Vladimír Clementis

Vladimír Clementis

Vladimír Clementis (born September 20, 1902 in Tisovec , Austria-Hungary , today Slovakia ; † December 3, 1952 in Prague , Czechoslovakia ), also called Vlado Clementis , was a Slovak politician, lawyer, writer and translator.

Life

Clementis first attended the Slovak evangelical primary school in Tisovec and then the eight-year high school in Skalica . Then he studied law at the Charles University in Prague from 1921 , where he became involved in the socialist movement for the first time. An association of Slovak socialist students was founded in 1922, devoted to the study of Marxism and Russian art. Clementis became the unofficial leader of this group. In 1924 he also founded a literary magazine called DAV , from which the name davisti for a number of left-wing Slovak authors was derived. In the same year he became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ).

After graduating, Clementis worked as a legal trainee from 1925 to 1930, as a lawyer in Bratislava from 1931 to 1939 and from 1935 to 1938 he was a member of the Czechoslovak Chamber of Deputies for the KSČ.

After the Communist Party had to cease its activities due to the Munich Agreement in November 1938, Clementis emigrated to France via Poland and the Soviet Union. After the outbreak of World War II , he was arrested by the French authorities. Because he volunteered for the Czechoslovak Army in France, he was released from prison. As a result, but also because of his criticism of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact and the winter war between the Soviet Union and Finland, he was excluded from the KSČ. Then he emigrated with his group to London , where they were first interned, but later released, and then worked for the Czechoslovak Radio in London as a journalist and speaker.

In 1945 Clementis returned to Czechoslovakia, was re-admitted to the KSČ and appointed State Secretary of the Foreign Ministry in the Klement Gottwald I government. Shortly after the KSČ came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, he became Foreign Minister (1948–1950) and then also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1949–1951). End of January 1951, he was arrested and a year later in November 1952 as part of the Slánský process in a show trial before the newly established State Court sentenced to death and in Prague on 3 December 1952 executed . In 1963 he was rehabilitated by the KSČ.

Works

Clementis was not a writer in the strict sense, as he wrote neither prose nor poetry. However, he was a publicist and the author of several reports and political contributions in various magazines.

Journalistic works:

• 1942: Usmerňované Slovensko ( Managed Slovakia)
• 1943: Medzi nami a Maďarmi (Between Us and Hungarians)
• 1943: Panslavizmus kedysi a teraz (Pan-Slavism yesterday and today)
• 1943: Slováci a Slovanstvo (The Slovaks and Slavdom)
• 1945: Československá zahraničná politika (foreign policy of Czechoslovakia)
• 1946: Slovanstvo kedysi a teraz (Slavism then and now)
• 1947: Odkazy z Londýna (references from London)

Web links

• Vladimír Clementis an osobnosti.sk (Slovak)