Yesterday, 21 August, was the 38th anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops. For the first time, a Czech daily newspaper, Mlada fronta Dnes, has revealed some details of what happened inside the Czechoslovak Radio building that was occupied by the troops. Citing documents stored in Prague’s National Archives which have never been published, the paper writes that the list of the items that were destroyed and damaged runs to 14 pages.
Estimates of the damage that the Soviet troops caused to radio station property exceeded CZK 1 million at that time. Apart from broken equipment and cut cables, all offices were plundered. The soldiers broke doors, broke into employees’ personal lockers and desks and forced open the vaults. The money, including foreign currency, disappeared. Radio station employees lost property worth almost CZK 250,000. The damage was calculated up to February 4, 1969, the paper says.
The archive documents and eyewitnesses’ evidence also confirm that the occupiers often did not use toilets, and that the building had to be disinfected after they left it. “The Russians only spared one room in which Communist posters and Lenin’s portraits were hanging on the walls,” former radio editor Karel Wichs said.
Nobody was ever prosected for these offences, because ”the investigators failed to ascertain the facts that would allow to start criminal prosecution of concrete persons,” prosecutor Karel Pesta decided in 1970.
(Source: CTK)
on Aug 24th, 2006 at 16:33
Ah, those good old times! Bringing the right kind of democracy was so lighthearted and naive back then. Breaking into lockers and peeing outside of the urinals - that sounds more like an elementary school joke. And that was the Soviet Army that the West was so afraid of?!
NATO wasn’t as nice in Yugoslavia when it bombed to the ground TV & Radio Building in Belgrade as a “legitimate target.” And if you want to know what true plundering is, just remind yourself of what happened in Baghdad right after the “liberation”.