Three-Meter Pushkin

by Karl

Proposed statue

One of the nice features of our neighborhood is Puškinovo náměstí, or Pushkin Square. It's a small city block, shaped sort of like a diamond, with grass, two play areas, and big trees, surrounded by quiet streets and pleasant five-story buildings. This was the site of Garrett's biking breakthrough earlier this month and a great place to take the boys for some running around without a big expedition.

Garrett bikes past the playground at Pushkin Square.

Today was the boys' last day of school (!!). I walked them past Pushkin Square, down to the shuttle bus, and when I got back to our building, as I made my way to the stairs I noticed a flier taped up on the building's information board. It turns out today is the last day to comment on a proposed addition to Pushkin Square.  Prague is divided into more than 20 "parts," each with its own mayor (as opposed to the lord mayor of all of Prague) and local council.  Our neighborhood of Bubeneč is in Prague 6, whose mayor says:

The Russian Cultural Foundation has offered Prague 6 a statue of the Russian renaissance poet Pushkin. They have also requested the placement of the statue on Pushkin Square in Bubeneč. Given that the statue would be placed near the dwellings of hundreds of people, we consider it our duty to ask the residents whether they agree with this plan. Based on their answers, we will formulate our position as a response to the Russian side.

I don't feel particularly confident in judgments of visual aesthetics, so I can't weigh in on whether this is a fine piece of art or some kitchy abomination that will ruin a pleasant neighborhood space. But there's also the whole Russian thing.

In the 19th century, many Czechs succumbed to Russophilia. In the Habsburg Empire there were all sorts of Slavs--Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Poles, Ukrainians--all with limited political power. The Russians were the only Slavic people with their own country, and what a country it was!  The biggest country in the world, the largest population in Europe, the great steamroller that had defeated Napoleon. It was understandable that Slavs elsewhere might look to Russia for salvation.

There was even a small revival of Orthodox Christianity. People played up the notion that the first baptism of western Slavs (Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles) was into Orthodoxy, by the brothers Cyril and Methodius. They came to the realm of Great Moravia in the 860s, at the request of Prince Rastislav, who may have been looking for some political independence from the Frankish realm to his west.  Along the way to Moravia they devised the Glagolitic alphabet (it's worth a look), the first written form of a Slavic language, and the distant ancestor of the various modern Cyrillic alphabets. This strengthened the sense of a Slav heritage shared with Russia, and even highlighted the role or the western Slavs in the origins of the writing system used by modern Russians. Some Czechs went so far as to propose that they write their own language in Cyrillic, instead of the modified Latin script that had been used for a millennium.

Not everyone was ready to embrace the Russian bear. František Palacký, the first great Czech historian of the modern age and the "father of the nation," remarked that, "if Austria did not exist, we would have to invent her." He wanted Austria to be a federation, to give its constituent peoples more say in their own affairs. But he also recognized that, even in the centralized, sometimes absolutist form that he knew it, Austria had provided space in which the Czechs had been able to revive their written language, their high culture, their national identity. He was convinced that if the small nations of Central Europe were ever to gain full independence, they would be unable to maintain it, but would inevitably come to be dominated either by Russia or by Prussia (after 1871, the German Empire that Prussia had created).

Palacký was well aware of Russian despotism. The whole idea of "pan-Slavism"--that all Slavic peoples shared some common traits that made them natural allies--was a hard sell given the situation in Poland. This country had expanded at Russia's expense when Russia was weak, then lost ground to its eastern neighbor over a couple of centuries, until in the late 1700s it was completely carved up in three stages of "partitions," among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Poles weren't particularly happy with any of their rulers, but it was clear that Russian rule in Poland was particularly harsh.

The Czech historian also feared absorption into Prussia/Germany. He didn't like how Austrian Germans ruled, but they were only about 25 percent of the Habsburg population, so some accommodation with non-Germans in the empire was necessary. But if the Czech lands were incorporated into Germany itself, the small Czech population would be swallowed up and in a few generations would cease to exist, as had happened with other small groups of western Slavs.

The 20th century arguably proved Palacký right. Czechoslovakia was established when Germany and Russia had been weakened by war and revolution, and it maintained itself from 1918 to 1938. There followed six months of German domination, then six years of outright occupation, with horrors greater than anything Palacký could have imagined. Then came liberation, mostly at the hands of the Soviet Army. The U.S. Army liberated the western slice of the country, but the powers had already assigned Czechoslovakia to the Soviet sphere of influence, so the Americans pulled out.

From May 1945 to February 1948 there was something more or less like democracy. The Communist Party gave itself some unfair advantages in the elections of 1946, but it was legitimately popular. Russophile tendencies had never entirely died out, and now the Soviets were the country's liberators. The bourgeois democracy of the interwar years was seen as a failure, with corrupt politicians just looking out for themselves (sound familiar?).

And the Munich Agreement of 1938, when Czechoslovakia was forced to cede the German-inhabited territories around its borders, left people understandably unimpressed with the alliance with France and Britain. Throw in a long cultural tradition of egalitarianism and anti-clericalism, and going with the Soviet Union seemed to many people like a reasonable option.

Of course, Czechs told themselves, Russia was a backward, peasant country when the Bolsheviks staged their coup in 1917, and they had lived for centuries under a brutal tsarist regime, so it was regrettable but entirely understandable that the Soviet system had turned out, well, somewhat brutal and undemocratic. Czechoslovakia, in contrast, was an advanced, industrialized economy with a democratic past and a well-educated workforce. It was an ideal country to build a truly democratic, humane version of socialism. That's not at all how it turned out.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was perhaps the most slavishly Muscovite in the whole Soviet bloc, with political repression as bad as anywhere, and show trials that would make Stalin proud. In 1968 the Party tried a sort of re-set, trying to build "socialism with a human face," but that was stopped in its tracks by the invasion of troops from the Warsaw Pact (mainly Soviets).  That was the final nail in the coffin of Czech Russophilia.

But the troops stayed, all the way through the end of communist rule. Just this month, the Czech Republic marked the 20th anniversary of the final withdrawal of Soviet forces from Czechoslovakia--the soldiers made it home just in time for the August, 1991 coup that tried to reinstate hardline communism in Russia.

The troops are gone, but the Russians are still here, or rather, they're back. There are the Russian nouveaux riches who have moved to the country, with varying degrees of unsavory in how they've made their money. Our neighborhood has its share of Russian establishments, including these  two:

The "Arbat" store (named after a famous shopping street in Moscow) has everything from Russian porcelain to airplane tickets and tour packages.

"Ruská kniha" (or "Russkaya kniga") means "Russian book," but they also sell and rent DVD's etc.

Russians are thick in places like Karlovy Vary, where they come by the busload and often buy apartments. (This is also a return to earlier times: there are scenes in War and Peace that play out in Karlovy Vary among the Russian nobility there for a cure.) Signs in stores are in Czech and Russian, or sometimes only in Russian. Signs advertising apartments for sale are also in both languages. A Czech acquaintance visited Karlovy Vary and his wife was offended when a store keeper addressed her first in Russian, before realizing she was Czech. "In twenty years of capitalism, the Russians have acquired more control over this country than in twenty years as occupiers." An exaggeration, but a revealing one.

The energy situation compounds the mood. Like much of Europe, the Czech Republic is dependent on Russian natural gas, which makes people uneasy about a possible return to Russian domination. The overall result is a tone of resentment and dislike. Last spring back in Oneonta, when we were looking online at Prague apartments, I found one that seemed promising: nice neighborhood, nice arrangement of space, good price. The last line in the ad read, "No foreigners from the east. Dogs and smokers no problem."

Of course, "foreigners from the east" is ambiguous--there's a sizable Vietnamese population in Prague, and maybe that's who they meant. But there are the Russian nouveaux riches, and also many Ukrainians, who are more likely to be poorly paid day laborers (maybe here without proper papers), who are about as unpopular, but for having too little money rather than too much. I'm guessing they were the target, rather than guys from southeast Asia running a produce shop.

Today was the last day to comment on the proposed Pushkin statue. I wonder what kind of feedback they got.