Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [150]
Masaryk was the son of a farm manager for big estates. He was born in 1850, just after the revolutions of 1848 ignited nationalism throughout central Europe. Pushed by his ambitious mother, he decided early on to escape rural life. Through sheer determination he got to the University of Vienna to study philosophy. He was a sober, hardworking, priggish young man with a striking confidence in his own opinions. At his first university posting he caused a sensation by disagreeing with a senior professor. When he moved into journalism and then politics, he showed the same propensity to challenge authority.7
When the war started, Masaryk slowly came to the conclusion that Austria-Hungary no longer made sense and that the future for Czechoslovakia (he assumed from the first that it would include the Slovak lands) lay in independence, possibly under Russian sponsorship. (That Slavs would work together was a hope he pursued until his death.) By 1915 he was safely in Switzerland. His family, unfortunately, were stuck in Prague. His wife, an American, suffered a nervous breakdown, from which she never really recovered, his eldest daughter was imprisoned, and his son Jan was conscripted into the Austrian army. Masaryk moved on to Britain, where he spent almost two years teaching at the University of London and making friends with a range of influential people, from diplomats to opinion makers such as Wickham Steed of The Times.8
The overthrow of the tsar in February of 1917 drew Masaryk to St. Petersburg. He urged the shaky provisional government to renew its attack on the Austrian armies and worked to transform Czech prisoners of war into an army that would fight side by side with the Russians. The Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 and Lenin’s decision to sue for peace made those plans impossible. The Bolsheviks were nonetheless happy to send the Czech Legion, now 50,000 strong, on its way to the Western Front. The only feasible route was a roundabout one, six thousand miles on the Trans-Siberian railway to the Pacific port of Vladivostok and then by boat to France. With assurances from Bolshevik leaders, Masaryk left first, in March 1918, confident that his troops would be right behind him. Partway across Siberia, however, the Czech Legion clashed with Hungarians heading west to join the Bolsheviks. The fighting spread and the Czechs found themselves at war with the Bolsheviks. By the end of the summer Czech forces were effectively in control of most of the railway and, by chance, the gold reserves of the tsarist government. By this time the war was winding down in Europe, and the Czechs were more useful where they were. The Allied forces that had landed at Vladivostok in August might well want to move westward against the Bolsheviks. Caught up now in the Allied intervention in the Russian civil war, the homesick soldiers were condemned to another two years in Siberia. Beneš was not sorry to see this; indeed, he extracted a promise from the grateful British to recognize his Czechoslovak National Council as the official representative of Czechs and Slovaks. Masaryk agreed. “The dear boys will have to stay a while alongside their allies,” he said as he sailed off from Vladivostok to the United States to gather support.9
Masaryk crisscrossed the country—Chicago, Washington, Boston, Cleveland, wherever there were Czech and Slovak immigrants. In New York he lectured the experts of the Inquiry on self-determination in eastern Europe. He talked to representatives from Austria-Hungary’s other nationalities about working together in freedom and friendship. At a huge meeting in Carnegie Hall, he and Paderewski spoke of their profound admiration for each other and their common struggle against oppression. Three