The explosion is prepared by the country’s best pyrotechnician, Jiří Příhoda. He knows that any mistake could send half the downtown area sky-high.
He spends two weeks thinking, and not sleeping; now and then he just drifts off for three minutes. He prepares 2,100 charges.
He wants to blast the whole monument in one go, but he is pressured by the military, whom the government has sent along just in case. They force him to do it in three stages—they are afraid pieces of the monument will fly out over the city and kill people. They dog him every step of the way, never letting him concentrate and constantly nagging him.
First, Jiří Příhoda has a fit of hysterics and starts shouting. Then he downs six glasses of slivovitz and presses the firing button.
When it’s all over he sits on the grass, weeping loudly.
An ambulance takes him away to the mental hospital.
The explosions were a great success. Clearing the metal and concrete from the surrounding area takes a year.
Not a single line about the monument’s destruction appears in the press.
Prague’s monument to Stalin never existed.
PART 2: LIFE-SAVING FRUIT JUICE
Stalin left behind a thirty-six-foot-high pedestal. Nowadays, there is a metronome on it. The big red pointer oscillates from the Soviet side to the Czechoslovak side and back again. Skateboarders rampage around it, and on the old steps, someone has used white paint to try to communicate with someone else, writing: [email protected].
Sometimes there are no sponsors to pay for the electricity, so the pointer comes to a standstill.
“Look, time has stopped again,” people say.
But that’s not a good metaphor for this place—quite the opposite.
Because time has picked up so much speed that Otakar Švec’s death, for instance, ten years after the Second World War ended, feels as if it happened in the days of cuneiform script.
I’ve always been bothered by the fact that the Czechs have never written a reliable history of the rise and fall of the greatest proof of love in communist Europe.
However, it turns out that to do this you have to become an archeologist.
When, at the Central Archive of the Czech Republic, I am handed a file marked Stalinův památnik v Praze (“The Stalin monument in Prague”) with stamps on the documents which show that they were only declassified three days ago, I feel a pleasant thrill—it was done at my request, nobody has taken an interest in them before.
There are dozens of protocols about the monument, many of them marked “Confidential.” But there’s nothing about the victims of the construction work or anything else about the sculptor, apart from the fact that he was horribly oppressed. Not a word about him having ended his own life.
If he really was found in his studio, the secret police must have gone in there. They must have questioned his neighbors, they must have sniffed about, so there ought to be at least a note about it. They must have written down the circumstances in which the body was found.
I put in a request to search the archives of the former Security Service for Otakar Švec’s file. From October 2003 until January 2004, I wait for a response.
They reply that they can’t find a single sheet of paper with his name on it.
Sculptor Olbram Zoubek says Otakar Švec gassed himself, just as his wife did, in the bathroom. (This may be true, as for many years Zoubek had an employee called Junek, who worked in stucco and was Švec’s loyal assistant.)
Television documentary director Martin Skyba says he shot himself. (He may be well informed, as he makes historical documentaries.)
An art historian called Petr Wittlich who specializes in that era says the sculptor hanged himself. (This may also be true, as Professor Wittlich wrote the one and only monograph on Švec not long after his death.)
“But where did he do it?”
“In his studio, in the loft of the Koruna Palace on Wenceslas Square.”
I spend three days trying to find out if the sculptor really did have a studio at the Koruna. He did not. He had two, but not downtown—besides, there’s no trace of Švec left in either. I tell this to the professor.
“I wrote about him, but I didn’t know him personally. He had no children, and you won’t find anybody in Prague who knew him because they must’ve all died by now.”
Despite some Frankovka red wine, Jiří Příhoda, the explosives expert, is economical with his words. If I hadn’t known in advance that he was taken off to the hospital, I’m sure he would never have mentioned it.
“That was the most dreadful event in my entire life, demolishing that thing, though I had some tough assignments afterwards too. But there’s no point in going back to it,” he says. “So much pain …”
We don’t go back to it.
Yet, a week later, in a little-known novel called Café Slavia, I come across a description of the explosion. It was written by Ota Filip, a writer who in 1960 was forced by the regime to become a miner.
I call the explosives expert. I tell him I have found something about his explosion.
Next morning, Mr. Příhoda’s wife informs me in the hallway that last night was hell. “Who could have written that?” he kept repeating, trembling all over.
“But it’s 2003,” I say.
“What difference does it make?” asks his wife.
I read out loud: “ ‘The next night there was a full moon. The Vltava looked like a silver snake that had lain down to sleep beneath the bridges. And then there was an earthquake.’ ”
“Well, well …” says Mr. Příhoda, clutching at his heart.
“ ‘A gray cloud of smoke shielded Stalin right up to the neck. Suddenly it lit up with all the colors of the rainbow. His head was still protruding amid that strange light, but he tipped forwards, as some dreadful force broke his neck. Stones drummed on the roofs and fell into the Vltava, opaque by now. The echo of the explosion returned to the city and broke through the cloud of dust which was hanging over the downtown area like a gray bell.’ ”
“But the explosions were in the daytime!” Příhoda rages.
