János M. Rainer

Imre Nagy, Life and Image

Imre Nagy, along with János Kádár and Vice-Admiral Miklós Horthy, arguably counts as one of Hungary's best-known twentieth-century political figures. For all that, many elements of his life and career remain little known. Outside Hungary he is usually only mentioned in relation to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the state reburial of his remains that took place on June 16th, 1989, one of the defining moments of the country's change of régime. I shall attempt here a potted biography of Imre Nagy before going on to assess his historical image, and more particularly, how historians outside Hungary have viewed him over the past fifty years. That international evaluation, by and large, was not guided by any research or public discourse in Hungary, though Hungarian-born émigré writers have played a major role in it. The aim of the selection presented here is to outline the various trends that are discernible.
Imre Nagy was born in the southwest Hungarian town of Kaposvár on June 7th, 1896 into a family of poor peasants and clerical assistants. He completed primary school and four years of secondary school, leaving home at the age of 15 to be apprenticed as a machine fitter in Budapest. He was called up for military service in 1915, and in July of the following year became a Russian prisoner of war. He spent the rest of the war in a POW camp beside Lake Baikal, then on release volunteered for the Red Army and took part in the Russian Civil War. He joined the Bolshevik Party in February 1920 and returned to Hungary in March 1921.
Back in Kaposvár he worked as a clerk for an insurance company and was active in the local Social Democratic Party organisation. In 1925, he was expelled by that party and became a founding member of the Socialist Workers' Party of Hungary (a cover organisation for the illegal Communists). He was arrested in early 1927, then released after two months. A year later, in the spring of 1928, he moved to Vienna, and during the rest of that year and in 1929 he spent two spells working illegally in Budapest as the head of the Communist Party's rural section. He was sent to Moscow as a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in early 1930 and stayed there for the next 15 years. He worked at the Comintern's International Institute for Agricultural Sciences, at the Central Statistical Office of the Soviet Union and as an editor of Hungarianlanguage broadcasts transmitted by Kossuth Radio from Moscow.
Nagy finally got back to his native land as a leading member of the Hungarian Communist Party in December 1944. As Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional National Government, he is associated with bringing in the radical land reform proclaimed in March 1945. He sat as representative in the Provisional National Assembly, convoked first in Debrecen and later (from April 1945) in Budapest, then in the National Assembly following the general elections of late 1945. He was briefly Minister of the Interior, from November 1945 to February 1946 (being succeeded by László Rajk), after which he functioned as a Communist Party Secretary and, between 1947 and 1949, as President of the National Assembly.
During this period, Nagy found himself in conflict with the Party leadership on several matters, foremost among which was his disagreement with the policy of rapid compulsory agricultural collectivisation. He was required to undertake selfcriticism in September 1949 but was nevertheless removed from leading party jobs, spending a year as a lecturer at the University of Agricultural Sciences at Gödöllô. From the summer of 1950, however, he was recalled to become head of the Administrative Department of the Hungarian Workers' Party and again became a member of the government in December of that year as Minister of Food and later as Minister for Crop Deliveries. In 1951 he was reinstated as a member of the Political Committee, in 1952 he became Deputy Prime Minister.
After Stalin's death, the new leadership in the Soviet Union picked on Imre Nagy as their man to carry out their policy of correcting the abuses that had occurred during the cult of personality years in Hungary. As Prime Minister from July 1953 to April 1955, he attempted, above and beyond that, to start a wider reform of the economy and political life. Intrigues by Hungary's Stalinist former Prime Minister, Mátyás Rákosi, who remained Party head, led to the Russians changing their minds about Nagy and removing him from office. In December 1955, he was expelled from the Party, but he refused to perform the obligatory ritual of exercising self-criticism. Instead he became a leading member of an opposition group within the Party, which, critical of Stalinist methods, supported the policies with which his own administration had been associated.
On October 13th, 1956, Nagy was readmitted into the Party. On October 23rd demonstrating crowds of students and workers in Budapest demanded, among other things, his reappointment as Prime Minister. At dawn on the following day, at the request of the Party leadership, he agreed to accept the position. On October 28th he declared a cease-fire and intervened to secure the withdrawal of Soviet troops, then on October 30th announced the country's return to a multiparty system. In response to renewed Soviet aggression, the government declared Hungary's neutrality and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.

