User:56osmunka/bios L-Z

Géza Losonczy ( 1917-1957)

Born at Érsekcsanád, Bács-Kiskun County, into the family of a Reformed Church minister, Losonczy studied Hungarian and French at Debrecen University after leaving school. He joined the March Front when still at university. While studying on a scholarship in France in 1939, he made contact with the Foreign Committee of the illegal communist party, which he joined. On his return, he became a journalist on the newspaper Népszava. He was arrested in 1940 and then placed under police surveillance. He completed his university studies in Budapest in 1941, took part in compiling the Christmas supplement of the Népszava, and in the following year, in establishing the Historical Memorial Committee. After the arrest of Ferenc Rózsa and Zoltán Schönherz in 1942, Losonczy went into hiding. In 1943, he and Ferenc Donáth jointly worded the memorandum of the Peace Party as the communist party was known at the time. He married Mária Haraszti in February 1945. In March that year, he became a senior staff member of the communist daily newspaper Szabad Nép. He was elected an alternate member of the Hungarian Communist Party Central Committee in 1946 and a member of Parliament in 1947. In December 1948, he was appointed a state secretary at the Prime Minister's Office, and from 1949 to 1951, he was political state secretary at the Ministry of Popular Education. However, he was arrested on trumped-up charges in 1951 and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. He was released in view of serious illness in the summer of 1954 and spent a year in hospital and sanatorium. In April 1955, he was rehabilitated. On his recovery, Losonczy became a senior journalist on the newspaper Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian Nation). Losonczy became a leading figure in the party opposition surrounding Imre Nagy. In 1955, he took part in organizing the writers' memorandum, and in 1956, he spoke at the press debate of the Petőfi Circle. Losonczy was co-opted into the party leadership at the overnight session [?& of the Central Committee] on October 23- 4, when he was elected an alternate member of the Political Committee. However, he and Donáth resigned by letter, in protest at the policy being pursued by the Central Committee. Again with Donáth, he demanded at the Central Committee meeting on October 26 that the party should cease to condemn the uprising and conduct negotiations on the main demands of the rebels. On October 30, he joined the Imre Nagy government as state minister, in charge of press and propaganda affairs. He was a member of the seven-man Steering Committee of the HSWP. He and Zoltán Tildy held the government's last press conference on November 3. On the following day, he took refuge in the Yugoslavia Embassy, and on November 22, he and the other members of the Imre Nagy group were arrested and transported to Romania. He was brought back to Budapest in mid-April 1957, and while he was being investigated, the lung disease he had contracted during his earlier imprisonment returned. Losonczy went on hunger strike and began to suffer disease of the nervous system. He would have stood trial as the second accused in the trial of Imre Nagy and his associates, but he died in unexplained circumstances while remanded in custody, before the trial began. ^[1]

Mikhail Sergeyevich Malinin ( 1899-1960)

Malinin joined the Soviet Red Army in 1919 and completed the Frunze Military Academy in 1933. He served in the 1939-40 Soviet-Finnish War, and in the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk and the capture of Berlin in the Second World War. From 1952 until his death, he was first deputy chief of staff of the Soviet Armed Forces, and from 1952 to 1956, an alternate member of the CPSU Central Committee. He and KGB chief Ivan Serov were despatched to Hungary with a Soviet military commission during the 1956 Revolution. ^[1]

György Marosán ( 1908-1992)

