The Marxist economist who predicted the Great Depression, and was punished for arguing capitalism could adapt
In the late 1920s, when most analysts proclaimed capitalism stable, he predicted the Great Depression; when the Comintern insisted on capitalism's imminent collapse, he predicted its end — and was proven right both times, earning Stalin's confidence.
A Hungarian Marxist economist who directed the USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and World Politics for two decades as the Comintern's foremost analyst. He earned Stalin's confidence by correctly predicting both the onset of the Great Depression and its end, each time against prevailing orthodoxy. After the war, his argument that wartime state intervention enabled capitalism to adapt provoked a fierce campaign: his institute was shut down in 1947 and he was branded a 'bourgeois economist.' Rehabilitated after Stalin's death, he received the Lenin Prize in 1963; a posthumous manuscript, opened per his will, delivered a sharp critique of Soviet bureaucratic degeneration.
Career timeline
- 1906Joined Hungarian Social Democratic Party; economics editor of party paper Népszava
- 1909PhD in philosophy, University of Budapest — dissertation on Kant's antinomies
- 1919People's Commissar of Finance, then Chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy, Hungarian Soviet Republic
- 1920Fled to USSR; joined VKP(b); began work in the Comintern
- 1921–1927Director, Comintern Statistical-Information Institute ('Varga Bureau'), Berlin
- 1927–1947Director, Institute of World Economy and World Politics (IMKhMP), USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1939Full member (Academician), USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1963Awarded Lenin Prize for life's work on modern capitalism
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.
Career timeline
- 1915Captured by the Russians; held in Tomsk
- 1918Co-founder of the Hungarian Communist Party
- 1919War commissar of the Slovak Soviet Republic
- 1936–1939Commander of the XI International Brigade in Spain
- 1946–1949Budapest chief of police
- 1956Interior minister under Nagy; minister of the armed forces and public security under Kádár
- 1958–1961Prime minister of Hungary
Premier for thirteen days
Refusing clemency after his secret trial death sentence, June 1958: "My only consolation is the conviction that sooner or later the Hungarian nation and the international working class will clear me of these grave charges."
A Hungarian communist. Taken prisoner by the Russian army in the First World War, he joined the Bolsheviks and became an agrarian expert during his Moscow exile. As agriculture minister in 1945 he carried out the land reform, but clashed with Rákosi and Gerő over the pace of collectivization in 1948–49 and was pushed aside. Prime minister from July 1953, he pursued a 'New Course' of lower investment, security for individual farms and the closing of the internment camps, until his dismissal in 1955. Returning as premier in the 1956 revolution, he proclaimed a multi-party system and neutrality, and was executed after a secret trial in 1958.
Career timeline
- 1916–1921POW in Russia; joins the Red Army and the party
- 1930–1944Moscow exile; agrarian research for the Comintern
- 1945–1946Agriculture Minister: land reform
- 1953–1955Premier: the New Course, camps closed, peasant burdens eased
- 1955Removed and expelled
- 1956.10–11Premier of the rising: multi-party rule, neutrality
- 1958Hanged after a secret trial
- 1989Reburied on Heroes’ Square
