Imre Nagy (Hungarian: [ˈimrɛ ˈnɒɟ]; 7 June 1896 – 16 June 1958) was a Hungarian
communist politician who was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian
People's Republic 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.
== Early life and career == Nagy was born in Kaposvár, to a peasant family
and was apprenticed to a locksmith. His father, József Nagy (1869–1925), was a manorial
servant, a county worker, and was later post assembly worker, and his mother, Rozália
Szabó (1877–1969), served as a maid before she was married. 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 rejoined the Communist
Party, also becoming a Soviet citizen. He was engaged in agricultural research, but
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, allegedly in an attempt to discredit Nagy. Nagy evidently did serve, however, 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 (a common tactic for foreign communists in the Soviet
Union at the time).
After the Second World War, Nagy returned to Hungary. He was the Minister of Agriculture
in the government of Béla Miklós de Dálnok, delegated by the Hungarian Communist Party.
He distributed land among the peasant population. In the next government, led by Tildy, he was
the Minister of Interior. At this period he played an active role in the expulsion of
the Hungarian Germans.In the communist government, he served as Minister of Agriculture and in
other posts. He was also Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary 1947–1949.After two
years as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic (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 18 April 1955, he was sacked as Chairman of the Council
of Ministers.
== Revolution ==
Nagy became Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic 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 recognise Hungary's status as a neutral state. Throughout
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.
== Secret trial and execution == Subsequently, the Soviets returned Nagy to
Hungary, where he was secretly charged with organizing the overthrow of 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 had been carried out. According to Fedor Burlatsky, a Kremlin insider, Nikita
Khrushchev had Nagy executed, "as a lesson to all other leaders in socialist countries".
American journalist John Gunther described the events leading to Nagy's death as "an
episode of unparalleled infamy".Nagy was buried, along with his co-defendants, in the prison
yard where the executions were carried out and years later was removed to a distant corner
(section 301) of the New Public Cemetery, Budapest, face-down, and with his hands and
feet tied with barbed wire. Next to his grave stands a memorial bell inscribed in Latin,
Hungarian, German and English. The Latin reads: "Vivos voco / Mortuos plango / Fulgura frango",
which is translated as: "I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the thunderbolts".
== Memorials and political rehabilitation ==
During the time when the Stalinist leadership of Hungary would not permit his death to be
commemorated, or permit access to his burial place, a cenotaph in his honour 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
organised in part by the democratic opposition to country's Stalinist regime. Over 100,000
people are estimated to have attended Nagy's reinterment. The occasion of Nagy's funeral
was an important factor in the end of the communist government in Hungary.
== Writings == The collected writings of Nagy, most of which
he wrote after his dismissal as Chairman of the Council of Ministers in April 1955, were
smuggled out of Hungary and published in the West under the title Imre Nagy on Communism.
== Family == 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).
Nagy is mentioned and seen in the movie Children of Glory.
== References ==
== Further reading == Gyula Háy (Julius Hay). Born 1900: memoirs.
Hutchinson: 1974. Johanna Granville. "Imre Nagy aka 'Volodya'
– A Dent in the Martyr's Halo?", "Cold War International History Project Bulletin", no.
5 (Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington, D.C.), Spring, 1995,
pp. 28, and 34–37. Johanna Granville, trans., "Soviet Archival
Documents on the Hungarian Revolution, 24 October – 4 November 1956", Cold War International
History Project Bulletin, no. 5 (Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington,
D.C.), Spring, 1995, pp. 22–23, 29–34. Johanna Granville, The First Domino: International
Decision Making During the Hungarian Crisis of 1956", Texas A & M University Press, 2004.
ISBN 1-58544-298-4 KGB Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov to CC CPSU, 16
June 1989 (trans. Johanna Granville). Cold War International History Project Bulletin
5 (1995): 36 [from: TsKhSD, F. 89, Per. 45, Dok. 82.]
Alajos Dornbach, The Secret Trial of Imre Nagy, Greenwood Press, 1995. ISBN 0-275-94332-1
Peter Unwin, Voice in the Wilderness: Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution, Little,
Brown, 1991. ISBN 0-356-20316-6 Karl Benziger, Imre Nagy, Martyr of the Nation:
Contested History, Legitimacy, and Popular Memory in Hungary. Lexington Books, 2008.
ISBN 0-7391-2330-0
== External links ==