Wednesday’s Child: Spat on a Plinth

Let us turn to the more lighthearted side of life.  While democracy groans and totalitarianism gloats, there is plenty of comedy out there to enjoy.

The episode I’ve been following is of personal significance to me, as I was born at the precise moment Hungary rose up against the Soviets in October 1956.  Unbeknown to the participants, the uprising – like all glorious revolutions since the death of Stalin – had been a sham, masterminded by Yuri Andropov and fomented on his orders by the Soviet secret police, though this in no way diminishes the valiance of the hapless Hungarians or the solemnity of the tragic event.  The KGB provocation was completed on November 4, when Soviet tanks entered Budapest.

Not very amusing so far, but please bear with me.  The tanks that rolled into Hungary were under the command of Marshal Konev, who in 1945 had competed with Marshal Zhukov in the race to occupy Berlin and in 1956 was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Warsaw Pact.  Twelve years later, in 1968, the same marshal sent the same tanks to restore the same Soviet order in Czechoslovakia following the same provocation masterminded by the same Andropov, who had in the meantime become the head of the same KGB.

Here’s where it gets somewhat more amusing.  In 1980 in Prague, then still the capital of Soviet-held Czechoslovakia, a giant bronze statue was erected to glorify past deeds of the dearly departed marshal, ostensibly in memory of the liberation of Prague from the Nazis, but in actual fact a brazen symbol of the later liberation of Prague from itself.  In recent years, not surprisingly, the monument was persistently vandalized by the unforgiving Czechs – spit was one of the more innocuous substances used – and in the end the city authorities decided to remove it, which earlier this month they did.  It would work better as an exhibit, they announced, in a Museum of the Twentieth Century that was being planned for Prague.

Moscow got wind of what was coming, and immediately a race was on to create a new law, making it a criminal offense “to destroy, damage, or remove, on the territory of the Russian Federation or beyond its borders (my italics), stelae, monuments, obelisks, or other edifices or objects erected to commemorate those fallen in defense of the Fatherland or its interests (my italics).”  As this piece of Jesuitical casuistry was signed into law on April 7, while the Konev statue had been dismantled on April 3, it seemed that there the matter would surely end, as even the Russian Penal Code affirms, in its Article 10, Part 1, that no criminal legislation can have retroactive force.

Unabashed, these pert legal minds seized upon an older article of the Penal Code, Article 454, Part 3, which punishes “desecration of symbols of national military glory,” declaring in an official statement that “demolition of the monument to Marshal Konev is tantamount to rehabilitation of Nazism.”  On April 10 the Russian prosecutors opened a criminal case against Prague’s municipal authorities, and here’s where it gets bewitchingly funny.  Aware that its chances of enforcing whatever its cockamamie courts would decide were not very high, the Kremlin dispatched to Prague a man with a diplomatic passport and a suitcase containing ricin, an agent whose toxicity to humans, when delivered by injection, is approximately 50 millionths of a gram per one kilogram of body weight.  It was the poison used by the KGB in London to kill the Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov in the famous umbrella assassination.

Not deadly polonium, anyway, that did it for Litvinenko, nor the gruesome concoction used on the Skripals, but luckily the Russian diplomat’s baggage was inspected in time and now the snafu is front page stuff in all the Czech newspapers.  The mayor of Prague and the municipal head of the district where the Konev statue had stood are both under round-the-clock police protection.  What is the Kremlin’s next move, the gentle reader may wonder, as the criminal case splutters, the assassination plot fails, and Russia’s coronavirus epidemic reportedly overtakes China’s?

Well, they’re going to change the name of a subway station in Moscow, which is now called Prague Station, to “Marshal Konev Station.”  I promised you this would be a comedy, didn’t I?