Boros Géza: Statue Park - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)

The endless promenade of the liberation monuments

■ Soldier írom the Liberating Soviet Army by Ziigmond Kiilaludi Strobl, 1947

countries liberated by the Soviet troops, in Hungary, too, the first public statues to be raised were Soviet war memorials, built according to Soviet wishes and to Soviet plans. The country, freshly liberated from Nazi rule, had but a short time to rejoice in its newly found freedom, since it soon turned out that the Soviets had in fact occupied the country and the real face of the new system was the face of totalitarianism.

Between 1945 and 1949, as many as ten Soviet war memorials were erected on Soviet instructions in Budapest alone and hundreds more elsewhere in the country. From 1947, monuments of artistic value were also raised, which were unveiled nationwide around the state celebrations of 4 April and 7 November. By the mid-1980s, most villages, towns and cities had their own liberation monuments. Most of these were either dismantled or transformed after the change of political system, which is what happened in Budapest, too.

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