Why Slovakia became Russia's fifth column in Europe
August 21, the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, is a good reason to reflect on the relationship of some Slovaks to former occupiers.
How is it possible that a nation whose freedom was smashed on the tracks of thousands of Russian tanks in 1968 and lived under Russian occupation for 21 years became Russia's fifth column in Europe?
Read more in the column by Juraj Mesík of the Slovak Foreign Policy Association: Shaped by propaganda: how Slovaks became pro-Russian.
The author emphasizes that in 1968, Czechoslovakia was invaded and occupied by the Russians, not by fictitious "Soviets".
Those who experienced it knew it exactly: the inscriptions on the walls of Czech and Slovak cities did not proclaim "Soviets, go home!" – they called for the departure of the Russians and "Ivan".
"They also named the murderers of people killed on the streets of our cities Russians – they did not call them Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Georgians, or members of any other nation imprisoned in the Russian Empire renamed to the Soviet Union in the 20th century," the Slovak Foreign Policy Association expert reminds us.
According to him, people under 40 – more than half of population – do not remember anything from the occupation.
"They only know what their parents told them about the life under the Russians, or what they caught from Czech films," the author writes.
At the same time, Mesík warns that what some young people hear about the occupation from their ancestors may be in stark contrast to reality. It is not just old age forgetfulness that comes into play. The fact that some Slovaks – communist functionaries, secret police officers etc. – benefited from the occupation also plays a role.
Nevertheless, it is Slovaks (and Hungarians) who became Russia's fifth column in Europe. What makes Slovaks different?
Juraj Mesík believes some roots are recent, others date back to the 19th century. Failure of Slovak education system is one. It fell victim of post-1989 politics and failed miserably.
"Its roots go back to the 19th century. Each Slovak pupil can recite verses about "turning to that old oak, which defies the pernicious times " from Ján Kollár's pan Slavic poem "The Daughter of Sláva" published in 1824. In this poem "the old oak" is tsarist Russia, country Kollar never visited," the expert notes.
According to him, Kollar's desire to turn to Russia was later overcome by none other than the (otherwise childless) father of the nation, Ľudovít Štúr himself. 99.9% of Slovaks have never read his "Slavdom and the world of the future", but everyone knows that this is Štúr's "political testament", in which he articulates his passionate love in Russia.
And yet neither Štúr nor Kollár had ever been to Russia.
The columnist even suggests that if the book is not a forgery, then a graduate of a German university and an evangelical Štúr so deeply hated Western Christianity, the ideas of the republic, democracy and the free market, and his own language, that he saw the future of Slovaks and " the beautiful Slovakia of the future" in serfdom, conversion to Orthodoxy, and use of Russian as a literary language of Slovaks.