Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  After a strong debut, when as a student he sculpted a motorcyclist and successfully captured movement in stone, he designed a statue of the father of the republic, T. G. Masaryk, and then a statue of Jan Hus. Both were destroyed by the fascists during the war. After the war, he designed a statue of Roosevelt, but never completed it, because the communists took power. Before the war, he used to exhibit his avant-garde sculptures in the West. He thought he would never get another commission.

  Now—so rumor has it—Otakar Švec throws together a model under the influence of a couple of bottles of vodka. He is a decent man, so he deliberately plagiarizes a well-known pre-war idea for a statue of Miroslav Tyrš, a bourgeois public benefactor whom the communists don’t like.

  Unfortunately, he wins.

  Stalin is standing at the head of a group of people. In one hand, he holds a book, and he rests the other hand on his chest, under his coat.

  On the left—Soviet—side, Stalin is followed by a worker holding a flag, then an agrobiologist, then a female partisan and finally a Soviet soldier who is looking round behind him.

  On the right—Czechoslovak—side of Stalin comes: a worker with a flag, a woman from the countryside, a scientist and a Czechoslovak soldier also looking backwards.

  Some people start to whisper boldly that “there’s Stalin with everyone crawling up his ass.”

  Just one of his buttons—they say—will be the size of a loaf of bread.

  The monument will be one hundred feet high, and Stalin fifty feet wide, altogether the size of a ten-story pre-war building. His foot alone will be over six feet long.

  The whole thing, made of granite (not at all suitable for sandstone Prague, but unlike sandstone, granite lasts for centuries) is to stand on Letná hill and provide competition for the castle. Its vast scale is to crush the past. It will be visible from the Old Town Square, and will stand on the other side of Čechův Bridge, across the river from the top of Pařížská Street.

  To make a Stalin of this kind, 260 blocks of granite are needed, each well over six feet by six feet by six feet in size.

  The fact that a quarry is found with thick enough walls from which to cut out such large blocks of stone of exactly the same color is little short of a miracle.

  The two architects helping Švec—a married couple called Štursa—have to devise a way to prepare the weak sandstone hill for this colossus.

  They decide that the hill will be filled from the inside with gigantic blocks of concrete, which will form something like underground halls.

  Two years after the competition is announced, people start to voice their concerns about the statue. Švec’s sketches, models and drawings are exhibited to the citizens for their consultation, and a debate is held about “Prague’s new jewel.”

  “I’m worried that from a distance the figures will merge into one and Stalin won’t be sufficiently visible.”

  “Why are the last figures in line looking backwards? I find that too avant-garde,” people say, as the doubts increase.

  “They’re looking back for ideological reasons,” replies Švec. “It’s to do with the guarantee of living in peace, it’s about defense. They’re also looking round for compositional reasons, so the monument will have a nice view from the back, not the rear end of a soldier.”

  “Why as an artist do you want to defend our people on the monument, comrade?”

  “A rearguard defense is necessary so that the people in the vanguard can feel calm,” explains the sculptor.

  Later on, people will say that the figures behind Stalin are standing in line for meat.

  Many citizens are still implacable. “As a symbol, we find the monument disturbing. It’s not a joyful, faithful depiction, but instead looks like a tombstone,” four people who signed the exhibition visitors’ book noted.

  “Whom is Comrade Stalin leading? The people are literally creeping after him as if they’re up against a wall. The design should be torn up and a new competition announced.”

  “The monument will be in bad taste. More care should be devoted to the depiction of one of the greatest giants in history.”

  Otakar Švec doesn’t yet know that he is a prisoner.

  • • •

  The models posing for the monument were apparently extras from the Barrandov Film Studios.

  Later, it was said that the man who posed as Stalin drank himself to death. Nobody knew his name, but the whole of Prague called him “Stalin,” and his psyche couldn’t take it.

  Švec and the architects build a series of models of the monument in clay. First, three feet high, then ten.

  The Party and the government have their eye on Švec. The record of comments made about him at a meeting between the authorities and the artist on January 4, 1951, fills twelve typewritten pages.

  The figure of Stalin isn’t towering over the rest of the monument! Prime Minister Zápotocký says that it should already be plain to see in the clay models that this is a monument to Stalin—a courageous man. “Now that he’s getting down to work, perhaps the artist is starting to be afraid of his own ideas,” he adds.

  Zápotocký and eight of his ministers discuss whether to lower the figures behind Stalin, or raise the leader on an extra pedestal.

  The monument must not look like a sarcophagus from afar!

  The figures behind Stalin are too decorative.

  Can’t the artist take a more profound approach to his work?

  Why does he refuse to make more clay models and show them to the authorities?

  Finally, the prime minister concludes that Otakar Švec is indeed afraid of his own monument.

  The sculptor doesn’t hear all of this; he and his colleagues are invited to join the meeting forty-five minutes later. First the architect, Vlasta Štursová, gives her explanation: they have deliberately not raised the figure of Stalin, because that would mean distancing him from the people, but in fact he is leading the people, and they stem from him.

  Švec explains to the authorities that if they wish for Stalin to be different in height from the rest, the monument will have two different scales. “From the artistic point of view, that is untenable,” he says.

