among the Czechs like the Old Czech Party leader Frantisek L. Rieger who accused the Slovaks of having "tom away" from the Czech nation. From 1849 to 1868 there was next to no political interest in Slovak affairs. In the 1870's, 1880's and 1890's literary contact was sporadic and minimal. The continuity of Czech-Slovak relations was maintained by a few Czech writers and persons involved in cultural activities. The closure of the three Slovak gymnazia forced Slovak students to go abroad to study, especially to Moravia which was geographically closer to Upper Hungary, as Slovakia was called . Conditions were difficult and the students were not always well received, as Vavro Srobar comments in his biography, Z mojho iivota (From My Own Life), concerning his own experience with Czech professors. Contact was not always amicable on the day-today level. Students found it difficult to learn Czech and soon discovered that academically they were far behind the Czech students. It was the work of such writers as Bozena Nemcova, Adolf Heyduk, Rudolf Pokorny, and Jozef Holecek who kept the Czech public informed on who and what the Slovaks were and under what conditions they were surviving in Hungary. However, only a tiny segment of the intelligentsia had any interest of a genuine nature in 211 Ceskoslovanska zeme, Cechy, Morava, cast Slezska a Slovenska v Uhi'fch jsou jiz davno v literarnfm a du~evnfm zivote jednfm narodem, a vet~f cast jejich byla jiz i jednfm statem. Znamej~f duchove jak z Cech, tak z Moravy, tak i ze Slovenska odjakziva smerovali k uplnemu spojenf techto zernf jednoho naroda, a povafovali sebe vzdy za osudy jednoho kmene, na co svedcf jmena a spisy najznamenitej~fch muz0 v~ech tech krajin". Karel Havlfcek Borovsky, Politicke spisy, Vol. III, ed. Dr. Zdenek Tobolka, Prague: Jan Laichter, 1902, p. 178. �66 SLOVAKIA the Slovaks. The overall view of the Slovaks tended to be a rather sentimental and romantic one. For example, the short time spent by Bozena Nemcova in Slovakia produced a collection of fairytales Slovensk6 pohadky a povesti (Slovak Stories and Tales), two novels with Slovak themes Pohorska vesnice (Mountain Villages) and Chyie pod horami (Shanties At the Foothills), and a monograph Krajov a lesov na Zvolensku (Lands and Forests of Zvolen) . Throughout her life, she remained in regular correspondence with Gustav K. Zechenter, the minister and poet Samuel Chalupka, and the poet Samuel Tomasik, author of the Slovak hymn "Hej, Slovaci!" Of the other early Czech Slovakophiles, R. Pokorny wrote Potulky po Slovensku (Wandering About Slovakia), Literama shoda ceskoslovenska (Czechoslovak Literary Agreement); A. Heyduk Cymbal a Husle (Cymbal and Violin); and J. Holecek Podejme ruku Slovakum (Let's Give Our Hand To the Slovaks). Heyduk's verses were sentimental, and the description of daily Slovak life was highly coloured but Holecek, as a journalist, pointed out to the Czechs the political importance of the Slovaks for them, that is, a union of Czech and Slovak forces in opposition to German pressure in the Czech Lands. This was to become one of the major arguments in favour of Czech-Slovak reciprocity in the late 1890's. Pokorny, too , did some foundation work in re-establishing Czech-Slovak contact by setting-up the "Knihovna ceskoslovenska" (Czechoslovak Library). Its purpose was to publish the work of Slovak literary figures but due to financial stress, it closed in 1881 after having published only two works . One can see that Czech society at large actually had very little contact with the Slovaks or even knowledge about them until the 1890's. Pavel Sochan, a Slovak artist, described the situation as follows : the circle of Slovak friends was then very limited among the Czechs , whereas among the Mora vi ans we had many sincere friends . Even intelligent Czechs considered Slovaks as "tinkers" and Slovakia as the "land of tinkers" .3 3Pavel Sochan, "Zalozenie spolku 'Detvan' v Prahe roku 1882" in Stanislav Meciar ed., Detvan 50 rokov v Prahe, Turc. Sv. Martin: Slovensky akademicky spolok �SLOVAKIA 67 At official functions, Czech academics often mistook the Slovaks for Bulgarians or Russians, for the Slovak language seemed very foreign sounding and unintelligible to their ears . They knew nothing of Slovak literature or her poets and writers. It was a very small Czech literary group which expressed any interest in the life of their brother Slavs. As the nineteenth century was coming to a close, the political situation of both the Czechs and the Slovaks required a new approach. What was needed was a realistic and systematic education effort of the Czech public with the existential struggle of the Slovaks in Hungary if aid was to be obtained for them. They had to become acquainted with Slovak culture, folklore and way of life . On the other hand, the Slovaks had to be awakened, educated, and shown that the Czechs were to be trusted and that they no longer held any grudges over the language issue. It was Karel Kalal, a Czech schoolteacher, who took on this role of arousing the Czechs in the 1890's and early 1900's to the plight of the Slovaks. Initially , his attitude vis-a-vis Slovak conditions was na"ively romantic and sentimental but by the twentieth century he became much more realistic in his comprehension, and his writing improved. Although his efforts were crowned with some success, the language question remained a thorn in the flesh of the Czechs. The Czechs were involved with the process of establishing their own separate identity from that of the Germans and yet they refused to see or accept the same nationalism in the Slovaks. They continued to see Czech-Slovak reciprocity in terms of one language, that is Czech. Kalal was just as stubborn a supporter of the Czechoslovak language. He represented a threat to the existence of the Slovak language and was often attacked for his articles by the Martin group. This language question was one of the basic problems hindering any "Detvan", 1932, pp . 8-9 . The original Slovak text is : " ...kruh slovenskych priatefov bol vtedy medzi Cechmi vefmi obmedzeny, kdezto medzi Moravanmi mali sme vefa uprimnych priatefov. I inteligentnf Cesi pokladali Slovakov za "dratenfkov" a Slovensko za "zeme drateru'lru ". �68 SLOVAKIA great Slovak moves towards the Czechs. The intellectual group centred in Turciansky Svaty Martin never ceased to defend the cultural-linguistic uniqueness of the Slovak nation from that of the Czech. The Slovak language and the idea of a distinct nation were the only weapons which they had at their disposal to fight Magyarisation. As it was, denationalisation of the younger generation, via mainly the school system, continued to increase. Another literary figure very active in attempting to bring about a rapprochement between the Czechs and the Slovaks was Jaroslav Vlcek . Born in Slovakia of mixed Czech-Slovak parentage, Vlcek spent his formative years on Slovak soil and received his early schooling there. While studying in Prague, he helped establish a student university club, Detvan, in 1882, for Slovak students studying there. During his student days, Vlcek wrote articles on a regular basis for the Slovak magazine Oral (Eagle) on Czech literature titled "Listy z Ciech" ("Letters from the Czech lands"), and in the Czech magazine Ruch a kvety (Activity and Flowers) on Slovak literature. His first major work Literatura na Slovensku (Literature in Slovakia) appeared in 1881. In 1883 he published a daring article in Slovanskf sbomfk (Slavonic Magazine) called "Slovensko za poslednfch peti let", (Slovakia in the Last Five Years) in which he disclosed the practices of the governing Magyar circles in Slovakia. In 1890, Vlcek published Dejiny literatlfry slovenske (The History of Slovak Literature). Vlcek was the first head of Detvan and he maintained an active interest in the club through the years canvassing to get support for it. The purpose of Detvan was to bring together Slovak students, to entertain and to educate them by having them give papers on Slovak literature, history and the contemporary conditions. The most important figures in the first decade of Detvan's existence were Vlcek, P. Sochan, Cyril Krcmery, St. Daxner, Ladislav Nadasi, Jan Slabej, Matej Bencur, M. Ursfny, Dusan Makovicky, J. Smetanay, and Srobar. Almost all of them were, at one time or another, to take part in the Slovak national awakening. Detvan organised Slovak evenings open to the Czech public whenever there was a significant Slovak celebration in order that the Czech public might come to �SLOVAKIA 69 know that the Slovaks were more than just a land of tinkers, that they had their own history, their great men, and that they were now in need of a helping hand from their brothers to stave off the process of Magyarisation. This club collaborated on similar ventures with the other Czech and Moravian clubs, with the Slovak club Tatran in Vienna and with the Slovak Club in Budapest. They canvassed in Bohemia and Slovakia for funds to help Slovak students to come to study in Prague. During Srobar's presidency, Detvan came to have the greatest contact with the average Czech living in Prague. Srobar had been influenced by the realist philosophy (political program) which Tomas G. Masaryk (later to become the first President of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918) expounded in his university classes. He came to believe that the political passivity favoured by the Martin group was not beneficial to the Slovak nation, that the Slovaks must abandon their fatalistic policy and stop expecting salvation from the east, from their Russian brothers. Upon returning home he became active in politics and ran for the Hungarian Parliament. In 1891 and 1895 the Czechs organised two large provincial exhibitions. The stand on the ethnographic exhibition was of the greatest importance, for the Slovaks had two rooms devoted to their culture, under the title "Part of the Czechoslav nation". Czech attendance at this exhibition was large and press coverage thorough, giving the Czech public its first opportunity to become acquainted with Slovak culture on a grand scale. Following the excitement and goodwill engendered by the Ethnographic Exhibition, the Ceskoslovanska Jednota (Czechoslavonic Unit), was formed on 7 May 1896 with the well-known Slavist, Professor Frantisek Pastrnek, as chairman. According to its constitution, its purpose was the "...cultivation of Czechoslav interests and the support of the poor young Slav people" .4 The vehicle via which this was to be carried out was: "a) to publish, to promote, 4Literami archiv pamatnik narodnfho pfsemnictvf, Rotnagl Collection. "Ucel spolku je pestovati kultumi zajmy ceskoslovanske a podporovati chudou mladez slovanskou" . �70 SLOVAKIA to collect, to buy literary works and to found libraries; b) to grant stipends and to support Slav students studying in Prague ... ; c) public lectures and discussions, excluding political ones; d) to sponsor social entertainment" .5 This organisation was created to act as a defense mechanism in areas culturally endangered by Germans, for example Moravia, Silesia and to help these Czechs outside of Bohemia to maintain their identity (Lower Austria, Vienna). As far as the Slovaks were concerned, the aim was to maintain contact, to acquaint the Czech nation with the Slovak culture, to give Slovak students financial support in Prague, and to establish Czech libraries in Slovakia. The organisation did not really become deeply involved with the Slovak situation until 1909. Detvan members Srobar, Smetanay and K. Salva, a publisher in Rufomberok, were directly connected with Jednota as trustees for Slovakia. Meanwhile, in Martin , the representatives of the Slovak National Party remained determined to uphold the programme of Shir and the concept of "Okolie", come what may . Any acceptance of the idea of a single nation called Czechoslovak was out of the question for it meant the refutation of the Slovak language. The language separation was regarded as a tragedy by the Czechs but for the ardent Slovak nationalists, it meant arising from the dead. 6 According to Elie Kedourie, "the test ... , by which a nation is known to exist is that of language. A group speaking the same language is known as a nation, and a nation ought to constitute a state" .7 To the Martin nationalists, acceptance of the Czech idea of two branches of one nation , of being completely identical peoples, despite the patent social, economic, linguistic and cultural differences which one thousand years of a different history had imposed upon them, was simply not possible. It meant a denial of their nationhood which their awakened distinct national consciousness forbade. Thus the writings of such ardent Czech Slovakophiles as Kalal were not always well 5Ibid. , Third regulation of Constitution . 6Stefan Jan~ak. tivot Dr. Pavla Blahu, Tmava: Spolok sv. Vojtecha, 1947, I, p. 41. 7Elie Kedourie, Nationalism , London: Hutchinson & Co., 1974, p. 68. �SLOVAKIA 71 received in the Martin circle. In their publication Narodnie noviny (National News), they made it clear that the Czechs were not being made familiar with true Slovak conditions: The Czech public only misleads itself, when "the friends " of the Slovaks come to it with these sorts of things. He who is a friend of the Slovaks and understands their situation would not now refer to the written language .. . From amongst the professionals of our Czech brothers none took a deep interest in the Slovaks, thus rose K. Kalal, as an "expert" on Slovak affairs.8 Masaryk, too, often came under fire by the older generation of Slovak political leaders, represented by Svetozar Hurban Vajansky a leading nationalist, poet and editor of Narodnie noviny. Masaryk was accused of anti-clericalism, immorality in the sense of disrespect for tradition and ethics, misrepresentation of the economic situation in Slovakia, that is that poverty was not on a national scale but existed only in certain regions of the country which were not conducive to crop growing due to geography , such as Orava and Eastern Slovakia, and finally, for having turned some of the young people away from their own party, the Slovak National Party. Vajansky felt the young simply did not fully comprehend the gravity of the domestic situation, that there were no alternatives to the tactics used, and that unity amongst all Slovaks in the face of the onslaught of Magyarisation was vital. The older generation was convinced that writing in newspapers, facing stiff fines and longterm jail sentences for these articles, nonparticipation in the government and steadfastness in their religious affiliations were the only avenues open to them in stemming Magyarisation. They believed in co-operation amongst the Slavs, for example the Czechs as their closest brethren, but not at the expense 8Narodnie noviny, 1901, No. 64. Original text reads: "c'.:eske obecenstvo Jen myli sa, keel' "priatelia" Slovakov prichodia mu s takymito vecmi. Kto je priatefom Slovakov a rozumie ich polofoniu , teraz nebude sa tyka{ otazky ich spisovneho jazyka ... U bratov c'.:echov z povolanych fudf nikto nev~fmal si de,kJadnej~ie Slovakov , tak povstal K. Kalal , ako "znalec" vo veciach slovenskych". �72 SLOVAKIA of their national language , with the resulting loss of their separate identity. This was something which the Czechs never came to understand fully and which created so much ill-feeling after 1918. At the tum of the century, the student club Detvan in Prague lost a good deal of its drive with the departure of many of its most active students , especially Srobar, who returned to Slovakia to establish himself in a medical practice in 1899 in Rufomberok. His departure left a gap which was to be filled later by a young Slovak from Kosariska, Milan Rastislav Stefanik. In the summer of 1897 Srobar and four other young , progressive-thinking, Slovak students dissatisfied with the tum of events at the Martin celebrations, went to Bystricka to speak with Masaryk. He had already had a great influence upon the Slovak students in Prague, and Srobar had taken very much to heart the realist philosophy which Masaryk expounded, that is "drobna praca", small work amongst the people themselves. 9 At this meeting the basic foundation for a liberaldemocratic thinking review called Hlas (Voice) was laid . Its adherents, called Hlasists, were represented by Srobar, Pavel Blaho and A. Stefanek, journalists, and the lawyer Ivan Derer, all of whom were to play prominent roles in the government of Czechoslovakia after World War I. They believed in progressive thinking, democracy, reason and non-intervention of the Roman Catholic Church in the daily life of the peasants. They were ardent Czechoslovaks, devoted to the idea of Czechoslovak unity (Ceskoslovenska jednota). Most of their support came from the organisation Jednota in Prague. The first copy of Hlas was published in 1898 in Skalica 911 Drobna praca" was developed in depth in a series of lectures by Masaryk in 1898. These can be found in Jak pracovat?, ZUrich: Konfrontation SA, 1977, pp. 16-27. Masaryk wanted students to take the knowledge they had acquired in school and by going into the countryside to pass it on to the common man in a practical fashion thus helping him to better himself and to educate himself. At the same time Masaryk believed that such endeavours would lead to greater opportunities for both. They would "be coming into contact with people and learning to work together" (p.57), thus promoting a better understanding between each other and furthering their national goal. �SLOVAKIA 73 under the editorship of Blaho. Most of the young people involved were former Detvan members. Due to financial problems, it appeared for the last time in 1904. It had not been able to build-up a wide enough reading public. Their open Czechoslovak program was regarded with suspicion by the majority of the Slovak intellectuals and others who might have bought a copy. Albeit short-lived, Hlas had a tremendous impact on Slovak political, social and cultural life. It was instrumental in establishing the idea of a union of the Czechs and Slovaks on cultural and national lines. It stressed the need to educate the peasants to think and make their own decisions and especially to free themselves from the influence of the clergy. Education was not only the means of building an awareness of the Slovak identity and political activity but also the means of bringing about change in such areas as the temperance movement. From 1909 to 1914, the progressive young Slovaks again concentrated themselves around a monthly review, Prudy. Once more, its appearance was due to the initiative of Detvan members, for example Bohdan Pavlu. It described its program as being an open platform upon which all were welcome to come and express their views. Most of the members were former Hlasists. One can see that the motivation for Czech-Slovak reciprocity from the Slovak side tended to be initiated by those people who had actually studied in the Czech Lands. One can understand why Narodnie novinytried to discourage students from continuing their higher education there. For the Martinites, to go to Bohemia meant returning as a Czechophile as a foregone conclusion It should be pointed out that although Czech political opinion may have softened vis-a-vis the Slovaks after Rieger, there was never any question of political support.IO As far as the Young 10In several speeches both in Prague and Budapest Rieger made it very clear that the relationship between the Czechs and the Slovaks was not a legal one. The Czechs had no legal right to interfere in Slovak affairs , and moreover, had not been requested to do so by Slovak political leaders. See Jozef Jablonicky, "Prfspevok k cesko-slovenskym vzt'ahom od konca 19. stor. do roku 1914", in Historicke stlfdie, �74 SLOVAKIA Czech Party was concerned, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia formed one unit as an historic state. Newly formed Czech political parties did not include the question of the Slovaks in their program. They upheld Rieger's stand that the Slovak question is a causa finita. 11 The only political leader to have a divergent view was Masaryk. He believed that Slovakia was a part of contemporary Czech politics. The span of time during which his influence was particularly significant to Slovak affairs was from 1896 to 1902. From then on he stopped travelling to Bystricka and turned his attention to Bohemian politics and dualism. His newspapers Cas and Nasa doba continued to publish articles on Slovakia. By the early 1900's the articles were losing their romantic style in describing Slovak conditions while such journals as Osveta and Slovanskj piehled concentrated on the culture and literature of Slovakia. This political stand of non-intervention continued even after the particularly unpleasant incident at Cernova in 1907 when the local Hungarian authorities opened fire upon unarmed Slovak villagers who had not wanted their new church to be consecrated by the Magyar clergy but wanted their own priest Andrej Hlinka, who had built it, to be the officiating personage. Although Czech Slovakophiles were able to get much propaganda out of the incident, the Czech political position remained the same. Czech politicans had no wish to threaten the Czech program based on Bohemia's Historic State Rights, nor to interfere in the internal matters of another state, Hungary. Contact between the Czechs and the Slovaks was very much on a limited literary and cultural level. In 1911, the Czechoslovak Unity under the direction Professor Fr. Bfly published Slovenska citanka, an encyclopedia on Slovak culture and literature. From 1907 to 1910 Nase Slovensko (Our Slovakia), an annual journal was published to acquaint the Czech public with the Slovaks. From 1908 until the break out of war, Jednota organised annual meetings of Czech and Slovak intellectuals at the Moravian health spa Luhacovice. Initially 26 individuals came together, but by 1914 IV, 1958, p. 8. 11 Ibid., p. 22. �SLOVAKIA 75 their number had grown to 300. 12 It should be noted that those who were active were the small number of Hlasists, the young generation mostly educated in Bohemia, Milan Hodza, a member of the Hungarian Parliament and representative of the Agrarian idea in Slovakia, and a few of the old guard from Martin; and from the Czechs, it was predominantly members of the Jednota. It is here that one begins to have some suggestion of possible discourse on political aspects. The actual meetings were held in secret and there appear to be no known official minutes. That something along political lines was being aired in these circles emerges in a letter from R . Pilat to the American Slovak, Milan Getting, in the summer of 1913 where he suggests that: " .. .it is high time that work was carried out on achieving the future program of a union of Czechs and Slovaks in a political sense". 13 He appears to have a premonition of the coming war and he adds confidentially that "preparations from the Czech side are on the way, in the event of the defeat of Austria, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia would be united with Slovakia in one state" .14 On 4 April 1914, Frantisek Votruba a well-known Czech publicist living in Slovakia presented at a major political rally in Prague a resolution of protest against Magyar oppression of its nationalities, along with a demand for the revision of the Ausgleich and the terms of dualism.1 5 This is indicative of the fact that most Slovaks still thought in terms of a resolution of their problems within the terms of the present state rather than outside of it with the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. Some mention must be made of the interests of industry, ban12 Ibid., p. 20. 13 v . Kumek , "0 cinnosti a vyznamu Ceskoslovenske jednoty pi'ed vznikem CSR", Historicky casopis 10 (1962), pp . 366-7 in Miroslav Peknfk, "Slovenska politika v Uhorsku a kry~talizacia jej politickych koncepcif pred vznikom I. svetovej voj ny" , Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, Bratislava: SA V, 1992, pp . 44. 14 M. Getting, Americkf Slovaci a vyvin ceskoslovenskej myslienky v rokoch 1914-18, Pittsburg: n. p., 1933 , p. 12 in Peknfk , p. 44. 15Slo vensky tyidennfk 12 , 4 . April 1914, No. 15 , p. 3 in Peknfk, p. 44. �76 SLOVAKIA king and investment in Slovakia by the Slovaks. With gradual economic growth in the 1870's and 1880's, the Tatra Bank was established in 1886 in Turciansky Svaty Martin. Shortly afterwards , there were bank officials and small investors , soon followed by branches in three other towns . By 1909, there were many similar banks throughout Slovakia. However, Czech investment was very small in Slovakia. Czech Slovakophiles extolled the virtues of Slovak resources, the untapped wealth, and so forth in such publications as Slovenska cftanka but it was not really significant. Similarly, there was very little movement of Slovak labour to Bohemia and Moravia except for the tinkers who wandered far to earn their bread. The largest manufacturing concern, Ceskoslovenska-Kolben-Danek (C-K-D) factory, had not a single employee recorded as coming from Slovakia in the period 1871-1920.16 In the decades that preceded the Great War, the idea of a union of the Czechs and the Slovaks was proposed initially by intellectuals rather than politicians as the only alternative to a situation which could no longer be tolerated. The general Czech and Slovak population knew very little of each other. The Czechs did not recognize the Slovak language and tended to mistake Slovaks for Yugoslavs as late as 1918.1 7 They had greater personal contact with other Europeans than with the Slovaks. Similarly, the educated Slovaks were much more at home in Vienna and Budapest. In fact, the peasants and workers migrated to these two cities as a general rule rather than to the Czech Lands. In addition, there was no truly unified Czech-Slovak club or association upon which Czechoslovak unity could be built. Ceskoslovanska Jednota had been founded by a minority, based on an idea rather than as the result of a political and economic evolutionary process. Thus, much of the misunderstanding which resulted after 16F . W. Carter, "C-K-D Employees, Prague 1871-1920: Some Aspects of Their Geographical Distribution", Journal of Historical Geography, I (I), 1975, p. 95. 17Jan Hajda, "The Role of Intelligentsia in Society" in Miloslav Rechcigl, ed., The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p. 311. �SLOVAKIA 77 1918 can be attributed to a mutual lack of awareness. The Czech intelligentsia sought to change basic Slovak society along the lines of their own but they did not take into account the growth and differentiation of the other. The "Anketa" carried out by Pnfdy in 1914 and finally published in 1919 clearly showed that those who welcomed political cooperation with the Czechs were the former Hlasists and Pnidists, the liberal-progressive streams in the Slovak National Party. Tampering with the Slovak language was out of the question . Co-operation was still relatively limited as Stefanek, an ardent supporter of CzechSlovak relations, remarked: In my view, the Czech political parties should work more systematically and their leaders should above all else know Slovakia personally and all their pronouncements on our behalf in the Austrian parliament and in delegations should be founded on their own views . As far as I am aware, other than Prof. Dr. Masaryk, Dr. Herben and Klofac and a few Agrarian politicians, no one has been to Slovakia, not even Dr. Hajn, nor Dr. Fiedler, Dr. Korner, Dr. Fort and many more excellent Czech politicians who through their own personal contact could accomplish much good . Slovakia still remains terra incognita even for Czech politicians, for university professors, writers , in short for the "cream" of the Czech nation. On the other hand we gladly recognize the good work of Czech politicans.18 I 811 Anketa", Prudy V , 9-10 (1913/ 1914- 1919), p. 11 . � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1991-92, Vol. 35 Description An account of the resource Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Slovak League of America Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available 1991-92 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 63 Czech-Slovak Relations From the 1840s to 1914 EDITA BOSAK Czech-Slovak relations were a constant but also a fundamental problem in the history of the Czech :md Slovak people, particularly from their political union in 1918 until the creation of two separate states in 1993. Their common state had been created out of the framework of the Austro-Hungarian Empire where the differences between the two peoples were already quite marked and also grossly underestimated . Since the arrival of the Magyars in today's Hungary in the late 9th century, the Slovaks had experienced a distinctly different development from the Czechs. Almost one thousand years of Hungarian rule had marked their economic activities , social life, degree of devotion to religion, mentality, tradition, and history. Even with the initial euphoria that followed the creation of the common state on 28 October 1918, these fundamental differences, which had not been fully considered, could not be erased. Not only were they cultural-linguistic but also religious. Our purpose is to examine how these differences were perceived prior to 1914 and what attempts were made to establish political relations between the two nations. The emergence of the Czech and Slovak national movements in the early nineteenth century helped to create a feeling of Slav solidarity. However, in the 1840s, the acceptance by most Slovak intellectuals of the central Slovak dialect as the Slovak literary language caused a permanent literary rift between the two peoples. The Slovaks were facing the first large scale attempts by the Magyars to assimilate the non-Magyars in Hungary. By 1844, 64 SLOVAKIA Magyar was made the official language of the country. The Slovak Lutherans were especially threatened because their close ties with the Czech Protestants were construed by official circles as evidence of treason, that is to say, collaboration with a foreign power. Thus they had to re-evaluate their position , especially since the Czechs were quite indifferent to the political and cultural situation of the Slovaks, embroiled as they were with their own national struggle with the Germans in Bohemia and Moravia. Assistance of any kind was not forthcoming . Nevertheless, the Czechs were considering creating a "Czechoslovak" literary language, yet refused to allow the modern Czech literary language to adopt any Slovak characteristics in order that the Slovaks might be able to identify with it. The Czechs were convinced that all concessions had to come from the Slovaks. However, as the idea that they were a nation of Slavs distinct from the Czechs grew among the Slovaks , there arose an incompatibility with the idea of being Czechoslovak and using only Czech as the literary medium. In the final analysis, a new Slovak literary language was the only recourse available to the Slovaks. Unfortunately, this step hardly fulfilled the expectations of L'udovit Stur and his followers that the Slovaks would become unified. The fact is that religious differences played an important role. The Slovaks were for the greater part Roman Catholics. But about one quarter was Lutheran and it was this group which tended to have the Czech ties that dated as far back as the sixteenth century and which used the Kralicka Bible for both literary and religious purposes . This split in Slovak society profoundly influenced the development of Czech-Slovak relations. The introduction of Sturovcina as the new Slovak literary language was called, remained a bone of contention between the Czechs and Slovaks for many decades . In the post-1849 period, CzechSlovak reciprocity almost completely disappeared. Controversy over the language split and political circumstances drove the two further apart. There were, however, some leading Czechs who continued to believe and to advocate the idea of Czechoslovakism, that is , the cultural ethnic and linguistic unity of both peoples as fellow Slavs. For instance, Karel Havlicek maintained that SLOVAKIA 65 the Czechoslav lands, Bohemia, Moravia, a part of Silesia and Slovakia in Hungary were for a Jong time one nation as far as literary and spiritual life goes, and the greater part of them belonged to one state. Well-known individuals in Bohemia as well as in Moravia, and likewise in Slovakia had always worked towards the complete union of these lands comprising one nation, and considered themselves members of one tribe, which is verified by the names and works of men from all these Jands. 