This realistic and didactic aesthetic style celebrated the hard working proletariat and especially the cult of personality surrounding figures like Vladimir Lenin, Stalin and other Eastern European Communist leaders.

I have been told that in Moscow it is customary to pay a visit to Comrade Lenin in Red Square before beginning, or after finishing, an important task, either to report or to ask his advice.

Directly across from Stalin's monument was MÉMOSZ, the house of the builder's union, condemned for its modernist architecture influenced by the West.

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 account of the incident by Sándor Kopácsi, head of Budapest's police: "[The demonstrators] 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.

A life-sized representation of the Stalin Monument was built in Budapest's Statue Park with the broken bronze boots on top of the pedestal in 2006.