Hungarian Communist Party

The first organisation of the party was set up in Moscow in October 1918 by Béla Kun and associates who had passed through Russian POW camps. They returned to Hungary in November and founded the party on 24 November in Budapest, in the flat of József Kelen, the brother of Ottó Korvin. According to the English source, the name ‘Party of Communists in Hungary’ was chosen instead of ‘Hungarian Communist Party’ because most of the Budapest factory workers it represented were not ethnic Hungarians.

Most of the leaders were arrested in February 1919, but the Social Democrats, unable to master the political crisis, turned to the imprisoned communist leaders for help, and on 21 March the two parties merged and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. During its 133 days the republic nationalised industry and launched a massive collectivisation of agriculture, and after an attempted coup in June it unleashed a terror campaign through its secret police. The republic fell on 1 August 1919 after its defeat by the Romanian army.

In the ensuing White Terror much of the old leadership was executed or fled to Vienna. Kun led the party from exile until he was executed in Stalin's purges in 1937. In 1925 the party created a legal cover party, the Socialist Workers' Party of Hungary (MSZMP); the Hungarian source says it was banned in 1928, while the English source says it existed in name only by 1927. Imre Sallai and Sándor Fürst were executed in 1932. For 1936 the English source says the Comintern dissolved the party, while the Hungarian source says the party then defined its goal as organising anti-fascist resistance based on workers' unity.

Mass arrests in 1942 destroyed the leadership, and in 1943 the party nominally dissolved itself and re-emerged as the Peace Party led by János Kádár. According to the Hungarian source it resumed the name Communist Party in September 1944, and on 5 November émigrés returning from the Soviet Union, including Ernő Gerő and Imre Nagy, set up the provisional central leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP) in Szeged. Mátyás Rákosi became general secretary in February 1945.

The party won 16.96% in the 1945 election, and with László Rajk as Minister of the Interior and the Red Army in the country, Rákosi weakened the non-communist parties with what he called ‘salami tactics’. In the 1947 election it became the largest party with 22.25%; the Hungarian source says the party forged large numbers of so-called ‘blue slips’ to cast fraudulent votes. Major banks and enterprises with more than 100 employees were nationalised in 1947, and in June 1948 the party was merged with the Social Democrats to form the Hungarian Working People's Party.