Jul 17 2008
Pink Soviet tank
Pink Soviet tank
In Kinsky Square in the Smichov district of Prague there is a memorial to the 144 000 soldiers of the Red Army who died during the liberation of Czechoslovakia in May 1945, a huge Soviet tank on a 5-metre pedestal after which the square had name the Square of Soviet Tank Crews. However for Czechs the tank became a reminder of the Soviet-led occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the spring of 1991, people in Prague woke up and could not believe their eyes: the tank had turned pink overnight. At 5 o’clock that morning, 23 years old David Cerny, a student at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts and famous sculpture later, had arrived with a number of accomplices, climbed the plinth and set about painting the tank bright pink. When police came 2 hours later David Cerny showed a fake document of permission from City Hall. Besides pink painting the artists added an absurd appendage that poked upwards from the cupola, an extended finger borrowed from America’s best-known rude gesture, and eventually daubing their signatures in white along the bottom of the grey stone plinth: ‘David Cerny and the Neostunners’. However Cerny was arrested and tank was restored to its original hue until, but a group of federal parliamentarians demonstrated their solidarity by repainting the tank pink. After it Russian protests and communist defacement of American memorials took place and a decision was finally made to remove the tank completely from the square. The Soviet pink tank is now kept in a military history museum outside Prague.