Europe is grappling with its dodgy memorials, a plinth at a time

, in Budapest’s southern suburbs, offers a glimpse of the glorious future communists once promised. Statues of muscular workers lunge confidently forward, the better to crush capitalism; unsuccessfully as it turned out. Dozens of likenesses of Lenin, Marx and their Hungarian ideological enforcers stare into the distance. These monuments dotted the Hungarian capital before central Europe shook off the Soviet yoke in 1989. The open-air museum, inaugurated a few years later, was an elegant solution to an intractable problem: how to place public displays of tyranny out of sight without resorting to the destruction of heritage of the sort tyrants themselves favour. As if to underline the rout of socialism, a “Red Star” gift shop offers joke tin mugs, and visitors can recreate the experience of East German motoring by pushing a beaten-up Trabant around.The old continent has a lot of history. Some of the figures it are people it now no longer wants to celebrate. Dictators, colonisers and other previously exalted villains are being shunted off their pedestals. In eastern Europe, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has rekindled a campaign to purge any remaining tributes to Soviet “heroes”. Farther west, attitudes to the past are evolving at a slower pace.