• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 120 0

as their first president announced the formation of the fledgling country. In 1938, the statue looked on as Czechs denounced the Munich Treaty, which offered up a piece of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in a futile gesture of appeasement; a year later, a staged rally would signify the arrival of Nazi fascism. Wenceslas Square was the place where throngs of student protesters were met by brute force during the country’s abortive and tragic attempt to temper Soviet totalitarianism in 1968, during which an eleven-year-old boy was shot dead on the steps of the statue as he pushed a Czech flag down the barrel of a Soviet tank. A year later, a Czech college student named Jan Palach became a national martyr when he burned himself alive here in protest of the Communist occupation; eight hundred thousand Czechs joined his funeral procession when it filed past the statue a week later. When Václav Havel was still a dissident, he was arrested for placing flowers by the statue in commemoration of Palach’s death, and when the Soviet Union crumbled in 1989, Havel stood before more than a quarter million Czechs who filled the square to witness Communism’s demise.

It is difficult to imagine Americans turning out in force in their own capital to protest the actions of another country, but the crowd that gathers here is fairly impressive. Many of the hallmarks of Sunday’s protest are present: there’s the same Uncle Sam effigy, the same flag-waving anarchists, and the same orangeshirted American woman who, when her turn arrives at the microphone, speaks at length in English about American dissent and recites a statement made that morning by Senator Robert Byrd, a speech incomprehensible to the majority of those assembled. That this crowd outnumbers Sunday’s is certainly due in large part to the war’s commencement, but the protest’s more central location is also helpful. Most Czechs have no particular reason to visit Old Town Square and its gaggles of tourists, but Wenceslas Square is where Czechs work and shop, and it seems likely that a number of today’s protesters happened upon the event on their way home from school or the office.

Several among the crowd have enlisted liquid assistance to combat the evening’s bitter cold. A young punk rocker chugs from a cardboard carton of red wine, which he attempts intermittently to warm with his vigil candle. To his left, three men pass around a plastic soda bottle filled with an unappetizing milky liquid and yell in a slurred fashion at various inappropriate moments during the speeches. Spurred by varying combinations of indignation and alcohol, the crowd this time is chanting and calling out, and as the speeches progress there is even the beat of a lone bongo drum.

One man somehow manages to mount the unaccommodatingly tall pediment of the King Wenceslas statue to lean against the leg of the horse, where he stands making a V-sign with his fingers until he is asked by policemen to get down. Though the man seems willing enough, his inebriation has given him all the agency of a treed kitten. The assistance lent him by the police is patient and assured and it is clear now that a primary police responsibility at Prague rallies involves the disengagement of protesters from surrounding statuary. Though there are more policemen here than were apparent at the previous protest, they can still be counted on two hands. With the crowd growing to five hundred strong, it seems thrillingly possible that this time the police have miscalculated.

There is excited talk of a march to the U.S. Embassy. No official permission has been obtained for such a march and it is unclear, when the speakers conclude, whether this will be allowed to occur. Perhaps it is permitted because it can’t be prevented: there are simply not enough police for the job. But as the march begins, it becomes clear that the police know their populace after all, for as the marchers swell down the length of the square they obligingly stop at each intersection to allow cars to pass. To an American eye, there are not nearly enough uniforms to enforce this