History of the building ===

“In April 1975, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the liberation of Hungary from the fascist invaders by the Red Army, the Friendship Park was laid out in Budapest and the monument to Hungarian-Soviet friendship was opened. The idea of ​​​​creating this monument and developing a preliminary design belonged to E. V. Vuchetich and the Hungarian sculptor J.-C. Strobl. However, none of them was destined to realize their plan. After their death, it was done by the Hungarians - the sculptor Barna Buza and the architect Istvan Zilachy. On the day of the grand opening of the monument, the residents of Budapest decided to donate a copy of the work to the residents of Moscow; and exactly a year and a half later, on September 15, 1976, a “twin” of the Hungarian monument appeared in Moscow’s Friendship Park.” (www.clow.ru/a-mosc...CRUncertain188)

p.s. Apparently, the Friendship Park in Budapest has long been renamed (impossible to find), and the prototype of the Moscow monument now rests in the “Monument Park” of Budapest (Szoborpark or Statue Park): www.wikimapia.org/#l.../ru/

Architectural features ===

"The composition is a 10-meter-tall architectural and sculptural structure in the form of a curved stele. On the inside of the arrow there is a bas-relief of ceramic tiles. It consists of two female figures, personifying the friendship of two fraternal peoples: Russia and Hungary. The girls’ hands flew up in joyful, friendly under the bas-relief is the inscription: “Eternal Hungarian-Soviet friendship is the guarantee of our freedom and peace!” Above the girls are depicted flying doves - a symbol of peace, and even higher - a five-pointed star.

The friendship between Russia and Hungary is also reflected in the choice of material for the monument. The entire monument is covered with pyrogranite tiles. This ceramic material is produced only in the Hungarian city of Pécs." (gedes.ru/articl.../art02.shtml)

Background of the place ===

“We didn’t have enough time to set up real flower beds. Only behind the main square along the axis of the site, from which a panorama of the future park opened, we managed to make the emblem of the VI festival – the famous five-petalled daisy – from annual flowers. For almost two decades, we restored this flower bed every year in memory of the friendship of the youth of the whole world. Only in 1977, two famous sculptors - our E.V. Vuchetich and the Hungarian Zh.K. Shtorbl, tore down a flower garden with a festival daisy, erected a monument to Hungarian-Soviet friendship in its place, thereby eliminating its worldwide significance park and reducing it to friendship with only one country - Hungary. And our city officials, who change like gloves even now, did not even bother to coordinate the placement of the monument not only with the authors of the project, but also with the Central Committee of the Komsomol, which has been taking care of the park for many years. I don’t want to evaluate this monument, however, I will say that it made it impossible to see the main perspective of the spatial solution of the park layout, covering one of the most successful panoramas with a blank wall. Our flower garden, gently rising only 0.8 - 0.9 m, marked the most important viewing point of the park. This once again proves that gardening art, its simplest techniques, are unknown and inaccessible to understanding even by eminent cultural and artistic figures, not to mention officials. Unfortunately, similar things continued to appear in the park afterwards." (From the memoirs of one of the architects of Friendship Park, Valentin Ivanovich Ivanov)

Monument to Hungarian-Soviet Friendship in Moscow - description, coordinates, photographs, reviews and the ability to find this place in Moscow (Russia). Find out where it is, how to get there, see what's interesting around it. Check out other places on our interactive map for more detailed information. Get to know the world better.

Today, after two days of continuous gloomy autumn rain, the sun suddenly came out!
We immediately decided to go for a walk.
Where should we go? Everyone was already moving far and wide. This is exactly how the idea was born to go to the outskirts of Budapest and see the Memento Park sculpture park, opened back in 1993. This park contains monuments from the period of socialism that lost their ideological significance and were removed from the streets of Budapest in the 1989-90s after the change in political mode.


Soviet monuments are conventionally divided into communist and military. The first group includes statues of Lenin, memorials dedicated to the October Revolution, its heroes, and other events related to the strengthening of the communist system. The second is monuments about events and people associated with the Great Patriotic War (and the Second World War in general), the history of the liberation of former socialist countries from fascist occupation. In different countries, attitudes towards these two types of memorials are different.