2 But there were other leading lights among the Czechs like the Old Czech Party leader Frantisek L. Rieger who accused the Slovaks of having "tom away" from the Czech nation. From 1849 to 1868 there was next to no political interest in Slovak affairs. In the 1870's, 1880's and 1890's literary contact was sporadic and minimal. The continuity of Czech-Slovak relations was maintained by a few Czech writers and persons involved in cultural activities. The closure of the three Slovak gymnazia forced Slovak students to go abroad to study, especially to Moravia which was geographically closer to Upper Hungary, as Slovakia was called . Conditions were difficult and the students were not always well received, as Vavro Srobar comments in his biography, Z mojho iivota (From My Own Life), concerning his own experience with Czech professors. Contact was not always amicable on the day-today level. Students found it difficult to learn Czech and soon discovered that academically they were far behind the Czech students. It was the work of such writers as Bozena Nemcova, Adolf Heyduk, Rudolf Pokorny, and Jozef Holecek who kept the Czech public informed on who and what the Slovaks were and under what conditions they were surviving in Hungary. However, only a tiny segment of the intelligentsia had any interest of a genuine nature in 211 Ceskoslovanska zeme, Cechy, Morava, cast Slezska a Slovenska v Uhi'fch jsou jiz davno v literarnfm a du~evnfm zivote jednfm narodem, a vet~f cast jejich byla jiz i jednfm statem. Znamej~f duchove jak z Cech, tak z Moravy, tak i ze Slovenska odjakziva smerovali k uplnemu spojenf techto zernf jednoho naroda, a povafovali sebe vzdy za osudy jednoho kmene, na co svedcf jmena a spisy najznamenitej~fch muz0 v~ech tech krajin". Karel Havlfcek Borovsky, Politicke spisy, Vol. III, ed. Dr. Zdenek Tobolka, Prague: Jan Laichter, 1902, p. 178. 66 SLOVAKIA the Slovaks. The overall view of the Slovaks tended to be a rather sentimental and romantic one. For example, the short time spent by Bozena Nemcova in Slovakia produced a collection of fairytales Slovensk6 pohadky a povesti (Slovak Stories and Tales), two novels with Slovak themes Pohorska vesnice (Mountain Villages) and Chyie pod horami (Shanties At the Foothills), and a monograph Krajov a lesov na Zvolensku (Lands and Forests of Zvolen) . Throughout her life, she remained in regular correspondence with Gustav K. Zechenter, the minister and poet Samuel Chalupka, and the poet Samuel Tomasik, author of the Slovak hymn "Hej, Slovaci!" Of the other early Czech Slovakophiles, R. Pokorny wrote Potulky po Slovensku (Wandering About Slovakia), Literama shoda ceskoslovenska (Czechoslovak Literary Agreement); A. Heyduk Cymbal a Husle (Cymbal and Violin); and J. Holecek Podejme ruku Slovakum (Let's Give Our Hand To the Slovaks). Heyduk's verses were sentimental, and the description of daily Slovak life was highly coloured but Holecek, as a journalist, pointed out to the Czechs the political importance of the Slovaks for them, that is, a union of Czech and Slovak forces in opposition to German pressure in the Czech Lands. This was to become one of the major arguments in favour of Czech-Slovak reciprocity in the late 1890's. Pokorny, too , did some foundation work in re-establishing Czech-Slovak contact by setting-up the "Knihovna ceskoslovenska" (Czechoslovak Library). Its purpose was to publish the work of Slovak literary figures but due to financial stress, it closed in 1881 after having published only two works . One can see that Czech society at large actually had very little contact with the Slovaks or even knowledge about them until the 1890's. Pavel Sochan, a Slovak artist, described the situation as follows : the circle of Slovak friends was then very limited among the Czechs , whereas among the Mora vi ans we had many sincere friends . Even intelligent Czechs considered Slovaks as "tinkers" and Slovakia as the "land of tinkers" .3 3Pavel Sochan, "Zalozenie spolku 'Detvan' v Prahe roku 1882" in Stanislav Meciar ed., Detvan 50 rokov v Prahe, Turc. Sv. Martin: Slovensky akademicky spolok SLOVAKIA 67 At official functions, Czech academics often mistook the Slovaks for Bulgarians or Russians, for the Slovak language seemed very foreign sounding and unintelligible to their ears . They knew nothing of Slovak literature or her poets and writers. It was a very small Czech literary group which expressed any interest in the life of their brother Slavs. As the nineteenth century was coming to a close, the political situation of both the Czechs and the Slovaks required a new approach. What was needed was a realistic and systematic education effort of the Czech public with the existential struggle of the Slovaks in Hungary if aid was to be obtained for them. They had to become acquainted with Slovak culture, folklore and way of life . On the other hand, the Slovaks had to be awakened, educated, and shown that the Czechs were to be trusted and that they no longer held any grudges over the language issue. It was Karel Kalal, a Czech schoolteacher, who took on this role of arousing the Czechs in the 1890's and early 1900's to the plight of the Slovaks. Initially , his attitude vis-a-vis Slovak conditions was na"ively romantic and sentimental but by the twentieth century he became much more realistic in his comprehension, and his writing improved. Although his efforts were crowned with some success, the language question remained a thorn in the flesh of the Czechs. The Czechs were involved with the process of establishing their own separate identity from that of the Germans and yet they refused to see or accept the same nationalism in the Slovaks. They continued to see Czech-Slovak reciprocity in terms of one language, that is Czech. Kalal was just as stubborn a supporter of the Czechoslovak language. He represented a threat to the existence of the Slovak language and was often attacked for his articles by the Martin group. This language question was one of the basic problems hindering any "Detvan", 1932, pp . 8-9 . The original Slovak text is : " ...kruh slovenskych priatefov bol vtedy medzi Cechmi vefmi obmedzeny, kdezto medzi Moravanmi mali sme vefa uprimnych priatefov. I inteligentnf Cesi pokladali Slovakov za "dratenfkov" a Slovensko za "zeme drateru'lru ". 68 SLOVAKIA great Slovak moves towards the Czechs. The intellectual group centred in Turciansky Svaty Martin never ceased to defend the cultural-linguistic uniqueness of the Slovak nation from that of the Czech. The Slovak language and the idea of a distinct nation were the only weapons which they had at their disposal to fight Magyarisation. As it was, denationalisation of the younger generation, via mainly the school system, continued to increase. Another literary figure very active in attempting to bring about a rapprochement between the Czechs and the Slovaks was Jaroslav Vlcek . Born in Slovakia of mixed Czech-Slovak parentage, Vlcek spent his formative years on Slovak soil and received his early schooling there. While studying in Prague, he helped establish a student university club, Detvan, in 1882, for Slovak students studying there. During his student days, Vlcek wrote articles on a regular basis for the Slovak magazine Oral (Eagle) on Czech literature titled "Listy z Ciech" ("Letters from the Czech lands"), and in the Czech magazine Ruch a kvety (Activity and Flowers) on Slovak literature. His first major work Literatura na Slovensku (Literature in Slovakia) appeared in 1881. In 1883 he published a daring article in Slovanskf sbomfk (Slavonic Magazine) called "Slovensko za poslednfch peti let", (Slovakia in the Last Five Years) in which he disclosed the practices of the governing Magyar circles in Slovakia. In 1890, Vlcek published Dejiny literatlfry slovenske (The History of Slovak Literature). Vlcek was the first head of Detvan and he maintained an active interest in the club through the years canvassing to get support for it. The purpose of Detvan was to bring together Slovak students, to entertain and to educate them by having them give papers on Slovak literature, history and the contemporary conditions. The most important figures in the first decade of Detvan's existence were Vlcek, P. Sochan, Cyril Krcmery, St. Daxner, Ladislav Nadasi, Jan Slabej, Matej Bencur, M. Ursfny, Dusan Makovicky, J. Smetanay, and Srobar. Almost all of them were, at one time or another, to take part in the Slovak national awakening. Detvan organised Slovak evenings open to the Czech public whenever there was a significant Slovak celebration in order that the Czech public might come to SLOVAKIA 69 know that the Slovaks were more than just a land of tinkers, that they had their own history, their great men, and that they were now in need of a helping hand from their brothers to stave off the process of Magyarisation. This club collaborated on similar ventures with the other Czech and Moravian clubs, with the Slovak club Tatran in Vienna and with the Slovak Club in Budapest. They canvassed in Bohemia and Slovakia for funds to help Slovak students to come to study in Prague. During Srobar's presidency, Detvan came to have the greatest contact with the average Czech living in Prague. Srobar had been influenced by the realist philosophy (political program) which Tomas G. Masaryk (later to become the first President of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918) expounded in his university classes. He came to believe that the political passivity favoured by the Martin group was not beneficial to the Slovak nation, that the Slovaks must abandon their fatalistic policy and stop expecting salvation from the east, from their Russian brothers. Upon returning home he became active in politics and ran for the Hungarian Parliament. In 1891 and 1895 the Czechs organised two large provincial exhibitions. The stand on the ethnographic exhibition was of the greatest importance, for the Slovaks had two rooms devoted to their culture, under the title "Part of the Czechoslav nation". Czech attendance at this exhibition was large and press coverage thorough, giving the Czech public its first opportunity to become acquainted with Slovak culture on a grand scale. Following the excitement and goodwill engendered by the Ethnographic Exhibition, the Ceskoslovanska Jednota (Czechoslavonic Unit), was formed on 7 May 1896 with the well-known Slavist, Professor Frantisek Pastrnek, as chairman. According to its constitution, its purpose was the "...cultivation of Czechoslav interests and the support of the poor young Slav people" .4 The vehicle via which this was to be carried out was: "a) to publish, to promote, 4Literami archiv pamatnik narodnfho pfsemnictvf, Rotnagl Collection. "Ucel spolku je pestovati kultumi zajmy ceskoslovanske a podporovati chudou mladez slovanskou" . 70 SLOVAKIA to collect, to buy literary works and to found libraries; b) to grant stipends and to support Slav students studying in Prague ... ; c) public lectures and discussions, excluding political ones; d) to sponsor social entertainment" .5 This organisation was created to act as a defense mechanism in areas culturally endangered by Germans, for example Moravia, Silesia and to help these Czechs outside of Bohemia to maintain their identity (Lower Austria, Vienna). As far as the Slovaks were concerned, the aim was to maintain contact, to acquaint the Czech nation with the Slovak culture, to give Slovak students financial support in Prague, and to establish Czech libraries in Slovakia. The organisation did not really become deeply involved with the Slovak situation until 1909. Detvan members Srobar, Smetanay and K. Salva, a publisher in Rufomberok, were directly connected with Jednota as trustees for Slovakia. Meanwhile, in Martin , the representatives of the Slovak National Party remained determined to uphold the programme of Shir and the concept of "Okolie", come what may . Any acceptance of the idea of a single nation called Czechoslovak was out of the question for it meant the refutation of the Slovak language. The language separation was regarded as a tragedy by the Czechs but for the ardent Slovak nationalists, it meant arising from the dead. 6 According to Elie Kedourie, "the test ... , by which a nation is known to exist is that of language. A group speaking the same language is known as a nation, and a nation ought to constitute a state" .7 To the Martin nationalists, acceptance of the Czech idea of two branches of one nation , of being completely identical peoples, despite the patent social, economic, linguistic and cultural differences which one thousand years of a different history had imposed upon them, was simply not possible. It meant a denial of their nationhood which their awakened distinct national consciousness forbade. Thus the writings of such ardent Czech Slovakophiles as Kalal were not always well 5Ibid. , Third regulation of Constitution . 6Stefan Jan~ak. tivot Dr. Pavla Blahu, Tmava: Spolok sv. Vojtecha, 1947, I, p. 41. 7Elie Kedourie, Nationalism , London: Hutchinson & Co., 1974, p. 68. SLOVAKIA 71 received in the Martin circle. In their publication Narodnie noviny (National News), they made it clear that the Czechs were not being made familiar with true Slovak conditions: The Czech public only misleads itself, when "the friends " of the Slovaks come to it with these sorts of things. He who is a friend of the Slovaks and understands their situation would not now refer to the written language .. . From amongst the professionals of our Czech brothers none took a deep interest in the Slovaks, thus rose K. Kalal, as an "expert" on Slovak affairs.8 Masaryk, too, often came under fire by the older generation of Slovak political leaders, represented by Svetozar Hurban Vajansky a leading nationalist, poet and editor of Narodnie noviny. Masaryk was accused of anti-clericalism, immorality in the sense of disrespect for tradition and ethics, misrepresentation of the economic situation in Slovakia, that is that poverty was not on a national scale but existed only in certain regions of the country which were not conducive to crop growing due to geography , such as Orava and Eastern Slovakia, and finally, for having turned some of the young people away from their own party, the Slovak National Party. Vajansky felt the young simply did not fully comprehend the gravity of the domestic situation, that there were no alternatives to the tactics used, and that unity amongst all Slovaks in the face of the onslaught of Magyarisation was vital. The older generation was convinced that writing in newspapers, facing stiff fines and longterm jail sentences for these articles, nonparticipation in the government and steadfastness in their religious affiliations were the only avenues open to them in stemming Magyarisation. They believed in co-operation amongst the Slavs, for example the Czechs as their closest brethren, but not at the expense 8Narodnie noviny, 1901, No. 64. Original text reads: "c'.:eske obecenstvo Jen myli sa, keel' "priatelia" Slovakov prichodia mu s takymito vecmi. Kto je priatefom Slovakov a rozumie ich polofoniu , teraz nebude sa tyka{ otazky ich spisovneho jazyka ... U bratov c'.:echov z povolanych fudf nikto nev~fmal si de,kJadnej~ie Slovakov , tak povstal K. Kalal , ako "znalec" vo veciach slovenskych". 72 SLOVAKIA of their national language , with the resulting loss of their separate identity. This was something which the Czechs never came to understand fully and which created so much ill-feeling after 1918. At the tum of the century, the student club Detvan in Prague lost a good deal of its drive with the departure of many of its most active students , especially Srobar, who returned to Slovakia to establish himself in a medical practice in 1899 in Rufomberok. His departure left a gap which was to be filled later by a young Slovak from Kosariska, Milan Rastislav Stefanik. In the summer of 1897 Srobar and four other young , progressive-thinking, Slovak students dissatisfied with the tum of events at the Martin celebrations, went to Bystricka to speak with Masaryk. He had already had a great influence upon the Slovak students in Prague, and Srobar had taken very much to heart the realist philosophy which Masaryk expounded, that is "drobna praca", small work amongst the people themselves. 9 At this meeting the basic foundation for a liberaldemocratic thinking review called Hlas (Voice) was laid . Its adherents, called Hlasists, were represented by Srobar, Pavel Blaho and A. Stefanek, journalists, and the lawyer Ivan Derer, all of whom were to play prominent roles in the government of Czechoslovakia after World War I. They believed in progressive thinking, democracy, reason and non-intervention of the Roman Catholic Church in the daily life of the peasants. They were ardent Czechoslovaks, devoted to the idea of Czechoslovak unity (Ceskoslovenska jednota). Most of their support came from the organisation Jednota in Prague. The first copy of Hlas was published in 1898 in Skalica 911 Drobna praca" was developed in depth in a series of lectures by Masaryk in 1898. These can be found in Jak pracovat?, ZUrich: Konfrontation SA, 1977, pp. 16-27. Masaryk wanted students to take the knowledge they had acquired in school and by going into the countryside to pass it on to the common man in a practical fashion thus helping him to better himself and to educate himself. At the same time Masaryk believed that such endeavours would lead to greater opportunities for both. They would "be coming into contact with people and learning to work together" (p.57), thus promoting a better understanding between each other and furthering their national goal. SLOVAKIA 73 under the editorship of Blaho. Most of the young people involved were former Detvan members. Due to financial problems, it appeared for the last time in 1904. It had not been able to build-up a wide enough reading public. Their open Czechoslovak program was regarded with suspicion by the majority of the Slovak intellectuals and others who might have bought a copy. Albeit short-lived, Hlas had a tremendous impact on Slovak political, social and cultural life. It was instrumental in establishing the idea of a union of the Czechs and Slovaks on cultural and national lines. It stressed the need to educate the peasants to think and make their own decisions and especially to free themselves from the influence of the clergy. Education was not only the means of building an awareness of the Slovak identity and political activity but also the means of bringing about change in such areas as the temperance movement. From 1909 to 1914, the progressive young Slovaks again concentrated themselves around a monthly review, Prudy. Once more, its appearance was due to the initiative of Detvan members, for example Bohdan Pavlu. It described its program as being an open platform upon which all were welcome to come and express their views. Most of the members were former Hlasists. One can see that the motivation for Czech-Slovak reciprocity from the Slovak side tended to be initiated by those people who had actually studied in the Czech Lands. One can understand why Narodnie novinytried to discourage students from continuing their higher education there. For the Martinites, to go to Bohemia meant returning as a Czechophile as a foregone conclusion It should be pointed out that although Czech political opinion may have softened vis-a-vis the Slovaks after Rieger, there was never any question of political support.IO As far as the Young 10In several speeches both in Prague and Budapest Rieger made it very clear that the relationship between the Czechs and the Slovaks was not a legal one. The Czechs had no legal right to interfere in Slovak affairs , and moreover, had not been requested to do so by Slovak political leaders. See Jozef Jablonicky, "Prfspevok k cesko-slovenskym vzt'ahom od konca 19. stor. do roku 1914", in Historicke stlfdie, 74 SLOVAKIA Czech Party was concerned, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia formed one unit as an historic state. Newly formed Czech political parties did not include the question of the Slovaks in their program. They upheld Rieger's stand that the Slovak question is a causa finita. 11 The only political leader to have a divergent view was Masaryk. He believed that Slovakia was a part of contemporary Czech politics. The span of time during which his influence was particularly significant to Slovak affairs was from 1896 to 1902. From then on he stopped travelling to Bystricka and turned his attention to Bohemian politics and dualism. His newspapers Cas and Nasa doba continued to publish articles on Slovakia. By the early 1900's the articles were losing their romantic style in describing Slovak conditions while such journals as Osveta and Slovanskj piehled concentrated on the culture and literature of Slovakia. This political stand of non-intervention continued even after the particularly unpleasant incident at Cernova in 1907 when the local Hungarian authorities opened fire upon unarmed Slovak villagers who had not wanted their new church to be consecrated by the Magyar clergy but wanted their own priest Andrej Hlinka, who had built it, to be the officiating personage. Although Czech Slovakophiles were able to get much propaganda out of the incident, the Czech political position remained the same. Czech politicans had no wish to threaten the Czech program based on Bohemia's Historic State Rights, nor to interfere in the internal matters of another state, Hungary. Contact between the Czechs and the Slovaks was very much on a limited literary and cultural level. In 1911, the Czechoslovak Unity under the direction Professor Fr. Bfly published Slovenska citanka, an encyclopedia on Slovak culture and literature. From 1907 to 1910 Nase Slovensko (Our Slovakia), an annual journal was published to acquaint the Czech public with the Slovaks. From 1908 until the break out of war, Jednota organised annual meetings of Czech and Slovak intellectuals at the Moravian health spa Luhacovice. Initially 26 individuals came together, but by 1914 IV, 1958, p. 8. 11 Ibid., p. 22. SLOVAKIA 75 their number had grown to 300. 12 It should be noted that those who were active were the small number of Hlasists, the young generation mostly educated in Bohemia, Milan Hodza, a member of the Hungarian Parliament and representative of the Agrarian idea in Slovakia, and a few of the old guard from Martin; and from the Czechs, it was predominantly members of the Jednota. It is here that one begins to have some suggestion of possible discourse on political aspects. The actual meetings were held in secret and there appear to be no known official minutes. That something along political lines was being aired in these circles emerges in a letter from R . Pilat to the American Slovak, Milan Getting, in the summer of 1913 where he suggests that: " .. .it is high time that work was carried out on achieving the future program of a union of Czechs and Slovaks in a political sense". 13 He appears to have a premonition of the coming war and he adds confidentially that "preparations from the Czech side are on the way, in the event of the defeat of Austria, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia would be united with Slovakia in one state" .14 On 4 April 1914, Frantisek Votruba a well-known Czech publicist living in Slovakia presented at a major political rally in Prague a resolution of protest against Magyar oppression of its nationalities, along with a demand for the revision of the Ausgleich and the terms of dualism.1 5 This is indicative of the fact that most Slovaks still thought in terms of a resolution of their problems within the terms of the present state rather than outside of it with the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. Some mention must be made of the interests of industry, ban12 Ibid., p. 20. 13 v . Kumek , "0 cinnosti a vyznamu Ceskoslovenske jednoty pi'ed vznikem CSR", Historicky casopis 10 (1962), pp . 366-7 in Miroslav Peknfk, "Slovenska politika v Uhorsku a kry~talizacia jej politickych koncepcif pred vznikom I. svetovej voj ny" , Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, Bratislava: SA V, 1992, pp . 44. 14 M. Getting, Americkf Slovaci a vyvin ceskoslovenskej myslienky v rokoch 1914-18, Pittsburg: n. p., 1933 , p. 12 in Peknfk , p. 44. 15Slo vensky tyidennfk 12 , 4 . April 1914, No. 15 , p. 3 in Peknfk, p. 44. 76 SLOVAKIA king and investment in Slovakia by the Slovaks. With gradual economic growth in the 1870's and 1880's, the Tatra Bank was established in 1886 in Turciansky Svaty Martin. Shortly afterwards , there were bank officials and small investors , soon followed by branches in three other towns . By 1909, there were many similar banks throughout Slovakia. However, Czech investment was very small in Slovakia. Czech Slovakophiles extolled the virtues of Slovak resources, the untapped wealth, and so forth in such publications as Slovenska cftanka but it was not really significant. Similarly, there was very little movement of Slovak labour to Bohemia and Moravia except for the tinkers who wandered far to earn their bread. The largest manufacturing concern, Ceskoslovenska-Kolben-Danek (C-K-D) factory, had not a single employee recorded as coming from Slovakia in the period 1871-1920.16 In the decades that preceded the Great War, the idea of a union of the Czechs and the Slovaks was proposed initially by intellectuals rather than politicians as the only alternative to a situation which could no longer be tolerated. The general Czech and Slovak population knew very little of each other. The Czechs did not recognize the Slovak language and tended to mistake Slovaks for Yugoslavs as late as 1918.1 7 They had greater personal contact with other Europeans than with the Slovaks. Similarly, the educated Slovaks were much more at home in Vienna and Budapest. In fact, the peasants and workers migrated to these two cities as a general rule rather than to the Czech Lands. In addition, there was no truly unified Czech-Slovak club or association upon which Czechoslovak unity could be built. Ceskoslovanska Jednota had been founded by a minority, based on an idea rather than as the result of a political and economic evolutionary process. Thus, much of the misunderstanding which resulted after 16F . W. Carter, "C-K-D Employees, Prague 1871-1920: Some Aspects of Their Geographical Distribution", Journal of Historical Geography, I (I), 1975, p. 95. 17Jan Hajda, "The Role of Intelligentsia in Society" in Miloslav Rechcigl, ed., The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p. 311. SLOVAKIA 77 1918 can be attributed to a mutual lack of awareness. The Czech intelligentsia sought to change basic Slovak society along the lines of their own but they did not take into account the growth and differentiation of the other. The "Anketa" carried out by Pnfdy in 1914 and finally published in 1919 clearly showed that those who welcomed political cooperation with the Czechs were the former Hlasists and Pnidists, the liberal-progressive streams in the Slovak National Party. Tampering with the Slovak language was out of the question . Co-operation was still relatively limited as Stefanek, an ardent supporter of CzechSlovak relations, remarked: In my view, the Czech political parties should work more systematically and their leaders should above all else know Slovakia personally and all their pronouncements on our behalf in the Austrian parliament and in delegations should be founded on their own views . As far as I am aware, other than Prof. Dr. Masaryk, Dr. Herben and Klofac and a few Agrarian politicians, no one has been to Slovakia, not even Dr. Hajn, nor Dr. Fiedler, Dr. Korner, Dr. Fort and many more excellent Czech politicians who through their own personal contact could accomplish much good . Slovakia still remains terra incognita even for Czech politicians, for university professors, writers , in short for the "cream" of the Czech nation. On the other hand we gladly recognize the good work of Czech politicans.18 I 811 Anketa", Prudy V , 9-10 (1913/ 1914- 1919), p. 11 .  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Czech-Slovak Relations from the 1840's to 1914 Description An account of the resource Edita Bosák Slovakia, Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92 pp. 63-77 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bosák, Edita, 1950-2022 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991-92 name https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/56d04b1b183ad87ba1111fba4989ab07.pdf fc1dae71100e15a9b672c29140f57429 PDF Text Text 78 SLOVAKIA Relations Between Slovaks and Czechs in the First CSR SUSAN MIKULA At this particular point in the history of the Czechs and Slovaks, the question of the nature of the relationship between these two nations has assumed a renewed significance and interest. The disintegration of the common state which had existed for 74 years is often presented in the popular press as the result of Slovak backwardness, provincialism, undemocratic tendencies, vestiges of communist influence; in short as anything but the consequence of a long historical process. There has in fact been a persistent tendency throughout much of the 20th century, whether by popular writers or even some professional scholars, to view Slovak demands for structural changes in their relationship with the Czechs along much the same lines, that is as reflective of fascist or communist extremists, of political, economic or cultural immaturity, or of a destructive opportunism. The prime reason for such tendencies may be that the prism through which the "Slovak problem" has often been viewed is the Czech or Czechoslovak. In other words, there are certain a priori assumptions being made about the nature of the problem which affect the analysis of the problem. One such tendency is to see it as just that, a Slovak problem, that is, as a problem between two competing Slovak factions, rather than as a problem between Czechs and Slovaks. The consequence of that has been the tendency to dismiss the problem and then be repeatedly surprised and dismayed when the central nature of the issues resurfaced and influenced the �SLOVAKIA 79 entire state and people. Another tendency is to identify the Slovak nationalist aspirations in the First Czechoslovak Republic (CSR) with the extreme nationalist movements of the inter-war era, that is with fascism. The problem thus becomes reduced to the analysis of Andrej Hlinka and the Slovak People's Party, which is designated as a clerical-fascist movement. The problem is then still a Slovak problem - the authoritarian tendencies of a huge segment of the Slovak population - and also an external one - the broad movement of European fascism. The difficulty comes with trying to account for the persistence of the Slovak national aspirations, long after the dismantling and systematic discrediting of the Slovak Republic. Here the notion of backwardness (economic and political) and immaturity (political and cultural) assumes a satisfactory explanatory character. What has been common in the great majority of these analyses, written mostly from the Czechoslovak perspective, is this notion that it is the Slovak's problem . On the other hand, the few works written from the Slovak perspective , at least until very recently , have tended to veer in the opposite direction, to view it as strictly a Czech problem, that is as the result of a systematic and deliberate policy of Czechoslovakization (analogous to Magyarization). This tendency has likewise but limited value. The Czech/Slovak problem has, rather, been a structural, historical problem, especially in the First Republic. With the creation of that state an attempt was made to apply an undifferentiated model of the nation-state to a society in which a number of nations were undergoing the process of national self-actualization accelerated beyond previous historical experience. The attempt to establish a unitary nation-state comprised of a hastily constructed nation (Czechoslovak) was thus flying in the face of the very process which had led to the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire and which had precisely allowed for the possibility of self-determination for the various nations of the empire. From this perspective, the problem ceases to be a Czech or Slovak problem and becomes a problem of �80 SLOVAKIA the very idea of the Czechoslovak state as it emerged by 1920.19 The unitary, power-based political structure (mocensko-politicky system)20 of the First Republic could not satisfy the needs of the Slovaks without significant revision. However the very real successes and achievements of that state, especially for the Czechs, meant that the need for revision met with incomprehension and therefore indifference and then resistance. An examination of some critical economic and political issues affecting the Slovaks illustrates the fundamental nature of the problem for the Czechoslovak republic. To do so, certain inescapable realities must be recognized. The first is that the economic conditions of the Czech and Slovak lands were vastly different at the very onset of the Republic. A further inescapable reality is that that differences persisted throughout the First Republic and in fact deepened. A third inescapable reality is that l 9 A recent example in Western scholarship which looks at how the structure of the state related to the national struggle of the Slovaks is Carol Skalnik Leff's book , National Conflict in Czechoslovakia, Princeton University Press, I 988 . The Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Science (Historicky ustav SA V) has just published the papers from the symposium held November, 1991 entitled Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, Bratislava, Historicky ustav , 1992. Here both Czech and Slovak scholars examined the political and structural aspects of the Slovak position in the First Republic; most of them have taken a hard look at the system itself. In that vein, some of the recent writings by Czech scholars, such as Vojtech Mencl a kollectiv, Krizovatky 20. stoleti, Prague, Na~e Vojsko, 1990; Petr Pithart Dejiny a politika , Prague, Prostor , 1990; and Zdenek Pinc "The Idea of the Czechoslovak State: History, Theory and Political Reality" in Czechoslovak and Central European Journal, Vol. 10, no . I, 1991, pp. 36-45 have also taken a more critical approach to the analysis of the political system of the First Republic . There are a variety of viewpoints here and not all agree with the notion that the very structure of the First Republic, namely that of a unitary nation-state, almost certainly precluded a satisfactory resolution of conflicting national aspirations, but all recognize that at issue was much more than competing Slovak factions or Slovak immaturity. On a related subject, the theoretical and methodological approach used by Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1984, is very useful. 