Hungarian Town at Odds on Communist Symbol

The Red Star casts a long shadow over Doboz.

Perched on a Soviet monument, it has split villagers more than a decade after the end of communist rule in Hungary and catapulted their remote community into national prominence.

The issue of whether to topple the monument seems anachronistic 13 years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and just a few years before Hungary is to become one of the first of the former Soviet bloc nations to join the European Union.

In Budapest and other Hungarian cities teeming with German roadsters, nouveau-riche stockbrokers and fashion-minded shoppers, the hammer and sickle has long given way to the golden arches and roadside billboards extolling Western consumer products.

But Budapest is not Doboz, a community of simple houses, and of two cafes crowded most mornings by pensioners, truck drivers and paprika growers discussing local issues over their first beer of the day. Here, the debate lives on, and in elemental terms.

“To me the star represents the antichrist,” said Countess Jeanne-Marie Wenckheim-Dickens, who supports Protestant pastor Lajos Balogh-Barna in his anti-monument crusade.

For the other side, retiree Janos Gabor declared: “If we had a referendum, the Red Star would stay, and the pastor would go.”

The main street--still called Red Army Boulevard--evokes times long past, as does the roadside concrete monument raised to the Soviets, other street names and a marble sign outside the mayor’s office paying tribute to a Hungarian communist luminary.

Most Red Stars and other Soviet-era symbols were banned by Hungary’s first post-communist government in the early 1990s. Streets were renamed elsewhere, but there was little change in Doboz--population 4,700--and other eastern villages close to the Romanian border where economic hard times feed nostalgia for communism’s full employment and social welfare.

While the Soviets are most remembered elsewhere in the country for suppressing the anti-communist 1956 revolution, many in the east still see them primarily as liberators from the Nazis--views that help Socialist Mayor Janos Szatmari’s campaign to keep the monument.

Pedigree and origins also play a role: The mayor shares blue-collar roots with most of the villagers and is a longtime Doboz resident. Balogh-Barna, the anti-communist clergyman, arrived less than four years ago and is linked by many villagers to the former “ruling class” swept away by the communists.

Customers leaning on the chipped counter at the Bisztro, one of the village watering holes, were clear on their preferences. “We don’t need rabble-rousers like the pastor,” declared trucker Janos Czifrak.

Outside, a black-clad widow who refused to identify herself said the church “should be concerned with salvation and not whether the Red Star stays or goes.”

In his office, the mayor displayed legal and government documents backing his case--that the monument can stay because it commemorates fallen soldiers rather than extols the communist system. He smiled wearily when asked about the dispute, which has been the subject of a state radio documentary and of more than a dozen national newspaper articles.

“When the system changed from communism to democracy, we asked the people whether the monument should stay or not,” Szatmari said. “The majority voted to keep it.”

Just a few houses away, on the other side of the street, Balogh-Barna said the mayor had hoodwinked the community in arguing that the star-topped obelisk facing the village school was exempt from the anti-symbol law.

Critics also accuse the pastor of overcharging for religious services. The round-faced, sad-eyed Balogh-Barna, who acknowledges sympathies with the extreme rightist MIEP party, said he is being libeled by godless “pagans” because he ended the past practice of ringing bells “for almost free” at funerals for those who had never seen the inside of the church.

A few yards away, Wenckheim-Dickens, whose late husband was a descendant of Charles Dickens, serves coffee and cookies in the sitting room of the tidily whitewashed Roman Catholic parish house she now calls home. Displaying photos of herself with Britain’s Princess Anne and Margaret Thatcher, the countess said she wants to replace the Red Star with a cross.

She came back a little over two years ago to the village her family fled more than a half-century before to escape the communists.

“They don’t want me here because I represent democracy and freedom,” she said. “The Lord said to me, ‘Your time will come, after the mayor is toppled.’ I am here to help the people of the village find God again.”