Smallholder premier of Hungary's second republic, forced out by Soviet-backed communists
At the Swiss border he signed his resignation on the hood of a car, the price of getting his son back.
A smallholder politician who became the first prime minister of Hungary's second republic under Soviet occupation (1946-47). He co-founded the Smallholders' Party with Zoltán Tildy in 1930, serving as its first general secretary, and after the party's 57 per cent landslide in 1945 rose from speaker of the assembly to premier, where he tamed the pengő hyperinflation with the forint. But as Rákosi's communists used salami tactics to strip away Smallholder deputies, he was blackmailed into resigning while on holiday in Switzerland in 1947, his son held as a hostage, and went into exile in the United States. His memoir The Struggle Behind the Iron Curtain (1948) became the founding Western account of the people's democracies of Eastern Europe.
Activities and affiliations
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1930–
Independent Smallholders' Party (FKGP)
Political and party leadership -
1946–1947
Hungary state institutionsPrime MinisterMain
Government and administration
Career Timeline
- 1930–1945Co-founded the Smallholders' Party and became its first general secretary
- 1944.04–10Imprisoned by the Gestapo; went underground after the Arrow Cross coup
- 1945–1946Minister of reconstruction, speaker of the assembly, High National Council
- 1946–1947First premier of the second republic: the forint, the Paris peace treaty
- 1947.06Forced to resign in Switzerland; exiled to the United States
- 1947–1970Émigré politics; International Peasant Union and memoir
Related historical events
- 1944–1949The People's Democracies of Eastern EuropeAuthor of an account of Eastern Europe's people's democraciesHis 1948 memoir became the founding Western account of Eastern Europe's people's democracies.
- 1944–1949Hungary: From the Smallholders' Victory to the Rajk TrialSmallholders Party prime ministerHe led the coalition after the 1945 election victory and resigned while on holiday in Switzerland right after Béla Kovács's arrest.
Émigré politics: "Soviet colonialism" and Bandung, 1955
After going into exile, Ferenc Nagy made anti-communist propaganda his work, through lectures, writing and émigré organizations. He was active in the Assembly of Captive European Nations and in emigre committees, and the papers preserved at Columbia University document his travels in Asia and his contacts with the American government.
His most ambitious undertaking was aimed at the Bandung Conference of 1955. He sought to draw Eastern Europe into the frame of decolonisation, pressing the concept of "Soviet colonialism" on the delegates of the participating states. After a tour of Japan and India in 1954, he laid out a three-month itinerary for 1955 covering the Philippines, Japan, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma and Ceylon, and he spent a long time in Karachi, where delegations travelling west to Bandung stopped.
Rather than attending the conference itself, he chose to move opinion outside the hall. In letters and telegrams to the Ceylonese prime minister, Sir John Kotelawala, he argued that while the Western powers had freed 600 million people in Asia, the Soviet Union had suppressed and colonised 100 million in Europe, and he proposed that free elections under international supervision would suffice to restore the freedom of the "Soviet colonies." The conference's final declaration condemned colonialism in all its manifestations, and neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was invited.
This work was an instrument of Cold War diplomacy and also served a personal purpose, return. He tried to go home during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but Austria, citing its neutrality, prevented him from crossing the border. In 1962, under the world campaign of the Assembly of Captive European Nations, he toured Asia again, and he gave close to four hundred lectures in the United States. Yet the achievement of his propaganda in raising the Eastern European question as an international issue and the extent to which it served American Cold War propaganda should be recorded together.