20 Josef Harna uses that term to characterize the operational structure of the First Republic . See Politickf system a statni politika v prvnfch Jetech existence Ceskoslo venske republiky (1918-1923), Praha, Historicky ustav, 1990. �SLOVAKIA 81 these circumstances were at the root of Slovak grievances and frustrations, which came to be shared by nearly all Slovaks, irrespective of their political beliefs. The initial differences between the two arose from their historical conditions, and are well known. While due to some degree to natural environmental factors (resources, terrain, geophysical placement) they are also the result of differing economic and political policies and interests on the part of the Austrians and the Magyars. While the Czechs had become the industrial nucleus of the Habsburg Empire and were well advanced in industrialization and urbanization by the latter decades of the 19th century, Slovak industrialization was at that time at its beginning stages. The Slovaks did have an analogous position within the Hungarian kingdom, designated to become industrially active for that sector of the Empire, but this was in its infancy stage when compared to the Czechs. Thus the creation of Czecho-Slovakia in 1918 joined together two very different economic regions. The effects of that union were also very different. While the Czech Lands continued to develop, after some initial adjustments, at least until the Great Depression, Slovakia stagnated throughout the entire period in almost every category of economic activity. 21 In attempting to explain this fact, one has to recognize that there was little if any economic planning prior to the establishment of the First Republic. In the immediate postwar period, Slovaks recognized the need for economic development and submitted plans and requests to Prague. However, their weak political representation in the crucial first years, the liquidation of the Slovak National Council, which left a leadership vacuum in Slovakia, and the small number of economic leaders in Slovakia all meant that these early efforts were without success. Equally powerless in the realm of economics were the Ministry of Unification of Laws and the Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia. The structure of the system did not allow for conside21 For an analysis of the Slovak economic situation in the First Republic , see the works of Miroslav Fabricius, Hospodarsky vjvoj Slovenska do konca predmnfchovskej republiky, 1987, no. 75 and Vjvoj nazorov na postavenie ekonomiky Sloven ska v prednmfchovskej republike, Bratislava, Eckonomicky ustav SAV , I 990, no. 79. �82 SLOVAKIA ration of Slovakia's economic development; it was rather submerged into the whole. In fact, the strongest protests over the restructuring of the historic counties came from those county boards most concerned with economic issues. Economic policy in the new republic was highly centralized, as was the political system. Prague was the political and economic center where all the offices and organs were located. Slovakia was not viewed as one of the two integrating units, but rather as a region to be appended to the Historic Lands.22 If there was any recognition of Slovakia's role in the economy as a distinct sector, it was to serve as the agricultural sector, to insure the agrarian self-sufficiency of the state. This theory of an "agrarian Slovakia" was the cornerstone of economic policy in the 1920's, in particular within the Agrarian Party, where political considerations played a part. Slovak Agrarian politicians also supported this notion, although by the end of the 1920's even Milan Hodfa recognized the need to bring industry to Slovakia.23 It was difficult to overcome this notion that the agrarian character of Slovakia was both natural and desirable, even while it was recognized that industrialization was essential to economic development in other areas of East Europe and also that there were actually less than optimal conditions for agriculture in Slovakia. This was especially unfortunate because there was plenty of available evidence which pointed to the social and economic inequality of the two halves of the state and their undesirable social and political consequences. The chief reason for failing to address this problem was the commitment to a laissez-faire policy of economic development. It was argued that to target Slovakia for special investment and\or development would create a dualistic policy while there existed a unitary society. In fact, 22 Vlastislav Lacina, "Uloha hospodai'ske politiky pri vytvlii'enf nove ceskoslovenske ekonomiky 1918-1923" in Politicky system a statni politika v prvnich Jetech existence Ceskoslovenske republiky, p. 86. 23 A summary of this debate about agrarian versus industrial Slovakia is to be found in Fabricius, Vyvoj nazorov na posta venie ekonomiky Slovenska v predmnfchovskej republike . �SLOVAKIA 83 economic dualism already existed and persisted and the failure to deal with it had enormous consequences for both people. Nor did Czechoslovakia actually pursue a laissez-faire economic policy, especially in the first years of the Republic. Rather what occurred was a failure to recognize the special Slovak economic needs, within the context of Slovakia rather than the context of the whole state. As a result the Slovak economy stagnated, with social, economic and political consequences. Evidence of this economic dualism can be found in both the agricultural and industrial sectors. In agriculture, between 19191927, for instance, 87,263 hectares of land in the Czech region underwent improvement while in Slovakia it amounted to 9,323 hectares or 9.6% of the total land improved . The division of investment costs for rural modernization were 95 .1 % to the Czech lands and 4.3% to Slovakia.2 4 Another indicator of the disparity was the rate of rural electrification; in 1933 , for example 125 villages were joined to the electrical network in the Czech lands, 112 in Moravia and Silesia and only 9 in Slovakia. Altogether only 1.9% of agricultural enterprises were electrified in Slovakia compared to 31.7% in Czech lands and 25.2% in Moravia.25 As a consequence, throughout the 1920 1s, Slovak agriculture remained essentially stagnant and less productive and in the 19301s the world agricultural crisis had a greater adverse effect on the Slovaks. In the industrial sector there was a whole battery of problems, so much so that it was referred to as the 11 complex of Slovak industrial woes (komplex bolesti slovenskeho priemyslu)" _26 The restructuring of Slovak industry during the period 19191921 led to an emphasis on the production of consumable (primary) goods, so that the percentage of activity devoted to producing export oriented goods declined. In spite of the fact that Slovakia needed greater modernization and improvement in its economic situation, the 24 Fabricius, Hospodarsky vyvoj S/ovenska do konca predmnichovskej republiky, p. 47 . 25 Jbid. , p. 64. 26 Ibid., p. 52. �84 SLOVAKIA pace of improvement here too was slower than in the Czech Lands. In fact, when in 1921-23 industrial output fell by 30%, some even began to talk about a policy of de-industrialization (odburavanie priemyslu). This was not quite the case but it did ring true for heavy industry; between 1918 and 1932, 260 enterprises were dismantled; by 1937 this had reached another 680 _2 7 Another severe problem was the lack of capital investment; the Czech bourgeoisie invested in existing Slovak firms, not in new ones and those listed in statistics as new were in fact results of transfer of capital and ownership. This process (nostrifikacia) was the road by which Czech capital was able to entrench itself in key positions , especially in banking, industry and marketing. 28 By 1930, after a 10 year period of the integration process, Slovakia was more clearly agrarian in character than before. The Slovak industrial labor share was at 19 .4% while Czech industrial labor rate reached 42.1 % . In the mid-1930's there was a brief spurt of "re-industrialization" in Slovakia, largely in defenserelated industries (perhaps to move them eastward, away from the German border), but even with this , at the end of the First Republic there was still a relative 6% decrease of industrial employment in Slovakia. The percentage of Slovaks in the total industrial employment in Czechoslovakia did not rise above 8% during the entire period. 29 Over the twenty year existence of the First Republic, Slovak economic development consistently lagged behind that of the Czechs, producing a highly developed sense of economic grievance among Slovaks of all political persuasions, including the centrists. On the issue of the economy there existed near unanimity of opinion among the Slovaks. The inability of the Slovaks, however, to effect significant changes in the economic policies and expenditures of the 27 Mencl , p. 143. 28 see Fabricius, Hospodarsky vyvoj S/ovenska do konca predmnfchovskej repub liky, pp . 40-56 and Lacina, pp . 87 and passim for a discusstion of Czech fin ancial investment policies in Slovakia. 29 Radoslav Selucky, "The Economic Equalization of Slovakia with the Czech Lands ", East European Economics, 4/1965, pp . 42-59. �SLOVAKIA 85 central government served to make manifest the structural impediments to full Slovak self-fulfillment within the framework of the unitary Czechoslovak republic. The result was frustration and alienation, both in the economic and the political sphere. In the political sphere, one could almost say that the very decision to create an unitary state of the "Czechoslovak" nation created an untenable situation. Even the most cursory examination of the process by which the unitary state was formed and the structure through which it functioned reveals that the system itself contributed to the erosion of the viability of the unitary Czechoslovak state. The prevailing opinions have generally been that this decision was necessary and beneficial: necessary because of the international situation, the Wilsonian commitment to national self-determination and above all by the fact that the Germans constituted the second largest national group in the new state. And it was beneficial because by that process the Slovaks became a state people rather than a national minority. The assumption therefore is that an unitary state structure was in response to these factors, and not a political decision by the Czech leadership, less a political opportunity but rather an historical necessity. What is generally glossed over is that until almost the very end of the peace process, the dualistic principle was a very real option, that is Czecho-Slovakia, as indicated by the use of the hyphen until 1920 _30 What decided the issue was not Wilsonian expectations but the military turmoil in Slovakia, necessitating occupation and creating fears for the safety of the whole republic . The structure of the state was influenced as much by some short-term problems which could have been resolved in several ways as by broad historical forces . Nor was the decision made because Slovaks were unprepared or disinterested in the structure of the new state. From the time that the Slovak League of America was empowered to negotiate for the Slovaks (Martin Memorandum, 1906) to the Pittsburgh Agreement to the various plans and statements made by Slovak leaders 30 see Joseph Kalvoda, The Genesis of Czechoslo vakia , Boulder, East European Monographs , 1986. �86 SLOVAKIA throughout 1918, it was clear the Slovaks were formulating concepts about their relationship with the Czechs. Examination of the meetings, speeches, correspondence of Slovak leaders, especially in 1918 reveals wide-ranging discussions about the anticipated relationship; autonomy was perhaps the most consistent expectation. For example, Matus Dula wrote on November 23, 1918: "when I discussed our autonomy with responsible [rozhodnymi] Czech leaders, they attested that Slovaks would get full autonomy autonomous rights would fall under the competency of the regional diet." 31 It is clear that in 1918 Slovaks were willing to join their sovereignty with that of the Czechs as partners in a new state, because that afforded them the best opportunity for political emancipation; what they were not expecting to do was to blend and blur their hardfought national identity. The decision to postulate a "Czechoslovak nation" was not made by Slovak political representatives, and these did exist, as did political parties, nor by any electoral process, but rather by a very small group of appointed politicians not very representative of the political, economic, social and cultural spectrum of Slovakia.32 There is no question that conditions were such that it did not appear that reasoned debates and consensus building were luxuries which could be afforded. What needs to be understood however is that decisions were made due to very specific historical events which led to the choice of certain options, which were not necessarily the optimal or sole options and which therefore could 31 Milan Krajcovic, "Slovensko v zahranicnopolitickych suvislostiach 1918-1922", in Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, p. 148 . See also the article by Vladimir Zuberec, "Vyznamny dokument o postaveni Slovenska za burfoaznej CSR v zbierkach Slovenskeho Narodneho Muzea" in Zbornik Slovenskeho Narodneho Muzea, LXXXIII , 1989, pp. 201-207 . 32 r:ubomir Liptak points out that there were 10,000 people with, if not political experience, certainly with experience in a variety of organizations and public life. And while the number of Slovak schools had dramatically declined , the number of Slovak students had gone up; these could all be acclimated quickly to the new Slovak reality . See "Pripravenosi Slovenska na demokraciu" in Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, pp. 7-12. �SLOVAKIA 87 have been readdressed as the situation changed. An underlying element in the creation of the new state was the notion that the year 1918 was the year zero - a new beginning with a clean slate. The failure to recognize and internalize the fundamentally different historical experiences and character of the two people, to recognize that in fact two separate nations existed, not branches of one nation, and that these two had differing notions about both the nature of their new relationship and its state structure influenced the subsequent development of the state as well as the two peoples. As Josef Hama points out "On the Czech side there was not the willingness to understand the differences; on the Slovak side there was impatience and anxiety arising from the feeling of powerlessness to achieve their objectives. Czechoslovakia was formed from the prevailing weight of the Czechs as a unitary state with significant characteristics of centralism." _33 The construct of the unitary state, and the method of ratification of the constitution, meant that there was no national debate and therefore no national consensus on the very definition of the nation state . In the formative period, the hyphenated form, suggesting a state of the Czechs and Slovaks, often was used interchangeably with the Czechoslovak. The definitive proclamation in the Constitution that the "Czechoslovak nation" was the creator of the state and "Czechoslovak" the language of the state created the situation in which those large numbers of Slovaks who resisted the label Czechoslovak were forced into opposition not just against the policies of the state, a normal aspect of parliamentary systems, but against the very nature of the state itself, a position the Slovaks initially had no desire to take and in fact until the very end of the republic sought to avoid. As a consequence the fiction of the single Czechoslovak nation was assumed to be the selfevident principle on which relations between Czechs and Slovaks were based. From the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority of Czech politicians, therefore, neither Slovak autonomy nor the federalization of the state on the basis of the national principle was deemed to be at all 33 Harna, p. 14. �88 SLOVAKIA necessary. This attitude prevailed even as the very construct "two branches of the Czechoslovak nation" would seem to demand the necessity of constitutional elaboration and resolution of the individuality contained within the notion of two branches _34 Once the decision was made to create a unitary state, the opportunities for initiating and implementing Slovak policies and political objectives were circumscribed at best, both by the structure of the state system, the political party structure and to an extent the Slovak political forms. The peculiar structure of the party system meant that opposition parties had no realistic chance of modifying the system. The frustration that results from the perceived inability to influence the system in any way often leads to radicalism and this was certainly the case in Czechoslovakia. The power politics party system in the interwar republic proved to be remarkably stable, even though it was a multi-party system in which significant groups were polarized. Stability was achieved at a price, namely the diminution of the role of Parliament and the enhancement of the power of the President and of the government forming coalition parties. A further price was the perception that these centrist parties (generally known as the Petka) had to achieve a consensus and cohesiveness in the face of the fundamental divergence of views from the outsider parties. Hence opposition becomes not something to be tolerated and contested, but something threatening and destabilizing. In effect, the coalition parties could not afford the luxury of opposition; aware of the differences in the state, they felt compelled to focus on retaining and centralizing power. The political cabinet of party leaders essentially overshadowed the ministerial cabinet and tended to make of Parliament a virtual rubber stamp, at least for deputies from the governing parties. What that meant in practice was that the system was impervious to any fundamental change through the normal parliamentary 34M. Matula, "Nektere problemy souvisejfci s institucionalnfm aspektem narodnfc h vztahu CSR v letech 1918-1938" in Slovensko v politickom syst6me Ceskoslovenska, p. 91 . �SLOVAKIA 89 process. What ensued then was the belief that the structure itself had to be modified if any real political power was to develop among the Slovaks. As one historian writes: The issue was not really whether or not the Slovaks achieved immediate autonomy but the Jack of understanding and the unwillingness of the Czech parties even to recognize the problem. Thus the spokesmen for the Slovak position were pushed into opposition and progressively forced into a negative stance relative to the existing regime.3 5 Illustrative of the unwillingness even to address the question of constitutional organization was the fate of administrative reconstruction. The County Law of 1920 was designed to integrate Slovakia into the new state by creating a new county structure to replace the old. What especially generated protests by Slovak administrators was that financial control at the county level was taken over by the central Ministries oflnterior and Finance. During 1921-22, several proposals were made in Parliament to address these Slovak concerns. The Hlinka Slovak People's Party (HSPP) called for selfadministration in Slovak affairs, a provincial Diet and a provincial government named by the President. There were also other variants, some more radical, of Slovak autonomy. Hodza, who at this time was still looking for a means of unifying Slovak political power, suggested a County Union with competencies in health, welfare, economic and cultural spheres precisely to shift administrative power in Slovakia out of Prague's bureaucratic hands and into Slovak political hands. The debate on these issues in the ministerial circles in Prague revealed a reluctance to delegate any real powers, even to a body like the County Union. The only concessions to be made were delegating powers addressing the needs of the feeble-minded, blind, deaf, epileptic, supervising forced labor and the poorhouses .36 35 Hama, p. 19. 36 For an analysis of the debate over the administration of Slovakia, see Natalia Krajcovicovli , "Politicke strany na Slovensku a usilie o samosprlivu v dvadsiatich rokoch" in Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, pp . 47-55 . See also Ladislav Lipscher, K vyvinu politickej spravy na Slovensku v rokoch 1918-1938, Bratislava, SA V, 1966. �90 SLOVAKIA The political concerns behind such positions were evident, as expressed in the magazine Tribuna: "It is certain that a County Union in Slovakia would be a constant threat to the unity of the state. Who can guarantee that it would not give birth to some kind of autonomous Diet for Slovakia?"3 7 The result was that the administrative structure for Slovakia was extraordinarily limited, always under the strict supervision of Prague. Slovaks lost even a modicum of local autonomy, under a system which was not implemented in the rest of the country precisely because the example of centralized power as manifested in Slovakia aroused local opposition in Bohemia and Moravia. The anomaly could not be sustained and in 1927 the Provincial Law replaced the county system with the four historic provinces. While this acknowledged the territorial existence of Slovakia as an entity, little was done to give that entity any real administrative powers. The failure of these administrative efforts indicated that no serious attempt would be made to bring about a measure of decentralization of government. Problems of special significance to the Slovaks, such as the economic imbalance, the lower standard of living, the dearth of jobs for the growing numbers of university trained younger leaders, the preservation of religious and cultural values were thus not addressed regionally, but left to the central government in Prague, where Slovak power was minimal at best. It could be argued, and often has been, that the lack of Slovak power was more the result of the divisions among the Slovaks themselves than of the unitary and centralized nature of the system. The inability of the Slovaks to form a cohesive bloc was a factor, but not a decisive factor, for as long as even one Slovak was found who would enter the government in the name of the Slovaks (and in fact three, namely Vavro Srobar, Ivan Derer, Hod:fa, were all that were basically necessary during the First Republic) and while coalition parties could attract a Slovak following, (and two did), the power of the coalition bloc would outweigh any Slovak bloc. The ambiguity about the nature of the Czech-Slovak problem would however have 37Krajfovicovii, p. 51. �SLOVAKIA 91 been clarified had the Slovaks achieved a Slovak party. Hod:fa and others recognized this and an attempt was made to form a National Bloc or even a Political Committee (which Hod:fa tried) which would have functioned in a manner analogous to the Petka. This failed because of the inability to achieve a uniform stand on the question of the Slovak position in the state and also to a diversity of views on some specific issues, a problem partially attributable to confessional differences. There did exist a basic consensus on general principles; only a few Slovaks were convinced Czechoslovaks. Unfortunately it was precisely these few who were able to join the government in Prague and were thus considered to represent the Slovaks. There was in fact a fundamental unity among the Slovak populace: a rejection of ethnic and linguistic Czechoslovakism, a commitment to the Czechoslovak state, albeit a reformed one, and a recognition of the pluralistic nature of the state and society. If there was division among the Slovaks, it came on the question of how, not whether, to reform the state: regionalism or autonomy. The Slovak Agrarians, under Hod:fa's leadership, were centrist in that they worked within the system to bring about a modification of some of the system, but especially in the 1930's were also advocates of regionalism. Hodfa came to advocate an intermediary notion, looking at it from a pragmatic perspective, which "means neither centralism nor autonomy, but state-political unity and regionalism with administrative self-government" .38 Hodfa was trying to find a bridge between two ever diverging assessments (one Czech and the other Slovak) of the satisfaction level with the existing political system. The escalating criticism by Slovaks of their position in the First Republic is evident from the following editorial in Zem, the journal of the younger generation of Agrarians: The aversion of Czechs and Slovaks arises from economic and social problems . Czechs accept our arguments with a judicious attentiveness , while they continue to make their own national , cultural and linguistic politics .. . Currently a majority of the Slovaks want to acknowledge their own nation .... and the unfortunate tendencies (potmehudske narazky) seen 38Milan Hodfa, C/anky, reci, §tudie, Prague , Novina , 1934, Vol. 7, pp . xxxii-iii . �92 SLOVAKIA in various Czech newspapers, to suggest that Slovak efforts to achieve their rights somehow indicates political unreliabi lity, wi ll not deter the Slovaks. 39 If even Hodza's and the Agrarians' moderate call for regionalism was ignored , the possibility for substantive constitutional reform was all the more remote. The position of the HSPP, which consistently included Slovak autonomy as its basic program, is certainly a case in point. Representing a large portion of the Slovak people,40 they were systematically frustrated in their attempts to implement their programs. Ignored most of the time, only in times of crisis did the governing powers seek to integrate the HSPP into the process , such as the coalition crisis of the late 192O's or the presidential elections of 1935 ; once the crisis was resolved, any further negotiations were deemed unnecessary. A good illustration of this can be seen from the December 1935 talks between President Edvard Benes and Andrej Hlinka, leader of the HSPP. Hlinka asked for decentralization and legislative power for regional Slovak organs and for the post of Minister for Slovakia for the HSPP. Benes promised to give the Slovaks all that was possible without undermining the unity of the state. In February 1936 Benes noted that the entry of HSPP into the government was delayed due to unacceptable nature of the demands: the same demands which were made in negotiations in December. The governing coalition rejected the demands and the matter was closed.41 No matter what route the Slovaks followed in their efforts to modify the structure and political system, they had little success. Political parties in Slovakia were unable to compete nationally, for 39zem, IV , 4 , 20 . February , 1938, p. 39 . 40 one could argue that at times it did indeed represent a majority of the Slovaks, if one assumes that Czechs voting in Slovakia supported centrist parties and Magyars their own parties . 41 E.F. Firsov, "K problemu modifik,kif parlamentneho systemu CSR a narodnopolitickeho konsenzu Cechov a Slovakov na prelome 20. a 30 . rokov" in Slo vensk o v politickom systeme Ceskos/ovenska, p. 104. �SLOVAKIA 93 the state was in the hands of the centrist parties and thus no shadow coalition or cabinet could form. Slovaks were united in their efforts to gain control of the bureaucratic apparatus in Slovakia, as a means of indirect access to the power center. This too was frustrated by the bureaucratic structure of centralism. It took the crisis of 1938 to bring about some readjustment in the state relations between Czechs and Slovaks, a settlement subsequently repudiated as being forcibly imposed. 42 By that time however a more aggressive and assertive stance had been taken by the HSPP; 20 years of waiting for the system to change from above had led to the radicalization of the efforts to change it. It is often argued that in time of crisis the Slovaks abandoned the Czechs, generating the notion of ungrateful Slovaks. One could likewise argue that only in times of crisis did the Czechs remember the Slovaks .. . one can go to the well only so many times. There is no question that fascist elements had entered into the Slovak political arena, fueled in part by economic grievances and political frustration . The fact that fascism was a force sweeping across the disaffected sectors of Europe does not absolve the Slovaks of responsibility for those fascist features; nor does however the argument that Czechoslovakia, while it had its faults, was still the only functioning democracy in Eastern Europe and better than the surrounding systems excuse those faults and deny their consequences. For both, historical relativism is a tempting but ultimately unsatisfying position. 43 42 An interesting side point here is Hodza's argument that the political cabinet's acceptance of Slovak self-administration, as negotiated in the summer of 1938 was in fact valid , against Bene§' subsequent argument , after W .W .II broke out , that Parliament had not approved it and it was therefore invalid. Hodza was correct in his perception that the political cabinet was the crucial decision making body . That was why Slovak political efforts were in fact so often frustrated, because Parliament tended only to reflect the decisions of the political cabinet. 43 As a prominent Czech historian has observed: "The ideal of democracy became a self-indulgent compliment, nurturing the need of the Czechs for universal recognition and admiration. Czech nationalism greeted the foundation of the republic not only as an occasion to score points in the nationalistic struggle with imperialistic �94 SLOVAKIA The analogy of a marriage is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for the course of Czech and Slovaks relations . In May of 1918, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was moving inexorably toward its demise, Hlinka declared: "It is absolutely necessary for us to decide if we will continue with the Magyars, or go with the Czechs. Let us not evade the question, let us say openly that we are for the CzechoSlovak orientation. The thousand year marriage with the Magyars has not worked. A divorce is necessary." 44 The marriage of the Czechs and Slovaks in 1918 was a classic war-time marriage: undertaken in haste, without adequate courtship, with both partners moving immediately from divorce (Austrian and Hungarian partners respectively) into this new relationship. There was no time to discuss the terms and conditions of the marriage, the expectations about what each sought and would bring to the marriage. What little was prepared was done largely by marriage brokers (Toma~ G. Masaryk on one side and the American Slovaks on the other, resulting in the Pittsburgh Agreement of 1918) . The first months of the marriage were very difficult, as the residual effects of the Great War needed to be addressed . It became apparent fairly soon, however, that the two partners in the marriage had very different expectations and notions. The Czech partner clearly saw himself as the preponderant factor, functioning as provider and decision maker in a traditional marriage . This was a natural expectation, given the Czech numerical and material dominance. Thus the Czechs had a clear notion of the nature of the relationship: a unitary state of the Czechoslovak nation. The Slovak partner was much less clear about her role in the marriage. Given her relative lack of wealth and experience, there was a tendency on the part of some to accept a dependent relationship and a subservient role in the marriage. Thus generally more than a third of the Slovaks Germany, but also as a justification of its own colonial ambitions toward Slovakia." Zden~k Pinc, "The Idea of the Czechoslovak State: History, Theory and Political Reality", Czechoslovak and Central European Journal, 10, no. I , 1991, p. 38 . 