The renewed assault on Budapest by Soviet troops at dawn on November 4th prompted Imre Nagy and other members of the government to seek refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy. Having been persuaded to leave by the offer of safe conduct from the newly installed Kádár government, Nagy and his associates were seized by the KGB (with Hungarian connivance) and deported to Snagov in Romania, a lakeside resort for high Party functionaries 40 km north of Bucharest. Following an agreement between the Kádár leadership and the Russian Politburo, Nagy and his associates were formally arrested on April 14th, 1957, and transferred to Budapest, where they were tried in secret. The charges and eventual death sentences had, of course, also been decided well in advance, in the summer of 1957, but the trial was repeatedly postponed because the Soviet leadership had increasing trouble reconciling it with wider political considerations. In February 1958, Moscow even toyed with the idea of clemency, but Kádár doggedly held out for the death sentences.
All through this process, Imre Nagy rejected the charges of crimes against the state that were brought against him and was even unwilling to offer a defence. He was sentenced to death on June 15th, 1958, and made no plea for clemency. The sentence was carried out at dawn the next day in the courtyard of the National Prison in Budapest. Nagy was buried in an unmarked grave in the courtyard; in 1961 the corpse was transferred to Lot 301 in an isolated corner of the Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest. The state reburial and posthumous legal rehabilitation of Imre Nagy and his associates, on June 16th, 1989, became the supreme symbolic event of Hungary's transition to a democratic system.
International opinion concerning Imre Nagy while the Revolution was in progress and in its immediate aftermath was far from unambiguous. It suffices to quote the words of a strikingly well-informed American journalist. Despite being part of a "personal letter", they were cited by Melvin Lasky in his White Book. As its subtitle notes, it is The Story of the October Uprising as Recorded in Documents, Dispatches, Eye-Witness Accounts, and World-Wide Reactions. Simon Bourgin wrote from Budapest on July 5th, 1956:

although Nagy has a certain stubborn popularity with some of the people who associated with him personally and with the public who remember that brief, short-lived breathing period that he gave them, I wonder whether he is popular in general. His regime ended on a very negative note... It is quite generally agreed that the Russians will never place enough confidence in him to permit him to come back as Prime Minister.¹

In an article in its October 27th, 1956 issue The Economist of London stated:

But the statesmen of the West will have to face the question, when the dust has settled, whether a more genuinely national communist government, even if propped by Soviet power, is not preferable to a mere puppet of Moscow. And if their answer is yes, they may well have to encourage such men as Mr Gomulka-or even Mr Nagy-on their road to a limited independence, by helping them in their economic difficulties.²

Meanwhile there was a fairly widespread legend that Imre Nagy had been forced to make his initial public statements at gunpoint.³ This was also about the time one of the appraisals seeing the light of day, from the pen of the noted

Prime Minister Imre Nagy addresses the nation on Radio Kossuth, October 28, 1956.

Kremlinologist Raymond Garthoff, claimed that every step Nagy made had to be cleared first with the Soviet leadership.⁴ Gordon Shepherd, correspondent for The Daily Telegraph of London, was of the opinion at the end of October that the population of Budapest regarded Nagy's intentions "as honest as those of any discredited Communist in present day Hungary can be."⁵

The conclusion that "Imre Nagy and/or the revolution went too far" also got underway early on. Isaac Deutscher, writing for the November 15th, 1956 issue of The Reporter of New York, suggested that the reason why the Soviet army had not intervened more aggressively and immediately after October 23rd, and indeed agreed to withdraw its forces from the Hungarian capital, was because the 'liberals' in the Presidium

hoped that this would enable Nagy to establish a national Communist regime that would, like Gomulka's regime, still remain aligned with the Soviet bloc. This hope was dashed two or three days later, when the disintegration of Hungarian Communism became evident and Nagy denounced the Warsaw Pact.⁶

