Item: i109896
 
Authentic Coin of:

Czechoslovakia – Death of President Masaryk
1937 Silver 20 Korun 34mm (11.95 grams) 0.700 Silver (0.2701 oz. ASW)
Reference: KM# 18
REPUBLIKA ČESKOSLOVENSKÁ 20 Kč J H, State Coat-of-arms.
T٠G٠MASARYK 1850-1937 O·Š, President Tomas G. Masaryk facing right.
Edge Lettering: ~x~

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Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (Czech: [ˈtomaːʃ ˈɡarɪk ˈmasarɪk]), sometimes anglicised to Thomas Masaryk (7 March 1850 – 14 September 1937), was a Czechoslovak politician, statesman, sociologist and philosopher.

Until 1914 he advocated reforming the Austro-Hungarian monarchy into a federal state. With the help of the Allied Powers, he eventually succeeded in gaining the independence of a Czechoslovak republic as World War I ended in 1918. He founded Czechoslovakia and served as its first President, and so is called the “President Liberator” (Czech: Prezident osvoboditel).

Masaryk was born to a poor working-class family in the predominantly Catholic city of Hodonín, Moravia (in the region of Moravian Slovakia, today in the Czech Republic but then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) Another tradition claims the nearby Slovak village of Kopčany, the home of his father, as his birthplace. He subsequently grew up in the village of Čejkovice, in South Moravia, before he moved to Brno to study.

His father Jozef Masárik, born in Kopčany in Slovakia (then the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary), was a carter and later the steward and coachman at the Imperial Estate of nearby Hodonín. Tomáš’s mother, Teresie Masaryková (née Kropáčková), was a Moravian of Slavic origin but German education. She worked as a cook at the Estate where she met Masárik, and they married on 15 August 1849.

With the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the Allies recognized Masaryk as head of the Provisional Czechoslovak government (on October 14), and on November 14, 1918, he was elected President of the Czechoslovak Republic by the National Assembly in Prague while he was in New York. He came back to Prague Castle on December 21, 1918.

Masaryk was re-elected as president three times: in May 1920, 1927, and 1934. A provision in the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920 exempted him from the two-term limit. He visited many countries like France, Belgium, England, Egypt and the Mandate for Palestine in 1923 and 1927. With Herbert Clark Hoover, he guaranteed the 1. PIMCO – First Prague International Management Congress, organized Masaryks Academy of Labour and 120 experts around the world in Prague in July 1924. In March 1930, the National Assembly approved the law: “T.G. Masaryk, he deserved on the State” (law No.22/1930 Sb., from March 6, Czech: “T.G. Masaryk, zasloužil se o stát”). After the rise of Hitler, he was one of the first political figures in Europe to voice concern. He resigned from office on December 14, 1935 on the grounds of old age and poor health, and Edvard Beneš succeeded him.

On paper, Masaryk’s powers as president were limited; the framers of the constitution intended for the Prime Minister and Cabinet to hold the real power. However, he provided a considerable measure of stability in the face of frequent changes of government (there were ten cabinets headed by nine Prime Ministers during his tenure). The stability that he ensured, as well as his great prestige both inside and outside the country, made Masaryk enjoy almost-legendary authority by the people. He used his authority to create an extensive informal political network called Hrad (the Castle). Under his watch, Czechoslovakia became the strongest democracy in central Europe.

Masaryk died less than two years after leaving office, at the age of 87, in Lány, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. He died before the Munich Agreement and the Nazi occupation of his country. He was known as “The Great Old Man of Europe”. Commemorations of Masaryk, state institutions and democratic societies have taken place annually in Lány cemetery on March 7 and September 14, since 1989.

Masaryk wrote several books, including The Czech Question (1895), The Problems of Small Nations in the European Crisis (1915), The New Europe (1917) and The World Revolution (1925), in Czech, published in English as The Making of a State (1927), and the two following Volumes). The writer Karel Čapek wrote a series of articles entitled ‘Hovory s T.G.M.’ (Conversations with T.G.M.) which were later collected as a form of autobiography.

Czechoslovakia: In 1945, the Third Republic came into being, in April. Its government, installed at Košice on 4 April, then moved to Prague in May, was a National Front coalition in which three socialist parties-the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), the Czechoslovak Social democratic Party, and the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party-predominated. Certain non-socialist parties were included in the coalition, among them the Catholic People’s Party (in Moravia) and the Democratic Party of Slovakia.

Following Nazi Germany’s surrender, some 2.9 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia with Allied approval, their property and rights declared void by the Beneš decrees.

Czechoslovakia soon came to fall within the Soviet sphere of influence..

 The popular enthusiasm evoked by the Soviet armies of liberation (which was decided by compromise of Allies and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta conference in 1944) benefited the KSČ. Czechoslovaks, bitterly disappointed by the West at the Munich Agreement (1938), responded favorably to both the KSČ and the Soviet alliance. Reunited into one state after the war, the Czechs and Slovaks set national elections for the spring of 1946.