44 Karol Medvecky, Slovenskf prevrat, Tmava, Spolok Sv. Vojtecha, 1930-31 , Vol. Ill , p. 347 . �SLOVAKIA 95 accepted the Czechoslovak unitary state, though only a tiny minority believed in the notion of the Czechoslovak people and virtually no one subscribed to a Czechoslovak language. There also existed a different notion of the marriage, namely the desire for an equal partnership between two equals. This was manifested in the desire for some form of Slovak autonomy as exemplified by the hyphenated Czecho-Slovakia, a position which generally a majority of the Slovaks supported. As the marriage progressed during the 1920's and 1930's, both internal and external factors escalated Slovak discontent. The Slovaks came to resent their status in the Czechoslovak Republic because they felt increasingly frustrated , both economically and politically and because they perceived a paternalistic indifference to Slovak grievances. Increasingly, this frustration led to a sense of alienation from the marriage and a greater responsiveness to ideological concepts which addressed both the reality and the theory of the inadequacy of an unequal marriage; in this marriage it was the call of nationalism which led the "weaker" partner to re-evaluate her place within the Czech-defined relationship. As storm clouds gathered over Europe, as tension and fear escalated, the Slovaks sought to re-define the marriage precisely at the moment that the Czechs, feeling far more threatened by the forces gathering over Europe, resisted any tampering with what to them was a satisfactory marriage. They in fact did not even comprehend the alienation and sense of frustration prevalent among the Slovaks . Thus the events of Munich and after led to deep bitterness, for the Czechs believed the Slovaks had stabbed them in the back, and the Slovaks felt that, having been denied the opportunity to improve their relationship with the Czechs, they had no obligations to travel the bitter path with a partner who had never listened to them and had never been prepared to engage in a genuine dialogue with a view toward developing a marriage of true partners. During the period of the war, the Czechs and some Slovaks denied that the marriage had broken up; some Czechs even denied that any adjustments were necessary for the marriage to resume. Virtually no Slovak could subscribe to that position; for the Slovaks, at the very minimum, a co-equal marriage was imperative. �96 SLOVAKIA The fall of communism enabled old and new grievances to surface, on both sides, and to be finally openly confronted. The result was a divorce. The seeds of that divorce, not necessarily inevitable , had been planted by failures common to so many marriages: lack of communications and the inability to listen as Czechs and Slovaks talked from different historical perspectives, in different languages and with different objectives , resulting in misunderstandings, undervaluing of roles , responsibilities and contributions, and above all , the lack of commitment to a marriage of diversity and genuine equality. � 78 SLOVAKIA Relations Between Slovaks and Czechs in the First CSR SUSAN MIKULA At this particular point in the history of the Czechs and Slovaks, the question of the nature of the relationship between these two nations has assumed a renewed significance and interest. The disintegration of the common state which had existed for 74 years is often presented in the popular press as the result of Slovak backwardness, provincialism, undemocratic tendencies, vestiges of communist influence; in short as anything but the consequence of a long historical process. There has in fact been a persistent tendency throughout much of the 20th century, whether by popular writers or even some professional scholars, to view Slovak demands for structural changes in their relationship with the Czechs along much the same lines, that is as reflective of fascist or communist extremists, of political, economic or cultural immaturity, or of a destructive opportunism. The prime reason for such tendencies may be that the prism through which the "Slovak problem" has often been viewed is the Czech or Czechoslovak. In other words, there are certain a priori assumptions being made about the nature of the problem which affect the analysis of the problem. One such tendency is to see it as just that, a Slovak problem, that is, as a problem between two competing Slovak factions, rather than as a problem between Czechs and Slovaks. The consequence of that has been the tendency to dismiss the problem and then be repeatedly surprised and dismayed when the central nature of the issues resurfaced and influenced the �SLOVAKIA 79 entire state and people. Another tendency is to identify the Slovak nationalist aspirations in the First Czechoslovak Republic (CSR) with the extreme nationalist movements of the inter-war era, that is with fascism. The problem thus becomes reduced to the analysis of Andrej Hlinka and the Slovak People's Party, which is designated as a clerical-fascist movement. The problem is then still a Slovak problem - the authoritarian tendencies of a huge segment of the Slovak population - and also an external one - the broad movement of European fascism. The difficulty comes with trying to account for the persistence of the Slovak national aspirations, long after the dismantling and systematic discrediting of the Slovak Republic. Here the notion of backwardness (economic and political) and immaturity (political and cultural) assumes a satisfactory explanatory character. What has been common in the great majority of these analyses, written mostly from the Czechoslovak perspective, is this notion that it is the Slovak's problem . On the other hand, the few works written from the Slovak perspective , at least until very recently , have tended to veer in the opposite direction, to view it as strictly a Czech problem, that is as the result of a systematic and deliberate policy of Czechoslovakization (analogous to Magyarization). This tendency has likewise but limited value. The Czech/Slovak problem has, rather, been a structural, historical problem, especially in the First Republic. With the creation of that state an attempt was made to apply an undifferentiated model of the nation-state to a society in which a number of nations were undergoing the process of national self-actualization accelerated beyond previous historical experience. The attempt to establish a unitary nation-state comprised of a hastily constructed nation (Czechoslovak) was thus flying in the face of the very process which had led to the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire and which had precisely allowed for the possibility of self-determination for the various nations of the empire. From this perspective, the problem ceases to be a Czech or Slovak problem and becomes a problem of �80 SLOVAKIA the very idea of the Czechoslovak state as it emerged by 1920.19 The unitary, power-based political structure (mocensko-politicky system)20 of the First Republic could not satisfy the needs of the Slovaks without significant revision. However the very real successes and achievements of that state, especially for the Czechs, meant that the need for revision met with incomprehension and therefore indifference and then resistance. An examination of some critical economic and political issues affecting the Slovaks illustrates the fundamental nature of the problem for the Czechoslovak republic. To do so, certain inescapable realities must be recognized. The first is that the economic conditions of the Czech and Slovak lands were vastly different at the very onset of the Republic. A further inescapable reality is that that differences persisted throughout the First Republic and in fact deepened. A third inescapable reality is that l 9 A recent example in Western scholarship which looks at how the structure of the state related to the national struggle of the Slovaks is Carol Skalnik Leff's book , National Conflict in Czechoslovakia, Princeton University Press, I 988 . The Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Science (Historicky ustav SA V) has just published the papers from the symposium held November, 1991 entitled Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, Bratislava, Historicky ustav , 1992. Here both Czech and Slovak scholars examined the political and structural aspects of the Slovak position in the First Republic; most of them have taken a hard look at the system itself. In that vein, some of the recent writings by Czech scholars, such as Vojtech Mencl a kollectiv, Krizovatky 20. stoleti, Prague, Na~e Vojsko, 1990; Petr Pithart Dejiny a politika , Prague, Prostor , 1990; and Zdenek Pinc "The Idea of the Czechoslovak State: History, Theory and Political Reality" in Czechoslovak and Central European Journal, Vol. 10, no . I, 1991, pp. 36-45 have also taken a more critical approach to the analysis of the political system of the First Republic . There are a variety of viewpoints here and not all agree with the notion that the very structure of the First Republic, namely that of a unitary nation-state, almost certainly precluded a satisfactory resolution of conflicting national aspirations, but all recognize that at issue was much more than competing Slovak factions or Slovak immaturity. On a related subject, the theoretical and methodological approach used by Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1984, is very useful. 20 Josef Harna uses that term to characterize the operational structure of the First Republic . See Politickf system a statni politika v prvnfch Jetech existence Ceskoslo venske republiky (1918-1923), Praha, Historicky ustav, 1990. �SLOVAKIA 81 these circumstances were at the root of Slovak grievances and frustrations, which came to be shared by nearly all Slovaks, irrespective of their political beliefs. The initial differences between the two arose from their historical conditions, and are well known. While due to some degree to natural environmental factors (resources, terrain, geophysical placement) they are also the result of differing economic and political policies and interests on the part of the Austrians and the Magyars. While the Czechs had become the industrial nucleus of the Habsburg Empire and were well advanced in industrialization and urbanization by the latter decades of the 19th century, Slovak industrialization was at that time at its beginning stages. The Slovaks did have an analogous position within the Hungarian kingdom, designated to become industrially active for that sector of the Empire, but this was in its infancy stage when compared to the Czechs. Thus the creation of Czecho-Slovakia in 1918 joined together two very different economic regions. The effects of that union were also very different. While the Czech Lands continued to develop, after some initial adjustments, at least until the Great Depression, Slovakia stagnated throughout the entire period in almost every category of economic activity. 21 In attempting to explain this fact, one has to recognize that there was little if any economic planning prior to the establishment of the First Republic. In the immediate postwar period, Slovaks recognized the need for economic development and submitted plans and requests to Prague. However, their weak political representation in the crucial first years, the liquidation of the Slovak National Council, which left a leadership vacuum in Slovakia, and the small number of economic leaders in Slovakia all meant that these early efforts were without success. Equally powerless in the realm of economics were the Ministry of Unification of Laws and the Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia. The structure of the system did not allow for conside21 For an analysis of the Slovak economic situation in the First Republic , see the works of Miroslav Fabricius, Hospodarsky vjvoj Slovenska do konca predmnfchovskej republiky, 1987, no. 75 and Vjvoj nazorov na postavenie ekonomiky Sloven ska v prednmfchovskej republike, Bratislava, Eckonomicky ustav SAV , I 990, no. 79. �82 SLOVAKIA ration of Slovakia's economic development; it was rather submerged into the whole. In fact, the strongest protests over the restructuring of the historic counties came from those county boards most concerned with economic issues. Economic policy in the new republic was highly centralized, as was the political system. Prague was the political and economic center where all the offices and organs were located. Slovakia was not viewed as one of the two integrating units, but rather as a region to be appended to the Historic Lands.22 If there was any recognition of Slovakia's role in the economy as a distinct sector, it was to serve as the agricultural sector, to insure the agrarian self-sufficiency of the state. This theory of an "agrarian Slovakia" was the cornerstone of economic policy in the 1920's, in particular within the Agrarian Party, where political considerations played a part. Slovak Agrarian politicians also supported this notion, although by the end of the 1920's even Milan Hodfa recognized the need to bring industry to Slovakia.23 It was difficult to overcome this notion that the agrarian character of Slovakia was both natural and desirable, even while it was recognized that industrialization was essential to economic development in other areas of East Europe and also that there were actually less than optimal conditions for agriculture in Slovakia. This was especially unfortunate because there was plenty of available evidence which pointed to the social and economic inequality of the two halves of the state and their undesirable social and political consequences. The chief reason for failing to address this problem was the commitment to a laissez-faire policy of economic development. It was argued that to target Slovakia for special investment and\or development would create a dualistic policy while there existed a unitary society. In fact, 22 Vlastislav Lacina, "Uloha hospodai'ske politiky pri vytvlii'enf nove ceskoslovenske ekonomiky 1918-1923" in Politicky system a statni politika v prvnich Jetech existence Ceskoslovenske republiky, p. 86. 23 A summary of this debate about agrarian versus industrial Slovakia is to be found in Fabricius, Vyvoj nazorov na posta venie ekonomiky Slovenska v predmnfchovskej republike . �SLOVAKIA 83 economic dualism already existed and persisted and the failure to deal with it had enormous consequences for both people. Nor did Czechoslovakia actually pursue a laissez-faire economic policy, especially in the first years of the Republic. Rather what occurred was a failure to recognize the special Slovak economic needs, within the context of Slovakia rather than the context of the whole state. As a result the Slovak economy stagnated, with social, economic and political consequences. Evidence of this economic dualism can be found in both the agricultural and industrial sectors. In agriculture, between 19191927, for instance, 87,263 hectares of land in the Czech region underwent improvement while in Slovakia it amounted to 9,323 hectares or 9.6% of the total land improved . The division of investment costs for rural modernization were 95 .1 % to the Czech lands and 4.3% to Slovakia.2 4 Another indicator of the disparity was the rate of rural electrification; in 1933 , for example 125 villages were joined to the electrical network in the Czech lands, 112 in Moravia and Silesia and only 9 in Slovakia. Altogether only 1.9% of agricultural enterprises were electrified in Slovakia compared to 31.7% in Czech lands and 25.2% in Moravia.25 As a consequence, throughout the 1920 1s, Slovak agriculture remained essentially stagnant and less productive and in the 19301s the world agricultural crisis had a greater adverse effect on the Slovaks. In the industrial sector there was a whole battery of problems, so much so that it was referred to as the 11 complex of Slovak industrial woes (komplex bolesti slovenskeho priemyslu)" _26 The restructuring of Slovak industry during the period 19191921 led to an emphasis on the production of consumable (primary) goods, so that the percentage of activity devoted to producing export oriented goods declined. In spite of the fact that Slovakia needed greater modernization and improvement in its economic situation, the 24 Fabricius, Hospodarsky vyvoj S/ovenska do konca predmnichovskej republiky, p. 47 . 25 Jbid. , p. 64. 26 Ibid., p. 52. �84 SLOVAKIA pace of improvement here too was slower than in the Czech Lands. In fact, when in 1921-23 industrial output fell by 30%, some even began to talk about a policy of de-industrialization (odburavanie priemyslu). This was not quite the case but it did ring true for heavy industry; between 1918 and 1932, 260 enterprises were dismantled; by 1937 this had reached another 680 _2 7 Another severe problem was the lack of capital investment; the Czech bourgeoisie invested in existing Slovak firms, not in new ones and those listed in statistics as new were in fact results of transfer of capital and ownership. This process (nostrifikacia) was the road by which Czech capital was able to entrench itself in key positions , especially in banking, industry and marketing. 28 By 1930, after a 10 year period of the integration process, Slovakia was more clearly agrarian in character than before. The Slovak industrial labor share was at 19 .4% while Czech industrial labor rate reached 42.1 % . In the mid-1930's there was a brief spurt of "re-industrialization" in Slovakia, largely in defenserelated industries (perhaps to move them eastward, away from the German border), but even with this , at the end of the First Republic there was still a relative 6% decrease of industrial employment in Slovakia. The percentage of Slovaks in the total industrial employment in Czechoslovakia did not rise above 8% during the entire period. 29 Over the twenty year existence of the First Republic, Slovak economic development consistently lagged behind that of the Czechs, producing a highly developed sense of economic grievance among Slovaks of all political persuasions, including the centrists. On the issue of the economy there existed near unanimity of opinion among the Slovaks. The inability of the Slovaks, however, to effect significant changes in the economic policies and expenditures of the 27 Mencl , p. 143. 28 see Fabricius, Hospodarsky vyvoj S/ovenska do konca predmnfchovskej repub liky, pp . 40-56 and Lacina, pp . 87 and passim for a discusstion of Czech fin ancial investment policies in Slovakia. 29 Radoslav Selucky, "The Economic Equalization of Slovakia with the Czech Lands ", East European Economics, 4/1965, pp . 42-59. �SLOVAKIA 85 central government served to make manifest the structural impediments to full Slovak self-fulfillment within the framework of the unitary Czechoslovak republic. The result was frustration and alienation, both in the economic and the political sphere. In the political sphere, one could almost say that the very decision to create an unitary state of the "Czechoslovak" nation created an untenable situation. Even the most cursory examination of the process by which the unitary state was formed and the structure through which it functioned reveals that the system itself contributed to the erosion of the viability of the unitary Czechoslovak state. The prevailing opinions have generally been that this decision was necessary and beneficial: necessary because of the international situation, the Wilsonian commitment to national self-determination and above all by the fact that the Germans constituted the second largest national group in the new state. And it was beneficial because by that process the Slovaks became a state people rather than a national minority. The assumption therefore is that an unitary state structure was in response to these factors, and not a political decision by the Czech leadership, less a political opportunity but rather an historical necessity. What is generally glossed over is that until almost the very end of the peace process, the dualistic principle was a very real option, that is Czecho-Slovakia, as indicated by the use of the hyphen until 1920 _30 What decided the issue was not Wilsonian expectations but the military turmoil in Slovakia, necessitating occupation and creating fears for the safety of the whole republic . The structure of the state was influenced as much by some short-term problems which could have been resolved in several ways as by broad historical forces . Nor was the decision made because Slovaks were unprepared or disinterested in the structure of the new state. From the time that the Slovak League of America was empowered to negotiate for the Slovaks (Martin Memorandum, 1906) to the Pittsburgh Agreement to the various plans and statements made by Slovak leaders 30 see Joseph Kalvoda, The Genesis of Czechoslo vakia , Boulder, East European Monographs , 1986. �86 SLOVAKIA throughout 1918, it was clear the Slovaks were formulating concepts about their relationship with the Czechs. Examination of the meetings, speeches, correspondence of Slovak leaders, especially in 1918 reveals wide-ranging discussions about the anticipated relationship; autonomy was perhaps the most consistent expectation. For example, Matus Dula wrote on November 23, 1918: "when I discussed our autonomy with responsible [rozhodnymi] Czech leaders, they attested that Slovaks would get full autonomy autonomous rights would fall under the competency of the regional diet." 31 It is clear that in 1918 Slovaks were willing to join their sovereignty with that of the Czechs as partners in a new state, because that afforded them the best opportunity for political emancipation; what they were not expecting to do was to blend and blur their hardfought national identity. The decision to postulate a "Czechoslovak nation" was not made by Slovak political representatives, and these did exist, as did political parties, nor by any electoral process, but rather by a very small group of appointed politicians not very representative of the political, economic, social and cultural spectrum of Slovakia.32 There is no question that conditions were such that it did not appear that reasoned debates and consensus building were luxuries which could be afforded. What needs to be understood however is that decisions were made due to very specific historical events which led to the choice of certain options, which were not necessarily the optimal or sole options and which therefore could 31 Milan Krajcovic, "Slovensko v zahranicnopolitickych suvislostiach 1918-1922", in Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, p. 148 . See also the article by Vladimir Zuberec, "Vyznamny dokument o postaveni Slovenska za burfoaznej CSR v zbierkach Slovenskeho Narodneho Muzea" in Zbornik Slovenskeho Narodneho Muzea, LXXXIII , 1989, pp. 201-207 . 32 r:ubomir Liptak points out that there were 10,000 people with, if not political experience, certainly with experience in a variety of organizations and public life. And while the number of Slovak schools had dramatically declined , the number of Slovak students had gone up; these could all be acclimated quickly to the new Slovak reality . See "Pripravenosi Slovenska na demokraciu" in Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, pp. 7-12. �SLOVAKIA 87 have been readdressed as the situation changed. An underlying element in the creation of the new state was the notion that the year 1918 was the year zero - a new beginning with a clean slate. The failure to recognize and internalize the fundamentally different historical experiences and character of the two people, to recognize that in fact two separate nations existed, not branches of one nation, and that these two had differing notions about both the nature of their new relationship and its state structure influenced the subsequent development of the state as well as the two peoples. As Josef Hama points out "On the Czech side there was not the willingness to understand the differences; on the Slovak side there was impatience and anxiety arising from the feeling of powerlessness to achieve their objectives. Czechoslovakia was formed from the prevailing weight of the Czechs as a unitary state with significant characteristics of centralism." _33 The construct of the unitary state, and the method of ratification of the constitution, meant that there was no national debate and therefore no national consensus on the very definition of the nation state . In the formative period, the hyphenated form, suggesting a state of the Czechs and Slovaks, often was used interchangeably with the Czechoslovak. The definitive proclamation in the Constitution that the "Czechoslovak nation" was the creator of the state and "Czechoslovak" the language of the state created the situation in which those large numbers of Slovaks who resisted the label Czechoslovak were forced into opposition not just against the policies of the state, a normal aspect of parliamentary systems, but against the very nature of the state itself, a position the Slovaks initially had no desire to take and in fact until the very end of the republic sought to avoid. As a consequence the fiction of the single Czechoslovak nation was assumed to be the selfevident principle on which relations between Czechs and Slovaks were based. From the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority of Czech politicians, therefore, neither Slovak autonomy nor the federalization of the state on the basis of the national principle was deemed to be at all 33 Harna, p. 14. �88 SLOVAKIA necessary. This attitude prevailed even as the very construct "two branches of the Czechoslovak nation" would seem to demand the necessity of constitutional elaboration and resolution of the individuality contained within the notion of two branches _34 Once the decision was made to create a unitary state, the opportunities for initiating and implementing Slovak policies and political objectives were circumscribed at best, both by the structure of the state system, the political party structure and to an extent the Slovak political forms. The peculiar structure of the party system meant that opposition parties had no realistic chance of modifying the system. The frustration that results from the perceived inability to influence the system in any way often leads to radicalism and this was certainly the case in Czechoslovakia. The power politics party system in the interwar republic proved to be remarkably stable, even though it was a multi-party system in which significant groups were polarized. Stability was achieved at a price, namely the diminution of the role of Parliament and the enhancement of the power of the President and of the government forming coalition parties. A further price was the perception that these centrist parties (generally known as the Petka) had to achieve a consensus and cohesiveness in the face of the fundamental divergence of views from the outsider parties. Hence opposition becomes not something to be tolerated and contested, but something threatening and destabilizing. In effect, the coalition parties could not afford the luxury of opposition; aware of the differences in the state, they felt compelled to focus on retaining and centralizing power. The political cabinet of party leaders essentially overshadowed the ministerial cabinet and tended to make of Parliament a virtual rubber stamp, at least for deputies from the governing parties. What that meant in practice was that the system was impervious to any fundamental change through the normal parliamentary 34M. Matula, "Nektere problemy souvisejfci s institucionalnfm aspektem narodnfc h vztahu CSR v letech 1918-1938" in Slovensko v politickom syst6me Ceskoslovenska, p. 91 . �SLOVAKIA 89 process. What ensued then was the belief that the structure itself had to be modified if any real political power was to develop among the Slovaks. As one historian writes: The issue was not really whether or not the Slovaks achieved immediate autonomy but the Jack of understanding and the unwillingness of the Czech parties even to recognize the problem. Thus the spokesmen for the Slovak position were pushed into opposition and progressively forced into a negative stance relative to the existing regime.3 5 Illustrative of the unwillingness even to address the question of constitutional organization was the fate of administrative reconstruction. The County Law of 1920 was designed to integrate Slovakia into the new state by creating a new county structure to replace the old. What especially generated protests by Slovak administrators was that financial control at the county level was taken over by the central Ministries oflnterior and Finance. During 1921-22, several proposals were made in Parliament to address these Slovak concerns. The Hlinka Slovak People's Party (HSPP) called for selfadministration in Slovak affairs, a provincial Diet and a provincial government named by the President. There were also other variants, some more radical, of Slovak autonomy. Hodza, who at this time was still looking for a means of unifying Slovak political power, suggested a County Union with competencies in health, welfare, economic and cultural spheres precisely to shift administrative power in Slovakia out of Prague's bureaucratic hands and into Slovak political hands. The debate on these issues in the ministerial circles in Prague revealed a reluctance to delegate any real powers, even to a body like the County Union. The only concessions to be made were delegating powers addressing the needs of the feeble-minded, blind, deaf, epileptic, supervising forced labor and the poorhouses .36 35 Hama, p. 19. 36 For an analysis of the debate over the administration of Slovakia, see Natalia Krajcovicovli , "Politicke strany na Slovensku a usilie o samosprlivu v dvadsiatich rokoch" in Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, pp . 47-55 . See also Ladislav Lipscher, K vyvinu politickej spravy na Slovensku v rokoch 1918-1938, Bratislava, SA V, 1966. �90 SLOVAKIA The political concerns behind such positions were evident, as expressed in the magazine Tribuna: "It is certain that a County Union in Slovakia would be a constant threat to the unity of the state. Who can guarantee that it would not give birth to some kind of autonomous Diet for Slovakia?"3 7 The result was that the administrative structure for Slovakia was extraordinarily limited, always under the strict supervision of Prague. Slovaks lost even a modicum of local autonomy, under a system which was not implemented in the rest of the country precisely because the example of centralized power as manifested in Slovakia aroused local opposition in Bohemia and Moravia. The anomaly could not be sustained and in 1927 the Provincial Law replaced the county system with the four historic provinces. While this acknowledged the territorial existence of Slovakia as an entity, little was done to give that entity any real administrative powers. The failure of these administrative efforts indicated that no serious attempt would be made to bring about a measure of decentralization of government. Problems of special significance to the Slovaks, such as the economic imbalance, the lower standard of living, the dearth of jobs for the growing numbers of university trained younger leaders, the preservation of religious and cultural values were thus not addressed regionally, but left to the central government in Prague, where Slovak power was minimal at best. It could be argued, and often has been, that the lack of Slovak power was more the result of the divisions among the Slovaks themselves than of the unitary and centralized nature of the system. The inability of the Slovaks to form a cohesive bloc was a factor, but not a decisive factor, for as long as even one Slovak was found who would enter the government in the name of the Slovaks (and in fact three, namely Vavro Srobar, Ivan Derer, Hod:fa, were all that were basically necessary during the First Republic) and while coalition parties could attract a Slovak following, (and two did), the power of the coalition bloc would outweigh any Slovak bloc. The ambiguity about the nature of the Czech-Slovak problem would however have 37Krajfovicovii, p. 51. �SLOVAKIA 91 been clarified had the Slovaks achieved a Slovak party. Hod:fa and others recognized this and an attempt was made to form a National Bloc or even a Political Committee (which Hod:fa tried) which would have functioned in a manner analogous to the Petka. This failed because of the inability to achieve a uniform stand on the question of the Slovak position in the state and also to a diversity of views on some specific issues, a problem partially attributable to confessional differences. There did exist a basic consensus on general principles; only a few Slovaks were convinced Czechoslovaks. Unfortunately it was precisely these few who were able to join the government in Prague and were thus considered to represent the Slovaks. There was in fact a fundamental unity among the Slovak populace: a rejection of ethnic and linguistic Czechoslovakism, a commitment to the Czechoslovak state, albeit a reformed one, and a recognition of the pluralistic nature of the state and society. If there was division among the Slovaks, it came on the question of how, not whether, to reform the state: regionalism or autonomy. The Slovak Agrarians, under Hod:fa's leadership, were centrist in that they worked within the system to bring about a modification of some of the system, but especially in the 1930's were also advocates of regionalism. Hodfa came to advocate an intermediary notion, looking at it from a pragmatic perspective, which "means neither centralism nor autonomy, but state-political unity and regionalism with administrative self-government" .38 Hodfa was trying to find a bridge between two ever diverging assessments (one Czech and the other Slovak) of the satisfaction level with the existing political system. The escalating criticism by Slovaks of their position in the First Republic is evident from the following editorial in Zem, the journal of the younger generation of Agrarians: The aversion of Czechs and Slovaks arises from economic and social problems . Czechs accept our arguments with a judicious attentiveness , while they continue to make their own national , cultural and linguistic politics .. . Currently a majority of the Slovaks want to acknowledge their own nation .... and the unfortunate tendencies (potmehudske narazky) seen 38Milan Hodfa, C/anky, reci, §tudie, Prague , Novina , 1934, Vol. 7, pp . xxxii-iii . �92 SLOVAKIA in various Czech newspapers, to suggest that Slovak efforts to achieve their rights somehow indicates political unreliabi lity, wi ll not deter the Slovaks. 