Prague, Aug 20 (CTK) – The Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia claimed 402 lives from August 1968 until 1991, while most of these people died in road accidents, daily Lidove noviny (LN) writes yesterday, citing the latest data of the Military History Institute.
The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968 to crush the Communist-led reform movement, known as Prague Spring. As from then Soviet troops permanently stayed at various bases in the country. The last Soviet soldiers were withdrawn from Czechoslovakia in 1991, following the 1989 collapse of the communist regime.
LN writes that historians from the Military History Institute, Ivo Pejcoch and Prokop Tomek, have written the Black Book of Soviet Occupation, in which they counted all civilian victims of the Soviet troops on Czechoslovak territory for the first time.
However, they say 402 may not be the final number since many documents about these accidents were shredded in the past. Moreover, a lot of people died of the consequences of a collision with Soviet troops after some time in hospital and doctors wrote another death cause in their files, LN writes.
The most atrocious case occurred on April 3, 1981 when a deserter from a Soviet garrison, Yuri Kononov, broke into a family house where he beat to death a young woman with her four-year-old son and six-year-old daughter with a hammer. The Soviet high military court sentenced him to death, LN writes.
The Czechoslovak Interior Ministry tried to conceal the information about the culprit mainly from the dissident circles and Western media, LN adds.
“The far highest number of people died in road accidents,” Pejcoch told LN.
The accidents were often caused by the soldiers’ drunk driving. as well as by technical defects of the heavy military vehicles that were not adapted to civilian roads and their brakes and lights broke sometimes.
Most Soviet soldiers sent to Czechoslovakia were very young and unexperienced and they were not used to drive in heavy traffic in towns. In addition, they had to drive long without a break and were often exhausted, the historians said.
However, some accidents were also caused by their negligence and indolence as they, for instance, laid by broken vehicles unlit at the side of the road without a warning triangle and car and motorcycle drivers bumped into them in the night.
The Soviet military attempted to put the blame for the accidents on their civilian victims, Pejcoch said.
Though the Czechoslovak police and military investigated such cases under the valid agreements, the Soviet military prosecutor’s office had always the final say, and it was up to it what information was released to the Czechoslovak authorities. This is why it was not found out whether the perpetrators had been tried and convicted in many cases, LN says.
From 1969 to 1990, a total of 248 people died in road accidents caused by Soviet soldiers in Czechoslovakia. The last victim, a man aged over 70, was killed by a Soviet military lorry in Teplice, north Bohemia, in November 1990, that is almost a year after the fall of communism, LN writes.
One of the most tragic road accidents caused by occupiers occurred in January 1984 when a heavy military carrier swept a pregnant young woman and her husband from a bridge. The woman, who was only 17 years old, died on the spot and the man survived with serious injuries, LN says.
The statistics worked out by Pejcoch and Tomek do not include the number of people injured by Soviet occupiers. “There were thousands of such cases,” Pejcoch told LN.
On the basis of “the agreements on the temporary stay of Soviet troops” from October 16, 1968, 75,000 Soviet soldiers and 200 planes could be stationed in Czechoslovakia. They used 33 garrisons, four airports, three military hospitals, ten storage facilities, six stores of state material reserves and five training grounds, LN writes.
On the other hand, it has never been found out how many Soviet soldiers died during trainings or under other circumstances in Czechoslovakia, LN says.
The Soviet military released only its losses in the first month of the 1968 invasion, claiming that 104 soldiers died, 12 of whom having been killed by Czechoslovak counter-revolutionaries, which is a lie, Pejcoch said, adding that no such case was ever described or investigated.