A bloodless, gentle takeover of power from officials who no longer wanted to be responsible for the administration of a Habsburg province

From The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds.  Page 9.

By the autumn of 1918, however, statements by the Allies became irrelevant, as the Habsburg and Ottoman armies collapsed and Russia disintegrated in civil war. What exactly would replace them and fill the looming power vacuum depended on a mixture of local power and international influence.

A classic example was the new Czechoslovakia. For Tomáš Masaryk, 1918 was a spectacular payoff for earlier gambles. An imposing philosophy professor turned Czech nationalist politician, Masaryk already had a predisposition to the West: his academic work was on British and French empiricist philosophy (Hume, Mill, and Comte) and, having married the daughter of a wealthy New Yorker, he spoke fluent English. Masaryk fled Prague in late 1914, settling for two years in London, where he lived in Hampstead, catching the bus into town to teach Slavonic studies at London University and also to cultivate his contacts with the British officials and journalists. After the fall of the tsar, he traveled to Russia on a British passport to organize the Czech Legion and then in 1918 to the United States to mobilize American support. He met Wilson on several occasions in the White House and, in a brilliant propaganda coup, read out a declaration of the “Independent Mid-European Nations” from the steps of Independence Hall, Philadelphia—shrine of America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776. Thanks to this blend of influence in high places and shrewd public relations, Masaryk had already secured Allied recognition for an independent Czechoslovakia several months before Habsburg rule collapsed. The revolution in Prague at the end of October was “a bloodless, gentle takeover of power from officials who no longer wanted to be responsible for the administration of a Habsburg province.” Four years after he had fled Prague, Masaryk returned in triumph as president of a new republic—a position he would hold for seventeen years.