Prague Cold War Walking Tour

During your 3-hour Prague Cold War Walking Tour, our knowledgeable local historian helps you to grasp the daily struggles of Czechs under four decades of totalitarianism. Along the way, you visit sites that reveal the tensions of the Cold War, beginning with a sinister pedestrian tunnel lined with nuclear bunkers. Exploring the Vitkov Hill Monument, which showcased the mummified body of the first communist president, you’ll experience the heavy-handed communist-era propaganda forced upon an entire population. Enjoying panoramic views of Prague, we take in the futuristic 1980s Zizkov Tower, once believed to jam Radio Free Europe. Descending to the city center and Wenceslas Square, we trace the events of the Warsaw Pact Invasion that sent tanks into Prague in 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989 when hundreds of thousands of Czechs brought down the Iron Curtain.

If you’re in Prague on the first Wednesday of the month, listen up at noon. As the air-raid sirens are tested, you’ll hear an eerie reminder of the city’s 40 years of suffering and struggle behind the Iron Curtain. There are still nearly 800 pressurized bunkers located across Prague that can accommodate 40% of the city’s population. Built primarily during the 1950s, the bunkers were a response to the shocks of WWII as well as the omnipresent threats of the Cold War. One of the larger shelters is tunneled into Vitkov Hill, where you begin your 3-hour walk focused on Prague’s decades as the capital of a Soviet satellite state.

As you explore the decorations and statuary of The Hall of the Red Army, created on the site after the communists took power in the “elegant coup” of 1948, we discuss the heavy-handed propaganda strategies of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC). You visit the mausoleum that displayed the mummified corpse of Klement Gottwald, the first chairman of the KSC, along with the adjoining laboratory and temperature control center, where a team of doctors, cosmetologists, and technicians cared for the embalmed body.

Vitkov Hill was already home to the largest equestrian statue in the world, a monument to the undefeated 15th-century Hussite general Jan Žižka, which was erected to honor the WWI Legionnaires who fought for an independent Czechoslovakia. To gain legitimacy, the KSC persistently used this tactic of linking their icons to Czech nationalism. Standing atop the Vitkov Memorial, you’ll take in an airy panorama of the city and the Žižkov Television Tower, an example of high-tech architecture that looms above the rest of the city’s skyline. When construction began in 1985, rumors circulated that it was designed to jam Radio Free Europe.

Returning to the city center, you visit key sites that focus our discussion on the life of Prague residents under totalitarianism. Perhaps the most symbolic structure of the totalitarian regime is the National Assembly building erected in 1972 as the seat of the communist government. A unique example of the “Socialist Brutalist” architectural style, the building was constructed as a titanic arch over the former Prague Stock Exchange, visually representing the triumph of socialism over the First Republic’s market economy.

From here you visit Wenceslas Square, the point of convergence for the Warsaw Pact tanks that crushed the Prague Spring of 1968, ending the 8-month period when freedom of speech and of the press blossomed. By the end of the tour, you’ll have a broad picture of the rise of communism in Czechoslovakia and of the consequences and key events of the Velvet Revolution, which ended the long Cold War era and swept Vaclav Havel, a dissident playwright and a prisoner of conscience, to the presidency of today’s liberal democracy, which is still recovering from the social and economic effects of totalitarianism.