Imre Nagy

Biography

Imre Nagy was born in Kaposvár in 1896 to a family of peasant origin and trained as a locksmith and metal fitter. Drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, he was wounded and captured by the Russians in 1916. In Siberian captivity he turned to Marxism, joined the Bolsheviks and fought briefly in the Red Army before returning to Hungary, where he did underground communist work in the 1920s.

In 1930 he moved to the Soviet Union, took Soviet citizenship and spent years in agricultural research at the International Agrarian Institute in Moscow; he also informed for the NKVD from 1933 to 1941. Returning to Hungary near the end of the Second World War, he became minister of agriculture in the provisional government of 1944-1945 and carried out a land redistribution that made him popular with the peasantry. He then served as interior minister, speaker of the National Assembly and a member of the party Politburo.

As prime minister from July 1953, Nagy pursued a 'New Course' that eased the harshest features of Mátyás Rákosi's Stalinist rule, but Rákosi's faction stripped him of his party functions and removed him as premier in April 1955. When the revolution broke out on 23 October 1956, he was brought back as prime minister. His government admitted non-communist ministers, dissolved the ÁVH secret police and on 1 November announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.

After the Soviet invasion of 4 November, Nagy took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy; lured out on 22 November, he was arrested and deported to Romania. He was later tried in secret by János Kádár's government and hanged in Budapest on 16 June 1958. His rehabilitation and reburial on 16 June 1989, attended by some 200,000 people, became a landmark in the end of communist rule in Hungary.