Remains of Socialism

Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary

Maya Nadkarni

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501750199
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Remains of Socialism, Maya Nadkarni investigates the changing fates of the socialist past in postsocialist Hungary. She introduces the concept of "remains"—both physical objects and cultural remainders—to analyze all that Hungarians sought to leave behind after the end of state socialism.

Spanning more than two decades of postsocialist transformation, Remains of Socialism follows Hungary from the optimism of the early years of transition to its recent right-wing turn toward illiberal democracy. Nadkarni analyzes remains that range from exiled statues of Lenin to the socialist-era "Bambi" soda, and from discredited official histories to the scandalous secrets of the communist regime's informers. She deftly demonstrates that these remains were far more than simply the leftovers of an unwanted past. Ultimately, the struggles to define remains of socialism and settle their fates would represent attempts to determine the future—and to mourn futures that never materialized.

1

BANISHING REMAINS

The Statue Park Museum

“What has value when it falls?” asked the newspaper Magyar Hírlap in early 1990. “The symbols of a former regime.” What had been painful for the East, it reported, now meant business for the West: huge red stars were selling for 4,000 deutschmarks and small Lenin statues for 80–120 (Magyar Hírlap 1990, 3).

Written just weeks before Hungary’s first democratic elections in more than four decades swept the communists from power, this article joined an abundance of both local and international media coverage that eagerly cataloged how Hungarians were already engaged in the process of “spring cleaning” the physical traces of communism from both public and everyday life.¹ The red star was removed from the Parliament building two months before the elections, and for local governments across the country, the process of renaming hundreds of streets and squares (usually to their precommunist names) was well under way. Busts of Lenin, military medals and uniforms, and other once-ubiquitous artifacts of communist rule also began to swiftly disappear from homes, schools, offices, and factories.²

Embedded in these stories of the ignoble fates of state socialist-era relics were hopes about the nature of the political transformation and the future yet to come. The appeal of such anecdotes to both international observers and newly democratic postsocialist citizens is that they not only decisively announced a break with the recent past but also confidently prophesied a future free of its influence. The speed and ease with which Hungarians and their former Soviet bloc neighbors removed the detritus of the past regime’s ideology seemed to guarantee that other, more intractable legacies might be as rapidly overcome. And the marketability of these objects seemed to be the harbinger of a future in which all could be redeemed within a capitalist economy, however politically worthless.

Across the former Soviet bloc, no image better encapsulated this desire for a quickly mastered past than that of a fallen monument. Whether in news articles, artworks, or scholarly books, photographs of toppled statues and headless Lenins helped to prop up a narrative of the political transformation as popular revolt, in which assaults against the visual symbols of Soviet rule represented the rebirth of national sovereignty.³ These spectacles of national agency had particular resonance in Hungary, where one of the key moments of its failed 1956 revolution against the Soviets was the destruction of a statue of Stalin in one of Budapest’s main squares. Protestors sawed the statue from its boots, dragged it through the city streets, and eventually hacked it into souvenirs.⁴

I highlight the fantasies of historical mastery invested in monuments and other physical remainders in order to denaturalize the commonsense assumption that after 1989, these objects simply represented a problem to be solved—whether through revolutionary destruction, ironic commodification, or simply their sale as scrap metal. Instead, our investigation of socialism’s remains begins by asking the ways such seemingly self-evident relics of Soviet rule emerged as a “problem” in the first place. This chapter examines how politicians, art historians, and city authorities struggled to determine the fate of Budapest’s communist statues, monuments, and memorial plaques. These debates reveal the cultural, political, and imaginative labor necessary to transform everyday landmarks into intrusive remains of an unwanted past.

Monumental Time and Everyday Life under State Socialism

Traditionally, monuments “face two ways in time”: they cast the past in metal or stone so that its memory will endure for posterity (Anderson 1990, 174). Each statue, memorial, or commemorative plaque thus represents a bid for eternity, by projecting a future that is the fulfillment of the past’s aspirations. This ability to signify both the nation’s historical depth and future permanence makes the monument a powerful tool for political legitimation. It is also what makes revolutionary iconoclasm so compelling to witness: destroying the monument as a physical object also represents the violent rejection of the future that the monument prophesied.

