In the early hours of 30 September 1938, the Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš received the kind of news that every statesman dreads. Months of sabre-rattling from Hitler’s Germany had spooked the peace-hungry leaders of France and Britain. They had descended on Munich to preserve the peace of Europe. The price was Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty.

With Prague still shrouded in darkness, it was the German ambassador who informed Beneš’ government that they would have to hand over the so-called Sudetenland – a ring of German-speaking territories along the border – without a fight. Beneš’ country had been abandoned by its ally, sold out to its greatest enemy, and humiliated before the entire world in one fell swoop.

A pro-western democrat, Beneš had no hope of political survival in the rump state. On 5 October he resigned. By the end of the month, he was in London. He would not see his homeland again for six and a half years.

Beneš was no stranger to exile. Little more than 20 years earlier, Czechs and Slovaks had been part of Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary. When it went to war in 1914, a circle of pro-Western democrats led by the renegade sociologist Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk emigrated westwards to propagandise the cause of Czechoslovak independence.

They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. While Austria-Hungary crumbled, a Czechoslovak republic emerged for the first time in history with western backing. Masaryk returned as a national hero, serving as president from the state’s foundation in 1918 up until 1935. His protégé Beneš had large shoes to fill. For all his virtues, in 1938 he perhaps faced an impossible task.

No matter how hopeless things seemed after Munich, Beneš did not despair. At his modernist villa in the town of Sezimovo Ústí south of Prague, he gathered some of his closest colleagues. While Neville Chamberlain was celebrating ‘peace in our time’, Beneš warned privately that a ‘second European war’ was coming. He may have lost the battle, but he took comfort in the fact that the war had yet to even begin. His life mission was to overturn the shame of Munich.

To the pensive sociologist-turned-statesman, the meaning and course of the coming war had been clear from the beginning. The ‘war with Germany would again be a war for the Drang nach Osten [drive to the east]’ that had menaced Czechs and their neighbours for centuries, ‘that is primarily against the Slavic nations’.

It indeed began on 1 September 1939 with the German invasion of its eastern Slavic neighbour: Poland. The decisive phase then followed in 1941 with a colossal invasion of the predominantly Slavic Soviet Union, where, under Stalin, the dominance of Russian culture would be decisively reasserted. Taking into consideration Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia – whose governments soldiered on in exile despite German partition and occupation – all four Allied countries in Europe’s east were Slavic.

Adolf Hitler saw the vast expanses of Eastern Europe as essential for Germany’s Lebensraum. They happened to be inhabited by tens of millions of Slavs – largely Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians – whose identity or very existence would have to be annihilated to pave the way for German colonisation.

Anti-Slavism was not, however, a pillar of Nazi ideology as antisemitism was. The attitude of Nazi ideologues towards Slavs might be best summed up as genocidal indifference. Tens of millions had to die not necessarily because they were Slavs, but because they were in the way. Those that weren’t – Slovaks, Croats, Bulgarians – could be and did become allies or puppets.

Insofar as Nazis had a Slav policy, it was to splinter Slavic peoples into as many small groups as possible (turning them into ‘racial material’ in Nazi lingo), Germanising some, working others to death, and dispensing entirely with those deemed racially worthless.

That the Second World War in Europe was largely a war of Slav against German is a curiosity few have felt necessary to accord with any significance as the war passed into history and memory. This is in no small part because of the fate of those that did expound upon the Slavic significance of the war during those fateful years.

The Second World War was unique and paradoxical. It is no exaggeration to say that it is endowed with more world-historical meaning than any other conflict. Yet its very scope makes any grand interpretation inherently incomplete. France and Britain went to war to defend Poland, and yet by war’s end they had abandoned it to its fate as a Soviet satellite. The Soviet Union for its part suffered the greatest casualties of any state, and yet until 1941 it was a secret collaborator of Nazi Germany. The western powers fought in the name of freedom and democracy alongside a totalitarian regime that terrorised and murdered its own people in the millions.

Indeed, many of the war’s paradoxes can be traced back to the role of the Soviet Union. This enigmatic communist state went from international pariah to cornerstone of the whole Allied war effort practically overnight; its aloof leader Joseph Stalin becoming a close ally of the capitalist powers he had hitherto denounced in the shrillest tones. Ideology proved distinctly absent from the war effort. Or, at least, the ideologies people might expect from a communist state locked in a life-or-death struggle against the standard bearer of international fascism.

When the Georgian-born Stalin announced the final victory against Nazi Germany in 1945, there was no talk of communism, international revolution, or proletarian struggles. He instead announced with pride victory in the ‘age-old struggle of the Slavic peoples for their existence and independence’ in the face of ‘German tyranny’.

