People of the Revolution and the USSR

Independent Smallholders' Party (FKGP) Agrarianism and peasant parties 1889–1961 ○ Imprisoned after 1956, freed 1959

The Reformed pastor-president who declared neutrality before Soviet tanks

At a press conference on November 1, 1956, asked about the likelihood of a new Soviet assault: "Such a tragedy is humanly impossible… it will never take place."

A Reformed pastor who became the face of Hungary's post-war democracy as founder and leader of the Independent Smallholders' Party. After his party's landslide victory, he served as prime minister (1945–46) and was elected the republic's first president, but communist salami tactics forced his resignation in 1948 on fabricated treason charges against his son-in-law; he spent the next eight years under house arrest. In October 1956 he joined Imre Nagy's revolutionary government as minister of state and was present at the November 1 cabinet meeting that voted unanimously to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and declare neutrality. Arrested after the crushing of the uprising, he was sentenced to six years and amnestied in 1959; the Supreme Court annulled his conviction in 1989.

Hungary state institutions Agrarianism and peasant parties 1903–1979 → Died

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.

Hungary state institutions Agrarianism and peasant parties 1908–1959 ○ Natural causes

The Smallholders' general secretary whose Soviet abduction triggered his party's destruction

Arrested, he declared: "I took no part in the conspiracy, I feel no guilt in it; had I done so I would have betrayed my life's work."

A peasant politician of peasant stock who, with only four years of elementary schooling, joined the Smallholders in 1933 and rose by 1945 to general secretary of post-war Hungary's largest party. As agriculture minister in the Tildy and Nagy governments he drove the break-up of the great estates and the land reform, and defended his party's independence against Rákosi's salami tactics. When parliament refused to lift his immunity in February 1947, Soviet forces arrested him on fabricated espionage charges and carried him off to the gulag, and the abduction became the trigger for Ferenc Nagy's resignation and the dismantling of the Smallholders. He returned in 1955, served as agriculture minister in Imre Nagy's revolutionary government in 1956, and after the suppression cooperated with the Kádár regime until his death in 1959.