As in the Sudeten German case, so here, too, among the roughly seven hundred thousand Magyars who were now incorporated together with the Slovaks into the new Czechoslovakia, it was the Social Democratic workers who initially resisted most vigorously. The society and governments of rump Hungary were never reconciled to the loss of the Slovak-populated northern counties of their historic kingdom and remained doggedly determined throughout the interwar era to recover them and the neighboring Ruthenian-populated counties to the east. As political relations between Czechs and Slovaks also soon soured, the Slovak link of the general peace settlement of 1919 proved to be a source of chronic friction.
The easternmost province of interwar Czechoslovakia, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, or the Carpatho-Ukraine, had held no political interest for the Czechs as long as Russia remained in the war and was regarded by them as having primary claims of cultural wardship over this retarded but strategically important Slav-inhabited corner of old Hungary. At war’s outbreak Ruthenia was populated by approximately six hundred thousand people, of whom two-thirds were miserably poor peasants and mountaineers speaking several Ukrainian dialects, with the remaining third divided roughly evenly between Hungarian officials and Jewish merchants and innkeepers. For a thousand years it had been an integral part of Hungary, supplying that country’s most faithful peasant soldiers and itinerant agricultural laborers and, in turn, being treated by the Hungarian gentry as a primeval deer forest. With over half of them illiterate on the eve of the war, the depressed and exploited Ruthenian peasants lacked the resources for effective political action; indeed, the real pressure for extricating them from under Hungarian rule came during the war from their numerous (about three hundred thousand) brothers in the United States. But the American Ruthenians’ stand against their old homeland’s Hungarian past did not by itself answer the question of Ruthenia’s political future.
This answer was eventually supplied in 1918 by a process of elimination: Russia was in the grip of civil war, hence the new Ukrainian state’s future appeared dubious; as Ukrainian-speakers, the Ruthenians were unwilling to be assigned to Poland or Romania; the American Ruthenians’ preference for a new state composed of the Bukovina, eastern Galicia, and Ruthenia was discouraged by President Wilson. At this point, late in October, 1918, their leader Grigory Žatković met with Masaryk, who was then traveling in the United States, and worked out with him an agreement to affiliate Ruthenia with Czechoslovakia, reserving for her extensive autonomous rights and institutions. A referendum among American Ruthenian parishes, culminating in a congress at Scranton on November 19, then approved this option, and on May 8, 1919, it was endorsed by the Central National Council back home in Užhorod (Ungvár). In Ruthenia the sentiment for continued association with Hungary, which earlier had more adherents at home than in America and which the first postwar Hungarian government had sought to encourage with a law of December 25, 1918, promising the Ruthenians autonomy, had meanwhile withered, partly under the impact of Béla Kun’s Hungarian Communist regime. The Great Powers were also suitably impressed by this logic of events and duly assigned Ruthenia to Czechoslovakia, specifying that the province be granted autonomy (September 10, 1919). Žatković himself came from America to be its first governor but resigned on March 16, 1921, and returned home a few weeks later, embittered at finding his supposed autonomous authority to be a dead letter and at learning that his province’s western boundary was so drawn as to leave almost one-fifth of Czechoslovakia’s Ruthenians outside it, in Slovak administrative districts.
Though the chance to attach Ruthenia to their state was for the Czechs a windfall from the unforeseen fact that the war destroyed both the Habsburg and the Tsarist empires, the Prague authorities quickly came to appreciate Ruthenia’s strategic significance for interwar Czechoslovakia, as a land bridge to her Little Entente ally Romania and as a potential political magnet for the Ukrainians in rival Poland. (The fact that Ruthenia is the only Ukrainian-speaking area south of the Carpathian Mountains is, of course, also of great strategic interest [military and political] to Moscow and probably accounts for Stalin’s decision to take it from his Czechoslovak ally in 1944.)
If Ruthenia was the acquisition for which Beneš found it easiest to elicit Great Power endorsement at the Paris Peace Conference, Těšín was the most troublesome one. This corner of old Silesia was small but important, thanks to its coal and industry and its transportation network. The Polish claim to it was ethnographic. The Czech claim was based on a combination of historical, economic, and strategic considerations: it had belonged to the Bohemian Crown since the fourteenth century; it contained Czechoslovakia’s only potential high quality coal reserves (of which Poland had a surplus); through it passed the railroad connection between the Czech provinces and Slovakia and on to Ruthenia and Romania.
Though Polish and Czech nationalism were in one sense allied during World War I—both aspiring to the restoration of their lost independence—Polish and Czech war aims and political strategies had not been synchronized and, indeed, were implicitly at variance. Their respective assessments of the Habsburg and Tsarist empires clashed: the former was the Czechs’ bugbear but was regarded benevolently by the Poles, and the reverse attitudes pertained toward Russia. Their views of each other’s postwar frontiers and destinies were also incompatible. Each wished to see the other confined to ethnographic frontiers, lest this neighbor become a source of irredentist instability in postwar Europe, while reserving for itself the right to claim historic or strategic or economically rational frontiers. The Czechs, for example, were convinced that Poland blundered in annexing her Belorussian- and Ukrainian-populated eastern kresy, while the Poles were skeptical about Czech-Slovak fraternity. Interwar alienation between Czechoslovakia and Poland thus went much deeper than the Těšín (Cieszyn, Teschen) dispute, this being rather its most vivid and tangible example.
Early in 1919, the Poles appeared to have the stronger hand in that dispute. For varying reasons, the American, British, and Italian delegations to the conference at Paris accepted the Poles’ ethnographic claims, and the Czechs had somewhat discredited themselves and embarrassed their French patrons by attempting—and failing—to impose a fait accompli via a sudden military occupation of Těšín at the end of January. The Poles resisted successfully, and the Czechs here, as they had in Slovakia on two occasions, paid the price of lowered credibility for this combination of aggressiveness and weakness. In 1920, however, the diplomatic situation shifted to the Czechs’ favor. The pro-Polish American delegation lost influence when the Senate repudiated President Wilson, Curzon replaced Balfour in the office of the British Foreign Secretary, and the Poles’ desperate straits in July, 1920, at the time of the Soviet advance on Warsaw, obliged them to become docile over Těšín, whose coal mines and railroad junction the Allies now assigned to Czechoslovakia. The Poles considered this loss to have been the result of despicable blackmail at a moment of great danger and never forgave the Czechs. (Two decades later, at the time of the 1938 Munich crisis, the Polish and Czech roles were to be reversed in an otherwise remarkably similar situation.) Masaryk and Beneš, if left to their own judgment, might have been more accommodating toward Polish sensibilities, but they were obliged—or claimed they were obliged—to trim their sails to the strong wind of the Russophile and Polonophobe Czech National Democrats in the Prague government. Beneš, indeed, had at the time no independent political strength in the Czechoslovak party system and felt himself under constant pressure to protect his political flanks by great stubbornness