Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia was the Central European state the Czechs and Slovaks built from Austria-Hungary in 1918 and kept, interrupted, to 1992. Championed by Masaryk and Benes, declared amid imperial collapse and affirmed at Saint-Germain, it hilled its 127,000 square kilometres of hilly and mountainous land between Germany, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine with Prague first among Brno, Ostrava, Plzeň, Liberec, Bratislava and Košice. Munich in 1938 cut away the Sudetenland and Trans-Olza to Poland, the rump turned client Second Republic, and 1939 split it three ways into Bohemia-Moravia Protectorate with separately-run Slovakia and Hungarian Ruthenia. Benes's exile kept the legal flame with the Allies till Red Army liberation restored it in pre-1938 borders minus Ruthenia, and the state returned, through Prague Spring crushed in 1968 to Velvet's eleven days in November 1989, when Marxist-Leninist rule fell across Central and Eastern Europe and the top leaders with the party itself were deposed, to fall apart peacefully at communism's end.