Four years earlier, on 22 June 1941, as millions of German and Romanian soldiers poured across the Soviet border, Edvard Beneš found himself in the serene Buckinghamshire village of Aston Abbots. His government-in-exile – formed in London with him as president and recognised by the Allies – had moved there to escape the Blitz.

Beneš sat behind his desk – where he always kept a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s stoic poem ‘If’ on a small display stand – listening to the radio. As his secretary Edvard Táborský recalled: ‘I could discern in his face, especially in his expressive eyes a satisfaction more serene and more intense than I had seen since the outbreak of the war’ in 1939. Beneš had been patiently waiting for this very moment for nearly three years. It was all as he had predicted.

According to his own explanation, Beneš had accepted the ‘Munich diktat’ because he was convinced the Nazis would not stop at Czechoslovakia. His decision not to begin a bloody struggle without French and British support was correct ‘not only from a Czechoslovak perspective, but also from the perspective of future Slavic politics’, he later wrote. It was essential, namely, that the greatest of all Slavic powers – the Soviet Union – be ‘solid and strong’ in the service of what would be dubbed the ‘new Slavic politics’.

Beneš conceived of this second European war as a struggle of Slavic nations for their existence as free democratic states against a perennial German threat that threatened to wipe them off the face of the Earth: the very same threat that was still present in the Czech lands under Habsburg rule when he first entered Czech politics, the very same threat that the Czech national movement had first emerged to counteract.

The Czechs, like Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and many others, are a Slavic people. Whether this has any meaning or significance beyond the fact that they speak closely related languages was a topic of intense discussion and debate since the early 19th century. Then, most leading scholars of Slavic languages and peoples conceived of their languages as dialects of one great common tongue spoken by a single nation divided into many ‘tribes’.

In the early 19th century the term ‘Pan-Slavism’ was coined to mean Slavic literary unity, but it rapidly became associated with a common social, cultural, and political struggle of Slavs in the Habsburg Monarchy – primarily Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes – against the urban domination of German language and culture. Following on from Herder, they portrayed ur-Slavic culture as inherently peaceful and democratic.

This movement reached a crescendo during the revolutions of 1848, when Prague played host to an illustrious Slav Congress that brought together leading Slavs from across the Habsburg Monarchy in an attempt to coordinate their activities and ambitions. Acrimonious debates rapidly proved any notion of Slavic unity to be a mirage. It was, crucially, not an international congress, but one confined to the bounds of the Habsburg Monarchy. Pan-Slavism as an element of international politics still lay in the future.

That much is testified by the ambivalence of the oft-rebellious Poles, who found firmer allies among the developed national movements of Germans, Hungarians, and Italians than their fellow Slavs. Indeed, Pan-Slavism had a different ring to it when the empire considered their greatest national oppressor was the same Slavic state others looked to for salvation.

In 1848, Pan-Slavism was largely unknown in that vast Russian Empire just as it was largely unknown to the proponents of Pan-Slavism. When the idea did spread, it took root as a peculiarly Russian idea rooted in Slavophile anti-westernism and envisioning Russia leading a Slavic world supposedly irreconcilable with the West.

In 1867 this Russo-centric Pan-Slavist tendency reached its own symbolic crescendo at an ethnographic exhibition in Moscow. Coming off the back of the Habsburg Monarchy’s dualist compromise that transformed it into Austria-Hungary – understood as a German-Magyar partition that would leave Slavs divided – the presence of a substantial delegation of leading Habsburg Slavs gave it a strongly political undertone.

Again, while there was no shortage of lofty pronouncements, true commonalities of interest were few and far between. The Russian Pan-Slavists, as the Central European Slavs found out, wanted to label everything Russian as Slavic so they could label everything Slavic as Russian, to paraphrase the disillusioned Czech Karel Havlíček.

Prague and Moscow thus represented two symbolic poles of the Pan-Slavic idea applied to politics. Western versus Eastern, decentralised versus centralised, democratic versus autocratic. By the turn of the century, the former was embodied by the political movement around Masaryk. The latter, by the imperialist policies of Tsarist Russia. A state that did not survive the First World War intact.

But had Moscow really abandoned this imperialist tendency? It was a question not just on Beneš’ mind in 1941, but one that he thought would be decisive in the whole course of the war and its aftermath. If it had, it meant something revolutionary. For the first time ever the vast power and wealth of Russia could be used in service of democracy and freedom in a Slavic world reeling from the consequences of western betrayal.

The Soviet Union was an attractive destination for left-wingers of all stripes in the interwar years, but especially for those from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and even Poland (though few in number) with pronounced Slavophile sympathies. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, these exiles suddenly found their status transformed by Stalin’s new-found desire to place himself at the head of the dawning ‘new Slavic movement’.

