Czechoslovakia woke up shocked on March 10, 1948. Its Foreign Minister had been found dead early that morning under suspicious circumstances. Jan Masaryk's body lay on the floor of the courtyard of the Cernín Palace, the headquarters of his portfolio, fourteen meters below the bathroom window of what had been his apartment in that baroque mansion in Prague.
Three days later, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to join the solemn state funeral. The turnout to bid farewell to Masaryk reached massive dimensions due to the sympathy the character aroused. Son of the president who had founded the republic, the ill-fated minister had been head of the diplomatic corps for almost a decade and the voice he had encouraged his compatriots by radio from London to resist the Nazi occupation in the Second World War.
But the massive goodbye was also a tacit act of opposition to the direction that Czechoslovakia had just taken in those germinal moments of the Cold War.
Just two weeks before the minister's strangely sudden death, the local Communist Party had articulated the so-called Prague coup, the institutional coup that aligned the country with Moscow in the bipolar era. Taking advantage of its majority of votes, cleanly obtained in the nation with the greatest democratic tradition in Eastern Europe, the Czechoslovak CP went from being the majority partner in the National Front – the broad ruling coalition since the Soviet expulsion of the Nazis – to practically taking over the executive cabinet.
A general strike and a vast deployment of agitation cells and factory militias were the pieces that the communists moved to force the formation of the new government of their color. Overcome by pressure, the social democrats, Christian democrats and liberals who until then had shared power with them gave in to the maneuver. Czechoslovakia thus became a satellite of the Kremlin, a situation that would continue for decades. However, not all ministries remained in the hands of the Communist Party. Masaryk remained in charge of Foreign Affairs.
It was an uncomfortable position that Masaryk agreed to at the request of the still president Edvard Benes, a nationalist who believed, like him, that this was better than ceding all the ground to the Marxist steamroller. This political marriage of convenience did not please the other party much either. The communist Klement Gottwald, prime minister and soon after president of the country, admitted before Parliament: “Our headquarters [of his party] is really Moscow.” And Moscow, ruled fiercely by Stalin, could not quite understand why it had to include an openly pro-Western liberal like Masaryk in its Prague puppet cabinet.
Jan Masaryk, in fact, could pose a serious threat to the heavy-handed regime that prevailed in Czechoslovakia from the Prague coup until the Velvet Revolution in 1989, with the exception of the short-lived Spring of 1968. He was not just a recalcitrant democrat. Son of the legendary nationalist leader Thomas Garrigue Masaryk and himself a charismatic leader since his much-listened to radio interventions in the Second World War, he could eventually become the backbone of the opposition to Stalinism in his country.
His affection for the West, all the worse for the Kremlin, was unbribable. This when, as Churchill had said just a few months earlier, “an iron curtain”, the Iron Curtain, had “descended on the continent” of Europe. Well, although Masaryk was born in Prague, his mother was American and he had grown up between Czechoslovakia and the United States. He lived, for example, in Chicago for more than five years after finishing high school and, after the interlude of World War I, he began his diplomatic career in Washington. He later continued to engage at the highest level with the West, serving as ambassador in London (left) for a decade and a half.
This romance with liberal democracies was accentuated with the Second World War, although it experienced some ups and downs. For example, when Masaryk resigned in protest at British tepidity during the Sudeten crisis and the Munich Agreement, which favored Germany over his country. However, a little later he joined the London government in exile as Foreign Secretary, a position that he would not abandon until his death a decade later.
His career therefore had close ties, or even roots, with the capitalist bloc. This propensity, which had led Masaryk to combat far-right Nazi totalitarianism in the war, also marked him out as an enemy of left-wing Stalinist totalitarianism after the conflict. A clear example of his incompatibility with the Soviet regime was evident when he returned to Prague to head the diplomatic portfolio in the multi-party National Front government.
In 1947, the United States offered Czechoslovakia the possibility of joining the Marshall Plan to contribute to postwar reconstruction. The invitation was received with enthusiasm by a man who, a year and a half earlier, when saying goodbye to the American troops who had helped reconquer western Bohemia, exclaimed: “We are a small country with a great tradition of freedom. […] God bless America and you, her children, who have fought so well to save the world.” However, as could be expected, the Kremlin strictly prohibited economic affiliation with Washington, as it would have undermined its expansionist plans.
Masaryk, who had gone to Moscow to talk together with Premier Gottwald, a cabinet colleague and political rival, declared devastated: "I went as a minister of a sovereign state, but I have returned as Stalin's lackey."
He was not wrong in the way in which the Red Tsar conceived the relationship with Czechoslovakia. A few months after that frustrating trip, Victorious February took place, which was how the Prague coup was named in the Marxist hemisphere.
To the surprise of many, Masaryk accepted President Benes' request to remain in the government, now ruthlessly led by Gottwald to Stalin's liking. It wasn't entirely a contradiction. Since the Red Army had liberated most of the country from the Nazis, Masaryk had dispelled the specter of the Soviet military presence becoming eternal – as was happening in the rest of Eastern Europe –, betting on appeasement with the communists, after of everything, backed by the ballot boxes.
His idea was to convince them that an independent Czechoslovakia did not represent a threat to the empire that the USSR was building, but rather a bridge to the West for the day when this resource was needed.
Despite this plausible explanation for his behavior, it was no less true that his hinge country strategy had failed miserably, considering setbacks as serious as the veto of the Marshall Plan, first, and the coup d'état later. The diplomat, in other words, had more than justified reasons to seriously question whether he was doing the right thing by being part of a cabinet that, on the contrary, perhaps he should denounce taking advantage of his media projection.
The fact is that, according to people close to him, in his last days, the head of Foreign Affairs seemed restless, and even with depressive symptoms. At the same time, adding more confusion about his final hours, it was also rumored that Masaryk was studying the possibility of fleeing to the West with the purpose of forming a government in exile.
And then, suddenly, his strange end occurred. It is still debated today whether it was a suicide, an accident or a murder. There are valid arguments for any of these versions. Some of them date back to Masaryk's own mass funeral and others to more recent dates.
After decades of officially confirming that it had been a suicide, in 2004 it was concluded at a forensic level, although not with judicial weight, that it was a homicide. Led by coroner Jiri Straus, the inquest noted that Masaryk fell on his feet from the bathroom window, as if he had tried to lessen the damage. He highlighted that the body was found two meters from the wall of the Cernín palace patio, which, according to the specialist, indicated that at least one person contributed to the minister's fall. This evidence, added to others such as nail marks found in the window opening, tipped the balance in favor of homicide.
Two years later, in 2006, a Russian journalist published that a certain Mikhail Illich Byelkin could have been the perpetrator, if what this former Soviet agent told the reporter's mother, also a spy, was to be believed. And in 2015, a Czech historian, Václava Jandečková, recounted the confession of Jan Bydžovský, supposedly in the pay of British intelligence, during an interrogation by the Czechoslovak secret police in the 1950s, although he later recanted. There are colleagues from Jandečková who doubt that the British had anything to do with Masaryk's death.
The most recent investigation took place between 2019 and 2021, and among the new developments was the statement recorded at the time by one of the first police officers to arrive at the scene, who noted that the body had already been moved when he showed up at the scene. the place. In the absence of clear evidence in one direction or another, the Masaryk case remains open as in the middle of the Cold War.
This text is part of an article published in number 543 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