39 If even Hodza's and the Agrarians' moderate call for regionalism was ignored , the possibility for substantive constitutional reform was all the more remote. The position of the HSPP, which consistently included Slovak autonomy as its basic program, is certainly a case in point. Representing a large portion of the Slovak people,40 they were systematically frustrated in their attempts to implement their programs. Ignored most of the time, only in times of crisis did the governing powers seek to integrate the HSPP into the process , such as the coalition crisis of the late 192O's or the presidential elections of 1935 ; once the crisis was resolved, any further negotiations were deemed unnecessary. A good illustration of this can be seen from the December 1935 talks between President Edvard Benes and Andrej Hlinka, leader of the HSPP. Hlinka asked for decentralization and legislative power for regional Slovak organs and for the post of Minister for Slovakia for the HSPP. Benes promised to give the Slovaks all that was possible without undermining the unity of the state. In February 1936 Benes noted that the entry of HSPP into the government was delayed due to unacceptable nature of the demands: the same demands which were made in negotiations in December. The governing coalition rejected the demands and the matter was closed.41 No matter what route the Slovaks followed in their efforts to modify the structure and political system, they had little success. Political parties in Slovakia were unable to compete nationally, for 39zem, IV , 4 , 20 . February , 1938, p. 39 . 40 one could argue that at times it did indeed represent a majority of the Slovaks, if one assumes that Czechs voting in Slovakia supported centrist parties and Magyars their own parties . 41 E.F. Firsov, "K problemu modifik,kif parlamentneho systemu CSR a narodnopolitickeho konsenzu Cechov a Slovakov na prelome 20. a 30 . rokov" in Slo vensk o v politickom systeme Ceskos/ovenska, p. 104. �SLOVAKIA 93 the state was in the hands of the centrist parties and thus no shadow coalition or cabinet could form. Slovaks were united in their efforts to gain control of the bureaucratic apparatus in Slovakia, as a means of indirect access to the power center. This too was frustrated by the bureaucratic structure of centralism. It took the crisis of 1938 to bring about some readjustment in the state relations between Czechs and Slovaks, a settlement subsequently repudiated as being forcibly imposed. 42 By that time however a more aggressive and assertive stance had been taken by the HSPP; 20 years of waiting for the system to change from above had led to the radicalization of the efforts to change it. It is often argued that in time of crisis the Slovaks abandoned the Czechs, generating the notion of ungrateful Slovaks. One could likewise argue that only in times of crisis did the Czechs remember the Slovaks .. . one can go to the well only so many times. There is no question that fascist elements had entered into the Slovak political arena, fueled in part by economic grievances and political frustration . The fact that fascism was a force sweeping across the disaffected sectors of Europe does not absolve the Slovaks of responsibility for those fascist features; nor does however the argument that Czechoslovakia, while it had its faults, was still the only functioning democracy in Eastern Europe and better than the surrounding systems excuse those faults and deny their consequences. For both, historical relativism is a tempting but ultimately unsatisfying position. 43 42 An interesting side point here is Hodza's argument that the political cabinet's acceptance of Slovak self-administration, as negotiated in the summer of 1938 was in fact valid , against Bene§' subsequent argument , after W .W .II broke out , that Parliament had not approved it and it was therefore invalid. Hodza was correct in his perception that the political cabinet was the crucial decision making body . That was why Slovak political efforts were in fact so often frustrated, because Parliament tended only to reflect the decisions of the political cabinet. 43 As a prominent Czech historian has observed: "The ideal of democracy became a self-indulgent compliment, nurturing the need of the Czechs for universal recognition and admiration. Czech nationalism greeted the foundation of the republic not only as an occasion to score points in the nationalistic struggle with imperialistic �94 SLOVAKIA The analogy of a marriage is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for the course of Czech and Slovaks relations . In May of 1918, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was moving inexorably toward its demise, Hlinka declared: "It is absolutely necessary for us to decide if we will continue with the Magyars, or go with the Czechs. Let us not evade the question, let us say openly that we are for the CzechoSlovak orientation. The thousand year marriage with the Magyars has not worked. A divorce is necessary." 44 The marriage of the Czechs and Slovaks in 1918 was a classic war-time marriage: undertaken in haste, without adequate courtship, with both partners moving immediately from divorce (Austrian and Hungarian partners respectively) into this new relationship. There was no time to discuss the terms and conditions of the marriage, the expectations about what each sought and would bring to the marriage. What little was prepared was done largely by marriage brokers (Toma~ G. Masaryk on one side and the American Slovaks on the other, resulting in the Pittsburgh Agreement of 1918) . The first months of the marriage were very difficult, as the residual effects of the Great War needed to be addressed . It became apparent fairly soon, however, that the two partners in the marriage had very different expectations and notions. The Czech partner clearly saw himself as the preponderant factor, functioning as provider and decision maker in a traditional marriage . This was a natural expectation, given the Czech numerical and material dominance. Thus the Czechs had a clear notion of the nature of the relationship: a unitary state of the Czechoslovak nation. The Slovak partner was much less clear about her role in the marriage. Given her relative lack of wealth and experience, there was a tendency on the part of some to accept a dependent relationship and a subservient role in the marriage. Thus generally more than a third of the Slovaks Germany, but also as a justification of its own colonial ambitions toward Slovakia." Zden~k Pinc, "The Idea of the Czechoslovak State: History, Theory and Political Reality", Czechoslovak and Central European Journal, 10, no. I , 1991, p. 38 . 44 Karol Medvecky, Slovenskf prevrat, Tmava, Spolok Sv. Vojtecha, 1930-31 , Vol. Ill , p. 347 . �SLOVAKIA 95 accepted the Czechoslovak unitary state, though only a tiny minority believed in the notion of the Czechoslovak people and virtually no one subscribed to a Czechoslovak language. There also existed a different notion of the marriage, namely the desire for an equal partnership between two equals. This was manifested in the desire for some form of Slovak autonomy as exemplified by the hyphenated Czecho-Slovakia, a position which generally a majority of the Slovaks supported. As the marriage progressed during the 1920's and 1930's, both internal and external factors escalated Slovak discontent. The Slovaks came to resent their status in the Czechoslovak Republic because they felt increasingly frustrated , both economically and politically and because they perceived a paternalistic indifference to Slovak grievances. Increasingly, this frustration led to a sense of alienation from the marriage and a greater responsiveness to ideological concepts which addressed both the reality and the theory of the inadequacy of an unequal marriage; in this marriage it was the call of nationalism which led the "weaker" partner to re-evaluate her place within the Czech-defined relationship. As storm clouds gathered over Europe, as tension and fear escalated, the Slovaks sought to re-define the marriage precisely at the moment that the Czechs, feeling far more threatened by the forces gathering over Europe, resisted any tampering with what to them was a satisfactory marriage. They in fact did not even comprehend the alienation and sense of frustration prevalent among the Slovaks . Thus the events of Munich and after led to deep bitterness, for the Czechs believed the Slovaks had stabbed them in the back, and the Slovaks felt that, having been denied the opportunity to improve their relationship with the Czechs, they had no obligations to travel the bitter path with a partner who had never listened to them and had never been prepared to engage in a genuine dialogue with a view toward developing a marriage of true partners. During the period of the war, the Czechs and some Slovaks denied that the marriage had broken up; some Czechs even denied that any adjustments were necessary for the marriage to resume. Virtually no Slovak could subscribe to that position; for the Slovaks, at the very minimum, a co-equal marriage was imperative. �96 SLOVAKIA The fall of communism enabled old and new grievances to surface, on both sides, and to be finally openly confronted. The result was a divorce. The seeds of that divorce, not necessarily inevitable , had been planted by failures common to so many marriages: lack of communications and the inability to listen as Czechs and Slovaks talked from different historical perspectives, in different languages and with different objectives , resulting in misunderstandings, undervaluing of roles , responsibilities and contributions, and above all , the lack of commitment to a marriage of diversity and genuine equality. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1991-92, Vol. 35 Description An account of the resource Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Slovak League of America Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available 1991-92 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document 78 SLOVAKIA Relations Between Slovaks and Czechs in the First CSR SUSAN MIKULA At this particular point in the history of the Czechs and Slovaks, the question of the nature of the relationship between these two nations has assumed a renewed significance and interest. The disintegration of the common state which had existed for 74 years is often presented in the popular press as the result of Slovak backwardness, provincialism, undemocratic tendencies, vestiges of communist influence; in short as anything but the consequence of a long historical process. There has in fact been a persistent tendency throughout much of the 20th century, whether by popular writers or even some professional scholars, to view Slovak demands for structural changes in their relationship with the Czechs along much the same lines, that is as reflective of fascist or communist extremists, of political, economic or cultural immaturity, or of a destructive opportunism. The prime reason for such tendencies may be that the prism through which the "Slovak problem" has often been viewed is the Czech or Czechoslovak. In other words, there are certain a priori assumptions being made about the nature of the problem which affect the analysis of the problem. One such tendency is to see it as just that, a Slovak problem, that is, as a problem between two competing Slovak factions, rather than as a problem between Czechs and Slovaks. The consequence of that has been the tendency to dismiss the problem and then be repeatedly surprised and dismayed when the central nature of the issues resurfaced and influenced the SLOVAKIA 79 entire state and people. Another tendency is to identify the Slovak nationalist aspirations in the First Czechoslovak Republic (CSR) with the extreme nationalist movements of the inter-war era, that is with fascism. The problem thus becomes reduced to the analysis of Andrej Hlinka and the Slovak People's Party, which is designated as a clerical-fascist movement. The problem is then still a Slovak problem - the authoritarian tendencies of a huge segment of the Slovak population - and also an external one - the broad movement of European fascism. The difficulty comes with trying to account for the persistence of the Slovak national aspirations, long after the dismantling and systematic discrediting of the Slovak Republic. Here the notion of backwardness (economic and political) and immaturity (political and cultural) assumes a satisfactory explanatory character. What has been common in the great majority of these analyses, written mostly from the Czechoslovak perspective, is this notion that it is the Slovak's problem . On the other hand, the few works written from the Slovak perspective , at least until very recently , have tended to veer in the opposite direction, to view it as strictly a Czech problem, that is as the result of a systematic and deliberate policy of Czechoslovakization (analogous to Magyarization). This tendency has likewise but limited value. The Czech/Slovak problem has, rather, been a structural, historical problem, especially in the First Republic. With the creation of that state an attempt was made to apply an undifferentiated model of the nation-state to a society in which a number of nations were undergoing the process of national self-actualization accelerated beyond previous historical experience. The attempt to establish a unitary nation-state comprised of a hastily constructed nation (Czechoslovak) was thus flying in the face of the very process which had led to the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire and which had precisely allowed for the possibility of self-determination for the various nations of the empire. From this perspective, the problem ceases to be a Czech or Slovak problem and becomes a problem of 80 SLOVAKIA the very idea of the Czechoslovak state as it emerged by 1920.19 The unitary, power-based political structure (mocensko-politicky system)20 of the First Republic could not satisfy the needs of the Slovaks without significant revision. However the very real successes and achievements of that state, especially for the Czechs, meant that the need for revision met with incomprehension and therefore indifference and then resistance. An examination of some critical economic and political issues affecting the Slovaks illustrates the fundamental nature of the problem for the Czechoslovak republic. To do so, certain inescapable realities must be recognized. The first is that the economic conditions of the Czech and Slovak lands were vastly different at the very onset of the Republic. A further inescapable reality is that that differences persisted throughout the First Republic and in fact deepened. A third inescapable reality is that l 9 A recent example in Western scholarship which looks at how the structure of the state related to the national struggle of the Slovaks is Carol Skalnik Leff's book , National Conflict in Czechoslovakia, Princeton University Press, I 988 . The Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Science (Historicky ustav SA V) has just published the papers from the symposium held November, 1991 entitled Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, Bratislava, Historicky ustav , 1992. Here both Czech and Slovak scholars examined the political and structural aspects of the Slovak position in the First Republic; most of them have taken a hard look at the system itself. In that vein, some of the recent writings by Czech scholars, such as Vojtech Mencl a kollectiv, Krizovatky 20. stoleti, Prague, Na~e Vojsko, 1990; Petr Pithart Dejiny a politika , Prague, Prostor , 1990; and Zdenek Pinc "The Idea of the Czechoslovak State: History, Theory and Political Reality" in Czechoslovak and Central European Journal, Vol. 10, no . I, 1991, pp. 36-45 have also taken a more critical approach to the analysis of the political system of the First Republic . There are a variety of viewpoints here and not all agree with the notion that the very structure of the First Republic, namely that of a unitary nation-state, almost certainly precluded a satisfactory resolution of conflicting national aspirations, but all recognize that at issue was much more than competing Slovak factions or Slovak immaturity. On a related subject, the theoretical and methodological approach used by Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1984, is very useful. 20 Josef Harna uses that term to characterize the operational structure of the First Republic . See Politickf system a statni politika v prvnfch Jetech existence Ceskoslo venske republiky (1918-1923), Praha, Historicky ustav, 1990. SLOVAKIA 81 these circumstances were at the root of Slovak grievances and frustrations, which came to be shared by nearly all Slovaks, irrespective of their political beliefs. The initial differences between the two arose from their historical conditions, and are well known. While due to some degree to natural environmental factors (resources, terrain, geophysical placement) they are also the result of differing economic and political policies and interests on the part of the Austrians and the Magyars. While the Czechs had become the industrial nucleus of the Habsburg Empire and were well advanced in industrialization and urbanization by the latter decades of the 19th century, Slovak industrialization was at that time at its beginning stages. The Slovaks did have an analogous position within the Hungarian kingdom, designated to become industrially active for that sector of the Empire, but this was in its infancy stage when compared to the Czechs. Thus the creation of Czecho-Slovakia in 1918 joined together two very different economic regions. The effects of that union were also very different. While the Czech Lands continued to develop, after some initial adjustments, at least until the Great Depression, Slovakia stagnated throughout the entire period in almost every category of economic activity. 21 In attempting to explain this fact, one has to recognize that there was little if any economic planning prior to the establishment of the First Republic. In the immediate postwar period, Slovaks recognized the need for economic development and submitted plans and requests to Prague. However, their weak political representation in the crucial first years, the liquidation of the Slovak National Council, which left a leadership vacuum in Slovakia, and the small number of economic leaders in Slovakia all meant that these early efforts were without success. Equally powerless in the realm of economics were the Ministry of Unification of Laws and the Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia. The structure of the system did not allow for conside21 For an analysis of the Slovak economic situation in the First Republic , see the works of Miroslav Fabricius, Hospodarsky vjvoj Slovenska do konca predmnfchovskej republiky, 1987, no. 75 and Vjvoj nazorov na postavenie ekonomiky Sloven ska v prednmfchovskej republike, Bratislava, Eckonomicky ustav SAV , I 990, no. 79. 82 SLOVAKIA ration of Slovakia's economic development; it was rather submerged into the whole. In fact, the strongest protests over the restructuring of the historic counties came from those county boards most concerned with economic issues. Economic policy in the new republic was highly centralized, as was the political system. Prague was the political and economic center where all the offices and organs were located. Slovakia was not viewed as one of the two integrating units, but rather as a region to be appended to the Historic Lands.22 If there was any recognition of Slovakia's role in the economy as a distinct sector, it was to serve as the agricultural sector, to insure the agrarian self-sufficiency of the state. This theory of an "agrarian Slovakia" was the cornerstone of economic policy in the 1920's, in particular within the Agrarian Party, where political considerations played a part. Slovak Agrarian politicians also supported this notion, although by the end of the 1920's even Milan Hodfa recognized the need to bring industry to Slovakia.23 It was difficult to overcome this notion that the agrarian character of Slovakia was both natural and desirable, even while it was recognized that industrialization was essential to economic development in other areas of East Europe and also that there were actually less than optimal conditions for agriculture in Slovakia. This was especially unfortunate because there was plenty of available evidence which pointed to the social and economic inequality of the two halves of the state and their undesirable social and political consequences. The chief reason for failing to address this problem was the commitment to a laissez-faire policy of economic development. It was argued that to target Slovakia for special investment and\or development would create a dualistic policy while there existed a unitary society. In fact, 22 Vlastislav Lacina, "Uloha hospodai'ske politiky pri vytvlii'enf nove ceskoslovenske ekonomiky 1918-1923" in Politicky system a statni politika v prvnich Jetech existence Ceskoslovenske republiky, p. 86. 23 A summary of this debate about agrarian versus industrial Slovakia is to be found in Fabricius, Vyvoj nazorov na posta venie ekonomiky Slovenska v predmnfchovskej republike . SLOVAKIA 83 economic dualism already existed and persisted and the failure to deal with it had enormous consequences for both people. Nor did Czechoslovakia actually pursue a laissez-faire economic policy, especially in the first years of the Republic. Rather what occurred was a failure to recognize the special Slovak economic needs, within the context of Slovakia rather than the context of the whole state. As a result the Slovak economy stagnated, with social, economic and political consequences. Evidence of this economic dualism can be found in both the agricultural and industrial sectors. In agriculture, between 19191927, for instance, 87,263 hectares of land in the Czech region underwent improvement while in Slovakia it amounted to 9,323 hectares or 9.6% of the total land improved . The division of investment costs for rural modernization were 95 .1 % to the Czech lands and 4.3% to Slovakia.2 4 Another indicator of the disparity was the rate of rural electrification; in 1933 , for example 125 villages were joined to the electrical network in the Czech lands, 112 in Moravia and Silesia and only 9 in Slovakia. Altogether only 1.9% of agricultural enterprises were electrified in Slovakia compared to 31.7% in Czech lands and 25.2% in Moravia.25 As a consequence, throughout the 1920 1s, Slovak agriculture remained essentially stagnant and less productive and in the 19301s the world agricultural crisis had a greater adverse effect on the Slovaks. In the industrial sector there was a whole battery of problems, so much so that it was referred to as the 11 complex of Slovak industrial woes (komplex bolesti slovenskeho priemyslu)" _26 The restructuring of Slovak industry during the period 19191921 led to an emphasis on the production of consumable (primary) goods, so that the percentage of activity devoted to producing export oriented goods declined. In spite of the fact that Slovakia needed greater modernization and improvement in its economic situation, the 24 Fabricius, Hospodarsky vyvoj S/ovenska do konca predmnichovskej republiky, p. 47 . 25 Jbid. , p. 64. 26 Ibid., p. 52. 84 SLOVAKIA pace of improvement here too was slower than in the Czech Lands. In fact, when in 1921-23 industrial output fell by 30%, some even began to talk about a policy of de-industrialization (odburavanie priemyslu). This was not quite the case but it did ring true for heavy industry; between 1918 and 1932, 260 enterprises were dismantled; by 1937 this had reached another 680 _2 7 Another severe problem was the lack of capital investment; the Czech bourgeoisie invested in existing Slovak firms, not in new ones and those listed in statistics as new were in fact results of transfer of capital and ownership. This process (nostrifikacia) was the road by which Czech capital was able to entrench itself in key positions , especially in banking, industry and marketing. 28 By 1930, after a 10 year period of the integration process, Slovakia was more clearly agrarian in character than before. The Slovak industrial labor share was at 19 .4% while Czech industrial labor rate reached 42.1 % . In the mid-1930's there was a brief spurt of "re-industrialization" in Slovakia, largely in defenserelated industries (perhaps to move them eastward, away from the German border), but even with this , at the end of the First Republic there was still a relative 6% decrease of industrial employment in Slovakia. The percentage of Slovaks in the total industrial employment in Czechoslovakia did not rise above 8% during the entire period. 29 Over the twenty year existence of the First Republic, Slovak economic development consistently lagged behind that of the Czechs, producing a highly developed sense of economic grievance among Slovaks of all political persuasions, including the centrists. On the issue of the economy there existed near unanimity of opinion among the Slovaks. The inability of the Slovaks, however, to effect significant changes in the economic policies and expenditures of the 27 Mencl , p. 143. 28 see Fabricius, Hospodarsky vyvoj S/ovenska do konca predmnfchovskej repub liky, pp . 40-56 and Lacina, pp . 87 and passim for a discusstion of Czech fin ancial investment policies in Slovakia. 29 Radoslav Selucky, "The Economic Equalization of Slovakia with the Czech Lands ", East European Economics, 4/1965, pp . 42-59. SLOVAKIA 85 central government served to make manifest the structural impediments to full Slovak self-fulfillment within the framework of the unitary Czechoslovak republic. The result was frustration and alienation, both in the economic and the political sphere. In the political sphere, one could almost say that the very decision to create an unitary state of the "Czechoslovak" nation created an untenable situation. Even the most cursory examination of the process by which the unitary state was formed and the structure through which it functioned reveals that the system itself contributed to the erosion of the viability of the unitary Czechoslovak state. The prevailing opinions have generally been that this decision was necessary and beneficial: necessary because of the international situation, the Wilsonian commitment to national self-determination and above all by the fact that the Germans constituted the second largest national group in the new state. And it was beneficial because by that process the Slovaks became a state people rather than a national minority. The assumption therefore is that an unitary state structure was in response to these factors, and not a political decision by the Czech leadership, less a political opportunity but rather an historical necessity. What is generally glossed over is that until almost the very end of the peace process, the dualistic principle was a very real option, that is Czecho-Slovakia, as indicated by the use of the hyphen until 1920 _30 What decided the issue was not Wilsonian expectations but the military turmoil in Slovakia, necessitating occupation and creating fears for the safety of the whole republic . The structure of the state was influenced as much by some short-term problems which could have been resolved in several ways as by broad historical forces . Nor was the decision made because Slovaks were unprepared or disinterested in the structure of the new state. From the time that the Slovak League of America was empowered to negotiate for the Slovaks (Martin Memorandum, 1906) to the Pittsburgh Agreement to the various plans and statements made by Slovak leaders 30 see Joseph Kalvoda, The Genesis of Czechoslo vakia , Boulder, East European Monographs , 1986. 86 SLOVAKIA throughout 1918, it was clear the Slovaks were formulating concepts about their relationship with the Czechs. Examination of the meetings, speeches, correspondence of Slovak leaders, especially in 1918 reveals wide-ranging discussions about the anticipated relationship; autonomy was perhaps the most consistent expectation. For example, Matus Dula wrote on November 23, 1918: "when I discussed our autonomy with responsible [rozhodnymi] Czech leaders, they attested that Slovaks would get full autonomy autonomous rights would fall under the competency of the regional diet." 31 It is clear that in 1918 Slovaks were willing to join their sovereignty with that of the Czechs as partners in a new state, because that afforded them the best opportunity for political emancipation; what they were not expecting to do was to blend and blur their hardfought national identity. The decision to postulate a "Czechoslovak nation" was not made by Slovak political representatives, and these did exist, as did political parties, nor by any electoral process, but rather by a very small group of appointed politicians not very representative of the political, economic, social and cultural spectrum of Slovakia.32 There is no question that conditions were such that it did not appear that reasoned debates and consensus building were luxuries which could be afforded. What needs to be understood however is that decisions were made due to very specific historical events which led to the choice of certain options, which were not necessarily the optimal or sole options and which therefore could 31 Milan Krajcovic, "Slovensko v zahranicnopolitickych suvislostiach 1918-1922", in Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, p. 148 . See also the article by Vladimir Zuberec, "Vyznamny dokument o postaveni Slovenska za burfoaznej CSR v zbierkach Slovenskeho Narodneho Muzea" in Zbornik Slovenskeho Narodneho Muzea, LXXXIII , 1989, pp. 201-207 . 32 r:ubomir Liptak points out that there were 10,000 people with, if not political experience, certainly with experience in a variety of organizations and public life. And while the number of Slovak schools had dramatically declined , the number of Slovak students had gone up; these could all be acclimated quickly to the new Slovak reality . See "Pripravenosi Slovenska na demokraciu" in Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, pp. 7-12. SLOVAKIA 87 have been readdressed as the situation changed. An underlying element in the creation of the new state was the notion that the year 1918 was the year zero - a new beginning with a clean slate. The failure to recognize and internalize the fundamentally different historical experiences and character of the two people, to recognize that in fact two separate nations existed, not branches of one nation, and that these two had differing notions about both the nature of their new relationship and its state structure influenced the subsequent development of the state as well as the two peoples. As Josef Hama points out "On the Czech side there was not the willingness to understand the differences; on the Slovak side there was impatience and anxiety arising from the feeling of powerlessness to achieve their objectives. Czechoslovakia was formed from the prevailing weight of the Czechs as a unitary state with significant characteristics of centralism." _33 The construct of the unitary state, and the method of ratification of the constitution, meant that there was no national debate and therefore no national consensus on the very definition of the nation state . In the formative period, the hyphenated form, suggesting a state of the Czechs and Slovaks, often was used interchangeably with the Czechoslovak. The definitive proclamation in the Constitution that the "Czechoslovak nation" was the creator of the state and "Czechoslovak" the language of the state created the situation in which those large numbers of Slovaks who resisted the label Czechoslovak were forced into opposition not just against the policies of the state, a normal aspect of parliamentary systems, but against the very nature of the state itself, a position the Slovaks initially had no desire to take and in fact until the very end of the republic sought to avoid. As a consequence the fiction of the single Czechoslovak nation was assumed to be the selfevident principle on which relations between Czechs and Slovaks were based. From the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority of Czech politicians, therefore, neither Slovak autonomy nor the federalization of the state on the basis of the national principle was deemed to be at all 33 Harna, p. 14. 