54 Facts About Imre Nagy

Imre Nagy was a Hungarian communist politician who served as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic from 1953 to 1955.

In 1956 Nagy became leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet-backed government, for which he was sentenced to death and executed two years later.

Imre Nagy was a committed communist from soon after the Russian Revolution, and through the 1920s he engaged in underground party activity in Hungary.

Imre Nagy returned to Hungary shortly before the end of World War II, and served in various offices as the Hungarian Working People's Party took control of Hungary in the late 1940s and the country entered the Soviet sphere of influence.

Imre Nagy served as Interior Minister of Hungary from 1945 to 1946.

Imre Nagy became prime minister in 1953 and attempted to relax some of the harshest aspects of Matyas Rakosi's Stalinist regime, but was subverted and eventually forced out of the government in 1955 by Rakosi's continuing influence as General Secretary of the MDP.

Imre Nagy remained popular with writers, intellectuals, and the common people, who saw him as an icon of reform against the hard-line elements in the Soviet-backed regime.

The outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution on 23 October 1956 saw Imre Nagy elevated to the position of Prime Minister on 24 October as a central demand of the revolutionaries and common people.

On 16 June 1958, Imre Nagy was tried and executed for treason alongside his closest allies, and his body was buried in an unmarked grave.

Imre Nagy was born prematurely on 7 June 1896 in the town of Kaposvar in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, to a small-town family of peasant origin.

Imre Nagy's father, Jozsef Nagy, was a Lutheran and a carriage driver for the lieutenant-general of Somogy county.

Imre Nagy was an unskilled worker for the rest of his life.

In 1904 Imre Nagy's family moved to Pecs before returning to Kaposvar the following year.

Imre Nagy attended a gymnasium in Kaposvar from 1907 to 1912, performing poorly.

Imre Nagy apprenticed as a locksmith in a small metalworking firm in Kaposvar, before moving to a factory for agricultural machinery in Losonc in northern Hungary in 1912.

Imre Nagy returned to Kaposvar in 1913 and was given a journeyman's certificate as a metal fitter in 1914.

Imre Nagy abandoned the job in the summer of 1914 and became a clerk at a lawyer's office, while simultaneously attending a commercial high school in Kaposvar, where his student performance was good.

Imre Nagy reported for duty at the 17th Royal Hungarian Honved Infantry Regiment in May 1915, after the end of the school year and before he had graduated.

Imre Nagy was wounded in the leg by shrapnel and taken prisoner by the Imperial Russian Army during the Brusilov Offensive in Galicia on 29 July 1916.

Imre Nagy fought in the ranks of the Red Army from February to September 1918 during the Russian Civil War.

Imre Nagy escaped captivity and spent the period until February 1920 holding odd jobs in White-controlled territory near Lake Baikal.

Imre Nagy helped to build up the socialist movement in his hometown, to his parents' disapproval.

Imre Nagy became secretary of the MSZDP's local branch in 1924.

Imre Nagy was expelled from the party for advocating revolution and was placed under police surveillance.

Imre Nagy was successful in gaining 700 voters for the MSZMP Kaposvar parliamentary candidate, one of the party's few successes in the countryside west of Budapest.

The MSZMP in Kaposvar was prohibited and Imre Nagy was fired from his insurance job in February 1927 and arrested on 27 February.

Imre Nagy was arrested again in December 1927 for three days and was called to Vienna by the KMP, arriving in March 1928.

Imre Nagy became head of the KMP's agrarian section and was sent back to Hungary in September 1928 under a false identity to build up underground communist networks.

Imre Nagy's efforts were largely a failure, his largest successes being the publishing of three issues of a small journal and his avoidance of arrest.

Imre Nagy rejoined the Communist Party, becoming a Soviet citizen.

Imre Nagy was engaged in agricultural research at the International Agrarian Institute for six years, but worked in the Hungarian section of the Comintern.

Imre Nagy was expelled from the party on 8 January 1936 and worked for the Soviet Statistical Service from the summer of 1936 onward.

Under the codename "Volodia", Imre Nagy served the NKVD secret police as an informer from 1933 to 1941.

The support that Imre Nagy received from the Soviet leadership after the Second World War was to some extent a result of his loyal service as a foreigner and denouncer to the NKVD.

Imre Nagy was the Minister of Agriculture in the government of Bela Miklos de Dalnok, delegated by the Hungarian Communist Party.

Imre Nagy was Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary from 1947 to 1949, a largely ceremonial position.

Imre Nagy was deprived of his Hungarian Central Committee, Politburo, and all other Party functions and, on 18 April 1955, he was sacked as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

Imre Nagy feared that the demonstration was a provocation by Gero and Hegedus to frame him as inciting rebellion and to crack down on the opposition.

The decision to call in Soviet forces had already been made by Gero and outgoing Prime Minister Andras Hegedus the previous night, but many suspected that Imre Nagy had signed the order.

Imre Nagy negotiated a ceasefire with the Soviets, which came into effect at 12:15 and fighting began to die down across the city and country.

Imre Nagy announced the dissolution of the AVH and his intention to negotiate the full withdrawal of Soviet troops from the city.

Imre Nagy supported the creation of a National Guard, a force of combined soldiers and armed civilians to maintain order amidst the chaos of the Revolution.

Imre Nagy began to meet and negotiated with several representatives of the armed groups that day, as well as the representatives of the workers' councils that had been formed over the course of the previous week.

Erno Gero and the other Stalinist hard-liners had left for the Soviet Union, and Imre Nagy's government announced its intent to restore a multi-party system based on the coalition parties from 1945.

Imre Nagy did not intend a full return to multi-party liberal democracy but a limited one within a socialist framework, and was willing to allow the function of the pre-1948 coalition parties.

Imre Nagy protested this action to Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov; the latter replied that the new troops were only there to cover the full withdrawal and protect Soviet citizens living in Hungary.

Imre Nagy made a dramatic announcement to the country and the world about this operation.

In prison, Imre Nagy was object of continuous tortures of part of officials.

Imre Nagy was secretly tried, found guilty, sentenced to death and executed by hanging in June 1958.

Imre Nagy was buried, along with his co-defendants, in the prison yard where the executions were carried out and years later was removed to a distant corner of the New Public Cemetery, Budapest, face-down, and with his hands and feet tied with barbed wire.

In 1989, Imre Nagy was rehabilitated and his remains reburied on the 31st anniversary of his execution in the same plot after a funeral organised in part by the democratic opposition to the country's Stalinist regime.

The occasion of Imre Nagy's funeral was an important factor in the end of the communist government in Hungary.

On 28 December 2018, a popular statue of Imre Nagy inaugurated in 1996 was removed from central Budapest to a less central location, in order to make way to a reconstructed memorial to the victims of the 1919 Red Terror that originally stood in the same place from 1934 to 1945, during the Miklos Horthy's pro-Nazi regime.

Imre Nagy did not object to his daughter's romance and eventual marriage to a Protestant minister, attending their religious wedding ceremony in 1946 without Politburo permission.