Unfortunately, in Hungary, many of the monuments of the Soviet era periodically become targets of vandalism; most of them, by decision of the authorities, were dismantled, destroyed, or moved to another place, usually to the outskirts of populated areas, to cemeteries, as well as to special “alleys of totalitarianism” and “museums of the Soviet occupation.” Some of the monuments were sold to private collectors or scrapped.

For example, after the Second World War, a memorial obelisk was erected in the center of Budapest on Freedom Square in memory of the 80 thousand Soviet soldiers who died during the liberation of the city from fascism. In Hungarian society, there has been a debate for several years about moving the memorial to a military cemetery on the outskirts. In 2007, the World Union of Hungarians (WUH) collected 200 thousand signatures for holding a referendum.

Miklos Patrubani, Chairman of the BSV, takes an active part in this process:
“We want to get the monument moved. I emphasize that we do not want it to be destroyed. We do not oppose the Soviet heroes who died during the Second World War. However, we want the Hungarian flag to fly in the center of our city, as it did before the Soviet monument appeared here.”

In March 2011, the chief burgomaster of Budapest, Istvan Tarlos, also spoke in favor of moving the monument.
The obelisk on Freedom Square is often attacked. One day, during anti-government riots, his gold star was torn off. In April 2008, demonstrations of anti-fascists and local nationalists almost clashed here. When the far right announced their action, anti-fascists came out to a rally to oppose them. After the anti-fascists left, the far right scattered commemorative wreaths laid at the memorial. In February 2010, a fascist vandal doused the monument with red paint and covered the memorial with the inscriptions “Murderers”, “Traitors”, “1956”.

Before the collapse of the USSR, there were slightly less than a thousand monuments to liberating soldiers in Hungary. Most of them were moved to military cemeteries. Burials, including those from the center of the capital, were moved to the Kerepeshi cemetery, where a central military memorial to Soviet soldiers appeared.

On October 23, 2006, celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the 1956 anti-communist uprising erupted into anti-government riots. An absolutely curious incident occurred: in one of the central squares, the protesters in some unknown way were able to set in motion a T-34 tank that stood as a monument. The police had to use tear gas to stop the car, which drove about a hundred meters under its own power.
Video from the scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcgJ_jYP6pg

Entrance to the museum.
On the left is a monument to Lenin, previously located on Uprising Square, one of the central squares of Budapest. On the right is a monument to Marx and Engels in the cubist style, which once occupied the place in front of the building of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Socialist Workers' Party in Budapest.

The mighty brick wall represents the Iron Curtain.

In the center of the huge gate, on rust-covered iron sheets, are the words of the poem “On Tyranny” by Gyula Illes (1902 - 1983) (Illyés Gyula: Egy mondat a zsarnokságról, 1956).

By the way, in the late 1940s, dictator Matyás Rákosi proposed to the poet Gyula Illes and composer Zoltan Kodály to remake the Hungarian anthem: they say, it is not appropriate for the anthem of a socialist country to begin with words addressed to God. However, both the poet and the composer found the courage to diplomatically but decisively refuse this proposal.

At the entrance to the museum you can buy unusual “souvenirs”: the “Excellence in Labor” badge, a cassette with May Day marches and “the last gasp of communism” in a tin can.

For the first time, the magical inscription “50% Discount!” didn't make the slightest impression on me! :-)

Marches and anthems are heard from a well-worn radio, including in Russian.
I must say, stereotypes are a great thing! I expected (forgetting about the size of Hungary - only 93,000 km2) space and monumentalism, but the park contains only 40 exhibits, and a third of them are memorial plaques dismantled from the walls of historical buildings.

