People of the Revolution and the USSR

Hungary Communism 1886–1967 ○ Died

Hungarian communist who backed Soviet intervention with Kádár in 1956 and became prime minister after the revolution was crushed

Born into a German Catholic family in Seregélyes, he studied law and was taken prisoner on the Eastern Front in 1915 and sent to Tomsk. There he joined the Bolsheviks and commanded an international POW unit; back in Hungary in 1918 he helped found the Hungarian Communist Party and was war commissar of the Slovak Soviet Republic. He lived in the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1936 and, under the name Otto Flatter, commanded the XI International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. After the war he was Budapest’s chief of police and then a diplomat. In the 1956 revolution he was interior minister under Imre Nagy, but in November he went to Moscow with János Kádár and openly backed Soviet armed intervention. As minister of the armed forces and public security in Kádár’s government he helped organise the security regiments and the Workers’ Militia, and he was prime minister from 1958 to 1961.

Party of Communists in Hungary (KMP) Communism 1892–1971 ○ Died

Architect of Hungary's Sovietization who built one-party rule through 'salami tactics'

Released on 30 October 1940 and reaching Moscow on 6 November, Rákosi stood beside Stalin atop Lenin's Mausoleum the next day as the October Revolution Day parade crossed Red Square.

General secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party (1945–1948) and then general secretary, later first secretary, of the Hungarian Working People's Party (1948–1956), he ruled Hungary as its de facto leader from 1948 to 1956. Arrested in 1925, he received an 8.5-year sentence in 1926 and a life term in 1935, serving over fifteen years in prison before reaching Moscow in November 1940. After returning in 1945 he dismantled the democratic parties through 'salami tactics' and forced the Social Democrats into a merger to build one-party rule, bearing responsibility for mass imprisonment, forced-labour camps and the Rajk show trial. He handed the premiership to Imre Nagy in 1953 yet obstructed reform as first secretary, was removed on 18 July 1956, expelled from the party in 1962, and died in Gorky on 5 February 1971 after deportation to Krasnodar, Tokmak and Arzamas.

Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) Communism 1898–1959 ○ Heart disease

Overseer of culture in the Rákosi era

In June 1953, Soviet leaders criticized Rákosi’s concentration of power and discussed a reorganization of Hungary’s leadership. Révai was not invited to the Moscow talks and was dropped from the party Political Committee that month.

Born into a Jewish middle-class family, he was a founder of the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918, lived in the Soviet Union in 1934–44 and edited the party daily Szabad Nép in 1945–50. From 1948 to 1953 he controlled all aspects of Hungarian cultural life, and from 1949 he was also minister of culture. Pushed into the background by Rákosi from 1952, he was not invited to the Kremlin talks of June 1953, where Molotov mocked him as "everything rolled into one" in ideology. He left the Political Committee in 1953 and briefly returned in 1956.

Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) Communism 1898–1980 ○ Natural causes

Hungary's last Stalinist First Secretary; his three months in power ignited the revolution

On the night of October 23, 1956, Gerő took to the radio and denounced the student demonstration: 'We condemn those who seek to instil in our youth the poison of chauvinism.'

A central figure of Hungarian communism, he joined the party at its founding in 1918 and served in the 1919 Soviet Republic. As a Comintern operative and NKVD agent, he worked across Europe in France, Belgium, and Scandinavia, and during the Spanish Civil War he directed the purge of Trotskyists, earning the epithet 'the Butcher of Barcelona.' After WWII he became Rákosi's right hand, driving the Stalinization of Hungary's economy through crash industrialization and collectivization. Appointed First Secretary in July 1956 after Rákosi's forced resignation, he refused reform; on the evening of October 23 his radio broadcast denouncing student demonstrators as 'fascists' and 'chauvinists' detonated the Hungarian Revolution, and within forty-eight hours he was replaced by János Kádár and fled to the Soviet Union.

Hungary Communism 1912–1989 ○ Natural causes (illness; cause disputed)

Architect of 'goulash communism', enforcer of the 1956 reprisals

"Whoever is not against us is with us" (1961)

Born illegitimate in Fiume (now Rijeka), registered in Italian as Giovanni Giuseppe Czermanek, and took his mother Borbála Csermanek's surname. He began a typewriter-mechanic apprenticeship in 1927 and qualified as a journeyman in 1929. Joining the illegal KIMSZ and party in 1931, he did underground work and served prison terms. As Interior Minister (1948–50) he backed the Stalinist line and was involved in László Rajk's purge; arrested in 1951, sentenced to life in 1952 and released in 1954. First Secretary from 25 October 1956, he crossed to the Soviet side on 1 November, accepted the intervention, proclaimed a new government at Szolnok on the 4th and approved Imre Nagy's execution; hundreds were executed and tens of thousands imprisoned. In 1961 he launched 'whoever is not against us is with us', opening amnesty and reform. He resigned in 1988 and died in Budapest in 1989.

Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSzMP) Communism 1930–1996 ○ Kidney cancer

Hungary's last old-guard party chief, caught between reform and retreat and overtaken by both

"If not, anarchy, chaos and — let there be no illusion — white terror will prevail" (29 Nov 1988)

Born to a working-class family in Miskolc, he joined the party at 14 and climbed steadily through the agitprop and regional apparatus to succeed János Kádár as General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party in May 1988. Championing 'model change' (gradual reform within the communist framework), he soon revealed his limits: his November 1988 speech warning of 'white terror' showed a leader who misread the tempo of transformation entirely. The following year he was sidelined by the radical reform faction of Miklós Németh; after the party reconstituted as the Hungarian Socialist Party, he led its rump hardline successor but failed to win any seat in the 1990 election.

Hungary Communism 1933–2016 ○ Died

The reformist Politburo member who called 1956 a 'popular uprising' and dismantled his own party's orthodoxy

In West Berlin he said the East German 'anti-fascist protective rampart' was a 'disgrace' that had to come down.

A reformist member of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) Politburo and the ideological patron of the reformers. On 28 January 1989 he told radio listeners that the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was a 'popular uprising,' demolishing the party's foundational lie; in May that year, in West Berlin, he called the Berlin Wall a 'disgrace.' Together with Otto von Habsburg he sponsored the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989, opening the first crack in the Iron Curtain, and later stood as the Socialist Party's presidential candidate but was defeated.