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Visitors may meet – among others – deaf, blind and mute Lenins, bow-tied and hat-wearing Stalins with their noses swollen from lying at the House of Terror Museum's temporary exhibition "It takes a great idea to commit a great crime!", featuring artworks by Hungarian-American artist Sam Havadtoy (Sámuel Havadtőy), accessible from Thursday.

Sam Havadtoy is a contemporary Hungarian artist, of which all three words are important: he has real-life experience of dictatorships, but as an artist he has a contemporary perspective of these once feared figures, said Mária Schmidt, Director-General of the House of Terror Museum, at the opening of the exhibition on Wednesday.

The director general recalled that Hungarians born as Havadtoy's contemporaries had to live for decades with Lenin sculptures that the artist recreated as deaf, blind and mute Lenins using his decade-long characteristic material, lace.

These fanatical dictators were truly out of touch with reality, living in their own utopia

- she added.

The busts of Lenin in the exhibition are bigger than those of Stalin, the director general pointed out, adding that the "real arch-villain" was indeed Lenin, and Stalin, "as a man of practice", was carrying out his nightmare.

Rajmund Fekete, director of the Institute for the Research of Communism, recalled that Soviet Russia, which was building socialism, and later the Soviet Union, experimented with constructing a new society for seven decades. The Soviet model was a total dictatorship from the first moment to the last, legitimised by terror. Despite its promises, it brought neither prosperity, nor brotherhood, nor freedom, but it claimed the lives of more than 100 million people worldwide," he noted.

Rajmund Fekete warned that Lenin has been dead for almost a hundred years, Stalin for exactly 80, yet the spirit of communism is not quite deceased.

"Even so we already know that another attempt at communism is like Elizabeth Taylor's eighth marriage: blind hope rising above real-life experience."

- he pointed out.

Rajmund Fekete told the Hungarian News Agency that the title of the exhibition echoes the words of American historian Martin Malia on communism.

Gergely Böszörményi-Nagy, the founder of the Brain Bar Future Festival and president of the Foundation for the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, called attention to the fact that Sam Havadtoy could never break away from his Hungarianness even when he tried to do so far from Hungary.

There is one thing, however, that is not characteristically Hungarian: eternal serenity, he said.

Sam Havadtoy recalled that the material for the exhibition was completed in over a decade, first the Lenin busts, then the Stalin busts, and lastly the two paintings on display.

Speaking about their history, he said that in Russia a few years ago, when they were restoring a portrait of Lenin painted by Vladislav Ismailovich in 1924, they discovered a portrait of Tsar Nicholas II painted earlier by Ilya Galkin on the other side of the canvas. Sam Havadtoy has recreated both artworks, now on separate canvases, in his own distinctive style, using lace as the backdrop for the two notable figures of Russian history.

According to the House of Terror Museum, the three Lenin busts on display were donated by the artist and have become the property of the museum.