ted to direct and indirect control by a number of great powers, including Sweden, Russia, Prussia and the Hapsburg Empire and was partitioned several times by or among these powers. Bohemia came under the control of the Hapsburgs in 1526 and did not achieve independence as Czechoslovakia until 1918. After 1648, Hungary was "wedged between Prussian, Russian and Austrian absolutism" (Maczak 21). It obtained a substantial degree of internal autonomy under the Compromise of 1867 with Austria-Hungary which established a Dual Monarchy, but it, too, did not become an independent state until 1918 and, like the others, was under Nazi and Soviet control to varying degrees until the end of the Cold War. Nationalist aspirations were repeatedly frustrated by neighboring great powers, most notably during the early Hussite protestant rebellion in Bohemia, revolts in Hungary and Poland in the early eighteenth century, the failed revolutions of 1848 and the Soviet takeover.
(2) Nationalist movements in those countries before the mid- twentieth century were largely controlled by a semi-feudal aristocracy or landholding class which served as an impediment to economic and social progress. The most extreme version of this were the Magyars in Hungary who dominated Hungarian politics after 1867. The Czech movement for independence was led by a combination of traditional defenders of the old Czech staatsrecht and a "rejuvenated bourgeois national intelligentsia" which came to dominate Czech politics in the latter part of the nineteenth century (Kahn 153).
(3) Nationalist movements in these countries tended to place their interests ahead of those of other minorities which were suppressed, leading to conflicts over language and control of the state and the economy. All three states had significant ethnic minorities which were in more or less continous conflict with the dominant nationality throughout most of m
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