Imre Nagy – A Communist Who Became a Symbol and Hero of the Anti-Communist Hungarian Revolution of 1956

Abstract

To understand Imre Nagy’s significance for the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, we must place him in a specific context. To assess why he made the decisions he made, we must consider the entirety of his life and work. He was no random street radical. Throughout his life, he was a committed Marxist who simply believed he could reform something that was irreformable. Through the course of events, he was placed in a position where he had to balance the demands of the protesters who had just overthrown his predecessor with those of the USSR. Imre Nagy served Soviet interests for decades. He spent his life serving a brutal, oppressive system, enforcing Moscow’s will at every turn. Working as an NKVD informant, he reported over 200 of his colleagues to the secret police. As Minister of the Interior, he participated in the brutal ethnic cleansing of German-speaking Hungarians and contributed to the dismantling of democratic institutions and traditional family structures that had existed in Hungary for centuries. He carried out collectivization, which devastated Hungarian agriculture and destroyed centuries-old rural communities. Imre Nagy exemplified the utopian pursuit of a model of “humanitarian socialism”, an artificial construct, an ideology that never existed and had no right to materialize. In this sense, Tibor Meray was right, when he wrote in his book about the Hungarian Prime Minister that: “Imre Nagy wanted to be a good communist and a good patriot, he wanted to be a good Hungarian and a sincere friend of the Soviet Union, and that was impossible”. In a sense, Imre Nagy exemplifies an astonishing transformation – from an orthodox communist apparatchik, Stalinist, informer, and Bolshevik agent with a highly inglorious past of imposing the communist yoke on Hungarian society – to the somewhat accidental, tragic, and heroic leader of the 1956 uprisings, elevated to a pedestal by movements of social resistance to the terror of communism. It is not without reason that Imre Nagy is described by right-wing politicians as a “Soviet man in Hungarian clothing”. His role in 1956 could not redeem decades of service to the oppressor. The culmination of this is the words of Victor Sebestyén, who summed up Imre Nagy’s fate by stating that “Imre Nagy died better than he lived”.