Somewhat unnoticed demolition of the “presidential” house. From Prague straight to Stalin’s joints
There is a lot of talk now about the possible demolition of an unusual villa in Na výšince Street. The building, which belonged to the builder Viktor Benešov, is one of the most remarkable buildings, and it adds an interesting atmosphere to the slope above the Smíchov valley.
At the same time, Pod lipkami Street is only a few steps away. Here the building disappeared in all silence. Now you will find an empty plot here. Until a few years ago, there was no exceptional villa in terms of construction. He belonged to the family of a well-known Czech lobbyist, the father of this family was even a minister of the federal government at the end of communism. Not an architecturally exceptional house, on the other hand, it played an interesting, albeit only episodic, role in the history of pre-war Czechoslovakia.
From 1939, a certain Augustin Volodi lived in the house. In the pre-Munich Republic, among other things, a member of the national parliament for the People’s Party, the clergy and, above all, you can, the first and only president of Carpathian Ukraine. The mini-state, which for one single day (although the durability of Carpathian Ukraine is officially stated on March 15-18, but de facto lived only one day), was established on the days of the final disintegration and end of the First Republic. In the days when the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia and Slovakia declared an independent state. And also on the days when the Hungarians were not yet enough to occupy the east of the rest of the Czech-Slovak state, to which, after all, they did not stop claiming throughout the pre-Munich republic.
Augustin Voloshin was appointed prime minister of autonomous Subcarpathian Russia shortly after Munich, and the development of the easternmost island of Czechoslovakia from that moment was essentially independent. The Masaryk Republic did not give the Ruthenians and other minorities much independence, it was such incarnations of the colony when we no longer had overseas colonies (Subcarpathian Russia was not commanded by any prime minister, chairman or agent, but by the governor – a popular name for colonial governors).
Thus, when Hitler definitively drew into cropped Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Subcarpathian politicians declared a state and elected their one-day president Augustin Vološin. More time for the existence of Transcarpathian Ukraine, which sought independence at the end of World War I (and was lucky that it did not seize it, like the rest of Greater Ukraine Lenin and his Bolsheviks. They spent at least twenty free years as a suffering pendant in Czechoslovakia, but the desire for independence did not fade from them.
After the final fall of Carpathian Ukraine, Voloshin moved to Prague, where he became an ordinary citizen of the protectorate. But immediately after the liberation (May 15, 1945, some sources state May 13), for whom Stalin’s NKVD came, more precisely the Smerš units, which in the territories conquered by the Red Army liquidated everything and everyone who was on their lists as an enemy of communism, the Soviet union and we do not think at all other than the Moscow despotism. Voloshin figured high in the lists of the enemies of the people and, together with hundreds to thousands of former Russian emigrants, traveled back to his homeland.
Vološina was taken to the snare by investigators in the Moscow prison Lefortovo so perfectly that a few days later (probably around May 25, but there is also talk of July 1945 – the date on July 19, 1945) died, bought, from a heart attack. He doesn’t have a grave, he probably ended up in some of the pits where the NKVD buried without ceremony and honor).
From the point of view of the law of the time, the Czechoslovak state and experts, Augustin Volodi was probably something of a traitor. He broke away from the state, which gave his country any freedom and independence. From today’s point of view, he was rather not a very happy politician who fulfills the still unfulfilled desires of his people. The desire of the East Ukrainian people for independence has not disappeared even from the current independent Ukraine. But at least Voloshin got something.
After 1989, a symbolic grave was built for him in Prague by the Ukrainian community in Olšany. In fact, just an extension on the grave of another Ukrainian family. And in 2002 he officially became the Hero of Ukraine.