György Marosán

Marosán György
Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSzMP) Marxism–Leninism Hungary Hungary 1908–1992 ○ Natural causes

Ex-social democrat who pushed the 1948 merger and, with "From today we shoot", became the face of the post-1956 reprisals

A baker by trade, Marosán joined the Hungarian Social Democratic Party in 1927 and led the food workers' union. As party secretary after 1945 he drove the merger with the Communists and in 1948 announced the expulsion of the party's right wing. Arrested in 1950 and sentenced to death, he had the sentence commuted, was released in March 1956 and became a Political Committee member and deputy premier in July. On 23 October he demanded an order to fire, and he became minister of state in Kádár's Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government. Removed in 1962, he left the party in 1965.

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

1956: the minister of state who demanded the order to fire

György Marosán was arrested under Rákosi in 1950 and sentenced to death, the sentence later commuted to life imprisonment; he was released on 29 March 1956, after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet party. He offered his services to the party leadership at once, and in July became a member of the Political Committee of the Hungarian Working People's Party and deputy premier.

At the Political Committee meeting of 23 October, joined by First Secretary Ernő Gerő, just back from Yugoslavia, and by János Kádár, he stood against everyone else in demanding not only that the planned student demonstration be banned but that the armed forces be given the order to fire. When control slipped from Gerő to Imre Nagy, Marosán was left out of the party leadership. But he took the side of Kádár, who had allied himself with the Soviets: in the cabinet of the Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government announced on 4 November he was minister of state, and he also sat on the Provisional Executive Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party.

In the restored regime he became its most aggressive politician. On 8 December at Salgótarján, having failed to impose his will on the delegation of the local workers' council, he declared "From today we shoot", making official the new government's policy of meeting mass protest with force. The volley fired at Salgótarján that day claimed 131 victims, and shootings followed in provincial towns over the next days. The political decision itself is held to have been Kádár's, not Marosán's. His removal in 1962 was read as the sign that the period of reprisals was over and the consolidation of the Kádár regime had begun.