Country

Hungary

Citizenship 30 · Background 31 · Events 8

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People by citizenship 30View all

György Lukács

Lukács György

Non-Soviet revolutionary

1885–1971 ○ Lung cancer

Founder of Western Marxism: the Hungarian thinker who reoriented 20th-century Marxist philosophy with History and Class Consciousness

“Now, after the collapse of actually existing socialism, his questions look like the only surviving form of Marxism.” — from a late-life interview

Hungarian Marxist philosopher who founded Western Marxism with History and Class Consciousness (1923), establishing the concepts of reification and class consciousness. Served as commissar/minister of culture in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic and the 1956 Imre Nagy government.

Career timeline

1902–1906Graduates Budapest law faculty; doctorate in law from Kolozsvár University
1909PhD in philosophy from Budapest University with The Form of Drama
1912–1918Lives in Heidelberg, studying with Simmel, Weber and Bloch
1918Joins the Hungarian Communist Party (KMP)
1919.3–8Deputy People's Commissar for Culture; political commissar, Hungarian Red Army
1919–1929Exile in Vienna; elected KMP CC General Secretary 1928, removed for right deviation
1923Publishes History and Class Consciousness; denounced as revisionist by Comintern
1929–1945Resides in Moscow; Marx-Engels Institute and Literary Critic journal
1941Arrested by NKVD; released after 2 months on Dimitrov's intervention
1942Defends The Young Hegel dissertation, USSR Academy of Sciences
1945–1958Professor of aesthetics, University of Budapest; member of parliament
1956.10–11Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy government; interned in Romania
1957–1967Expelled from party; reinstated 1967. The Specificity of the Aesthetic

Béla Kun

Kun Béla

Non-Soviet revolutionary

1886–1938 ✕ Executed

133 days of the second Soviet state in Europe, and the execution cellar 19 years later

“The Hungarian proletariat betrayed not their leaders but itself.” — last speech before the Republic's fall, 1 August 1919

A Transylvanian-born Jewish journalist turned revolutionary, Béla Kun founded and led the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, Europe's second proletarian dictatorship. In 133 days he nationalised industry, but his refusal to distribute confiscated land to peasants, turning estates into state farms, lost the countryside; Entente-backed armies crushed the Republic. In Soviet exile he became a key Comintern figure, ECCI Presidium member and head of Agitprop, backing the ultra-left "Third Period" and resisting the 1935 Popular Front turn, clashing with Dimitrov. Swept up in the Great Purge in 1937, tortured, shot in 1938, and posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.

Career timeline

1902Joins the Hungarian Social Democratic Party; organises Transylvanian branch
1916Taken prisoner by the Russian Army in WWI; exposed to Bolshevism in the Urals camp
1917Joins the RSDLP(b); works in the Tomsk party committee and Bolshevik press
1918.3Co-founds the Hungarian Group of the Russian Communist Party in Moscow — precursor to the KMP
1918.11Returns to Budapest; founds the Party of Communists in Hungary (KMP) and becomes CC chair
1919.3–8People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and de facto leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic
1920Chairman of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee
1921Directs the March Action in Germany — uprising fails
1921–1936Member of the ECCI and its Presidium
1924–Head of the ECCI Agitprop Department
1937Arrested on charges of leading a counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation
1938.8.29Sentenced to death and shot — Kommunarka, Moscow

Zoltán Tildy

Tildy Zoltán

Foreign statesman

1889–1961 ○ Imprisoned after 1956, freed 1959

The Reformed pastor-president who declared neutrality before Soviet tanks

At a press conference on November 1, 1956, asked about the likelihood of a new Soviet assault: "Such a tragedy is humanly impossible… it will never take place."

A Reformed pastor who became the face of Hungary's post-war democracy as founder and leader of the Independent Smallholders' Party. After his party's landslide victory, he served as prime minister (1945–46) and was elected the republic's first president, but communist salami tactics forced his resignation in 1948 on fabricated treason charges against his son-in-law; he spent the next eight years under house arrest. In October 1956 he joined Imre Nagy's revolutionary government as minister of state and was present at the November 1 cabinet meeting that voted unanimously to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and declare neutrality. Arrested after the crushing of the uprising, he was sentenced to six years and amnestied in 1959; the Supreme Court annulled his conviction in 1989.

Career timeline

1921–29Reformed pastor; edited church periodicals
1936–44Smallholders MP; pressed to exit the war; hiding after German occupation
1945–46Prime Minister
1946–48President of the Republic; forced to resign
1948–56House arrest
1956.10–11Minister of State in Nagy's revolutionary government
1958–59/1989Sentenced to 6 years; amnestied 1959; rehabilitated 1989

Mátyás Rákosi

Rákosi Mátyás

Socialist-bloc leader

1892–1971 ○ Died

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

On November 7, 1940 — the day after his train from Horthy's prisons reached Moscow — Rákosi stood beside Stalin atop Lenin's Mausoleum to review the October Revolution Day parade on Red Square.

