History of the Stalin Monument in Prague from the 1950s Competition to Demolition

In the 1950s it was decided to erect a monument to Stalin in Letná Park, on a viewing platform overlooking Prague, timed to mark the tenth anniversary of the city's liberation from the fascists by Soviet troops. But the sculptors were in no hurry to take part in the open competition for the design, and those who did submit entries offered extremely feeble work. In the end the competition was won by the now almost forgotten sculptor Otakar Švec, who, by some accounts, said that he would rather have come second. Naturally, the creator of the monument at once found himself under the watch of the organs of state security. He took to drink, fell into a terrible depression and took his own life by strangulation a year before the completion of the five-year project. The author never saw the result of his tormenting labours: the largest statue of Stalin in the world, 15.5 metres high, with two rows of workers, Soviet and Czechoslovak, at his back. Praguers called the composition "the queue at the butcher's" and did not love it, and little wonder, since the money for its construction, hundreds of millions of crowns, was collected by compulsion from all over the country. After the exposure of the cult of personality it was decided to demolish the monument, and the most convenient means of dismantling it was judged to be an explosion, but Stalin did not yield at the first attempt, and the charges had to be laid twice. At that time a curfew was introduced in Prague, so that the townspeople should not watch, still less photograph, the demolition of the symbol of Soviet domination. The empty premises beneath the monument were turned into a potato store. In time, in the 1990s, a giant metronome was installed on the spot.