When the Soviet Union regime fell in Hungary in 1989, an interesting question arose for the population of the capital in Budapest: What do we do with all of the statues?
The solution was to move many of them into a park on the outskirts of the city, where they remain today. “The idea was not to destroy and it came from the public,” says Judit Holp, head of tourism and civil relations at what is now known as Memento Park.
It was decided to retain but relocate the Soviet-era statues to what became an open-air museum, as a means of explaining the history of communist rule in Hungary. “Initially there were 61 statues, which they started a debate about and they decided to remove 41 from the public squares of Budapest. The statue debate took two years from 1990 until 1992,” Holp says. “Generally speaking an average of 80 per cent of the population of Budapest wanted to save the statues.”
The collection of statues, which ranges from life-sized to some that tower over visitors, includes depictions of Red Army soldiers and Stakhanovite representations of the worker, alongside depictions of key figures in communist history such as Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx.
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The park is off the beaten track on the outer edges of Budapest, with the trip out by public transport taking visitors to one end of the city metro line. After that you have to wait for a bus that gives the impression it runs very much on its own schedule when it pulls up. The driver is likely to clock you are not a local and may give you a nod when the stop for the statue park is coming up though.
Other countries in eastern and central Europe which had been subject to communist rule took different approaches to their statues when the Soviet Union collapsed. “Bulgaria decided to abandon them, all the statues are in the original location but unmaintained. Czechoslovakia, Poland, they destroyed almost everything,” Holp says. “Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, there are still... statues in the original locations... In the Baltic countries they created a big museum, but in the early 2000s.”
In Budapest there were alternative ideas for what the statue park might look like. One suggested concept involved building a huge gallows structure where the statues would hang, as a sort of metaphorical death sentence for an ideology.
“The second design suggested to dig a huge pit like a grave, a shallow grave, and they suggested to throw all the statues in there, with hands and legs and heads. They would just peek out and deteriorate by frost and precipitation and nature, and again people could come and spit on them,” Holp says. The concept for a “tyranny memorial park”, which was later renamed Memento Park, was the option that was settled on. The architect behind the project wanted it to educate visitors about the dangers of totalitarianism.
The fate of the Soviet statues outside of the capital varied. Some that were erected as monuments to workers in industrial cities were kept in their original locations. Others were removed and put in museums. In at least one case a communist-era statue was left abandoned in a forest. Statues commemorating Red Army soldiers who fought Nazi Germany in the second World War were often moved to cemeteries where troops who died during the fighting were buried in Hungary.
Dr Lucy Jeffery, a University of Reading academic, said in the current climate Memento Park is an “endangered” museum in Hungary. The nationalist, more Kremlin-friendly government of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has at times sought to try to shape how the past is remembered. The content of some museums in the country has been politicised by the overbearing influence of the right-wing government, which has cracked down on civil society and opposition during its 14 years in power.
Jeffery, who is involved with a project exploring the cultural memory of communism in former Soviet satellite states, says Memento Park has withstood any move to rewrite the history of the period, or engineer a contemporary political narrative around it. “When you walk through the park you encounter the past in a way you want to, not in a way you are told to. These heritage sites give their society agency over if, how, and when they confront a traumatic period.”
The Budapest park could also be a possible template for how other countries like Britain could deal with contentious historical statues, such as prominent figures who were involved in the slave trade, she said.