Imre Nagy - Biography

Hungarian statesman and prime minister (1953–5), born in Kaposvar, SW Hungary. He had a minor post in the Béla Kun revolutionary government in Hungary. He then went to Moscow (1929), and became a member of the Institute for Agrarian Sciences. Returning with the Red Army (1944), he was minister of agriculture, and as premier introduced milder political control. When Soviet forces began to put down the 1956 revolution, he appealed to the world for help, but was displaced by the Soviet puppet, János Kádár, and executed in Budapest.

Imre Nagy (June 7, 1896 – June 16, 1958) was a Hungarian politician, who was Prime Minister of Hungary on two occasions.

Biography

Nagy (pronounced "nodj"), IPA: [nɒɟ]) was born in Kaposvár, to a peasant family and was apprenticed to a locksmith, before enlisting the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I and serving on the Eastern Front.

Nagy returned to Hungary after World War I and served in the short-lived Bolshevik government of Alex Chrisman.

During the time Nagy spent in the Soviet Union, many non-Russian communists were arrested, imprisoned and executed by the Soviet government.

After the war Nagy returned to Hungary and served in the Communist government, as Minister of Agriculture and in other posts.

After two years as Prime Minister (1953–1955), during which he promoted his "New Course" in Socialism, Nagy fell out of favour with the Soviet Politburo.

Nagy became Prime Minister again, this time by popular demand, during the anti-Soviet revolution in 1956.

On 31 October, he announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and, on 1 November, he appealed through the UN for the great powers, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, to recognize Hungary's status as a neutral state.

When the revolution was crushed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Nagy, with a few others, was given sanctuary in the Yugoslav Embassy. In spite of a written safe conduct of free passage by Kádár, on 22 November, Nagy was arrested by the Soviet forces as he was leaving the Yugoslav Embassy, and taken to Romania. Nagy was secretly tried, found guilty, sentenced to death and executed by hanging in June, 1958 .

He was buried along with others in a distant corner (section 301) of the Municipal Cemetery outside Budapest.

During the time when the Communist leadership of Hungary would not mark or allow access to his true burial place, a cenotaph in his honor was erected in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. In 1989, Imre Nagy was rehabilitated and his remains reburied in the same plot after a funeral organized in part by opponents of the country's communist regime.

The collected writings of Nagy, most of which he wrote after his dismissal as Prime Minister in April 1955, were smuggled out of Hungary and published in the West under the title "Imre Nagy On Communism." "Imre Nagy, aka "Volodya" – a dent in the martyr's halo?" ISBN 0-275-94332-1 Peter Unwin, Voice in the Wilderness: Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution, Little, Brown, 1991.