Marosán was born in Hosszúpályi, Hajdú-Bihar County, where his father was a Greek Catholic schoolmaster and choirmaster. However, he arrived in the Debrecen Orphanage in 1917. In the autumn of 1919, the Romanian occupation authorities sent him to Nagyvárad (Oradea) because he was of Romanian origin. There he became a baker's apprentice. In 1922, he joined the Labourers and Bakery Industry Trade Union, and in 1926, he moved to Budapest. In 1939, he became general secretary of the National Association of Food Workers, and in 1943, its president. He joined the Budapest leadership of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party in 1941. In 1942, he was among the founders of the Attila József Memorial Committee. He was arrested that summer but released in the autumn. In 1943, he became provincial organizing secretary of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party. Arrested again during the German occupation, Marosán was interned in Nagykanizsa. In August 1945, he became national secretary of the Social Democratic Party, later that year its leading secretary, and in February 1947, its deputy general secretary. He also headed the party's provincial department from 1945. Meanwhile he began a member of the Provisional National Assembly on April 2, 1945 and remained a member of Parliament until 1963. Marosán was one of the main instigators of the merger between the Hungarian Communist Party and the Social Democrats. On March 10, 1948, he became deputy chairman of the joint Political Committee and the joint Steering Committee. At the beginning of 1948, he received a decoration from Tito, which was later held against him in his trial. At the merging congress of the two left-wing parties, Marosán was elected third secretary and made a member of the Central Committee, the Political Committee, the Steering Committee and the Secretariat. From August 18, 1948 to July 1, 1949, Marosán was also first secretary of the Budapest HWP Committee, and from June 11, 1949 to August 4, 1950, minister of light industry. He was appointed a member of the Economic Council in 1949. At the Central Committee meeting in May 1950, he was put in charge of the Administrative Department. However, he was arrested at the beginning of July 1950 and sentenced to death, although the sentence was then altered, without a hearing, to life imprisonment. Marosán was freed on March 29, 1956 and rehabilitated three months later. The Central Committee meeting of July 18-21, 1956 elected him onto the Political Committee. He was a deputy prime minister from July 30, 1956 to October 27. At the meeting of the HWP Political Committee on October 23, 1956, Marosán had pressed for an order to fire to be given, citing a danger of counterrevolution. On October 28, he was dropped from the inner circle of the leadership, and on October 31, arrested by the Széna ter group of insurgents for a short while. On November 2, Marosán went to the Soviet military headquarters at Tököl. He became a member of the Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government <Kádár government> and on November 7, a member of the HSWP Provisional Executive Committee. At the February 1957 meeting of the HSWP Central Committee, he was elected administrative Central Committee secretary and deputy to János Kádár. Marosán was also state minister from February 28, 1957 and January 15, 1960. On April 30, 1957, he became chairman of the Provisional Executive Committee of the Budapest HSWP Committee and then secretary of the latter. In 1962, Marosán expressed a dissenting, 'ultra-left' opinion on a draft party resolution on quashing illegal trials of labour-movement members prosecuted in the early 1950s. This brought him into conflict with Kádár. Marosán addressed a letter to the Central Committee of the HSWP, which responded at its meeting on October 11- 12, 1962 by recalling him from membership of the Political Committee, relieving him of his position as a Central Committee secretary and excluding him from Central Committee membership. In November 1964, he took part in the festive procession as a simple party member, after which there were attacks on him from within the party. He resigned from the HSWP in 1965 but rejoined in 1972. In 1989, he opposed the dissolution of the HSWP and formation of the social democratic Hungarian Socialist Party, took part in the formation of a new communist HSWP instead. ^[1]

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov ( 1890-1986)

Born in Kukaida, Russia, Molotov studied at St Petersburg Technical College. He took part in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and held various state and party offices from 1918 onwards. From 1930 to 1941, he was prime minister, and then deputy or first deputy prime minister until 1957. At the same time, he served as foreign minister from 1939 to 1949 and again from 1953 until June 1956. In 1956-7, he was minister of state supervision. He was a member of the CPSU Central Committee from 1921 to 1957 and its Presidium from 1926 to 1957. In June 1957, he was expelled from the leadership after an attempted coup against Nikita Khrushchev. He then served as ambassador to Mongolia and in 1960-62 as the Soviet permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. He was expelled from the party in 1962, but readmitted in 1984. ^[1]

Imre Nagy ( 1896-1958)

