POLIŠENSKÝ, JOSEF VINCENTHISTORY OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA IN OUTLINE
Bohemia International, Praha, 1991
2. vydanie (1. v Bohemii)
ISBN 80-85195-05-04
história, Československo,
144 s., čb fot., angličtina
hmotnosť: 287 g
mäkká väzba
stav: veľmi dobrý, knižničné pečiatky
*bib14* in *H-kris*
THE FIGHT FOR NATIONAL FREEDOM
The outbreak of the first World War in July 1914 was the result of the tension between Vienna and Belgrade. It is not uninteresting to mention that a year earlier T. G. Masaryk had gone to Belgrade, and returned with Serbian suggestions for the improving of relations between both the states. The government of Austria-Hungary let this occasion pass without notice. The immediate pretext for the declaration of war on Serbia was the assassination of the imperial successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Francis Ferdinand. In Bohemia he was known as an adherent of federalism, but at the same time as a supporter of the plans of the German Emperor, William II, and as a rigid autocrat and bigoted Catholic. So Czech public opinion, with its democratic, Slavonic and often anti-clerical tendencies, was in no way disturbed by the assassination. But the war against Serbia and Russia, two countries to which the sympathies of a very great part of the nation were bound, was regarded as an evil only a little lesser than civil war.
The very beginning of the last war-adventure of the Hapsburg monarchy was accompanied by the suppression of all political freedom. The Austro-Hungarian government embarked on a struggle, which from a preventive campaign in the Balkans turned to a world-war of two power-groups, without Parliament and without a free press. Czech politicians took, roughly, two standpoints in this situation. K. Kramář, the representative of Czech Liberalism and Neoslavism, was for the Czech nation’s remaining passive, reckoning that the Russian Army would in any case sooner or later occupy Bohemia and that they would probably put on the throne one of the Romanov dynasty.
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