Igor Lukes (born 1950) [1] is a professor of history at Boston University, who focuses on central European history since World War I. He is also an Honorary Consul General of the Czech Republic. [2]
The Munich Agreement was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. The agreement provided for the German annexation of land on the border between Czechoslovakia and Germany called the Sudetenland, where more than three million people, mainly ethnic Germans, lived. The pact is also known in some areas as the Munich Betrayal, because of a previous 1924 alliance agreement and a 1925 military pact between France and the Czechoslovak Republic.
Jan Garrigue Masaryk was a Czech diplomat and politician who served as the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1940 to 1948. American journalist John Gunther described Masaryk as "a brave, honest, turbulent, and impulsive man".
The Little Entente was an alliance formed in 1920 and 1921 by Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes with the purpose of common defense against Hungarian revanchism and the prospect of a Habsburg restoration in Austria or Hungary. France supported the alliance by signing treaties with each member country. The rapid growth of German power caused its collapse in 1938, and it never went into wartime operation.
During World War II, Czechoslovakia had disappeared from the map of Europe. The Third Czechoslovak Republic, officially the Czechoslovak Republic, emerged as a sovereign state from 1945 to 1948 following the end of World War II. It was not only the result of the policies of the victorious Western allies, the French Fourth Republic, the United Kingdom and the United States, but also an indication of the strength of the Czechoslovak ideal embodied in the First Czechoslovak Republic.
With the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy at the end of World War I, the independent country of Czechoslovakia was formed as a result of the critical intervention of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, among others.
The Slánský trial was a 1952 antisemitic show trial against fourteen members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), including many high-ranking officials. Several charges, including high treason, were announced against the group on the grounds of allegedly conspiring against the Czechoslovak Republic. General Secretary of the KSČ Rudolf Slánský was the alleged leader of the conspirators.
Rudolf Slánský was a leading Czech Communist politician. Holding the post of the party's General Secretary after World War II, he was one of the leading creators and organizers of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia.
Robert Gilbert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart,, known as Sir Robert Vansittart between 1929 and 1941, was a senior British diplomat in the period before and during the Second World War. He was Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister from 1928 to 1930 and Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938 and later served as Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government. He is best remembered for his opposition to appeasement and his strong stance against Germany during and after the Second World War. Vansittart was also a published poet, novelist and playwright.
The Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization, also known as the Military Case or the Tukhachevsky Case, was a 1937 secret trial of the high command of the Red Army, a part of the Great Purge.
Emanuel Moravec was a Czech army officer and writer who served as the collaborationist Minister of Education of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia between 1942 and 1945. He was also chair of the Board of Trustees for the Education of Youth, a fascist youth organisation in the protectorate.
The German–Polish declaration of non-aggression, also known as the German–Polish non-aggression pact, was a non-aggression agreement between Nazi Germany and the Second Polish Republic that was signed on 26 January 1934 in Berlin. Both countries pledged to resolve their problems by bilateral negotiations and to forgo armed conflict for a period of 10 years. The agreement effectively normalised relations between Poland and Germany, which had been strained by border disputes arising from the territorial settlement in the Treaty of Versailles. Germany effectively recognised Poland's borders and moved to end an economically-damaging customs war between the two countries that had taken place over the previous decade.
Nikolai Vladimirovich Skoblin was a general in the White Russian army, a senior operative in the émigré expatriate Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) and a recruited Soviet spy, who acted as an intermediary between the NKVD and the Gestapo in the Tukhachevsky affair and was instrumental in the abduction of the ROVS chairman Gen Yevgeny Miller in Paris in 1937. He was married to the Russian singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya. A number of important details about his cooperation with the USSR′s intelligence agencies as well as exact circumstances of his death have remained controversial and contested.
Zdeněk Fierlinger was a Czechoslovak diplomat and politician. He served as the prime minister of Czechoslovakia from 1944 to 1946, first in the London-based Czechoslovak government-in-exile and then in liberated Czechoslovakia. Long close to the Soviet Union, he has his name often associated with the merger of his Czech Social Democratic Party with the Czechoslovak Communist Party after the communist coup in 1948.
The Republic of Poland and Czechoslovakia established relations early in the interwar period, after both countries gained independence. Those relations were somewhat strained by the Polish–Czechoslovak border conflicts over Zaolzie and Cieszyn in the early 1920s and late 1930s. Both countries joined the Allies during World War II. After the war they both fell into the Soviet sphere of influence. Poland, together with other Eastern Bloc countries, participated in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Relations between the two countries were nonetheless rather amicable, but became somewhat strained in the aftermath of the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980 and 1981, improving again afterwards.
Edvard Beneš was a Czech politician and statesman who served as the president of Czechoslovakia from 1935 to 1938, and again from 1945 to 1948. He also led the Czechoslovak government-in-exile 1939 to 1945 during World War II.
Vojtěch Mastný was a Czechoslovak diplomat.
China–Czech Republic relations or Sino–Czech relations are international relations between China and the Czech Republic. There were official relations by 1919 and formally established relations followed on 6 October 1949 between Czechoslovakia and China. In 1993, the Czech Republic was established and inherited the Czechoslovak treaty. The relations, trade and tourism between the China and the Czech Republic improved rapidly since the 1990s; and in the 2010s, agreements were made for more thorough economic improvements. Recently, relations have deteriorated due to major Czech politicians visiting Taiwan.
Sir Joseph Addison KCMG was British ambassador to the Baltic States, and to Czechoslovakia during the rise of Nazi Germany.
The Runciman Mission to Czechoslovakia was a British Government initiative aimed at resolving an international crisis threatening to lead to war in Europe in the summer of 1938. The Mission, headed by a former British cabinet minister Lord Runciman, was sent to mediate in a dispute between the Government of Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten German Party (SdP), representing the radicalised ethnic German minority within the country. The British mediators were active on the ground in Czechoslovakia during the late summer, issuing their report shortly before the Munich Conference in September.
The May Crisis was a brief episode of international tension in 1938 caused by reports of German troop movements against Czechoslovakia that appeared to signal the imminent outbreak of war in Europe. Although the state of high anxiety soon subsided when no actual military concentrations were detected, the consequences of the crisis were far-reaching.