Product Description
Product Description
Edvard Benes was a key figure in the history of Czechoslovakia in the first three decades of her existence. He helped Thomas Masaryk to found the state in World War I; and in the 1920s he worked on foreign policy and was briefly prime minister before being elected president in 1935. His presidency saw the loss of the Sudetenland at Munich in 1938, followed by the German occupation in 1939, which forced Benes to form a London-based government-in-exile for the duration of the war. He lived to see a brief period of restored independence (1945-48), and died in 1948, in the year when Czechoslovakia became another satellite state in Stalin's Soviet Union. Benes was an awkwardly successful politician, with a controversial reputation at home and abroad. His loyalty to the first Czech President, Masaryk, was absolute. In return, Masaryk supported Benes' political ambitions, and between them, the two men shaped the domestic and foreign policies of the new state and the ways in which it was run. Benes regarded himself