After Nagy's execution in 1958 the Hungarian Party leadership made an effort to influence international public opinion.⁷ A White Book: The Counter-Revolutionary Conspiracy of Imre Nagy and His Accomplices, containing a selection of documents and transcripts of the investigation and hearing, was published not just in Hungarian but also in the main world languages. This was clearly aimed at underpinning the assertions made in the communiqué that was issued when the sentence was announced. The accused were split into two groups. As they would have had a tough job cutting and pasting statements made by Nagy in such a way as to suggest he had exercised self-criticism, he was assigned the role of the incorrigible denier, who impugned and quarrelled with his associates, who had obviously been so cowardly as to flee from accepting any responsibility. In contrast, his associates and the witnesses arrested with them were assigned the role of those who admitted responsibility and were making remorseful confessions. The volume was produced with all the standard manipulative tricks, such as ripping quotations out of context, keeping quiet about awkward details or contrary opinions, and outright forgery of texts and non-existent conversations. On reading the English version, even a British Communist lawyer like D. N. Pritt felt moved to advise the Party centre in Budapest that the publication's wording was "unduly trenchant". Though he (Pritt) quite liked that, the same could not necessarily be said for intended readers, and it might provoke lawsuits for slander.⁸
Assembled principally by Tibor Méray and Péter Kende, two of Nagy's supporters who escaped to the West after 1956 and likewise published in several languages, The Truth about the Nagy Affair literally dissected the communiqué issued after Nagy had been sentenced, along with the above White Book, demonstrating that every single word was based on lies and distortions.⁹ The democratic Hungarian émigré community in the West also published a manuscript that Nagy had written in 1955-56 and which had been smuggled to the West.¹⁰ The first proper biographies and historical portraits to appear, which are still trustworthy to the present day, emerged from among the intellectuals and scholars grouped around the literary magazine Irodalmi Újság (published initially in London and later in Paris), and also the Imre Nagy Institute for Political Research, which functioned in Brussels from 1958 to 1963. These were the books Nagy Imre élete és halála (The Life and Death of Imre Nagy) by Tibor Méray and Reformátor vagy forradalmár volt-e Nagy Imre (Imre Nagy- Reformer or Revolutionary?) by Miklós Molnár and László Nagy. The translated versions of the books have broadly shaped the terms of academic and political discourse about the figure of Imre Nagy and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution to the present day.
Méray's book¹¹ remains to this day probably the most commonly cited of all works about 1956 and Nagy. The primary reason for its success is the way it superbly combines a chronological account, based on the available contemporary sources, with the author's own experiences of the events he records. Méray was able to draw extensively on the close personal relationship he developed with Nagy as a newspaper reporter and a sensitive, deeply committed writer. Furthermore, he started writing the book before Nagy had been sentenced. The way Nagy is presented is essentially as a man who, during the days of revolt, managed to implement the program he had been working for all his life as a Communist politician and who, unlike many of his comrades, felt a special responsibility for the Hungarian people. Rich in detail, it is a portrait imbued with a profound respect, and indeed love, for its subject.
Similar, though somewhat keeping its distance in the line it took towards Nagy, was the short biography by Miklós Molnár and László Nagy. Whereas Méray supplied the colourful sequence of events as a backdrop, they aimed to show where Nagy fitted within the structure of the Hungarian version of the Soviet régime. Thus, Molnár and Nagy wrote more about the path that led up to 23 October-a subject that Méray left to a later book that he co-authored with Tamás Aczél. They raise more issues too, but in the end they come to much the same conclusion as Méray: "If his life was a question mark-his death was the answer... We feel that this man with a turbulent life deserves the grand words: 'a hero in his death'."¹²
Alongside these two influential interpretations, which laid a primary emphasis on the human and moral dimensions of their subject, were also a number of analyses which, while not questioning the moral example Nagy had set, took as their starting-point the political failure of the Hungarian Revolution, and hence of the Prime Minister. One of the earliest examples of this sort was an essay by Jean- Paul Sartre, in whose opinion Nagy, albeit not by choice, ceased to be a Communist:

In fact he is a sincere Communist whom the course of events is in process of de-Communizing. A Communist chief, indeed, relies on a structured Party, which, in theory at least, assures links with the masses. But the Party has gone up in smoke... That's the whole tough luck of this good and sincere man: subjectively he remains faithful to his Party; objectively, everything happens as if he resigned from it... a de-Communized Nagy in fact, didn't represent the Party either in the eyes of the Russians or in those of the insurgents.¹³

A much-favoured transposition of that idea is the parallel drawn between Nagy and Gomulka. Raymond Aron, unlike Sartre, considered Nagy a Communist, but he took a similar line on the reason for his failure:

