Activities and affiliations

Diplomacy and international organization Czechoslovakia state institutions 1886–1948 ✕ Died in a fall

The non-Communist foreign minister who lent Gottwald's government legitimacy, found dead under Černín Palace window two weeks after the coup

Returning from Moscow in July 1947 after being forced to reject the Marshall Plan, Masaryk said: 'I left as a minister of a sovereign state and I have come back as Stalin's servant.'

Son of Czechoslovakia's founder-president Tomáš Masaryk, he served as minister-plenipotentiary to Britain from 1925, resigning in protest at the Munich Agreement. As foreign minister of the London government-in-exile, his weekly BBC broadcasts to occupied Czechoslovakia made him a national symbol. In July 1947 Stalin forced him to withdraw from the Marshall Plan; Masaryk returned saying he had left 'as a minister of a sovereign state' and come back 'as Stalin's servant.' When non-Communist ministers resigned in February 1948, Masaryk stayed on as Gottwald's only non-Communist minister, lending the coup a veneer of legality: two weeks later he was found dead beneath his bathroom window at the Černín Palace, and the shock of his still-unresolved death helped drive the Marshall Plan through Congress.

Diplomacy and international organization Czechoslovakia state institutions 1913–1993 ○ Natural causes

A diplomat who turned international law into a language of civic rights

At the United Nations in 1968, he protested the Soviet invasion as an “occupation.”

Jiří Hájek was a Czechoslovak politician and diplomat who experienced both the reform promise of the Prague Spring and its defeat. After calling the Soviet-led invasion an occupation at the United Nations in 1968, he lost his offices and Communist Party membership, demonstrating the limits and possibilities of invoking international commitments against state power. In 1977, with Václav Havel and Jan Patočka, he became one of Charter 77’s first spokespeople, presenting the human-rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act as a basis for civic responsibility.