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BUDAPEST
ONCE, their gaze radiated purpose and conviction. Now the bronze and stone outcasts stare accusingly at the horizon.
Hungary's recent past has been exiled to a former landfill next to a Shell station on the outskirts of Buda. Here, the Communist statuary assembled into an open-air museum looms over groups of merry college students, revealing truths it was never meant to tell. There are 41 monuments in all, strewn between a false neoclassical portal and a low, nondescript brick wall. A primitivist bronze Lenin greets visitors, who are then ambushed by a 20-foot-- tall Kalashnikov-toting Soviet soldier.
Beyond, the Hungarian Communist leader Bela Kun leads his motley troop into the battle that produced a short-lived Communist republic in the aftermath of World War 1. Their bayonets point toward a writhing man commemorating Communist martyrs of Hungary's 1956 uprising against Soviet rule.
Stripped of their grandiose former settings in central Budapest's squares and parks, the statues cannot escape these ironies. Some have their views of eternity blocked by brick cottages that testify to capitalist Hungary's new prosperity.
Such juxtapositions have made Statue Park a living textbook for scholars seeking to show their students the meaning of the fall of Communism.
Andrea Peto uses the park to teach history to graduate students at Budapest's Central European University. She points out stylized elements of Communist iconography, like the taut muscles and jutting jaws that trace the movement's early reliance on poster art. And then she talks about how offspring of the revolution used these idols to erase the hated past, installing them in place of Austro-Hungarian monuments.
"These statues represent the frozen...