The Liberation of Budapest in 1945 enters this account not through a description of military operations but through the afterlife of a monument. On Gellért Hill, a gigantic woman raising an outstretched flag came to commemorate the city’s liberation by the Soviet Red Army. Yet the statue had been made two years earlier, on the orders of Fascist Admiral Horthy, to honor his son, who had fallen on the Russian front fighting that army. Its conversion into a liberation memorial turns a single public image into a compact history of political reversal and the unstable meanings attached to art.

The Statue Before and After Liberation

The statue was made in 1943 for a purpose opposed to the one it would later serve: it honored a son killed in combat against the Soviet forces. In 1945, after the city’s liberation, Soviet commander Marshal Kliment Voroshilov was shown the figure. He thought it could serve as the monument to liberation. The account thus traces a concrete change of use: an existing statue, created under Horthy’s Fascist rule and tied to a loss inflicted by the Red Army, was taken up as an emblem of the Red Army’s victory in Budapest.

A Monument with a Mutable Message

The figure is usually perceived as an exemplary piece of socialist-realist baroque kitsch, a judgment that seems to assign it a settled ideological identity. Its history unsettles that reading. The same image could honor a soldier who died fighting the Soviet Army and then commemorate the Soviet liberation of his city. The anecdote makes the monument’s meaning less a fixed property of its form than an outcome of the political circumstances in which it is displayed and interpreted.

The book sets this example beside the changing interpretation of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth or Seventh Symphony. At their first performances, the symphonies were celebrated as exemplary Socialist Realism; later, they were read as carrying a concealed dissident message. In particular, the marching rhythm of the Seventh Symphony, once understood as the German Army’s advance into Russia, came to be interpreted as the mechanically cruel advance of Communism. The Budapest statue and the symphony show meaning changing in opposite directions: an image associated with Fascist commemoration is reassigned to Soviet liberation, while music once treated as an affirmation of Communist ideology is reread as its critique.

The Revolution in the Background

The book’s broader account of the October Revolution supplies a political frame for this reversal, though it does not recount the military course of Budapest’s liberation. It argues that the revolutionary process continued through the forced collectivization and rapid industrialization of 1928–33, when Soviet policy set out to transform the composition of society. The New Economic Policy had consolidated state power while leaving much of the social texture intact; the subsequent campaign, by contrast, aimed to liquidate peasants as a class of individual owners and replace the old intelligentsia with a new one. This history complicates any simple identification of Soviet victory with an uncomplicated emancipatory legacy.

The account insists on holding two judgments together: the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. It also presents forced industrialization and collectivization as an inward redirection of revolutionary energy after the revolution remained confined to the Soviet Union. These arguments do not explain the statue’s adoption in 1945, but they sharpen the tension embodied by it: liberation is commemorated through an image whose earlier history belongs to the defeated political order, while the Soviet project behind the new memorial carries both revolutionary promise and a history of coercive transformation.