Supreme leader of the Hungarian Communist Party and Working People's Party, he returned with Soviet forces after WWII to build Hungary's people's democracy. A veteran of Kun's 1919 Soviet Republic and a Comintern secretary, he endured 16 years in Horthy's prisons before Moscow secured his release in 1940. Returning in 1945, he used 'salami tactics', slicing away rivals piecemeal, to consolidate one-party rule. As prime minister (1952–1953) he drove crash industrialization. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev forced his resignation in July 1956; the October Revolution sent him into Soviet exile for life.

Career timeline

1919People's Commissar of Trade, Hungarian Soviet Republic; commands Red Guard and Red Army
1921–1924Secretary, Executive Committee of the Comintern
1925–1940Imprisoned under the Horthy regime (8.5-year sentence, later life; freed 1940)
1940–1945Leads the Foreign Bureau of the Hungarian Communist Party, Moscow
1945–1948General Secretary, Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party
1948–1956First Secretary, Central Committee of the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP); General Secretary until 1953
1952–1953Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Hungarian People's Republic
1956–1971Forced exile in the USSR (Kirghizia, Arzamas, Gorky)

People by national background 31View all

Evgeny Samuilovich Varga

Varga Jenő

Non-Soviet revolutionary

1879–1964 ○ Natural causes

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

György Lukács

Lukács György

Non-Soviet revolutionary

1885–1971 ○ Lung cancer

Founder of Western Marxism: the Hungarian thinker who reoriented 20th-century Marxist philosophy with History and Class Consciousness

“Now, after the collapse of actually existing socialism, his questions look like the only surviving form of Marxism.” — from a late-life interview

Career timeline

1902–1906Graduates Budapest law faculty; doctorate in law from Kolozsvár University
1909PhD in philosophy from Budapest University with The Form of Drama
1912–1918Lives in Heidelberg, studying with Simmel, Weber and Bloch
1918Joins the Hungarian Communist Party (KMP)
1919.3–8Deputy People's Commissar for Culture; political commissar, Hungarian Red Army
1919–1929Exile in Vienna; elected KMP CC General Secretary 1928, removed for right deviation
1923Publishes History and Class Consciousness; denounced as revisionist by Comintern
1929–1945Resides in Moscow; Marx-Engels Institute and Literary Critic journal
1941Arrested by NKVD; released after 2 months on Dimitrov's intervention
1942Defends The Young Hegel dissertation, USSR Academy of Sciences
1945–1958Professor of aesthetics, University of Budapest; member of parliament
1956.10–11Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy government; interned in Romania
1957–1967Expelled from party; reinstated 1967. The Specificity of the Aesthetic

Zoltán Tildy

Tildy Zoltán

Foreign statesman

1889–1961 ○ Imprisoned after 1956, freed 1959

The Reformed pastor-president who declared neutrality before Soviet tanks

At a press conference on November 1, 1956, asked about the likelihood of a new Soviet assault: "Such a tragedy is humanly impossible… it will never take place."

Career timeline

1921–29Reformed pastor; edited church periodicals
1936–44Smallholders MP; pressed to exit the war; hiding after German occupation
1945–46Prime Minister
1946–48President of the Republic; forced to resign
1948–56House arrest
1956.10–11Minister of State in Nagy's revolutionary government
1958–59/1989Sentenced to 6 years; amnestied 1959; rehabilitated 1989

Mátyás Rákosi

Rákosi Mátyás

Socialist-bloc leader

1892–1971 ○ Died

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

On November 7, 1940 — the day after his train from Horthy's prisons reached Moscow — Rákosi stood beside Stalin atop Lenin's Mausoleum to review the October Revolution Day parade on Red Square.

Career timeline

1919People's Commissar of Trade, Hungarian Soviet Republic; commands Red Guard and Red Army
1921–1924Secretary, Executive Committee of the Comintern
1925–1940Imprisoned under the Horthy regime (8.5-year sentence, later life; freed 1940)
1940–1945Leads the Foreign Bureau of the Hungarian Communist Party, Moscow
1945–1948General Secretary, Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party
1948–1956First Secretary, Central Committee of the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP); General Secretary until 1953
1952–1953Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Hungarian People's Republic
1956–1971Forced exile in the USSR (Kirghizia, Arzamas, Gorky)

Directly involved historical events 8View all

1941–1945

The Great Patriotic War

The Great Patriotic War, opened by Nazi Germany with a surprise invasion in June 1941, was the largest land war in human history. Recovering from the catastrophic losses of the first year, the Soviet Union moved its industrial base bodily eastward and rearmed, reversed the tide at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, and drove on to Berlin in 1945 to bring down Nazi Germany. Roughly 80 percent of the ground combat power of the Wehrmacht was destroyed on the Eastern Front, and it was the multinational Soviet people who bore the overwhelming burden of defeating fascism.