Painfully familiar features...
Only it’s kind of slanted :-)
But this joyful uncle personifies victory in the Second World War.
At the bottom of this monument are the words: “The guarantee of our freedom and peace is the unbreakable Hungarian-Soviet friendship.”
And where is this unbreakable friendship, I apologize?
Monument to the Hungarian communists led by the leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919 Bela Kun
There are inscriptions that even bring tears to your eyes: “Eternal glory to those who fell in battles for the freedom and independence of the Soviet Union and for the liberation of the Hungarian people.”

But this monument stood on the top of Mount Gellert....
And here it is again, the “unbreakable” friendship of Soviet liberation soldiers and the Hungarian people......
The current Hungarian politicians also did not please our own, Hungarian volunteers of the international brigades - participants in the civil war in Spain
A photograph of this monument once adorned Hungarian history textbooks.
Remember in the cartoon about the crocodile Gena, Cheburashka says with envy: “Gen, ah, Gen, pioneers again...”
Monument to Captain Ilya Ostapenko, who on December 29, 1944, by the command of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, was sent as a parliamentarian to the Nazis surrounded in Budapest with an ultimatum to surrender and died tragically.

At the exit from the park:
Opposite the entrance to the park - boots on a pedestal - all that remains of

May 5th, 2016 , 09:13 pm

The creation of the Friendship Park, covering an area of ​​about 50 hectares, was timed to coincide with the VI World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow. Until 1957, on the Leningradskoye Highway opposite the Northern River Station there was a vacant lot with the remains of rural buildings on the site of the village of Aksinino, with a wood warehouse and railway lines to the asphalt concrete and Nikolsky brick factories.



After the end of the Second World War, a world conference of youth for peace was held in London, at which it was decided to hold international festivals under the slogan “For peace and friendship!” The program included political seminars and discussions, concerts, sports competitions, and the festivals opened with a colorful procession of participants. The symbol of the youth forum was the Dove of Peace, painted by Pablo Picasso.

The main youth forum of the planet came to the capital of the USSR after Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Berlin, Warsaw, and in each of the cities that hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students, delegates planted trees in parks and squares. Moscow supported the festival tradition by greening the northwestern outskirts of the city.


Plan of Friendship Park. 1957: https://pastvu.com/p/13102

The park project was developed by a team of young architects, recent graduates of the Moscow Architectural Institute. For Valentin Ivanov, Galina Ezhova, Anatoly Savin, this was the first independent work, completed with the tactful participation of Vitaly Dolganov, who headed the design workshop for landscaping Moscow. In particular, according to Dolganov’s project, an observation deck was built on the Lenin Mountains, and his services were awarded the Order of Lenin. The master’s professional advice was useful to the youth, who were given complete freedom of action.

The creators of the park also collaborated with the architect Karo Alabyan, who at that time was developing a detailed layout of the new streets, which in 1964 received the names Festivalnaya and Flotskaya. On December 31 of the same year, the Rechnoy Vokzal metro station, built according to a standard design, opened for passengers on the territory of Friendship Park.


Friendship Park and Festivalnaya Street. 1965-1967: https://pastvu.com/p/22315

Well, in the spring of 1957, young architects pushed their project through the authorities. The architectural and planning solution differed from the neighboring park of the Northern River Station, located on a flat terrain.

Ivanov, Ezhova and Savin defended the preservation of the picturesque landscape with hills and ponds. Only in April the executive committee of the Moscow City Council approved the plan and a team of landscapers from the Moszelenstroy trust began practical work with the support of hundreds of Komsomol members brought to the site by buses with shovels and rakes.

In Friendship Park, paths and squares were laid out, benches were installed, bridges were built across the canals, and 500 birch, linden, maple, larch, chestnut and coniferous trees from nurseries were planted. Five fifty-year-old linden trees symbolized the five continents, and in the center stood an eighty-year-old oak tree from the Khimki Forest Park. The main decoration of the park was a flower bed - the emblem of the World Festival of Youth and Students - a daisy with five multi-colored petals.
Let me remind you that at that time the surroundings of the River Station were a village mixed with an industrial zone and, in order to retouch the unsightly reality, the organizers painted blank fences with images of young people of different nations walking towards the park with seedlings, watering cans and shovels in their hands. This was probably the first domestic graffiti, and legal one at that.