Imre Nagy was a Marxist-Leninist even at the time when events placed him at the helm of the revolution. He could have played the role Gomulka played in Poland: he could have given a revolution of national-liberal inspiration an appearance acceptable to the Soviet Union and found a compromise between the aspirations of the Hungarian people and the international situation. The main reason for his failure where Gomulka succeeded, and his inability to prevent Russian intervention, was the weakness, the falling apart of the Hungarian Communist Party... Imre Nagy, in turn, presided over a government which was incapable of either directing or curbing the revolution.¹⁴

The figure of Imre Nagy as a faithful Communist-in the light of his tragic death or his political failure-seems to have been fading by the mid-60s. Ferenc Váli compared him with the great heretics in history:

who similarly placed their trust in institutions rather than in the leaders of these institutions, in observance of strict legality, irrespective of the nature of the men who might decide their fate... What is most characteristic about Imre Nagy is that he managed to combine his faith in his conception of Socialism with genuine Hungarian patriotism... Nagy, despite his Moscow training, remained essentially Hungarian.¹⁵

In another of the clutch of essays written to mark the tenth anniversary, Miklós Molnár was thinking along similar lines when he wrote that, even if it was for only a brief period, Nagy successfully integrated a revisionist reform policy and the national democratic objectives of the Revolution. He did, however, close his thoughts with a reference to the cold realities of the present:

Imre Nagy's historical role and his life have come to an end. His ideological work [...] was too pragmatic, his career too short and fractured, his concepts too humane and schoolmasterishly intellectual for his spiritual heritage to serve a new epoch as a point of departure under new conditions.¹⁶

In the wake of events in Paris and Prague in 1968, the figure of Nagy again became a focus of interest, but from a completely new angle. The New Left was not interested in the moralist and humanist or the nationally inspired, antitotalitarian politician, so much as looking for a prototype (that is, where they were not denying him that role). István Borsody went so far as to call him "a martyr for Eurocommunism":

It is nothing less than amazing (as amazing as the case of some of the Soviet dissidents) that a communist who spent a good part of his life in the Soviet Union should be able to create such a synthesis of revolutionary communism and civilized Europeanism as Imre Nagy did. This civilized Europeanism, and not just the Magyar patriotism which Hungarian followers admire in him, accounts for the remarkable ease with which the communist Nagy could assume the leadership of a national revolution against the communist regime imposed by force on Hungary by the Soviet Union.¹⁷

Ágnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér also called Nagy "the first Eurocommunist" or (elsewhere) "the first Eurosocialist". The crisis that unfolded in Hungary over 1953-56, they write, "became a representative drama of the inner disintegration of Bolshevism, of which Nagy was a representative figure... who through his inner torments, through that struggle between anxieties that is indeed dependent upon great moral qualities, had transcended Bolshevism."¹⁸ In their book they attempted to sketch the portrait of a "new radical political militant", chief among whose qualities were post- (or perhaps rather anti-) Machiavellianism, the statesman who possesses "the craft of forging consensus" (though they did not mean political consensus in the liberal sense of the term, but a new type, the basis of which was rebellion against the dictatorship of necessity), and an antiauthoritarian personality (neither conservative, nor charismatic) rebelling against the regime and capable of giving everything a national dimension.¹⁹

Heller and Fehér's view, of course, was not shared unreservedly by everyone, even within their own ideological camp. Cornelius Castoriadis, for instance, strongly condemned Nagy the politician for being unable to "find in himself the clarity of mind and the resolve to speak out loudly against Russian deception, with which he was so well acquainted. Instead, he muddled through and tried to seek help... from the United Nations!" Castoriadis regards this as so wrong-headed and ridiculous that he goes so far, admittedly only in a footnote, as to refer to Nagy's personal tragedy as "irrelevant".²⁰ Bill Lomax had already taken a similarly critical line is his book about the Revolution a few years earlier. In his view, Nagy "was more of a social moralist than a radical politician, and it is this characteristic that makes his ideas so difficult to classify or systematize... his central and tragic weakness-the lack of any clearly thoughtout ideological standpoint beyond his commitment to the vague values of humanism and decency."²¹ Lomax did not regard Nagy as even a reform Communist:

Unlike the more extreme Stalinists who clearly sought to use the bureaucracy as a means for implementing their own ends, and unlike other reformist communists who sought to moderate the role of the bureaucracy, Nagy very rarely, and perhaps never consciously, rose above the level of the functionary within the machine, albeit a very decent and reasonable functionary.