Born in Kaposvár, Imre Nagy's father was a farm labourer on a manor, a county employee and a telegraph worker. After eight years of schooling, Nagy trained as a fitter. He was conscripted into the army in 1915 and taken prisoner by the Russians in the following summer. He joined the Red Guard in June 1918 and fought in the Russian Civil War. He joined the Bolshevik party in February 1920. On his return to Hungary in March 1921, Nagy worked as a clerk with an insurance company. He was active in the local branch of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party, but was expelled in 1925. He then became a founder member of the communist HSWP. After being imprisoned for a short while in 1927, he emigrated to Vienna, but returned to Hungary secretly several times. In the communist party, he became responsible for recruitment among the peasantry and head of the Rural Department. He also edited the Parasztok Lapja (Peasants' Paper). Nagy was criticized for right-wing deviations at the 2nd Congress of the Hungarian Communist Party, held in 1930 in Moscow. In that year, he went to live in the Soviet Union, working at the Comintern Institute of Agricultural Sciences, at the Central Statistical Office of the Soviet Union, and at Radio Moscow, where he was editor of the Hungarian broadcasts from 1939 to 1944. Nagy published several agricultural studies during his years in Moscow. In 1936, he was expelled from the Hungarian party, but he was reinstated in 1938. He returned to Hungary in November 1944 as a member of the Hungarian Communist Party leadership, joining the committee that was preparing for the Provisional National Assembly. He became a member of the legislature in December 1944 and then agriculture minister in the provisional government. In the coalition government that took office on March 20, 1946, he was interior minister. Thereafter he became a secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party Central Committee, and from 1947 to 1949, speaker of Parliament. He was a Central Committee member from 1944 to 1949 and a Political Committee member from 1945 to 1949. He returned to the Political Committee in 1951-5. Nagy was critical of the rapid collectivization of agriculture and of the persecution of the kulaks. Although he exercised self-criticism, he was dropped from the leading bodies of the party in 1949. He then taught at the Hungarian Agricultural University until the summer of 1950, when he was appointed head of the Administrative Department of the HWP Central Committee. He became a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1950 and a full member in 1953-5. In December 1950, he was appointed minister of food, and in January 1953, minister of collection (in charge of procurement and centralization of agricultural produce from the countryside). In November 1952, he became a deputy prime minister, and on July 4, 1953, prime minister, after an initiative by the Soviet Union. He then tried to implement a New Course, a comprehensive programme of economic and political reforms, but on April 18, 1955, he was dismissed, and on December 3 of that year, excluded from the communist party. However, he refused to renounce his views. He was considered the leading politician in the party opposition, opposed to the Stalinists. He was readmitted into the HWP on October 13, 1956, when his academic status was also restored. On October 23, 1956, he was brought back into the leadership of the party, in response to the demands of the demonstrators, and became prime minister again. As such, he tried to gain acceptance from the HWP and the Soviet Union for the main demands of the revolution, while toning down the demands he considered excessive. Identifying ever more closely with the will of the public, Nagy proclaimed a ceasefire, called for the departure of the Soviet troops, and declared the reintroduction of a multi-party system. In response to the entry of further Soviet troops into the country, in spite of the ceasefire, Nagy declared on November 1 Hungary' s neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. He took refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy at dawn on November 4. On November 22, he left the building with a safe conduct from the Kádár government, but was arrested by the Soviets and deported to Romania. He was arrested again in Snagov on April 14, 1957 and taken to Budapest. In line with a resolution of December 21, 1957 by the Central Committee of the HSWP, Nagy was prosecuted on political charges. The trial, having been postponed several times, commenced before the Council of the People' s Court of the Supreme Court, with Ferenc Vida in the chair. On June 15, 1958, Nagy was sentenced to death for initiating and leading a conspiracy and for treason. He rejected the charges throughout the proceedings and was not even prepared to put forward a substantive defence. The sentence was carried out in the courtyard of the National Prison on June 16. He was buried in an unmarked grave on the same site. His body was removed in 1961 to Parcel 301 of the main public cemetery in Budapest. However, pressure from democratic forces led to its exhumation in the spring of 1989. Nagy and his fellow martyrs were reburied in Parcel 301 on June 16, 1989, after a funeral ceremony that became symbolic of the democratic transformation that Hungary was undergoing at that time. ^[1]

István Örkény ( )

Born in Budapest, the son of a pharmacist, Örkény studied chemical engineering after leaving school and then turned to pharmacy, graduating from Budapest University in 1934. He travelled to London in 1938 and lived in Paris from casual work in 1939. In 1940, he continued his studies at Budapest Technical University, where he graduated in chemical engineering. He was sent to the front on labour service in 1942 and taken prisoner of war in 1943. On his return to Hungary in 1946, he worked as a drama editor for a theatre company. In 1954, he began working as an outside editor for the Szépirodalmi (Literary) publishing company. Although Örkény attempted to meet the requirements of the officially sanctioned Socialist Realism, his short story 'Violet Ink' was attacked by the ideologue József Révai. Örkény took part in the opposition meetings of writers. On September 17, 1956, at the general assembly of the Writers' Union where the first secret elections were held since 1948, Örkény was among the party and non-party opposition writers elected onto a new board. When the revolution broke out, he phrased a statement condemning the role hitherto played by the radio, in which the following sentence became a household word: 'We have lied by night, we have lied by day, we have lied on every wavelength.' He took part in workers' council meetings with Tibor Déry. On November 10, he and fellow writers Déry, Gyula Illyés, László Benjámin and Zoltán Zelk sought asylum at the Polish Embassy in Budapest, but they were only offered temporary refuge and left the building after a few hours. As a member and interpreter for the Writers' Union delegation, he met with K.P.S. Menon, the Indian ambassador in Budapest, whom they sought as an intermediary between Hungary and the Soviet Union. He and five associates signed an open letter of self-criticism, which appeared in September 1957, in the first issue of the literary journal Kortárs (Contemporary), covering their conduct before and during the revolution. However, he was squeezed out of the literary scene in 1957 and subjected to several publication bans. Örkény worked from 1958 to 1963 at the United Pharmaceutical and Nutriment Factory. In the second half of the 1960s, his books were allowed to appear again and his plays were performed. In 1966, his book The Princess of Jerusalem appeared, including his first cycle of 'one-minute' stories and his novella 'Cat's Play'. His absurd drama The Tót Family was a huge success in 1967. ^[1]

László Rajk ( 1909-1949)

