"We are transforming the prophecy of Libuše into reality!" : The communist vision of Prague in the Stalin era
Abstract
The article focuses on the construction and symbolic encoding of Prague during the 1950s. After 1948 the political and professional elites constructed a suggestive propagandist image of the capital as a 'new socialist city'.
Prague began to be transformed through interventions in its physical space (architecture, monuments), production of its social reality (organized work teams) and reinterpretation of its history. The leading role of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in this process was systematically popularized by the political representatives, the local press and guidebooks.
The Communist rhetoric emphasized both Soviet paragons and selected Czech historical traditions (in particular, the Hussite Movement and the Czech National Revival). Citing the example of Prague, this article attempts to underline the spatial aspect of Stalinist ideology and the social 'constructability' of any space.