Introductory essay

Czechoslovakia

Norman Stone

pp. 1-7

in: Norman Stone, Eduard Strouhal (eds), Czechoslovakia, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

In his essay on seaside postcards, George Orwell remarks that we are all divided, in character, between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: aspiring, romantic, impractical on the one side, down-to-earth, appetite-oriented, resentful of abstractions, on the other. This is a distinction which might be applied to the self-images of various cultures. The historical picture of Poland in the west (though not in Russia) is quixotic in high degree: a nation of fighters, inspired by a militant Catholicism which, despite all of the mayhem that Poland has suffered, has given Poles a pride and resilience that make so many Poles impervious to communism. The cost of the Poles' refusal to collaborate has been very high — from the extinction of so many Polish institutions following the Russians' crushing of the revolt of 1863, through the slaughter of one-fifth of the population and the destruction of Warsaw in Nazi times, to the appalling economic mess of the past few years. But you can be proud to be a Pole; is that the case with other nations in the Soviet bloc? This question underlies several of the essays collected here, in a volume written mainly by Czechs and Slovaks living in the West, and devoted to the four "eights": 1918, when the republic was founded; 1938, when its western parts were handed over, by Great Britain and France, to Hitler; 1948, when the communists took power; and 1968, when an effort to create 'socialism with a human face" was crushed by Soviet tanks.