I'm a historian in training myself, but this is an anecdote I could never really pin down: my father was telling me that in Poland in 1981, when there was a looming threat of potential Soviet intervention shortly prior to the imposition of martial law in December, he (late teens back then) remembers going out and taking down or otherwise covering some roadsigns outside the town he lived in back then.
If they were afraid of a foreign invasion, I get the thought process, though I don't know how genuinely effective this would have been, but is there any precedent to this or writing about similar phenomena that you guys have come across? Thanks.
Fellow historian in training here. I wrote my thesis on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and currently preping it for Journal submission. During my research I found reports of Czechs and Slovaks taking down all street signs, especially in Prague itself, except for ones which pointed towards Moscow. This of course implied that the Soviets should go back to where they came from. It should be noted that Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and East German troops also participated in the invasion, but I’ve only found reports of keeping up signs pointing to Moscow itself (not other Warsaw Pact capitals) as an act of peaceful resistance. It was quite shocking to Warsaw Pact troops when they realized that they were not wanted there by the Czechoslovak citizens, contrary to what their governments had told them.