Praguers remember it took many botched attempts to finally decimate the monument by dynamite. ItвЂ™s one thing to move a political party away from prior actions, itвЂ™s another to prostrate its mistakes full-fledged in the faces of its citizenry. On a temperate October day in 1962, Prague residents (вЂњPraguersвЂќ) were told to stay indoors. Orders came from Moscow to get rid of the Stalin monument that watched over Prague.

In 1962, Nikita Krushchev was leader in Moscow, and although he had a lengthy bureaucratic career toeing the party line under Stalin, Kurshchev was eager to distance himself from the вЂњman of steelвЂќ. Communism still reigned supreme, of course, but communist leaders wished to back away from the cult of Stalin and the associated purges and gulags. Stalinism had begun to fall out of favor even at the time of the monumentвЂ™s unveiling. Radio Praha also reported the man who posed for Е vecвЂ™s Stalin in the monument fell into alcoholism and died three years after the statueвЂ™s unveiling in 1955, he was unable to stand people calling him вЂњStalinвЂќ. Е vecвЂ™s suicide is attributed to political stress, or perhaps guilt, his wife had in fact killed herself in the same manner prior to his suicide. Е vec lit the gas in his kitchen stove and committed suicide weeks before the monumentвЂ™s unveiling. To his surprise his entry won, and Е vec ended up directing hundreds of Czechs as they dutifully chiseled and hammered to bring the sculptorвЂ™s vision to life. Winners always went to pre-fixed party members, after all. The fated artist of the Stalin monument was chosen in a contest Е vec entered in a nonchalant wish to win second place. His works before the Stalin monument were considered decidedly modern (dubbed вЂњfuturisticвЂќ) bronze images of curving motorcycles, a face split down the middle, hollow inside. The sculptor commissioned to build the statue, Otakar Е vec, was born in 1892, and lived through not only the communist occupation of the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia) but also the Nazi occupation. Some stories are too poetic not to be true. The monument was seeped with a dark stain from its beginning. вЂњThe meat queueвЂќ was the cityвЂ™s nickname for the monument, as the workers lined behind Stalin reminded them of the interminable lines they waited in for everything as per the supply/demand equation of MoscowвЂ™s communism. Stalin had died two years before the monument was unveiled, so Prague did not become the jewel of StalinвЂ™s eye as a result. The design of the structure was to include room to host party events and, one day, house a museum dedicated to Stalin. The statue weighed 17,000 tons and was heavy with depictions of вЂњgood comradesвЂќ working together under the auspices of their leader, who was looking contentedly into the future as any good leader should. The monument took five and a half years to build and was reported to be the largest group statue in Europe at the time of its unveiling in 1955. StalinвЂ™s statue in LetnГЎ Park was no small feat in sculpting exercise.

The story of the red metronome in Prague is the building of a new future that canвЂ™t possibly escape the old.

This is a source of constant amusement to the pessimistic Czechs. Ironically, the metronome often lies still, as if the weight of PragueвЂ™s history has given it too much baggage to continue the heartbeat. Some think of the metronome as the slow tick of growing democracy in the Czech Republic, as it was erected in 1991 after the fall of communism over the ruins of a giant monument of Stalin.

Looming mournfully over the mismatched medieval roofs of Prague is a red metronome.

Metronome meaning