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In some ways, the method of Masaryk's murder is the least of the mysteries surrounding the case. Presumably Masaryk was murdered because he was the only remaining political figure who might stir popular resistance against the party, and so draw in Western support. But who ordered the murder? Were the murderers themselves killed? When a new investigation began during the brief freedom permitted by the Dubček government in 1968, why did the new investigating prosecutor distort the evidence—as he did, among other ways, by downplaying the disorder in Masaryk's apartment? Claire Sterling answers these attendant mysteries of 1948 by relating her long train of sleuthing. Though repetitive, and at times infuriatingly complex (there are 112 characters involved), the result is a sporadically enthralling detective story.
It is something more: a fascinating palimpsest of history. Author Sterling evokes the intricate maneuverings surrounding the 1948 putsch and describes the earlier tragic betrayal that led to Hitler's 1938 march into the Sudetenland. She outlines the Russian troop movements that took place in 1948 and shows how in 1968 Soviet agents poured into Czechoslovakia in much the same fashion. It is indeed melancholy to be reminded that men like Ludvik Svoboda and Josef Smrkovský, valiant champions of liberal democracy in 1968, were deeply implicated in the 1948 putsch—Svoboda as a pliant Defense Minister who kept the troops in their barracks, Smrkovský as the man who armed and led the Communist Workers' Militia into the streets.
Deeper Mystery. Beyond the bloody murder and the political history lies a deeper mystery: Jan Masaryk himself. His fiancée-mistress, Marcia Davenport, who left Prague two days before his death, has written that he did not kill himself,* and would not "intentionally have gone out the window." As the son of the austere Tomáš Masaryk, founder of the nation after World War I, Jan Masaryk was revered by the Czechoslovak people. He was also loved by them for his charm and his proven loyalty. But much that he did, or failed to do, remains unclear. Why, for instance, as the personification of Czechoslovak democracy, did he remain in the Czech government after the 1948 Communist takeover? Was he in touch with Western agents? Was he planning to flee?
In the absence of hard evidence, insight into such questions might come from inner knowledge of Masaryk's character. Claire Sterling devotes a chapter to martyred Religious Hero Jan Hus and to Jaroslav Hašek's rumpled antihero Good Soldier Schweik as they relate to the Czechoslovak national character and to Masaryk's own. Masaryk remains curiously elusive, a betwixt and between figure. If he had been a passionately unrelenting zealot like Hus (a figure hardly characteristic of his country in modern times), the history of Czechoslovakia after the war might have been different. He loved Schweik, with his comic, little-man's passive resistance to "patriotism, militarism, idealism, totalitarianism, causes of whatever kind, and all plots, schemes, blandishments and exhortations." On the record, Masaryk, in dealing with the Communists, tried to follow several Schweikian rules:
Never offer open resistance to an irresistible force.
Always offer to cooperate.