The Failure of President Benes

By SIDNEY Z. ELLER* TEN years have gone by since the iron cur- tain came down along the western border of Czechoslovakia; and twenty years since disturb- ances broke out in the Sudetenland which set in train the events leading to Munich. The Com- munist coup left behind a question which has not been satisfactorily answered so far : why did the Czechs, once so proud of their democracy, not fight for it in 1948? As time passes by, the query has shifted from the minds of commentators on current affairs to those of historians; and the more the historians wander over the ground, the more they converge on a figure of paramount im- portance: Eduard Benes, the second President of Czechoslovakia.

Twice in his life was this man confronted with the most arrogant totalitarian challenge to all he had stood for on the European political scene. In 1938 the defiance was served by Hitler, in 1948 by Stalin. Both times Benes took the final decision. In 1938 a fully mobilised army and a compact nation stood behind him, clamouring to fight; in 1948 an exasperated, indignant majority implored his leadership. On neither occasion did he stretch out his hand for the lance of St. Wenceslas, to lead his people into battle; he gave Way without striking a single blow. It has been said—in the British Parliament—that in similar circumstances nine out of ten Englishmen would have fought. I submit that in 1938 at least nine out of ten Czechs, and in 1948 at least six out of ten (depending on the vigour of leadership) would have fought for their democracy. But they never got the chance, owing to the utter failure of their leaders.

Why did President Benes, with whom the fate- ful decision rested on both occasions, not respond to the call of his people?

The answer must be sought in the character of the President. Both issues were too big to be determined solely by a cool weighing-up of pros and cons; the temperament, innate or acquired, • Lecturer in Modern History in University College, Dublin. of the man called upon to make the final decision was ultimately bound to prevail. And here lesser- known aspects of Benes's career furnish a valu- able clue. They show that Benes, though he had displayed a remarkable energy in the struggle for Czechoslovak independence during the First World War, was not a born fighter; and his rise to statesmanship did not train him to become one.

This rise was meteoric, but it was not entirely due to his merits. A high, helping hand guided and supported him. The Czechs were surprised when, in 1918, he became the first Minister for Foreign Affairs of their new republic. He was then an unknown young man of thirty-five, teacher in a secondary school in Prague, returning from exile with President Masaryk not only as a Cabinet Minister, but as the great favourite among the President's disciples. This dual position he was to fill for seventeen years. He had not needed to tread the arduous path of a politician fighting his way up from the bottom to attain a major governmental position. He had been catapulted into it, and kept in it, by the favour of his powerful protector.

From the beginning, the first President wanted Benes to be his successor. In 1920 Masaryk fell gravely ill. The constitution of the republic being just drafted at that time, he managed to have one of its articles modified so that the age required for candidates for the presidency was reduced from fifty to thirty-five years. This was an obvious Lex Benes, intended to enable the youthful Minister to succeed. The invalid recovered and continued in office, but from then on the in- escapable issue of the presidential succession lay like an incubus over the whole political life of Czechoslovakia. For the next fifteen years, from 1920 to 1935, Eduard Benes was waiting for his presidency.

The job of an heir-apparent may sometimes require the courage and daring of a warrior. When Hadrian, nephew and designated heir to the great Roman emperor Trajan, was preparing himself to take over the succession, he did so with the prospect of a fierce struggle before him. He ordered his physician to draw a circle in red ink on his chest right over his heart, so that he could kill himself with one sure stroke if defeated by his rivals on the battlefield. No such grim measures were necessary for Benes. The un- swerving attachment of President Masaryk upheld him in all the successive Czech governments, and with this high backing he was gradually able to eliminate all his potential rivals from the political scene.

There was, then, nothing in the career of Benes that would shape and sharpen his character into a combative disposition. On the contrary, he trained himself assiduously in the art of main- taining the internal affairs of Czechoslovakia unchanged, for in their stagnancy he saw the best chance of preserving his position as sole pre- tender to the presidency and, eventually, of achieving his cherished ambition. Accordingly, he set great store by negotiation and compromise, in which, with his outstanding gift for diplomacy, he acquired an undisputed mastery. Finally, when in 1935 Masaryk suffered a stroke and resigned, Benes was elected President practically un- opposed—except by the Sudeten Germans.

In those seventeen formative years he had be- come a European figure in statesmanship and a master of diplomacy, but not a fighter. His con- duct in February, 1948, bears the clear stamp of this deficiency. Munich had shown him that bar- gaining skill was of no avail in the face of totalitarianism. But he did not heed this lesson ten years later, and there was no one in Czechoslo- vakia, in that hour of supreme emergency, to take the command out of the hands of the defaulting President.