Yet by signifying the inevitability of both the past and future, monuments render the present static and unchangeable. As a result, monuments tend to go strangely unnoticed in everyday life. In the famous words of the Austrian novelist Robert Musil, “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument”: its stillness and durability seem to “repel attention” (1995, 61).⁵ Instead, the monument’s memorial value usually inspires attention only as a marker in cyclical time: a site to commemorate holidays within the official calendar.

In capitalist democracies, the temporal completion of the monument is at odds with the cycles of novelty and obsolescence that drive the ways different commercial and political claims compete for public attention. But for authoritarian regimes, monuments are a key element of what Alexei Yurchak terms the regime’s “hegemony of representation,” in which signs and symbols do not represent their literal meaning. Instead, their very ubiquity signifies the immutability of the system itself (1997, 165–166). In daily life under state socialism, most people may have been unaware of or indifferent to the specific ideological content of each monument that they passed on the street, whether a statue of a liberating soldier, a memorial plaque to a street partisan, or a stone relief commemorating heroes of the workers’ movement. But although these monuments may have failed as commemorations of particular individuals or events, their very invisibility and taken-for-grantedness represented the success of the regime’s claim to permanence.

To protect this bid to eternity, monuments were not allowed to accrete the effects of time. Instead, rumor had it that if statues needed repairs, communist authorities would whisk them out under cover of night and replace them with replicas. One perhaps apocryphal example is Budapest’s first statue of Lenin, donated by the City Council of Moscow and erected outside Hungary’s center of heavy industry, the famous Csepel Iron and Metal Works, in preparation for a 1958 visit from Nikita Khrushchev. Because of the poor quality of the statue’s construction, the metal soon began to corrode, and in 1970 it was reportedly secretly removed and recast. No newspapers covered the event: a silence that both preserved the prestige of the statue’s Soviet donors and denied the monument’s own vulnerability to the depredations of chronological, historical time.⁶

Over the decades of communist rule, the static, eternal temporality of the monument and its role in reinforcing the immutability of everyday life would come to replace other, potentially more revolutionary temporal orientations. Communist ideology was determinedly oriented toward the future, breaking with national tradition to hurry history to its inevitable fulfillment. Even when it celebrated figures and events in the national canon so as to give historical justification to communist rule, what these new histories ultimately demonstrated was the regime’s mastery of the past itself and the ability to mold it to its will. And if the past was the servant of the politics of the present, the present was to be sacrificed to a constant will to progress—what Michael Buroway and János Lukács call the myth of the “radiant future” (1992, 145), at once imminent and yet always out of reach.

The routinized rhythms of everyday life thus initially posed a challenge for communist ideology. In the early years of state socialism, Soviet authorities sought to revolutionize the quotidian with interventions such as the communal apartment, which declared war on bourgeois notions of privacy and domesticity (Boym 1994, 124–125). Following the years of retaliation after the 1956 revolution, the Kádár regime changed course to pursue a policy that sought to provide in advance some of the rewards that communism had long been promising. It offered an unspoken compromise: in exchange for abstaining from political participation, Hungarians could enjoy a raised standard of living, increased autonomy at work, the opportunity to earn extra income in the private sector (“second economy”), and relative freedom from harassment in private life.

Although more peaceful than previous decades, this everyday life during the Kádár era was characterized by a sense of inertia, insignificance, and eventlessness—a feeling of being on the sidelines of international trends and outside the global course of history. By the 1980s, many Hungarians would describe the temporality of late socialism in terms similar to that used to describe monuments themselves: defined by utter stasis and the perception that nothing would ever change. Indeed, one of late socialism’s most popular and critically acclaimed films was titled Time Stands Still (Megáll az idő; Péter Gothár, 1982). The film takes place during the early years of normalization after the 1956 revolution, but its title—borrowed from a love song of that era—was applicable to late socialism as well: expressing the frustrated longing for rebellion and escape that the film’s teenaged protagonists experienced. Even communism’s promise of a beautiful future fell silent, to be replaced by the everyday concerns of “existing socialism.” In the words of the historians András Gerő and Iván Pető, “Time seemed to have stopped: socialism was being built, but the construction process appeared to be uncompletable, never ending” (1997, 7).

