Some politicians have things other than the health crisis to worry about. It’s reported this week that Prague’s mayor, Zdeněk Hřib (no, I don’t know how to pronounce it either), is under police protection due to fears that he is the target of an assassination plot by agents of the Russian government.
Hřib has not confirmed the suspicions of Russian involvement, but said that his death “would mean that Russian agencies had crossed a red line.” The claim is that a Russian travelling on a diplomatic passport entered Czechia three weeks ago carrying a suitcase of ricin, a deadly poison, and that he represented a threat to “municipal politicians who were in recent months critical of the Kremlin.”
There’s no doubt Hřib fits that description. He backed the move to change the name of the square on which the Russian embassy is located to commemorate Boris Nemtsov, the murdered Russian opposition leader. He also supported the removal of a statue of Ivan Konev, the Russian general who led the forces that liberated Prague in 1945.
With some 14 million dead in the Second World War, the Russians are understandably touchy about war memorials. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet war memorial in West Berlin (known locally as the “tomb of the unknown rapist”) was conscientiously guarded by western troops, and many such memorials remain dotted around central and eastern Europe.
But Czechia’s relationship with the Soviets was uneasy at best. Prague had mostly liberated itself before the red army arrived, partly in the hope that the Americans would arrive first. In 1948 the Czech Communists, backed by Soviet troops, staged a coup and established a one-party state, which remained in place (as in the rest of eastern Europe) until the revolutions of 1989.
Konev was a key part of the apparatus of Soviet control. In 1956 he was commander of the Warsaw Pact armies that overthrew the government of Hungary and reimposed Communist rule, and in 1968 he visited Czechoslovakia (as it then was) to inspect its military defences in preparation for the invasion later that year that crushed the Prague Spring.
So it’s not surprising that the statue, erected in 1980, was controversial. Czech president Miloš Zeman, however, condemned its removal, describing it as “an abuse of the [Covid-19] state of emergency.” Although his powers are mostly ceremonial, Zeman is regarded as one of Vladimir Putin’s (and Donald Trump’s) firmest friends in the European Union.
The reports don’t quote any comment from prime minister Andrej Babiš, who in the past has denied reports that he is close to Putin. Since he depends not only on maintaining a civil relationship with the difficult Zeman but also on tacit parliamentary support from the Czech Communist Party, it’s probably a controversy he would prefer to stay out of.
No such restraint, though, from Hřib, who represents the Pirate Party and leads a broadly liberal three-party alliance on Prague’s municipal assembly. A few months ago he joined forces with the mayors of Bratislava, Budapest and Warsaw in a pact to resist populism in the region, and particularly the authoritarian tendencies of their various national governments – one of which, that of Robert Fico in Slovakia, has since gone down to electoral defeat.
Standing up to the Russians will probably play well with his constituents. Let’s hope it doesn’t have unpleasant consequences for his personal safety.
The World is Not Enough 
‘In 1948 the Czech Communists, backed by Soviet troops, staged a coup and established a one-party state …’ This is misleading. Soviet troops had withdrawn in 1945, and weren’t in the country in 1948. It’s a quibble, but the Communist coup was a home grown one.
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Thanks Tim! The Soviet troops were no longer on Czech soil, but the fact that they were on the border and available for intervention was clearly a factor in the coup. Without that implicit threat, Beneš and the others might have put up a more effective resistance.
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For a monoglot Anglophone such as myself, I suggest that something like Zdenyek Hrzhip would get you reasonably close without much strain, although almost certainly still not sounding right to a native speaker of Czech.
I don’t think ‘zd’ is a major pronunciation problem for English-speakers who are prepared to make a bit of an effort to get used to it, even though it doesn’t naturally occur at the beginning of words in English. The caron (that’s what that diacritical mark is called) over the e affects the pronunciation of the n which comes before it, in roughly the way I’ve indicated. The r with the caron represents a sound which is recognised as giving the most difficulty to speakers of other languages trying to master Czech, and since I’m basing all of this on what I’ve read, not what I’ve actually heard, I am not confident that I know what it really sounds like, but ‘rzh’ might at least get you part of the way there. In Czech, ‘b’ is mostly used in a similar way to English, but it has a different sound when it comes at the end of a word.
(Incidentally the s with a caron which you’ve got in a couple of the other Czech names you mention is approximately the equivalent of the English ‘sh’.)
But do you know how Boris Nemtsov is pronounced in Russian, or Ivan Konev? They might be different from what you think!
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Thanks J-D! Your explanation of Czech makes sense, but I do wish they’d put more vowels in some of their words. Polish is worse; I remember having to practise in order to buy a ticket to Świnoujście.
Russian, on the other hand, I have studied, so at least in principle I know how to do vowel reduction (bad at it in practice) once I know where the stress is. Unfortunately that’s often a matter of guesswork. (Wikipedia tells me it’s on the first syllable in Konev and the second in Nemtsov.)
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