The son of a shoemaker, Rajk was born in Székelyudvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc, now in Romania) and completed his secondary-school studies there and in Budapest and Nyíregyháza. He entered Budapest University in 1927 to study Hungarian and French, but left for France in 1928. On his return in 1930, he joined in the illegal communist movement, becoming a member of the communist youth organization Kimsz and the Hungarian Communist Party in 1931. He was arrested for his political activity several times. Unable to continue his studies, he began to work in 1933 as a building worker. He was one of the organizers and leaders of the building-workers' strike of 193, for which he was deported from Hungary. In 1936, he was sent by the party to Prague, and from there to Spain in 1937, where he took part in the Civil War. He was political commissar of the Hungarian brigade of the International Brigade and was seriously wounded in the fighting. (He was accused in Spain of being a Trotskyist and only cleared himself with Comintern in 1941.) When the Spanish Republic fell, Rajk fled to Spain, where he was interned. Freed in September 1944 (with false papers provided by the Hungarian Communist Party), he became a secretary of the Central Committee, a leader of the Hungarian Front, and one of the main organizers and directors of the resistance movement. He was arrested by Arrow-Cross men in December 1944, but managed to disguise who he was, so that his elder brother, Endre, an Arrow-Cross state secretary, could save him from execution. He was taken to Sopronkőhida and then to Germany, from where he returned to Hungary on May 13, 1945. He then joined in national politics, becoming a member of the leading bodies of the Hungarian Communist Party and a member of the Provisional National Assembly. From May to November 1945, he was secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party Budapest Committee, and from then until March 1946, deputy general secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party. He served as interior minister from March 1946 to August 1948, during which time the efforts to break up the institutions of a civil society began. He banned or dissolved numerous religious, national and democratic institutions and organizations on the pretext of acting against fascist and reactionary groups. Rajk also took part in organizing the first show trials, unveiled the so-called 'blue-chit' election fraud, and acted mercilessly against any forces shown or imagined to be anti-Stalinist. This made him one of the most consistent perpetrators of the Rákosi-ite 'salami tactics'. Meanwhile, power rivalry developed with Gábor Péter and Mihály Farkas. This led to him being moved from the Interior Ministry to the post of foreign minister in August 1948. On May 30, 1949, he was arrested on fabricated charges. His trial involved almost a hundred sentences, including the subsidiary trials, and received huge publicity, with radio broadcasts of the public sessions. The so-called Rajk Trial marked the beginning of the Soviet-bloc campaign against Tito' s Yugoslavia. The accused were tortured and subjected to psychological terror. (Among those who persuaded Rajk to take the role of a traitor, in the interest of proletarian power, was his friend János Kádár.) On September 24, he was sentenced to death by the People's Court for crimes and treachery against the people (for spying). He was executed on October 15, 1949 and rehabilitated in 1955. His reburial in the Kerepesi Cemetery on October 6, 1956 turned into a demonstration against the Rákosi system. ^[1]

(1892-1971)

