Territorial claims of Germany, Hungary and Poland to the first Czechoslovak Republic in modern Russian historiography

The aim of the article is to overview the main works of modern Russian historians devoted to territorial variance between the first Czechoslovak Republic and Germany, Hungary and Poland. At the beginning of the article, the author said that the problem of territorial claims and national minorities in studying the foreign policy of Czechoslovakia in the interwar period is crucial because it caused aggression from Germany, Hungary and Poland. The author used works of Nikolay Stankov and Sergey Kretinin to analyse the modern Russian historiography of German-Czechoslovak territorial variances in the interwar period. The author said that both researchers consider the problem of Sudeten Germans as the key issue of German-Czechoslovak relations in this period. Stankov considers this problem along with other aspects of the relations between the two countries, whereas in Kretinin's work it is the object of the research. According to the historians, the activities of the Sudeten Germans largely depended on the influence from abroad and, therefore, this process was slow in the 1920s. Activation of it was associated with the rise of power of Nazis in Germany and the formation of the Henlein movement in Czechoslovakia. According to Kretinin's opinion on the events of 1938, Czechoslovakia would have been able to resist Germany if Poland and Hungary had not acted against it. The article notes that Hungarian territorial claims are poorly investigated in the modern Russian historiography. The author used the work of Andrey Pushkash Foreign Policy of Hungary. February 1937 - September 1939 to analyze this question. In this monograph, relations between Hungary and Czechoslovakia are considered in the context of the Little Entente, since Budapest had territorial claims to all countries included in it. According to Pushkash, these claims were mainly directed against Czechoslovakia, but Hungary was ready to take risk in this to a lesser degree than Poland and Germany because the position of Yugoslavia was unclear. Poland is the last country whose territorial claims are studied in this article. The author used the monograph of Stanislav Morozov Polish-Czechoslovak relations 1933-1939. In his book, Morozov researches the causes and course of deterioration of relations between Prague and Warsaw, as well as the process of convergence of the latter with Berlin. Morozov explains that the Munich Conference marked the failure of the foreign policy of Poland in the interwar period. At the end of the article, it is concluded that the problem of the territorial claims of Germany, Hungary and Poland to Czechoslovakia, as well as the question of the national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe are very important and profoundly studied in the modern Russian historiography.

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