In the fall of 1989, communism crumbled in cities across Eastern Europe. Walls were destroyed. Soviet flags were burned. Statues were toppled in public squares. But in Budapest, which broke free of Soviet rule in October of that year, the deconstruction took a different tack. Rather than wiping the city’s cache of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, and Engels monuments, the new democratic Hungarian government chose to safeguard the vestiges of Russian rule by relegating them to a park outside of the city center.
Opened to the public in 1993, Memento Park now displays 42 Cold War statues arranged along a cloverleaf pattern of grassy walkways. Brick arches and a Greek temple-like pediment lead into an open-air cathedral to the demigods of the Soviet era. Evicted from lively streets and city squares, these saluting soldiers and flag-waving patriots occupy a vacant lot of gravel paths surrounded by transmission towers. Most are solemn-faced. They perch atop brick pedestals. Throughout the stark field, brick red, that faded, rusty red of bricks, is the dominant hue, a shadow of the red that hung over Hungary and the Eastern Bloc for four decades.
As a museum, the park has managed to preserve what was lost to other revolutions. Its architect, Akos Eleod, explicitly set out to create a space where visitors can explore dictatorship in the freedom of democracy. The day I took a bus to the park, drab clouds shouldered out any trace of blue sky. As I walked among the statues, I was struck by the sheer scale and number of the sculptures. There is inequity even in their proportions. Originally meant to rally, if not to subjugate the masses, Eleod has, in collecting these effigies in one place, turned them into a mnemonic device for a nation.
A generation ago the Soviet Union was still the playground bully of Europe. From Sofia to Warsaw, Belgrade to Kiev, radical leftist ideology had divided peoples, nations, and families, in some cases with literal brick and mortar. In modern Hungary, those days are no distant memory. When I first visited Budapest in 2001, a mere ten years after the last Soviet soldier left on a train for Moscow, friends told of horrors from the communist regime. During the worst days, they said, family members and neighbors would disappear from their homes in the night, never again to be seen.
Life under Moscow wasn’t completely miserable in Budapest. Following the spontaneous Hungarian Uprising of 1956, a new dispensation of “Goulash Communism” ensued. This Hungarian version of Marxism incorporated a measure of free market economics that brought more consumer goods into the country. As a result, many Soviet citizens made Budapest their preferred vacation spot. Some even referred to Hungary as the happiest barrack in the communist camp.
Despite that fact, many Hungarians still regard that period of Russian domination with disdain and mild embarrassment. While walking through the iconic architecture of Budapest’s romantic skyline, across Chain Bridge and up from the patina dome of Buda Castle, a friend pointed out a 40-foot statue on Gellert Hill overlooking the Danube. The Soviets erected the figure, of a woman extending a palm branch, after they liberated Hungary from the Nazis. “That’s the Liberation Monument,” my friend smirked. “Or at least that’s what the Russians called it.” But for Hungarians, trading dictators didn’t feel like liberty.
Following World War II, Stalin’s Russia overtook Hungary. A decade later, his largest monument, measuring some 26 feet in height, was dislodged from City Park during the first revolution. One hundred thousand protestors demolished the image, leaving only Stalin’s boots attached to the pedestal. Since 2006, a replica of Stalin’s hollow boots — the one statue that is a recreation of the original — has marked the entrance to the Memento Park.
In recent days the Hungarian populace has once again taken to the streets by the thousands to voice concern with the current government’s abuse of power. Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his rightist Fidesz Party’s proposed tax on internet use was the matchstick for this latest firestorm. While Mr. Orban won a third term in April by an overwhelming majority, many Hungarians are alarmed at his authoritarian tendencies and chumminess with Russia’s Putin.
Likewise, in neighboring Czech Republic, where celebrations marked the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution this month, crowds pelted President Milos Zeman with eggs because of his growing courtship of Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Stalin may be gone, but it seems that his bootprint remains on Hungary and much the Eastern Bloc. If the cliché about remembering and repeating history is valid, Budapest’s Memento Park has as much to do with Europe’s future as it does its past.
Brian McKanna is a regular contributor to EthnoTraveler. He writes extensively about Central Asia and Europe.