Born into a shopkeeper's family in Ada (now in Serbia), Rákosi completed secondary school in 1910 and then studied at the Keleti Commercial Academy, where he received a diploma in 1912. From 1912 to 1914, he was a trainee with international commercial firms in Hamburg and London. He joined the Social Democratic Party in 1910, and began to take part in the Galilei Circle in 1911. On his return to Hungary in 1914, he volunteered for military service. He was sent to the eastern front early in 1915, where he was taken prisoner by the Russians. He escaped early in 1918 and returned to Hungary, where he became a training officer with an infantry regiment stationed at Szabadka (Subotica). In the same year, he became a founder member of the Hungarian Communist Party. As a member of the party's leadership, he was arrested on February 20, 1919, but freed on March 21. When the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed, Rákosi was appointed deputy commercial commissar and became a member of the Revolutionary Governing Soviet. On April 3, he became a member of the board directing the People' s Commissariat for Social Production and the Supreme People's Economic Soviet, as a people' s commissar. However, at the end of April, he was sent to the southern front as a political commissar. On June 24, he was elected a member of the Central Control Commission of the Governing Soviet, and on July 17, he was appointed national commander of the Red Guard. When the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed, he fled to Vienna on August 1, 1919, where he and the other communist emigrés were interned. He was freed in 1920, but deported after a speech on May 1 and permanently banned from visiting Austria. Rákosi travelled to Soviet Russia and joined in the work of the Comintern Executive. He was appointed a Comintern secretary in 1921. Sent home to Hungary in 1924, he was elected to the Central Committee at the congress re-establishing the Hungarian Communist Party in 1925 and made head of the domestic secretariat. He was arrested in Hungary in September 1925 and sentenced for rebellion to eight-and-a-half years' imprisonment as a common criminal. When he had served this sentence, he was prosecuted again for his activity under the Hungarian Soviet Republic. In 1940, he was allowed to travel to the Soviet Union, in exchange for the return of some honvéd regimental banners from the 1848-9 Hungarian war of independence. The two trials of Rákosi made him a well-known figure in the international communist movement. When he arrived in Moscow, he faced a party disciplinary investigation for conduct towards the police back in 1925, although neither the investigation nor the result were ever made public. In 1942, Rákosi became a leading politician among the Hungarian emigré communists. At first he represented his party in Comintern, and when that was dissolved, he became a Central Committee member and leader, and an editor for the Kossuth Radio station in Moscow. Rákosi returned to Hungary on January 30, 1945, when the Soviet leadership sent him to Debrecen the provisional seat of government, to organize the communist party. On February 22, 1945, he became general secretary of the combined Debrecen and Budapest Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party. After the 1945 elections, he was appointed state minister, and after the 1947 elections, deputy prime minister as well. On March 10, 1948, he was elected a Political Committee member of the merged communist and social democratic party, the HWP, and on March 19, its president. He became HWP General Secretary at the merging congress on June 12 of that year. On February 1, 1949, Rákosi was appointed president of the new Hungarian Popular Front for National Independence Patriotic People' s Front. After the 1949 elections, he became president of the State Security Commission, while retaining all his previous functions. Parliament elected him prime minister on August 14, 1952. From the time of his return from Moscow, Rákosi was the paramount leader of the communists, with a political influence greater than his formal position would suggest. During the communist assumption of power in 1947-9, Rákosi turned himself from leader of the HWP into the absolute ruler of his country. From the outset, he ran the ÁVH personally. In every aspect of building up the communist dictatorship, he followed the example of Stalin's Soviet Union. He was Stalin' s most diligent student in Eastern Europe, not least in pursuing the Byzantine process of self-glorification known later to its critics as the 'cult of personality' . However, he fell from favour with the Kremlin in 1953. In line with Soviet intentions, the Organizing Committee he headed was dissolved by the Central Committee of his party at its meeting on June 27- 8. He was replaced as prime minister by Imre Nagy. Although Nagy's New Cours had received encouragement from Moscow, Rákosi set about sabotaging the reforms wherever he could. From May 1954 onwards, he headed the committee dealing with rehabilitation of those illegally convicted in the show trials, while in fact trying to put a brake on the process. After a long period of intrigue, he managed to have Nagy removed in the spring of 1955, with Soviet approval, but he was unable to curb the popular dissent. Some of his colleagues turned against him after the 20th Congress of the CPSU and he was unsuccessful in trying to divert the blame, first onto Gábor Péter and then onto Mihály Farkas. He was dismissed as first secretary at the Central Committee meeting of July 18-21, 1956, and even failed to be re-elected to the Political Committee. After the meeting, he pleaded illness and left for treatment in the Soviet Union. During the 1956 Revolution, he remained in Moscow, where the CPSU Central Committee Presidium decided on November 5, 1956 that he should be removed from power permanently. Thereafter, Rákosi sent several letters to the Central Committee and to Khrushchev pressing to be allowed to return to Hungary. In February 1957, the Provisional Central Committee of the HSWP decided that he should not be allowed to return for five years. This decision was seconded on April 18 by the Central Committee of the CPSU. In June 1957, Rákosi was taken with his wife from Moscow to settle in Krasnodar, then in Tokmak in Kirghizia, and finally in Gorky. Meanwhile Rákosi had been shorn of his parliamentary seat on May 5, 1957. On November 1, 1960, the Political Committee of the HSWP suspended his membership of the party, from which he was excluded on August 16, 1962. The plenary session of the HSWP Central Committee in April 1970 was prepared to let him to return to Hungary provided he gave a written undertaking not to engage in politics. This he refused to do. He died on February 5, 1971 in Gorky, and on February 16, his ashes were secretly brought to Hungary and buried in the Farkasrét Cemetery in Budapest ^[1]

József Révai ( 1898-1959)

