Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  This fragile strategy was undermined when, on March 2, the ambassador to Washington, Juraj Slavík, resigned and in a dramatic statement denounced the Gottwald government. Masaryk and Slavík were friends; the Communists were sure to hold the resignation against the foreign minister, and they did. From that day, in addition to his longtime bodyguard, he was shadowed by two rough-looking figures from the Interior Ministry. Masaryk warned Davenport to leave the country; he feared that she would be arrested, perhaps on charges of being a U.S. spy. Reluctantly she agreed and made plane reservations for the seventh of March. The night before, he visited her apartment. She later wrote:

  He came at half-past eight. He looked absolutely ghastly. All those days he had an exhausted, claylike pallor, but that evening he was even more grey of face. He had come from Sezimovo Ústí where he had lunched with Beneš and spent the afternoon. He told me nothing of what had happened there. . . . I saw only that he was distraught. He muttered, “Beneš . . .”

  Masaryk was unable to finish the sentence. The couple sat for a time and did not talk much. He told her that, upon her arrival in London, she should stay close to her hotel. Soon, within a few days, she would hear from him. She was to tell their English friend Bruce Lockhart of his intention to escape. The hour grew late, and Masaryk rose and struggled into the old cinnamon-colored overcoat that he had been wearing on those wintry days. They said their farewells; she listened as he trudged down the stairway, then watched from a window as his guards fell in beside him on his short journey back up the slope to Černín Palace.

  GOTTWALD’S POLITICAL NETWORK had tentacles long enough to reach the Czechoslovak legation in Belgrade. The day before the coup, my father’s deputy, Arnošt Karpišek, had presented him with a draft telegram signed by members of the embassy’s newly formed action committee, pledging their support for Stalin and the Communist Party. Karpišek asked the ambassador to forward the telegram to Prague and to include his own name at the bottom to make it official. Red-faced and furious, my father crumpled the paper, threw it away, and reminded Karpišek that the embassy’s sole loyalties were to Beneš and the Constitution.

  When word arrived that Gottwald had come out on top in his street fight with the democratic ministers, my father’s first instinct was to find help. He contacted Charles Peake, the British ambassador in Belgrade, and asked to meet with him privately. Both men took precautions to avoid being overseen. My father said that our family might be forced to seek asylum in Great Britain; he did not think that he could, nor would he want, to remain with the Communists in power. He didn’t fear Gottwald but worried that more brutal elements might soon take control. In his visit to Prague earlier that month, he had told the prime minister that the country might be better served in Belgrade by a Communist. Gottwald replied that a UN commission was being formed to find a solution to the violent dispute involving Kashmir, a resource-rich province claimed by both India and Pakistan. Czechoslovakia was one of the commission’s members. Gottwald, seconded by Masaryk, suggested that my father might be a good person to represent the country on that panel.

  That night the British ambassador sent a “Most Immediate—Top Secret” cable to London:

  [Korbel] and his family are in great distress. He tells me that he is now being closely watched and followed when he leaves the Embassy. . . . Since I took up this post eighteen months ago, I have observed that he has been uncompromisingly pro-British in season and out of season, and he has never failed to provide me with any information . . . he thought would be of use to my government. . . . I have found him in every way decent, honest, respectable, and I have no hesitation in recommending him to you as a particularly deserving case.

  Peake’s telegram was treated with urgency. “What have we done?” wrote Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin across the top of the cable. Within days, the British government agreed to issue visas for our immediate family. However, the United Nations was still debating the terms and conditions under which the Kashmir commission would operate, and my father worried that Gottwald’s offer would be withdrawn. He took solace in the fact that Jan Masaryk remained as foreign minister.

  ON MARCH 7, Czechoslovakia’s new government sponsored a celebration of the ninety-eighth anniversary of T. G. Masaryk’s birth. The speakers, most of whom were Communists, told the familiar stories of his exploits and made the absurd claim that, had the elder Masaryk still been alive, he would have cheered the recent developments. Following the speeches, a group of cabinet ministers proceeded to Lány, where they gratified official photographers by posing at the founder’s grave site.

  One minister did not arrive until after the others had left.

  There is no doubt that Jan Masaryk visited his father’s grave that afternoon. Less certain is whether he did so in the company of a private secretary, as the secretary later asserted; of his niece, as the niece later claimed; or only of his bodyguard, as the bodyguard said was the case. The foreign minister may have remained for only five minutes, or he may have stayed for an hour. He may have engaged in soulful reflections resulting in a momentous decision—or he might simply have performed a filial duty.

  Masaryk knew by then that Davenport was safely en route to London; he had sent a friend to the airport to make sure she departed without incident. The night before, he had been unable to put into words how much his meeting earlier that day had depressed him. He had gone to Sezimovo Ústí to ask what Beneš intended and what he should do. Did the president have a plan? Was there anything further the foreign minister could do to honor the pledge he had made to his father? The old president had not liked the inquiries; he had become excited and angry, telling Masaryk that he did not care what he did, that he should solve his own problems. The situation was impossible, came the reply. Jan said he could not continue; he intended to leave.

