Šťastný sté výročie!

Today marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia. I did thankfully manage to celebrate a little bit yesterday by going to a concert by the Kenwood Symphony Orchestra, playing Romanian and Hungarian folk songs as well as a rendition of Eugen Suchoň’s Psalm of the Sub-Carpathian Land.

I know several monarchists who see the occasion as a cause not for celebration, but for grief – however, that is a sentiment I cannot share. Given the horrific atrocities they committed upon Slavic bodies in the War, I can no more lament the partition of the Habsburg Monarchy than I can lament the fall of the Soviet Union, despite the very obvious political downsides to each. (Historical revisionism regarding the Great War does rather lose its charm when one goes to church with Arab-Americans, Armenians, Pontic Greeks and Rusins whose families remember the Central Powers as existential foes.) And, like the fall of the Soviet Union, that of the Habsburg Monarchy happened quite suddenly and with little to no thought beforehand of its taking place. As Daniel Miller put it in his biography of Antonín Švehla: ʻDespite the tensions within the Monarchy, few politicians from any of Austria-Hungary’s constituent nations were calling for the dissolution of the realm as the guns of August 1914 sounded.ʼ The republicanism of Masaryk and the Russophile politics of Kramář were not particularly popular even among the first Czechoslovak statesmen (including Švehla) to inherit this republic, in its way every bit as accidental as the independent Kazakhstan birthed around this same time in 1990.

All that having been said, though, this most accidental republic did have a spiritual mission to the world. I say this in part from my own residual conservative agrarian-distributist sympathies, of course. As Chesterton himself acknowledged in his own writings, the greatest hope for distributism was the peaceful peasant revolution underway in countries like Romania, Yugoslavia and – yes – Czechoslovakia, under activists and statesmen like Švehla and Hodža. I also point to this spiritual mission, in acknowledgement of the Orthodox holy men who were spiritually-formed in this interwar period: Bishop Saint Gorazd of Prague and Saint Iov the Venerable of Ugolka.

Neither of these developments is to be greatly wondered at. The lands of the Czechs, the Slovaks and the Carpatho-Rusins rest in a transitional area between the Christian civilisation of the West and the Christian civilisation of the East – even just as they lie on the dialect continuum between the West and East Slavic language groups. These were the lands where Saints Cyril and Methodius first took up preaching in the late 800s AD. Are we therefore to be surprised, that the pent-up spiritual energies repressed by four hundred years of a Teutonic captivity should be released with independence in the form of advocacy on behalf of the peasantry, and in the form of a renewal of the Orthodox Christian witness?

One other thing to note – the intellectual side of Orthodox Christian development also owes a great debt of gratitude to the interwar Czechoslovak state, as a haven and a refuge for Tsarist and White refugees fleeing the Soviets. Among these were a talented Prince, Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoi, whose contributions to the field of linguistics have been unrivalled (being a particularly strong influence on a certain Dr Noam Chomsky); as well as a father and son: Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky and Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky, whose combined contributions to Orthodox religious philosophy and intellectual development cannot possibly be understated. The reasons for this solicitude may be stated in a twofold way, though the two in fact are related. Firstly, the Czechs and Slovaks have always had a certain public pan-Slavist, Russophile streak that has been absent among, for example, the Poles. We see this also in the work of people like Karel Škorpil and Konstantin Jiriček in the newly-independent Kingdom of Bulgaria. And secondly, the Czechs were the first and most eager to turn to Byzantine concepts of statecraft as part of their growing Slavic awareness – their friendliness to the Russian white émigrés may also thus be seen in this light.

It is a complex and multifaceted heritage for so short a time-frame, between the end of the Great War in 1918 and the occupation by the Nazis in 1939. It is very far from being one worthy of outright dismissal. It is in such a mind, and in memory of people like Saint Gorazd, Saint Iov, Švehla, Hodža, Kramář, Lossky père et fils and Trubetskoi, that I for one can heartily wish the Czechs and Slovaks a hearty ‘šťastný sté výročieʼ on this, their hundredth national day of independence.