János Kádár
János Kádár came back to Budapest in November 1956 behind the Soviet tanks that had crushed the revolution he had joined a week earlier, had Imre Nagy hanged, and then governed Hungary for thirty-two years as the most tolerable communist state in the bloc, on the principle that whoever was not against him was with him; he died in July 1989, three weeks after Nagy was reburied before a crowd of two hundred thousand, and the day the supreme court rehabilitated the man he had killed. He was born in Fiume in 1912, the illegitimate son of a soldier and a maid, was a typewriter mechanic and an illegal communist from 1931, and was in the underground party through the war. After 1945 he was minister of the interior, in which office he helped arrange the show trial of László Rajk, and in 1951 was arrested himself, tortured and jailed for three years; the experience is usually said to explain everything after. Freed in 1954, he was in Nagy's government of October 1956 and on 1 November announced the new party on the radio; on the same night he vanished to the Soviet embassy and reappeared on 4 November at Szolnok as head of a government the Red Army was installing. The reprisals took two years and some two hundred and thirty executions, Nagy's in June 1958 after a secret trial. Then the bargain: an amnesty in 1963, the New Economic Mechanism of 1968 that let prices and small enterprise work, shops with goods in them, passports for the West, a press that knew the limits, and no one asked to believe anything, which the West called goulash communism and Hungarians called the compromise. He sent troops to Czechoslovakia in 1968 with visible reluctance. By the 1980s the mechanism was running on Western loans and the debt was the largest per head in the bloc, and in May 1988 the party conference removed him to an honorary post and then from that. He died senile and, by the account of those near him, haunted by Nagy. His party dissolved itself three months later.
- Lived: 1912 CE – 1989 CE
- Nationality: Hungarian
- Roles: politician, party_leader
