Before his return from his second exile Benes concluded a pact with Stalin and Molotov in Moscow and ousted more than three million Germans from Czechoslovakia. This pact led to such reliance on the Soviet Union that his whole country became its satellite and Jan Masarvk. son of Czechoslovakias first president. committed suicide or. as it is said. was murdered. Hundreds of Czech and Slovak leaders emigrated for a second. and some for a third time. No matter how great the efforts of small states in Central Europe were to achieve parliamentary democracy. economical development. cultural improvement. the faulty international political system engulfed the leading politicians together with thousands. even millions of families. The suicides. executions. imprisonment. repeated emigration of national leaders during these fifty years are proof that the "Independence" of these small states was and is an illusionwith one exception. The only independent country in Central Europe at present is the neutral and federal Austria whose neutrality was guaranteed by the great powers together with sixty other states. After 1918 a few transitional years of democratic parliamentarian experimentation followed the disintegration of the empire.
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emigration emigrated