37 years ago, on the night of November 4, 1986, several exiled Latvians in the Austrian capital, Vienna, tried to draw the world’s attention to the occupation of the Baltic states with a magnificent campaign. Under the guidance of Gunārs Pāvuls (1930–2006), an artist and scenographer living in Sweden, several Latvian boys planted pink at the foot of the memorial dedicated to the Red Army, without causing major and irreversible damage to the monument. When the Austrian police were on the trail of the arsonists, Pāvuls alone took responsibility for the “performance” that took place, protecting his accomplices from legal proceedings.
Similar to the occupied German capital Berlin, the Soviet forces erected a monument dedicated to the Red Army in Vienna immediately after World War II. The place for it was chosen in the very center of the city, on Schwarzenberg Square, and since 1955 it has been protected by a bilateral agreement between Austria and the USSR (later Russia). At the center of the memorial is a Soviet soldier armed with a machine gun, but it is surrounded by a massive colonnade. Even after 1986, the monument has been damaged several times, in 2014 and 2015, activists poured paint over it.
At the beginning of November 1986, a conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was held in Vienna, and Latvian exile organizations decided that this was a good opportunity to remind the world that the USSR still occupied the Baltic states.
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Gunārs Pāvuls, born in 1930, who fled to Sweden with his family at the end of World War II, became the organizer of the campaign.
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2023-11-04 09:14:12
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