HUNGARIAN STUDIES 20. No. 2. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [2006]

János Rainer M.: Intersecting Lives - Imre Nagy and János Kádár in 1956

200 JÁNOS RAINER M. Hungarian Politburo in 1951-56, Prime Minister in 1955-56, and in the 1960s a dissident sociologist, the functionary mentality has two main traits: (1) faith in the infallibility and omnipotence of the party, and (2) belief in the mission of the party and its functionaries to save the world. ' To this can be a further feature in the Cen­tral and East European region: the faith not simply in the party, but in the Commu­nist Party of the Soviet Union and its leaders. Nagy was already showing an inclination to depart from this pattern in the early stages of his career,2 probably because of his intellectual leanings, which prompted him several times in his life to weigh political problems not just as a party functionary, but after the fashion of aparty intellectual.3 Born in 1896, Nagy had no university education; indeed he never finished secondary school either. He joined the Bolshevik movement in 1918 while he was a prisoner of war and was a low-level functionary by the end of the Russian Civil War. On his return to Hun­gary, he committed himself wholly to the communist movement, which was ille­gal at the time, only some five years later.4 At the end of the 1920s, however, he was a relatively successful local functionary in the south-west Hungarian town of Kaposvár, when he was offered a post as a senior provincial organizer. This Nagy declined, saying he wanted to devote most of his time to researching Hungary's agrarian problems. This set him off on a path of intellectual "specialization".5 During the great internal debates among the Hungarian communists in 1928-9, Nagy took a position close to that of György Lukács's famous Blum Theses.6 Lukács, Nagy and their associates were defeated in the debate, and Nagy was then sent to the Soviet Union, where he joined the staff of the COMINTERN Interna­tional Agrarian Institute, on the borderline between a functionary and a party in­tellectual, but closer to the latter.7 Imre Nagy survived the great purge (although he lost his job) because he did not belong to the Hungarian elite of functionaries in Moscow and because he was presumably helped after his arrest in 1938 by the po­litical police, for which he was an informer. By the end of 1944, he was a function­ary again, a Politburo member, and a communist minister in the new coalition government. The communist party was very short of cadres and Nagy had considerable value, with his pleasing personality and ability to mix, and the fact that he was not a Jew, unlike most of his colleagues. Surviving the purges was a kind of passport or guarantee of his reliability. But when the question came up of a rapid change to a Soviet-type system, he again expressed his doubts and gave voice to them in internal debates. He sought an 'alternative' model that would not break with the ideological aims of the international movement, but would be different from the Soviet model. The key again was the "transition" (like it was in the Blum Theses) during which Nagy and others did not think the Soviet line had to be followed mechanically, or if so, then only the New Economic Policy. The transition was equal to a revolution, but the violent and coercive elements of that could be

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