Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s

349 Pages·1996·24.655 MB·English

by  Igor Lukes

Czechoslovakia between
Stalin and Hitler
This page intentionally left blank
Czechoslovakia between
Stalin and Hitler
The Diplomacy of Edvard Benes
in the 1930s
IGOR LUKES
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1996
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay
Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi
Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne
Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore
Taipei Tokyo Toronto
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1996 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lukes, Igor.
Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler : the diplomacy of
Edvard Benes in the 1930s / Igor Lukes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-510266-5; ISBN 0-19-510267-3 (pbk.)
1. Benes, Edvard, 1884-1948. 2. Czechoslovakia—Foreign
relations—Germany. 3. Germany—Foreign relations—Czechoslovakia.
4. Czechoslovakia—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 5. Soviet
Union—Foreign relations—Czechoslovakia. 6. Czechoslovakia—
Foreign relations. I. Title.
DB2078.G3L85 1996
327.437043'09'043—dc20 95-9284
1 35798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
PREFACE
Edvard Benes (1884-1948) was a major European politician, foreign policy strate-
gist, and important actor in the Czechoslovak-German drama of the 1930s. This
volume studies the first two decades of his diplomacy and analyzes the Prague
government's attempts to secure the existence of the Republic of Czechoslovakia in
the treacherous space between the millstones of East and West.
The crisis of the 1930s, especially the Four Power Agreement signed at Munich
in September 1938, provoked a vast amount of writing. To be sure, some important
questions still remain to be answered. But it is safe to say that we now have a high-
resolution picture of the British, French, German, Hungarian, and Polish dimen-
sions of the crisis. This cannot be said about the roles played by the Prague govern-
ment and the Kremlin.
Czechoslovak territory in the Sudetenland was one of the main points of con-
tention in 1938, yet historians have often downplayed the activities of President
Benes and his colleagues in the escalating European conflict. And no wonder: until
the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was difficult for researchers unaffiliated with official
Czechoslovak institutions to gain complete access to the relevant archival collections
in Prague. Under such circumstances, one had to treat as evidence politically slanted
memoirs, official pronouncements, and collections of arbitrarily selected docu-
ments. Because of this limitation, the Prague government was frequently treated as
the passive object of a Franco-British deal with Hitler, an entity without options and
incapable of initiatives. The scarcity of Czechoslovak primary sources concerning
the crisis of the 1930s closely paralleled the dearth of Soviet documentation. This—
and Stalin's absence at Munich—led many historians to treat the Soviet role in the
Czechoslovak-German crisis as marginal at most. Others chose to give an approving
account of the Soviet leader's behavior in Central Europe prior to World War II.
This book deals with the European crisis of the 1930s by focusing on the
hitherto neglected Czechoslovak and Soviet perspectives. Chapter 1 analyzes
Czechoslovak-Soviet relations from the end of World War I to the beginning of the
Nazi rule in Germany. Thomas G. Masaryk, Edvard Benes, and other policy-makers
in Prague held the view that Russia—under whatever regime—would not be able to
develop without strong ties with Europe and that the European political scene needed
active Russian participation to become stable. Therefore, Prague was at first cau-
tiously inclined to respond positively to signals from the Kremlin that the Soviets
vi Preface
were ready to enter into full diplomatic relations. But Masaryk and Benes refused to
ignore the cruelty of Bolshevism; they maintained the hope that a new and more
tolerant Russia would eventually reappear. Consequently, by the time Adolf Hitler
came to power, most European countries had granted the Bolsheviks de jure recogni-
tion while diplomatic contacts between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union were
almost nonexistent. It seems in retrospect that until the beginning of the Nazi era in
Germany, the Prague government was guided by a rather pessimistic view of Bol-
shevism. More so than other European politicians who had rushed to do business
with the Kremlin already in the 1920s. Paradoxically, this did not prevent them a
decade later from showing off their anti-Communist credentials by dismissing
Czechoslovakia as a Bolshevik outpost in the heart of Europe.
Chapter 2 studies the impact of Hitler's Machtergreifung in 1933 on Prague's
relations with Moscow and shows how Nazism helped to legitimize the Soviets in
the eyes of Edvard Benes. Henceforth, he would devote much of his energy to
bringing Stalin's Soviet Union into Central European politics in order to compensate
for the spectacular growth of the Third Reich. Prague entered into full diplomatic
relations with the Kremlin in 1934 and proceeded the next year to negotiate the
Czechoslovak-Soviet agreement. This chapter analyzes the stipulation that made
Soviet action on behalf of Czechoslovakia in case of war with Germany dependent
on the prior involvement of France. It shows that the stipulation was put into the text
by Prague.
