Was Svejk a Whig in Disguise?
Those familiar with Czech political history can almost recite the Whig version of events in their sleep: the oppressed Czech people waged a struggle first for autonomy and then for independence from the Habsburgs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in 1918 Tomas Masaryk and his loyal minions Edvard Benes and Milan Stefanik founded Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in interwar East Central Europe; following the triple tragedy of Munich, the war, and the Communist coup d’etat, the Czech people were relegated to forty years of domination by a Communist regime controlled from Moscow. In 1989 the oppressed Czech people, this time led by Vaclav Havel and his younger and more numerous loyal minions, conquered communism through the purity of their moral purpose. Despite the best efforts of Havel and others loyal to the idea of Czechoslovak unity, the Republic foundered in 1992 on the rocks of resurgent Slovak nationalism. Throughout it all, the Czech love of democracy and fr
