Slovakia 1918-1929 Slovakia 1939-1945






Slovakia within Czechoslovakia, 1929-1939



This chapter will only deal with events, developments affecting Slovakia; for a description of the history of Czechoslovakia click here.

Slovak Participation in Czecho-Slovak Democracy . Governments frequently changed; the cabinets appointed in February 1929, December 1929, October 1931, June 1935 and September 1938 included Slovak ministers. When a court, without sufficient evidence, convicted Professor Vojtech Tuka, member of parliament for the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party (HSLS) of high treason (he was, justifiedly, suspected of having spied for Hungary), Slovak ministers Jozef Tiso and Ludovit Laba, also of the HSLS, resigned from office. In the elections held in October 1929, the HSLS emerged as the strongest party in Slovakia with 28 %, followed by the Agrarians with 19.5 % and the Communists with 10.7 %. In elections held in May 1935, the HSLS gained 30.12 % of the votes in Slovakia, followed by the Agrarians (17.6 %) and the bloc formed by the Hungarian National Party and the Hungarian Christian Socialist Party.
Politically, the Slovaks were split in two camps; those who unconditionally approved of Czechoslovakia, and those who wanted to see an autonomous Slovakia within a federal Czechoslovak state. Many political parties, among them the Agrarians, Communists, Social Democrats, had branches and competed for election in all of Czechoslovakia. The HSLS, the smaller Slovak National Party, the Karpatendeutsche Partei (Carpathian German Party, representing the German minority in Slovakia) and the Hungarian National Party represented Slovakian interests, the latter two the interests of ethnic minorities residing within Slovakia. The political parties demanding political autonomy for Slovakia, with the temporary exception of the HSLS, formed part of the opposition; many of these pro-autonomy parties, including a wing within the HSLS, rejected parliamentary democracy.
The HSLS strove to achieve a higher degree of political autonomy; the first such proposal of August 1922 having not been implemented, the HSLS made a second such proposal in May 1930. Again it failed to gain a parliamentary majority. Despite the fact that the HSLS participated occasionally in the formation of coalition governments, as in 1929, the party was suspected of being separatist, and in August 1933 Andrej Hlinka, the founder of the HSLS, was barred from publishing books. With the Great Depression hitting Slovakia much worse than the Czech lands, dissatisfaction in Slovakia grew. In 1936 the Hungarial National Party and the Hungarian Christian Social Party merged. In June 1938 demonstrations demanded the autonomy of Slovakia; in August the Hlinka Guard was established as a militia loyal to the HSLS. In October 1938 the HSLS adopted the Zilina Manifesto, in which she formulated her reiterated demand for the autonomy of Slovakia. In November 1938, the Slovak branches of six Czechoslovak political parties, most notably the Agrarians, declared that the HSLS would be the only representative of the will of the Slovak nation; in December 1938 the Slovak National Party merged with the HSLS.

The Slovak Economy . In November 1929 Czechoslovakia introduced the gold standard. This move signaling the strwength of her economy coincided with the Wall Street Crash; unemployment rose. On May 25th 1931, the police fired at participants in a demonstration in Kosice, organized by the Communist Party. In 1931, unemployment rose shrply, industrial production declined; Slovakia was hit harder by the Great Depression than the Czech lands, an aspect exacerbated by the fact that the Prague administration focussed on alleviating the situation in the Czech lands. While unemployment decreased in all of Czechoslovakia in 1931-1936, it increased in Slovakia. Slovakia registered high emigration figures (202,000 for the years 1919-1936). The closure of factories in 1932 and in 1933 occasionally caused public protest, on two occasions of which persons were shot.
In 1931, a National Economics Institute for Slovakia and Sub-Carparthian Ruthenia was established, which produced proposals for a policy leading to the industrialization of Slovakia. In 1937 the Slovak Technical University in Kosice was founded.

Slovak Culture . Matica Slovenska assembled in May 1932; this society of Slovak linguists elected a new committee without the participation of Czechs and of pro-Czechoslovak Slovaks. The Slovak intellectual community at a congress in June 1932 declared her support for political autonomy. In August 1933 the Slovak church celebrated her millenium. In June 1934 Czechs as well as Slovaks celebrated the success of the Czechoslovak football team, which lost in the world cup final in Rome to host Italy.






EXTERNAL
LINKS 		From Wall Street Crash to Munich, Chapter 9 of the History of Slovakia by Prof. Jozef Komornik, Univ. Bratislava
History, from Eastern Slovakia Genealogy
Teodor Münz, Catholic Theologians and the National Question (1939-1945), in : Tibor Pichler, Jana Gaparkova (ed.), Language, Values and the Slovak Nation, posted by CRVP
Article Slovakia, Jozef Tiso, Slovak People's Party, Vojtech Tuka, Slovak National Party, Andrej Hlinka, Milan Hodza, Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, Profiles of the main leaders of the Clerofascist Regime, posted by Prometheus Society
DOCUMENTS Virtual Archive of East European History, click State Collections : Czechoslovakia. Documents in English
REFERENCE Julius Bartl et al., Slovak History, Chronology & Lexicon, Wauconda, Illinois : Bolchazy-Carducci 2002
Peter A. Toma, Slovakia in the Pre-Munich Czechoslovak RepublicI, pp.78-120 in : Peter A. Toma, Dusan Kovac, Slovakia from Samo to Dzurinda, Stanford : Hoover Institution Press 2001 [G]
Ehemaliges Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte (ed.), Die Vertreibung der Deutschen Bevölkerung aus der Tschechoslowakei (The Expulsion of the German population from Czechoslovakia), München : Weltbild 1994 [G]
C.A. MacArtney, Hungary and her Successors, 1919-1937 (1937) posted by Hungarian History, online book
Edward Chaszar, Decision in Vienna. The Czechoslovak-Hungarian Border Dispute of 1938, (1978) posted by Hungarian History, online book
Charles Wojatsek, From Trianon to the First Vienna Arbitral Award (1981), posted by Hungarian History, online book


This page is part of World History at KMLA
First posted on April 16th 2006, last revised on June 5th 2006

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