Czechoslovakia was created out of the northern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War. It was crushed by the Nazi takeover of the Sudetenland in 1938 and the rest of the country in 1939. After the Second World War Czechoslovakia fell under Soviet domination, an attempt at liberalization being crushed by military intervention in 1968, until the ‘velvet revolution’ of 1989. The two parts separated on 1 January 1993.