Czechoslovakia: Moving Day

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Short of execution, expulsion from the party used to be the deepest form of disgrace for a Communist. Now, the saying goes in the satellites, it is expulsion from the grave.

In Czechoslovakia, Communist Boss Antonin Novotny followed Khrushchev's destalinization line by reburying a predecessor, ex-President Klement Gottwald, who died in 1953, nine days after Stalin, of natural causes (pneumonia and pleurisy, contracted at Stalin's funeral). From his modernistic mausoleum in suburban Prague's Vitkov Hill, where he lay in public view, Gottwald was moved to a national memorial park and placed underground. Novotny himself used to be a notorious Stalinist, but in an ironic and macabre turnabout managed to blame most of his party's past Stalinist errors on former Party Boss Rudolf Slansky, who was hanged in 1952. Slansky, went the story, had misled Gottwald into the Stalinist personality cult, but despite "shortcomings and mistakes" he was still "a leading revolutionary.''

Emptying the Gottwald mausoleum was simple compared with a second task Novotny put before the party: leveling the 6,000-ton marble monument to Stalin, which, on a perch overlooking the city, looms like a ghost ship from the banks of the Moldau River. Unveiled in 1955, after three years of steady chiseling, the 56-ft.-high statue of Stalin stands atop a 40-ft. base, flanked by eight slightly smaller figures representing workers, soldiers, scientists. Instead of bothering to demolish the colossus, people were whispering in Prague cafés last week that Comrade Novotny could simply cut off the heads of the eight statues and label the edifice: "In memory of the victims of Stalinism.''