Europe's Revolution - 20 years on
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Monday 9 November was the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the outstanding event in the wave of changes which swept Eastern Europe in 1989, and which triggered the collapse of Communism and the ending of the Cold War.
To mark the anniversary, RTÉ Europe Correspondent Tony Connelly embarked on a train journey through the key capitals of the old Eastern Europe to recall the spectacular changes of 1989 and to reflect on what independence means to the people of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany.
3 November - Budapest, Hungary
Day two of my rail journey through the landscape of the old Soviet Bloc finds me in Budapest, the Hungarian capital.
In the past 10 years it has become popular with Irish tourists enjoying a rather diverse spectrum of tourist delights, from stag parties, to cheap dental services, to fevered property acquisition.
Like many Eastern European capitals the symbols and reminders of a brutal Soviet legacy are ironically - sarcastically - sold to tourists, I suppose a kind of easy revenge, through capitalism, against a largely derided communist system.
Our translator Bea Khukon takes us to Budapest's 22th district on bus line 7 to a red bricked mock-classical gateway, studded with two enormous statues, one Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (aka Lenin), the other a twin representation in granite of Marx and Engels, the only cubist-style statue of the pair in the world.
Welcome to Memento Park, an artistic response to the hundreds of Soviet statues which sprung up across Hungary after the victorious Red Army helped the local communist party to set up a dictatorship in 1947.
The park is trapezoid in shape bound by fences and a wall at the front and rear. Between the two walls is the main path, which effectively leads nowhere except the rear wall. It's designed to convey the futility of the communist system, and the back wall is a declaration that the system could go no further. 
Ringing the central space are the choicest statues which were wrenched from their plinths after 1989. For 50 years they had symbolised the imposed and increasingly ludicrous claims of eternal Soviet friendship (read domination) towards Hungary.
Now they stand rooted to the spot in a kind of ritual humiliation by bemused tourists and resentful locals.
'I don't know who half these people are,' says Bea. 'I just recognise their names because some of the streets are still named after them.'
This is surprising and yet, I suppose, eloquently natural. Bea was 28 when the Berlin Wall came down, and within months, she recalls, the statues disappeared without a trace. The human hunger to move on and forget the awfulness of the system seems profound.
The statues are huge, imposing, muscular and unambiguous, the classic expressions of Soviet socialist-realist art. They press themselves against the viewer as unimpeachable role models for aspiring socialist behaviour.
But desiging these statues was always problematic. They were meant to turn abstract communist doctrine into meaningful symbols to which the proletariat could easily relate. But art and propaganda, while often going hand in hand, can pose difficulties to the artist, even those who were committed communists.
Some artists were uncomfortable when they were approached by whatever committee charged with coming up with the latest statue to commemorate some revolutionary here or other. Often they would submit deliberately outlandish designs in the hope that they would be rejected, only to find that the committee loved them and insisted they went ahead.
There's the 6m bronze statue of the Liberating Soviet Soldier which once stood on Gelért Hill overlooking the Danube and the main spread of Budapest (it was destroyed in the 1956 Uprising and replaced by the authorities after the revolt was crushed).
The statue of Lenin stood a surprisingly low two metres tall on Parade Square (so he could be close to the people) but he was placed in front of a 15 metre concrete block dressed in Swedish granite.
Nearby is a statue of the Hungary-Soviet Friendship Memorial, a Hungarian worker and a Russian soldier in a frozen handshake. The guide book notes the posture of both figures: the Hungarian enthusiastically grips with both hands, while the Russian coolly offers only one.
Biggest of all is the Monument to the Hungarian Socialist Republic, the communist government set up by Béla Kun in 1918 and which lasted just 133 days. The monument represents an enormous charging peasant trailing a red flag in his fist.
It became the butt of Budapest jokes, including one that he was really a cloakroom attendant running after someone who'd forgotten his scarf.
Of course, the symbols of the workers revolution didn't always fit well with the cities on which they were imposed. Budapest is a World Heritage Site who's broad boulevards and neo-Gothic buildings reflect the surge of national rebirth after Hungary was joined to Austria to form a new empire in 1873.
The grand facades and imperial splendour were hardly the appropriate backdrop to the new workers paradise, so the communist authorities simply stuck as many five pointed red stars (the symbol of the international workers movement) on top of as many 19th century buildings as possible. When communism collapsed they were quietly and neatly removed.
But the repression Hungary suffered was by no means superficial. In the so-called 'heavy dictatorship' under the supreme leader Mátyás Rákosi, from 1949 to 1953 and Stalin's death, the population was terrorised by the new regime. Soviet troops, who in part had been greeted as liberators from the Nazis, were soon recognised as occupiers.
It was a period of constant paranoia in which the security apparatus of the state imposed itself with an iron will on the population. Spying became a pathological obsession as the system sought enemies, real and imagined. The role of the political police, said its leader Mihály Farkas, was 'to look for the bad things in each citizen. To look for the good things in them is not part of their job.'
Thousands of innocent victims were arrested, tortured and imprisoned in slave labour camps in the north of Hungary.
Tony Connelly
'Don't Mention The Wars: A Journey Through European Steretoypes,' by Tony Connelly is published this month by New Island Books.