Lomax saw that lack of ideological weight or definition as the cause of the failure of 1956, which he described as being a personal failure:

When the revolution broke out, he was to find himself without any means of orientation in a world which had already broken in practice the bonds within which he was still held captive by the limits of his own thought.²²

During the 80s, historians of the Revolution were distancing themselves from ideological platforms. Approaches that emphasised Nagy's human qualities again gained ground, or perhaps it would be truer to say that they had never really been eclipsed. The main centre of interest, though, was how the 1956 Revolution was to be assessed in a historical perspective, and especially what place it occupied in the history of the Soviet régime-initially in terms of the system's changelessness, then from 1985 in terms of its unexpected changeability.
This was true primarily of late Kremlinology, with its focus on decisionmaking and political institutions and structures. George Schöpflin, for example, analysed the part that Nagy and others played in 1956 from the point of view of the "leadership options". The Prime Minister's ideas and values, having been a subject of so much earlier writing, were not discussed by him; Nagy was examined in the light of his relationships with various Hungarian and Soviet power factors and how he was seen by them.²³ He was still an important player, but more as an explanatory element within the broader approaches. That is why Condoleezza Rice and Michael Fry observe what has since become a commonplace in both academic and journalistic accounts:

Nagy had violated the accepted canons of satellite behavior, going much further than even moderates [in the Kremlin] could possibly allow. The situation in Hungary now presented a quadruple threat: to the Communist Party dominance, to the reliability of the army, to the stability of the Eastern bloc, and to the Soviet security system.²⁴

The syntheses that were produced in the late 80s clearly exhibited the part Nagy had played in the reform experiment of 1953, which were the roots of his policy during the revolutionary days, and at the same time firmly underscored the individuality and charisma of his person. For his young reform-minded supporters, wrote Charles Gati in 1986, "Nagy was both a genuine father figure and the last hope for socialism with a human face." During the Revolution he filled the same role on a national scale: "he became the last hope for freedom and independence for all Hungarians."²⁵ However, adds Gati, "it is one of the paradoxes of political life in Eastern Europe that, until the last days of this short-lived revolution, Nagy was also the man Moscow counted on, and could count on, to save its cause in Hungary." That dichotomy was resolved by the second Russian invasion, in response to which Nagy decided to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact: "From the loyal Muscovite he had been all his life, this is when Nagy became a Hungarian revolutionary."²⁶
The biography of Nagy by Peter Unwin, one-time British Ambassador to Budapest, was published in 1991 but still basically reflects the picture that had been developed during the previous decade. Whereas émigré Hungarians from Méray to Gati had laid particular stress on the influence that oppositionist intellectuals exercised on Nagy in 1955-56, Unwin saw him more as a "lonely hero" and in reaching his final conclusions, he was swayed most of all by the still very fresh idea of an end to the story of the Soviet era:

... three things emerged to stand to his credit in the book of history. The first was the service he did to himself when he stood firm against the forces which came to reimpose alien authority upon his country... The second was the service he gave to the Communist world... he had shown Communism a way out of the wilderness into which Stalinism had taken it. But Nagy's greatest service was not to himself or to his party but to his country. He did not make the revolution. But he made it possible... Nagy and the Revolution went down to defeat, but they gave Hungary back its self-respect.²⁷

From the turning point of 1989-91, assessments of Nagy and the events of 1956 were shaped in terms of a new chapter in the international discourse about the history of the Cold War. The archival revolution resulted, to some degree, in a dwindling of the significance of the Hungarian Revolution, including Nagy's role, within the grand narratives that now preoccupied scholars, especially in the United States.²⁸ In many respects, analyses of the crises that broke out in Eastern Europe during the mid-50s went back to the conclusions of earlier Kremlinologists. Even in the early 90s, someone like Henry Kissinger took the view that it was Imre Nagy's declaration of Hungarian neutrality that provoked Soviet intervention. While paying due respects to Nagy's martyrdom, indeed calling him "the living symbol of truth" when he deals with the final days of the revolt, Kissinger still notes that:

