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Czechoslovakia
The Central European republic of 1918 that ended in a peaceful Velvet Divorce
Czechoslovakia began as one of the hopeful products of the peace after World War I, a democratic republic built by Czechs and Slovaks from the ruins of Austria-Hungary, and ended as a rare example of a country that divided without a shot fired. In between, it lived through much of twentieth-century Europe's drama: abandoned to Nazi Germany at Munich in 1938, taken over by communists in 1948, invaded by its Warsaw Pact allies in 1968 when the Prague Spring tried to build socialism with a human face, and freed in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Its Velvet Divorce on January 1, 1993, created the Czech Republic and Slovakia, two states that remain close partners.
The country was a long, narrow ribbon of land across the middle of Europe, about 127,900 square kilometers at its end. In the west, Bohemia is a basin ringed by the Ore Mountains, the Bohemian Forest, and the Sudetes, drained north by the Vltava and the Elbe. Moravia, in the middle, opens south toward the Danube plain. Slovakia climbs eastward into the Carpathians, where the granite peaks of the High Tatras reach 2,655 meters at Gerlachovský štít, the highest point in the country. Its territory is now divided between the Czech Republic (Czechia) and Slovakia, along the old internal boundary. The far eastern province of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, part of the interwar republic, was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1945 and is now Ukraine's Zakarpattia region.
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and his allies proclaimed the republic on October 28, 1918, and it remained a parliamentary democracy through the 1930s, an exception in the region. The Munich Agreement of September 1938 handed the German-speaking Sudetenland to Germany, and in March 1939 Hitler occupied the Czech lands while a separate Slovak state was set up. Restored in 1945, the country expelled most of its German minority and came under communist rule in February 1948. Warsaw Pact troops crushed the Prague Spring reforms in August 1968. After the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 the country became a federation of Czech and Slovak republics, and elected leaders on both sides negotiated a separation that took effect on January 1, 1993, without a referendum.