"An Unfortunate Accident"

One winter night in 1948, two weeks after the Communists had seized power in Czechoslovakia, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk fell to his death from his third-floor apartment in the Cernin Palace. Despite an official report that he had committed suicide, many Czechoslovaks believed he had been murdered by Soviet secret police. During Alexander Dubcek's short-lived regime in 1968, a new inquest was ordered into Masaryk's death. Then came the Soviet invasion. Last week the new report was finally released, and it proved to be a tortured compromise between the Soviet position (suicide) and the popular view (murder).

The report said Masaryk had a habit of sitting in cold places to cure his insomnia. He also had a way, it said, of sitting cross-legged in yoga fashion. The "remarkable connection" of these two habits, it concluded, probably led to his death in "an unfortunate accident."

The findings were dismissed as ludicrous by U.S. Journalist Claire Sterling, who recently completed a book on the Masaryk affair. "There is overwhelming evidence to rule out accidental death," she said. She cited signs of a struggle in the room, and smears of excrement on the window sill and Masaryk's body, suggesting that he might have been dead or gravely injured before his fall. Nonetheless, the attorney general's office ruled that "the possibility of murder can be excluded." It also ruled out suicide, quoting psychiatrists as saying that two weeks under Communism was probably not enough to have driven Masaryk to take his life.

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