Nagy, a lifelong member of the communist cadre, could not have failed to understand the import of the Soviet warnings, or of the changes he was himself fostering. Yet, by this time, Nagy, caught between the fury of his people and the implacability of his communist allies, was riding a tide he could neither control nor direct.²⁹

The Malin minutes-the surviving records, often enigmatically fragmentary, of the debates within the Presidium of the Communist Party of the USSR during the autumn of 1956³⁰-have confirmed something that Méray and Molnár already saw clearly in the late 50s. The reason for declaring Hungarian neutrality and unilaterally withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact was because Nagy tried to use these as tactics to delay the impending renewed Soviet intervention, which had already been decided upon the previous day in Moscow. In this way, the more serious appraisals that draw on the newly available documentation-at least in regard to Nagy's role in its events-have returned to starting point.

The nature of Nagy's communism, his apostasy and revisionism, is something that has concerned at best a rather limited circle of scholars since the early 80s. In 1989, however, a new development stimulated a new look at this seemingly tedious and insignificant biographical aspect. Documents came to light that revealed contacts Nagy had with Soviet state security organs during the 30s³¹-and this at a time that more or less coincided with Hungary's latest major historical moment. As Sándor Horváth pointed out in a recent essay about how Hungarian historians have treated 1956 since the change in régime, the essence of their rewriting of the Nagy story had been his immortalisation as a martyr.³² This can be interpreted likewise as a return to the narratives of the late 50s, which saw Imre Nagy's extraordinariness as lying in his ethical stance. The state security link itself, of course, fitted a series of current trends, including a new wave of revelations during the 90s about the Stalinist régime, with the reopening of files on all manner of historical crimes, and a widespread public interest in the history of the secret services, still the subject of continued mystification as it was. At the time (1989), of course, the revelation also had a delegitimising character and purpose, since it lay in the interests of orthodox Communists in the Soviet Union and Hungary to discredit Imre Nagy, the posthumous protagonist of Hungary's democratic transformation. The motif was incorporated into writing about 1956 and Nagy as a new element that outgrew its Hungarian specifics.³³ Authoritative figures in general did not ascribe any great importance to this, however. In Russia during the early 90s there was quite a lot written about Nagy as the informer "Volodya"; still, Aleksandr Stikalin, author of the first Russian scholarly monograph about the Hungarian Revolution, concluded: "although they are important for building up a complete picture of Nagy's personality, in my view these documents in themselves provide no grounds for re-evaluating his role in Hungarian society and politics in the mid-50s or in the 1956 Revolution."³⁴ The ethical significance of Nagy's martyrdom, and the strength it manifested in 1989, was captured by Timothy Garton Ash in his closing address to an international conference that was held ten years ago in Budapest. In this he noted, "It is undeniable that the largest symbolical event in the Hungarian Refolution of 1989 [Garton Ash is deliberately conflating the later reforms with the 1956 Revolution] was the ceremonial reburial of Imre Nagy on 16 June, the anniversary of his execution in 1958."³⁵ He made this even more explicit in a reference to the parallel with Gomulka that has attended writing about Nagy from the very start: "My attention was taken by something that Jan Nowak [one of the speakers at the conference] mentioned in passing: 'Why did Gomulka succeed where Nagy failed?' The question is whether Gomulka actually succeeded in attaining anything. Let us just look at what happened to him, and what became of the hopes placed in him and the Polish reforms. Has Gomulka been accorded a ceremonial reburial?"³⁶
Just as historians in the 90s in many respects went back to verdicts that had been reached by their predecessors, in the new millennium they may be going back to even older disputes. At least that is something one gathers about a new book by Charles Gati which is due to appear shortly in English, Hungarian and other languages.³⁷ In a lecture that he gave to herald this, Gati asserts that "the revolution was lacking in effective leadership. There is no sign that Imre Nagy or his colleagues advised the young and inexperienced insurgents to take a quick look at a map, to check the location of the Soviet Union and show a measure of self-restraint. There is no doubting the leaders' fine intentions and patriotism, and their task was truly hopeless, but it is no longer necessary, 50 years later, to gloss over their poor performance." He adds: "if Imre Nagy and his government had controlled and not merely reacted to events, then they might have been able to achieve a limited pluralism in exchange for support for Soviet foreign policy."³⁸
Gati clearly intends to start a controversy, and he will most likely succeed in doing so. All I would like to do here is to stress that this pointed assertion is no more than a restatement of one of the basic issues for the international assessment of Nagy, one already expressed while the Revolution was still in progress- that is, what Realpolitik was to be (or could be) followed in the revolutionary situation, or in other words, what was actually achieved politically speaking.
There are not too many comparable issues in the almost five decades of considering the life of Imre Nagy. In point of fact, there are just two. One is the problem of the (Communist) politician as opposed to the moral man: was it possible as a politician to choose what was right from a human point or view, and how was Nagy able to do this at decisive moments? The other concerns the legacy of Nagy's political thinking, which the New Left and Eurocommunism once sought to set up as one of its traditions and models. Realpolitik has been recurringly argued over, and will continue to be argued over, but a consensus has prevailed with regard to Nagy's ethical position ever since the time of Nagy's death. The meaning of that death has not been questioned by anything that may have been discovered about Nagy's life. The events of 1989 defined, or rather redefined, and fixed that consensus for a long time to come. As for his political thinking-which was most important for him personally-the various models for a transition to a Soviet-type socialism, its openness to reform, even models for socialism itself, all that now seems to be a memory of what is now finally a closed chapter, of interest today only as a museum exhibit.

