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In-Depth Information
Rákosi, the winner. The following year the Social Democrats merged with the Communists
to form the Hungarian Workers' Party.
Rákosi, a big fan of Stalin, began a process of nationalisation and unrealistically fast in-
dustrialisation at the expense of agriculture. Peasants were forced into collective farms and a
network of spies and informers exposed 'class enemies' such as Cardinal József Mindszenty
to the secret police - the ÁVO (ÁVH after 1949) - who interrogated them at their headquar-
ters at VI Andrássy út 60 (now the House of Terror) in Pest and sent them to trial at the then
Military Court of Justice in Buda. Some were executed; many more were sent into internal
exile or condemned to labour camps. Stalinist show trials became the order of the day and in
August 1949 the nation was proclaimed the 'People's Republic of Hungary'.
After Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, Rákosi's tenure was up and the terror
began to abate. The reputations of executed apparatchiks were rehabilitated and people like
former minister of agriculture Imre Nagy, who had been expelled from the party a year earli-
er for suggesting reforms, were readmitted. By October 1956 murmured calls for a real re-
form of the system - 'socialism with a human face' - were being heard.
CARDINAL MINDSZENTY
Born József Pehm in the village of Csehimindszent near Szombathely in western Hun-
gary in 1892, Mindszenty was politically active from the time of his ordination in 1915.
Imprisoned by Communist leader Béla Kun in 1919 and again by the fascist Arrow
Cross in 1944, Mindszenty was made archbishop of Esztergom (and thus primate of
Hungary) in 1945, and cardinal in 1946.
In 1948, when he refused to secularise Hungary's Roman Catholic schools under
the new Communist regime, Mindszenty was arrested, tortured and sentenced to life
imprisonment for treason. Released during the 1956 Uprising, the cardinal took refuge
in the US Embassy when the Communists returned to power. He remained there until
1971.
As relations between the Kádár regime and the Holy See began to improve in the
late 1960s, the Vatican made several requests for Mindszenty to leave Hungary, which
he refused to do. Following the intervention of US president Richard Nixon, Mind-
szenty left for Vienna, where he continued to criticise the Vatican's relations with Hun-
gary. He retired in 1974 and died the following year. Mindszenty had vowed not to re-
turn to Hungary until the last Russian soldier had left Hungarian soil, but his remains
were returned in May 1991, several weeks before that pivotal date.
