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Czechoslovakia Others
The roughly 6 percent of the population who are neither Czech
nor Slovak have had an uneven history in the postwar era
(see
fig. 12). The highly centralized rule of the KSC undermined the
political leverage that the First Republic's multiparty politics
had permitted to ethnic minorities. Beyond this, however, the
sheer decrease in the German and Ukrainian populations of
Czechoslovakia would have limited their influence in any event.
The events of the late 1960s brought calls for reform from
ethnic minorities. The government's response was Constitutional
Act No. 144 (October 1968), which defined the status of ethnic
groups in Czechoslovakia and acknowledged the full political and
cultural rights of legally recognized minorities. Minorities were
granted the right, with state approval, to their own cultural
organizations. The emphasis has been on cultural activities;
minority organizations have had no right to represent their
members in political affairs.
In the 1980s, Hungarians were the largest enumerated minority
ethnic group. In 1984 approximately 590,000 Hungarians
(concentrated in southern Slovakia) made up 11 percent of
Slovakia's population. Despite significant anti-Hungarian
sentiment in Slovakia, the postwar exchange of Slovaks in Hungary
for Hungarians in Slovakia met with only limited success; the
proportion of Hungarians in the population has changed little
since 1930 (see
table 4, Appendix A).
Although Hungarians were a distinct minority of the total
population, they were highly visible in the border regions of
Slovakia. There, Hungarians constituted nearly half the
population of some districts. Furthermore, 20 percent lived in
exclusively Hungarian settlements. Given Hungary's long
domination of Slovakia, Hungarian-Slovak relations have not been
easy; the two groups are separated by substantial linguistic and
cultural differences. In 1968 some Hungarians in Slovakia called
for reincorporation into Hungary. This was apparently a minority
view; Hungarian Warsaw Pact troops entering Czechoslovakia in
1968 encountered as much hostility from Hungarians in Slovakia as
they did from the rest of the population.
Before their relocation in 1945, Germans outnumbered Czechs
in both the Krusne Hory and the Sudeten Mountains. Over 3 million
Germans were included in the First Republic, constituting the
largest German community in a non-German state. They were
intensely pan-German and aggressively nationalistic. Their
inclusion in the First Republic precipitated massive protests.
Throughout the interwar period, Sudeten Germans were acutely
aware of their minority status within Czechoslovakia; they found
the contrast with their former preeminence galling.
The large, often unabashedly secessionist German minority
ultimately proved to be the undoing of the First Republic
(see Munich
, ch. 1). With their expulsion, Czechoslovakia lost over
one-fifth of its population. Some 165,000 Germans escaped
deportation and remained scattered along the country's western
border in the former Sudetenland. Through the mid-1970s, Germans
represented a declining proportion of the population; younger
Germans increasingly were assimilated into Czech society or
emigrated to the West. Even those Germans who were not expelled
after World War II were not permitted to hold Czechoslovak
citizenship until 1953.
In 1968-69 Germans demanded more German-language publications
and mandatory German-language instruction in areas having a
substantial German minority. The 1968 Constitutional Act No. 144
recognized the Germans' legal status as an ethnic minority for
the first time since World War II.
Poles (approximately 71,000 in 1984) were concentrated in the
Ostrava mining region on the northern border. In addition to a
large community of resident Poles, a substantial number commuted
across the border from Poland to work or to take advantage of the
relative abundance of Czechoslovak consumer goods. Official
policies toward the Poles (resident or not) have attempted to
limit their influence both in and out of the workplace. In 1969,
for example, a Czech journal reported that a primarily
Polish-speaking district in the Ostrava area had been
gerrymandered to create two districts, each with a Czech
majority.
Czechoslovak officialdom considered Polish influence in the
workplace an insidious danger. The "seepage" from more liberal
Polish regimes has concerned Czechoslovak communists since the
1950s, when Poles led the way in resisting increased work
demands. The 1980-81 unrest in Poland exacerbated the situation
(see Relations with Communist Nations
, ch. 4). There were reports
of strikes among the workers in the Ostrava area in late 1980.
Before World War II, Gypsies in Czechoslovakia were
considered Czechoslovak citizens of Gypsy nationality. After the
war, since they did not possess the properties of a nationality
according to communist criteria, they were regarded by the
communist regime as merely a special ethnic group. Based on this,
the regime approached the matter not as a question of nationality
but as a social and political question.
Eastern Slovakia had a sizable Gypsy minority. About 66
percent of the country's Gypsies lived in Slovakia in the 1980s,
where they constituted about 4 percent of the population.
Estimates of their exact numbers vary, but observers agree that
their postwar birthrate has been phenomenal. In the early 1970s,
there were approximately 200,000 to 300,000 Gypsies in the
country. In 1980 estimates ranged from 250,000 to 400,000.
Gypsy intelligentsia agitated unsuccessfully for inclusion of
Gypsies in the 1968 Constitutional Act No. 144, and they remained
the largest unrecognized minority in Czechoslovakia. Policy
makers have found them a conundrum. The Gypsy population combines
continued high rates of crime and illiteracy with a cultural
system that places low value on regular employment. According to
Czechoslovak Life, in 1986, "the customs and thinking of
the Gypsy population are somewhat different." A 1979 article in
Bratislava's Pravda asserted that the crime rate among
Gypsies was four times the national average. The author went on
to call for "the incorporation of all Gypsy citizens of
productive age to [sic] the working process" and to decry the
number of Gypsies "who constantly refuse to work." A large number
of Gypsies were involved in the black market.
