Prakfalvi Endre: Architecture of Dictatorship. The Architecture of Budapest between 1945 and 1959 - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

for the development of Greater Budapest, for shaping “Csepel, a City of Workers” in 1948. It was precisely in connection with the creation of a Red Csepel that the elements of the ideology ascendant in the years to come were given expression. One of these elements concerned itself with the relationship between the outskirts and the city centre. The reductive doctrines of the period taught that the horribly decrepit edges of the city populated by the workers had been in the starkest contrast with the elegant downtown and residential areas in the Budapest of the defunct “gentry Hungary”. The structure of the city was a mirror of the antagonistic class system of a discarded capitalist society. In the name of public welfare, these contradictions were now to be eliminated in the course of the city’s reconstruction (as yet, this was envisaged in a Modernist style). In his review of the exhibition, Perényi hints that the country’s art should, “by and large” be based on a Socialist Realist aesthetic, but he adds that the success of the event marked a “major victory” of the new architecture.

Shortly after the exhibition, Szabad Nép mounted an attack on the “scientifically unprogressive” professors of the University of Technology, including István Kotsis whose tenure was soon terminated, for “obliging the student body to design superseded architectural forms". The “real irony of the story was yet to come when,” writes Kotsis in his autobiography “the Bolshevist government began to persecute modern ideas in architecture while officially authorising ‘superseded architectural forms’ in their Asian version at that.” Kotsis described these years with much bitterness noting that “those who remained loyal to their principles were soon marginalised by the communist administration preventing them from exerting their talents to help the work of post-war reconstruction, while those who capitulated to Bolshevism were eo ipso lost for the nation, because the acceptance of Bolshevist methods precludes doing creative work."

When legislation XXVI of 1949 took effect on 1 January 1950, “the decades-long dream of the workers [had] come true" as the parliament of the People's Republic created Greater Budapest, through the economic and administrative unification of outlying towns and villages with the capital. The professional community could therefore set about its new task of the system-specific restructuring of Budapest, through developing the existing “sketches”. A dividing line had also been demarcated when it was declared

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