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

The endless promenade dedicated to the ideas and events of the labour movement

This plaque, removed from the wall of Szentháromság utca 2, used to mark the District I centre of the workers' rule. The word glorious' in the inscription was a common adjective in the phraseology of the communist cult of monuments.

30. Plaque of the Workers' Militiaman (András Kiss Nagy, 1973)

The establishment, in response to popular demand', of the Workers' Militia was decreed in February of 1957 by the Presidential Council of the People’s Republic of Hungary. The aim was to create an "efficient guardian of the peace of the working people, the guarantor of undisturbed production, and a needful protection against attempts at restoring the reactionary regime of the past". The militia was in fact an armed extension, consisting of volunteers, of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, as the right to decide on deployment was relegated to the local party committees. This relief, which was originally on the wall of the building at No. 2 November 7 tér (today's Oktogon), was commissioned by the National Command Centre of the Workers’ Militia and put up to commemorate the first militiamen’s demonstration held in February 1957. This particular location was selected because the battalions, which had started to march from various directions, all converged on November 7 tér. The inscription on the plaque is a quotation from Attila József's poem Worken. The sculptor understood his task well: the homogenous, coarse features of the marchers dissolving in a faceless mass in the nether ranks as the armed militia was hammered into one force by a shared ideology rendered the essence of the armed organisation adequately by giving an unmistakeable public warning of the militia's aggressively repressive function. The emblematic representation was such a success that a smaller version in the shape of a medal was ordered from the artist in 1976. (In the sprit of the democratic transition, the Workers' Militia was disbanded by the last parliament of the party-state in October 1989.)

^I. Monument of the Workers' Movement (István Kiss, 1976)

Before 1945 left-wing workers’ and youth organisations often held illegal meetings in the Nagyrét area of Hűvösvölgy in the Buda Hills. It was in memory of these meetings that the party and council organisations of District II turned the pathway through the forest here into the Workers' Movement Walkway, along which they erected, in 1975, a series of monuments of no particular artistic value. As a closure, an enlarged version, made at cost price by the artist, of István Kiss’s statuette entitled Creative Idea, was placed at the end of the path. (The much-employed method of sculptors 'waiving' their royalty and charging only

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