The Socialist Body + Scrubbing History Clean

I'm back looking over my notes about the historicisation of the Hungarian 1956 revolution. It's certainly one of those events which, as history, is actually worthy of that favourite old cultural studies descriptor, "contested". It's split between leftists claiming the history of an attempt to reform socialism and right-wingers claiming it as a nationalist, anti-Soviet, anti-imperialist and anti-Communist uprising. (The Flickr photo accompanying this paragraph, for instance, is an image of a rally organised by the conservative Fidesz party on the occasion of the 51st anniversary of 1956.) That bifurcation is another post for another time. What is interesting me at the moment is the socialist body and its use in aesthetic regimes.

Most useful here has been Beverly A. James' Imagining Postcommunism: Visual Narratives of Hungary's 1956 Revolution, a TAMU press book from 2005. She talks in there quite a bit about statuary, both in Socialist Realist and later forms. Statuary is at the heart of 1956, of course, because a statue was at the heart of the revolution's stunning sweep through Budapest. The toppling of the enormous Stalin statue was at once a spontaneous spectacle and a definitive political statement. (Spontaneous in the way the US-staged Hussein-statue debacle in Iraq precisely wasn't.)

Following Yampolsky, James suggests that the power associated with the destruction of a monument is redoubled by its representation in other media -- it elevates it to a “super symbol.” The internet, for one, has become a repository of related Stalin-statue images -- see, for instance, hungary1956.com, from where the above collage is drawn. The destruction of a monument is a powerful intervention because of the very "intended durability" of the statue; the "memorial is designed to cheat history through the eternal commemoration of an individual, event, or concept," James writes. The memory and account of the events surrounding the toppling is doubly important because of the "repression of memories of that glorious moment throughout the thirty-one years of the Kádár regime," the Soviet-friendly regime which ruled following the revolution. They introduced certain approaches to the monument, specifically, and history, more generally, just as their predeccesors had and followers would do: "the codes that governed (or were intended to govern) the collective consciousness of Hungarians were radically revised several times over the course of the monument’s life and afterlife." (That is, Socialist Realism, denunciation of the cult of personality, softening in artistic policy, liberal democracy etc.)

The Stalin statue was widely damned as artistically worthless, merely a doctrinaire execution of socialist realist programming. The Socialist Realism form the statue represented was, for the Hungarians, its own indictment -- regardless of the equally despised body and visage it represented. "Observers of the Stalin monument," James writes, "'saw' reflected in its patina the heavy hand of the state, with its clumsy attempt to recast history." Indeed, the statue was made from the very stuff of the Soviet cultural imperialism:

Quite apart from the fact that Stalin...was the prime symbol of everything bad, people held a grudge that the bronze for this eight-metre monstrosity, on its ten-metre-high podium, had been obtained by melting down the statues of a host of still widely respected Hungarian figures, such as István Tisza, Gyula Andrássy and Artúr Görgey.

The statue, then, certainly had it coming. Following the Khrushchev denunciation, the authorities were already discussing removing the iconic monument. The revolutionaries beat them to it. This destruction has been "prominent in the discursive revisions that have ensued[:] the scene is recounted through language that is highly metaphoric, with its references to Gulliver and the Lilliputians, and highly visual, with its images of fiery sparks flying against the clear, black October night[;] what is most striking about the narratives is how the visual imagery illuminates the courage and will to freedom that motivated the destruction of the monument." The base of the monument stood until 1990.

James ends the chapter on the monument with a nice story about Stalin’s enormous hand. It was picked up by Sándor Pécsi, put in a taxi, taken home and secreted away for years. It's now on display at Hungarian National Museum.

[T]he most potent symbol of the regime had been destroyed at the hands of the people, an event that endures in Hungary’s collective memory. If socialist realism loomed large in its physical scale and in its ability to inspire terror, the destruction of its epitome by a people armed only with the tools of their trade is a powerful narrative indeed. The humiliation and physical suffering inflicted on Hungarians during the period of reprisals was (bitter)sweetened by the memory of this mythic event. And when the end of the long revolution finally came, the memories would come out of hiding as objects to behold, just like Pécsi's Stalin hand.

~

If this was simply the bloodless symbolic and monumental victory of the revolutionaries, more problematic were the events of the Republic Square. James' following chapter looks at Memorial to Martyrs of the Counter-Revolution -- a "colossal bronze statue" -- which was one of the (few) public markers of the 1956 uprising during the Kádár regime. It was sited in Republic Square, a site of resistance in 1956. It sat opposite what was the Communist Party’s municipal branch. Defended by the ÁVO -- the secret police -- in 1956, revolutionaries nevertheless managed to get inside and shoot, "in cold blood," a number of staff. Police and military were "hanged on the spot, and their bodies mutilated." It was, in all, "the scene of the revolutionaries' most reprehensible actions in the thirteen days of the uprising." By the mid-70s the siege was forgotten.

