Russia angered by plan to alter monument

The Russian Embassy in Prague describes as "blasphemy" attempts to remove the hammer and sickle from a Brno war memorial dedicated to fallen Soviet soldiers.

Vandals desecrated the memorial in mid-January, daubing it with a swastika in red paint.

Erected in 1946, the monument commemorates 326 Red Army soldiers who died liberating Brno in April 1945. The Soviet Union lost more than 25 million people in the fight against Nazism.

Brno City Council voted unanimously Jan. 19 to remove the hammer and sickle from the monument in the Královo Pole neighborhood but to leave the red star intact.

"This is not about altering a memorial with controversial symbols," Russian Embassy spokesman Alexander Pismenny told The Prague Post.

"It is about demeaning the memory of those who fell during the liberation of Czechoslovakia. It cannot be described as anything other than blasphemy. The USSR was a member of the anti-Hitler coalition, and that says it all. Something else is going on here; the bureaucrats are trying to make a correction to history."

The Russian response echoes events in Tallinn, Estonia, in April 2007, when the dismantling of a Red Army memorial resulted in ethnic Russians rioting.

The Brno vote means discussions must now take place between the Defense Ministry and Russian officials in March.

One of the leading voices calling for the removal of the hammer and sickle is Brno Deputy Mayor Martin Ander, who believes the ministry should stand firm and back the city's decision.

"My opinion is the Defense Ministry should not give in to Russian pressure," he said. "And if Russia wants to appear as a democratic country, it should not defend symbols of a totalitarian regime."

A leading historian said removing the hammer and sickle, which he compared to the swastika, would not diminish the memory of those who fell fighting the Nazis.

"After all, the hammer and sickle is not the official symbol of the Soviet Army; only the red star is," said Jiří Pernes, a member of the Institute of Contemporary History and a professor at Brno's Masaryk University. "Together, they are communist symbols. It would be as offensive as if someone were to display a swastika. I don't know why the Russians cling to it so much. They do not seem to want to part with their communist past."

However, not all Czechs view the hammer and sickle as a reminder of communist rule but simply a factual representation of those who sacrificed their lives for the freedom of Czechoslovakia.

"It does not have anything to do with communist rule," said the director of the Ořechov Army Museum, Dan Urbánek.

"Every soldier's uniform had the symbol of the Red Army: the red star embossed with the hammer and sickle."

This is not the first time the memorial has made headlines. The hammer and sickle was removed from the statue in 1990, but, in 2006, the city put it back after protests from the Russian consulate.

Then, in 2007, the deputy mayor of Brno-Královo Pole, René Pelán, removed it with a stone grinder in the middle of the night, calling it "a reminder of the reign of terror." Restoration work was carried out after protests from the Russians and the Foreign Affairs Ministry intervened.

The Defense Ministry confirmed it will discuss the issue with Russian officials.

- Klára Jiřičná contributed to this report.

Philip Heijmans can be reached at
pheijmans@praguepost.com