Zdeněk Fierlinger (11 July 1891 – 2 May 1976) was a Czechoslovak diplomat and politician. He served as the prime minister of Czechoslovakia from 1944 to 1946, first in the London-based Czechoslovak government-in-exile and then in liberated Czechoslovakia. Long close to the Soviet Union, he has his name often associated with the merger of his Czech Social Democratic Party with the Czechoslovak Communist Party after the communist coup in 1948.
He was the uncle of Paul Fierlinger, the animator for numerous PBS cartoons.
Early life Zdeněk Fierlinger came from a lower-middle-class Czech family in the city of Olmütz in Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Olomouc, Czech Republic). His father worked as a teacher of French and English in the local high school. Fierlinger was described as a mediocre student but one who was excellent with languages. He graduated from business school in 1910 in Olmütz and then worked in Russia as a sales agent for the MacCormick International Harvester Company of Chicago in Rostov-on-Don. Fierlinger was one of the 70,000 or so Czechs living in Imperial Russia in 1914.
First World War He had no loyalty to Austria-Hungary and, like many of the other Czechs living in Russia, chose not to return to the Empire upon the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 but instead stayed in Russia.
Fierlinger, together with several other Czechs living in Rostov-on-Don, organised themselves into the Česká družina ("Czech Companions"), which joined the Imperial Russian Army to fight in Galicia against Austria. Like many other Czechs of his generation, Fierlinger was a Russophile and saw Russia as the great Slavic power that would liberate the other Slavic peoples like the Czechs from Austrian rule.
During the war, he joined the Czechoslovak Legion, which fought for independence from Austria. He was described as a "brave and selfless soldier". For his bravery on the battlefield, he was awarded the Order of St. George four times. Among other battles, he participated at the Battle of Zborov as the commander of the 9th Company.
After the battle, he was promoted to the commander of a battalion. In July 1917, the Czechoslovak National Council, led by Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, sent Fierlinger and Emanuel Voska to the United States. The purpose of the American tour was to recruit Czech-Americans and Slovak-Americans for the Czechoslovak Legion, which led him to spend most of his time in the industrial towns of the Midwest and the Pennsylvania coal and steel towns, and he appealed to Czech and Slovak immigrants to fight for independence from Austria.
After completing his American recruiting tour, he went to France in late 1917 to resume his career with the Czechoslovak Legion. Unlike the other members of the Czechoslovak Legion, who remained in Russia and subsequently fought for the White Movement during the Russian Civil War during an epic march across Siberia, Fierlinger did not share the anticommunist feelings of many veterans of the Czechoslovak Legion although it fought against the Reds. Upon arriving in France, Fierlinger was promoted to the rank of colonel.
The Czechoslovak National Council, which was based in Paris, was recognized in 1918 by the governments of France, the United Kingdom and the United States as a government-in-exile, as the Allies committed themselves to the dissolution of Austria as a war aim. During his time in Paris, Fierlinger first met Beneš, who served as the right-hand man to Masaryk, the leader of the government-in-exile.
Fierlinger got along well with Beneš, who became his patron. The Czech historian Zbyněk Zeman and the German historian Rainer Karlsch wrote: "Neither had close friends and both were industrious and ambitious. There was a trace of arrogance in Fierlinger, who was extremely practical and less academically gifted than Beneš. They complemented each other and the similarities in their character helped to draw them together. Their long association left a strong mark on the history of Czechoslovakia".
In the interwar period, Beneš and Fierlinger lived on the same street in Prague. The villa that Beneš owned in the countryside outside Sezimovo Ústí was next to Fierlinger's villa. Both men ascribed to the same centre-left politics.
Zeman and Karlsch state, "Beneš used Fierlinger as an important piece on the diplomatic chessboard".
Early diplomatic career After the war, Fierlinger returned to Czechoslovakia and joined the diplomatic service. Masaryk became the first president of Czechoslovakia, and Beneš became the foreign minister. Fierlinger was appointed by Beneš to serve as the chief of the economic section of the Foreign Ministry despite complaints that he lacked a university degree and that he was unsuitable to be a diplomat. He was successively ambassador to the Netherlands, Romania, the United States, Switzerland and Austria. Zeman and Karlsch wrote: "Fierlinger was self-confident, blunt in expressing his views and ready to stand up to the experts". During this period, he was a close friend and collaborator of Edvard Beneš.
In 1924, he joined the Czech Social Democratic Party. From 1925 to 1928, he served as the Czechoslovak minister in Washington, DC, where he developed an illness in his kidneys that required him to go to Switzerland for medical treatment.
During his time as the Czechoslovak minister in Bern, Fierlinger also served as the chief of the Czechoslovak delegation for the League of Nations, which required him to make regular visits to Geneva when the League of Nations was in session. Because of all the member states of the League of Nations were theoretically equal, Beneš as foreign minister attached much importance to the League and felt it was the best institution for allowing a small power like Czechoslovakia to project influence abroad.
