Hrdina a nepriateľ
The hero and the enemy

Masaryk and the Slovak issue

Summary/Abstract: The author shows how the perception of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937) by the Slovak society was created and has been changing in the course of history and how it was influencing the Slovak milieu. He dates Masaryk’s contacts and disputes with Slovak intellectuals already at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time, he had a great influence on the young generation of Slovak liberals grouped around the “Hlas” journal. Masaryk was widely respected in Slovakia as the founder and first president of the Czechoslovak Republic. A major change occurred with the demise of the First Republic in the autumn of 1938, and particularly with the birth of the independent Slovak State in March 1939. The power in Slovakia was taken over by Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party which, according to the author, introduced negative ideological deformations into the assessment of Masaryk’s personality and historical role. Its members depicted Masaryk as an enemy of the Slovaks, who had not abided by the Pittsburgh Agreement, had given orders to shoot at Slovak workers, had been responsible for the death of General Milan Rastislav Štefánik in 1919, etc. After 1948, the propaganda machine of the ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia adopted some of these negative stereotypes,its official historical interpretation of the pre-war Czechoslovak Republicas a bourgeois state also including a condemnation of its representatives, including Masaryk, who was labelled an agent of imperialism in the 1950s. The author claims that consequences of the dual ideological deformation still exist in Slovakia,supporting his statement by, for example, the fact that Masaryk’s name and other forms of his presentation (statues, busts, names of streets and institutions, etc.) are almost absent in the public space.

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