Imre Nagy

Imre Nagy (June 7, 1896 – June 16 1958) was a Hungarian politician, appointed Prime Minister of Hungary on two occasions. Nagy's second term ended when his non-Soviet-backed government was brought down by Soviet invasion in the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, resulting in Nagy's execution on charges of treason two years later.

Career

Nagy was born in Kaposvár, to a peasant family and was apprenticed to a locksmith. He enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I and served on the Eastern Front. He was taken prisoner in 1915. He became a member of the Russian Communist Party, and joined the Red Army. Nagy returned to Hungary in 1921. In 1930 he travelled to the Soviet Union and joined the communist party. He was engaged in agricultural research, and also worked in the Hungarian section of the Comintern. He was expelled from the party in 1936 and later worked for the Soviet Statistical Service. Rumours that he was an agent of the Soviet secret service surfaced later, begun by Hungarian party-leader Károly Grósz in 1989 in an attempt to discredit Nagy. There is evidence, however, that Nagy did serve as an informant for the NKVD during his time in Moscow and provided names to the secret police as a way to prove his loyalty (not an uncommon tactic for foreign communists in the Soviet Union at the time).

After the war Nagy returned to Hungary and served in the Communist government, as Minister of Agriculture and in other posts. He was also Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary 1947-1949.

After two years as Prime Minister (1953–1955), during which he promoted his "New Course" in Socialism, Nagy fell out of favour with the Soviet Politburo. He was deprived of his Hungarian Central Committee, Politburo and all other Party functions and on April 18, 1955, he was sacked as Prime Minister.

Nagy became Prime Minister again, this time by popular demand, during the anti-Soviet revolution in 1956. Soon he moved toward a multiparty political system.

On 1 November, he announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and appealed through the UN for the great powers, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, to recognize Hungary's status as a neutral state. Even in this period, Nagy remained steadfastly committed to Marxism; but his conception of Marxism was as "a science that cannot remain static", and he railed against the "rigid dogmatism" of "the Stalinist monopoly".

When the revolution was crushed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Nagy, with a few others, was given sanctuary in the Yugoslav Embassy. In spite of a written safe conduct of free passage by János Kádár, on 22 November, Nagy was arrested by the Soviet forces as he was leaving the Yugoslav Embassy, and taken to Snagov, Romania. Subsequently, the Soviets returned him to Hungary, where he was secretly charged with organizing to overthrow the Hungarian people's democratic state and with treason. Nagy was secretly tried, found guilty, sentenced to death and executed by hanging in June, 1958. His trial and execution were made public only after the sentence was carried out. According to Fedor Burlatsky, a Kremlin insider, Nikita Khrushchev had Nagy executed, "as a lesson to all other leaders in socialist countries.

He was buried along with others in a distant corner (section 301) of the Kozma Street Cemetery Municipal Cemetery outside Budapest.

During the time when the Communist leadership of Hungary would not permit his death to be commemorated, or permit access to his burial place, a cenotaph in his honor was erected in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. In 1989, Imre Nagy was rehabilitated and his remains reburied on the 31st anniversary of his execution in the same plot after a funeral organized in part by opponents of the country's communist regime. Over 100,000 people are estimated to have attended Nagy's reinternment.

The collected writings of Nagy, most of which he wrote after his dismissal as Prime Minister in April 1955, were smuggled out of Hungary and published in the West under the title "Imre Nagy on Communism".

Nagy was married to Mária Égető. The couple had one daughter, Erzsébet Nagy (1927-2008), a Hungarian writer and translator. Erzsébet Nagy married Ferenc Jánosi. Imre Nagy did not object to his daughter's romance and eventual marriage to a Protestant minister, attending their religious wedding ceremony in 1946 without Politburo permission. In 1982, Erzsébet Nagy married János Vészi.

Nagy in film and the arts

In 2003 and 2004, the Hungarian director Márta Mészáros produced a film based on Nagy's life after the revolution, entitled A Temetetlen halott (English: The Unburied body) (IMDb entry).

Imre Nagy home in Budapest

References

Further reading

1. Gyula Háy [Hay, Julius ]. Born 1900: memoirs. Hutchinson: 1974.
2. Granville, Joanna. "Imre Nagy, aka "Volodya" – a dent in the martyr's halo?" Cold War International History Project Bulletin 5 (1995): 28, 34–36.
3. KGB Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov to CC CPSU, 16 June 1989 (trans. Joanna Granville). Cold War International History Project Bulletin 5 (1995): 36 [from: TsKhSD, F. 89, Per. 45, Dok. 82.]
4. Alajos Dornbach, The Secret Trial of Imre Nagy, Greenwood Press, 1995. ISBN 0-275-94332-1
5. Peter Unwin, Voice in the Wilderness: Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution, Little, Brown, 1991. ISBN 0-356-20316-6