Needless to say, the Bolsheviks’ clammy embrace of Jan Hus (curiously enough, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was also a great fan of him) backfired and made people either confused about his real historical importance, or even more indifferent to religion as such. And while the Bolshevik regime luckily belongs to history, the antagonism between Czech Catholics and Hussites is still alive and kicking, as a quite entertaining quarrel about the monuments on Prague’s Old Town Square demonstrates.
Ever since the Velvet Revolution, Czech Catholics have struggled to reinstall the magnificent Mary column that was torn down in 1918. Money has been raised through a collection campaign, a suitable stone has been transported all the way from India, and a copy of the column has even been finished. But the Catholics are still waiting. To a majority of Prague’s inhabitants, it’s simply unacceptable that a symbol of “Hus’ murderers” is erected next to the statue of the Martyr himself.
So, how may the Czech state pay respect to Hus’ historic importance without offending the country’s Catholics and their Svatý Václav (Saint Wenceslas), who for centuries has been the national patron?
The first Czech Parliament that emerged after Czechoslovakia split in 1993 found a truly Solomonic compromise: to honour the legacy of Jan Hus and please his contemporary followers, the 6th of July remained a national holiday. To please the Catholics, the 28th of September, Saint Wenceslas Day, was named a holiday as well. And just to be on the safe side, Parliament decided to tolerate Cyril and Methodius Day, the 5th of July, so the country’s Orthodox believers didn’t get mad.
Say what you want, but three days free from work every year thanks to saints and martyrs is not bad for a nation that can boast probably more atheists than any other country in Europe.
Ice Hockey
Take a look around you in any public place in this country, and you’ll immediately understand why the relatively small Czech Republic has become a superpower in fields such as beer drinking, beautiful models or heart diseases caused by obesity (see: Czech Cuisine). However, there is actually no logical reason why the country has also become a superpower in ice hockey.
The winters are usually so mild that the Bohemian and Moravian fishing ponds only freeze to ice for a week or two, and totally, this nation of 10 million people doesn’t contain more than some 150 ice hockey halls. Nevertheless, the Czechs have — bar Russia (who has an abundance of ice) and Canada (who invented the game) — won more world ice hockey championships than any other nation on the planet. In 2004, the Czech National Theatre even staged an opera — Nagano — about the national team’s smashing victory in the winter Olympics in 1998.
To an outsider, the Czech hockey miracle seems to be based on two pillars: the urge to make the nation visible on the international arena, and — today — money. The Czechs themselves will probably also add factors such as “natural talent for improvisation”, “good team players” and “typical Czech cleverness”, but these arguments seem to be more closely linked to the common perception of their national identity than to reality.
Hockey fever arrived in Bohemia from England at the end of the nineteenth century. As in all other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the new game aroused great enthusiasm also among the Czechs, who already had discovered the delight of sports through the Sokol movement. However, to the Czechs, ice hockey soon became something more than a sweaty fight for a rubber puck. It was, according to Tomáš Čechtický, a writer and expert on Czech ice hockey, “a way in which they could beat their Austrian masters in public”.
The urge to humiliate Vienna was so strong that the Czechs even found it more important to be recognized by the International Ice Hockey Federation before the Austrians were (in November 1908) than to establish their own national hockey federation (in January 1909).
The first time ice hockey boosted the Czechs’ national pride internationally was in 1909, when their team won the European Championship. Naturally, the thirst for hockey victories didn’t weaken after Czechoslovakia was established. At the World Championship in Prague in 1938, for instance, on exactly the same day that Adolf Hitler threatened to crush Czechoslovakia with all conceivable means, the Czechoslovak team crushed Germany 3:0 in the fight for the bronze medal.
“Those hockey sticks can be transformed into rifles,” the popular poet and later Nobel Prize laureate Jaroslav Seifert (see: First Republic) exulted after the fantastic victory over the Germans. Well, they could not. But as Czechoslovakia suffered one devastating humiliation after the other in the arena of international politics, its triumphs in the arena of international ice hockey were at times the only source of national pride.
Ice hockey’s political impact became, according to Čechtický, even more evident under the communists. In 1949, the Czechoslovak national team won the World Championship for the second time. The next championship was scheduled in London, and the Czech and Slovak players prepared thoroughly to repeat the success. The communist regime, however, had other plans.
First, party bigwigs told the players they were not allowed to travel to capitalist Western Europe. Then secret police agents provoked the frustrated players, who in the classic Czech manner were drowning their sorrows in a hospoda, to start a fight. The hospoda brawl was subsequently used as a pretext to arrest the sportsmen. Shortly after, 11 members of the Czechoslovak national hockey team were sentenced to long prison terms on different fabricated charges.
It’s hard to say whether the rotten attack on the hockey heroes was initiated by the Czechoslovak communists or by their masters in Moscow.
In any case, it’s obvious that the Bolsheviks regarded the national hockey team’s enormous popularity as a political threat.
By an odd twist of fate, the national hockey team was once more to humiliate a detested occupant on the ice. In 1969, only half a year after the Soviet Union “brotherly” invaded the country, Czechoslovakia’s national team beat the Russian team 2:0 in the World Championship in Stockholm.
As expected, the victory was greeted with tremendous joy by millions of Czechs and Slovaks, who, on their television screens, noticed that several of the players had even pasted tape over the red star that disgraced the Czech lion on their shirts. In fair play, the apparently all-mighty Russians didn’t stand a chance against little Czechoslovakia! The spirit of the Prague Spring (see: Communism) was not crushed!
Paradoxically enough, it was precisely that hockey triumph in Stockholm that marked the end of Czechoslovakia’s reform experiment in the late 1960s.
As soon as the referee blew his whistle, thousands of exhilarated Czechs and Slovaks filled the streets of towns and cities all over the country in boundless transports of joy. But once more, the secret police staged a provocation. When an agent disguised as hockey fan started demolishing the office of the Soviet airliner Aeroflot on Prague’s Wenceslas Square, he was immediately joined by hordes of enthusiastic citizens who had no idea that their actions would have tragic consequences.