Word: gottwalds
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...Soviet empire is run by Czechoslovakia's Antonin Novotny. Observing the form rather than the function of Nikita Khrushchev's destalinization drive, Novotny three months ago ordered the demolition of Prague's 6,000-ton Stalin statue and the transfer of dead Red Boss Klement Gottwald from a glass-topped coffin in a grandiose mausoleum to a less conspicuous resting place (TIME. Dec. 1, 1961). But this month, under the transparent banner of destalinization, Novotny carried out a political execution that Stalin himself would have appreciated...
...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...
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...
Died. Antonin Zapotocky, 72, calculating President (since Klement Gottwald's death in 1953) of Czechoslovakia, onetime (1948-53) Prime Minister, gaunt old wheelhorse of the Czech Communist Party, and one of the architects of the 1948 bloodless coup that smashed Czech democracy and imposed Red rule; of a heart attack; in Prague. Stonecutter by training, Zapotocky was a longtime trade unionist and Parliamentary Deputy (1920-38, 1945-48), tenaciously survived jail terms. Nazi concentration camps and de-stalinization purges, but, for all his rise to power, remained in the shadows-primarily a backstage figure...
...sycophantically sang Stalin's praise alive now scorned him dead. Chunky, jug-eared Khrushchev set the tone for this as for everything else when, in a perfunctory tribute to comrades who had died since the last congress, he disdainfully lumped together in one sentence "J. V. Stalin, Klement Gottwald and Kyuichi Tokuda." Stalin's theories about Communism were also cavalierly rewritten...