Beneš disliked the congress system since the leaders of the great powers would meet to decide the fate of Europe and felt that the leaders of the great powers put their own interests ahead of those of the small powers. As such, Beneš frequently visited Geneva to attend the sessions of the League, where he always pressed for it to become the principal instrument of international diplomacy, instead of the traditional congress system.
During Beneš's visits to Geneva, Fierlinger was known as the only Czechoslovak diplomat who was willing to disagree with Beneš and argued with him about matters such as disarmament and the place of the League in international diplomacy. Fierlinger was regarded as a bumptious and boorish diplomat, but his career flourished because of the patronage of Beneš, who kept "making the excuses" for him by arguing that Fierlinger's lack of a university education and his lower-middle-class background made him somewhat uncouth although Fierlinger had talents that made up for his lack of manners.
Beneš himself came from a lower-middle-class background and, like other Czechoslovak diplomats, resented how European diplomacy was dominated by upper-class men, with a disproportionate number of European diplomats being aristocrats. Beneš felt that many of the complaints against Fierlinger reflected snobbery of the aristocratic-dominated world of European diplomacy.
In the early 1930s under the impact of the Great Depression, Fierlinger's views took a sharp turn to the left as he came to believe the depression proved quite literally the bankruptcy of capitalism as an economic system. Fierlinger came to feel that socialism and a "planned economy" were the solution to the Great Depression. In 1931, he visited the Soviet Union, and in 1932, he published a book, Sovětský svaz na nové dráze (The Soviet Union On A New Track), which recounted his visit in glowing terms. In his book, Fierlinger presented a very uncritical and sympathetic account that portrayed the Soviet Union as something very close to a utopia. He drew a contrast between the economic growth of the First Five Year Plan and said that he saw factories being built everywhere, but in the West, he saw factories being closed.
During the World Disarmament Conference, in Geneva, Fierlinger came into conflict with Beneš who moved him to Vienna as the Czechoslovak minister to Austria. During his time in Vienna, Fierlinger wrote articles in several Czech newspapers to argue for the theory of "convergence", as he argued that the Soviet Union was moving closer to Western political values such as democracy, and the Western nations were moving closer to Soviet economic values. He also maintained that capitalism was a dying system.
Through not a communist, Fierlinger tended to portray the Soviet Union a very favorable light in his articles, and even when he was critical, such criticism was always expressed in the terms of the "convergence theory", as he maintained that inevitably the Soviet Union would over time adopt Western liberal values.
Fierlinger tended to portray the policies of Joseph Stalin as a reaction against his enemies and essentially took Stalin's claims of a vast conspiracy against the Soviet Union at face value. In a sign of Beneš's favour, Fierlinger was allowed to criticise domestic policies in Czechoslovakia, as he drew an unfavourable contrast between the lives of the unemployed in Czechoslovakia, as opposed to the Soviet Union, which he maintained had no unemployment.
In 1935, Masaryk retired as president, and Beneš, who had long been his heir apparent, was elected as the new president. The new president kept a tight control over foreign policy and wanted men who were personally loyal to himself to conduct Czechoslovak foreign policy.
Despite their disagreements, Fierlinger was one of Beneš's favourites. Fierlinger, in turn, was a warm supporter of the treaty of alliance that Beneš signed in 1935 with the Soviet Union. In 1936, Beneš appointed Fierlinger as the political director at the foreign ministry. Fierlinger supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937, he learned that a large shipment of arms from Czechoslovakia that was going to Lisbon supposedly for the Portuguese Army was in fact intended for the Spanish Nationalists, with Lisbon merely being a trans-shipment point to maintain the pretense of abiding by the arms embargo on both sides in Spain.
Fierlinger lacked the legal authority, but he ordered the arms to be seized by the Czechoslovak police as a violation of the arms embargo. The Portuguese government was embarrassed to be caught violating the arms embargo and so Portugal broke off diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia over the arms seizure. Fierlinger's actions made him the object of much controversy, with many criticising him for exceeding his authority and for costing Czechoslovak arms industry a contract to supply arms.
Ambassador to Soviet Union Between 1937 and 1939 and again between 1941 and 1945, Fierlinger held the post of envoy (and later ambassador) to the Soviet Union. Fierlinger arrived in Moscow on 5 October 1937 as the Czechoslovak minister-plenipotentiary. The diplomat to whom Fierlinger was closest during his time in Moscow was Joseph E. Davies, the American ambassador, who shared his pro-Soviet sentiments. Predictably enough, the diplomat to whom Fierlinger was most hostile was Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador in Moscow, whom he made no secret of disliking. Fierlinger reported to Prague that Davies had told him that he felt that the two best world leaders were President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States and President Edvard Beneš of Czechoslovakia and described both leaders as progressive liberals whom he greatly admired.