“ ‘Then silence fell. Only Helena von Molwitzová screamed and fell to the ground. She wasn’t found until morning, lying on the lawn …’ ”
“Good God, what are you reading?”
“ ‘They carried her into the embassy on a stretcher. Her face was covered in blood.’ ”
Jiří Příhoda can’t get over it. “Only one man was killed during the demolition, and that was before the explosion. He was from the committee. He went into the chambers underneath the monument, stood on a plank in the wrong place, fell over and never got up again. Why on earth invent other victims?”
“Because Stalin demands victims,” explains his wife.
“They once wrote that his head fell off and rolled down the bridge into the marketplace. And then I get blamed for it all!”
“Straight after Stalin he had a heart attack,” Mrs. Příhodová tells me. “Ever since he’d had sleepless nights for two weeks before the explosion, my husband hasn’t slept properly, for forty-one years.”
“I fall asleep, like last night, for five minutes. And then I have a dream, I don’t know what it’s about, I just know I grit my teeth and say: ‘I won’t allow it!’ ”
In its weekend edition, the newspaper Lidové noviny publishes my small ad, with a photograph of the models who posed for Švec. I came across their picture in Prague’s Museum of Communism, but I couldn’t find their names.
I write that I am looking for these people, or relatives of theirs.
Five letters arrive. All more or less about the fact that somebody has very troublesome neighbors and asking if I could do something about it.
Two years ago, Czech television showed some footage taken by a daredevil who illegally filmed the explosion on an amateur camera. There was a reminder that the totalitarian state was just as afraid of cameras as it was of firearms.
He is a Mr. M.,
the same age as everyone concerned, around eighty. He is wearing a tartan jacket and a cravat. He shows me a magazine for which he writes about Moravian wines.
“A friend and I filmed the explosion. He had an eight-millimeter camera, and we hid in the bushes on the hill opposite. One filmed, the other kept watch. The friend was my foreman, because we’d worked together as laborers building a tunnel, right next to Stalin.”
“What sort of laborers?” I ask, glancing at the cravat and the magazine about wine.
“I was a road worker.”
“With a camera?”
“I mean I was a workman in the mornings, and at night I wrote the screenplays for TV programs, under a pseudonym of course. I was already middle-aged when I graduated in journalism. But I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“But you’ve already started.”
“All right, I’ll finish: I had to be a workman, and please don’t badger me about it.”
“Why not?”
“Those are things best not mentioned,” he says, and lowers his voice, as if somebody undesirable might really be listening. We are talking at the Café Arco, where Kafka used to sit, and where the Ministry of Internal Affairs later had its own canteen.
Mr. M. fetches out a file with a photograph of the Soviet side of the monument.
“You see, I set up the camera to get the best possible shot of the partisan girl’s gesture as she grabs the soldier.” He shows me. “Some people were informed that Švec killed himself because of that fly.”
“Who told them that?”
“I think about fifteen of Prague’s cab drivers said, naturally in the greatest confidence, that they had driven him up to the monument that night.”
The sculptor Olbram Zoubek is seventy-seven years old, an energetic man who has no ungrounded fears.
He was a student when Švec was working on Stalin.
After the self-immolation of history student Jan Palach in 1969, Zoubek managed to get inside the morgue and make two death masks of the national hero, who was being guarded by a whole herd of secret policemen, and so too shall I succeed in discovering some facts about Švec.
Zoubek knows a sculptor who worked with Otakar Švec on Stalin, and whose name is Josef Vajce. He is the only man still alive who knew him personally.
Fantastic!
To make sure I don’t give the old man a shock, Zoubek calls him at home for me.
“Listen, Honza,” he says, “there’s a guy from Poland here who’s going to call you in an hour …” (“He’ll see you,” he mutters across to me.)
I leave Zoubek’s place, and in an hour the phone is answered by a man who sounds elderly.
“I’m afraid Mr. Vajce has been away in Ukraine for a week and I’m not at all sure when he’ll be back.”
I have found a list of the names of the radio commentators and technicians who worked on a live broadcast from the unveiling ceremony.
Most of them aren’t in the phone book, but several are still alive.
“We know you well, brave partisan, raising your head on our monument …” said editor Sylvie Moravcová.
“I can hardly hear you,” she says today, “because I’ve gone deaf, there’s no point in you coming to see me, I can’t remember anything, unless you’d like a glass of fruit juice!”
“Lines of people are slowly ascending the steps, paying tribute to the great Stalin and swearing to defend the freedom brought to us by the Soviet soldiers, and to make our homeland a paradise on earth,” said editor Vladimír Brunát. “I’m eighty-five now and I’m blind, on top of which I’m in a wheelchair, but I’m happy to help,” he says today. “The designer? I reported on the unveiling, but I’m sure I never knew the sculptor’s name. There was no talk of any suicide. What’s that you’re saying? Nothing was known about it at the time.”