  The Masaryks, son and father

  At least that is one account of the meeting. A second highlights instead a discussion of Drtina’s suicide attempt, which Masaryk is said to have dismissed as the kind of thing “a servant girl would do.” “Suicide,” he reportedly declared, “doesn’t absolve anybody of his responsibilities. It’s a very poor escape.” In that version, there is no confrontation with Beneš but instead a suggestion by Masaryk to a third party, Dr. Oskar Klinger, that he and Klinger leave the country together. The doctor who treated both Masaryk and Beneš was the fourth person present at the March 6 meeting, along with the two principals and Mrs. Benešová. This second description of what transpired was given by Klinger to the Czech-born English journalist Henry Brandon. The first, also originating with him, was given to Davenport. Curiously, the two accounts neither directly contradict each other nor overlap.

  On Tuesday, Masaryk had cause to see Beneš once more. The newly designated Polish ambassador had arrived in Prague and wished to present his credentials. Masaryk and Clementis accompanied him to Sezimovo Ústí for a brief meeting with the president. Jan stayed behind to talk with Beneš in his study; he left about fifteen minutes later in relatively high spirits, telling jokes to the secretaries, exhibiting his charm.

  Back in his flat, Masaryk, who was still nagged by bronchitis and high blood pressure, napped for two hours. Upon awakening, he conducted routine business and reviewed his schedule for the coming day. He was slotted to attend the reopening of parliament and a meeting of the Polish-Czechoslovak Friendship Society, for which he would have to draft a short speech. According to what his secretary would later tell police, Masaryk also planned to leave that night for a two-week stay in the German village of Gräfenberg, a spa famed for its natural healing techniques. There was no mention of how he was to get there.

  After the secretary left, the butler brought in a dinner of roast chicken, potatoes, and salad. When the dishes were cleared, Masaryk asked that the bedroom window be opened and that two bottles of mineral water and one of beer be placed on his table. “Don’t forget,” he said, “wake me at 8:30!”

  F
or the next hour or two, the foreign minister continued with his paperwork, filled an ashtray with cigarette stubs, and wrote his 126-word speech including the line, “We . . . look with open eyes towards the future.” He may also have read, for there were familiar books close to hand: The Good Soldier Švejk and his father’s Bible. Then he took two tablets of Seconal and retired for the night.

  AROUND SUNRISE, JAN MASARYK’S body was found in the ministry courtyard, several yards out from the wall. He was partly clothed, his unmarked face a mask of fright. Far above, the bathroom window gaped open; inside, the night table—which contained a loaded revolver—was overturned. The contents of the medicine chest were scattered and smashed; there were shards of broken glass in the bath, one soiled pillow in the tub, a second beneath the sink. Closet doors were open, as were dresser drawers. A search of the rooms revealed Masaryk’s freshly drafted speech, written in pencil, but no farewell note. Some witnesses claimed that the Bible was closed, others that it was open to a suggestive and freshly underlined passage from Saint Paul: “Those that are Christ’s have crucified their own flesh.” A forensic examination uncovered traces of paint beneath his fingernails, a long scratch on his abdomen, and two sleeping pills half dissolved in his stomach. His heels were shattered and the bones splintered; someone had placed the fragments in a small pile. Officials rushed to secure the scene. Within hours, any mystery about what had happened had apparently been resolved. The Communist authorities declared that Jan Masaryk had been driven to take his own life because of Western criticisms. The time of death had been in the early hours of March 10.

  The bath in Masaryk’s apartment

  CTK PHOTO (Michael Kamaryt)

  30

  Sands Through the Hourglass

  March 12, 1948: The queue of mourners stretched for two miles or more up the steep hill to Černín Palace. They filed by four abreast, students and factory workers, teachers and farmers, to pay final respects to their Honza, the irrepressible Jan. Candle flames kept watch at each corner of the open casket; flowers were everywhere; so, too, were the secret police.

  March 13: The nation’s largest funeral since that of the founder, T. G. Masaryk. Mammoth crowds gathered along sidewalks and staircases to look on as the procession made its way down the castle heights, across the bridge, past storefronts draped with black bunting, to Wenceslas Square, and up the steps to the cavernous National Museum. The public’s grief could not have been more heartfelt; still, official hypocrisy would rule the day. The ten and a half years between the funerals of Masaryk father and son had been marked by war, occupation, renewal, and disintegration; a series of trials and transitions leading—where? In 1937, when the elder man had died, the dream of a democratic and humane Czechoslovakia still lived; now that vision had been distorted into something dark and cold.

  For Klement Gottwald the ceremony was less a solemn rite than a coronation. No one inside the country dared point to the irony that he, of all people, would preside on this occasion. Perhaps only Jan could have found apt words, for the Communist had come both to praise Masaryk and to bury democracy. Yet Gottwald might have felt a tinge of unease. The murder, if murder it had been, was not (or probably not) his doing. A month earlier, he had been on the edge of bungling away his party’s position, wasting years of preparation. Due to his adversaries’ mistakes and Masaryk’s death, the path to power was now clear—but Gottwald was both boss and underling. He had often expressed his belief that communism was compatible with Czech nationalism and that his country could have a workers’ revolution distinct from any other. Stalin had grown impatient with such talk, and if Soviet agents could murder Masaryk and call it suicide (attributed officially to “insomnia and nervous disorder”), they could do the same to Gottwald. But they would not have to. When Moscow played the tune, he would dance.

