Prague, Oct 5 (CTK) – A granite commemorative plaque will evoke Red Army war dead at the Chodov Cemetery in Prague, which will be sponsored with 200,000 crowns by the Prague 11 Town Hall and 900,000 crowns by Russia, local mayor Petr Jirava (ANO) told journalists on Thursday.
The local Greens are against the plan.
At the cemetery, there is a memorial to the Red Army soldiers killed in the Sokolovo Battle in 1943 and hundreds of graves of Red Army soldiers who died in Prague at the end of the war.
Now they are to be joined by a large stone slab with their names, Jirava said.
The Russian embassy wants to instal similar memorials in all places where Soviet World War Two soldiers are buried.
Most of the project will be paid by Russia through the private BAU-AMTAV company.
“There was originally the idea that we will provide the money directly to the embassy, but later it turned out that under law it cannot accept subsidies,” Jirava said.
Former Prague 11 mayor Jiri Styler said he had come up with the idea while in office. It was prompted by two Russians who were trying to find the grave of their grandfather at the cemetery and they only managed to do so on the basis of the date of birth, because the name was corrupted on the tombstone.
The Greens argue that the soldiers’ names were already written on in the individual tombstones.
“Repeating the name on some information post is a bureacratic squandering someone invented without knowing the real state of affairs,” Michal Veselsky, from the local Greens, said.
Some 140,000-150,000 Soviet soldiers died when liberating the former Czechoslovakia.
