A different kind of decay

The Stalin statue in Budapest was erected in 1951 as a “present” of the Hungarian people for the soviet leaders seventieth birthday. But the life of the monument happened to be quite short: During the of the Hungarian October Revolution in 1956, the massive bronze statue was torn down and cut into pieces. The protest was suppressed by he soviet army but the statue was never re-erected since Stalin was dead and his policies were pretty much out of favor

Yet, you can still see Stalin’s feet at the Szobor “Memento” Park just outside Budapest.

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However there is more to see at Budapest’s Memento Park. It’s a quite wide and open terrain with a collection of statues and monuments of Hungary’s socialist era. Here are some of the unknown soviet soldier who came with the Red Army to fight the Nazis and their allies which included the conservative regime in Hungary. No wonder the soldier statues of the socialist realism always portrait them as winners of history which is quite humoring looking at the course of history.

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There were also the statues of Bela Kun and Muennich Ferenc, two Hungarian politicians from the same era with different fate. Bela Kun was a communist and revolutionary who led the Hungarian Soviet Republic after the end of WWI and the fall of the Austrian-Hungarian empire in 1919. I didn’t even know that Hungary was the second Communist state following the Soviet Union. The power of Bela Kun didn’t last long since Romania invaded Hungary and handed the power to the Social Democrats. Bela left Hungary and become an important operative of the comintern (the communist international) serving Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Finally he lived permanently in Moscow where he was accused of Trotskyism  and disappeared during Stalin’s great purge in 1937. He was rehabilitated in 1956 as part of the de-Stalinization but it was only known in 1989 that he was actually executed in a Siberian gulag in 1938.

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Muennich Ferenc was also member of the government of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. He fought as a member of the International Brigade against General Franco in Spain. After WWII he returned to Hungary and became a police superintendent in Budapest. During the uprising of the people against communism he became interior minister in the Imre Nagy government but defected to Moscow to return after the revolution was put down. Later he had several minister posts under Janos Kadar and was Hungarian prime minister between 1958 and 1961.

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All images were taken with a Hasselblad 500CM on Adox CHS 100. I used a strong orange filter to enhance the blue sky. The film was developed in Spuersinn HCDnew, a fine grain, two step developer.

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