  Funeral procession, March 13, 1948

  CTK PHOTO

  Among the officials present was Vlado Clementis, the successor to Jan as foreign minister. It would be his duty to speak at the internment ceremony in Lány. Clementis had been one of two cabinet ministers summoned to Masaryk’s living quarters when the body was discovered. What had he thought when he entered the apartment and found it in disarray? He had searched for a note and seen nothing except the speech Jan had prepared and some personal keepsakes that he would later send to Marcia Davenport. What did he think when he looked at the narrow bathroom opening through which the fleshy sixty-year-old had supposedly squeezed, ignoring the more accessible window in the bedroom? Had the man really chosen to end his life in the middle of the night while barefoot and in a mismatched set of pajamas? Had he decided to throw himself out of a window barely ten days after Drtina had, with embarrassing results, done the same? Why, if death was his decision, had he not used his revolver or quadrupled his dose of sleeping pills? Was Clementis troubled by the speed and sloppiness of the so-called police investigation? Did he have doubts about the official version of events? There can be no question that he mourned Masaryk’s death. His idea of communism was different from that being dictated by Moscow. This was a tribute to Clementis’s character and (as will shortly be described) a reason for his own demise.

  The first reaction of many of Jan’s friends and acquaintances had been to accept that he had committed suicide. They didn’t know—for they were not told—of the countervailing evidence but were well aware of Masaryk’s tendency toward gloom. My father learned of the death while on an excursion in Yugoslavia with a group of Czechoslovak sightseers. His inclination, based on his most recent encounters with Jan, was to think that a man so careworn might well have been driven to take his own life. My mother felt otherwise; she knew of their friend’s aversion to pain and thought that even if he had decided to kill himself, he would never have done so in the manner described.

  Reporting to Washington on the afternoon of the tragedy, Ambassador Steinhardt speculated that Jan had reached a breaking point and could not go on allowing the Communists to exploit his family name. He suggested that the foreign minister had been weighed down by depression and that the visit to his father’s grave had been to explain what he had decided to do—perhaps even to ask permission. He might have hoped that his death would be seen as the kind of eloquent protest he had failed to voice publicly. “In his desperation,” mused Steinhardt, “he appears to have turned to suicide as the only means of expressing his disapproval.” Bruce Lockhart, the English diplomat whom Davenport had been asked to contact in London, held a similar view:

  What he thought or felt [at the grave site] no one will know, but of one thing I am sure. The knowledge that his father’s birthday was being celebrated hypocritically and for purely opportunistic reasons by the men who were undoing his work must have been agony to Jan, and I think it probable that during that lonely vigil he made his decision. I do not doubt that he had made his plans to escape. I also do not doubt that when the time for action came he preferred the simpler way.

  By this point in their long history, Czechs had grown accustomed to official explanations that they did not for a minute take seriously. Many citizens, perhaps most, suspected that Masaryk had been murdered. Less than a month after the alleged suicide, Steinhardt too was having second thoughts. “I cannot escape the feeling that the repeated rumors . . . might have some basis,” he wrote. He was puzzled, in particular, by the absence of a farewell message. “Masaryk was a showman and knew the value of such a statement. Nor do I believe that there was . . . [one] which has been suppressed or destroyed, for Masaryk was too shrewd and knew too well what was going on not to have made certain that at least a copy would be in the possession of Marcia Davenport or myself.”

  From almost the moment Jan began falling, the battle of perceptions was launched. The government produced a fifty-page illustrated tribute to the deceased hero, recounting his career and repeating the theory that he had jumped because of harsh criticism from his supposed friends in the West. In England, Dr. Klinger, Masaryk
’s physician, told the New York Times that Jan had arranged for a plane to whisk them away on the morning of his death, so that together they might begin a new campaign against communism. No evidence for that notion has been found, nor has a second part of Klinger’s story been corroborated—that Masaryk became embroiled in a shootout, killing four of his would-be assassins before losing his own life. Klinger supposedly had an informant, one of his patients, who claimed to have seen coffins being ferried from the ministry that night.

  I believe that Masaryk was murdered, probably by Stalin’s agents. I can’t prove this and would hardly be shocked should conclusive evidence one day surface to the contrary. But the Soviets had a motive, especially if they thought Masaryk was on the verge of flight. He may have been overheard discussing plans to leave, whether on wiretaps in his apartment or when meeting with Beneš in the president’s study. The Communists could not realistically put Jan into prison. They could hardly fire him and still claim, for public purposes, that they had his support. Suicide, blamed on the West, was the ideal solution. Also pointing to murder was the foreign minister’s businesslike behavior on his last night, the signs of fear and struggle in his bedroom and bath, the lack of a professional investigation, the government’s rush to judgment, the absence of any last words, the half-digested sleeping pills, and the fact that he had taken time to draft a speech for the following day.