On 10 August 1941, Moscow witnessed the opening of the first All-Slavic Congress, gathering Slavic exiles from across Europe. It was made explicit that this new Slavic movement was entirely different from the Muscovite Pan-Slavism of the past. In the opening address Alexei Tolstoy called on the attendees to reject as reactionary ‘the old ideology of Pan-Slavism’.

Slavs, as he expanded in an article published in Pravda the following year, were ‘hard-working, lovers of liberty and peace and culture’ who had spent all of history fighting against the despotism of an arrogant west and nomadic conquering east. Now they should unite, so that every Slavic nation ‘may be entitled, as other nations are, to a free, peaceful existence – that the culture of our nations may flourish without restraint’.

The product of the congress was a new All-Slavic Committee. Its purpose was to propagandise the war as a joint struggle of Slavic nations against Hitler’s genocidal plans, reaching not just Slavs in the Soviet Union, but even those in Latin America and Anglophone countries (London and Detroit would also host Slavic Congresses during the war). As Stalin warned on 7 November 1941 – the anniversary of the October Revolution – the fanatical German dictator was seeking to ‘exterminate the Slav peoples’ and annihilate ‘the great Russian nation’.

Unspoken here was Stalin’s complicity in the first stages of this genocidal agenda. The Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland was unspeakably brutal, aimed at turning Poles from a state-forming nation into a helot class. The Soviets did not step in to save their ‘Slavic brother’ but took their own slice of Poland in which they pursued their own murderous policy targeting the Polish elites.

It was an early indication that the new Slavic politics was not as far removed from the old Tsarist Pan-Slavism as many of its proponents insisted. But at a time when Stalin had seemingly convinced the entire world of his earnestness, when the Red Army was the only fighting force that could bring down Hitler’s war machine, it was easy to fall prey to wishful thinking.

There was no more poignant example than Beneš. The ‘new Slavic politics’ was precisely what he and many generations of liberally minded Czechs had dreamed of. A Slavic world driven by the democratic spirit of the West but standing on its own two feet. In a series of articles for the All-Slavic Committee’s house paper in 1943, Beneš outlined his own practical, democratic vision, later expanded into a book that examined the whole history of the Slavic idea and its hopeful future.

In December 1943 he travelled to Moscow seeking confirmation from Stalin himself that their visions of the new Slavic politics were as aligned as they seemed to be from Soviet Pan-Slavic propaganda. Over the course of his winding journey through Iraq and the Caucasus, he spent many days in lively conversation with the Soviet Deputy Foreign Commissar Alexander Korneichuk.

As his secretary recalled, Slav cooperation and the issue of Poland were the two main topics of conversation. The affable Korneichuk assuaged any lingering doubts Beneš may have had that the Soviet embrace of the Slavic idea was merely tactical, that it had any anti-democratic intentions, or that it would act as a tool of future subversion.

They reached Moscow on 11 December, having passed by frozen mountains of gnarled German armour and the eerie ruins of Stalingrad. The reception was grand. Banquets and private meetings with Stalin followed. Beneš was elated to find that they agreed on almost everything. Particularly that Stalin did not object to his plan to expel millions of Germans from Czechoslovakia once the war was over.

For all its propagandistic pronouncements, the new Slavic politics had real consequences. The Soviets and all their Slavic allies agreed that this great Slavic war would end with a final victory over ‘Germandom’. Not only an end to the Drang nach Osten, but the total reversal of its centuries-long creep. Hitler’s murder of tens of millions of Slavs – alongside the millions of Jewish citizens of defeated Slavic states – would be paid in kind by one of the largest forced population transfers in human history: the expulsion of over ten million Germans from Eastern Europe.

Stalin had not been lying about his tacit support for this particular nationalist endeavour. But, as Beneš would soon discover, the same was not true about all they had agreed upon. Over the course of 1944, Beneš was steadily gripped by a sense of impending doom. In the summer, the Red Army reached the left bank of Warsaw. The Poles rose up against the Germans on the right bank expecting their support, but the Soviets stood by and let their Slavic brethren be crushed.

The Poles had been lukewarm about the Slav Congress in 1848, outraged about the ethnographic exhibition in 1867, and suspicious about the Pan-Slavic overtures during the Second World War. It was not difficult to see why. An even more painful blow for Beneš came when he discovered Soviet forces were dealing with the Slovak puppet government without his knowledge. Then, the true betrayal came when the Soviets effectively annexed the far-eastern territory of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia.