The role assigned to Czechoslovak communists by the 7th Congress of the
Communist International and western attitudes toward Central Europe in 1935-37
are analyzed in Chapter 3. Moscow's early efforts to become an active participant in
the crisis-laden political scene are contrasted with the passive acceptance of the
decline and collapse of the Versailles system by Great Britain and France. In addi-
tion, just when the Nazis began kicking at the doors of Czechoslovakia, at a time
when Prague would have needed signs of firm support from the Kremlin, the Soviet
Union's value on the international scene declined dramatically. This was the result
of a variety of factors among which the most important was the Stalinist terror. The
latter's roots were extraordinarily long, and some reached even as far as Prague and
Paris.
Chapter 4 delves into Prague's secret negotiations with Berlin and Benes's role
in the famous Tukhachevsky affair. It identifies early signs of Stalin's campaign
against the Red Army leadership: in 1935 a Prague-based Russian newspaper began
publishing a series of articles designed by the Stalinist secret police to plant seeds of
doubt about the loyalty of large numbers of Red Army officers. By early 1937,
Benes started receiving clear indications that a Soviet-German rapprochement
was in the cards. This would have meant the immediate collapse of one of Prague's
main security arrangements, the Czechoslovak-Soviet agreement of 1935. Hence
Benes's relief when he learned in the summer of 1937 that Tukhachevsky had been
shot for his treasonous schemes with various German personalities and agents.
Importantly, however, this chapter shows that, Benes's own claims notwithstand-
ing, the Prague government did not pass to the Kremlin the rumors implicating
Marshal Tukhachevsky and others in acts of high treason.
Preface vii
Chapter 5 studies the Anschluß of Austria and the so-called partial mobilization
of the Czechoslovak army in May 1938. Documents from the Second Bureau of the
Czechoslovak army's General Staff are analyzed to disprove Prague's assertion that
reservists and military specialists had to be called up in response to hostile strategic
military concentrations by the Wehrmacht. Hitler did not intend to attack in May
1938, but the Prague government had been deliberately misled into thinking that he
did. Given the relatively high quality of the intelligence reports that the Second
Bureau received during the May crisis, it is safe to assume that it came from a
professional espionage organization. Alas, only speculation can be offered regar-
ding the identity of the source of this daring deception which brought Europe to the
brink of war.
Chapter 6 deals with the crisis during the summer and fall of 1938, and sheds
new light on Stalin's strategic thinking on the eve of World War II. Soviet assump-
tions at this time regarding the shape of future developments were rooted in the
analytical framework of the 7th Congress of the Communist International, and they
were reaffirmed in Prague by Andrei Zhdanov in August 1938. The evidence pre-
sented here shows that in 1938 Stalin was not bent on avoiding war. His objective
was for the conflict to break out at the right time and place so that opportunities for
the growth of Soviet power in postwar Europe would be maximized. This in itself
did not make him the main villain of international politics at the time: he would have
failed to project his influence throughout Central Europe but for the war uleashed by
the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler. As it happened, some assumptions made by the
Soviet policy-makers turned out to be quite inaccurate; nevertheless, the strategy
designed in the Kremlin at the height of the crisis proved to be considerably more
sophisticated than such poorly thought-out tactical schemes as the mission of Lord
Runciman.
Chapter 7 traces the paths that led the participants in the Czechoslovak-German
drama to the Munich solution. Properly, the focus is on the tragic figure of Edvard
Benes and his agonizing decision to capitulate. The president has been sometimes
portrayed as a man who had mistaken deal-making in the League of Nations for a
viable foreign policy. He has been criticized for his failure to come to terms with
Czechoslovakia's neighbors and the numerous Sudeten German population. Some
have seen in him a man who spoke with toughness when he could hide behind the
backs of his French and Soviet allies but who ultimately lacked the necessary resolve
to lead his people to war against the Wehrmacht. It is suggested throughout that
Benes was a flawed man, and so was his foreign policy, but this chapter offers
evidence that the president lacked neither courage nor the capacity for greatness. He
had in fact hoped for a military conflict to break out in September 1938, and it
appears that the moments during the crisis when he was optimistic corresponded
with those occasions when war seemed inevitable. The president did not give up
hope that war would break out even after it had become quite clear that no assistance
could be expected from France: on 28 September 1938 the Prague government
requested "immediate air support" from the Soviet Union and an inquiry concern-
ing the availability of Soviet assistance to Czechoslovakia was made even after the
Munich agreement had been signed. A recently uncovered document presents défini-
viii Preface
live evidence regarding the possibility of Soviet aid to Czechoslovakia in the fall of
1938. Benes stated that Moscow's failure to respond to his repeated inquiries regard-
ing Soviet help against the Third Reich "was the main reason why I capitulated."
Specialists in Benes studies will note that this is a new dimension of the crisis, and it
leads us to reconsider previously held opinions. Notable, too, is the evidence that the
Kremlin attacked the leader of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia, Klement
Gottwald, for his failure to use the crisis in September 1938 as a convenient catalyst
for carrying out a revolution.