Taking note of linguistic details in the Czech Republic can offer clues. Thus, in a situation where someone ought to say: “I was afraid to talk about it,” “I hadn’t the courage to ask about it,” or “I had no idea about it,” they say:
“THERE WAS NO TALK about it.”
“NOTHING WAS KNOWN about it.”
“That WASN’T ASKED about.”
I often hear the impersonal form when people have to talk about communism. As if people had no influence on anything and were unwilling to take personal responsibility. As if to remind me that they were just part of a greater whole, which also had some sin of denial on its conscience.
I mention the Czechs’ reluctance to remember the past to my friend Piotr Lipiński, who has been writing about the executioners and victims of Stalinism for years.
“It’s out of fear,” he says.
“Fifty years on? Nowadays, when they shouldn’t be afraid of anything?”
“All the people you met are about eighty. The last fifteen years of independence are just an episode in their lives. Too short a time for them to be sure that it’s a permanent state of affairs and can’t change.”
Prague’s monument to Stalin does exist.
* * *
* Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin should have celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1948. It seems that he falsely gave 1879 as his date of birth in many documents, and thus it was accepted as the official date during his lifetime. This is discussed by Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky in his book, Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives (Doubleday, 1996).
VICTIM OF LOVE
In the summer of 2006, I get an e-mail from an employee of the archive at the Czech Ministry of Internal Affairs. He writes that he has finally managed to find a file inscribed “Suicide of the artist Švec.”
When the Security Service investigators and agents broke down the door (double locked, with the keys on the inside) of Švec’s apartment, the sculptor was lying on the same sofa bed as his wife had been when she poisoned herself (and so he had not found her dead in the bathtub, as rumor had it).
The blinds were down. They could smell gas in the air.
On the table, he had left a letter to a notary called Dr. Dvořák.
The letter began with the sentence: “I am going after my wife Vlasta, and I am leaving my entire property, including the final installment for the Stalin monument, to the rank-and-file soldiers who lost their sight in the war.” He asked for his body to be cremated using money left in the house, and for his car to be sold.
He didn’t write a word about what had compelled him to commit suicide.
The investigators tracked down the notary. He turned out to be a friend of Švec’s. “Vlasta did a good thing by poisoning herself,” the sculptor had said to the notary. “At least she won’t grow old. Why should I bother unveiling the monument if she’s not here?”
He had apparently complained to the notary that he had dreamed of being appointed a professor, but hadn’t been. He had also expected to be given a State Prize, but hadn’t been awarded one.
A sculptor who worked with Švec on the monument told the investigators that “without a doubt, the specialists’ comments on his work had an influence on his death.” Additionally, Švec had heard people saying that he was too costly an artist, and that for the money assigned to his monument they could have built two housing estates for workers.
The sculptor also said that Švec was worried that the hill underneath Stalin was too weak, that it should be reinforced with concrete fill, and that it might collapse under the colossus he had designed.
The cleaning woman who looked after his apartment had noticed “the master” was nervous. Apparently, he had told her that lately Minister Kopecký “had come to hate him for some reason and no longer paid him as much attention as before, and that Vlasta had shown him the way.”
Second Lieutenant Kraus, who conducted the inquiry, conveyed the following official explanation to his superiors: “Otakar Švec’s suicide was brought about by the death of his wife, loneliness, and critical comments about his work which were made by some expe
rts.”
Among his documents, prescriptions for anti-depressants were found, and “photographs of several highly placed people from the USA.”
The militia broke into the sculptor’s apartment on April 21, 1955 (nine days before the monument was unveiled). He had committed suicide on March 3—that was the date on the letter, and that was the conclusion the inquiry came to. (Later on—for reasons unclear to me—dictionaries and encyclopedias gave the date of his death as April 4.)
Otakar Švec was lying dead in his apartment for fifty days. All that time, the gas was escaping.
And so for fifty days, in the run-up to the unveiling of the largest Stalin on the entire planet, nobody was actually interested in the whereabouts of its creator.
MRS. NOT-A-FAKE
It’s 2004.
We’re noisy, casually dressed. We’ve come from the West and we’re striding the streets with patent insatiability.
We’ve already got mugs with Kafka on them.
We’ve got Kafka T-shirts.
We’ve got matchboxes.
We’ve got cartoon versions of his life story tucked under our arms and a 177-page summary of all his works. We’re hanging out in the Jewish district, which is mainly a fake version of itself.
Over a hundred years ago, all the houses here were demolished, and the holes in the ground were covered in disinfectant. Once the Jews had been removed, bourgeois Germans and Czechs put up their grand tenements. Now we’ve stopped outside the house where he was born, though it’s not the same house, but a different one, a fake version of it.
We’re studying the menu displayed at the entrance, listing the dishes on offer at the Franz Kafka restaurant. Although this place was only established in 2003, and just looks like a restaurant from a hundred years ago.
Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia Page 8