In Focus: Withdrawal of Soviet Troops from Czechoslovakia

Moments of political change are often pictured at scale. Crowds, flags, leaders, the public choreography of history. The end of a military occupation unfolds differently. It moves through offices and transport schedules, through buildings emptied room by room, through people waiting, repairing, and carrying what they can.

Between February 1990 and June 1991, Soviet troops withdrew from Czechoslovakia, ending a military presence that had followed the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. For most people in the country, this was widely understood as a positive and necessary outcome. The presence of Soviet bases had shaped everyday life for more than twenty years: housing, land use, local economies, and whole areas closed off or repurposed. Withdrawal meant regained sovereignty.

But that relief did not arrive cleanly. The occupation had been normalised over decades. Its end involved dismantling infrastructure, negotiating property, dealing with environmental damage, and living with social consequences that did not disappear when the troops began to leave. The withdrawal followed the Velvet Revolution, but it was not the revolution itself. It was slower, bureaucratic, and carried out through committees, paperwork, and transport timetables. For many Czechoslovaks, relief sat alongside anger, exhaustion, and a long memory of what had been imposed and endured.

Dana Kyndrová photographed this process from inside Soviet barracks and bases, accompanying the parliamentary commission overseeing the withdrawal. Her position placed her away from public ceremony and inside the ordinary spaces where departure was organised and lived through. The photographs do not address the meaning of the withdrawal from a distance. They stay with the conditions under which it took place.

Across the work, soldiers appear as individuals rather than as a single force. They pause in doorways, sit alone on benches, lie down to rest. Even when others are present, the images resist the sense of collective momentum or a military force. Leaving is underway, but, in these images, not yet complete.

In a dormitory, rows of metal beds extend across the room, identical and tightly ordered. Against that repetition, a single soldier sits and sews. The action is careful and absorbed. It is maintenance, carried out in a space built for scale rather than intimacy. A political decision has already been made, but daily life continues through small, necessary tasks. The photograph holds those two realities together without resolving them.

That same attention to lived detail shapes the image made during the departure of the last Soviet troops from Slovakia. Soldiers stand in formation, uniforms still neat. But many hold plastic shopping bags. The bags are ordinary and civilian, associated with everyday lives rather than military purpose. The scene is orderly, but stripped back of ceremony.

Elsewhere, bodies slacken. Soldiers rest on mattresses laid outdoors, their postures loose and unguarded. The mattresses are thin and exposed, no longer anchored to an interior. Rest appears provisional rather than restorative. These are not scenes of readiness or control. They show people waiting through an ending that has already begun, with no clear sense of what replaces it in their daily lives.

The photographs also record what happens to the visual language of authority. Framed portraits and sculpted heads are stacked near a doorway, removed from walls and leaned together. These are images made to organise space and behaviour. Here, they are handled practically, gathered and waiting to be moved on. Nothing is destroyed, but importantly, nothing is elevated. Change is bureaucratically underway, and that has stripped these symbols of power of their social and cultural place.

For the Russian soldiers themselves, the withdrawal was rarely experienced as a victory. Many were conscripts who lived for years in isolated bases, often with little control over where they would go next. Leaving meant uncertainty, return to a collapsing Soviet system, housing shortages, unemployment, and social dislocation. None of this offsets the injustice of occupation. Yet, by highlighting people not just symbols, Kyndrová shows the complicated human reality of how this occupation ended.

Seen across the series, the photographs hold this unevenness without spectacle. The withdrawal reshaped the political reality of Czechoslovakia. That shift appears through ordinary action. Rooms lose their function before they lose their occupants. Authority persists as structure, but without direction. They show an occupation ending not as a single moment of resolution, but as a process lived through by people on all sides of it. History does not announce itself here. Moments of change are absorbed into everyday life, carried quietly.

These photographs remind us that change rarely arrives as a single moment. It shows up in ordinary places, through small adjustments, pauses, and the things people carry with them when something ends.

MySide: Moments of Change invites you to photograph those kinds of moments in your own life and community. Not just the big headline events, but the places and details where something is shifting, ending, or beginning.