1 Melvin J. Lasky, ed., A White Book. The Hungarian Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg, 1957, p. 32. Bourgin's reports from Hungary were republished during the 90s: see Simon Bourgin, "The Well of Discontent. Part 1. Briefing Radio Free Europe, 1956," The Hungarian Quarterly 1996 (vol. 37, no. 142): pp. 3-23.
2 Lasky, op. cit., p. 94.
3 A colourful version of this from George Mikes, The Hungarian Revolution, London, 1957 is quoted by Lasky, op. cit., pp. 78-79.
4 Raymond L. Garthoff, "The Tragedy of Hungary", Problems of Communism, January-February, 1957.
5 Quoted by Lasky, op. cit., p. 132.
6 Quoted by Lasky, op. cit., p. 185.
7 In a December 1956 resolution, the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party listed the oppositionist activities of Imre Nagy and his group as just one (out of four) of the causes of the 1956 "counterrevolution". Admittedly, another resolution in February 1957 declared that Nagy had "betrayed" the cause of the international Communist movement, but after that the ex-premier's name was hardly mentioned at all in public till his execution.
8 D. N. Pritt, confidential remarks about the publication The Counter-Revolutionary Conspiracy of Imre Nagy and His Accomplices, September 10th, 1958. Hungarian National Archive, nks., 288. f. 22/1958. fcs. 6. ô.e. 337-347.
9 The Truth about the Nagy Affair. Facts, Documents, Comments. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1959.
10 See Imre Nagy, On Communism. In Defence of the New Course (London, 1957). In this Nagy was responding to criticisms that had been made both of the policies he had pursued as Prime Minister in 1953-54 and of him personally. In several separate pieces written in early 1956 he set out his own criticisms of Stalinism and outlined his own fundamental political beliefs.
11 Known particularly in the English edition: Tibor Méray, Thirteen Days that Shook the Kremlin. Transl. by Howard L. Katzander. New York, Praeger, 1959.
12 Miklós Molnár & László Nagy, Imre Nagy, réformateur ou révolutionnaire? (Publications de l'Institut Universitaire de Hautes Études Internationales no. 3). Geneva & Paris, Ambilly, 1959, p. 145.
13 Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Ghost of Stalin", in: Béla K. Király, Barbara Lotze & Nándor F. Dreisziger, eds., The First War Between Socialist States: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and its Impact. New York, Brooklyn College Press, 1984, p. 116.
14 Raymond Aron, "The Meaning of Destiny", in: Tamas Aczel, ed., Ten Years After. The Hungarian Revolution in the Perspective of History. New York, Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1966, pp. 24-25.
15 In: Tamas Aczel, ed., Ten Years After..., pp. 198-199.
16 Miklós Molnár, "The Heritage of Imre Nagy", in: Tamas Aczel, ed., Ten Years After..., p. 172.
17 Stephen Borsody, "Imre Nagy and Eurocommunism", in: Béla K. Király and Paul Jónás, eds., The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in Retrospect. Boulder: East European Monographs, 1978, p. 129.
18 Ferenc Fehér and Ágnes Heller, Hungary 1956 Revisited. The Message of a Revolution a Quarter of a Century After. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1983, p. 118.
19 Ibid., pp. 126-30.
20 Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Hungarian Source", Telos, Fall 1976 (vol. 29): pp. 4-5.
21 Bill Lomax, Hungary 1956, London, Allison & Busby, 1976, p. 52.
22 Ibid., pp. 53-54.