As virtually the only public [that is, sanctioned] memento of October 30, 1956, [sculptor Kalló's] Memorial to the Martyrs of the Counter-Revolution shouldered a heavy rhetorical responsibility. But what was the nature of this responsibility if the party's aim was the obliteration of the memory of 1956? The martyrs monument embodied a narrative that was generated in various public discursive spaces long before the bronze was cast.…With the suspension of the terror that had been enacted in the form of imprisonments, show trials, and executions, the state could now exercise social control through the microphysics of power. And Kalló's monument would blend into the landscape as one more barely noticed apparatus of control.

This monument complicates memory of the revolution in precisely the same way the events of Republic Square altered the tenor of the uprising.

The purity of the revolution was a point of pride during the uprising itself, and it has taken on the character of a central myth in the post-communist rehabilitation of 1956. With national sovereignty as a rallying point, Hungarians experienced a deep sense of solidarity and national honour during the thirteen days of the uprising. A small country with limited resources had faced off against a superpower bent on world domination, and they had pursued this cause with a standard of honour and integrity seldom experienced in peacetime.…The massacres in Republic Square were immediately denounced by the various revolutionary groups at the time.…Despite such [denunciations], Republic Square is the black eye of the uprising. [Emphasis mine]

The years which followed were uneven in their approach to the revolution. As noted above, clutches of people were charged, some of them executed or imprisoned for "life". However, the government's smear campaign, which immediately followed the revolution, was brief -- it lasted only a few years. Much longer was silence, repression and concealment.

The competition for the statue was called in 1957. The statue was to be erected in 1960. By this time, a general amnesty saw free most of those imprisoned, even those with life sentences. (Less lucky, of course, were those who had already been summarily killed.) At the time of the erection, this shift had already begun. Consequently, the text to be written on the inscription was a matter of some controversy and debate. (Glossing somewhat so as to accelerate...)

There are some interesting remarks on the relationship of socialist realism and the body. Kalló's monument breaks with the stiff form favoured by socialist sculpture. "The result was a monument that is undeniably more subjective, expressive, and dynamic than Sándor Mikus's [toppled] Stalin." Despite this, the figure was still passably socialist realist, it thematically "represents the struggle against the [']reactionary enemies['] of the socialist project, and stylistically it meets Christina Lodder's specifications: 'an essential descriptiveness which is reliant for its impact on a stark monumentality.' (1993, 17)" Now we're at the interesting bit.

What is this emphasis on the body all about? Tibor Wehner's work on socialist realist sculpture helps us make sense of it. He writes that most of the statues commissioned in Hungary during the 1950s and 1960s depicted the generic worker or peasant engaged in productive activity. In keeping with the didactic function of Zhadanovian art, such representations almost always featured a tool so that the public could easily read the figure's occupation and understand the role he or she played in the building of socialist society -- the miner was armed with his lamp, the welder with his torch, the engineer with his compass, the soldier with his rifle, the peasant with her scythe, and the student with her book. In the final moment of his life, though, Kalló's figure is no longer defined by the clichéd tools of socialist production. He has now become an archetypal martyr, and his 'tool' is the body he sacrifices in performing this role.…Unlike the martyr of Christianity, whose virtues of fatalism and passivity evoke a sense of pathos, the martyr of communism -- following Marx's admonition to make man the agent of history -- is resolute, determined, and self-controlled. The result, iconographically, is that the robust, heroic body of the communist displaces the sickly, weak, pale body of the Christian martyr. (Aradi 1974, 140).

Representations of the communist martyr's physical body reflect the broader trope of the 'new man,' which dates back to early Soviet art and literature. From that time the human body was used to display projections of the coming utopia and to personify its ideals of a perfectly functioning body politic. The movement toward a classless society would free people from the physical debilitations of hunger, poor nutrition, inadequate medical care, and back-breaking manual labor. In turn, workers and peasants who were liberated from the crippling and stunting effects of capitalism would be willing and able to build the new society by virtue of their strength, stamina, vigor, and health. In the worldwide class struggle, the flabby, enervated capitalist that so often appeared in Soviet propaganda would be no match for the superhumans engineered according to Marxist specifications. (Clark 1993)

The monument, today, is a different matter. It's missing from its original location in the square, abandoned to the outskirts of the city.

The absence of the Martyrs Monument conveys a more complicated set of meanings. It stood in Republic Square for thirty-two years -- far longer than the Stalin statue -- yet few people today remember it. The statue came down not in a memorable fit of revolutionary zeal, but in the routine of government activity by municipal bureaucrats who aimed to scour the city of its communist iconography. While the public had registered its preference for leaving such monuments in place, the truth is, most people didn't much care.

The abandoned platform in Republic Square speaks volumes about the complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of revealing and concealing, that characterize the formation of historical memory in postcommunist Hungary. The symbolic erasure of a once-dominant narrative -- in this case the literal removal of a monument -- is only the first step in re-remembering the past. The empty space must be filled in, the pedestal must be recycled to support a new narrative. This is not so simple. David Lowenthal writes (1985, 326), 'though the past is malleable, its alteration is not always easy: the stubborn weight of its remains can baulk intended revision.' In other words, reconstructions of the past must come face to face with elements of the old narrative.

The monument now lurches into the sky at the Statue Park outside Budapest. A place of fascination itself, where the stark desolation of the setting clashes with outsized monuments and their embodied litany of ethico-politico-historic ideals. A place I'll no doubt return to in future posts...