Boros Géza: Statue Park - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
The endless promenade of the liberation monuments
Soviet power and the confidence of the victors. Kisfaludi modelled the soldier on Vasiliy Mihailovich Golovtsov, a Red Army infantryman. During the 1956 Revolution, the female figure was left unharmed but the Soviet bronze figure was toppled and cut into pieces. After the quelling of the revolution, the soldier's figure was quickly replaced — the genius of liberty was not to be left unguarded or without Soviet supervision for a moment. After the change of political system the transformation of the monument was decreed by the Budapest authorities. Having by then become symbolic of the Hungarian capital, the female figure with the palm leaf was allowed to stay and so were the side- figures and the reliefs, but the five-pointed star was removed from the obelisk and so was the Soviet soldier, which was thus relocated to the Statue Park. The transformation of the monument's symbolic significance was facilitated by an artist's campaign called Project for the Statue of Freedom's Soul. For a few days during the 1992 Budapest Fairwell Celebrations (marking the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungarian soil) Tamás Szentjóby draped the female figure of the monument in ghostly garb'. With this curious transmutation, funny and thought-provoking at the same time, the artist managed to resolve, if only for a few days, the dilemma of toppling or sparing. Wrapped in a huge white shroud, the statue appeared as a ghost on the horizon, thus allowing the spirit of communism to hover above the city between two eras and between East and West for a fleeting moment before disappearing forever. After this 'happening' the official transformation of the monument was also completed. In 1993 the reliefs were walled in and the inscriptions with the names in Cyrillic letters were chiselled off. Thus rid of its negative messages, the plinth is now inscribed with the following text: In memory oft all who save their lives for the independence, liberty and happiness of Hungary. Having lost its original significance, the 'de-Sovietised' liberation monument now stands on Gellért Hill as a generic monument of liberty. /|. Monument of Soviet-Hungarian Friendship (Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl, 1956) With the liberation monument on Gellért Hill, Kisfaludi established himself as the official sculptor of the communist regime overnight, and commissions and awards were literally heaped on him. This particular work of his was set up in 1956, in Pataki (today Szent László) tér, Kőbánya, as a higher quality replacement of an obelisk marking the mass grave of Soviet soldiers who fell in the 1945 siege of Budapest. Two male figures standing on a plinth, a Hungarian worker and a Soviet soldier, are shaking hands in a theatrical pose. It is clearly 20
