Destruction
On October 23, 1956, around two hundred thousand Hungarians gathered in Budapest to demonstrate in sympathy for the Poles who had just gained political reform during the Polish October. The Hungarians broadcast sixteen demands over the radio, one of them being the dismantling of Stalin's statue. A hundred thousand Hungarian revolutionaries demolished the Stalin statue, leaving only his boots, in which they planted a Hungarian flag. The bronze inscribed name of the Hungarians' leader, teacher and "best friend" was ripped off from the pedestal. Before the toppling of the statue, someone had placed a sign over Stalin's mouth that read "RUSSIANS, WHEN YOU RUN AWAY DON'T LEAVE ME BEHIND!" The revolutionaries chanted "Russia go home!" while pulling down the statue. “W.C.” and other insulting remarks were scrawled over the fragmented parts of the statue.
The account of the incident by Sandor Kopacsi, head of Budapest’s police: " placed a thick steel rope around the neck of the 25-metre tall Stalin’s statue while other people, arriving in trucks with oxygen cylinders and metal cutting blowpipes, were setting to work on the statue’s bronze shoes. An hour later the statue fell down from its pedestal."
Read more about this topic: Stalin Monument (Budapest)
Famous quotes containing the word destruction:
“I am firmly opposed to the government entering into any business the major purpose of which is competition with our citizens ... for the Federal Government deliberately to go out to build up and expand ... a power and manufacturing business is to break down the initiative and enterprise of the American people; it is the destruction of equality of opportunity amongst our people, it is the negation of the ideals upon which our civilization has been based.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.”
—Freya Stark (1893–1993)
“Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)