The Czechs in a Nutshell

Unfortunately, the Russians’ bad luck didn’t end here. Immediately after the liberation of Czechoslovakia, Stalin’s Red Army started to silently round up White Russian emigrants who had survived the war. In 1946, 12,000 Russians (many of whom by now had become Czechoslovak citizens) were transported to the Soviet Union without a single word of protest from the Prague government. Back “home”, the emigrants were without exception imprisoned in gulags. Less then 4,000 of them ever saw Czechoslovakia again.

As relatives of the abducted emigrants’ recently told Týden magazine, this horrible injustice didn’t arouse any popular upheaval. After France and Great Britain’s treason in Munich in 1938, which paved the way for six years of brutal Nazi occupation, the mood in post-war Czechoslovakia was, not surprisingly, strongly pro-Soviet. Stalin had not stabbed Czechoslovakia in the back. On the contrary, his victorious Red Army’s soldiers had liberated the country from its occupants (later it appeared that they also had raped quite of lot of women). As a result, even non-communist Czechs were convinced that Soviet Russia was the only nation they could really trust.

It’s fair to say that a majority of post-war Czechs tolerated the strong fixation on Soviet Russia as long as it didn’t affect the economy (as it started to do in the 1960s). Symptomatically, most people didn’t react to the Russians’ violent invasion in Hungary in 1956 (see: Communism), but this changed dramatically when the Czechs themselves, in 1968, were treated with the bitter medicine that the Hungarians had tasted twelve years earlier.

Photo © Terje B. Englund

Contrary to the Hungarians, the Czechs didn’t put up an armed fight against the invading Russians, but the resistance was still heroic. Almost 30 protesting civilians were shot dead by the invaders (many of whom apparently believed they were curbing an American-supported revolution), over 70 others were killed in accidents caused by the invaders, and thousands of civilians were wounded, some severely. The Czechs’ peaceful attempt to create “socialism with a human face” was crushed by blunt and brutal force. Jan Palach’s self-sacrifice was an extreme reaction, but his immense despair was shared by millions of Czechs.

The invasion in 1968 and the following deployment of a 75,000-strong occupation force in Czechoslovakia ruined the Russians’ image for generations. As so often before, the majority of the Czechs didn’t express their deeply felt revulsion for the rulers openly (see: Communication; National Identity). Neither did they stop reading Chekhov or listening to Tchaikovsky. Instead, they poked fun of and ridiculed the Russians in private, just as Švejk in the past had ridiculed the Austrians.

Most of the jokes were based on one comical fact: while the official propaganda portrayed the Soviet Union as a frontrunner in almost every thinkable area of human activity, the Czechs knew perfectly well that the Eastern Empire, stripped for its nuclear arms, was in reality hopelessly backwards. As one common joke went: We’ll follow the Soviet Union to eternity, but not a second more!

So, have the Czechs’ relations to the Russians changed after the fall of the Iron Curtain? The answer seems to be both yes and no.

On a political and economic level, the relations have indubitably improved (that is, from a Czech point of view). A milestone was passed in June 1991, when the last Red Army soldier left Czechoslovakia, and few Czechs shed tears when the Soviet Union was dissolved a couple of months later. Then add Germany as the Czech Republic’s main trade partner, membership in NATO and the EU, and the picture gets clear: Moscow has to treat the Czechs as any other smaller, Western country.

Yet the common suspicion of everything Russian still persists. Now, many Czechs believe, they are not threatening us with their tanks or political pressure, but with their criminals!

It’s hard to judge whether these allegations are exaggerated or not. Yes, the enormous privatisation, the lack of official control, and the legal chaos that characterized the Czech Republic in the first half of the 1990s attracted criminals from every corner of the world, including the former Soviet Union. The question, however, is whether “Russian-speaking persons”, which is the official Czech euphemism for inhabitants of the former Soviet Union, are over-represented among foreign criminals.