You can also listen to the gloss in the audio version.
Only older people like me remember that Anděl subway station B (the “yellow line” for migrants) was called Moskevská.
It lasted quite a while. Exactly from November 2, 1985 to February 22, 1990, when at the beginning of the new era, the people of Prague sensibly concluded that the stop symbolizing Czechoslovak-Soviet “friendship” was located in Prague, on Anděl, safely far from Moscow. So it should be called that too.
And now, almost 35 years later, we are suddenly again wondering if we have a little more left from Moskevská at Anděl after all than is healthy.
Specifically, for example, a sculpture with the inscriptions “Prague – Moscow” in the vestibule at the bus station. Or signs reminding of mandatory companionship. One in which engineers from the country that invaded Czechoslovakia and occupied it during the construction of the station generously helped with the construction of the subway.
Or creations of socialist realism depicting the first Czechoslovak cosmonaut Vladimír Remek and his Soviet sidekick Alexey Gubarev in the conquest of space. Czechoslovakia received this trip to orbit in 1978 from Moscow as a gift for the 10th anniversary of the Soviet occupation. Even so, in 2013, Remko, later a member of the European Parliament for the KSČM, was given the position of Czech ambassador in Moscow by the will of President Zeman.
Play Happy Monday
Perhaps it seems that in 2024 it is a bit late for such debates. The fact that the Prague metro has survived in this form to this day also says something about how we got used to it all. We simply pass by those reminders without even wanting to realize what they were supposed to mean.
It’s just that sometimes someone reminds us of it again. Here Putin, here, for example, the sixteen-year-old student Jan Boháč, the author of a petition that requests the removal of historical scars from Anděl. It’s a pretty useful perspective from someone who is clearly unaffected by our dead-end debates and just asks with age-appropriate directness, “Does this really seem normal to you?”
Jan Boháč is right. It’s not normal. It’s absurd. Similar to the explanation of Prague municipality spokesman Vít Hofman. He declared that nothing will be changed or removed at Anděl, because “it is a historical part of the area, i.e. part of the architecture and art of the station, and the transport company did not follow the path of cancel culture”.
What? Cancel culture? Does this now mean that all “historical components of a given area” are inviolable? It’s a shame we didn’t know this earlier in the capital. We could still look at the statues of Gottwald or Lenin (both disappeared from Prague in January 1990). Or Marshal Koněv, who only left Dejvice in 2020. Why did we actually rename all those streets, squares or metro stations? To this day, we could drive from Mayor Vack to Budovatelů, Druzhba, Mládežnická or Kosmonautů.
Or just to Moskevská, where today I would enthusiastically get off on my way to work. I would come there from Fučíkova, which was, however, “cancelled” at Holešovice Station.
When we talk about “cancel culture” in relation to the removal of works of art, it is usually a manifestation of someone’s bad conscience from their own past. We can talk about our own responsibility for communism and normalization for a long time. However, the Czechs and Slovaks did not really invite Soviet tanks into the country in 1968. On the other hand, Moskevská, like many other things, should have reminded them that they are still here.
Listen to the Happy Podcast
By the way, building Moskevská in a place that had been called Anděl for more than a hundred years at the time was perversely symbolic. As the reader-book writer and poet Jáchym Topol described it at the time: “The Anděl intersection will be called Moskevská and it will be ugly.” Even in the time of slowly disintegrating normalization, the Communists had a tendency to occupy every piece of public space, to show their power there, possibly as at Anděl , the power of its protectors. And in 2024, we are dealing with the complex issue of whether we can afford to touch this unwanted legacy?
Of course, yes, just as it was right to send the statue of Koněv to the depository only in 2020, because one probably comes to some things later, under the influence of many other circumstances and experiences.
In the end, the transport company came up with this, as it wants to deliver an “explanatory table” to Anděl as quickly as possible according to the tried-and-tested model. And in the future, to announce an art competition that will “determine a new form for the surface with the relief”. Which is no longer “cancel culture”, if I understand correctly. We’ll probably make fun of it as usual.
But it may not actually be a bad solution. Not even complicated. We can look for inspiration in Vienna, for example. There, since 1945, they have had a giant statue of a Soviet soldier right in front of the palace of the Schwarzenberg family. The Austrians probably never thought that they would get rid of this beauty once and for all. Probably also because the Soviet army, which liberated Vienna, withdrew from them already in 1955 and, luckily for Austria, never returned.
After the Russian attack on Ukraine, this corner of Vienna underwent a visible transformation. Someone painted the walls behind the monument yellow and blue. And recently someone made two portraits of Alexei Navalny there. For a start, something similar could be enough in Prague on Anděl – Moskevská.