  The government buys him a bigger studio, because his old one is turning out to be too small. Now, Party representatives will hold their meetings at his workshop.

  They come with their own penknives.

  Each time, they stick them in the clay and trim down the heads of the people behind Stalin.

  The first man with a penknife is the minister with radical views on Mont Blanc and Mount Elbrus.

  Wielding the second penknife is the most virulent of them all, Professor Zdeněk Nejedlý, author of The History of Czech Music. He was an art historian, and had even been a democrat; during the occupation he illegally escaped to Moscow and became a professor there. He came back to become a theoretician of everything in socialist Czechoslovakia.

  In 1951, he is minister of schools, the sciences, and the arts. He writes a famous essay about new art and love. “People will still fall in love,” he predicts, “but we expect that, under socialism, as the working class, they will love each other more and better than before. They’ll no longer come up with any of that fake stuff about ‘unhappy love affairs,’ or the sensual deterioration in which bourgeois romance so often wallowed.”

  For instance, he can’t bear the fact that Czechoslovakia was famous before the war for avant-garde photography. When he sees shadows or smoke photographed out of context in Jaroslav Rössler’s photographs from the 1920s, he flies into a rage.

  (When Stalin dies, Nejedlý will state that from now on the Czech monument makes the most important statement about the Father of Nations: Stalin lives forever.)

  Four months after the first reprimand, Švec receives another. The authorities upbraid him again in 1952, in 1953 and in 1954.

  Four years go by, the stonemasons have been working on the blocks of granite for a long time now, the scaffolding and the crane are in place, and
the artist is still being advised to “soften and change some of the figures, so they won’t look despotic.” Švec takes women back to his studio and drinks with them.

  He comes forward with explanations.

  A year before the monument is unveiled, his wife can’t bear the situation any longer, and turns on the gas in the bathroom.

  Švec finds her dead in the bathtub.

  • • •

  New doubts arise, which luckily have nothing to do with the sculptor. The concern is that it looks as if the stone Stalin has come to Prague, stopped at the river and is gazing at the wonderful city.

  However, he has come from the east, so why is he standing on the western riverbank?

  If he were on his way in, he would have to stop at the river, but with his back to the city. So he’s not on his way in.

  If he isn’t entering the city, perhaps he’s leaving it?

  But for what reason?

  What doesn’t he like about socialist Prague?

  Has he only just crossed the Vltava and is already turning back?

  Why is he looking east?

  Or perhaps he has in fact entered the city, and is merely looking behind him out of nostalgia?

  From the hundreds of pages typed on Czechoslovak typewriters, pages filled with comments about the monument and then treated as classified, it appears that the proliferation of doubts is a race without a finish line—nobody can possibly predict when and how it will end. And each idea can instantly change into its own contradiction.

  It is the spring of 1955, more than two years since Stalin’s death.

  The monument is to be unveiled on May 1. A seventeen-page deed of erection has been prepared, which not only states that from now on the Father of Nations presides over Prague, but also stresses that Stalin “is looking at the Bethlehem Chapel.”

  A remarkable statement for the communist era.

  This is the chapel where Jan Hus preached his sermons. Communist propaganda has appropriated religion: it says Hus was a revolutionary, the Hussites were the first communist organization, and their pillaging expeditions were nothing more than disinterested incitement of the local peoples to fight against feudalism.

  Now, between Stalin on Letná hill and Hus in the chapel on Bethlehem Square, an almost visible red thread is to be stretched.

  The sculptor knows that his monument is aesthetically hideous. Pompous and overblown.

  He knows the authorities don’t like the monument either, but for different reasons. They are so disgusted with the sculptor that by now they only communicate with him through the architects.

  But the press gushes: “From the ideological point of view, this is the only composition that shows Generalissimus Stalin as a statesman, a builder, a victorious leader, a teacher of the people, and at the same time as Comrade Stalin and Stalin the man, as one of us.”

  It is evening, some time before the unveiling.

  Otakar Švec leaves his studio, takes a cab, and goes to Letná hill to look at the monument incognito.

  He asks the cab driver what he thinks about it.

  “I’ll show you something,” says the cab driver. “Take a good look at the Soviet side.”

  “What’s there?”

  “I think you can see it. The partisan girl has her hand on the soldier’s fly.”

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you, sir, when they unveil it, the guy who designed it is one-hundred-percent sure to get shot.”

  Otakar Švec goes back to his studio and commits suicide.

  News of his death is kept secret; nobody is allowed to publicize it.

  The name Švec does not appear on the monument.

  On May 1, 1955, during the unveiling ceremony, it is announced that the monument was created by the Czechoslovak People.

  There are rumors about victims.

  “A total of seven people were killed during construction,” the sacristan went on. “The first was the sculptor who designed this statue, and the last was the unskilled laborer who arrived on Monday, still well-oiled, and a board on the sixth floor broke under him—he fell head downwards and was killed when he hit the statue’s little finger.”

  In fact, the sacristan from Bohumil Hrabal’s story “The Treachery of Mirrors” is wrong. Prague’s Stalin had no protruding finger. If somebody was killed, maybe he hit the whole hand.

