Stalin Monument (Budapest)

The Stalin Monument in Budapest was completed in December 1951 as a "gift" to Joseph Stalin from the Hungarian People on his seventieth birthday (December 21, 1949). It was torn down on October 23, 1956 by enraged anti-Soviet crowds during Hungary's October Revolution.

The monument was erected on the edge of Városliget, the city park of Budapest. The large monument stood 25 metres tall in total. The bronze statue stood eight metres high on a four-metre high limestone base on top of a tribune eighteen metres wide. Stalin was portrayed as a speaker, standing tall and rigid with his right hand at his chest. The sides of the tribune were decorated with relief sculptures depicting the Hungarian people welcoming their leader. The Hungarian sculptor, Sándor Mikus, created the statue and was awarded the Kossuth Prize, the highest distinction that can be attained by a Hungarian artist.

The Stalin monument was built during the classical period of Socialist Realism, the official art of Stalinism, which was a tool to instill the ideology of the Party into the people. This realistic and didactic aesthetic style celebrated the hard working proletariat and especially the cult of personality surrounding figures like Vladimir Lenin, Stalin and other Eastern European Communist leaders.

Stalin statues sprang up everywhere in Eastern Europe from the 1930s to the 1950s. They were cult objects that demonstrated the almost mystical powers of Stalin. Upon the completion of the Stalin statue, a journalist in Budapest said:

"Stalin was with us earlier; now he will be with us even more. He will watch over our work, and his smile will show us the way. I have been told that in Moscow it is customary to pay a visit to Comrade Lenin in Red Square before beginning, or after finishing, an important task, either to report or to ask his advice. Undoubtedly the same will occur here with the statue of Comrade Stalin."

The monument not only demonstrated Stalin’s power, but the power of the Hungarian Working People's Party as well. Directly across from Stalin’s monument was MÉMOSZ, the house of the builder’s union, condemned for its modernist architecture influenced by the West.

After the death of Stalin in 1953 Socialist Realism went into decline, in connection with the political changes, initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when he denounced Stalin's cult of personality.

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Wikipedia