The Prague Post
http://www.aaaradiotaxi.cz/index.php?xSET=lang&xLANG=2
July 7th, 2008
Endowment Fund     Book of Lists ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Real Estate Prague Prague Rentals Prague Apartments Prague Art & Antiques

Home » Archives » News

Seeing red

Officials attempt damage control as tiff over Soviet war memorial leaves Russia seething

By Hilda Hoy
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 4th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Deputy Mayor René Pelán called the monument "a monster," and took tools to it himself.
The Foreign Affairs Ministry is rushing to smooth tensions after controversy erupted over a Soviet war memorial in south Moravia that's pitted the Russian consulate against a local politician.
The monument, beside a church in the Královo Pole district of Brno, commemorates 326 Red Army soldiers who died liberating the city from Nazi forces in 1945. Above the interred remains of the dead sits a stone obelisk, erected in 1946, that’s crowned with a five-pointed star and embossed at the base with a hammer and sickle. A message in Russian commemorates the unidentified dead.
But during the night June 25, the hammer and sickle disappeared, and none other than Královo Pole’s deputy mayor has claimed responsibility. Two days before the memorial was to be officially unveiled after months of renovations, René Pelán called a stonemason for help. Pelán was so opposed to the hammer and sickle that he himself took power tools to the stone to help grind it off.
“The hammer and sickle are communist symbols, and communism is connected with dictatorship and a reign of terror,” said Pelán, who called the memorial “a monster.” As for the star, “I have nothing against [it],” he said. “That’s the official symbol of the Red Army.”
At the unveiling June 27, police had to be called to detain protesters who showed up to support Pelán’s move, the Czech News Agency (ČTK) reported. Alexei Kolmakov, attaché at Brno’s Russian consulate, arrived to observe the fracas.
Russian consular officials refused to comment, but in a June 28 press release called Pélan’s actions “a deliberate disgracing” of the Red Army victims and an attempt to “rewrite history.”
In late May, when Pelán proposed replacing the monument with a general one to all World War II victims, the consulate released a statement saying they would consider any steps to remove the memorial as “hostile.”
Damage control
While Pelán and his local supporters remain defiant, officials on the national level are scrambling to avert a diplomatic incident.
In their recent memory is the situation that erupted in Tallinn, Estonia, in late April after officials there dismantled a Red Army memorial and exhumed the remains beneath it. In the ensuing days of rioting among Estonia’s ethnic Russian population, one man was killed, hundreds injured and many hundreds more arrested. The Estonian Embassy in Moscow was blockaded and the ambassador attacked.
There are no discussions to exhume the remains in Královo Pole, but officials are eager to contain the diplomatic fallout from Pelán’s actions.
In a letter to Královo Pole Mayor Ivan Kopečný June 28, the Foreign Affairs Ministry called on district officials to “fix the damage immediately.”
“The discussion about communism and its symbols should never dishonor those people who participated in the liberation of Czechoslovakia,” wrote Tomáš Szunyog, head of the ministry’s Southern and Eastern Europe department.
Szunyog cited a 1999 Czech-Russian agreement on the keeping of war graves that requires each state to “respect the national, religious and other traditions” of the other.
“I am currently working on [replacing the symbol],” Kopečný said. Though he disagrees with the way Pelán went about things, he and other local officials have voiced their opposition to having a hammer and sickle in their midst. However, their opinions have always been overridden by the Foreign Affairs and Defense ministries.
Still, he stressed, “We did not intend to dishonor the soldiers buried there.”
Heavy symbolism
In the years following the 1989 revolution that ended communism, overt reminders of the past regime were systematically removed, and streets named for figures such as Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin were renamed.
It was during that early post-revolution period, in 1990, that the hammer and sickle on the Královo Pole monument first disappeared. Pelán was on hand at that occasion too, though it was an acquaintance that actually did the removal work that time, he said.
The obelisk languished in this condition for 16 years until last June, when the local Russian consulate inspected the site and discovered the “inappropriate” discrepancy.
The scope of the renovations was decided by the Defense Ministry and Russian consular officials, said Brno Mayor Roman Onderka. At a cost of 53,000 Kč ($2,484), the site was cleaned up this spring and the hammer and sickle reinstated.
“I respect the agreement made by the Czech and Russian sides,” Onderka said.
Pelán, meanwhile, isn’t worried about repercussions.
“They can charge me with damaging somebody else’s property, but I was fighting against another crime — the promotion of movements that restrict human rights and freedom,” he said.
Czech law bans the support or propagation of such movements, and, under some interpretations, this means not only fascism but also socialism and communism.
Pelán says that means the hammer and sickle is not unlike the swastika, and thus illegal, because both are symbols tied to such movements.
Brno Police spokesman Bohumil Malášek said the force has 30 days to investigate before deciding if charges will be laid against Pelán.
— Naďa Černá and Hela Balínová contributed to this report.

Hilda Hoy can be reached at hhoy@praguepost.com


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

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Book of Lists

Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.