Ferenc Erdei

Ferenc Erdei was a rural sociologist whose 1934 books on the farmsteads and society around Makó drew the attention of the populist writers. He took part in founding the National Peasant Party in 1939, and in the autumn of 1944 contacted the underground Communist Party in Soviet-occupied Szeged. Hungarian Wikipedia writes that he became a crypto-communist at this point and that his secret membership was common knowledge inside the Communist Party. With József Darvas he led the party's left wing, pressing for alliance with the workers' parties rather than with the Smallholders.

As agriculture minister in 1949–1953 he carried out forced collectivization and the consolidation of holdings, earning the deep hatred of the peasantry. When Imre Nagy became premier in 1953, Erdei, as justice minister, went along with Nagy's rehabilitation policy. In the 1956 revolution Nagy kept his close friend on as deputy premier in his second government; Erdei's name was also on the inner cabinet Nagy announced on 30 October when he abolished the one-party system. But László Németh, Gyula Illyés and others who refounded the National Peasant Party as the Petőfi Party protested that Erdei should have no role in governing the country.

Left out of the next reshuffle, he joined the delegation negotiating the Soviet withdrawal. On the night of 3 November the delegation, arriving at the Soviet base at Tököl, was arrested together with Defence Minister Pál Maléter on the orders of KGB chief Ivan Serov. He was released a few weeks later after János Kádár intervened. He took no real leadership role again, working as general secretary of the Academy of Sciences, and in the early 1960s helped Lajos Fehér reform the collective-farm system.