The Kremlin, brave Czechs, the Kim dynasty, and more
The removal of a statue is usually dicey business, and that has proven so in post–Cold War affairs. In fact, you often wonder how “post-” the Cold War really is.
In Prague, they removed a statue of Ivan Konev. He was the Soviet marshal who led Red Army troops into the city at the end of World War II. Did the Soviets liberate Prague? Or should the credit go to Czech resistance fighters? This is a historical dispute that I have no intention, and no need, of wading into.
The Konev statue was erected by Czechoslovakia’s Communist government in 1980. Since freedom, it has been vandalized many times. People spatter it with blood and so on.
What’s their beef against Konev, particularly?
In 1956, he led the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution. In 1961, he led Soviet forces in East Germany as the Berlin Wall went up. In 1968, he prepared the crushing of the Prague Spring.
You know the type.
In place of the Konev statue, the City of Prague will erect a monument to the resistance fighters. They will place the Konev statue in a museum of the 20th century.
The Kremlin reacted furiously to the removal of the statue, saying that Prague was “defiling symbols of Russia’s military glory.” (The Soviet Union and Russia are easily, and often, equated.) They made various threats and claims.
Also critical, if not furious, was Milos Zeman, the Czech president. He is a Putin ally. The Konev statue is under the purview of city officials, not national ones. Zeman called the statue’s removal “ridiculous and miserable.”
In 2018, Zeman refused to participate in events marking the 50th anniversary of the Prague Spring. He did not want to offend Putin.
There are many such people in the Czech Republic, and in other former Soviet-bloc countries, and in life. We have our Putin apologists in America, too.
They occasionally tell me, “Don’t you know the Cold War is over, you relic, nostalgist, and fool?” “Yes,” I say. “Does Putin?”
The statue of Soviet marshal Ivan Konev is loaded onto a truck after being removed from its platform in Prague, April 3, 2020. (David W Cerny / Reuters)
• When we Americans discuss Confederate monuments — the question of whether they should stay or go — someone always says, “You don’t want to eradicate history, do you?”
Some monuments, it is true, are meant to record history. Other monuments are meant to honor the people depicted. We literally place them on pedestals, to be looked up to by one and all.
After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, statues of Lenin and Stalin were taken down all over. Were the people taking them down trying to eradicate history? No, they were more faithful to history than others. They simply believed that Lenin and Stalin did not deserve places of honor, towering over everyone else.
To my knowledge, there is no statue of Hitler. I’m sure there are many such statues — hidden or otherwise out of the way — but I have never seen one. I don’t believe there is one in public. Yet somehow, people are able to learn about the Third Reich, the war, and the Holocaust.
Just something to consider. (Three years ago, I wrote a piece saying pretty much everything I believe about the Confederate-monuments issue. To read it, go here.)
• In recent weeks, a Russian “diplomat” named Andrei Konchakov entered Prague. According to reports, he is an intelligence agent who entered with a suitcase full of ricin, to be used against Prague officials. Moscow has made a specialty of murdering opponents and critics with poison. Konchakov, for his part, said his suitcase contained “disinfectant and candies.”
Don’t bet the ranch (or Ranch candies).
An incidental fact, giving you a flavor of the man: One of Konchakov’s Facebook photos shows him surrounded by the Night Wolves — the notorious Russian motorcycle gang — in front of Prague’s Konev statue.
The targets of the assassination plot are said to be the mayor of Prague, Zdenek Hrib, and two of the city’s “district mayors,” Ondrej Kolar and Pavel Novotny. They are under round-the-clock police protection. Kolar has been forced into hiding, living in a location unknown even to his family.
To see an interview that Kolar gave the BBC, in hiding, go here. His interviewer asks him, “Are you afraid?” Kolar answers, candidly, “I must say, I am.”
Each of the targeted officials has offended the Kremlin in specific ways. Mayor Hrib favors renaming the square next to the Russian embassy after Boris Nemtsov, the Russian liberal democrat who led the opposition to Putin, and was murdered within sight of the Kremlin in 2015.
