Imre Nagy: A High Fidelity Biography

János M. Rainer: Nagy Imre. Politikai életrajz (Imre Nagy: A Political Biography), Vol. I, 1896–1953. Budapest, 1956-os Intézet, 1996. 533 pp.

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Imre Nagy was one of the many thousand young revolutionaries whose awareness was awakened in 1917 by the Russian Revolution. He joined the Red Guard as a Hungarian prisoner of war. After they returned home, captivity and revolution lived on in most of his comrades only as youthful memories of adventure. Imre Nagy, on the other hand, remained captive - right until his death. By giving a detailed account of the facts, the book helps us understand how Nagy, having become a member of the CP at the age of 22, was able to retain common sense and moral integrity, things often contradictory to his Party membership.

When he returned to Hungary in 1921, he was happy to be home in Kaposvár. If the Horthy regime had been more tolerant, and if the Social Democratic Party he then joined had made a stronger case for the peasantry, he could possibly have remained a provincial insurance clerk devoting his leisure to the workers' movement. But in Kaposvár, it took years for the turbulent aftermath of the stormy events of the revolution and counter-revolution to pass. Nagy joined the leftist opposition within the Social Democratic Party, and ended up as a suspect in a Communist conspiracy case. He tried to start an underground Communist peasant movement with little success, and since he held on to a peasant way of thinking, he became suspected of "rightist deviation" in the Communist Party. He was sent to Moscow, from where he could no longer return.

However, once there, he was able to get into the agricultural institute of the Comintern, where he could, at long last, do what had interested him most for a long time - study the agrarian question. He was already working on his thesis when the wave of purges hit him. In January 1936, he was expelled from the CP and lost his job as well. He struggled hard to eke out a living for years, like so many other exiles, until the War created a new situation for him, too: he was employed as an announcer by the Hungarian-language propaganda station of Radio Moscow. When the war ended, from a survivor of purges and from a suspicious "enemy alien" living in misery, he suddenly turned into a candidate for a ministerial position.

Rainer devotes a short chapter (entitled Files) to an ambiguous and controversial episode of the Moscow years. The majority of exiles were forced by the NKVD to write reports on their fellows. They included Imre Nagy, a pawn in this diabolical game from about 1933 to 1939. This was impossible to refuse, and, as every exile's name turned up at least in a dozen or two such reports, the NKVD could pick out those it meant to arrest. This meant that some of those reported on by Imre Nagy were also deported - while others were made ministers or members of the academy. The file of Imre Nagy - or rather some tendentiously selected parts of it - were circulated by the KGB after 1989 for the purpose of discrediting him. That malicious intent is proved unequivocally by the June 16, 1989 report of KGB Chief Kryuchkov, published in America. The whole file is not accessible. What was leaked of it can only confuse the issue. Rainer nevertheless could not ignore this, and makes an attempt to objectively reconstruct what can be found of the truth. His scholarly propriety has meant that he has been attacked and his work hindered by many quarters, including the successors of the KGB, who are still unwilling to reveal the unadulterated truth. The daughter of Imre Nagy sued the historian, as if he were the cause of what had happened. The court was right when it refused to express an opinion on matters of history.

As far as I know, Rainer is working on the second and concluding volume of the biography undeterred by these and other difficulties.

Tibor Hajdu's

books include A magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság (The Hungarian Soviet Republic, 1969) and a biography of Count Mihály Károlyi.