Czechoslovakia between the two World Wars bred no outstanding politicians, apart from the towering duumvirate of Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Benes. The Czech premiers, in particular, were conspicuous only by their anonymity. Most of them were elderly farmers, pre-1918 politicians of the Agrarian Party. The guiding motive in their selection for office seems to have been their mediocrity, which ensured that they would not endanger Benes's ambition to succeed the first President. A rigid electoral system kept all the Czech political parties (except the Communists) under the strict control of old, pre-1918 veterans who, clinging jealously to their power, were particularly vigilant over their parties' deputies in the parliament. Deputies had to pledge themselves to their party bosses to for- feit their mandate if they disagreed with the party's directives. Hardly any case of such for- feiture ever occurred. This could not fail to have a degrading effect on the quality and morale of the parliamentary body and, from the viewpoint of national leadership, it precluded any in- dependent and forceful tribunes of the people arising from the parliamentary benches.

Czech public life before the war therefore suffered from stagnation; the atmosphere was un- favourable to the natural growth of political talents. This latent crisis manifested itself when, in the Munich tragedy, the government and par- liament of Prague gladly abandoned their re- sponsibilities to President Benes. They could comfort themselves with the excuse that, after all. the trouble with Hitler concerned external affairs in which they had been trained for twenty years to accept Benes's judgments unconditionally. Soott afterwards, however, in the Second World War, the crisis of the Czech leadership assumed dramatic proportions. The old generation of party politicians vanished in the turmoil of Nazi occupation; and there was no one to replace them. The resistance movement did produce capable and valiant men, but they could not acquire wider popularity because of the underground secrecy of their work. The best of them, besides, perished before the liberation. No better was the situation in exile. When President Benes, having escaped to England, formed in London a government of emigres, the personali- ties he was able to muster were second- and third- rate even by Czech pre-war standards. The aged Mgr. Sramek, founder of the Czech Catholic Party, was the only statesman among them; after the war, however, he was rapidly fading away. Jan Masaryk, the most popular member of the London team, became a politician only during the war, and in spite of himself, out of a sense of 'patriotic duty; he never took politics very seriously, and the Czechs never took him very seriously, as a politician.

Under these conditions, the old pattern of the Czech governmental set-up was revived in • London in miniature. Benes reverted to his for- mer authority, sole shining star in a dim firma- ment. When he returned to Prague in 1945, . triumphant and vindicated after the Munich dis- aster, his prestige was higher than ever. But the London team he brought with him, though glori- fied and self-glorified as liberators, had not grown in political stature. Mediocrity (except for Mgr. Sramck and Jan Masaryk) and confident submis- sion to the authority of the President were their common features. They had been lifted to their positions in London by his favour and they con- tinued to be a grateful, dependent and obedient crowd. .They had been taught in London that in major political issues the President did not like dissenters and that he resented contradiction. To keep his favour, they left major decisions to him, their main concern being to make of them- selves a new caste ' of permanent party bosses similar to that ruling in Prague before the war.

They succeeded astonishingly. They managed to push into the background the heroes. of the home resistance and to seize control of the re- vived democratic parties, including—in the old, pre-war way—control of parliament and of the press. The first post-war Government, constituted at Prague in 1945, comprised twelve former exiles from London, six Communists front Moscow and four members of the home front. All the four members of the last group, however, were from Stovakia; they had to be taken into the Cabinet because the democratic Slovaks in exile had been few in number and very unrepresentative. Not a single one .of the outstanding figures of the Czech home resistance was admitted to the Government, Having achieved this, the London men engaged busily in multicoloured party politics. Divided over these and abdicating their judgment in the highest State issues to the wisdom of the President, they were no match for the dynamic, unscrupulous and cleverly planned ex- pansion of the Communists.

Such was the situation in February, 1948, when the Communist revolt broke out. The challenge could have been met. Had the democratic members of the Government promptly closed their ranks in a collective stand, they would have been backed from the start, according to sober estimates, by at least 60 per cent., perhaps 70 per cent,, of the population. Had they rallied their own party supporters, appealed to the people and called upon the loyal elements, then still in a majority, among the army and police, they could have swung the balance. Although the price might have been civil war, the angry Czechs were prepared for it, by three years of Communist perfidy. But the Ministers did nothing. They quietly offered their resignations to the President and left the problem confidently in his hands.

Nobody could have arrested, single-handed, the tide of the insurrection without adequate backing by physical force. Had Benes acted as alertly in calling upon the available armed forces as Thomas Masaryk had done in 1921, when faced with Czechoslovakia's first experience of a Bol- shevik rebellion, democracy could still have been saved. But he did not. He tried to compromise. He spent five critical days negotiating, issuing bulletins about his consultations instead of the appeal to arms that his people desperately awaited. In the end he capitulated to the Com- munist demands, appointed the totalitarian Gott- wald Cabinet and thus legalised the rebellion with his constitutional authority. By then all hope for successful counter-action had been lost. The people, abandoned by their leaders, had already been crushed and vanquished by mass arrests and the wholesale terror of the Communist 'Action Committees.'

Democracy in Czechoslovakia had lived. If the Czechs did not fight for it, it is because they never got a chance. The failure of their leader- ship was so complete that it is hardly an exag- geration to say that it was, ultimately, not the Communists, but its own leaders that brought the Czech democracy to its inglorious and lamented end.