When the United States felled one of Saddam Hussein’s famous statues in 2003, it couldn’t help but recall Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, ‘the second time as farce’. The spectacle was staged to evoke the Eastern European uprisings of the USSR’s twilight, but was repeatedly ridiculed at the time because the US flag marines planted over Saddam’s face had to be quickly removed. The soldiers just didn’t get it.

Familiar gestures repeated under new status quos are doomed to be fatally ironic, a little like the Eastern European uprisings themselves. Quite rightly resisting foreign domination, those uprisings nevertheless failed to produce anything new, rallying behind a nationalistic banner of reverting to the ex-ante state of affairs. Third way socialists notwithstanding, Poland stagnated in priest-ridden sleaze, the Balkans burned under nationalistic racism and across the continent ‘neo-Nazi’ movements went from strength to strength. Memento Park in Budapest exhibits the contradictions of living in a post-socialist state, caught between a denial of the past and the lack of a new vision for the future.

The park is one of the few museums showing communist statuary in Eastern Europe. Whilst elsewhere the revolutionaries of liberal-democratic reform busied themselves with melting down their bronze Lenins, Hungary settled on dumping their best pieces of communist art ignominiously in a scrubby field just beyond the city’s last suburb. From a strictly capitalist point of view it was a wise move. With the advent of cheap flights from Western Europe, Hungary as a piece of new Europe exotica needs to cater for this desire for difference, not sameness. Across the city Memento Park is marketed with bright red glossy leaflets borrowing the same kitsch style as a Stolichnaya vodka commercial. Starting every section with ‘Comrades!’ sits uneasily alongside the narrative of national liberation and freedom, and there is no mention of the replacement of the command economy by free markets. Following a trend in 20th century historical revisionism the transition is described solely in terms of the difference between tyranny and democracy.

But if the official marketing does all the right things to push the buttons of Western European visitors, the reality of the Park does exactly the opposite. For one thing, there is no easy way to get there. Aside from a staggeringly expensive tour bus, the route via public transport requires a tram ride, a bus ride to a far flung suburban interchange and then a ride on another bus company which drops you off in the middle of the countryside with little to indicate one of Budapest’s most exciting tourist attractions is around the corner. Once you have finally surmounted this public transportation labyrinth - it took me four hours to get there, but it’s a long and embarrassing story so I’ll spare you the details – you are greeted by the most depressing little museum you may ever see. The kitsch stops here. As if trying to make a predictable point about Communist era drabness, the park has been ‘finished’ with no finesse. Any concessions to Communist kitsch are limited solely to the combined ticket counter and gift shop, where a wall mounted radio blares out old Soviet anthems and a collection of t-shirts are emblazoned with prints like ‘The Three Terrors’; that’s Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, if the last of the trio eluded you. If you check their tags you find they’re imported from the UK.

In the park itself, the pebbled ground is overgrown with weeds, and the grass looks like it hasn’t been mown all season. The brickwork plinths of many of the statues are crumbling, and concrete steps for visitors are cracked or missing. Even more peculiarly there are no tags telling you the name of the work or its past location in the city, no information about the artist, the year it was commissioned, or any historical context at all. These are pieces of history in the abstract, belonging to Hungary’s past, yet not quite of it. This could simply add up to sloppiness on the part of the park’s administrators of course, but you can’t help feeling a deeper dynamic at work. The absence of any information is a deliberate sabotage against their too close association with the country’s past, and their symbolic power to affect the present.

The artistic value of the statues is varied. You will search in vain for anything indicating Modernist subversion of party orthodoxy. This is Socialist Realism through and through; along with megalomaniacal personality cult statues of Lenin, Marx and some half forgotten Soviet bureaucrats. But taken on their own terms, the massive statues of October revolutionaries do not fail to impress. They thrust out off their plinths in gestures all the more heroic because they portray the spirit of really existing revolutionary potential, not the classical or baroque memory of heroes gone by. There are some nods to the Modernist developments of the 20th century.

Particularly noteworthy is one statue in pseudo Bauhaus style of a worker breaking away from a wall of oppression. To get a sense of how inspiring and radical such a piece would be in a public setting you only have to compare it with Mark Quinn’s statue based on a cast of the armless Alison Lapper that sat for some time on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth. Quinn’s work encourages voyeuristic curiosity under the socially utilitariarian mandate of respect for disability, breaking social taboos, getting away from the expectation of an ideal body etc, etc. His model sits placidly, motionless, resigned to life, with no apparent desire to change a thing about either her own condition or that of the world around her.

All of which gets the point about what Socialist Realist art is, and why it matters. Rather than deriding it for its lack of creativity, its artistic philistinism and ‘authoritarian’ rules about appropriate subject matter and so on, should we not acknowledge that there is more than a core of truth to Socialist Realism? Is a work of art that forges its content out of the everyday, and shows its epic potential, not infinitely preferable to fantasy tales from Middle Earth? Isn’t the ability to inspire change and social consciousness a thousand times better than the world of bourgeois, diamond-studded skulls and hedge-fund art markets? Isn’t there a reason why for the average person, movies, which by their very nature have to be crafted out of some semblance of reality, are preferable to the interpretative game of abstract pictorial art? Doesn’t a worker bursting out a wall appeal to a greater sense of our humanity than a disabled person, relying on the care and good will of others for a dignified existence?

The ultimately irony of this statue park is that if the Soviet authorities had been really canny they would have filled all of Budapest with statues like Mark Quinn’s. In the end though, the revolutionary spirit which manages to make its presence felt through these works contributed to the consciousness that believed it could overthrow the foreign occupation. They succeeded and then dumped these statues outside of the city. But the pressures of the market will one day ensure the park is better maintained and serviced, and provides more information. At that point the art will be reinscribed back into Hungary’s history and capitalism will realise Communism’s place in the national legacy. Wasn’t it meant to be the other way around?

Photos shot on Kodak T-Max 100 35mm film