Stalin on Letná

1960

The Stalin Monument on Letná Plain, 1955. Otakar Švec's granite group was the largest statue of Stalin ever built. Place: Letná plain, above the Vltava, north bank Figures: Otakar Švec, sculptor (deceased three weeks prior) · Jiří Štursa and Vlasta Štursová, architects · Antonín Zápotocký, President Otakar Švec wins the 1949 competition for the Prague Stalin monument with a maquette he intends to be provisional. He is talented, unpolitical, the son of a confectioner. The commission is a curse. For five and a half years he works on a granite figure thirty meters tall (fifteen meters of figure, fifteen meters of pedestal), the largest sculpted representation of Stalin ever built anywhere. Behind Stalin he places eight representative Czechs and Soviets in a tight line: worker, peasant soldier, woman, partisan. The composition is meant to be Lenin's vanguard. Praguers, looking up from the Old Town across the river, immediately read the queue as a different thing. They call it fronta na maso, the meat queue. The figures behind Stalin are not following him; they are waiting their turn. The joke is repeated everywhere and is impossible to suppress because it is silently visible from half the city. This photograph dates from 1960.