Liberation by the Red Army? Czechoslovakia became a province of the monstrous Soviet-Russian empire

And the traditional military parade in Moscow every May 9 on Red Square celebrates the victory in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), i.e. in a somewhat different conflict than Europe remembers.

The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, as the treaty signed on August 23, 1939 in Moscow between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union is called, opened the way to World War II, in which the two totalitarian powers became allies. The German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, joined a little later by the Red Army, set off a spiral of violence marked by German-Soviet cooperation.

In the same year, the Soviet Union annexed the eastern part of Poland and attacked Finland, for which he was expelled from the League of Nations in Geneva on 14 December 1939. While Germany crushed France and occupied other European countries in 1940, the Soviet Union, referred to by the current Kremlin dictator as “historic Russia”, annexed parts of Finland and Romania and absorbed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Czechoslovakia no longer existed, and in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, collaborators competed in praise of the German-Soviet alliance. In 1940, Emanuel Moravec, a former Masaryk resident and now a Czech Nazi, spoke in radio speeches about Germany and the Soviet Union as “socialist superpowers” and about the hatred that prevails from “Gibraltar to Vladivostok” towards the “plutocratic-liberalist order”. According to him, there was a struggle between “European socialism and democratic plutocracy”, which is why Moravec warned that the Czechs must not miss the “bus to socialist Europe”.

Similarly, the communist Julius Fučík wrote as early as 1941 that Hitler “prepared Europe for a revolutionary explosion” with his actions, but only the Soviet Union is “the guarantee of the socialist future of Europe” and Stalin the guarantor of the freedom of European nations. Fučík considered the “capitalist” Churchill to be the main danger, and his dream was not a free Czechoslovakia, but a Sovietized Europe. He was therefore the same traitor and collaborator as Emanuel Moravec, whom he criticized.

In the years 1939–1941, the central newspaper of the Soviet communists, Pravda, wrote about the indiscreet friendship of National Socialist Germany with the Soviet Union. Everything changed on June 22, 1941, when Hitler militarily attacked the former ally. Soviet Truth immediately changed its rhetoric and Germany became a “fascist enemy”, whose revolutionary socialism had to be kept silent. The German-Soviet war began, in which two totalitarian and genocidal powers bit into each other.

The Soviet Union, until recently the implacable enemy of Western democracies, moved to the allied camp led by Great Britain (and later also the United States of America), without whose military and economic aid it would not have survived. Soon the myth of the Great Patriotic War arose, the name of which referred to Napoleon’s campaign in Russia in 1812, which was interpreted as an existential struggle not only with France, but with the entire West.

A symbol of the return to Russian imperial traditions was the reintroduction of the St. George ribbon in the Red Army. It was created in 1769 as part of the Order of St. George established by the victorious Russian Empress Catherine the Great and was also used by the White Guards fighting against the Bolsheviks. It has now been revived in the Soviet Union as the “Guards Ribbon” and was also a favorite of Stalin.

When the Second World War ended in 1945, the Soviet Union settled on the side of the victors and in 1945–1946 was one of the guarantors of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg against German Nazi criminals. The Soviet Union was quietly allowed to cover up that it was complicit in the outbreak of the war in 1939, only to end up fighting another war that did not begin until 1941.

In addition, the Soviets brazenly retained the spoils of the German-Soviet alliance, namely parts of Poland, Finland and Romania, as well as all of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Soviet participation in the defeat of Germany certainly did not mean freedom for these countries. Even Poland, Czechoslovakia and other countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe were not liberated “to freedom” by the Red Army, but became the subject of Sovietization and new governorates of the monstrous Soviet-Russian empire.

The Soviet Union, in its sphere of influence, displaced any awareness that it had helped Germany start the war, rechristening the finale of the German-Soviet war as “victory over fascism”. He did not tolerate a reminder of the unpleasant fact of Western aid to his war effort. And he also spread the fairy tale that while he was bleeding for Europe, the “capitalist” West was delaying the opening of the “second front” until 1944 to let Mother Russia bleed out. Unwittingly, he revealed that he was stuck in the optics of the German-Soviet war. After all, one front, held by the West, was in Africa from 1940 and the other from 1941 in the Pacific. In addition, the Americans and their allies opened a second European front already in 1943 by landing in Sicily and starting the Italian campaign.

Countries like Poland knew well, and even their communist leaders did not doubt it, that they lost their state sovereignty in 1944-1945 when they were “liberated” by the Red Army. Only in “people’s democratic” Czechoslovakia during the Third Republic (1945-1948) did we pretend that Sovietization did not concern us, even though it was running at full speed. The Red Army men behaved as if they were in a conquered country, the Soviets were interested in our industrial enterprises and also in uranium for the production of an atomic bomb. May Prague was jubilant in lilac intoxication, and the Soviet units of the Smérš were already arresting, murdering and deporting Czechoslovaks of Russian, Ukrainian or Belorussian origin.