Putin’s government takes these things very seriously. Critics of this government — Russian, certainly, and sometimes foreign — often take their lives into their hands. I admire them more than I can say.
• In 2010, the Russian Duma acknowledged that the Soviet Union was guilty of the Katyn massacre. In April and May of 1940, the Soviets killed about 22,000 Polish military officers, intellectuals, and others.
Many people were upset with the Duma, for its acknowledgment of guilt. I wrote about one of them in Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators. Actually, this one was a grandson — or probable grandson — Yevgeny Dzhugashvili. (“Dzhugashvili,” remember, was Stalin’s name, before he rechristened himself.) Yevgeny sued the Duma, for its offense against Soviet honor.
Although, why any Stalinist should object to killing — or why any other Communist should — is a mystery.
Since 2010, the Russian government has done a great deal of backtracking. Soviet conduct is being defended or denied, in numerous ways.
Yuri Dmitriev is a researcher into the Stalin period — a discoverer of mass graves — and an official of the Memorial society. I wrote about him in 2017, here. Dmitriev is, of course, in prison.
On May 1 of this year, the Russian mission to the European Union sent out a tweet, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. The tweet showed a picture of pretty Polish girls and women greeting Soviet soldiers with flowers in July 1944. The tweet also had this quaint observation: “Defending their motherland, 26 thousand Polish troops were killed or went missing.”
In the Russian city of Tver, about 100 miles northwest of Moscow, there were two plaques on the façade of a medical-school building: a building that once housed the secret police, where Russians and Poles alike were tortured and executed. The plaques commemorated both the Great Terror and the Katyn massacre. They were placed there by the city government in the early 1990s.
But that was then. On May 7 of this year, the government removed the plaques, on grounds that they were “not based on documented facts.”
Look, my friends, it’s happening again, and anyone who fails to see that, just doesn’t want to.
• Move, now, to North Korea. (I mean, not literally — that would be dangerous.) Kim Jong-un was out of sight for a while. Was he dead, dying, recuperating? Playing video games and eating cheeseburgers? There was widespread speculation.
Since then, Kim has resurfaced, cutting the ribbon at the opening of a new fertilizer factory. (Dictator of North Korea is maybe not the glamorous job it sometimes appears to be.) President Trump issued a tweet, over a shot of the ribbon-cutting: “I, for one, am glad to see he is back, and well!”
The Kim dictatorship has been going on — the worst, most murderous, most evil government on earth — since the end of World War II. Its collapse will be a day of rejoicing.
Might there be a fourth Kim? A fourth one on the throne? Let me paste the last paragraph of my Kim chapter in Children of Monsters:
The dictator, Kim Jong-un, has a wife, Ri Sol-ju. And they have a daughter, Kim Ju-ae. We know this girl’s name because Dennis Rodman, a former basketball star, reported it. Rodman has formed a bond with Jong-un, giving the young ruler a link to the basketball world. Whether Jong-un will be the last dictator from his family, no one can know. It seems unlikely the dynasty can continue. Then again, it seemed unlikely that it could endure, strangling North Korea, for as long as it has.
(Incidentally, Nicolae Ceausescu, in Romania, competed with Kim Il-sung to establish the first Communist dynasty. The Korean won, by miles and miles.)
• Oh, my friends, I have many other items for you — U.S. politics! — but maybe we should leave this column all-Commie. Just a few notes, in closing.
For the Q&A podcast I did with Jeb Bush yesterday, go here. (The main topic, naturally, is the pandemic, and how governors are handling it.)
For a quick post on a funny musical topic, go here. (“Funny”? In this post, I discuss singers and how they sort out their onstage protocol — or how they have it sorted it for them.)
For the archive of Music for a While, go here. This is my music podcast — a little talk, lots of rock (so to speak) — and the latest episode should be “dropping” today.
I hope you are not dropping but blooming. Thanks for joining me, and see you later.
