Imre Nagy

In his Moscow exile Imre Nagy became an agrarian expert, and as agriculture minister in 1945 he carried out the land reform. In 1948–49, however, he clashed with Rákosi and Gerő over the pace of collectivization, was branded an "opportunist" and pushed out of the Political Committee.

When a poor harvest and over-ambitious plans set off threshers' strikes and refusals to deliver quotas in the countryside in the summer of 1952, Nagy, then a deputy prime minister, proposed to the party Secretariat that free-market grain trading be allowed again. When eight Hungarian leaders were summoned to the Kremlin on 12 June 1953, he was the only one the Soviet leaders mentioned approvingly. Beria said Nagy's removal in 1949 had not been correct and was the first to name him for the premiership: loyal to the party, Hungarian, and knowledgeable about agriculture. Nagy traced the trouble to "separation from the masses" and pointed out that Rákosi, Gerő and Farkas decided many questions among themselves without the rest of the Secretariat. On 16 June his insistence on abolishing the kulak list was the only Hungarian proposal the Soviet side accepted in two days of talks. Both days survive in the record of the Moscow talks of June 1953 taken down by the Hungarian delegation.

At the Central Leadership meeting of 27–28 June, Nagy introduced the resolution and went further than his Soviet critics. The roots of the mistakes, he said, went much deeper than they appeared; economic policy had failed to apply the fundamental economic law of socialism, a constant rise in living standards, and could be called "an adventurist policy." He warned against "half-measures." The resolution itself, however, was not made public; the measures were announced only as the programme of a new government.

Elected prime minister on 4 July, Nagy gave a speech in Parliament that was broadcast across the country. He admitted that the raised targets of the five-year plan exceeded the country's strength, dropped the pursuit of industrial autarky, promised security of production and ownership to individual farms, and offered trade licences to private artisans. He pledged to end suspicion of the intelligentsia and administrative pressure on the churches, and to invest in elementary schools for "the hopes for the future, the little Hungarians" rather than in higher education. The weightiest passage admitted that courts, police and local councils had offended the people's sense of justice, and invoked legality four times. Rainer suggests it was the first speech by a communist leader since 1945 with which the majority of the country agreed.

After Beria's fall, when Rákosi revived the old slogans at the Budapest party activists' meeting of 11 July, Nagy went to the Soviet ambassador Kiselyov on 16 and 25 July to report opposition in the party apparatus and the leadership. The Soviet party soon asked the Hungarians for a progress report. The amnesty of 24 July remitted sentences of up to two years but excluded most political prisoners. Even so, by the autumn the internment camps and the Hortobágy deportation camp were closed, and members were allowed to leave agricultural cooperatives, under strict conditions.

Nagy explained the turn as a correction of an unjustifiably shortened people's-democratic transition. He did not mean to change the model, only to steer a development that had run too far back onto a slower but surer path. But as Rainer points out, hardly anything of the people's-democratic structure remained to return to.

On 8 January 1955, in the same Kremlin, the CPSU Presidium condemned Nagy's article of 20 October 1954 and his "new stage" as anti-party and backed Rákosi again. Voroshilov, Bulganin and Khrushchev each told him he had only two roads, with the party or against it. The speeches survive in the Hungarian minutes of the Presidium's criticism of Nagy in January 1955.

When a student demonstration in Budapest on October 23, 1956 swelled into a mass uprising, the party leadership called Nagy back to the premiership that night. For the next twelve days he struggled to set events on a constitutional track between the risen streets, the Soviet army, and a collapsing party apparatus. He redefined the uprising as a "national democratic movement", dissolved the political police, and formed a multi-party coalition government. As the Malin notes show, the Soviet Presidium leaned on October 30 toward negotiation and withdrawal, then reversed itself on October 31 amid the lynching of security men on Republic Square, the fear that the whole bloc might unravel, and the international storm of the Suez war. As Soviet forces re-entered, on November 1 Nagy declared neutrality, announced withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and appealed to the United Nations.

Operation Whirlwind began at dawn on November 4, and Nagy took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. He left it under a written promise of safe conduct, but was seized by Soviet forces and taken to Snagov in Romania. At a closed trial in Budapest in June 1958 he was sentenced to death. He maintained that his actions had been lawful, refused to petition for clemency, and said he entrusted the judgment of his case to history. Executed on June 16, 1958, he was buried without a marker, finally in plot 301 of the municipal cemetery.

Post-archive research has shown the trial to be a political trial driven by the restored Hungarian leadership and countenanced by Moscow. On June 16, 1989 Nagy was reburied before two hundred thousand people on Heroes' Square, and Hungary's Supreme Court fully rehabilitated him. 1956 was a tragedy that cannot be reduced to either side's Cold War myth. The Hungarian agrarian scholar who became a Bolshevik in a prisoner-of-war camp considered himself a socialist to the end, and his execution is recorded among the decisions that wounded the socialist movement itself most deeply.