So, on destroying statues: My favourite story is of the world’s largest Stalin statue (at the time) built in 1955 in a park overlooking Prague. At 15.5m it was an absolute beast & took over 5 years to build. /1

There was an open competition to build it but no sculptor really wanted to win. They were forced to enter & it was eventually Otakar Švec who got the gig. He’d have preferred to come second. /2

The monument depicted Stalin with groups of workers behind him: one row Soviet, the other row Czechoslovak. Locals called it the “Queue for the butcher.” Švec never saw it completed. Horrified, he committed suicide before it was eventually unveiled, 2 years after Stalin died. /3

I once obtained the Czechoslovak secret police file on him & it told a very sad story of a man hounded & observed, who eventually gassed himself in his room. He was an alcoholic & had been having an affair as well. His wife had committed suicide a year earlier. /4

Then came Krushchev, who in his ‘secret speech’ of 1956 denounced Stalin. The statue had to go. But it was too big too take down so it was blown up with 800kg if explosives. A curfew was ordered so people weren’t allowed to witness it. /5

Bits were carried away and there are lots of urban myths (and published stories) about where the head/finger/whatever ended up. Nowadays the park exhibits a giant metronome in its place, slicing up vast chunks of time. /6

In a mindless display of tone-deaf arrogance, when Michael Jackson came to play a concert in Prague after the fall of Communism he got a statue of himself temporarily erected there. /7

Švec is mostly forgotten now, a sad footnote of history, but he’s done other work that lingers. His motorcycle sculpture has a powerful sense of motion and dynamism. /8

The last time I went to the site of the statue (Letná Park) a few years ago, it was occupied mostly by skateboarders and kissing teenagers. /ends