14.3 1953 Klement Gottwald died

Czechoslovak president and communist politician Klement Gottwald died 67 years ago. It was speculated that he was poisoned in Moscow.

His wife Marta was hit hard by her husband's death. She was convinced that he had not died of an aortic aneurysm, but that he had been poisoned in Moscow. "Such suspicions were voiced even among hardened Stalinists, especially because only nine days had passed between Stalin's and Gottwald's deaths. There were rumours that Stalin had been murdered by poison and then Gottwald had been liquidated in a similar way," writes Rudolf Kroll in his book Gottwald and His Times.

Today, however, it is known that this was just unfounded conjecture. The cause of Stalin's death was a stroke he suffered as a result of advanced arteriosclerosis. Gottwald died of massive internal bleeding caused by a ruptured aortic aneurysm. Although compared to Stalin, he had immediate and at the time the best medical care.

About six months after Gottwald's death, his wife Marta also died, and she bore her husband's death very hard. She lost weight drastically, sixty kilograms in a few months. She had an aggressive form of cancer, which the doctors kept from her at first. "But nobody felt sorry for her, she was not very popular as First Lady. She played the bourgeois mistress and allowed herself to be addressed as 'Madame Grace'. She liked to tease the castle staff. Among her legendary dresses were furs, which she wore even on sultry days, which was quite ridiculous," Kroll adds.

Gottwald's body was embalmed by experts under the supervision of Soviet specialists. The sarcophagus was opened to the public after two years. While Lenin's remains, for example, are still on display in Moscow, Gottwald's was found to have advanced tissue decomposition in 1958. Both of his legs had to be replaced with prostheses.

"But even repeated intervention by embalmers could no longer prevent the decomposition process, so in 1962 the remains were burned in a crematorium and the urn with the ashes returned to the National Memorial. After the Revolution, it was buried with other urns of Communist functionaries in a mass grave at Olšany Cemetery," Kroll writes.

Among Gottwald's best-known words is the February 1948 speech from Old Town Square that triggered a decade of totalitarianism. "I am just returning from the Castle from the President of the Republic. This morning I submitted to the President of the Republic a proposal to accept the resignation of the ministers who resigned on February 20 of this year. And at the same time I proposed to the President a list of persons with whom the Government is to be completed and reconstructed. I can tell you that the President has accepted all my proposals, exactly as they were made."

Sources:

Rudolf Kroll: Gottwald and His Times
www.hrad.cz, www.vlada.cz, www.wikipedia.org