88 SLOVAKIA necessary. This attitude prevailed even as the very construct "two branches of the Czechoslovak nation" would seem to demand the necessity of constitutional elaboration and resolution of the individuality contained within the notion of two branches _34 Once the decision was made to create a unitary state, the opportunities for initiating and implementing Slovak policies and political objectives were circumscribed at best, both by the structure of the state system, the political party structure and to an extent the Slovak political forms. The peculiar structure of the party system meant that opposition parties had no realistic chance of modifying the system. The frustration that results from the perceived inability to influence the system in any way often leads to radicalism and this was certainly the case in Czechoslovakia. The power politics party system in the interwar republic proved to be remarkably stable, even though it was a multi-party system in which significant groups were polarized. Stability was achieved at a price, namely the diminution of the role of Parliament and the enhancement of the power of the President and of the government forming coalition parties. A further price was the perception that these centrist parties (generally known as the Petka) had to achieve a consensus and cohesiveness in the face of the fundamental divergence of views from the outsider parties. Hence opposition becomes not something to be tolerated and contested, but something threatening and destabilizing. In effect, the coalition parties could not afford the luxury of opposition; aware of the differences in the state, they felt compelled to focus on retaining and centralizing power. The political cabinet of party leaders essentially overshadowed the ministerial cabinet and tended to make of Parliament a virtual rubber stamp, at least for deputies from the governing parties. What that meant in practice was that the system was impervious to any fundamental change through the normal parliamentary 34M. Matula, "Nektere problemy souvisejfci s institucionalnfm aspektem narodnfc h vztahu CSR v letech 1918-1938" in Slovensko v politickom syst6me Ceskoslovenska, p. 91 . SLOVAKIA 89 process. What ensued then was the belief that the structure itself had to be modified if any real political power was to develop among the Slovaks. As one historian writes: The issue was not really whether or not the Slovaks achieved immediate autonomy but the Jack of understanding and the unwillingness of the Czech parties even to recognize the problem. Thus the spokesmen for the Slovak position were pushed into opposition and progressively forced into a negative stance relative to the existing regime.3 5 Illustrative of the unwillingness even to address the question of constitutional organization was the fate of administrative reconstruction. The County Law of 1920 was designed to integrate Slovakia into the new state by creating a new county structure to replace the old. What especially generated protests by Slovak administrators was that financial control at the county level was taken over by the central Ministries oflnterior and Finance. During 1921-22, several proposals were made in Parliament to address these Slovak concerns. The Hlinka Slovak People's Party (HSPP) called for selfadministration in Slovak affairs, a provincial Diet and a provincial government named by the President. There were also other variants, some more radical, of Slovak autonomy. Hodza, who at this time was still looking for a means of unifying Slovak political power, suggested a County Union with competencies in health, welfare, economic and cultural spheres precisely to shift administrative power in Slovakia out of Prague's bureaucratic hands and into Slovak political hands. The debate on these issues in the ministerial circles in Prague revealed a reluctance to delegate any real powers, even to a body like the County Union. The only concessions to be made were delegating powers addressing the needs of the feeble-minded, blind, deaf, epileptic, supervising forced labor and the poorhouses .36 35 Hama, p. 19. 36 For an analysis of the debate over the administration of Slovakia, see Natalia Krajcovicovli , "Politicke strany na Slovensku a usilie o samosprlivu v dvadsiatich rokoch" in Slovensko v politickom systeme Ceskoslovenska, pp . 47-55 . See also Ladislav Lipscher, K vyvinu politickej spravy na Slovensku v rokoch 1918-1938, Bratislava, SA V, 1966. 90 SLOVAKIA The political concerns behind such positions were evident, as expressed in the magazine Tribuna: "It is certain that a County Union in Slovakia would be a constant threat to the unity of the state. Who can guarantee that it would not give birth to some kind of autonomous Diet for Slovakia?"3 7 The result was that the administrative structure for Slovakia was extraordinarily limited, always under the strict supervision of Prague. Slovaks lost even a modicum of local autonomy, under a system which was not implemented in the rest of the country precisely because the example of centralized power as manifested in Slovakia aroused local opposition in Bohemia and Moravia. The anomaly could not be sustained and in 1927 the Provincial Law replaced the county system with the four historic provinces. While this acknowledged the territorial existence of Slovakia as an entity, little was done to give that entity any real administrative powers. The failure of these administrative efforts indicated that no serious attempt would be made to bring about a measure of decentralization of government. Problems of special significance to the Slovaks, such as the economic imbalance, the lower standard of living, the dearth of jobs for the growing numbers of university trained younger leaders, the preservation of religious and cultural values were thus not addressed regionally, but left to the central government in Prague, where Slovak power was minimal at best. It could be argued, and often has been, that the lack of Slovak power was more the result of the divisions among the Slovaks themselves than of the unitary and centralized nature of the system. The inability of the Slovaks to form a cohesive bloc was a factor, but not a decisive factor, for as long as even one Slovak was found who would enter the government in the name of the Slovaks (and in fact three, namely Vavro Srobar, Ivan Derer, Hod:fa, were all that were basically necessary during the First Republic) and while coalition parties could attract a Slovak following, (and two did), the power of the coalition bloc would outweigh any Slovak bloc. The ambiguity about the nature of the Czech-Slovak problem would however have 37Krajfovicovii, p. 51. SLOVAKIA 91 been clarified had the Slovaks achieved a Slovak party. Hod:fa and others recognized this and an attempt was made to form a National Bloc or even a Political Committee (which Hod:fa tried) which would have functioned in a manner analogous to the Petka. This failed because of the inability to achieve a uniform stand on the question of the Slovak position in the state and also to a diversity of views on some specific issues, a problem partially attributable to confessional differences. There did exist a basic consensus on general principles; only a few Slovaks were convinced Czechoslovaks. Unfortunately it was precisely these few who were able to join the government in Prague and were thus considered to represent the Slovaks. There was in fact a fundamental unity among the Slovak populace: a rejection of ethnic and linguistic Czechoslovakism, a commitment to the Czechoslovak state, albeit a reformed one, and a recognition of the pluralistic nature of the state and society. If there was division among the Slovaks, it came on the question of how, not whether, to reform the state: regionalism or autonomy. The Slovak Agrarians, under Hod:fa's leadership, were centrist in that they worked within the system to bring about a modification of some of the system, but especially in the 1930's were also advocates of regionalism. Hodfa came to advocate an intermediary notion, looking at it from a pragmatic perspective, which "means neither centralism nor autonomy, but state-political unity and regionalism with administrative self-government" .38 Hodfa was trying to find a bridge between two ever diverging assessments (one Czech and the other Slovak) of the satisfaction level with the existing political system. The escalating criticism by Slovaks of their position in the First Republic is evident from the following editorial in Zem, the journal of the younger generation of Agrarians: The aversion of Czechs and Slovaks arises from economic and social problems . Czechs accept our arguments with a judicious attentiveness , while they continue to make their own national , cultural and linguistic politics .. . Currently a majority of the Slovaks want to acknowledge their own nation .... and the unfortunate tendencies (potmehudske narazky) seen 38Milan Hodfa, C/anky, reci, §tudie, Prague , Novina , 1934, Vol. 7, pp . xxxii-iii . 92 SLOVAKIA in various Czech newspapers, to suggest that Slovak efforts to achieve their rights somehow indicates political unreliabi lity, wi ll not deter the Slovaks. 39 If even Hodza's and the Agrarians' moderate call for regionalism was ignored , the possibility for substantive constitutional reform was all the more remote. The position of the HSPP, which consistently included Slovak autonomy as its basic program, is certainly a case in point. Representing a large portion of the Slovak people,40 they were systematically frustrated in their attempts to implement their programs. Ignored most of the time, only in times of crisis did the governing powers seek to integrate the HSPP into the process , such as the coalition crisis of the late 192O's or the presidential elections of 1935 ; once the crisis was resolved, any further negotiations were deemed unnecessary. A good illustration of this can be seen from the December 1935 talks between President Edvard Benes and Andrej Hlinka, leader of the HSPP. Hlinka asked for decentralization and legislative power for regional Slovak organs and for the post of Minister for Slovakia for the HSPP. Benes promised to give the Slovaks all that was possible without undermining the unity of the state. In February 1936 Benes noted that the entry of HSPP into the government was delayed due to unacceptable nature of the demands: the same demands which were made in negotiations in December. The governing coalition rejected the demands and the matter was closed.41 No matter what route the Slovaks followed in their efforts to modify the structure and political system, they had little success. Political parties in Slovakia were unable to compete nationally, for 39zem, IV , 4 , 20 . February , 1938, p. 39 . 40 one could argue that at times it did indeed represent a majority of the Slovaks, if one assumes that Czechs voting in Slovakia supported centrist parties and Magyars their own parties . 41 E.F. Firsov, "K problemu modifik,kif parlamentneho systemu CSR a narodnopolitickeho konsenzu Cechov a Slovakov na prelome 20. a 30 . rokov" in Slo vensk o v politickom systeme Ceskos/ovenska, p. 104. SLOVAKIA 93 the state was in the hands of the centrist parties and thus no shadow coalition or cabinet could form. Slovaks were united in their efforts to gain control of the bureaucratic apparatus in Slovakia, as a means of indirect access to the power center. This too was frustrated by the bureaucratic structure of centralism. It took the crisis of 1938 to bring about some readjustment in the state relations between Czechs and Slovaks, a settlement subsequently repudiated as being forcibly imposed. 42 By that time however a more aggressive and assertive stance had been taken by the HSPP; 20 years of waiting for the system to change from above had led to the radicalization of the efforts to change it. It is often argued that in time of crisis the Slovaks abandoned the Czechs, generating the notion of ungrateful Slovaks. One could likewise argue that only in times of crisis did the Czechs remember the Slovaks .. . one can go to the well only so many times. There is no question that fascist elements had entered into the Slovak political arena, fueled in part by economic grievances and political frustration . The fact that fascism was a force sweeping across the disaffected sectors of Europe does not absolve the Slovaks of responsibility for those fascist features; nor does however the argument that Czechoslovakia, while it had its faults, was still the only functioning democracy in Eastern Europe and better than the surrounding systems excuse those faults and deny their consequences. For both, historical relativism is a tempting but ultimately unsatisfying position. 43 42 An interesting side point here is Hodza's argument that the political cabinet's acceptance of Slovak self-administration, as negotiated in the summer of 1938 was in fact valid , against Bene§' subsequent argument , after W .W .II broke out , that Parliament had not approved it and it was therefore invalid. Hodza was correct in his perception that the political cabinet was the crucial decision making body . That was why Slovak political efforts were in fact so often frustrated, because Parliament tended only to reflect the decisions of the political cabinet. 43 As a prominent Czech historian has observed: "The ideal of democracy became a self-indulgent compliment, nurturing the need of the Czechs for universal recognition and admiration. Czech nationalism greeted the foundation of the republic not only as an occasion to score points in the nationalistic struggle with imperialistic 94 SLOVAKIA The analogy of a marriage is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for the course of Czech and Slovaks relations . In May of 1918, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was moving inexorably toward its demise, Hlinka declared: "It is absolutely necessary for us to decide if we will continue with the Magyars, or go with the Czechs. Let us not evade the question, let us say openly that we are for the CzechoSlovak orientation. The thousand year marriage with the Magyars has not worked. A divorce is necessary." 44 The marriage of the Czechs and Slovaks in 1918 was a classic war-time marriage: undertaken in haste, without adequate courtship, with both partners moving immediately from divorce (Austrian and Hungarian partners respectively) into this new relationship. There was no time to discuss the terms and conditions of the marriage, the expectations about what each sought and would bring to the marriage. What little was prepared was done largely by marriage brokers (Toma~ G. Masaryk on one side and the American Slovaks on the other, resulting in the Pittsburgh Agreement of 1918) . The first months of the marriage were very difficult, as the residual effects of the Great War needed to be addressed . It became apparent fairly soon, however, that the two partners in the marriage had very different expectations and notions. The Czech partner clearly saw himself as the preponderant factor, functioning as provider and decision maker in a traditional marriage . This was a natural expectation, given the Czech numerical and material dominance. Thus the Czechs had a clear notion of the nature of the relationship: a unitary state of the Czechoslovak nation. The Slovak partner was much less clear about her role in the marriage. Given her relative lack of wealth and experience, there was a tendency on the part of some to accept a dependent relationship and a subservient role in the marriage. Thus generally more than a third of the Slovaks Germany, but also as a justification of its own colonial ambitions toward Slovakia." Zden~k Pinc, "The Idea of the Czechoslovak State: History, Theory and Political Reality", Czechoslovak and Central European Journal, 10, no. I , 1991, p. 38 . 44 Karol Medvecky, Slovenskf prevrat, Tmava, Spolok Sv. Vojtecha, 1930-31 , Vol. Ill , p. 347 . SLOVAKIA 95 accepted the Czechoslovak unitary state, though only a tiny minority believed in the notion of the Czechoslovak people and virtually no one subscribed to a Czechoslovak language. There also existed a different notion of the marriage, namely the desire for an equal partnership between two equals. This was manifested in the desire for some form of Slovak autonomy as exemplified by the hyphenated Czecho-Slovakia, a position which generally a majority of the Slovaks supported. As the marriage progressed during the 1920's and 1930's, both internal and external factors escalated Slovak discontent. The Slovaks came to resent their status in the Czechoslovak Republic because they felt increasingly frustrated , both economically and politically and because they perceived a paternalistic indifference to Slovak grievances. Increasingly, this frustration led to a sense of alienation from the marriage and a greater responsiveness to ideological concepts which addressed both the reality and the theory of the inadequacy of an unequal marriage; in this marriage it was the call of nationalism which led the "weaker" partner to re-evaluate her place within the Czech-defined relationship. As storm clouds gathered over Europe, as tension and fear escalated, the Slovaks sought to re-define the marriage precisely at the moment that the Czechs, feeling far more threatened by the forces gathering over Europe, resisted any tampering with what to them was a satisfactory marriage. They in fact did not even comprehend the alienation and sense of frustration prevalent among the Slovaks . Thus the events of Munich and after led to deep bitterness, for the Czechs believed the Slovaks had stabbed them in the back, and the Slovaks felt that, having been denied the opportunity to improve their relationship with the Czechs, they had no obligations to travel the bitter path with a partner who had never listened to them and had never been prepared to engage in a genuine dialogue with a view toward developing a marriage of true partners. During the period of the war, the Czechs and some Slovaks denied that the marriage had broken up; some Czechs even denied that any adjustments were necessary for the marriage to resume. Virtually no Slovak could subscribe to that position; for the Slovaks, at the very minimum, a co-equal marriage was imperative. 96 SLOVAKIA The fall of communism enabled old and new grievances to surface, on both sides, and to be finally openly confronted. The result was a divorce. The seeds of that divorce, not necessarily inevitable , had been planted by failures common to so many marriages: lack of communications and the inability to listen as Czechs and Slovaks talked from different historical perspectives, in different languages and with different objectives , resulting in misunderstandings, undervaluing of roles , responsibilities and contributions, and above all , the lack of commitment to a marriage of diversity and genuine equality.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Relations Between Slovaks and Czechs in the First CSR Description An account of the resource Susan Mikula Slovakia, Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92 pp. 78-96 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mikula, Suzanna Maria, 1943- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991-92 LCNAF https://slovakia.wordsofpassage.net/files/original/8f82b142b04278bd07dbb6849afe0c55.pdf a6e0a2ff98b268bf6f148328ce71cc1e PDF Text Text SLOVAKIA 97 The Czech Question in Slovakia in the Post-War Years STANISLAV J. KIRSCHBAUM It is not a simple task to describe the role of the "Czech question" in Slovakia in the post-war period, especially under the Communist regime (1948-1989). The difficulties in understanding it are not unlike the dilemmas faced by a man who is looking for a comfortable place to rest at night in a dark room in which a black panther is sleeping: he knows that he must not disturb it and each movement he makes is influenced by its unseen presence. Similarly, the best way to understand the role the Czech question has played in Slovakia is to examine the twists and turns of Slovak politics in this period. The restoration of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1945 meant that the Slovaks would once again have to come to terms with the Czech control of the state. For most Czech politicians, in particular Edvard Bend, the re-created state was to be identical to the pre-Munich First Republic . Many declarations to that effect had been made during the war. At first glance it seems therefore that the war had merely been an interruption. However, the political situation at its end was quite different from what it had been in the twenties and thirties. The six-year existence of the first Slovak Republic (19391945) had brought about such changes in Slovak national life that Slovakia's re-incorporation into Czechoslovakia had to take place on new terms. What was not clear were not only the terms, but above �98 SLOVAKIA all the room for manoeuvre that the Slovaks would have to negotiate and maintain the new relationship with the Czechs. Slovak leaders had to deal with two factors that influenced postwar politics: first of all, the war-time resistance movement that the Allies recognized had been organized and led by Czech politicians with Benes at their head in the name of the Czechoslovak Republic. Slovak non-Communist politicians who joined them had no choice but to accept Czech leadership . Even Slovak Communists, who initially went their own way by creating the Communist Party of Slovakia (CPS) and propagating the idea of a Slovak Soviet Republic attached to the USSR, accepted it not only in the state, but in the end also in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCS). The second factor had to do with the existence of the Slovak Republic. Jozef Lettrich, one of the Slovak non-Communist leaders, writes that "Slovak separatism was not only anti-Czech; it was also anti-democratic" .45 We can question the accuracy of this statement; in 1945, however, it had validity and justified the decision of the Allies to have the Slovak Republic disappear at the end of hostilities. These were the arguments invoked not only to maintain the decision to deny the Slovaks the right to their own state but above all to allow the Czechs a relatively free hand in dealing with them. As a result, as the Slovak writer, Peter Zig man, put it recently, "After the renewal of the CSR in 1945, it was not possible to renew the pre-war autonomy [of Slovakia], rather certain political forces whose particular representative was President Edvard Benes preferred to apply against Slovakia and the Slovaks the principle of collective guilt (the only problem was that, unlike the Sudeten Germans, there was no place where to deport them)" .46 The Czech question in Slovakia thus came to be identified with these two factors. They created a political situation which for all intents and purposes subjected the Slovaks to a Czech agenda which 45 Jozef Lettrich, History of Modem Slovakia, New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1955 , p. 110. 46 Peter Zigman, •Cesko-slovenske s1Htatie", Slovenske narodne noviny, 44/3 November 1992. �SLOVAKIA 99 once again was defined as "Czechoslovak", notwithstanding the Kosice Programme of April 1945 which officially recognized the Slovak nation. This meant that there was no question of Slovakia's equality with the Czech Lands nor of equal Slovak participation in the running of the state. This situation was in total disregard of the slogan "equal partners" (rovnf s rovnfm) which the leaders of the Slovak resistance movement propagated during the 1944 Revolt in order to gain support among the Slovak people. The Revolt was a military action whose aim had been not only to overthrow the Slovak Republic and tie the Slovaks to the anti-Nazi movements in Europe, but above all to proclaim their allegiance to Czechoslovakia. 47 The first and clearest indication that they would have limited room for manoeuvre came during the negotiations that took place in Moscow in March 1945 between the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and Slovak representatives; the latter failed to have their main demand implemented, namely the transformation of Czechoslovakia into a federal state .48 Nevertheless, in the Czechoslovak government's first post-war programme, known as the Kosice Programme, the Slovaks were given relatively broad political and administrative autonomy. The institutions created during the Revolt, the Slovak National Council and the Board of Commissioners , took over the legislative and executive functions of the Parliament and Government of the Slovak Republic. For a short while, Slovakia was a state within a state. This was a situation that could not last. In a process reminiscent of the first years of the First Czechoslovak Republic, the Czech agenda was swiftly imposed on the Slovaks by the government once it was back in Prague: first, it 47 On the events of August 1944, see Stanislav J . Kirschbaum , 'The Re volt of 1944', in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum , ed ., Slovak Politics , Cleveland, Slovak Institute , 1983 , pp . 286-313 . 48 For more on this and subsequent events, see Stanislav J . Kirschbaum , "Federalism in Slovak Communist Politics", Canadian Slavonic Papers, XIX (4), 1977 , pp . 444451. �100 SLOVAKIA forced the Slovak National Council and the Board of Commissioners to sign the three Prague Agreements of 1945 and 1946 which seriously curtailed Slovak political and administrative autonomy; secondly, it sanctioned the trials of officials of the Slovak Republic, in particular President Jozef Tiso and Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka, most of whom were condemned either to death or prison terms. The political struggle between the Communist and Democratic Parties in Slovakia gave additional leverage to the government to control Slovakia. The elections of 1946 were won by the Democratic Party. As a result, the Communists , in the political battle that ensued, abandoned the nationalist stance they had taken during the elections, aligned themselves with the CPCS and ceased to oppose the centralizing tendencies of the Prague government. By the time the CPCS won power in a coup in February 1948 (with a dry-run in Slovakia in November 1947), Czechoslovakia had become a unitary centralized state in all but name, a situation which the Constitution of 1948 recognized. What this meant for the Slovaks, in the words of the Slovak historian C'ubomfr Liptak, was that "Slovak politics was replaced by politics in Slovakia" .49 For all intents and purposes, the Czech agenda, writ large as "Czechoslovak", was once again in place throughout the state. The Communists who ended up in charge of Slovak affairs in the first decade of the regime were not those who had participated in the 1944 Revolt. The latter, who were known as "povstalci", had lost a power struggle within the CPS to comrades who gave their total allegiance to the Czech leadership of the CPCS. The "povstalci" became the victims of the Stalinist purges that befell Eastern Europe in the late forties and early fifties. The "centralists", as those in power were called, proceeded to implement the Czech agenda. Their programme was an economic one: to industrialize Slovakia to the level of the Czech Lands. They allowed Slovak national institutions to be all but stripped of their remaining powers, they conducted campaigns against Slovak nationalism not only during the Stalinist 49 1:ubomfr Liptlik, Slovensko v 20. storoci, Bratislava, Vydavatefstvo politickej literatury , 1968 , p. 296. �SLOVAKIA purges, but also in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and in 1960, together with their Czech colleagues, they celebrated the achievements of socialism in Czechoslovakia with the promulgation of a socialist constitution. The second Soviet destalinization in 1961 and an economic crisis in the early 1960s made possible a challenge to the regime, in particular its handling of Czech-Slovak relations. First came the pressure to free and rehabilitate the condemned "povstalci". However, as Zigman writes, "The suppression of Slovak interests did not end even in the 1960s, a period which in the Czech Lands was perceived as a political thaw. This was particularly evident in the activities of [CPCS First Secretary] Antonfn Novotny and his followers as head of the state and the party" .50 Therefore, when Slovak Communists challenged the Czech agenda, they did so only in a veiled way. They allowed and even encouraged the rehabilitated "povstalci" to refer to the goals of the 1944 Revolt, namely the transformation of the state into a federation. The Slovak press as well as academic journals published new and revised histories of the 1944 events, called officially the Slovak National Uprising, and argued for the implementation of their goals .s I This challenge, which culminated in the federalization of the state on 28 October 1968, was successful only because it was shown to have ideological validity. This is the message in the memorandum52 Milo~ Gosiorovsky submitted to the Central Committee of the CPCS in 1963 which provoked an angry reaction from Novotny. Nevertheless, even with clearly acceptable ideological arguments, it took five years before a law federalizing the state could be passed. Novotny and his supporters had to be removed from office, a 50 see note 2. 51For more on this period , see Stanislav J . Kirschbaum , "National Self-Assertion in Slovakia" in George Simmonds, ed ., Nationalism in the U.S.S.R . and Eastern Europe in the Era of Brezhnev and Kosygin, Detroit , University of Detroit Press , 1977 , pp. 380-400. 52 Milo~ Gosiorovsky, "K niektorym otazkam vziahu Cechov a Slovakov v politike KSC ", Historicky casopis XVI (3), 1968, pp . 370-396. �102 SLOVAKIA removal which also made possible for a reform process to be introduced in the political life of the state _53 Under the leadership of Novotny's successor, the Slovak Alexander Dubcek, an effort was made during the spring and summer of 1968 to introduce "socialism with a human face" in the political life of the Czechs and Slovaks . The federalization of the state was one of the reforms envisaged and was the object of intensive discussions.54 However, Czechoslovakia's neighbours did not approve of this experiment in political liberalization 55 and cut it short with a military intervention in August. Of all the reforms, only the federalization of the state survived. Compared with the first decade and a half of the regime, the years leading up to the liberalization process were a period of relative freedom of expression which enabled the Slovaks to renegotiate their status in the state. They were not, on the other hand, permitted to put its existence in question.56 Put another way, there could be no discussion of the "Czech question". It is not surprising therefore that the federalization law ended up being a compromise that reflected far more the limits of Czech tolerance of constitutional change than the successful implementation of Slovak objectives or 53For an examination of the reform process of the 1960s, see Galia Golan, The Czechoslovak Reform Movement, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971. 54For an analysis of the debate around the federal solution, see H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia 's Interrupted Revolution, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976), pp . 451-489 . 55 For more on the reform movement of 1968 see Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, "Kontinuitat und politischer Wechsel in der "Tschechoslowakei 1968"", Bohemia , XV, 1974, pp . 378-395 and Galia Golan , Reform Rule in Czechoslovakia 1968-1969, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973). 