Activities and affiliations

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1850–1937 ○ Natural causes

The philosopher-president who organized the Czechoslovak Legion from exile and signed the Penza Agreement with the Bolsheviks

On 7 March 1918, his 68th birthday, Masaryk boarded a train from Moscow to Vladivostok to prove to his Legion in person that the crossing of Siberia was possible.

Masaryk, a philosophy professor and Reichsrat deputy from Moravia, went into exile at the outbreak of the First World War and became the political leader of the Czechoslovak independence movement. In 1917 he travelled to Russia, where he organized Czech and Slovak prisoners of war into the Czechoslovak Legion and negotiated the Penza Agreement with the Bolsheviks, securing the Legion's transfer to France via Vladivostok. Elected the first president of Czechoslovakia in 1918, he presided over Central Europe's most stable parliamentary democracy for 17 years, a success built on the contradiction of his Legion being drawn into the Russian Civil War against the very Bolsheviks with whom he had bargained.

Government and administration Czechoslovakia state institutions 1884–1948 ○ Natural causes

The last democratic president, who tried to topple a government with resignations and instead handed it to Gottwald

On 25 February 1948, with Communist militias controlling Prague and civil war imminent, Beneš accepted the resignations of twelve non-Communist ministers.

Beneš was a central figure in the Czechoslovak independence movement, co-founding the Czechoslovak National Council with Masaryk and Štefánik during the First World War. As foreign minister for 17 years from 1918, he shone at the League of Nations, built the Little Entente with Romania and Yugoslavia, and forged alliance treaties with France and the Soviet Union. Elected president in 1935, he resigned after Munich and led the government-in-exile in London, securing Britain's repudiation of the Munich Agreement. In February 1948, he accepted the resignations of non-Communist ministers and sanctioned Gottwald's Communist-dominated government, a decision that sealed Czechoslovakia's entry into the Soviet bloc.

Government and administration Czechoslovakia state institutions 1921–1994 ○ Car crash

The miner's son and technocrat who led the Prague Spring government, then signed the Moscow Protocol under duress

In July 1968, amid controversy over the 'Two Thousand Words' manifesto, Černík told parliament: 'This declaration is certainly not an expression of counterrevolution but only the opinion of one segment of the Party.'

Reform communist prime minister of Czechoslovakia (1968–1970). A technocrat from a mining family, he served as minister of fuels and energy and chairman of the State Planning Commission before his appointment as premier at the April 1968 Central Committee plenum that adopted the Action Programme. Together with Dubček he led the Prague Spring; after the August invasion he was seized and taken to Moscow, where he signed the Moscow Protocol. He promised to continue reforms upon his return, but under Husák was removed and expelled from the party in 1970, spending the next twenty years as a deputy director of a research institute.

Government and administration Czechoslovakia state institutions 1924–2023 ○ Natural causes

Husák's right hand who ran the normalization cabinet for eighteen years, then fell backing Gorbachev's perestroika

Asked why he lost, Štrougal answered: 'I underestimated the dissidents.'

A Czechoslovak communist politician who served as prime minister from January 1970 to October 1988: the face, alongside Gustáv Husák, of the 'normalization' regime that crushed the Prague Spring. A law graduate and career party functionary, he rose through the agriculture and interior ministries to become deputy premier under Dubček; after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion he abandoned his initial reservations and joined Husák's anti-reform camp, replacing Oldřich Černík as premier. Over eighteen years he cultivated a reputation as a pragmatic technocrat, and in the late 1980s his sympathy for Gorbachev's perestroika brought him into conflict with hard-line party chief Miloš Jakeš, who forced him out. Expelled from the KSČ after the Velvet Revolution, he was prosecuted in old age over Iron Curtain deaths; the case was halted by dementia, and he died in 2023 at ninety-eight.