23 George Schöpflin, "Leadership Options and the Hungarian Revolution", in: Béla K. Király, Barbara Lotze & Nándor F. Dreisziger, eds., The First War Between Socialist States: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and its Impact. New York, Brooklyn College Press, 1984, pp. 535-48 (esp. pp. 543-45).
24 Condoleezza Rice and Michael Fry, "The Hungarian Crisis of 1956: The Soviet Decision", in: Jonathan R. Adelman, ed., Superpowers and Revolutions, New York & Westport, Conn,, Praeger, 1986, pp. 193-4.
25 Charles Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc. Durham, Duke University Press, 1986, p. 126.
26 Ibid., pp. 127-128.
27 Peter Unwin, Voice in the Wilderness: Imre Nagy and the Hungarian Revolution. London, Macdonald, 1991, pp. 187-9.
28 One example is John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know. Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 210-211 & 235-236. A multifaceted perspective on the changed views is provided by László Borhi, "1956 helye a nemzetközi szakirodalomban" (The Place of 1956 in the International Scholarly Literature) in: Évkönyv 2002. Budapest, 1956-os Intézet, pp. 225-232.
29 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1994, pp. 556-561.
30 Mark Kramer, "New Evidence on Soviet Decision-Making and the 1956 Polish and Hungarian Crises", Cold War International History Project Bulletin, 8-9 (Winter 1996-97): pp. 358-384.
31 According to the documents, Nagy was a secret informer for the Soviet political police from 1933 to early 1940 (but possibly for even longer), using the cover name 'Volodya' on written reports about his colleagues and the Hungarian political émigré community in Moscow. Johanna Granville, "Imre Nagy, aka 'Volodya'-a Dent in the Martyr's Halo?", Cold War International History Project Bulletin 5 (Spring 1995): pp. 34-37, and Valerij Muszatov, "What Was Imre Nagy?" New Times International 20 (1993): pp. 13-15.
32 Sándor Horváth, "1956 történetírása a rendszerváltás óta (Writing about the History of 1956 since the Change in Régime)," in: Évkönyv 2002, Budapest, 1956-os Intézet, pp. 215-224.
33 Johanna C. Granville, The First Domino. International Decision Making during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956, College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 2004, pp. 19-24 & 71-74.
34 Aleksandr Stikalin: Prervannaya revolutsiya. Vengerskii krizis 1956 goda i polityka Moskvi. Moscow: Novy Khronograf, 2003, p. 23.
35 Timothy Garton Ash, "Forty Years On. Introductory Essay", in: The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents. Compiled, edited and introduced by Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne & János M. Rainer. Budapest & New York, Central European University Press, 2002, p. xxiv. Garton Ash's paper was originally published in The New York Review of Books vol. 43, no. 18 (14 November 1996).
36 Timothy Garton Ash: "Zárszó" (Closing Address), in: Évkönyv 1996/1997. Budapest, 1956-os Intézet, p. 311.
37 Charles Gati: Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. Woodrow Wilson Center Press & Stanford University Press. See an excerpt from Chapter 1: "Fifty Years After", in The Hungarian Quarterly, 2006, pp. 132-146.
38 Charles Gati, "Mit tett (és mit nem tett) Amerika 1956-ban?" [What Did America Do (and Not Do) in 1956?], História, no. 4, suppl. (2006): p. i.

János M. Rainer
heads the Institute for the History of the 1956 Revolution. His publications include pioneering statistical accounts of the reprisals following the 1956 Revolution (in samizdat 1986-89) and a book on the 1953-59 debates in literary periodicals. The first volume of his biography of Imre Nagy was published, in Hungarian, in 1996 by Századvég, Budapest.