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.83The view of Masaryk as a prophet was also stressed by the founder of theAssociation of Religious Socialists, Frantiaek Linhart, who had close ties to theCzechoslovak Church.Rather than emphasizing his core of religious beliefs,as Roman Catholic commentators had done, Linhart employed Masaryk in theservice of both a religious and socialist revolution.Masaryk s conception ofreligion represented a return to the prophetic type of religion, to the religionof the prophets of Israel and to the religion of Jesus, in which this religionreached its height. Further, Masaryk s prophecy represented a new concep-tion of religion, a revolutionary conception opposed to the traditional. Thetraditional conception of religion was dualist, basing itself on the assumptionof a natural, terrestrial world and a supernatural, holy world. 84 Masaryk, in-terpreted as a revolutionary bringing religion into closer contact with theworld, thereby served the central goals of the Czechoslovak Church.Hepointed the way toward the redemption of Christianity from its perceived cri-sis through the revitalization of faith, and provided a path leading throughworldly social change that would redeem the nation from its crisis.Several important conclusions can be drawn from the discussion of the her-itage of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic and its president.Above all, com-munist intellectuals were largely successful in throwing the First Republic intodisrepute, both for its bourgeois nature and for the weakness it revealed in con-nection with Munich.The latter of these had implications ranging beyond do-mestic political relations.Democratic socialists did little to defend the interwarrepublic against communist criticism.Their agreement on at least the inade-quacy of the interwar republic both represented the socialist consensus of thetimes and helped to encourage and spread that consensus.This was also thecase with the battle over Masaryk s heritage, although here Marxist intellectualswere less successful than they had been with the First Republic.Democratic so-cialist and Roman Catholic intellectuals mounted relatively stiff resistance to 138 Part II: The Interpretation and Reinterpretation of Czech Historycommunist attempts to appropriate Masaryk.This proved the case despite thefact that the Evangelicals and especially Czechoslovak Church leaders lentmuch support to the Marxist view.Roman Catholics, as always, placed spiritualmatters to the fore and by doing so rejected the communist assumption ofMasaryk s mantle.The position of the democratic socialist intelligentsia was farmore problematic.By enlisting Masaryk in the battle against reaction and inthe cause of the socializing republic, and partly dissociating him from the in-terwar republic, they encouraged communist appropriation of him in the nameof world socialism.The People s Democracy was manifestly Communist-led,and casting its institution and aims as a fulfillment of Masaryk s promise couldnot but aid the Communist Party in its battle to portray itself as the inheritor ofhis heritage.Their urge to use Masaryk with corrections to validate theirhope for a synthesis of Masarykian humanist democracy and radical social re-form revealed a programmatic ambiguity that did not well serve their cause. 7The Shift in Sensibilities andGenerations: May 5, 1945,versus October 28, 1918Communist intellectuals furthered their dominant position in the understandingof the interwar First Republic and complemented the inroads they had made to-ward an appropriation of the heritage of its president, Tomáa G.Masaryk, bymeans of a two-pronged move that revealed the depth of the changes in Czechconsciousness.This was aimed toward both the appropriation of CzechoslovakIndependence Day, October 28th, and its replacement by May 5th.The move-ment will be examined here by contrasting the role October 28th played in na-tional life and political consciousness with that played by May 5th, the new hol-iday commemorating the commencement of the Prague Uprising in 1945.Formany Communist Party members and their intellectual allies May 5th repre-sented the state s true independence, as the uprising rapidly transformed froman anti-German military action intending to secure the physical liberation of thenation into the first act of the national and democratic revolution. This revolu-tion had as its national component the expulsion of close to 3 million ethnicGerman citizens of the prewar Czechoslovak Republic and as its democratic component wide-ranging economic and social reforms.Young Czechs playedperhaps the most important role in the attempt to replace October 28 with May5.They conceived of themselves as a clearly determined generation whosedefining moment had been the days of the uprising.As a result, radicalizedyoung intellectuals who had come of age during the Second World War, hadlittle personal recollection of the pre-Depression republic, and identified them-selves with the postwar People s Democracy viewed May 5th as their hol-iday, in opposition to the October 28th of their elders.Conversely, non-communist intellectuals of the older generation attempted simultaneously toconfirm the social changes of the immediate postwar period and to limit the rev-olutionary élan expressed particularly by this generation of radicalized youths.139 140 Part II: The Interpretation and Reinterpretation of Czech HistoryCommunist intellectuals were greatly aided in both claiming May 5th andappropriating the established October 28th by certain chronological featurespeculiar to the postwar period.May 5th falls only four days after the inter-nationally recognized Day of Labor, which was traditionally the high point ofthe Social Democratic and Communist calendar.Furthermore, May 9th wascelebrated from 1946 as Liberation Day, since it was on this day in 1945that the first Soviet Army troops entered Prague.1 This combination of holi-days created a seamless web of relationships built on the solidarity of theinternational labor movement, the drive for national and economic self-liberation, and the final liberation by the forces of the world s only socialiststate.The power this association wielded was enormous, and from the endof April through the second week of May newspapers such as the Commu-nist Party s Rudé právo and the Union of Czech Youth s Mladá fronta pre-sented readers with an uninterrupted stream of self-congratulatory editorial-izing and praise for the glorious Soviet Union.2Communist intellectuals appropriation of October 28th benefited fromsimilar circumstances.Several important events that established the gains ofthe national and democratic revolution took place on that date in 1945 and1946.For example, the Temporary National Assembly, the revolutionary par-liament that sat until the first postwar elections in May 1946, convened for thefirst time on October 28, 1945, and the first nationalization decrees signed byPresident Edvard Benea came into effect on the same day
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