  • • •

  The statue stands there for almost eight years, until 1962.

  It outlives the thaw of 1956 and the condemnation of Stalin by seven years!

  He is condemned, but only in the USSR, Poland and Hungary. French historian Muriel Blaive wrote a book about 1956 in Czechoslovakia entitled Une déstalinisation manquée (“A Missed Opportunity for Destalinization”).

  There is an astonishing lack of strong reactions to what is happening in the neighboring countries, and the regime in Prague even digs itself in more firmly. For example, as we know from Security Service reports, in private conversations people are saying things like “we should implore God not to let those beasts from Hungary come here, because they’d kill us all.” Attempts at student demonstrations don’t prompt any major public response.

  Whereas there is a demonstration of loyalty to the Soviet Union, and the Soviet ambassador is greeted by 25,000 people in Prague. “The Czech government itself is surprised by society’s conformism,” reports a correspondent for Journal de Genève.

  Why?

  Three years earlier, monetary reform was introduced, which for the average citizen proved to be a swindle, so people came out onto the streets and a large number of industrial plants went on strike. There was no Stalin around anymore to threaten a third world war, so to improve the nation’s sense of well-being, Czechoslovakia’s arms factories switched to manufacturing television sets, gramophones and refrigerators. Now the market is flooded with goods.

  On the day when Khrushchev delivers his famous secret speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, President Zápotocký (the man who as prime minister had supervised Švec’s work), who has been invited to attend, has a meeting in Moscow with Czech and Slovak students. The students have been here for some time, and they already know that Khrushchev regards Stalin as a murderer, so they want to talk to their leader about this.

  “Do you really want to poke around in all that?” asks the president. “The right policy is not to interfere,” he adds.

  The team of Stalin’s faithful disciples from Prague has a problem. In Moscow, people talk openly about his crimes, but the Czech visitors have no interest in publicizing Khrushchev’s speech on their return home—that would mean their own end.

  Besides, there is nobody in Czechoslovakia capable of assuming the new leadership, nobody like Poland’s Władysław Gomułka, first secretary of the Party and de facto leader of the country.

  A newsreel.

  The journalist asks a middle-aged man walking past Letná hill what heroism means today. “Once upon a time, brave men went to war,” she says, and thrusts the microphone his way.

  Laborer Josef Král thinks for a while, and then says: “These days, heroism means doing everything that’s demanded of us.”

  This we know: in order to survive in unfavorable circumstances, a small nation has to adapt. It has carried this down from the days of the Habsburgs and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

  Writer Pavel Kohout points out that, after the war in Czechoslovakia, there were no Soviet troops, there was no putsch, the communists had genuine support, and in the 1946 elections they gained more than 40 percent of the votes. In 1938, the Czech nation had experienced annexation and occupation, and had been betrayed by Great Britain and France, so when the communists took power, it looked as if the Soviet Union was their only reliable means of support.

  Besides, a hundred years earlier František Palacký, the man who awakened Czech national consciousness, predicted that if the Czechs ever moved closer to Russia, it would be an act of desperation on their part.


  “That’s why, later on,” says Pavel Kohout, “it was so hard to admit to those who had supported the communists that they had unwittingly done the devil a favor. And of course it all happened very quickly.”

  Underneath Stalin, in the concrete spaces inside the hill, prostitutes receive their clients. Earlier, a famous painter kept a folding bed in there. But only until it came out that he was taking underage girls there. Earlier still, tons of potatoes were stored there.

  In 1961, Moscow holds another Party Congress and Khrushchev is still criticizing Stalinism.

  Stalin’s mummified body is removed from Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square, and Zápotocký’s successor as president of Czechoslovakia, Antonín Novotný, must respond to this.

  In 1952, he had personally divided among himself and his colleagues the valuables left behind by their comrades who died on the gallows. Now he must be ready to rehabilitate them and admit that the Party was wrong.

  The monument that stands “forever” was another mistake.

  The man who is to eliminate Stalin—engineer Vladimír Křížek—hears the strangest sentence of his entire life from the authorities: “You are to demolish the monument, but with dignity.”

  The top expert at an elite engineering enterprise, Křížek asks them to explain. The monument is a concrete monster, clad in granite, and it is fixed to the inside of the mountain by a reinforced concrete structure. Nobody foresaw that it would ever have to be destroyed. It can only be blown up.

  “Destroy it in a dignified way, so that the gravity of the USSR isn’t harmed,” the secretary of the district Party committee instructs him, and spells out the conditions.

  No explosive materials may be placed inside Stalin’s head.

  Nobody is to fire at it.

  No gunshots are to be heard at all.

  Nobody is to talk about it, film it or photograph it. Anyone who breaks this rule will be arrested on the spot.

  Engineer Křížek’s entire enterprise is paralyzed with fear.

  The grounds are strictly guarded day and night. The whole thing will be blown up, but someone has the idea of taking the head apart manually. Two stonemasons (father and son) are suspended from it, chipping off five-inch chunks at a time with hammers. They dare not throw them to the ground, so they are removed by hoist.