Short of execution, expulsion from the party used to be the deepest form of disgrace for a Communist. Now, the saying goes in the satellites, it is expulsion from the grave.
In 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...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
