Oral History Transcripts Online

Stalin Monument in Letná park prior to its destruction in 1962

This fall semester, George Mason University History and New Media student Misha M. Griffith has been working to transcribe a number of the interviews gathered by Recording Voices & Documenting Memories so far. To mark the publication of the first interview transcript on Otomar Hájek's profile page, here is a previously unbroadcast snippet from his interview which caught our eye at the NCSML:

"I was a member of the first university workers’, no… students’ brigade to build the Stalin statue!"

You worked on building it?

"Well, yes. We went there and we played cards all day; we managed to do it. And when they were taking it down, I wanted to volunteer to be in the first students’ brigade to take down the statue, but my mother talked me out of it."

...The statue was built in ’52, wasn't it?

"I don't remember. My memory of the time is… I don’t remember... I was still at the university. I was at the university from ’49 until ’53. It must have been built in ’52, or begun to be built. It took a long time."

Could you describe for me the process? That’s such a monster statue. I’m just curious about what the whole engineering setup was like there, and how it was done. How was it organized?

"The statue itself was called the 'food line,' which looked as if a line of people - okay, I don’t have to describe that. The foundations were therefore elongated, and since it was supposed to be solid stone, the foundation had to be extremely solid. An extra railway line was built from the nearest spur to bring in these stones, [each] of a size roughly two yards cubic. And unloaded there and then transported. Some of the sculptural work was carried out in the original situation, and then some of it was finished here."

Was it a big group of people, or how many... Were there hundreds of people?

"There were hundreds of people. There were hundreds of people. The most interesting thing is that the builder, the artist who conceived it, committed suicide immediately afterwards."

Upon graduating from Charles University in 1953 (and waving goodbye to student labor brigades), Otomar worked in a range of research positions, including one at a computer science facility in Prague:



For Otomar Hájek's complete profile (and now the full transcript of his interview as well) visit the NCSML's oral history web pages.