(200.23)
Price: 350.00 euro
Size: 45x37cm./17.7×14.5inch.
Weight: 4215gr./148.6oz.
Year: 1953
Pages: 40
Fro sale at http://www.propagandaworld.org
Big and stunning picture album about the funeral of Klement Gottwald. It comes in 2 boxes and with 40 sheets of black paper with real photos on it. The inlay of the red box is some kind of red velvet. Luxurious and very rare. The box is from a lawyer who’s grandfather had a high position in the Romanian intelligence service. Written on the outside box is “Romania” in the Czechian language so this box went to Romanian officials.
Klement Gottwald (1896-1953) was a Czech communist politician, who was the leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1929 until his death in 1953–titled as general secretary until 1945 and as chairman from 1945 to 1953. He was the first leader of Communist Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1953.
He was the 14th prime minister of Czechoslovakia from July 1946 until June 1948, the first Communist to hold the post. In June 1948, he was elected as Czechoslovakia’s first Communist president, four months after the 1948 coup d’état in which his party seized power with the backing of the Soviet Union. He held the post until his death.
Gottwald was a long-time alcoholic and suffered from heart disease caused by syphilis that had gone untreated for several years. Shortly after attending Stalin’s funeral on 9 March 1953, one of his arteries burst. He died five days later on 14 March 1953, aged 56. He was the first Czechoslovak president to die in office.
Gottwald’s embalmed body was initially displayed in a mausoleum at the site of the Jan Žižka national monument in the district of Žižkov, Prague. In 1962, the personality cult ended and it was no longer deemed appropriate to show Gottwald’s body. There are accounts that in 1962 Gottwald’s body had blackened and was decomposing due to a botched embalming, although other witnesses have disputed this. His body was cremated, the ashes returned to the Žižka Monument and placed in a sarcophagus.
After the end of the communist period, Gottwald’s ashes were removed from the Žižka Monument (in 1990) and placed in a common grave at Prague’s Olšany Cemetery, together with the ashes of about 20 other communist leaders which had also originally been placed in the Žižka Monument. The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia now maintains that common grave.
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