Thread by @ajcdeane

This is the 17th instalment of #deanehistory.

Jan Masaryk was the son of the founding President of Czechoslovakia.

Coincidentally, his civil service career really took off after his dad took office.

He was posted to the CZ Embassy in the USA after the First World War. Then he became aide to the Foreign Secretary (Benes, who succeeded his father as President). Then he became the longstanding Czechoslovakian Ambassador to the UK, perfect for an Anglophile such as he.

Whilst in the UK, he became Foreign Minister in the CZ government in exile during the Second World War. When conflict finished, he returned to his country, under Soviet occupation of course, & stayed in that role – remaining in it after a CZ Communist government formed in 1946.

In 1948, non-Communists tried to force new elections by resigning. They failed. Masaryk was the only non-Communist in a big role, thus useful to the Soviets & their puppets… then, when he endorsed the idea of CZ taking money from the hated West under the Marshall Plan, he wasn’t

Conveniently for some, supposedly he promptly committed suicide, jumping from a window in his official apartment in the baroque Czernin Palace in Prague, to which he’d been confined (with a whole new set of staff) since his Marshall Plan outburst.

There were, let’s say, reasons for scepticism about this suicide explanation. Amongst them, I’d count the following points.

There were scratch marks around the windowframe, consistent with, er, someone desperately clinging to life against someone trying to chuck them out of it.

Witnesses passed through the courtyard a quarter of an hour before his body was found – & you might think they’d notice a body splayed out on the cobbles; they didn’t. But the police doctor carrying out the first examination ruled that death took place at least two hours prior.

Masaryk’s own doctor was not allowed to attend the postmortem.

The doctor who undertook it had demonstrated his willingness to work flexibly with unpleasant regimes by being a longstanding servant of the Nazis.

He supposedly jumped from a small, narrow window set high up- hard to get to, hard to get through. His own bedroom window in the Palace was large & much easier to access.

He apparently chose this tough, unpleasant route to die, ignoring the gun & drugs available in his chambers.

His family maintained there was no way he’d take his own life.

He revered his father & spent his whole life trying to live up to his example. His father famously decried suicide as a coward’s way of escape.

If suicide, it would be the 2nd definitely-not-defenestration death by jumping from a window by an awkward government minister, as the former Minister of Justice had done just the same, or not, recently before.

Columbo would be just one more thinging all over this, wouldn’t he?

Little wonder that, with the dark humour so prevalent amongst those enduring communist regimes, the joke in Czechoslovakia was the Masaryk was a man so tidy-minded he’d even closed the windows behind himself after he jumped.

A 2nd enquiry, after the Prague Spring of 1968, concluded it was an accident, but didn’t rule out murder.

After the communist regimes fell in the 1990s, a 3rd enquiry held – surprise! – that he was murdered.

A 4th enquiry, by the police in the 2000s, ditto.

But... by whom?

So much has been revealed & finally understood by personal testimony & archive material becoming available after the fall of Communism. But, despite it being so high profile in his country, Masaryk’s death isn’t amongst them. His murder remains unsolved to this day.

The police re-re-re-reopened the case at the end of 2019 on government instructions; no findings yet, coronavirus has no doubt stymied progress, and so on and so forth. So, for the first time in a #deanehistory story – watch this space.

The motto of Czechoslovakia was “The Truth Prevails.”

The memorial plaque to Masaryk in Prague’s Vila Osvěta bears the slogan “The Truth Prevails – But it Takes Some Elbow Grease.”

And so it shall be here.