2000 Volume 2000 Issue 29 Pages 86-94
The aim of this paper is to examine the beginning of the reformer-line in Hungary. Hungary carried out reforms of its agricultural and economic systems after the mid 1960s. The author analyses how the Imre Nagy-problem influenced Hungarian domestic policy. Nagy was the Prime Minister during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and declared a renunciation of the one-party rule and a withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet army arrested him after the military intervention in Hungary of November 1956.
After the Soviet military intervention, János Kádár, the First Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, took over the reins of the government with the intention of domestic reform. But he couldn't carry out the reform because of the unstable domestic situation and relations with the Soviet Union. He had to restrain the Soviet Union from intervention in internal affairs in Hungary on the condition that he established the reformer-line. So he consolidated his hold on the country by oppressing opponents and restoring the old socialist system.
Kádár executed Nagy in June of 1958. He took the initiative in the execution without instruction from the Soviet Union. Nagy's execution was the climax of the restoration of the socialist system after the Hungarian Revolution. Kádár tried to show the Soviet Union that executing Nagy had discontinued Nagy's radical reform. After the Nagytrial he gradually loosened domestic controls and established the reformer-line, within the one-party rule in the early of 1960s. The fast step of Hungarian reformer-line in the Kádár-era was to restore the socialist system at the end of 1950s.
