Imre Nagy

• 1. Introduction

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  Imre Nagy was hanged in secret on the 16th of June 1958, and the Hungarian government waited until after he was dead to tell anyone. He had been Prime Minister twice. He had led his country's most dramatic act of resistance against Soviet rule. And yet his body was buried face-down in a prison yard, his hands and feet bound with barbed wire, in an unmarked grave.

  How does a man who began his life as the son of a carriage driver in the town of Kaposvár end up at the centre of one of the Cold War's most consequential upheavals? What does it mean that the same man who served as a secret informer for Stalin's NKVD police later announced his country's withdrawal from the Soviet military alliance? And why did a quiet funeral thirty-one years after his death draw an estimated two hundred thousand people, and help bring down a government?

• 2. A Locksmith's Education

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  Nagy was born prematurely on the 7th of June 1896 in Kaposvár, a town in the Kingdom of Hungary. His father, József Nagy, drove carriages for the lieutenant-general of Somogy county. His mother, Rozália Szabó, worked as a maid for the same official's wife. They were not wealthy. József attempted to build the family a house beginning in 1907, but lost his job in 1911 and had to sell it.

  Nagy's schooling followed a similarly uneven path. He attended a gymnasium in Kaposvár from 1907 to 1912, but performed poorly enough that the institution cancelled his tuition. He apprenticed as a locksmith in a small metalworking firm, then moved to a factory for agricultural machinery in the northern Hungarian town of Losonc in 1912. Back in Kaposvár the following year, he earned a journeyman's certificate as a metal fitter in 1914.

  Then came the war. Nagy was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in December 1914. He reported to the 17th Royal Hungarian Honvéd Infantry Regiment in May 1915, and after three months of basic training in Székesfehérvár, his unit shipped out to the Italian Front in August 1915. He was wounded in the leg at the Third Battle of the Isonzo. After recovering, he trained as a machine gunner and was sent east. On the 29th of July 1916, Russian forces captured him during the Brusilov Offensive in Galicia. The journey that followed took him from a field hospital, to Darnitsa, then to Ryazan, and finally by train to Siberia.

• 3. From Siberia to the Underground

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  Near Lake Baikal, at a camp called Berezovka, Nagy joined a Marxist discussion group. It was the beginning of a political transformation that would define the next four decades of his life. In 1918 he joined the Communist Party of the Foreign Workers of Siberia and took up arms in the Russian Civil War, fighting in Red Army ranks from February to September 1918.

  Controversy has swirled ever since over what his unit did during those months. Some sources, including the document sometimes called the Yurovsky Document, allege that Nagy's unit was assigned to guard the former Russian Imperial Family in Yekaterinburg. Some historians have speculated that he was personally present at the Romanov execution. The history professor Ivan Plotnikov of the Ural State University, however, concluded through his research that the firing squad was composed of specific named individuals, a group consisting almost entirely of ethnic Russians with no clear place for Nagy among them. The question remains contested and has contributed to his divisive reputation in modern Hungary.

  Nagy was eventually captured by the Czechoslovak Legion in early September 1918, escaped, and spent the following year doing odd jobs in White-controlled territory near Lake Baikal. When the Red Army reached Irkutsk on the 7th of February 1920, his war was over. He became a candidate member of the Russian Communist Party on the 12th of February 1920 and a full member that May, then clerked for the Cheka secret police before being sent back to Hungary.

  In April 1921, the Hungarian Communist Party dispatched Nagy along with 277 other Hungarian communists to build underground networks in a country that had banned the party since 1919. He arrived in Kaposvár in late May. His efforts over the following years were, by most measures, modest. He helped organise local socialist activity, became secretary of a Social Democratic branch in 1924, was expelled for advocating revolution, and was arrested more than once. He married Mária Égető on the 28th of November 1925. His largest concrete achievement during this period was gaining seven hundred voters for a left-wing parliamentary candidate in Kaposvár, described as one of the party's few successes outside Budapest.

• 4. NKVD Informer, Agricultural Thinker

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  Nagy arrived in Moscow in February 1930 after traveling through Vienna. He rejoined the Communist Party and took Soviet citizenship. For six years he worked at the International Agrarian Institute, where his long-standing interest in land policy took a more academic form. He also worked in the Hungarian section of the Comintern.

  The darker chapter came quietly and officially. Under the codename "Volodia", Nagy served Stalin's NKVD secret police as an informer from 1933 to 1941. The NKVD rated him a "qualified agent, who shows great initiative and an ability to approach people." His files were later described as contributing to the support he received from Soviet leadership after the Second World War. He was expelled from the party on the 8th of January 1936 and spent time working for the Soviet Statistical Service, but his ties to Soviet intelligence remained.

  The NKVD work sat in deep tension with the image he would later project. His written reflections on Marxism, mostly composed after his political fall from grace in 1955, described the ideology as a "science that cannot remain static" and attacked the "rigid dogmatism" of Stalinist monopoly. His collected writings were smuggled out of Hungary and published in the West in 1957 under the title On Communism: In Defense of the New Course. The gap between his years as a Soviet denouncer and his later reputation as an anti-Stalinist reformer is one of the more uncomfortable features of his legacy, and historians have not resolved it cleanly.