Official policy has vacillated between forced assimilation
and enforced isolation in carefully controlled settlements. The
nomadic wandering integral to Gypsy culture has been illegal
since 1958. Laws passed in 1965 and 1969 provided for
"dispersion" of Gypsies, i.e., transferring them from areas where
they were concentrated to other areas. In the late 1970s and
early 1980s, assimilationist policies held clear sway. There were
efforts to increase the participation of Gypsy children in
preschool, kindergarten, secondary school, apprenticeship
programs, and summer recreational and educational camps. There
were also concerted government attempts to integrate Gypsies into
the national labor force; in the early 1980s, some 90 percent of
adult Gypsy males below retirement age were employed. In 1979
about 50 percent of working-age Gypsy women were employed; by
1981 this figure had risen to 74 percent.
Critics have contended that government policies verge on
"genocide." They have charged that the government was taking
children away from Gypsy parents and pressuring Gypsy women to
undergo sterilization. The Gypsy birthrate was reportedly two and
one-half to three times the national average; in the mid-1980s,
it was 2.6 percent per year as opposed to 0.7 percent per year
for the population as a whole.
Czechoslovakia lost most of its Ukrainian population when
Carpatho-Ukraine was ceded to the Soviet Union after World War
II. This had been the First Republic's poorest region, and, if
Slovakia had fared badly under Hungarian domination,
Carpatho-Ukraine's situation had been far worse. In the words of
one historian, in 1914 the region was "little more than a Magyar
deer park." Its people were wretchedly poor, having for centuries
supplemented the meager living the mountainous area afforded with
seasonal agricultural labor and service in the Hungarian
infantry. Because of its strong cultural and linguistic links
with the Ukrainians of the Soviet Union and interwar Poland, the
region was a hotbed of secessionist sentiment throughout the
interwar period. There were also calls for Ukrainian autonomy
within the Czechoslovak Republic
(see Problem of Dissatisfied Nationalities
, ch. 1).
In 1983 the remaining 48,000 or so Ukrainians were clustered
in north eastern Slovakia. They remained overwhelmingly
agricultural; often they were private farmers scattered on small,
impoverished holdings in mountainous terrain. They were generally
Uniates and suffered in the 1950s and 1960s from the government's
repression of that group in favor of the Orthodox Church
(see Religion
, this ch.).
A very small fraction of Czechoslovakia's pre-World War II
Jewish community remained in the 1980s. Estimates of both the
prewar and the postwar Jewish population are imprecise.
Calculations based on either religious preference or the number
of Yiddish speakers ignored the large numbers of assimilated Jews
in Bohemia and Slovakia. Most estimates put the pre-World War II
population in the neighborhood of 250,000. In 1975 Malcom Browne
stated that there were some 5,000 practicing Jews remaining in
Czechoslovakia, including about 1,200 in Prague, which once had a
large, vibrant Jewish community dating back to the Middle Ages.
In the Czech lands, Nazi efforts to encourage anti-Semitic
legislation had met with limited success until the establishment
of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
(see Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
, ch. 1). Bohemian Jews had been prominent
members of the Czech elite, and anti-Semitism in the Czech lands
had more often been directed toward Jews of the Sudetenland, who
were condemned both as Germans and as "capitalist exploiters."
Reinhard Heydrich, named Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia
in 1941, vowed to make the region judenrein (free of Jews)
within two months. Heydrich pursued the deportation and
extermination of the Jewish population with a passion rare even
among those most dedicated to the "final solution." On June 6,
1943, Hitler declared Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate to
be judenrein. Most Czech Jews perished, along with sizable
numbers of Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, and Slovakia.
In Slovakia many Jews were Hungarian speakers; they
identified and were identified with Hungarian domination. It
mattered little that Slovak Catholic and nationalistic
anti-Semitism had social and intellectual roots different from
Nazi racism. Monsignor Tiso's government complied with Nazi
deportation orders with little reluctance; even baptized Jews
were not exempt. Eventually, in 1943, the Vatican intervened,
informing Tiso in no uncertain terms that deporting Jews meant
sending them to their deaths. After the Slovak National Uprising
in 1944 and the Nazi occupation of Slovakia, more Jews were
deported. At the time of the Soviet "liberation" of Bratislava,
only about 20,000 survived.
Some anti-Jewish sentiment still existed in the 1980s. The
government's vehemently anti-Israeli stance, coupled with a
persistent failure to distinguish between Israelis and Jews, gave
anti-Semitic attitudes continued prominence. Official
denunciations of dissidents having purportedly Jewish names added
a distinctly anti-Semitic flavor. One Charter 77 signer was
condemned as "an international adventurer" and another, more
pointedly, as "a foreigner without fatherland who was never
integrated into the Czech community"--notorious euphemisms long
used in anti-Jewish rhetoric. Officials alleged that the signers
were under orders from "anticommunist and Zionist centers."
Data as of August 1987
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