Letná Blown Up

JAN 01 1962 · 12:00

The demolition of the Stalin Monument, 1962. Eight hundred kilograms of explosives reduced the largest Stalin in the world to gravel. Place: Letná plain, above the Vltava Figures: Antonín Novotný, First Secretary · the demolition crew of the Konstruktiva enterprise · 800 kilograms of dynamite Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech reaches Prague late. Novotný, who has built his career on the Slánský trial, resists de-Stalinization for as long as Moscow tolerates it. By 1961 Stalin's body has been removed from the Lenin mausoleum on Red Square; cities across the bloc are rebranding. The Czechoslovak Politburo finally votes in summer 1962 to remove the Letná monument. The order is to do it quietly. Quietly is not possible. The figure is thirty meters of granite anchored into a concrete core; nothing short of dynamite will shift it. The demolition is staged over five weeks across October and the first week of November, in carefully spaced charges so the central plinth survives. Each blast brings out a crowd along the Vltava embankment to watch.