Socialism's Leftovers

All that's left of Josef Stalin's monument? His boots.

Up in the hills of Buda there is a train operated by children.

Well, they’re not operating the trains themselves, the're operating the train line. There are 11-year-olds are up there, selling tickets, collecting tickets, working the signals, conducting conductor duties and shouting what I’m sure is “All aboard” in Hungarian.

The railway winds its way through the woods and high up into the hills, beginning near a Budapest tram lines’ last stop and terminating atop one of Buda’s higher hills.

There are old socialist-style murals and posters all over the first station. It feels like one of those Soviet programs for children to teach them elemental socialist values about the importance of a hard day’s work in the service of the state. Think of the Young Pioneers, which were the Soviet Union’s version of boy scouts, only these kids get trains.

Being conducted by the little  people of the Children's Railway

The train kids perform their duties and take them seriously in the way kids do when you give them a sharp-looking uniform and an important job. It’s a beautiful ride too. You travel through the Buda’s forests, make brief stops at old and, with the rainy weather, deserted train stations until the last stop. 

But it despite the family friendly atmosphere and the fact these kids were born well after the Berlin Wall fell, the Children's Railway still feels very East Bloc.

Engels, Marx and me

It’s an interesting holdover from the Hungary’s communist days. There are vestiges of Hungary’s socialist era, but while much has been swept away, I’ve become interested in what has remained, and why. So when I first heard about Memento Park, I knew  I had to visit, and bring my photog-friend Marcin along.

Marcin grew up in communist Poland before moving to Canada and his love for communist iconography is well known among our group of friends: He received a Mao Tse Tung garden gnome as a housewarming gift.

Memento Park is where socialist Hungary’s grander garden gnomes have been laid to rest when they were removed after communism fell. All the tributes to the Soviet ‘liberators ’ and Hungary’s socialist heroes came here to be seen, rather than destroyed.

The designer of the park said: “This park is about dictatorship. And at the same time, because it can be talked about, described, built, this park is about democracy. After all, only democracy is able to give the opportunity to let us think freely about dictatorship.”

It's a noble gesture, considering so much the era's documents remain unstudied and so much of the collective memory goes unshared. 

By laying all of these grand pieces of propaganda to bear, there is a chance for discussion about it, but the potential for jocular poses with the statues. We did both, which is what democracy is for: the serious and the silly.