Prague, May 9 (CTK) – The most popular personalities of the 100 years of the independent state are the first Czechoslovak president Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and student martyr Jan Palach, according to the results of a CVVM poll released on Wednesday.
Tomas Masaryk (in office 1918-1935) is popular among 84 percent of Czechs. Palach, who immolated himself in 1969 in protest against the lack of public resistance against the Soviet occupation of the country, is popular among two thirds of Czechs, same as the first Czech president Vaclav Havel, who was also the last president of Czechoslovakia before its split in 1993.
However, Havel is perceived less positively than Masaryk’s son Jan Masaryk, former ambassador to London (1925-1938) and foreign minister (1940-48) because more people viewed negatively Havel than Jan Masaryk, who is popular among 57 percent of them.
The most unpopular personalities are Konrad Henlein, who founded and led the Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia in 1933-38, and Karl Hermann Frank, one of the highest Nazi officials in Czech lands during the German occupation (1939-1945). Czechoslovak Communist presidents Klement Gottwald (in office 1948-1953) and Gustav Husak (in office 1975-1989) are perceived very negatively as well, although they are popular among one in ten people.
The respondents also assessed Czech historical landmarks of the last 100 years.
The events that are perceived most positively are the 1989 Velvet Revolution (72 percent), which led to the fall of the country’s Communist regime, and the independent interwar Czechoslovak state (1918-1938; 66 percent).
A majority of Czechs also view positively the 1990s and the Charter 77 human right manifesto that developed into an anti-Communist opposition movement in the late 1970s and the 1980s as well as the foundation of the Czech Republic (1993), the NATO accession (1999) and the 1968 Prague Spring, a Communist reform movement.
The most negatively viewed events are the Warsaw Pact military invasion of the country in August 1968, the Nazi-administered Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (1939-1945), the 1938 Munich Agreement, which permitted the German annexation of Czech border regions, and the 1948 Czechoslovak Communist coup.
The poll was conducted on 1061 people aged over 15 in March.
