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"Twenty years without the Russians" On June 21, 1991, as Soviet troops left the territory of Czechoslovakia, 100,000 soldiers and their families and all their military equipment rolled out of more than 70 bases. It was a massive logistical undertaking, photographed by Karel Cudlín and published with a report in the weekly Respekt. In Bratislava, the Slovak daily SME draws up the ecological balance twenty years later: "The Russians left devastation behind them…. After the human wreckage that began with the 1968 occupation, the Soviets went on to ravage the landscape for another 23 years," writes the paper, calculating that Slovakia has paid out some 40 million euros in the fight against “ecological disaster", especially pollution from fuels.
