Czech Republic: A historic clash with Russia
How much do Czechs owe Russians for their freedom? On the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, that question has the two countries at loggerheads, said Katerina Perknerova in Denik. The tussle began in February, when Prague Mayor Zdenek Hrib renamed the square in front of the Russian Embassy for Boris Nemtsov, a dissident Russian politician murdered in Moscow in 2015. Then last month, Ondrej Kolar, mayor of a district in the capital, removed a statue of Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev, whose troops liberated most of Czechoslovakia from Nazi Germany. Another Prague district mayor, Pavel Novotny, further angered Russia by proposing a memorial to the Russian Liberation Army—a group of turncoat Red Army soldiers who collaborated with the Nazis for years before changing sides and helping the Czech resistance. Russia has struck back: President Vladimir Putin last month made it a criminal offense to damage war memorials, and Russian prosecutors launched an investigation into the removal of the Konev statue. Then a Russian agent showed up in Prague, allegedly carrying a batch of the deadly toxin ricin to poison Hrib, Kolar, and Novotny, all of whom are now under police protection. “Death threats and hate messages fly through the air,” and Czechs are tense and angry.
Our debt to Moscow is minimal, said Filip Sara in Novinky.cz. When Konev arrived in our capital in May 1945, he found a city that had been “virtually freed” by the Prague Uprising, in which ordinary Czechs rose up against the Nazis. That’s not quite fair, said Jiri Nemec in Pravo. With 20 million dead, the Soviet Union
“bore the brunt of the burden of the war against Hitler.” We can’t erase the sacrifices and achievements of the Red Army simply because Soviet tanks would later crush the nascent Czechoslovak democracy that emerged in the Prague Spring of 1968. Without the Soviets in 1945, “we would be dominated by the descendants of Hitler today.”
This isn’t the first time Czechs have removed Soviet monuments, said Ondrej Neff in Lidove Noviny. In 1991, two years after Communist rule here was toppled, artist David Cerny desecrated a Soviet tank that stood in a Prague square as a monument to Konev’s troops, painting it pink and erecting a giant middle finger on its turret. That tank was later relocated to a museum with no Russian protest. But since then, Czech “displays of weakness”—notably its 2011 withdrawal from a U.S. missile defense program—“have led Russia to believe it could wipe its shoes on us.” Our president, Milos Zeman, the Czech Communist Party, and other proMoscow figures are happy to be walked on, said Petr Honzejk in Hospodarske Noviny. They have downplayed the death threats against the Prague mayors, “openly opposing Czech citizens in favor of Russian state power.” Supposed patriots such as Zeman think they are acting in the national interest, regarding Russia as a defender of “traditional values” like family and sovereignty against the decadence of Western liberal democracy. They are blind to what Putinism represents in reality: the “imprisonment and murder of political opponents, absolute submission to authority,” and the utter destruction of human rights.