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Former Soviet bear casts a long shadow
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July 4th, 2007 issue

It’s very worrisome when Russia starts making bellicose demands of the Czech Republic.

The slumbering bear of the former Soviet Union reared its furry head last week to protest against a Brno district deputy mayor removing a hammer and sickle symbol that had been chiseled into the base of a restored Soviet-era war memorial. The monument commemorates 326 Red Army soldiers who died liberating the city from Nazi forces in 1945.
A five-pointed star, the official Red Army symbol, remains as does a message in Russian honoring the unidentified dead. (for details, check out the story on page A1).
Russia and the Czech Republic have intergovernmental agreements governing such monuments, and defacing them is “vandalism,” a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman who declined to be identified told Itar-Tass, the Russian news agency, June 28.
This is not vandalism, and it’s not even about the war dead, even though the Russians would have us think so.
It is about countries coming out from under the former Soviet shadow breaking free of communism once and for all.
It’s telling that the Russians are getting bent out of shape now. After all, thousands of street names were changed from Lenin and Stalin to names that were more appropriate to each country, post-1989. There also used to be a gigantic statue of Stalin on the Letná hill overlooking Prague that has been gone for years. Removing the statue did not create an international incident.
What this is really about is who gets to frame the argument about power in a world where Russia feels threatened politically.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is struggling to have a hand in a missile-defense shield system that the United States wants to locate in the Czech Republic and in Poland. Putin wants to put the shield within his sphere of influence and control in southern Russia and former Soviet Azerbaijan.
U.S. President George W. Bush continues to insist that it be in the Czech Republic and in Poland. In a “fishing summit” in Maine this weekend, Bush said he “trusts” Putin.
But politicians who remember what it was like to live under the Soviets cannot afford to be as diplomatic as Bush.
While surface changes make cities like Prague, Kyiv and Tallinn, Estonia, feel open and international less than 20 years later, the long shadow of the Soviets does not easily fade in the collective memory. Russia is showing that it can be aggressive and nasty when the former Soviet satellites do something it doesn’t like.
Recently, officials in Tallinn saw riots that killed at least one person and injured hundreds after relocating a similar war monument.
Czechs, Poles and others formerly behind the Iron Curtain have to take a stand.
They should take a page from the book of Ukrainian politicians on the Lviv city council who now want to make sure they destroy all Soviet symbols and monuments in their will to express solidarity with Estonia. As one of them so eloquently put it, there are too few symbols commemorating the country’s homegrown heroes and too many monuments to “those who tortured the Ukrainian people for decades.”
Don’t let the bear be a bully.
Acquiesing to Russian demands is a step backward and does not fit in with the vibrant changes of today.


Other articles in Opinion (4/07/2007):

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