Slovak Considerations of the Slovak Question: The Ludak, Agrarian, Socialist and Communist Views in Interwar Czechoslovakia

Abstract

The so-called Slovak question, that is, what should be the place of Slovakia and the Slovak nation within a Czechoslovak state, played a major role in inter-war Czechoslovak politics and was without doubt the dominant political problem of that time. This question was connected with a number of issues, above all the national status of the Slovak-speaking population in the republic (were they Slovaks or Czechoslovaks?), Slovakia’s relationship to the central government in Prague, and Slovakia’s sundry political, economic, social and cultural problems. This chapter will examine the attitude toward these issues of the four major political parties that sought votes among the Slovak-speaking population and were thus compelled, in one way or another, to address the Slovak question. These four parties were the Slovak People’s Party (SPP), the Slovak branch of the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party, the Slovak branch of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party, and the Slovak branch of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), and they (or their branches) accounted for about seventy per cent of the votes cast in parliamentary elections in Slovakia throughout the inter-war period and the overwhelming majority of the votes cast by Slovaks (See Table 9.1.). With the exception of the Hungarian nationalist bloc, no other party was able to attain more than 3.8 per cent of the vote in Slovakia after 1920.¹