Sacrifice and Rebirth by Mark Cornwall John Paul Newman

Author:Mark Cornwall, John Paul Newman [Mark Cornwall, John Paul Newman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Austria & Hungary, Modern, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781782388494
Google: mzP4vgEACAAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2016-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

War Veterans and Czechoslovak Politics

Veterans’ transition to peacetime in the Czechoslovak case was by no means straightforward. The homecoming of the “real” soldiers to emerge from the conflict—legionary veterans engaged in active conflict on the Western and Eastern fronts—was staggered over several years, with the last units reaching Czechoslovakia from Siberia in the summer of 1921. The memorialization of that conflict was further tempered by various political forces, including revolution and civil war in Bolshevik Russia and social unrest at home. In this fluid context, the notion of legionary values and the need to maintain them became a bone of contention between those veterans who had been politicized by their experience and those who had left the trenches with little more than a sense of despair and disregard for politics. For some, particularly those on the right, preserving legionary values translated into a fierce and militant defense of their importance as an energizing force underpinning the political legitimacy of the new post-Habsburg establishment.10 For others, pacifists and those on the left, the only traditions worth preserving from the horrors of war were those of comradeship and social understanding. Although a majority of Czech veterans returned to their prewar professions upon reaching Czechoslovakia, some—most of them former legionaries from Russia—were employed in state institutions and especially the Ministry of Defense.11 The Resistance Memorial/Liberation Institute—created in June 1920 as an official memorial to Czech and Slovak legionaries who had fought for the Czechoslovak cause—was also an important employer of former legionaries, including professional soldiers like Rudolf Medek and legionary authors like Josef Kopta. The majority of Czechoslovak legionaries during the war had been left-leaning: many had belonged to the Czech Social Democratic party or been close to Austrian social democracy pre-1914. Therefore most, if not all, of these, including those radicalized by Bolshevik ideas in the east, were members of the ČsOL. The ČsOL remained the largest organization for legionary veterans throughout the First Republic, representing the legionary-veteran left wing (Social Democrat, but also some Communist members).12 The purpose behind the ČsOL’s creation had been to unify the deeply divided legionary movement and represent all legionary interests, left and right. However, by 1923 the movement was becoming overtly politicized and its original purpose transformed into supporting the politics of the “Castle” led by President Masaryk.

The ČsOL had several influential ideologues, all of whom were loyal to the Castle and Foreign Minister Edvard Beneš, most notably the chairman, Josef Patejdl, and legionary journalists Lev Sychrava and Václav Cháb. Beneš patronized the ČsOL informally from its founding in 1921, and as a result the society gradually became part of the political framework of the center-left National Socialist party. The ČsOL was, therefore, very much part of the Czechoslovak political establishment, whereas the NJČsL occupied a unique position on the fringes of politics and received a different type of patronage from the Czechoslovak military establishment, particularly the Chief of the General Staff. The core ideas of both groups were developed in a variety of polemical debates conducted on the front pages of newspapers, specialist journals, and pamphlets.

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