Mary Heimann | Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed

With the help of his old patron Charles Crane, Masaryk got himself included in a lunch held at the White House to discuss whether or not the US should intervene in Siberia; this won him a private interview with President Wilson on 19 June 1918, which he was able to follow with a letter to the American secretary of state in which he hinted heavily that he ought to be granted political recognition as leader of the ‘Czecho-Slovaks’ since, ‘although he had at his disposal three armies, fighting in Russia, France and Italy’ and was ‘the master of Siberia and half Russia’, yet he was still ‘in the United States formally a private man’. Beneš, meanwhile, asked by the British to leave the troops in Siberia, was told that HM Government would be prepared to recognize the Czecho-Slovaks as Allies; French prime minister Georges Clemenceau went further, promising that his government would go ‘all the way’ in return for getting the soldiers to the Western Front. Beneš, sensing French desperation, pressed his advantage, asking for a range of statements and declarations, including that ‘the Czecho-Slovaks were independent for long centuries’ and an explicit promise that ‘the Slovaks would be united with the Czechs in a Czecho-Slovak state’ to be ‘composed of the four [sic] historic provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, Austrian Silesia and Slovakia’ (Slovakia was not, of course, one of the historic Lands of the Bohemian Crown).

On 29 June 1918, Czechoslovak troops captured Vladivostok from the Bolsheviks, causing a splash in the world press. The French foreign minister reacted immediately, sending Beneš every formulation and statement that he had requested (including the bogus reference to Slovakia as one of ‘the four historic provinces’). By now bombarded with press cuttings about the plucky and gallant Czechs, the Supreme War Council declared to President Wilson that an Allied intervention, making use of the Czech troops in Siberia, had become ‘an urgent and imperative necessity’.

The widespread and sympathetic Allied publicity which was given to the Legions, together with the French commitment to some form of Czecho-Slovak independence, were the first clear signs that the Czech deputies at home had seen to indicate that Masaryk’s grandiose hopes for an enlarged, independent postwar Bohemian kingdom were becoming politically possible. On 13 July 1918, Kramář revived the National Committee (Národní výbor) in Prague, a group of thirty-eight Czech deputies led by himself, Václav Klofáč, Antonín Švehla and František Soukup, the leaders of the Young Czech, National Socialist, Agrarian and Social Democratic parties. For the first time, Austrian Czech political opinion – as formally represented by elected deputies acting through the Czechs’ National Committee – showed itself willing to back the Masaryk–Beneš team by declaring itself in favour of the creation of an ‘independent Czechoslovak state with its own administration within its own domain and under its own sovereignty’.