56 However, as Robert W. Dean writes, "While nothing indicated that separatism was actively being considered as an altemat_ive by responsible Slovak politicians, discussions of it appreared in the press regularly". See Robert W. Dean, Nationalism and Political Change in Eastern Europe: the Slovak Question and the Czechoslovak Reform Movement, The Social Science Foundation and Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 10, Denver, University of Denver, 1973, p. 31. �SLOVAKIA 103 even a definition of mutually acceptable goals. The two decades that followed the Warsaw Pact intervention of August 1968 , the period known as normalization, saw the wine of centralization being poured out of a federal bottle. The fact that a Slovak, Gustav Husak, had replaced Dubcek as head of the party and was from 1975 on also head of state seemed to suggest that an acceptable constitutional relationship had been found between the two nations. In actual fact, the regime was pursuing new ideological goals which once again reflected Czech interests and which were not dissimilar to the ideology of Czechoslovakism of the First Republic. As Viliam Plevza, the leading Slovak scholar of the normalization regime, writes: "It is evidently only a question of time for the prerequisites to develop, under new and most favourable conditions, based on the recent history of mutual relations , which will lead to the acceleration of the total development and rapprochement of the Czechs and Slovaks and the nationalities living in the republic, and to the attainment of such a synthesis that the notion of a "Czechoslovak people" will be the symbol of a new qualitative unity of all the citizens of the CSSR" _57 On the constitutional level, the results of the policy of normalization on the federal system were quite dramatic, as Zigman points out: "Progressively , with the argument of making the central organs more effective, a number of laws were passed which transformed the Czech Socialist and the Slovak Socialist Republics into unequal provinces in the CSSR whose republican institutions merely carried out orders from above. Every social movement was frozen and officially the theory of proletarian internationalism prevailed. In this way - with the help Soviet conservatives - this situation was maintained for twenty years and nothing modified it, not even cosmetic changes under [CPCS Secretary-General Milos] Jakes or the [political] game of "glasnost'" _58 Nevertheless , federalism did allow initially for a Slovak national 57 Viliam Plevza, Socialisticke premeny Ceskoslovenska, Bratislava, Pravda , 1983 , p. 420 . 5 8s ee note 2. �104 SLOVAKIA cultural renaissance; but given the political climate, it was quickly halted. Carol Skalnik Leff notes that in the mid-1970s there were warnings and threats about bourgeois nationalism, reminiscent of those uttered in the 1950s, which signalled a move away from the earlier enthusiastic recovery of the national heritage in cultural and academic publications. She writes that "It is unlikely that this noticeable shift reflects a diminution of Slovak national sentiment - quite the contrary, it suggests a concern that such sentiment was getting out of hand" .59 Clearly, anything in Slovakia that threatened the Czech agenda had to be eliminated; and it was. The Husak policy of normalization faced increased opposition both in Slovakia and in the Czech Lands after the Czechoslovak government signed the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. The Czechs, in particular academics, artists and writers, formed a loose movement called Charter 77 which attacked the ideology and policies of the regime. 60 Only a very small number of Slovak Communist dissidents adhered to it. The more significant Slovak opposition to the regime found its outlet primarily in religious demonstrations which had a broad mass appeal. This opposition was in fact a challenge to the continued imposition of the Czech agenda in Slovakia. The regime responded with a policy of open repression to both movements, especially the Slovak one. As far as it was concerned, there could be no discussion of anything but its own agenda while it was in power. It is only with the fall of Communism in November 1989 that a discussion of the Czech question could finally begin to take place in Slovakia. The first signal that there would be such a discussion came with the motion proposed by Slovak deputies to the Czechoslovak Federal Parliament on 30 March 1990 to return the hyphen to Czechoslovakia, the short name of the country. This spelling had been used in the Peace Treaties when the country was formed in 1918. 59 carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia. The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 268. 60 on this movement see H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1981. �SLOVAKIA 105 Officially the country was still the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The motion was defeated by the Czech majority (with the help of some Slovak deputies). The compromise title of Czech and Slovak Federative Republic with the authorization of using the hyphen in Slovakia on the short form adopted a fortnight later was also not satisfactory. As a result, a campaign to influence Slovak public opinion on Czech-Slovak relations began in earnest. However, unlike the immediate post-war years and the Communist period when one outcome, the separation of Slovakia, was excluded, all solutions were now possible. This debate around the name of the common state strengthened the resolve of many Slovaks to initiate discussions on constitutional reform and helped to clarify the different positions. According to Zigman, "Suddenly, along with other problems, the question of a constitutional arrangement came to the surface. On the Czech side in particular, voices came to be heard shortly after the revolution [suggesting] that in the interest of the transformation of our economy the already centralized pseudo-federation should be further centralized and replaced by a unitary state (part of Civic Forum and [also] Public Against Violence). On the other hand , parties and movements appeared in Slovakia which sought greater rights for the republics and the breaking up of the federal moloch which crushed every national political movement. They demanded that it be replaced with a flexible system of institutions whose task it would be to coordinate the activities of the republics (part of the Slovak National Party and later part of the Christian Democratic Movement)" .6 1 The constitutional debate went on for two years 62 and indicated a desire to find a solution to the Czech question in Slovak political life. It was, however, only one aspect of a wider public debate, 61 See note 2. 62 For an examination of this debate, see Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, "Les Slovaques et le droit des peuples a disposer d'eux-m~mes: a la recherche d'une solution", in Andre Liebich et Andre Reszler, eds ., L 'Europe centrale et ses minorites: vers une solution europeenne?, (Geneve , Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales) , Paris , Presses universitaires de France , 1993, pp . 92-10 I. �106 SLOVAK.IA initiated by the Czech writer Ludvik Vaculfk when he published in May 1990 an article entitled "Our Slovak Problem". In an at times bitter tone, Vaculfk railed at the fact that the Slovaks, to whom he referred as little brothers, refused to share the common bed with the Czechs. He did not think, furthermore, that they were ready to sleep in their own. In his rejection of a Slovak approach and in his steadfast conviction of the importance of Czechoslovak statehood he wrote; "To develop our own Czech state - it is after all a step backwards. Not long ago I went to Bratislava and all my friends said to me why are you getting so agitated because those nationalist noises come from carrierists, idiots or else intrigue-makers. I heard this with pleasure" _63 Among the many who responded, it was Vladimir Minac, a Slovak writer, who best took Vaculfk to task in an article entitled "Our Czecho-Slovak Problem". Rejecting the notion of a "little brother" and examining generally the meaning of Czechoslovakism, Minac added: "Vaculik writes that "it is an honest duty to be a Czechoslovak". However, what you find behind a Czechoslovak is a badly covered pure Czech who in some peculiar way made the land of the Slovaks his own; and if he hasn't done so, then he wants to do so. But a Slovak doesn't want to be a Czechoslovak, he doesn't want to be shoved behind a foreign facade, he wants to be himself, independent and equal. Is that so difficult to understand?" .64 Minac did not propose a solution; he left that to the politicians. The parameters, on the other hand, had been made quite clear. During the twenty-four months that separate the first two free elections in post-Communist Czechoslovakia, Slovak politicians, while pushing for the transformation of the state, made every effort to come to terms with the Czechs. A parallel with the 1968 constitutional discussions comes to mind. There is, however, an important difference this time, namely the absence of a superpower to influ63Ludv0c VaculOc, "Na§e slovenska otazka", Literami noviny, 5/1990, 3 May 1990, reprinted in Nove slovo 21/1990, 24 May 1990. 64 Vladimfr Minac, "Na§a cesko-slovenska otlizka", Nove s/ovo, 21/1990, 24 May 1990 . �SLOVAKIA 107 ence, if not determine the outcome. As a result, the Czech parties were able to indicate very clearly that they were unwilling to abandon their historical perception of Czechoslovakia as a Czech state with which the Slovaks were asked to identify and accept. At best, the status quo, in other words the federal law of 1968, was acceptable. As far as most Slovaks were concerned, despite a certain lack of unity , there had to be major constitutional reforms. There were many meetings and many propositions,65 including a number of interventions from President Vaclav Havel, yet no constitutional agreement was reached before the elections of June 1992. As a result, an important percentage of the electorate in each republic cast votes for parties that articulated a parallel message: if the other nation will not accept our terms, then let us make a go of it alone. This paved the way for the Czechs to rid themselves of the "Slovak question" while the Slovaks, many reluctantly, came to the conclusion that they might be better off without a "Czech question". After the Slovak National Council declared the sovereignty of the Slovak nation in July 1992, Prime Ministers Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic and Vladimfr Meciar of the Slovak Republic agreed that Czechoslovakia would be dissolved and two states would come into existence on 1 January 1993; on 25 November 1992, the Federal Parliament passed a law approving the dissolution. Thereafter, until the break up, both sides negotiated the division of federal property and other assets. Did the independence of Slovakia and the creation of a Czech Republic put to rest the "Czech question" in Slovak politics? Two factors suggest that one cannot give a categorical answer. First, public opinion polls preceding the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in the Czech and Slovak Republics suggested that if a referendum had been held at that time on the acceptance of the break-up of Czechoslovakia into two independent national states it would most likely not have won a majority. One may well ask whether this means that 65 These are described in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, "Czechoslovakia: The Creation, Federalisation and Disolution of a Nation-State", Regional Politics and Policy, III (I), 1993, pp . 69-95. �108 SLOVAKIA the Slovaks, after 68 years in a common state, when shove comes to push, saw living with a "Czech question", however intractable it was, as acceptable and perhaps even preferable to an uncertain future in an independent state? There is probably no simple answer to this question. What is certain, however, is that democratic politicians, unlike Communist ones, who treat public opinion as quantite negligeable do so at their own risk. It is possible that these polls reflected some degree of nostalgia as much as a fear of the future. But then again, they may have reflected the recognition of a second factor , the close relations that the two nations developed over the years. As Zigman indicated when these polls were taken, this factor placed the Slovaks before a choice: "The economic relations [with the Czechs] which were created during the recent period of development will remain and will become a significant element in a future European integration [process]. We [the Slovaks] are at a crossroads and have to decide between a Czecho-Slovak state and Czech-Slovak cooperation. I think that the starting point out of this dilemma is clear" .66 To return to our image of the beginning, after many attempts to find a comfortable place for themselves, the Slovaks found in the end that it was better to leave the room which they shared with the allegorical black panther. But they did so only after first seeking to come to an understanding with it. They also made a choice for a different kind of Czech-Slovak cooperation. Therefore, as they proceed to develop their own state, for the foreseeable future at any rate, the Slovaks will have to pay attention to a "Czech question". It is not clear what, if any, influence it will have on Slovak political life. It will, however, have ceased to be that which had been the main challenge to Slovak politics in the common state, namely an unhyphenated "Czechoslovak question" which they had not been allowed either to define or influence. 66 see note 2. � SLOVAKIA 97 The Czech Question in Slovakia in the Post-War Years STANISLAV J. KIRSCHBAUM It is not a simple task to describe the role of the "Czech question" in Slovakia in the post-war period, especially under the Communist regime (1948-1989). The difficulties in understanding it are not unlike the dilemmas faced by a man who is looking for a comfortable place to rest at night in a dark room in which a black panther is sleeping: he knows that he must not disturb it and each movement he makes is influenced by its unseen presence. Similarly, the best way to understand the role the Czech question has played in Slovakia is to examine the twists and turns of Slovak politics in this period. The restoration of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1945 meant that the Slovaks would once again have to come to terms with the Czech control of the state. For most Czech politicians, in particular Edvard Bend, the re-created state was to be identical to the pre-Munich First Republic . Many declarations to that effect had been made during the war. At first glance it seems therefore that the war had merely been an interruption. However, the political situation at its end was quite different from what it had been in the twenties and thirties. The six-year existence of the first Slovak Republic (19391945) had brought about such changes in Slovak national life that Slovakia's re-incorporation into Czechoslovakia had to take place on new terms. What was not clear were not only the terms, but above �98 SLOVAKIA all the room for manoeuvre that the Slovaks would have to negotiate and maintain the new relationship with the Czechs. Slovak leaders had to deal with two factors that influenced postwar politics: first of all, the war-time resistance movement that the Allies recognized had been organized and led by Czech politicians with Benes at their head in the name of the Czechoslovak Republic. Slovak non-Communist politicians who joined them had no choice but to accept Czech leadership . Even Slovak Communists, who initially went their own way by creating the Communist Party of Slovakia (CPS) and propagating the idea of a Slovak Soviet Republic attached to the USSR, accepted it not only in the state, but in the end also in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCS). The second factor had to do with the existence of the Slovak Republic. Jozef Lettrich, one of the Slovak non-Communist leaders, writes that "Slovak separatism was not only anti-Czech; it was also anti-democratic" .45 We can question the accuracy of this statement; in 1945, however, it had validity and justified the decision of the Allies to have the Slovak Republic disappear at the end of hostilities. These were the arguments invoked not only to maintain the decision to deny the Slovaks the right to their own state but above all to allow the Czechs a relatively free hand in dealing with them. As a result, as the Slovak writer, Peter Zig man, put it recently, "After the renewal of the CSR in 1945, it was not possible to renew the pre-war autonomy [of Slovakia], rather certain political forces whose particular representative was President Edvard Benes preferred to apply against Slovakia and the Slovaks the principle of collective guilt (the only problem was that, unlike the Sudeten Germans, there was no place where to deport them)" .46 The Czech question in Slovakia thus came to be identified with these two factors. They created a political situation which for all intents and purposes subjected the Slovaks to a Czech agenda which 45 Jozef Lettrich, History of Modem Slovakia, New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1955 , p. 110. 46 Peter Zigman, •Cesko-slovenske s1Htatie", Slovenske narodne noviny, 44/3 November 1992. �SLOVAKIA 99 once again was defined as "Czechoslovak", notwithstanding the Kosice Programme of April 1945 which officially recognized the Slovak nation. This meant that there was no question of Slovakia's equality with the Czech Lands nor of equal Slovak participation in the running of the state. This situation was in total disregard of the slogan "equal partners" (rovnf s rovnfm) which the leaders of the Slovak resistance movement propagated during the 1944 Revolt in order to gain support among the Slovak people. The Revolt was a military action whose aim had been not only to overthrow the Slovak Republic and tie the Slovaks to the anti-Nazi movements in Europe, but above all to proclaim their allegiance to Czechoslovakia. 47 The first and clearest indication that they would have limited room for manoeuvre came during the negotiations that took place in Moscow in March 1945 between the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and Slovak representatives; the latter failed to have their main demand implemented, namely the transformation of Czechoslovakia into a federal state .48 Nevertheless, in the Czechoslovak government's first post-war programme, known as the Kosice Programme, the Slovaks were given relatively broad political and administrative autonomy. The institutions created during the Revolt, the Slovak National Council and the Board of Commissioners , took over the legislative and executive functions of the Parliament and Government of the Slovak Republic. For a short while, Slovakia was a state within a state. This was a situation that could not last. In a process reminiscent of the first years of the First Czechoslovak Republic, the Czech agenda was swiftly imposed on the Slovaks by the government once it was back in Prague: first, it 47 On the events of August 1944, see Stanislav J . Kirschbaum , 'The Re volt of 1944', in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum , ed ., Slovak Politics , Cleveland, Slovak Institute , 1983 , pp . 286-313 . 48 For more on this and subsequent events, see Stanislav J . Kirschbaum , "Federalism in Slovak Communist Politics", Canadian Slavonic Papers, XIX (4), 1977 , pp . 444451. �100 SLOVAKIA forced the Slovak National Council and the Board of Commissioners to sign the three Prague Agreements of 1945 and 1946 which seriously curtailed Slovak political and administrative autonomy; secondly, it sanctioned the trials of officials of the Slovak Republic, in particular President Jozef Tiso and Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka, most of whom were condemned either to death or prison terms. The political struggle between the Communist and Democratic Parties in Slovakia gave additional leverage to the government to control Slovakia. The elections of 1946 were won by the Democratic Party. As a result, the Communists , in the political battle that ensued, abandoned the nationalist stance they had taken during the elections, aligned themselves with the CPCS and ceased to oppose the centralizing tendencies of the Prague government. By the time the CPCS won power in a coup in February 1948 (with a dry-run in Slovakia in November 1947), Czechoslovakia had become a unitary centralized state in all but name, a situation which the Constitution of 1948 recognized. What this meant for the Slovaks, in the words of the Slovak historian C'ubomfr Liptak, was that "Slovak politics was replaced by politics in Slovakia" .49 For all intents and purposes, the Czech agenda, writ large as "Czechoslovak", was once again in place throughout the state. The Communists who ended up in charge of Slovak affairs in the first decade of the regime were not those who had participated in the 1944 Revolt. The latter, who were known as "povstalci", had lost a power struggle within the CPS to comrades who gave their total allegiance to the Czech leadership of the CPCS. The "povstalci" became the victims of the Stalinist purges that befell Eastern Europe in the late forties and early fifties. The "centralists", as those in power were called, proceeded to implement the Czech agenda. Their programme was an economic one: to industrialize Slovakia to the level of the Czech Lands. They allowed Slovak national institutions to be all but stripped of their remaining powers, they conducted campaigns against Slovak nationalism not only during the Stalinist 49 1:ubomfr Liptlik, Slovensko v 20. storoci, Bratislava, Vydavatefstvo politickej literatury , 1968 , p. 296. �SLOVAKIA purges, but also in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and in 1960, together with their Czech colleagues, they celebrated the achievements of socialism in Czechoslovakia with the promulgation of a socialist constitution. The second Soviet destalinization in 1961 and an economic crisis in the early 1960s made possible a challenge to the regime, in particular its handling of Czech-Slovak relations. First came the pressure to free and rehabilitate the condemned "povstalci". However, as Zigman writes, "The suppression of Slovak interests did not end even in the 1960s, a period which in the Czech Lands was perceived as a political thaw. This was particularly evident in the activities of [CPCS First Secretary] Antonfn Novotny and his followers as head of the state and the party" .50 Therefore, when Slovak Communists challenged the Czech agenda, they did so only in a veiled way. They allowed and even encouraged the rehabilitated "povstalci" to refer to the goals of the 1944 Revolt, namely the transformation of the state into a federation. The Slovak press as well as academic journals published new and revised histories of the 1944 events, called officially the Slovak National Uprising, and argued for the implementation of their goals .s I This challenge, which culminated in the federalization of the state on 28 October 1968, was successful only because it was shown to have ideological validity. This is the message in the memorandum52 Milo~ Gosiorovsky submitted to the Central Committee of the CPCS in 1963 which provoked an angry reaction from Novotny. Nevertheless, even with clearly acceptable ideological arguments, it took five years before a law federalizing the state could be passed. Novotny and his supporters had to be removed from office, a 50 see note 2. 51For more on this period , see Stanislav J . Kirschbaum , "National Self-Assertion in Slovakia" in George Simmonds, ed ., Nationalism in the U.S.S.R . and Eastern Europe in the Era of Brezhnev and Kosygin, Detroit , University of Detroit Press , 1977 , pp. 380-400. 52 Milo~ Gosiorovsky, "K niektorym otazkam vziahu Cechov a Slovakov v politike KSC ", Historicky casopis XVI (3), 1968, pp . 370-396. �102 SLOVAKIA removal which also made possible for a reform process to be introduced in the political life of the state _53 Under the leadership of Novotny's successor, the Slovak Alexander Dubcek, an effort was made during the spring and summer of 1968 to introduce "socialism with a human face" in the political life of the Czechs and Slovaks . The federalization of the state was one of the reforms envisaged and was the object of intensive discussions.54 However, Czechoslovakia's neighbours did not approve of this experiment in political liberalization 55 and cut it short with a military intervention in August. Of all the reforms, only the federalization of the state survived. Compared with the first decade and a half of the regime, the years leading up to the liberalization process were a period of relative freedom of expression which enabled the Slovaks to renegotiate their status in the state. They were not, on the other hand, permitted to put its existence in question.56 Put another way, there could be no discussion of the "Czech question". It is not surprising therefore that the federalization law ended up being a compromise that reflected far more the limits of Czech tolerance of constitutional change than the successful implementation of Slovak objectives or 53For an examination of the reform process of the 1960s, see Galia Golan, The Czechoslovak Reform Movement, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971. 54For an analysis of the debate around the federal solution, see H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia 's Interrupted Revolution, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976), pp . 451-489 . 55 For more on the reform movement of 1968 see Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, "Kontinuitat und politischer Wechsel in der "Tschechoslowakei 1968"", Bohemia , XV, 1974, pp . 378-395 and Galia Golan , Reform Rule in Czechoslovakia 1968-1969, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973). 56 However, as Robert W. Dean writes, "While nothing indicated that separatism was actively being considered as an altemat_ive by responsible Slovak politicians, discussions of it appreared in the press regularly". See Robert W. Dean, Nationalism and Political Change in Eastern Europe: the Slovak Question and the Czechoslovak Reform Movement, The Social Science Foundation and Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 10, Denver, University of Denver, 1973, p. 31. �SLOVAKIA 103 even a definition of mutually acceptable goals. The two decades that followed the Warsaw Pact intervention of August 1968 , the period known as normalization, saw the wine of centralization being poured out of a federal bottle. The fact that a Slovak, Gustav Husak, had replaced Dubcek as head of the party and was from 1975 on also head of state seemed to suggest that an acceptable constitutional relationship had been found between the two nations. In actual fact, the regime was pursuing new ideological goals which once again reflected Czech interests and which were not dissimilar to the ideology of Czechoslovakism of the First Republic. As Viliam Plevza, the leading Slovak scholar of the normalization regime, writes: "It is evidently only a question of time for the prerequisites to develop, under new and most favourable conditions, based on the recent history of mutual relations , which will lead to the acceleration of the total development and rapprochement of the Czechs and Slovaks and the nationalities living in the republic, and to the attainment of such a synthesis that the notion of a "Czechoslovak people" will be the symbol of a new qualitative unity of all the citizens of the CSSR" _57 On the constitutional level, the results of the policy of normalization on the federal system were quite dramatic, as Zigman points out: "Progressively , with the argument of making the central organs more effective, a number of laws were passed which transformed the Czech Socialist and the Slovak Socialist Republics into unequal provinces in the CSSR whose republican institutions merely carried out orders from above. Every social movement was frozen and officially the theory of proletarian internationalism prevailed. In this way - with the help Soviet conservatives - this situation was maintained for twenty years and nothing modified it, not even cosmetic changes under [CPCS Secretary-General Milos] Jakes or the [political] game of "glasnost'" _58 Nevertheless , federalism did allow initially for a Slovak national 57 Viliam Plevza, Socialisticke premeny Ceskoslovenska, Bratislava, Pravda , 1983 , p. 420 . 5 8s ee note 2. �104 SLOVAKIA cultural renaissance; but given the political climate, it was quickly halted. Carol Skalnik Leff notes that in the mid-1970s there were warnings and threats about bourgeois nationalism, reminiscent of those uttered in the 1950s, which signalled a move away from the earlier enthusiastic recovery of the national heritage in cultural and academic publications. She writes that "It is unlikely that this noticeable shift reflects a diminution of Slovak national sentiment - quite the contrary, it suggests a concern that such sentiment was getting out of hand" .59 Clearly, anything in Slovakia that threatened the Czech agenda had to be eliminated; and it was. The Husak policy of normalization faced increased opposition both in Slovakia and in the Czech Lands after the Czechoslovak government signed the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. The Czechs, in particular academics, artists and writers, formed a loose movement called Charter 77 which attacked the ideology and policies of the regime. 60 Only a very small number of Slovak Communist dissidents adhered to it. The more significant Slovak opposition to the regime found its outlet primarily in religious demonstrations which had a broad mass appeal. This opposition was in fact a challenge to the continued imposition of the Czech agenda in Slovakia. The regime responded with a policy of open repression to both movements, especially the Slovak one. As far as it was concerned, there could be no discussion of anything but its own agenda while it was in power. It is only with the fall of Communism in November 1989 that a discussion of the Czech question could finally begin to take place in Slovakia. The first signal that there would be such a discussion came with the motion proposed by Slovak deputies to the Czechoslovak Federal Parliament on 30 March 1990 to return the hyphen to Czechoslovakia, the short name of the country. This spelling had been used in the Peace Treaties when the country was formed in 1918. 59 carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia. The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 268. 60 on this movement see H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1981. �SLOVAKIA 105 Officially the country was still the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The motion was defeated by the Czech majority (with the help of some Slovak deputies). The compromise title of Czech and Slovak Federative Republic with the authorization of using the hyphen in Slovakia on the short form adopted a fortnight later was also not satisfactory. As a result, a campaign to influence Slovak public opinion on Czech-Slovak relations began in earnest. However, unlike the immediate post-war years and the Communist period when one outcome, the separation of Slovakia, was excluded, all solutions were now possible. This debate around the name of the common state strengthened the resolve of many Slovaks to initiate discussions on constitutional reform and helped to clarify the different positions. According to Zigman, "Suddenly, along with other problems, the question of a constitutional arrangement came to the surface. On the Czech side in particular, voices came to be heard shortly after the revolution [suggesting] that in the interest of the transformation of our economy the already centralized pseudo-federation should be further centralized and replaced by a unitary state (part of Civic Forum and [also] Public Against Violence). On the other hand , parties and movements appeared in Slovakia which sought greater rights for the republics and the breaking up of the federal moloch which crushed every national political movement. They demanded that it be replaced with a flexible system of institutions whose task it would be to coordinate the activities of the republics (part of the Slovak National Party and later part of the Christian Democratic Movement)" .6 1 The constitutional debate went on for two years 62 and indicated a desire to find a solution to the Czech question in Slovak political life. It was, however, only one aspect of a wider public debate, 61 See note 2. 62 For an examination of this debate, see Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, "Les Slovaques et le droit des peuples a disposer d'eux-m~mes: a la recherche d'une solution", in Andre Liebich et Andre Reszler, eds ., L 'Europe centrale et ses minorites: vers une solution europeenne?, (Geneve , Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales) , Paris , Presses universitaires de France , 1993, pp . 