1942–1943

Battle of Stalingrad

The Battle of Stalingrad was the major engagement fought from July 17, 1942, to February 2, 1943, around Stalingrad and the lower Don and Volga rivers in the Soviet Union. Germany launched Case Blue to seize southern oil and communications, but Adolf Hitler turned the capture of Stalingrad into a separate priority, dispersing the offensive. The German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army reached the city in late August and attacked its ruins, while Vasily Chuikov's Sixty-second Army held a narrow strip along the Volga, reinforced across the river and relying on close combat. From November 19 the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, broke through the German army's Romanian-held flanks from north and south, and linked near Kalach on November 23. The encircled German force survived failed relief and inadequate air supply only briefly, began surrendering in January 1943, and capitulated on February 2.

1944–1949

The People's Democracies of Eastern Europe

From the summer of 1944, coalition governments with communist participation were formed in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary as the Red Army arrived, in the Soviet zone of Germany, and in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania, which had been liberated largely by their own forces. Each country passed through land reform and the nationalisation of major industry. The elections of 1945–46 produced divided results in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while in Poland and Romania the official counts diverge from records published later. In 1947 the other coalition parties were pushed out through dissolution, splits and trials, and between 1946 and 1948 the social democratic parties were merged into the communist parties. Over the same years "people's democracy" was explained first as a "new road" distinct from the Soviet system and then, in December 1948, redefined as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. By 1949 constitutions and single-list elections had fixed the new order in every country, and trials and purges had begun inside the parties themselves.

1944–1949

Hungary: From the Smallholders' Victory to the Rajk Trial

Hungary's post-war politics began at the Provisional National Assembly in Debrecen in December 1944 and took shape with the general election of 4 November 1945, in which the Smallholders won 57 per cent. At the demand of Voroshilov, chairman of the Allied Control Commission, the four-party coalition continued and the interior ministry went to the Communists. In March 1946 the Left Bloc demanded the expulsion of Smallholder deputies; in February 1947 Soviet forces arrested the Smallholders' general secretary Béla Kovács; in May Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy resigned from abroad. In the "blue ballot" election of 31 August the Communists became the largest party with 22.3 per cent. The Social Democrats merged with the Communists in June 1948, and Cardinal Mindszenty was arrested in December. A single-list election in May 1949 and the constitution of 20 August established the People's Republic; in September the former interior minister László Rajk was tried, and he was executed in October.

1955

The Founding of the Warsaw Pact

The Warsaw Pact (formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance) was a collective-defense alliance signed on May 14, 1955, in Warsaw by the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European socialist states. The immediate trigger was the October 1954 Paris Agreements, which set West Germany on course for rearmament and NATO membership. The Soviet Union began preparing the alliance at the November 1954 Moscow Conference; the treaty was signed four days after West Germany entered NATO. The preamble identified a remilitarized West Germany in NATO as a threat to peace-loving states, and Article 4 committed signatories to render immediate assistance, including armed force, in the event of armed attack in Europe. Marshal Ivan Konev was named supreme commander, and a Political Consultative Committee was established. Yet the Warsaw Pact was more facade than substance: the USSR already controlled Eastern Europe through bilateral treaties and stationed troops, and Nikita Khrushchev conceived the new organization as a bargaining chip, to be traded for a pan-European collective security system that would also dissolve NATO.

1956

The Hungarian Revolution

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was an uprising against the Stalinist system, born of the hopes for de-Stalinization opened by Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. When student and worker protests in Budapest grew into a nationwide revolt in October, the reformer Imre Nagy returned as premier and declared a multiparty system, withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and neutrality. The Soviet leadership saw this as the collapse of the bloc and crushed the uprising with a massive military intervention in November.

1968

The Prague Spring

The Prague Spring was a reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968 led by Alexander Dubček. Its “socialism with a human face” — easing censorship, widening freedom of expression and movement, and economic reform — won broad popular support. But the Soviet Union defined it as a break from the bloc and, in August 1968, occupied Czechoslovakia with the armies of five Warsaw Pact states.

1989

The Revolutions of 1989

In 1989 one-party communist systems fell in quick succession across Eastern Europe. Hungary opened its border, Poland reached free elections through round-table talks, the Berlin Wall came down, and in Romania Ceaușescu was executed. The decisive difference was that Gorbachev, unlike in 1956 and 1968, renounced armed intervention.