Imre Nagy

Imre Nagy led the Hungarian government during the 1956 revolution, was hanged for it in secret, and was reburied thirty-one years later in front of a quarter of a million people. He was a communist of the founding generation: captured on the Russian front in the First World War, converted in captivity, and a Comintern official in Moscow through the 1930s, where he survived the purges and, as archives later showed, informed on other exiles. As agriculture minister after 1945 he ran the land reform. Made prime minister in 1953 after Stalin's death, he slowed collectivisation, released political prisoners and closed the internment camps, and was removed in 1955 for right deviation. The students who rose in October 1956 demanded his return, and he was brought back into a revolution moving faster than he was. In six days he abolished the one-party state, promised free elections, declared neutrality and withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. Soviet tanks returned on 4 November; he made a short radio broadcast and took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, left it under a written safe-conduct, and was seized at the door. He was tried in secret, hanged in June 1958, and buried face down in unconsecrated ground with his hands tied. His public reburial in June 1989 is the moment Hungarian communism is usually said to have ended. Some 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers died in the fighting, and about 200,000 people left the country. Janos Kadar, who had served in Nagy's cabinet, returned with the Soviet forces and governed for thirty-two years. The archives opened after 1989 showed Nagy's Moscow informing, which complicated the reburial considerably and changed nothing about how he died.

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