The republic was not even restored in the pre-Munich borders, it was not a state of law or a full-fledged democracy. Along with the communists, Edvard Beneš and Jan Masaryk and other “democratic” parties of the so-called National Front participated in the sovietization of Czechoslovakia, cloaked in gibberish about a “bridge” between the West and the East, or about “Slavic brotherhood”. Not long after the February coup in 1948, Václav Kopecký, the chief ideologue of the local communists, described the situation aptly: “Prague Castle is our little Prague Czechoslovak branch Kremlin.”

From this perspective, the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 appears above all to be the pacification of a disobedient governorate on the part of the colonial metropolis – after all, our “people’s” army did not resist, as its real commanders were not in Prague, but in Moscow. And persons revered by Czechoslovakians, such as President Svoboda and the tearful First Secretary Dubček, behaved like deputies and traitors whose priority was “not to harm the cause of socialism”, not to defend state sovereignty, which they themselves knew best was a mere chimera. That is why former reform communist and exile Antonín J. Liehm later questioned even Gorbachev’s perestroika, because according to him the Soviet Union was an “occupational empire”, while the position of Czechoslovakia and other countries of the “Eastern Bloc” was controlled by Moscow on the basis of “imperial colonial relations”.

Liberation from the tyranny of Moscow, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, was completed only in 1991: the departure of most of the occupation troops, the failure of Yanayev’s putsch, which was an attempt to maintain the empire, and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet-Russian empire in 1991 represented the greatest geopolitical miracle of the 20th century for the nations of Central and Eastern Europe – the imperial-minded Russians, led by the dictator Putin, refer to it as their “geopolitical catastrophe”.

When former KGB officer Vladimir Putin became the ruler of the Kremlin after Yeltsin at the turn of 1999-2000, he immediately initiated a return to Soviet and Russian imperial traditions. Part of it was Putin’s “textbook policy” aimed at unifying teaching in schools in the spirit of Great Russian chauvinism. In 2003, Putin met with veterans of the Great Patriotic War and expressed his dissatisfaction with the way they learn about it in Russia. The result was a “unambiguous interpretation” of Russian history that began to be massively propagated across Russian society, often with the support of the Orthodox Church.

The cornerstones of Putin’s doctrine include the ancient idea of ​​a triune Great Russian nation, which includes Ukrainians and Belarusians as non-self-governing ethnic groups. Both Kievan Rus and the Soviet Union are simply “historical Russia”. Stalin, a brutal dictator and mass murderer, is hailed as the modernizer and architect of victory in the Great Patriotic War, who made Russia (!) a world superpower.

Since 2009, the Kremlin has been saying that World War II was started by Poland, which annexed part of Czechoslovakia with Germany in 1938, and then rejected Hitler’s legitimate demands, leaving Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 with no choice but to come to an agreement.

A significant role in the construction of the new historical narrative was played by Vladimir Medinsky, a political scientist and author of obscure historical novels, a member of Putin’s United Russia party and a former member of the State Duma. He was an activist against the “falsification of Russian history”, for example against the critical commemoration of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, and in the years 2012-2020 he even held the office of Minister of Culture. The Czech public was able to register it in 2019, when in the Koněv case he indiscriminately attacked Ondřej Kolář, then mayor of Prague 6 – calling him a Nazi “Gauleiter” and praising the attitude of Czech President Miloš Zeman.

Putin also likes to play the role of historian, who speaks authoritatively about the history of the 20th century. He essentially declared a major war against Ukraine in 2021 when he wrote ahistorically about the Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939 that “the lands previously occupied by Poland were returned to the USSR” and Ukraine is “entirely a child of the Soviet era.” Although it is said to have been a part of the “Russian world” for a long time, the West has maliciously turned it into Anti-Russia. Last year, a unified history textbook was published in Russia, which describes the history of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries as a conspiracy of the West against Russia, an epoch of the spread of Russophobia and the efforts of the US and NATO to destabilize the Russian state.

Bombastic celebrations of the Soviet-Russian victory in the so-called Great Patriotic War are not innocent. They are staged as a claim to the gratitude of the “liberated” countries, which have an eternal obligation to remain in the Russian imperial orbit. Any critical reflection on the supposedly always positive role of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation in history is considered a manifestation of Russophobia.

Steps leading to the removal of manifestations of Sovietization and Russification in the public space of the former Soviet-Russian governorates, especially monuments to Red Army soldiers and Soviet leaders, are perceived as particularly hysterical. In the Czech Republic, we experienced this in 2020, when the Prague statue of the bloody Marshal Koněv was taken to the museum depository. The obsession with the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, which Russia completely appropriates, takes bizarre forms. Russian “peacefulness” was represented here, for example, by the Russian motorcycle gang Night Wolves, equipped with red flags, portraits of Stalin and St. George’s ribbons.

Putin’s Russia pursues an aggressive politics of memory. When the Victory Day military parade was held in Moscow on May 9, 2022, shortly after Russia’s major invasion of Ukraine, the main slogan was “We can do it again.” This was not a peaceful celebration of an ancient victory, but an open threat to all countries that refuse to submit to Russian imperialism and colonialism.

The author is a historian and philosopher, director of the Department of Research and Education at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes