Imre Nagy

Imre Nagy was born in Kaposvár, Hungary, conscripted in the First World War, and taken prisoner by the Russian army in 1916. He met the revolution in the prisoner-of-war camps of Siberia, joined the Bolsheviks after 1917, fought in the civil war as a Red Guard, and lived the rest of his life a communist. After underground work back in Hungary he emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1930 and worked in Moscow as a theorist of agrarian questions. Returning at the end of 1944 with the Red Army, he executed the land reform of March 1945 as minister of agriculture in the provisional government. The reform broke up the great estates and gave land to more than six hundred thousand peasant families, and it made him beloved in the villages as "the land-distributing minister".

In June 1953, after Stalin's death, the new Moscow leadership summoned the Hungarian leaders to the Kremlin, sharply criticized Rákosi's forced industrialization and mass reprisals, and put Nagy forward as prime minister. Nagy's "New Course" closed the internment camps, amnestied political prisoners, allowed peasants to leave the collectives, and shifted weight to consumer goods and living standards. Hungarian society caught its breath.

But when Malenkov was pushed aside in Moscow in early 1955, Rákosi counterattacked. Nagy was removed as premier and expelled from the party, yet refused self-criticism and wrote essays defending socialist legality and roads to socialism suited to each country's conditions. The Nagy of these years was not a dissident but a communist demanding reform from within the party, and his home became the gathering point of the party intellectuals who wanted it.

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.