Prague has plenty of statues, some of which I like (the Pomník vojákům Rudé armády, the Red Army Soldiers Monument, near the front entrance of the main train station), some of which annoy me (I mean you, Jan Hus in Old Town Square), and some of which I simply ignore (pretty much anything later than David Černý’s wonderful upside-down horse, “Kůň,” from 1999). Then there’s the statue after my own heart: the one I have photographed regularly, the one that doesn’t always let me get good images of it, the one that has upset some Czechs—and some Russians—in the twenty-first century.
Yes, I’m talking to you, Ivan Stepanovich Konev, Marshal and Hero of the Soviet Union, standing as you do on náměstí Interbrigády in Prague 6, Bubeneč. I often passed you in the late afternoon and early evening as I walked down Jugoslávských partyzánů from the Dejvická (formerly Leninova) subway stop.
There you were, standing high atop your pedestal wearing your great coat, your left arm raised in what I assumed was a friendly greeting. In the spring the scent of lilacs, or bez, wafted through the air. Those were flowers that Prague residents presented their Red Army “liberators,” and you hold a bouquet of them in your right hand. I did wonder about that great coat. It was May, after all, when you and your troops arrived in Prague. As it turns out, a cold May.
Prague Lilacs (May 2013); Figure of Konev (May 2013)
Local sculptors Zdeněk Krybus and Vratislav Růžička produced the Konev statue during the Communist era. Unveiled in 1980, it included a laudatory commemorative plaque on the right-hand side of the base referring to “Major Commander Marshal of the Soviet Union Ivan Stepanovich Konev, Double Hero of the Soviet Union and Hero of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front.” I never paid much attention to the inscription. Although I’ve long been agnostic on the question of a Prague uprising that began on May 5, versus a Nazi German retreat, or some combination of the two, Konev did lead the Soviet troops who marched into Prague on the 9th.
I also didn’t pay much attention to the anomaly of a statue of the Soviet Marshal still standing in a city and a country that had consigned so many communist-era statues, if not to the dustbin of history, to disused airplane hangers and back gardens of district archives. Among the banished are Bohumír Šmeral, Jan Šverma, Vladimir Lenin, and Julius Fučík, below.
I have always thought of the Konev statue in terms similar to Russian-/Czech-language plaques I’d seen elsewhere in Prague. They honored the Red Army for liberating the Czechoslovak people in 1945 and I considered the Konev statue more anti-Nazi than philo-Communist.
Certainly, various Czech/Czechoslovak governmental and popular organizations had long laid wreaths at the base of the statue every May honoring Konev’s role in liberating Prague.
Local interpretations of the statue’s significance vary widely, and some Prague residents don’t like what they believe it represents at all. In November 2014, someone doused the good marshal with pink paint, recalling Černý’s splattering pink paint on Soviet Tank No. 23, (aka the pink tank), a monument Konev helped dedicate in 1945. I personally thought the color became him. The following year, “Heil, Putin” appeared on the statue’s pedestal. A local petition drive, also in 2015, saved Konev from wholesale removal, the fate of so many of his fellow communists after 1989. The statue was again vandalized in late November 2017 when someone painted the years 1956, 1961, 1968, and 2017 on it in red paint. Many Czechs consider the Soviet commander’s behavior to have been something less than heroic in the first three of those years. Rather than remove the statue, the mayor of Prague 6 promised to provide additional signage to help set straight the record about Konev’s post-1945 actions.
All of this attention to Konev caused a minor diplomatic row. The Russians were not amused. As they did in the matter of the removal of a statue of a Russian soldier from the center of Tallinn, Estonia in 2007, the Russians sought to intervene to control the narrative of the Red Army’s role in the Second World War. Joined by the ambassadors of four other post-Soviet states, the Russians sent an open letter to the Czech Foreign Ministry to protest plans for Konev. If I were Czech, I wouldn’t want the Russians telling me what to think about this statue or how to commemorate Czechoslovakia’s liberation from the Nazis.
On August 21, 2018, sixtieth anniversary of the Russian invasion during the Prague Spring, new, more accurate, inscriptions in Czech, Russian and English were unveiled on the base of the statue. They included information on Konev’s role in both the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring. I’m glad the plaques have been added. Not everyone has accepted this solution to the Konev legacy, however. As I write this in late August 2019, the statue’s pedestal has been splashed with red paint on the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s August 21, 1968 invasion of Prague and someone has painted the words “No bloody Marshal” and “We will not forget” on its base.
I don’t mind that someone has again vandalized Konev as long as the damage isn’t permanent. I just like him there because I’m used to him. And, the marshal can be a good teaching aid, if passersby bother to read the information about this historic figure. Sadly, I seem to be in the minority, along with some Czech Communists. The elected officials of Prague 6 seem to have had enough Konev drama and voted to remove him. The Russians are not amused.
Note: So, this morning, April 3, I got a message from a Slovenian friend, the historian Rok Stergar, this morning with the header, “Isn’t this your statue?” And, indeed it was. Under the cover of the pandemic, the perfidious Czech authorities had sneaked in and taken Konev down, just as they had various Joseph II monuments between the wars. All that remains of the statue is a wooden box around the stone pedestal on which he used to stand. Stay tuned for a picture of the empty space.
But, soon enough, although Konev has been carted off to spend his days in oblivion, or at least, some stray communist museum, graffiti appeared on the wooden sarcophagus entombing the space my friend formerly occupied. Someone/someones put a toilet, quickly removed, atop the sarcophagus. And, still more graffiti has appeared. All this, despite the on-going corona virus lockdown. Check here for the further adventures of Konev, the statue.
Of Monuments and Memory 