• 5. Minister of Land and Power

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  Nagy returned to Hungary before the end of the Second World War. His first major post was Minister of Agriculture in the government of Béla Miklós de Dálnok, where he carried out land redistribution among the peasant population. Among Hungary's rural poor, this won him a broad and durable following that no subsequent turn in his career entirely erased.

  In the next government, led by Tildy, he served as Minister of Interior. During this period he played an active role in the expulsion of the Hungarian Germans. He later served as Speaker of the National Assembly from 1947 to 1949, a largely ceremonial post. As the Hungarian Working People's Party consolidated power in the late 1940s, Nagy moved through various roles in the new communist apparatus.

  In 1951, alongside the rest of the Politburo, he signed the document ordering the arrest of János Kádár, who was then tried in a show trial and sentenced to life in prison. Kádár's path and Nagy's would intersect again with devastating consequences. Nagy became Chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1953, the position of de facto Prime Minister, and launched what he called a "New Course" in socialism, attempting to loosen some of the most punishing features of Mátyás Rákosi's Stalinist rule. Rákosi, who called himself "Stalin's greatest disciple," retained his position as General Secretary and eventually outmanoeuvred Nagy. On the 18th of April 1955, Nagy was stripped of all party and government roles.

• 6. The Revolution and Its Aftermath

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  After Nikita Khrushchev's February 1956 speech denouncing Stalin's crimes, pressure on Rákosi intensified. The Soviets forced him to resign on the 18th of July 1956 and leave for the Soviet Union, replacing him with Ernő Gerő. The switch satisfied almost no one. A debating club called the Petőfi Circle, established by the DISZ student youth union, became a focal point for dissent, with speakers openly demanding Nagy's return to leadership. Nagy himself did not attend these meetings, but his associates Miklós Vásárhelyi and Géza Losonczy kept him closely informed of the popular sentiment expressed there.

  On the 23rd of October 1956, a massive demonstration swept through Budapest. Students from the Technical University had drawn up sixteen policy demands, the third of which called explicitly for Nagy's return to the premiership. He was reinstated as Chairman of the Council of Ministers in the early hours of the 24th of October. He was also largely powerless that first day. The decision to call in Soviet forces had already been made the night before by Gerő and the outgoing Prime Minister András Hegedüs. Many Hungarians mistakenly believed Nagy had signed the order. His declaration of martial law and offer of amnesty to rebels who disarmed deepened public suspicion.

  Over the following days, Nagy changed course. On the 28th of October, he successfully blocked a Soviet assault on rebel strongholds at the Corvin Cinema and the Kilián Barracks, then negotiated a ceasefire that took effect at 12:15. That afternoon, broadcasting on the radio, he called the uprising a "national democratic movement" and announced the dissolution of the ÁVH secret police. By the 30th of October, his reformist faction held full control of the Hungarian government.

  On the night of the 31st of October, Soviet troops began crossing back into Hungary, contradicting their public declaration of willingness to withdraw. Nagy protested to Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov, who replied that the new troops were only there to facilitate withdrawal and protect Soviet citizens. Sceptical, Nagy announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact on the 1st of November and appealed to the United Nations for recognition of Hungary's neutrality. Meanwhile, Khrushchev had traveled to Warsaw Pact capitals and met with Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, who advised selecting the then-General Secretary János Kádár as Hungary's new leader. On the 4th of November, the USSR launched what it called "Operation Whirlwind." Nagy ordered the Hungarian Army not to resist, and fled to the Yugoslav Embassy.

  On the 22nd of November, despite a written guarantee of safe passage signed by Kádár, Soviet forces arrested Nagy as he left the embassy. He was taken to Snagov in Romania. He was later returned to Hungary, secretly tried for treason by Kádár's government, and hanged in June 1958. American journalist John Gunther called the sequence of events leading to his death "an episode of unparalleled infamy." Nagy's body was buried face-down in the prison yard, then later moved to a corner of the New Public Cemetery in Budapest. A memorial bell placed beside the grave carries a Latin inscription: "Vivos voco / Mortuos plango / Fulgura frango" - "I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the thunderbolts."

• 7. Rehabilitation and Memory

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  For years, the Hungarian government forbade any commemoration of Nagy's death and blocked access to his burial place. A cenotaph in his honour was erected at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris on the 16th of June 1988, marking the thirtieth anniversary of his execution.

  The following year, on the 31st anniversary of his execution, Nagy was formally rehabilitated. His remains and those of other 1956 figures were reburied with full honours, drawing an estimated two hundred thousand people. The occasion served as a public referendum on forty years of communist rule. A young politician named Viktor Orbán delivered his first major speech to the Hungarian public at the ceremony.

  Thirty years later, in December 2018, a statue of Nagy that had stood in central Budapest since its inauguration in 1996 was removed to a less prominent location. The stated reason was to make way for a reconstructed memorial to the victims of the 1919 Red Terror, a monument that had originally occupied the same site during the Miklós Horthy era. Opposition politicians accused Orbán's government of historical revisionism. Supporters argued the move was simply restoring the pre-war cityscape. The dispute over where, and whether, to honour Imre Nagy has not ended. His daughter Erzsébet Nagy, who was born in 1927 and worked as a writer and translator, died in 2008, the same year the argument over her father's place in Hungarian memory began its latest chapter.