The Smallholders' general secretary whose Soviet abduction triggered his party's destruction
Arrested, he declared: "I took no part in the conspiracy, I feel no guilt in it; had I done so I would have betrayed my life's work."
A peasant politician of peasant stock who, with only four years of elementary schooling, joined the Smallholders in 1933 and rose by 1945 to general secretary of post-war Hungary's largest party. As agriculture minister in the Tildy and Nagy governments he drove the break-up of the great estates and the land reform, and defended his party's independence against Rákosi's salami tactics. When parliament refused to lift his immunity in February 1947, Soviet forces arrested him on fabricated espionage charges and carried him off to the gulag, and the abduction became the trigger for Ferenc Nagy's resignation and the dismantling of the Smallholders. He returned in 1955, served as agriculture minister in Imre Nagy's revolutionary government in 1956, and after the suppression cooperated with the Kádár regime until his death in 1959.
Career Timeline
- 1933–44Joined the Smallholders (FKGP); Baranya organiser; anti-Nazi resistance
- 1944–45Political state secretary of the interior in the provisional government
- 1945–46Minister of agriculture
- 1945.08–47General secretary of the Smallholders' Party
- 1947–55Abducted by the Soviets; 20-year sentence; gulag then Moscow prison
- 1955–56Handed over to Hungary; released April 1956
- 1956.10–11Agriculture minister and state minister in Nagy's revolutionary government
- 1957–59Cooperated with the Kádár regime; MP in 1958