Beneš could not believe it. He would have been ready to hand it over if Stalin had wanted it, but he had said nothing about it in Moscow. Why would Stalin betray him like this? It must have been overzealous Ukrainian communists at fault, he reasoned. It was perhaps still too painful to consider the alternative.

As Beneš travelled to Moscow for a second wartime visit in March 1945, his old optimism had been transformed into an uncomfortable sense of foreboding. Ever the wily diplomat, Stalin once again tried to reassure him. At a banquet in Beneš’ honour, he apologised for the misconduct of Soviet soldiers and then raised his glass ‘to drink a toast to all neo-Slavs’.

‘I especially emphasise this – to new Slavs – to differentiate it from’ the old imperialistic Slavism of the tsarist regime. ‘We Bolsheviks, or you can say communists, have another idea of Slavism. We wish that all will be allied irrespective of whether small or large, but every nation will preserve its independence and arrange its life according to its ideology and tradition, be they good or bad.’

As Beneš crossed the Czechoslovak border for the first time in over six years on 3 April 1945, a new Slavic world was already taking shape. Germans were fleeing westwards in their hundreds of thousands as the victorious Polish, Czechoslovak, and Yugoslav governments reestablished their authority.

Mimicking Stalin, the new rulers came speaking the language of nationalism and Pan-Slavism. The communist Polish government installed by the Soviet dictator called for a ‘great Slavic dam’ to hold back German imperialism. A ‘free, strong, independent, sovereign and democratic’ Poland would be a crucial component. Beneš’ own new government’s programme – penned by his communist partners – announced that the ‘new importance of Slavism’ in domestic and international politics would have to be recognised by a firm alliance with the Soviet Union and other Slavic nations, by extirpating German and Hungarian cultural influences, and giving pride of place to Russian in the new school curriculum.

The new Yugoslav government was equally enthusiastic about the new Slavic politics. A product of self-liberation by a communist partisan movement, it was the first of many Soviet-aligned states to declare itself a ‘people’s republic’. In Belgrade as in many other liberated Slavic cities, a local All-Slavic Committee was set up to spread the new Slavic gospel. It soon suggested that the city host another great Slav Congress.

The ‘new Slavic movement’ would reach its pinnacle in December 1946. In a city still scarred by war, hundreds of Slavic delegates gathered from all over the world. They came from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union, but also the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other non-Slavic countries. At the congress, those present agreed to transform the wartime All-Slavic Committee into a new General Slavic Committee headquartered in Belgrade.

The symbolic contrast with the 1848 Slav Congress was evident in the flags hanging above the stage. Then, a massive banner in Habsburg black-gold was hung to display the loyalty of nations without states to call their own. Now, the national flags of five Slavic states hung proudly behind the portraits of their five leaders, Beneš’ cold visage flanked by those of four communist leaders. Above them stood a banner that read: ‘Long live the brotherhood and unity of the Slavic nations!’ It was written in Russian.

Many fine words were spoken, of the new Slavic democratic era, of the Slavs’ desire for international peace and cooperation, of the glory of the Soviet Union and its peerless leader Joseph Stalin. At times it sounded less like they were taking cues from a leader than direction from an overlord. The subsequent Slav Congresses of 1947 and 1948 left no doubt that it was the latter.

The communists that took power across Eastern Europe in the wake of the Second World War soon grew tired of wishy-washy talk of democratic Slavic politics. The sentiments that had been conjured up to mobilise a wartime alliance of Slavic nations in the struggle against the German Drang nach Osten were no longer needed. Reliable satellites that could act as a buffer against the newly antagonistic West was all Stalin wanted. Even the slightest deviation from the Stalinist line would not be tolerated.

In 1948 Tito’s Yugoslavia was unceremoniously expelled from the nascent Eastern Bloc. The headquarters of the General Slavic Committee was now cut off from every other Slavic country. Not that it really mattered to Stalin, who had welcomed the non-Slavic communist states of Hungary and Romania into his new communist world. In the global Cold War, Slavism would have no role to play.

On 27 February 1948, Edvard Beneš left Prague for his country house in Sezimovo Ústí. A communist coup had just overthrown the government. An ill and broken man, he could not bear another stint of exile. He died there seven months later.

In the final years of his life, he had witnessed once-unimaginable transformations across Europe’s east. The Sudetenland had not just been reclaimed, but all its Germans expelled. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia had not just regained their statehood, but the annihilation of Germany and new position of the Soviet Union seemed to indicate the Drang nach Osten would not menace them for a long time to come. Their new governments expelled non-Slavic minorities and spread their wealth in land and property to the Slavic majorities. The victory of Slavdom over Germandom had been total. But it was not Slavdom’s victory to savour. It was Stalin’s.