A communist judge who enforced political trials
Even in 1989, he maintained that Imre Nagy was guilty and expressed no regret for the judgment.
Ferenc Vida was a communist lawyer who had taken part in the illegal movement, endured imprisonment, and rose through Hungary’s postwar party and judicial bureaucracy. After the 1956 Revolution he became one of the judges who imposed the greatest number of death sentences in the state’s retaliatory trials. In the 1958 trial of Imre Nagy, he chaired the Supreme Court’s People’s Court Council, sharply restricting defendants’ statements and the defence’s requests for evidence, and sentenced Nagy, Miklós Gimes and Pál Maléter to death. He still refused in 1989 to acknowledge the trial’s illegality or express remorse.
Activities and affiliations
- 1953–1972 Law and justice · Hungary
Career Timeline
- 1934Graduated from Szeged law academy and helped found the Palestine Communist Party
- 1935–1942Joined Hungary’s illegal communist movement and worked as a trainee lawyer
- 1942–1945Sentenced to life imprisonment in the Schönherz trial and deported to Germany
- 1945–1949District party secretary and adviser to the Ministry of the Interior
- 1951–1953Worked in the Ministry of Justice
- 1953–1972Judge of the Supreme Court, presiding over People’s Court Councils and serving as deputy head of a judicial college
- 1958Presiding judge in the Imre Nagy trial, issuing death sentences
Related historical events
Presiding over the People's Court Council in the post-1956 retaliation
Ferenc Vida's name cannot be separated from the machinery of the post-1956 retaliation. When the People's Court Council was set up within the Supreme Court in April 1957, it functioned as a political special court: a defendant could be brought to trial without an indictment, and the Council could arbitrarily take over any case, which is how the Imre Nagy case came before it and was heard at a single instance with no avenue of appeal. Vida was one of the judges who presided over these councils.
He imposed death sentences, at first or second instance, on a total of 20 people for their activity in the 1956 Revolution. Beyond the Nagy trial, his cases included those of Tibor Déry and associates, Péter Erdős, Sándor Haraszti and associates, László Kardos and associates, Pál Lőcsei, Ferenc Mérei and associates, Zoltán Zsámboki and associates, Corvin Passage armed commander László Iván Kovács and associates, and the Csepel insurgents of Károly Szente and associates.
The conduct of the proceedings is documented. He rejected every defence motion without stating reasons, and when defendants sought to summon witnesses or have documents produced he granted this not at all or only in an extremely restricted way. The defence could call no witness at all; every witness who spoke testified for the prosecution. He interrupted defendants, gave them no room to develop their position, and cut them off in a lecturing tone. The record describes him attacking defendants with shouting and uncontrolled outbursts, in a voice from which “sincere and deep indignation, indeed hatred” radiated.
This posture was not incidental. Supreme Court president József Domokos told him he was giving him the Imre Nagy case precisely because he was the kind of man who would not compromise in reaching a verdict. In his 1989 interview Vida said, “I sentenced a great many people to death,” while insisting it was not from revenge. On 15 June 1958 the council he led sentenced Imre Nagy to death and total confiscation of property, and also sentenced Miklós Gimes and Pál Maléter to death. Vida to the end denied that any illegality had occurred in his judging and claimed he had acted correctly in every respect; the only concession he made was the possibility that, with his very limited first-instance experience, he had “violated a few rules of procedure.”