Born into a lower middle-class family in Budapest, Révai went from commercial secondary school to university in Vienna and Berlin. He was a member of the Galilei Circle. Révai worked as a bank official before joining in 1917 the staff of the internationalist, left-wing, anti-war periodical Tett (Deed) and its successor] Ma (Today), run by [?& the avant-garde writer and artist Lajos Kassák. Révai took part in the inaugural meeting of the Hungarian Communist Party in November 1918 and then joined the staff of its paper, Vörös Újság (Red News). During the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, he was a member of the Central Workers' and Soldiers' Soviet in Budapest. He emigrated to Vienna in the autumn of 1919, where he contributed to communist publications and joined the faction led by Jenő Landler, a senior figure who had commanded the Red Army in the final weeks of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. At the first congress of the Hungarian Communist Party, held in 1925 in Vienna, Révai was elected head of the Secretariat and took part in drafting the congress resolutions. He set up the illegal paper Kommunista in Budapest in 1928. His pupil-teacher friendship with György Lukács deteriorated in 1929, when he criticized the Blum Theses of the Marxist thinker and politician. Révai was arrested in Hungary on December 31, 1930 and sentenced in 1931 to three-and-a-half years' imprisonment. On his release in January 1934, he left for Prague and then for Moscow. There he became a member of the Comintern Executive and taught at the Lenin School. In early 1937, he began to take part in the work of the Hungarian Communist Party Central Committee in Czechoslovakia, but had to flee from the German occupation through Poland and Sweden to the Soviet Union. During the war, he ran the Hungarian-language Radio Kossuth in Moscow and edited the paper Igaz Szó (True Word). He was also a member of the Foreign Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party. In the autumn of 1944, Révai and Ernő Gerő drew up an action programme for the party. He returned to Hungary on November 7, 1944 and took part in establishing the Hungarian Communist Party Central Committee. He was then in Szeged, where he edited the paper Délmagyarország (South Hungary), which was controlled by the Hungarian National Independence Front. He headed the communist group in the National Assembly. From January 26 to May 11, 1945, he was an alternate member of the National Supreme Council, and then until September 27, a full member of it. He remained a member of Parliament for the rest of his life. In the Hungarian Communist Party, he was on the Central Committee, joining the Political Committee in May 1945, having become head of the Central Committee Propaganda and Press Department in the previous month. From 1945 to 1950, he was editor-in-chief of the central party daily, Szabad Nép. He was the Political Committee member supervising the Intelligentsia Department of the Central Committee in 1946-7, and until 1949, the Education and Foreign Affairs Department. He drafted the manifesto for the merged HWP , and on March 15, 1949, received the Kossuth Prize Gold Grade for the 'publicist struggle against reaction' in other words, journalism and publicity attempting to counter anti-communism. Révai served as minister of public education from June 1949 to July 1953. He attacked György Lukács sharply in the so-called Lukács debate in 1950 and both Lukács and Tibor Déry in another controversy in 1952. However, he was dropped from the Political Committee in June 1953. From July 3, 1953 to November 26, 1958, he was a deputy president of the Presidential Council , and from October 1953 to July 1954, editor-in-chief of the journal Társadalmi Szemle (Social Review). The July 1956 meeting of the Central Committee returned him to the Political Committee. On the afternoon of October 23, 1956, he and István Frisch tried to control the coverage by the Szabad Nép , but without success. He was re-elected to the Political Committee at the Central Committee meeting that night. Shortly afterwards, he was taken to Moscow. Early in 1957, he wrote a lengthy article entitled 'Purity of Ideas' (published in the Hungarian party daily Népszabadság (People's Freedom) on March 7, 1957), arguing that the criticisms of the Rákosi leadership were exaggerated. He was recalled to Hungary in February 1957, as an adviser to the Provisional Executive Committee of the HSWP , and elected to the HSWP Central Committee. The debate continued in June as a clash between the adherents of János Kádár and those of Révai at the national meeting of the HSWP, where he was defeated. He then ' accepted the majority view' and was re-elected to the Central Committee. He was a member of the Presidential Council until his death. ^[1]

József Szilágyi ( 1917-1958)

Born in Debrecen, Szilágyi attended the Reformed Church Grammar School in the city. He received a law degree from Debrecen University in 1939. As a student, he had taken part in the activity of the anti-fascistMarch Front, and in 1938, joined the illegal communist party. He was arrested in the spring of 1940 and sentenced to three years' imprisonment for disrupted the social order. He was freed on March 15, 1944 and then went into hiding until the end of the war. At the end of the year, he became the police chief in Debrecen. Later the communist party gave him the task of organizing the national police headquarters. In 1947- 49, he headed the military and special forces department at the communist-party headquarters, joining the party's Central Control Committee in 1948. However, in 1949, he questioned the grounds for charging László Rajk and his associates and was dismissed from his positions. In the following year, he became a department head in the Produce Trading Enterprise. He became associated with the Imre Nagy circle after 1953 and was expelled from the HWP early in 1956. In 1953, he became an evening engineering student at Budapest Technical University. On October 13, 1956, Szilágyi gave the funeral address at the reburial of a group of rehabilitated high-ranking army officers. On October 22, he spoke at the mass assembly at Budapest Technical University. During the early days of the revolution, Szilágyi worked alongside Sándor Kopácsi in the Budapest Division of the Interior Ministry. He became a close associate of Imre Nagy, and on October 27, tried to persuade the prime minister of the need for a change of political course. On October 28, he and Jenő Széll set up Nagy's prime ministerial secretariat, which Szilágyi headed. He and his family fled to the Yugoslav Embassy on November 4 and he was among those interned in Romania after November 22. Arrested in Snagov on March 27, 1957 and brought back to Hungary, he refused to answer his investigators, passionately swore his innocence and went on hunger strike. When the trial of Imre Nagy and his associates began, Szilágyi refused to cooperate in any way and was tried apart for that reason. The People' s Court Council of the Supreme Court separately convicted him on April 22, 1958 of initiating a conspiracy and sentenced him to death without room for appeal. He was executed on April 24. ^[1]

