BUDAPEST, 12 January 2006 — On a bright chill day, weekend tourists are listening intently to explanations of the monuments, statues and plaques of Budapest’s Heroes’ Square. Few cities display their history on public monuments and plaques as does Budapest. But like Pinter’s plays (one of which is usually being performed at any time in the city), what is left out is often as important as what is actually said. Heroes’ Square was built at the end of the 19th century during the rebirth of the nation as part of the dual empire with Austria, yet there are no statues to the Hapsburg emperors of those halcyon days. In fact as Bob Dent, author of the Blue Guides to Hungary and Budapest, tells his group, they were erected and taken down twice, reflecting the fortunes — and size — of the reborn Hungary. And if the nationalist right, which plays on calls for the return of “lost” territories that are now parts of Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia-Montenegro and even Austria and Romania, ever comes to power, the Hapsburg statues could yet return again.
But nowhere are the politics of the plaque more telling than over the event now most associated with the city: The uprising of 1956, which began with a good-humored march in support of reform on Oct. 23 and was ended by Soviet tanks on Nov. 4. A little way out of the city is Statue Park, where the Lenins and heroic workers, and plaques to Soviet liberators and Communist Party functionaries, were removed during the changes after 1990; it is now a slightly eerie tourist attraction. Back in the city, outside the neo-Gothic Parliament, pride of place goes to the most potent symbol of 1956: A Hungarian flag with a hole in the middle. One of the first acts of the 1956 demonstrators was to cut out the flag’s Soviet-style emblem.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the uprising, and already the battle to claim its legacy has been opened. President Bush is being invited to the commemoration, and there is a growing clamor in some quarters to demand an apology for America’s failure to come to the aid of the uprising. The same people are unlikely to be quite so keen on apologizing for one of the uprising’s most notorious acts: The brutal killings that took place after the seizure of the Budapest Communist Party headquarters on Oct. 30. While detailed plaques mark the other main sites of the fighting, only a small, vaguely worded stone marks this crucial event.
Dent, whose guide to all the locations involved in the uprising is due to be published in June, puts the atrocity down to spontaneous anger and indefensible overreaction by some of the insurgents. Others see more sinister forces at work. Relatives of party members, such as translator Kati Racz, talk of armed gangs going door to door during the uprising searching for communists. But it would be a pity if the debate next year boils down to a simplistic one of freedom fighters versus counterrevolutionaries.
The reality is much more complex. The economic reform program of former Communist Prime Minister Imry Nagy, brought briefly back to power by the uprising — and later tried and shot — was eventually implemented in large part by the new Soviet-backed regime of Janos Kadar. As a result, Hungary was already the most prosperous state in Eastern Europe by the time communism collapsed, and has had a peaceful and painless transition to relative prosperity and EU membership.
