Czechoslovakia

A federation that ended by agreement, which almost no multinational state manages. It was created in 1918 from the Czech lands and Slovakia, assembled by Tomas Masaryk and Edvard Benes out of Habsburg territory, and was the only central European democracy to survive the interwar period intact - industrialised, literate, with the Skoda works among Europe's largest arms manufacturers. It also contained three million Germans in the Sudetenland, which is what Hitler used: Britain and France handed him the border regions at Munich in September 1938 without the Czechoslovak government in the room, and the rest was occupied within six months. The Germans were expelled after 1945. A communist coup in February 1948 brought forty years of rule that included the Prague Spring of 1968, crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks, and the Charter 77 movement that produced Vaclav Havel. The Velvet Revolution of November 1989 removed the regime in weeks without deaths. Slovak demands for greater autonomy then went unresolved, and the two prime ministers agreed a separation neither population had voted on, effective 1 January 1993. Assets were divided roughly two to one by population. It is called the Velvet Divorce. Prague was the capital throughout. The country existed for seventy-four years in total across two periods. Its interwar arms industry made it one of the world's largest exporters of weapons. Bata's shoe company built a planned company town at Zlin. The word robot was coined by a Czech playwright in 1920. Its 1918 borders included Ruthenia, which passed to the Soviet Union in 1945 and is now in Ukraine.

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