The democratic elements, led by President Edvard Beneš, hoped the Soviet Union would allow Czechoslovakia the freedom to choose its own form of government and aspired to a Czechoslovakia that would act as a bridge between East and West. Communists secured strong representation in the popularly elected National Committees, the new organs of local administration. In the May 1946 election, the KSČ won most of the popular vote in the Czech part of the bi-ethnic country (40.17%), and the more or less anti-Communist Democratic Party won in Slovakia (62%).

In sum, however, the KSČ only won a plurality of 38 percent of the vote at countrywide level. Edvard Beneš continued as president of the republic, whereas the Communist leader Klement Gottwald became prime minister. Most importantly, although the communists held only a minority of portfolios, they were able to gain control over most of the key ministries (Ministry of the Interior, etc.)

Although the communist-led government initially intended to participate in the Marshall Plan, it was forced by the Kremlin to back out. In 1947, Stalin summoned Gottwald to Moscow; upon his return to Prague, the KSČ demonstrated a significant radicalization of its tactics. On 20 February 1948, the twelve non-communist ministers resigned, in part to induce Beneš to call for early elections; however Beneš refused to accept the cabinet resignations and did not call elections. In the meantime, the KSČ marshalled its forces for the Czechoslovak coup d’état of 1948. The communist-controlled Ministry of the Interior deployed police regiments to sensitive areas and equipped a workers’ militia. On 25 February Beneš, perhaps fearing Soviet intervention, capitulated. He accepted the resignations of the dissident ministers and received a new cabinet list from Gottwald, thus completing the communist takeover under the cover of superficial legality.

On 10 March 1948, the moderate foreign minister of the government, Jan Masaryk, was found dead in suspicious circumstances that have still not been definitively proved to constitute either suicide or political assassination.

In February 1948, the Communists took power in the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d’état, and Edvard Beneš inaugurated a new cabinet led by Klement Gottwald. Czechoslovakia was declared a “people’s democracy” (until 1960) – a preliminary step toward socialism and, ultimately, communism. Bureaucratic centralism under the direction of KSČ leadership was introduced. Dissident elements were purged from all levels of society, including the Roman Catholic Church. The ideological principles of Marxism-Leninism and socialist realism pervaded cultural and intellectual life.

The economy was committed to comprehensive central planning and the abolition of private ownership of capital. Czechoslovakia became a satellite state of the Soviet Union; it was a founding member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) in 1949 and of the Warsaw Pact in 1955. The attainment of Soviet-style command socialism became the government’s avowed policy.

Slovak autonomy was constrained; the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS) was reunited with the KSČ (Communist Party of Czechoslovakia), but retained its own identity. Following the Soviet example, Czechoslovakia began emphasizing the rapid development of heavy industry. Although Czechoslovakia’s industrial growth of 170 percent between 1948 and 1957 was impressive, it was far exceeded by that of Japan (300 percent) and the Federal Republic of Germany (almost 300 percent) and more than equaled by Austria and Greece.

Beneš refused to sign the Communist Constitution of 1948 (the Ninth-of-May Constitution) and resigned from the presidency; he was succeeded by Klement Gottwald. Gottwald died in March 1953. He was succeeded by Antonín Zápotocký as president and by Antonín Novotný as head of the KSČ.

In June 1953, thousands of workers in Plzeň went on strike to demonstrate against a currency reform that was considered a move to solidify Soviet socialism in Czechoslovakia. The demonstrations ended without significant bloodshed, disappointing American Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, who wished for a pretext to help the Czechoslovak people resist the Soviets. For more than a decade thereafter, the Czechoslovak communist political structure was characterized by the orthodoxy of the leadership of party chief Antonín Novotný, who became president in 1957 when Zápotocký died.

In the 1950s, the Stalinists accused their opponents of “conspiracy against the people’s democratic order” and “high treason” in order to oust them from positions of power. In all, the Communist Party tried 14 of its former leaders in November 1952 and sentenced 11 to death. Large-scale arrests of Communists and socialists with an “international” background, i.e., those with a wartime connection with the West, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Jews, and Slovak “bourgeois nationalists,” were followed by show trials. The outcome of these trials, serving the communist propaganda, was often known in advance and the penalties were extremely heavy, such as in the case of Milada Horáková, who was sentenced to death together with Jan Buchal, Záviš Kalandra and Oldřich Pecl.

The 1960 Constitution declared the victory of socialism and proclaimed the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR).

De-Stalinization had a late start in Czechoslovakia. In the early 1960s, the Czechoslovak economy became severely stagnant. The industrial growth rate was the lowest in Eastern Europe. As a result, in 1965, the party approved the New Economic Model, introducing free market elements into the economy. The KSČ “Theses” of December 1965 presented the party response to the call for political reform. Democratic centralism was redefined, placing a stronger emphasis on democracy. The leading role of the KSČ was reaffirmed, but limited. Slovaks pressed for federalization. On 5 January 1968, the KSČ Central Committee elected Alexander Dubček, a Slovak reformer, to replace Novotný as first secretary of the KSČ. On 22 March 1968, Novotný resigned from the presidency and was succeeded by General Ludvík Svoboda.