Question: What was János Kádár greatest accomplishment?

Imre Nagy







Imre Nagy (Hungarian:[ˈimrɛ ˈnɒɟ]; 7 June 1896 – 16 June 1958) was a Hungarian politician who served as Prime Minister and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic from 1953 to 1956. Nagy became leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet-backed government, for which he was executed two years later.
Nagy, a devout communist functionary since the Russian Revolution, served in various offices as the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) took control of Hungary in the late 1940s after World War II and entered the Soviet sphere of influence. Nagy became Chairman in 1953 and attempted to relax some of harshest aspects of Mátyás Rákosi's Stalinist regime, but was subverted and eventually forced out of the government in 1955 by Rákosi's continuing influence as General Secretary of the MDP. Nagy remained popular with writers, intellectuals, and the common people, who saw him as an icon of reform against the hard-line elements in the Soviet-backed regime.  
The outbreak of Hungarian Revolution in October 1956 saw Nagy's return to government as a central demand of the revolutionaries and common people, becoming Prime Minister on 24 October by popular demand. Nagy's reformist faction gained full control of the government, admitted non-communist politicians, dissolved the ÁVH secret police, promised democratic reforms, and on 1 November unilaterally withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union launched a massive counter-revolution on 4 November, forcibly deposing Nagy who fled to the Embassy of Yugoslavia in Budapest. Nagy was lured out of the Embassy under false promises on 22 November but was arrested and deported to Romania. On 16 June 1958, Nagy was tried and executed for treason alongside his closest allies, and his body was buried in an unmarked grave.
In June 1989, Nagy and other prominent figures of the 1956 Revolution were rehabilitated and reburied with full honors, an event that played a key role in the collapse of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party regime.
Early life and career
Imre Nagy was born on 7 June 1896 in Kaposvár in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, to a peasant family. 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. In 1904 Nagy's family moved to Pécs before returning to Kaposvár the following year. Nagy apprenticed to a locksmith before enlisting in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I, serving on the Eastern Front. Nagy was taken prisoner in Western Russia in 1915, during which he learned Russian and became a member of the Russian Communist Party, and later 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.[1] 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).[2]

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.[3]
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.[4] 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".[5]

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.[6] His trial and execution were made public only after the sentence had been carried out.[7] According to Fedor Burlatsky, a Kremlin insider, Nikita Khrushchev had Nagy executed, "as a lesson to all other leaders in socialist countries".[8] American journalist John Gunther described the events leading to Nagy's death as "an episode of unparalleled infamy".[9]
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,[10] 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".[11]
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.[12] 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.
On December 28, 2018, a popular statue of Nagy was removed from central Budapest to a less central location.[13] Opposition parties, mainly liberal, socialist and the remaining communists accuse Orban's government of Historical Revisionism.[14][15]
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.[16] 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.[2]
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) ().
Nagy is mentioned and seen in the movie Children of Glory.


Further reading
Gyula Háy (Julius Hay). Born 1900: memoirs. Hutchinson: 1974.
Johanna Granville. , "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., , 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, , Texas A & M University Press, 2004. ISBN1-58544-298-4
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. ISBN0-275-94332-1
Peter Unwin, Voice in the Wilderness: Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution, Little, Brown, 1991. ISBN0-356-20316-6
Karl Benziger, Imre Nagy, Martyr of the Nation: Contested History, Legitimacy, and Popular Memory in Hungary. Lexington Books, 2008. ISBN0-7391-2330-0