Stalin Monument (Budapest)
The Stalin monument ( Hungarian Sztálin-szobor ) in Budapest was erected in December 1951 as a “gift from the Hungarian people” to Josef Stalin on his 70th birthday in 1948. At the beginning of the Hungarian popular uprising in 1956, the statue was destroyed by anti-Soviet demonstrators.
Construction
The bronze monument was erected on Felvonulási tér (Parade Square) on the edge of the municipal park “ Stadtwäldchen ” in Budapest and was 25 meters high. The statue of Stalin was eight meters high, on a four-meter high limestone pedestal , which in turn stood on a pedestal eighteen meters wide . Stalin was depicted in the pose of a speaker, head raised and right hand on his chest. The sides of the podium were decorated with relief sculptures depicting the Hungarian people cheering for Stalin. The statue was created by Sándor Mikus , who was awarded the Kossuth Order for this work , the highest distinction that an artist could receive in Hungary at that time.
background
The monument was created during the period of Socialist Realism , the official art form under Stalinism , which was aimed at anchoring the ideology of Stalinism in the population. A central component of the ideology was to portray the leaders of communism such as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin , Stalin or other Eastern European communists in the style of a personality cult , surrounded by the hard-working proletariat. The personality cult around Stalin in particular had the consequence that from the 1930s to the 1950s countless Stalin monuments were erected in the Soviet Union and from 1945 in the Eastern Bloc and that Stalin was revered as a person with mystical abilities.
After the monument was completed in 1951, a journalist in Budapest said:
“Stalin was with us; but now he will be with us even more. He will watch over our work and his smile will show us the way. I was told that it is customary in Moscow to visit Comrade Lenin in Red Square before the beginning or after the end of an important task, either to report to him or to seek his advice. Undoubtedly the same will be the case here with the statue of Comrade Stalin. "
The monument demonstrated not only Stalin's power, but also the power of the ruling party of the Hungarian working people . After Stalin's death, de-Stalinization ended the cult of Stalin's person, which also had an impact on his monuments.
destruction
On October 23, 1956, around 200,000 Hungarians gathered in Budapest to express their support for the easing of the political climate in Poland in the wake of Polish October . Depending on the version, a list of demands with 10 to 16 points was announced on the radio, one of which was the removal of the Stalin monument. In its place the students of the Technical University of Budapest demanded the erection of a monument to the Hungarian Revolution of 1848/1849 . The demonstrators in Budapest complied with the demolition request and destroyed the statue of Stalin, of which only the boots on the base remained, on which the Hungarian flag was attached. The inscription “Leader, teacher and best friend of Hungarians” was torn from the base. At the head of the statue of Stalin, a sign saying “Russians, if you run away, don't leave me” was placed and insulting slogans were written on different parts of the statue.
The then police chief of Budapest, Sándor Kopácsi , wrote in his report on the incident: “The demonstrators put […] a thick steel cable around the neck of the 25-meter-high statue of Stalin, while other people brought oxygen bottles and welding equipment in trucks and grabbed the bronze one The statue's shoes. An hour later the statue fell from its pedestal. "
According to other sources, the demonstrators were at the memorial for several hours before using welding equipment and trucks to topple the statue from its pedestal on the evening of October 23, 1956 at 9:37 pm. Parts of the statue remained on the streets of the capital for several days.
present
Since 2006, the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, there has been a memorial to the uprising on the site of the former Stalin monument. Based on the year 1956, the square was also renamed Ötvenhatosok tere when the monument was inaugurated on October 23, 2006 .
In the same year a copy of the base was erected in Szoborpark . The boots on it come from the artist Ákos Eleőd and are not a true copy of the original.
literature
- Anders Åman: Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe During the Stalin Era . Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 1992.
- Matthew C. Bown: Art Under Stalin . Oxford: Phaidon P Limited, 1991. pp. 73-86.
- Ann Demaitre: The Great Debate on Socialist Realism , in: The Modern Language Journal 50.5 (1966): 263-268.
- Katalin Sinko: Political Rituals: the Raising and Demolition of Monuments. In: Art and Society in the Age of Stalin . Ed. Peter Gyorgy and Hedvig Turai. Budapest: Corvina Bookk, 1992. 81.
- Victor Terras: Phenomenological Observations on the Aesthetics of Socialist Realism , in: The Slavic and East European Journal 22.4 (Winter, 1979), pp. 445-457.
Web links
- Article in the Berliner Zeitung on the 40th anniversary of October 19, 1996
Individual evidence
- ↑ quoted in Katalin Sinko: Political Rituals: the Raising and Demolition of Monuments. , in: Péter György, Hedvig Turai (Eds.): Art and Society in the Age of Stalin . Corvina Books, Budapest 1992, p. 81
- ↑ 14-point resolution of the students of the Budapest Technical University from October 22nd / 23rd. 1956 ( Memento of March 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Anders Åman: Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe During the Stalin Era , The MIT P, Cambridge, MA, 1992, p. 195
- ↑ Magyar kronológia: October 1956. ( Memento of the original from October 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: House of Terror , accessed on October 16, 2016 (Hungarian)
- ↑ Kifütyülték a térdepelő Gyurcsányt. In: Origo.hu. October 23, 2006, accessed October 16, 2016 (Hungarian)
Coordinates: 47 ° 30 ′ 41 ″ N , 19 ° 4 ′ 53 ″ E