Meanwhile, public statues, rituals, and political symbols continued to buttress the faltering regime’s ideological self-justification until almost the last days of its rule. Occasionally, these statues offered an opportunity for political critique; for example, a piece of bread spread with lard (zsíros kenyér) was anonymously placed in the outstretched hand of the Csepel Lenin statue to protest the rising prices of everyday goods in 1980 (Prohászka 1994, 168). In most cases, however, the intended meanings of the monuments went relatively unnoticed. Instead, they endured as indexes of the unchanging nature of everyday life itself, taking on prosaic and often ironic meanings in the urban environment they helped to organize.

For example, István Kiss’s monument to Hungary’s short-lived 1919 Soviet Republic reproduces the imagery of a famous propaganda poster from that era: a sailor caught mid-stride, waving a red flag and calling “To arms! To arms!” Rendered in bronze, the charging figure was placed near Budapest’s City Park on the site of a former church, standing next to one of Budapest’s several statues of Lenin. Rather than inspire awe or even indifference, however, the enormity of the statue made its dynamic pose look comical, and it became the target of urban humor that compared the sailor to a cloakroom attendant, rushing after a customer to give him his coat (Réthly 2010, 47).

The End of Revolution

Then suddenly it was over. Mostly it rotted away on its own, plus there was Gorbachev, after all. We began to live in a different world—in a matter of minutes, what had presented itself as a continuous, timeless present suddenly became a finished past. “The era died like an enormous, huge carcass,” and amidst the old scenery, the same human material began to do something radically new.

—Tibor Keresztury, “We Are Those People”

Hungary enjoyed a steadily growing national income and level of consumption throughout the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, problems with foreign trade debt necessitated Western loans and austerity policies that threatened the regime’s post-1956 promise of an ever-increasing standard of living. Gorbachev’s perestroika thus found a welcome reception by reform-minded communists who hoped that increasing pluralism within the one-party system would help to reestablish their legitimacy on political rather than economic grounds. In 1988, these reform communists forced the retirement of General Secretary János Kádár, who had led Hungary for the past thirty years. Over the following months, they pursued a policy of increasing openness and political restructuring that ultimately permitted other political parties to form. In March 1989, the democratic opposition groups and parties established an Opposition Round Table, which was to spend the next year in negotiations with the communist government to determine the nature of Hungary’s new parliamentary democracy. Eight months later, Hungary was declared a democratic republic; free elections followed in March and April of the next year.

The end of socialism in Hungary thus did not represent revolution, but rather—as István Rév argues—the apparent end of the age of revolutions.

In Hungary there was no revolution in 1989, not even a velvet one, as in Prague. There were no strikes, no large-scale demonstrations, no signs of massive popular unrest. Hungarians skeptically watched the not-so-dramatic suicide of the system. The dictatorship of the proletariat, in its own version of history, had started with the seizure of power. Perhaps this was why, in 1989, nobody wanted to begin again with “all power to the Soviets,” or something similar. (Rév 2005, 30)

No shots were fired and few monuments were vandalized as the regime dismantled itself in negotia...

Table of contents

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Names and Abbreviations of Hungary’s Main Political Parties (1990–2010)
• Introduction
• 1. Banishing Remains
• 2. The Hole in the Flag
• 3. Nostalgia and the Remains of Everyday Life
• 4. Recovering National Victimhood at the House of Terror
• 5. Secrets, Inheritance, and a Generation’s Remains
• 6. A Past Returned, A Future Deferred
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index