92-10 I. �106 SLOVAK.IA initiated by the Czech writer Ludvik Vaculfk when he published in May 1990 an article entitled "Our Slovak Problem". In an at times bitter tone, Vaculfk railed at the fact that the Slovaks, to whom he referred as little brothers, refused to share the common bed with the Czechs. He did not think, furthermore, that they were ready to sleep in their own. In his rejection of a Slovak approach and in his steadfast conviction of the importance of Czechoslovak statehood he wrote; "To develop our own Czech state - it is after all a step backwards. Not long ago I went to Bratislava and all my friends said to me why are you getting so agitated because those nationalist noises come from carrierists, idiots or else intrigue-makers. I heard this with pleasure" _63 Among the many who responded, it was Vladimir Minac, a Slovak writer, who best took Vaculfk to task in an article entitled "Our Czecho-Slovak Problem". Rejecting the notion of a "little brother" and examining generally the meaning of Czechoslovakism, Minac added: "Vaculik writes that "it is an honest duty to be a Czechoslovak". However, what you find behind a Czechoslovak is a badly covered pure Czech who in some peculiar way made the land of the Slovaks his own; and if he hasn't done so, then he wants to do so. But a Slovak doesn't want to be a Czechoslovak, he doesn't want to be shoved behind a foreign facade, he wants to be himself, independent and equal. Is that so difficult to understand?" .64 Minac did not propose a solution; he left that to the politicians. The parameters, on the other hand, had been made quite clear. During the twenty-four months that separate the first two free elections in post-Communist Czechoslovakia, Slovak politicians, while pushing for the transformation of the state, made every effort to come to terms with the Czechs. A parallel with the 1968 constitutional discussions comes to mind. There is, however, an important difference this time, namely the absence of a superpower to influ63Ludv0c VaculOc, "Na§e slovenska otazka", Literami noviny, 5/1990, 3 May 1990, reprinted in Nove slovo 21/1990, 24 May 1990. 64 Vladimfr Minac, "Na§a cesko-slovenska otlizka", Nove s/ovo, 21/1990, 24 May 1990 . �SLOVAKIA 107 ence, if not determine the outcome. As a result, the Czech parties were able to indicate very clearly that they were unwilling to abandon their historical perception of Czechoslovakia as a Czech state with which the Slovaks were asked to identify and accept. At best, the status quo, in other words the federal law of 1968, was acceptable. As far as most Slovaks were concerned, despite a certain lack of unity , there had to be major constitutional reforms. There were many meetings and many propositions,65 including a number of interventions from President Vaclav Havel, yet no constitutional agreement was reached before the elections of June 1992. As a result, an important percentage of the electorate in each republic cast votes for parties that articulated a parallel message: if the other nation will not accept our terms, then let us make a go of it alone. This paved the way for the Czechs to rid themselves of the "Slovak question" while the Slovaks, many reluctantly, came to the conclusion that they might be better off without a "Czech question". After the Slovak National Council declared the sovereignty of the Slovak nation in July 1992, Prime Ministers Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic and Vladimfr Meciar of the Slovak Republic agreed that Czechoslovakia would be dissolved and two states would come into existence on 1 January 1993; on 25 November 1992, the Federal Parliament passed a law approving the dissolution. Thereafter, until the break up, both sides negotiated the division of federal property and other assets. Did the independence of Slovakia and the creation of a Czech Republic put to rest the "Czech question" in Slovak politics? Two factors suggest that one cannot give a categorical answer. First, public opinion polls preceding the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in the Czech and Slovak Republics suggested that if a referendum had been held at that time on the acceptance of the break-up of Czechoslovakia into two independent national states it would most likely not have won a majority. One may well ask whether this means that 65 These are described in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, "Czechoslovakia: The Creation, Federalisation and Disolution of a Nation-State", Regional Politics and Policy, III (I), 1993, pp . 69-95. �108 SLOVAKIA the Slovaks, after 68 years in a common state, when shove comes to push, saw living with a "Czech question", however intractable it was, as acceptable and perhaps even preferable to an uncertain future in an independent state? There is probably no simple answer to this question. What is certain, however, is that democratic politicians, unlike Communist ones, who treat public opinion as quantite negligeable do so at their own risk. It is possible that these polls reflected some degree of nostalgia as much as a fear of the future. But then again, they may have reflected the recognition of a second factor , the close relations that the two nations developed over the years. As Zigman indicated when these polls were taken, this factor placed the Slovaks before a choice: "The economic relations [with the Czechs] which were created during the recent period of development will remain and will become a significant element in a future European integration [process]. We [the Slovaks] are at a crossroads and have to decide between a Czecho-Slovak state and Czech-Slovak cooperation. I think that the starting point out of this dilemma is clear" .66 To return to our image of the beginning, after many attempts to find a comfortable place for themselves, the Slovaks found in the end that it was better to leave the room which they shared with the allegorical black panther. But they did so only after first seeking to come to an understanding with it. They also made a choice for a different kind of Czech-Slovak cooperation. Therefore, as they proceed to develop their own state, for the foreseeable future at any rate, the Slovaks will have to pay attention to a "Czech question". It is not clear what, if any, influence it will have on Slovak political life. It will, however, have ceased to be that which had been the main challenge to Slovak politics in the common state, namely an unhyphenated "Czechoslovak question" which they had not been allowed either to define or influence. 66 see note 2. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1991-92, Vol. 35 Description An account of the resource Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Slovak League of America Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available 1991-92 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document SLOVAKIA 97 The Czech Question in Slovakia in the Post-War Years STANISLAV J. KIRSCHBAUM It is not a simple task to describe the role of the "Czech question" in Slovakia in the post-war period, especially under the Communist regime (1948-1989). The difficulties in understanding it are not unlike the dilemmas faced by a man who is looking for a comfortable place to rest at night in a dark room in which a black panther is sleeping: he knows that he must not disturb it and each movement he makes is influenced by its unseen presence. Similarly, the best way to understand the role the Czech question has played in Slovakia is to examine the twists and turns of Slovak politics in this period. The restoration of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1945 meant that the Slovaks would once again have to come to terms with the Czech control of the state. For most Czech politicians, in particular Edvard Bend, the re-created state was to be identical to the pre-Munich First Republic . Many declarations to that effect had been made during the war. At first glance it seems therefore that the war had merely been an interruption. However, the political situation at its end was quite different from what it had been in the twenties and thirties. The six-year existence of the first Slovak Republic (19391945) had brought about such changes in Slovak national life that Slovakia's re-incorporation into Czechoslovakia had to take place on new terms. What was not clear were not only the terms, but above 98 SLOVAKIA all the room for manoeuvre that the Slovaks would have to negotiate and maintain the new relationship with the Czechs. Slovak leaders had to deal with two factors that influenced postwar politics: first of all, the war-time resistance movement that the Allies recognized had been organized and led by Czech politicians with Benes at their head in the name of the Czechoslovak Republic. Slovak non-Communist politicians who joined them had no choice but to accept Czech leadership . Even Slovak Communists, who initially went their own way by creating the Communist Party of Slovakia (CPS) and propagating the idea of a Slovak Soviet Republic attached to the USSR, accepted it not only in the state, but in the end also in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCS). The second factor had to do with the existence of the Slovak Republic. Jozef Lettrich, one of the Slovak non-Communist leaders, writes that "Slovak separatism was not only anti-Czech; it was also anti-democratic" .45 We can question the accuracy of this statement; in 1945, however, it had validity and justified the decision of the Allies to have the Slovak Republic disappear at the end of hostilities. These were the arguments invoked not only to maintain the decision to deny the Slovaks the right to their own state but above all to allow the Czechs a relatively free hand in dealing with them. As a result, as the Slovak writer, Peter Zig man, put it recently, "After the renewal of the CSR in 1945, it was not possible to renew the pre-war autonomy [of Slovakia], rather certain political forces whose particular representative was President Edvard Benes preferred to apply against Slovakia and the Slovaks the principle of collective guilt (the only problem was that, unlike the Sudeten Germans, there was no place where to deport them)" .46 The Czech question in Slovakia thus came to be identified with these two factors. They created a political situation which for all intents and purposes subjected the Slovaks to a Czech agenda which 45 Jozef Lettrich, History of Modem Slovakia, New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1955 , p. 110. 46 Peter Zigman, •Cesko-slovenske s1Htatie", Slovenske narodne noviny, 44/3 November 1992. SLOVAKIA 99 once again was defined as "Czechoslovak", notwithstanding the Kosice Programme of April 1945 which officially recognized the Slovak nation. This meant that there was no question of Slovakia's equality with the Czech Lands nor of equal Slovak participation in the running of the state. This situation was in total disregard of the slogan "equal partners" (rovnf s rovnfm) which the leaders of the Slovak resistance movement propagated during the 1944 Revolt in order to gain support among the Slovak people. The Revolt was a military action whose aim had been not only to overthrow the Slovak Republic and tie the Slovaks to the anti-Nazi movements in Europe, but above all to proclaim their allegiance to Czechoslovakia. 47 The first and clearest indication that they would have limited room for manoeuvre came during the negotiations that took place in Moscow in March 1945 between the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and Slovak representatives; the latter failed to have their main demand implemented, namely the transformation of Czechoslovakia into a federal state .48 Nevertheless, in the Czechoslovak government's first post-war programme, known as the Kosice Programme, the Slovaks were given relatively broad political and administrative autonomy. The institutions created during the Revolt, the Slovak National Council and the Board of Commissioners , took over the legislative and executive functions of the Parliament and Government of the Slovak Republic. For a short while, Slovakia was a state within a state. This was a situation that could not last. In a process reminiscent of the first years of the First Czechoslovak Republic, the Czech agenda was swiftly imposed on the Slovaks by the government once it was back in Prague: first, it 47 On the events of August 1944, see Stanislav J . Kirschbaum , 'The Re volt of 1944', in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum , ed ., Slovak Politics , Cleveland, Slovak Institute , 1983 , pp . 286-313 . 48 For more on this and subsequent events, see Stanislav J . Kirschbaum , "Federalism in Slovak Communist Politics", Canadian Slavonic Papers, XIX (4), 1977 , pp . 444451. 100 SLOVAKIA forced the Slovak National Council and the Board of Commissioners to sign the three Prague Agreements of 1945 and 1946 which seriously curtailed Slovak political and administrative autonomy; secondly, it sanctioned the trials of officials of the Slovak Republic, in particular President Jozef Tiso and Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka, most of whom were condemned either to death or prison terms. The political struggle between the Communist and Democratic Parties in Slovakia gave additional leverage to the government to control Slovakia. The elections of 1946 were won by the Democratic Party. As a result, the Communists , in the political battle that ensued, abandoned the nationalist stance they had taken during the elections, aligned themselves with the CPCS and ceased to oppose the centralizing tendencies of the Prague government. By the time the CPCS won power in a coup in February 1948 (with a dry-run in Slovakia in November 1947), Czechoslovakia had become a unitary centralized state in all but name, a situation which the Constitution of 1948 recognized. What this meant for the Slovaks, in the words of the Slovak historian C'ubomfr Liptak, was that "Slovak politics was replaced by politics in Slovakia" .49 For all intents and purposes, the Czech agenda, writ large as "Czechoslovak", was once again in place throughout the state. The Communists who ended up in charge of Slovak affairs in the first decade of the regime were not those who had participated in the 1944 Revolt. The latter, who were known as "povstalci", had lost a power struggle within the CPS to comrades who gave their total allegiance to the Czech leadership of the CPCS. The "povstalci" became the victims of the Stalinist purges that befell Eastern Europe in the late forties and early fifties. The "centralists", as those in power were called, proceeded to implement the Czech agenda. Their programme was an economic one: to industrialize Slovakia to the level of the Czech Lands. They allowed Slovak national institutions to be all but stripped of their remaining powers, they conducted campaigns against Slovak nationalism not only during the Stalinist 49 1:ubomfr Liptlik, Slovensko v 20. storoci, Bratislava, Vydavatefstvo politickej literatury , 1968 , p. 296. SLOVAKIA purges, but also in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and in 1960, together with their Czech colleagues, they celebrated the achievements of socialism in Czechoslovakia with the promulgation of a socialist constitution. The second Soviet destalinization in 1961 and an economic crisis in the early 1960s made possible a challenge to the regime, in particular its handling of Czech-Slovak relations. First came the pressure to free and rehabilitate the condemned "povstalci". However, as Zigman writes, "The suppression of Slovak interests did not end even in the 1960s, a period which in the Czech Lands was perceived as a political thaw. This was particularly evident in the activities of [CPCS First Secretary] Antonfn Novotny and his followers as head of the state and the party" .50 Therefore, when Slovak Communists challenged the Czech agenda, they did so only in a veiled way. They allowed and even encouraged the rehabilitated "povstalci" to refer to the goals of the 1944 Revolt, namely the transformation of the state into a federation. The Slovak press as well as academic journals published new and revised histories of the 1944 events, called officially the Slovak National Uprising, and argued for the implementation of their goals .s I This challenge, which culminated in the federalization of the state on 28 October 1968, was successful only because it was shown to have ideological validity. This is the message in the memorandum52 Milo~ Gosiorovsky submitted to the Central Committee of the CPCS in 1963 which provoked an angry reaction from Novotny. Nevertheless, even with clearly acceptable ideological arguments, it took five years before a law federalizing the state could be passed. Novotny and his supporters had to be removed from office, a 50 see note 2. 51For more on this period , see Stanislav J . Kirschbaum , "National Self-Assertion in Slovakia" in George Simmonds, ed ., Nationalism in the U.S.S.R . and Eastern Europe in the Era of Brezhnev and Kosygin, Detroit , University of Detroit Press , 1977 , pp. 380-400. 52 Milo~ Gosiorovsky, "K niektorym otazkam vziahu Cechov a Slovakov v politike KSC ", Historicky casopis XVI (3), 1968, pp . 370-396. 102 SLOVAKIA removal which also made possible for a reform process to be introduced in the political life of the state _53 Under the leadership of Novotny's successor, the Slovak Alexander Dubcek, an effort was made during the spring and summer of 1968 to introduce "socialism with a human face" in the political life of the Czechs and Slovaks . The federalization of the state was one of the reforms envisaged and was the object of intensive discussions.54 However, Czechoslovakia's neighbours did not approve of this experiment in political liberalization 55 and cut it short with a military intervention in August. Of all the reforms, only the federalization of the state survived. Compared with the first decade and a half of the regime, the years leading up to the liberalization process were a period of relative freedom of expression which enabled the Slovaks to renegotiate their status in the state. They were not, on the other hand, permitted to put its existence in question.56 Put another way, there could be no discussion of the "Czech question". It is not surprising therefore that the federalization law ended up being a compromise that reflected far more the limits of Czech tolerance of constitutional change than the successful implementation of Slovak objectives or 53For an examination of the reform process of the 1960s, see Galia Golan, The Czechoslovak Reform Movement, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971. 54For an analysis of the debate around the federal solution, see H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia 's Interrupted Revolution, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976), pp . 451-489 . 55 For more on the reform movement of 1968 see Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, "Kontinuitat und politischer Wechsel in der "Tschechoslowakei 1968"", Bohemia , XV, 1974, pp . 378-395 and Galia Golan , Reform Rule in Czechoslovakia 1968-1969, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973). 56 However, as Robert W. Dean writes, "While nothing indicated that separatism was actively being considered as an altemat_ive by responsible Slovak politicians, discussions of it appreared in the press regularly". See Robert W. Dean, Nationalism and Political Change in Eastern Europe: the Slovak Question and the Czechoslovak Reform Movement, The Social Science Foundation and Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 10, Denver, University of Denver, 1973, p. 31. SLOVAKIA 103 even a definition of mutually acceptable goals. The two decades that followed the Warsaw Pact intervention of August 1968 , the period known as normalization, saw the wine of centralization being poured out of a federal bottle. The fact that a Slovak, Gustav Husak, had replaced Dubcek as head of the party and was from 1975 on also head of state seemed to suggest that an acceptable constitutional relationship had been found between the two nations. In actual fact, the regime was pursuing new ideological goals which once again reflected Czech interests and which were not dissimilar to the ideology of Czechoslovakism of the First Republic. As Viliam Plevza, the leading Slovak scholar of the normalization regime, writes: "It is evidently only a question of time for the prerequisites to develop, under new and most favourable conditions, based on the recent history of mutual relations , which will lead to the acceleration of the total development and rapprochement of the Czechs and Slovaks and the nationalities living in the republic, and to the attainment of such a synthesis that the notion of a "Czechoslovak people" will be the symbol of a new qualitative unity of all the citizens of the CSSR" _57 On the constitutional level, the results of the policy of normalization on the federal system were quite dramatic, as Zigman points out: "Progressively , with the argument of making the central organs more effective, a number of laws were passed which transformed the Czech Socialist and the Slovak Socialist Republics into unequal provinces in the CSSR whose republican institutions merely carried out orders from above. Every social movement was frozen and officially the theory of proletarian internationalism prevailed. In this way - with the help Soviet conservatives - this situation was maintained for twenty years and nothing modified it, not even cosmetic changes under [CPCS Secretary-General Milos] Jakes or the [political] game of "glasnost'" _58 Nevertheless , federalism did allow initially for a Slovak national 57 Viliam Plevza, Socialisticke premeny Ceskoslovenska, Bratislava, Pravda , 1983 , p. 420 . 5 8s ee note 2. 104 SLOVAKIA cultural renaissance; but given the political climate, it was quickly halted. Carol Skalnik Leff notes that in the mid-1970s there were warnings and threats about bourgeois nationalism, reminiscent of those uttered in the 1950s, which signalled a move away from the earlier enthusiastic recovery of the national heritage in cultural and academic publications. She writes that "It is unlikely that this noticeable shift reflects a diminution of Slovak national sentiment - quite the contrary, it suggests a concern that such sentiment was getting out of hand" .59 Clearly, anything in Slovakia that threatened the Czech agenda had to be eliminated; and it was. The Husak policy of normalization faced increased opposition both in Slovakia and in the Czech Lands after the Czechoslovak government signed the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. The Czechs, in particular academics, artists and writers, formed a loose movement called Charter 77 which attacked the ideology and policies of the regime. 60 Only a very small number of Slovak Communist dissidents adhered to it. The more significant Slovak opposition to the regime found its outlet primarily in religious demonstrations which had a broad mass appeal. This opposition was in fact a challenge to the continued imposition of the Czech agenda in Slovakia. The regime responded with a policy of open repression to both movements, especially the Slovak one. As far as it was concerned, there could be no discussion of anything but its own agenda while it was in power. It is only with the fall of Communism in November 1989 that a discussion of the Czech question could finally begin to take place in Slovakia. The first signal that there would be such a discussion came with the motion proposed by Slovak deputies to the Czechoslovak Federal Parliament on 30 March 1990 to return the hyphen to Czechoslovakia, the short name of the country. This spelling had been used in the Peace Treaties when the country was formed in 1918. 59 carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia. The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 268. 60 on this movement see H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1981. SLOVAKIA 105 Officially the country was still the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The motion was defeated by the Czech majority (with the help of some Slovak deputies). The compromise title of Czech and Slovak Federative Republic with the authorization of using the hyphen in Slovakia on the short form adopted a fortnight later was also not satisfactory. As a result, a campaign to influence Slovak public opinion on Czech-Slovak relations began in earnest. However, unlike the immediate post-war years and the Communist period when one outcome, the separation of Slovakia, was excluded, all solutions were now possible. This debate around the name of the common state strengthened the resolve of many Slovaks to initiate discussions on constitutional reform and helped to clarify the different positions. According to Zigman, "Suddenly, along with other problems, the question of a constitutional arrangement came to the surface. On the Czech side in particular, voices came to be heard shortly after the revolution [suggesting] that in the interest of the transformation of our economy the already centralized pseudo-federation should be further centralized and replaced by a unitary state (part of Civic Forum and [also] Public Against Violence). On the other hand , parties and movements appeared in Slovakia which sought greater rights for the republics and the breaking up of the federal moloch which crushed every national political movement. They demanded that it be replaced with a flexible system of institutions whose task it would be to coordinate the activities of the republics (part of the Slovak National Party and later part of the Christian Democratic Movement)" .6 1 The constitutional debate went on for two years 62 and indicated a desire to find a solution to the Czech question in Slovak political life. It was, however, only one aspect of a wider public debate, 61 See note 2. 62 For an examination of this debate, see Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, "Les Slovaques et le droit des peuples a disposer d'eux-m~mes: a la recherche d'une solution", in Andre Liebich et Andre Reszler, eds ., L 'Europe centrale et ses minorites: vers une solution europeenne?, (Geneve , Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales) , Paris , Presses universitaires de France , 1993, pp . 92-10 I. 106 SLOVAK.IA initiated by the Czech writer Ludvik Vaculfk when he published in May 1990 an article entitled "Our Slovak Problem". In an at times bitter tone, Vaculfk railed at the fact that the Slovaks, to whom he referred as little brothers, refused to share the common bed with the Czechs. He did not think, furthermore, that they were ready to sleep in their own. In his rejection of a Slovak approach and in his steadfast conviction of the importance of Czechoslovak statehood he wrote; "To develop our own Czech state - it is after all a step backwards. Not long ago I went to Bratislava and all my friends said to me why are you getting so agitated because those nationalist noises come from carrierists, idiots or else intrigue-makers. I heard this with pleasure" _63 Among the many who responded, it was Vladimir Minac, a Slovak writer, who best took Vaculfk to task in an article entitled "Our Czecho-Slovak Problem". Rejecting the notion of a "little brother" and examining generally the meaning of Czechoslovakism, Minac added: "Vaculik writes that "it is an honest duty to be a Czechoslovak". However, what you find behind a Czechoslovak is a badly covered pure Czech who in some peculiar way made the land of the Slovaks his own; and if he hasn't done so, then he wants to do so. But a Slovak doesn't want to be a Czechoslovak, he doesn't want to be shoved behind a foreign facade, he wants to be himself, independent and equal. Is that so difficult to understand?" .64 Minac did not propose a solution; he left that to the politicians. The parameters, on the other hand, had been made quite clear. During the twenty-four months that separate the first two free elections in post-Communist Czechoslovakia, Slovak politicians, while pushing for the transformation of the state, made every effort to come to terms with the Czechs. A parallel with the 1968 constitutional discussions comes to mind. There is, however, an important difference this time, namely the absence of a superpower to influ63Ludv0c VaculOc, "Na§e slovenska otazka", Literami noviny, 5/1990, 3 May 1990, reprinted in Nove slovo 21/1990, 24 May 1990. 64 Vladimfr Minac, "Na§a cesko-slovenska otlizka", Nove s/ovo, 21/1990, 24 May 1990 . SLOVAKIA 107 ence, if not determine the outcome. As a result, the Czech parties were able to indicate very clearly that they were unwilling to abandon their historical perception of Czechoslovakia as a Czech state with which the Slovaks were asked to identify and accept. At best, the status quo, in other words the federal law of 1968, was acceptable. As far as most Slovaks were concerned, despite a certain lack of unity , there had to be major constitutional reforms. There were many meetings and many propositions,65 including a number of interventions from President Vaclav Havel, yet no constitutional agreement was reached before the elections of June 1992. As a result, an important percentage of the electorate in each republic cast votes for parties that articulated a parallel message: if the other nation will not accept our terms, then let us make a go of it alone. This paved the way for the Czechs to rid themselves of the "Slovak question" while the Slovaks, many reluctantly, came to the conclusion that they might be better off without a "Czech question". After the Slovak National Council declared the sovereignty of the Slovak nation in July 1992, Prime Ministers Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic and Vladimfr Meciar of the Slovak Republic agreed that Czechoslovakia would be dissolved and two states would come into existence on 1 January 1993; on 25 November 1992, the Federal Parliament passed a law approving the dissolution. Thereafter, until the break up, both sides negotiated the division of federal property and other assets. Did the independence of Slovakia and the creation of a Czech Republic put to rest the "Czech question" in Slovak politics? Two factors suggest that one cannot give a categorical answer. First, public opinion polls preceding the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in the Czech and Slovak Republics suggested that if a referendum had been held at that time on the acceptance of the break-up of Czechoslovakia into two independent national states it would most likely not have won a majority. One may well ask whether this means that 65 These are described in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, "Czechoslovakia: The Creation, Federalisation and Disolution of a Nation-State", Regional Politics and Policy, III (I), 1993, pp . 69-95. 108 SLOVAKIA the Slovaks, after 68 years in a common state, when shove comes to push, saw living with a "Czech question", however intractable it was, as acceptable and perhaps even preferable to an uncertain future in an independent state? There is probably no simple answer to this question. What is certain, however, is that democratic politicians, unlike Communist ones, who treat public opinion as quantite negligeable do so at their own risk. It is possible that these polls reflected some degree of nostalgia as much as a fear of the future. But then again, they may have reflected the recognition of a second factor , the close relations that the two nations developed over the years. As Zigman indicated when these polls were taken, this factor placed the Slovaks before a choice: "The economic relations [with the Czechs] which were created during the recent period of development will remain and will become a significant element in a future European integration [process]. We [the Slovaks] are at a crossroads and have to decide between a Czecho-Slovak state and Czech-Slovak cooperation. I think that the starting point out of this dilemma is clear" .66 To return to our image of the beginning, after many attempts to find a comfortable place for themselves, the Slovaks found in the end that it was better to leave the room which they shared with the allegorical black panther. But they did so only after first seeking to come to an understanding with it. They also made a choice for a different kind of Czech-Slovak cooperation. Therefore, as they proceed to develop their own state, for the foreseeable future at any rate, the Slovaks will have to pay attention to a "Czech question". It is not clear what, if any, influence it will have on Slovak political life. It will, however, have ceased to be that which had been the main challenge to Slovak politics in the common state, namely an unhyphenated "Czechoslovak question" which they had not been allowed either to define or influence. 66 see note 2.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Czech Question in Slovakia in the Post-War Years Description An account of the resource Stanislav J. Kirschbaum Slovakia, Vol. 35 (No. 64-65), 1991-92 pp. 97-108 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kirschbaum, Stanislav J., 1942- Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991-92 SNK