Josif Vissarionovich Stalin, 1879–1953

Born Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia, he attended a theological seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi) in 1894–9, but was expelled for socialist activities. Known under the alias of Koba (Untameable), he was exiled to Siberia in 1903. Three other sentences of banishment for illegal communist activity were to follow. In 1912, he took the name Stalin (Steel). After the Bolshevik take-over of November 1917, he became commissar (minister) for nationality affairs in 1917–23 and state control in 1917–22. He was elected a member of the Political Committee of the Russian Communist Party in 1919. In 1922, he became general secretary of the Central Committee, but this did not become the highest function in the party until after Lenin’s death in 1924. While obtaining sole control, he attacked his opponents in the party with brutality. The most dangerous of these was Leon Trotsky, against whom he erected a ‘troika’ of himself, Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev and Lev Borisovich Kamenev, declaring the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’. In 1927, he removed both Trotsky and his two fellow troika members from the leadership. In 1928, it was the turn of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin and his associates, who had supported Stalin hitherto. He then declared the first five-year economic plan, collectivization of land, and the goal of turning the Soviet Union into a great industrial power through forced development of heavy industry. Stalin’s Byzantine-style cult of personality began to shape up in the early 1930s. In 1935, he began to pursue an open reign of terror, in which he dealt with his main political opponents in a series of great show trials. Hundreds of thousands of people were executed at his command or in the light of his decisions and millions more were herded into forced-labour camps. The theoretical basis for the mass terror was the perceived need to ‘heighten the class war’. In 1939, Stalin made a pact with Nazi Germany, under which the Soviet Union annexed the Eastern half of Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia (from Romania). In May 1941, Stalin assumed the post of chairman of the Council of Commissars (prime minister) in addition to his positions in the CPSU. Germany invaded its former Soviet ally in 1941, forcing Stalin into alliance with the Western powers. Thus the Soviet Union became one of the victors in the Second World War, occupying Berlin and breaking up Nazi Germany. After the war, Stalin turned most of the countries ‘liberated’ by Soviet forces into satellites, including Hungary. By 1947, Stalin viewed the outbreak of a third world war as inevitable and began arming at a forced pace, compelling the satellite countries to contribute. In his final years, the persecution complex long apparent in Stalin became an overriding trait. He suspected conspiracies against him everywhere and restarted the machinery of show trials. However, his death in May 1953 came before the trials could take place and the accused were freed again. Stalinism, the system of rule named after him, had been copied faithfully in the Hungary of Rákosi and in other Soviet-bloc states. It became more refined after his death, in the Soviet Union and the satellite countries, but the system of state and the methods of imposing it remained basically unchanged. ^[1]

Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov ( 1902-1982)

Born in Shakhovskoye, Russia, Suslov worked for the Poor Peasants Committee in Khvalinsk district and joined the communist part in 1921. He completed his studies at the Plekhanov College of Economics in 1928. In 1931, he started working for the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate. In 1937, he became district party secretary in Rostov, and in 1939- 44, first secretary of the party committee in Ordzhonikidze (Stavropol). He was active in implementing the Stalin purges of the 1930s. In 1944-6, he chaired the bureau of the party Central Committee in Lithuania. In 1947- 9, he successively headed the agitation and propaganda department and the foreign relations department at the CPSU Central Committee. He supervised propaganda, ideology and cultural activity from 1947 until his death. From 1949 to 1951, he was editor-in-chief of the central party daily Pravda. Having become a CPSU Central Committee member in 1941, Suslov was on the Presidium in 1952-3 and again from July 1955 until his death. In this capacity, he had talks in July 1956 in Budapest with the Hungarian leaders and with János Kádár and Imre Nagy, and returned on October 24, 1956 with Mikoyan, as a special envoy. Opposed to Khrushchev's de-Stalinization moves, Suslov played a part in ousting him in 1964. ^[1]

Gábor Tánczos ( 1928-1979)

