THE MASARYK CASE by Claire Sterling. 366 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.
Views of the cold war are still being busily revised. Much that was once taken on this side of the Iron Curtain as a clear-cut matter of Soviet aggression is now being questioned. Among many events that revisionism is unlikely to explain away, however, is the murder of Jan Masaryk in Prague on March 10, 1948.
Or so Claire Sterling concludes in a new study of the case. The Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister, she says, was murdered—exactly as cold war history had it—by the Communists, under Soviet direction, two weeks after the party had taken power in Czechoslovakia. The guilty party was quick to declare Masaryk a suicide. Even in 1948, hardly anybody in Prague believed the story. Four weeks ago, after more than 20 years, the Czech Communists closed an investigation they themselves had opened under the liberal Dubcek regime. Despite the new presence of the Russian army, they withdrew the suicide verdict. But in a grotesque compromise (TIME, Dec. 19, 1969), they decided that Masaryk's fall from his bathroom window was an accident.
Detective Story. The circumstances were obscene. At sunrise on March 10, Masaryk's body was found in the courtyard of the Cernín Palace. He was in pajamas, barefoot. He lay on his back a yard from the open bathroom window 30 feet above. He seemed to have landed on his feet, for both legs were broken at the ankles, the heels shattered, the stumps protruding and bits of bone strewn over the cobbles. His hands were scuffed, and the fingernails had paint or plaster beneath them.
Within minutes of the "discovery" of Masaryk's body, the case and his apartment were sealed off by the Communist-run security police, led by Interior Minister Václav Nosek. Within months, at least 25 people who knew something, or were believed to know something, were locked up. Of these, 14 were executed, murdered, committed suicide or, as the phrase went, "died in prison."
By sifting every scrap of evidence and interviewing virtually everyone still alive who could have knowledge of the death, the author has reconstructed certain essentials. There was extreme disorder in both Masaryk's bedroom and bathroom—pillows on the bathroom floor and in the dry tub, glass bottles from the medicine chest ground under foot, a smear of excrement on the sill. Strangely, Masaryk had gone out the bathroom window even though it was much smaller than the one in the bedroom and very awkward to reach.
Claire Sterling, a veteran foreign correspondent now on the staff of Harper's Magazine, relies heavily on such physical facts, construed more logically, to prove murder. On authority from forensic medicine, she makes the point that men on the point of suicide do not lose control of their bowels. Such loss of control is a symptom of the last stages of suffocation. As the author visualizes it, the struggle between the 200-lb. Czech statesman and his assailants began in the bedroom and progressed to the bathroom. There they finally managed to hold him down in the tub and stifle him with pillows. When he was unconscious or nearly so, he was shoved out the nearest window, feet first.