The park's opening celebration took place on August 1, 1957, with a huge crowd of people. About a thousand trees were stocked for planting, but there were five times more people willing to take part in the gardening. The delegates left notes with their names on the seedlings and, after completing the honorable mission, were treated to wine and fruit, which were served by young men and women in the national costumes of the peoples of the republics of the USSR. But the amateur performance did not take place due to heavy rain, which forced the festival delegates to scatter to their buses.


Planting trees in the park. August 1, 1957: https://pastvu.com/p/13104

Soviet youth, having just freed themselves from the Stalinist cap, for the first time had the opportunity to freely exchange opinions with guests from capitalist countries, hence the fashion for jeans, stylish hairstyles, rock and roll, and some Komsomol members could not resist even more informal communication with the envoys of others continents, which led to the emergence of the phraseological unit “children of the festival.”

Another Moscow festival was held in 1985 at a high ideological level and did not become such an enchanting event. By the beginning of this festival, the landscape composition “Festival Flower” was opened in Friendship Park. The tradition of holding youth forums has survived to this day; the XIX World Festival of Youth and Students is planned to be held in September-October 2017 in Sochi.

Well, all the planted trees took root and Friendship Park is still a favorite walking place for local residents. In 1957, Moscow pioneers solemnly promised to take care of the plantings, but with the abolition of the pioneer organization, this responsibility was transferred to employees of public utilities.

The daisy flowerbed was destroyed in 1977, and in its place a monument to Hungarian-Soviet friendship was erected based on the idea of ​​the Soviet sculptor Vuchetich and the Hungarian Shtorbl (sculptor B. Buza, architects I. Zilahi, I. Fedorov). Since then, many chaotically installed sculptures and memorial signs have appeared on the territory of Friendship Park, which are not directly related to the youth festival movement.

The sculptural compositions “Bread” and “Fertility” were created according to sketches by Vera Mukhina

The “Friendship” monument is the central part of the “Festival Flower” composition


Memorial sign to Nicaraguan revolutionary Carlos Fonseca Amador, who died in 1976


Danish gratitude to the feat of the Soviet Union (1986)


Commemorative plate of the monument to the memory of soldiers killed in Afghanistan


Monument to the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1990)


Monument to the Spanish writer Cervantes (1981, copy of the 1835 sculpture by Antonio Sol). Vandals regularly take Cervantes's sword.


Monument to the Kyrgyz epic hero Manas the Magnanimous - bronze figure of a hero (2012)


Sculptural composition


Tree of Peace


Alley of Alisa Selezneva, heroine of the television film “Guest from the Future” (2001)

Six Festival ponds are connected by channels with bridges across them. After the festival, this part of the park remained wild and only by 1980 it acquired its current appearance - with asphalt paths and concrete banks. The reason for the improvement was the holding of the XXII Olympic Games in Moscow, in which the Dynamo Sports Palace on Lavochkina Street, adjacent to the park, was involved.


Quarries filled with water. 1957-1958: https://pastvu.com/p/13101

Improvement of the ponds is planned for 2016, for which the surrounding area is fenced and passages through the walkways are blocked. The list of planned works includes cleaning of silt and deepening of ponds, reconstruction of the spillway, installation of a feeding water pipeline, repair of the coastline, and improvement of the adjacent territory.

Some of the quarries of the Nikolsky Brickworks were flooded, while others were used as sports grounds for playing rugby and baseball. The park hosted model aircraft competitions and hunting dog tests. Once upon a time, the NKZ brick factory occupied a vast area along the Leningradskoye Shosse and Konakovsky Proezd and worked on its own raw materials, extracting clay from quarries, which later became ponds. The excavation of clay was carried out all year round by dredging machines that moved on rails along the edge of the quarry. In the early 1980s, production began to be curtailed, building up the factory territory with housing, and legally the NKZ ceased to exist in 1998.