This book deals with the escalating crisis of the 1930s mainly on the basis of
original primary sources from the recently opened archives in Prague. It would be
presumptuous and naive to think that such a method could result in a product that
sheds light of equal intensity on all the many layers of the decade. Instead, the book
emphasizes those questions and themes on which the archives yielded the most
interesting and significant new information. This, as well as the enormity of the
topic, necessitated that several important components of the Munich affair had to be
ignored or merely sketched. Prominent in this category is the important French role
in the Czechoslovak-German crisis: it is merely touched on in this volume, and the
reader will have to turn to Documents diplomatiques français and some of the
specialized studies of the topic to gain a more complete picture. Prague's compli-
cated relations with the Sudeten German population, the Slovak question, Soviet
global maneuvers, details of politics in the Kremlin, the Spanish civil war, the
brewing troubles in the Far East, and the roles played by Czechoslovakia's neigh-
bors Hungary and Poland also deserve a more extensive treatment than is given here.
Volumes dealing with such issues, old and new, can be found in the bibliography
attached at the end. My main goal has been to demonstrate how the developing crisis
that resulted in the Munich Agreement appeared from the perspective of Prague.
This approach may seem somewhat narrow, but it allows for the hitherto missing
Czechoslovak perspective to be added to what we already know, thanks to Walter
Laqueur, Robert C. Tucker, Adam B. Ulam, Piotr S. Wandycz, Donald Cameron
Watt, and Gerhard L. Weinberg.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has resulted in greater access to Moscow
archives than ever before. Consequently, it has become possible to uncover evidence
regarding many important topics in Soviet history. Unexpectedly, the greatest ad-
vances have been achieved in what would appear to be some of the most sensitive
areas: Stalin's murder of more than fifteen thousand Polish army officers in 1940,
Soviet atomic research and diplomacy, the Cuban missile crisis, and the 1968
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, to name only a few examples. Except for
several sets of documents released to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, cited
in this book, much less evidence has been made available on Soviet behavior in the
1930s. Regarding Moscow's role in the Czechoslovak-German crisis, some interest-
ing documents can indeed be found in the archives of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, especially when it comes to personalities—the Soviet Minister in Prague,
Sergei S. Aleksandrovsky; his Czechoslovak colleague, Minister Zdenék Fierlinger;
political journalist and future Czechoslovak diplomat and politician, Hubert Ripka;
and others. But these documents add relatively little to what had been made gradu-
ally available—albeit in an edited form—from the 1950s onward. There is every
Preface ix
reason to think that crucial documentation on some of the central topics of this book
(Benes and the Tukhachevsky affair or the Soviet role in the May partial mobiliza-
tion) is hidden in the so-called Presidential Archives in the Kremlin and in the
archives of the KGB. My own vain attempts to obtain a research permit from those
quarters suggest that we will have to await yet another miracle in Moscow. In the
meantime, the Czechoslovak-German drama and the role played by Stalin can be
narrated from the perspective of Prague archives.
Acknowledgments
It gives me pleasure to acknowledge that this project was made possible by the
generous support I received from various foundations. My research in Prague was
conducted while I was a Fulbright Research Fellow and an IREX (International
Research and Exchanges Board) Fellow; I could later return to Prague for a shorter
time with travel grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and IREX.
The writing of this volume was accelerated thanks to the John M. Olin Faculty
Fellowship in History and a fellowship in the Society of Fellows at my professional
home, Boston University, both of which released me from teaching duties.
Some of the themes explored in this book were dealt with in previously pub-
lished articles, which appeared in Diplomacy & Statecraft, Slavic Review, and
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte.
I am most grateful to Gioia Stevens, my Oxford University Press editor, for her
support and guidance. Special mention must be made of Professor Hsi-Huey Liang,
Vassar College; Dr. Eva Jonas, Harvard University; and Dr. Antonin Klimek of the
Historical Institute of the Czech Army in Prague, all of whom allowed me to use
photographs from their private collections. Dr. Klimek, moreover, helped me self-
lessly, and often at the expense of his own writing and other academic obligations, to
orient myself in the Prague archives.
My mother, Milena Lukesova, an author of dozens of books, is also an out-
standing editor. She patiently read through the manuscript and pointed out numerous
ways of improving it. I wish I knew as much about history as she does about the art
of writing. My father, Professor Dr. Zdenëk Lukes, assisted me with archival
research at a time when I could not travel to Prague. He was one of many
Czechoslovak army reserve officers who never fully recovered from the humiliation
of their retreat in early October 1938. It is from him that I inherited my interest in
this topic.
Wellesley, Massachusetts I.L.
Chocen, the Czech Republic
July 1995