Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [8]
In fact, the plinth was commissioned by the Czech Communist Party to support a thirty-meter, fourteen-thousand-ton statue portraying Stalin leading a worker, a woman, a soldier, and a botanist into the glorious Socialist future. The behemoth took hundreds of workers five years to build. Carved into its base was Stalin’s proclamation FROM THIS DAY ONWARD THE AGE-OLD STRUGGLE OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK PEOPLE FOR THEIR NATIONAL EXISTENCE AND INDEPENDENCE CAN BE CONSIDERED AS VICTORIOUSLY COMPLETED, which must have come as a huge relief to all those Czechs who—having outlasted the short-lived afterglow of Nazi ouster—thought they were once again subject to occupation.
Triumphant speeches were delivered at the statue’s dedication in 1955, but neither Stalin nor his sculptor witnessed the ceremony: Stalin had died two years previous and the artist had committed suicide prior to the statue’s completion. Within a year of the unveiling, Khrushchev had revealed Stalin’s crimes against the Soviet people, leading chagrined Prague officials to conceal the dishonored statue in scaffolding. Though one bureaucrat suggested that the statue might be saved if Stalin could be sliced off its front and replaced with “an allegory—perhaps a woman holding a bouquet,” in 1962 the entire statue was demolished. The monstrous pedestal, however, was too massive to be destroyed and so it remained as a mute witness to the passing of an age, an enormous parapet edged by broad, wide expanses of smooth, smooth marble waiting for Communism’s fall. Waiting for the skaters to come.
The Stalin plinth is skater nirvana. The Lenin plaza is a mere marble toenail clipping by comparison, a skater kiddy pool. Spray paint tags cover most of the plinth’s accessible surfaces, and on a sunny day the air is dense with the liquid sound of spinning skateboard wheels and the clatter of wood against stone. The plinth’s steps are good for perfecting aerial skills: its smooth expanses are ideal for turns and spins. There are a few hacky sack players, a few teenaged girls with dyed hair and fishnets looking on, but here the skateboarders reign supreme. The few adults at the pedestal’s expansive summit congregate near the metronome, away from the marble margins. The view from the metronome is excellent and it is clear why the plinth’s designers chose this location: from here Stalin could oversee the castle, the bridges, and all of Old Town, as if he were a spoiled child who had just been presented the most marvelous model train set in creation.
The frozen metronome begs the imagination to envision a time before its tall red arm fell still. On sunny days, the metronome could have been set to a leisurely andante to encourage the city to slow down and savor the blue skies; on gray days the tempo could have been upped to a peppy presto to lift Prague from its doldrums. Concerts held at the base of the metronome would have required no conductor. Dancers whirling at its base would have always been assured of the downbeat. The connections between a giant metronome and a unified Czechoslovakia are murky at best, but by the time of the metronome’s installation in 1991, a clear rift existed between Czechs and Slovaks. It would have behooved the Prague Society for a Universal