Tánczos was born in Budapest into the family of a paint merchant from Baja. During the war, he and his mother were deported to Vienna, where he survived the war as an orderly in a hospital attached to a concentration camp. Back in Baja in 1945, he helped to organize Madisz and set up a people's college Nékosz. That autumn he joined the Hungarian Communist Party, of which he became youth secretary in Baja in 1946 and not long after, in the county. After completing secondary school, he moved to Budapest, where he became one of the youngest members of the István Győrffy People's College and deputy general secretary of the communist-led National Association of Hungarian Students. Tánczos began to study philosophy at Budapest University, while working as a functionary in various youth organizations. However, he was dismissed from the apparatus during the purges after the Rajk trial, partly because of his' class background' and partly through one of his colleagues, who was arrested in a show trial. He graduated in 1953 and was appointed an assistant lecturer in the philosophy department of the university. He was the first of the young communist leaders and intellectuals to recognize his political and moral obligation to support the reforms of Imre Nagy. At the beginning of 1955, the leaders of the youth organization Disz elected him to head the Petőfi Circle, for which he devised a programme in keeping with Nagy's policies. This called for an informal framework without introductory lectures, in which the debate was immediately thrown open to the floor. Thanks to his role as an intermediary, the Petőfi Circle was able to continue functioning, even in the final days of the Rákosi system. After the debate about the press on June 27, 1956, the HWP Central Committee passed a resolution condemning the activity of the Petőfi Circle, but its leaders refused to retract. Tánczos took part in the political events of the autumn following Rákosi's downfall, supporting the policies of Nagy in an article entitled 'Cleansing Anguish'. Meanwhile he worked for an organizational and political renewal of Disz. He was present at the student demonstration on October 23 and wanted to address the crowd at Bem tér, but faulty amplifiers prevented him. From October 24 onwards, he tried to be of assistance to Imre Nagy at the party centre. He made a conciliatory appeal to the rebels, while criticizing the inconsistencies in the policies of Nagy. Ernő Gerő framed a party resolution calling for his removal and personally ordered him out of the building. Tánczos took part in establishing the Revolutionary Committee of the Hungarian Intelligentsia (MÉFB), signed its appeal in the name of the Petőfi Circle, and helped to revive the latter on November 3. On the morning of November 4, he and his wife joined the group applying for asylum in the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest. They were arrested and interned in Romania on November 23. On March 17, 1957, Tánczos was arrested again in Snagov brought back to Hungary and prosecuted in one of the subsidiary trials to the Imre Nagy trial. On August 19, 1958, he was sentenced by the Supreme Court to 15 years' imprisonment, but was released under an amnesty in the spring of 1962. After his release, Tánczos taught for some years in a secondary school and then worked at the National Pedagogical Institute, doing research into the sociology of schools and reading. He also took part in sociological research into the history of the people' s colleges Nékosz. In the final years of his life, he was concerned with the poor, Gypsies, and Hungarians living beyond the country's borders. In 1979, Tánczos signed the declaration of solidarity with the imprisoned members of the Czechoslovak Charta ' 77 civil-rights movement. He committed suicide on December 6, 1979, while suffering from depression. His ashes were buried in Plot 300 at the main Budapest cemetery in 1990 not far from the remains of Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs.^[1]

Péter Veres ( 1896-1970)

Born in Balmazújváros, Hajdú-Bihar County, Veres was illegitimate and brought up by a landless peasant family. He worked as a farm servant and herd boy, before joining the railway as a plate layer at the age of 16. Called up into the army in 1917, he served as a telegrapher during the fighting at Piave. He returned home in 1918 and remained in the army. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he became a member of the Balmazújváros Directory. He was taken prisoner by Romanian forces in May 1919 and returned from there in 1920, only to be imprisoned for his part in 1919. On his release in 1922, he took part in the farm workers' movement. Veres's first piece of published writing appeared in the periodical Századunk (This Century). Most of his writings concerned the land question and the peasantry. In 1933, he attended the congress of the social democrats. His descriptive social study The Peasantry of the Great Plain appeared in 1936. Veres joined the so-called populist writers, became one of the leaders of the March Front, and joined the National Peasant Party in 1939. He took part in the government-organized meeting of writers at Lillafüred in 1942, and at the Balatonszárszó meeting of the populists in the following year, he spoke of the need for a leftward change of course after the war. He performed labour service three times during the war. In August 1944, he went into hiding in Budapest. Early in 1945, he was elected in Debrecen as president of the National Peasant Party. He became chairman of the National Land Redistribution Council, as well as a member of the Budapest National Committee and local-government authority. Veres supported the idea of his party cooperating with the communists. He became a member of the Provisional National Assembly in April 1945 and later a member of Parliament. In 1947- 8, he was minister of reconstruction and public works and then minister of defence. However, he was eased from power by the communist leaders during the period of land collectivization. His writings in the 1950s were mainly a mixture of autobiography with social description. He received the Kossuth Prize in 1950 and again in 1952. From 1954 to 1956, he was president of the Writers' Union and a member of the Patriotic People's Front national presiding committee. On October 23, 1956, Veres read the Writers' Union statement at the Petőfi and Bem statues. He was elected onto the steering committee of the revived National Peasant Party. He espoused the aims of the revolution, although he did not work actively to support them. The 1958 party position on the populist writers included him in its criticisms, but no obstacles were placed to his literary activity. He was again elected a member of the Patriotic People's Front presiding committee, and in the autumn of 1959, he became a founder member of the re-established Writers' Union. ^[1]