Imre Nagy (7 June 1896 – 16 June 1958) was a Hungarian Communist politician who served as Chairman of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) of the Hungarian People's Republic from 1953 to 1955. In 1956 Nagy became leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet-backed government, for which he was sentenced to death and executed two years later. He was not related to previous agrarianist Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy.
Born to a peasant family, Nagy was apprenticed as a locksmith before being drafted in World War I. Nagy was a committed communist from soon after the Russian Revolution, and through the 1920s he engaged in underground party activity in Hungary. Living in the Soviet Union from 1930, he served the Soviet NKVD secret police as an informer from 1933 to 1941. Nagy returned to Hungary shortly before the end of World War II, and served in various offices as the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) took control of Hungary in the late 1940s and the country entered the Soviet sphere of influence. In 1944 and 1945, he was Hungary's Minister of Agriculture, where he carried out land divisions that won him widespread popularity among the peasantry. He served as Interior Minister of Hungary from 1945 to 1946. Nagy became prime minister in 1953 and attempted to relax some of the harshest aspects of Mátyás Rákosi's Stalinist regime, but was subverted and eventually forced out of the government in 1955 by Rákosi's continuing influence as General Secretary of the MDP. Nagy remained popular with writers, intellectuals, and the common people, who saw him as an icon of reform against the hard-line elements in the Soviet-backed regime.
The outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution on 23 October 1956 saw Nagy elevated to the position of Prime Minister on 24 October as a central demand of the revolutionaries and common people. Nagy's reformist faction gained full control of the government, admitted non-communist politicians, dissolved the ÁVH secret police, promised democratic reforms, and unilaterally withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact on 1 November. The Soviet Union launched a massive military invasion of Hungary on 4 November, forcibly deposing Nagy, who fled to the Embassy of Yugoslavia in Budapest. Nagy was lured out of the embassy under false promises on 22 November and was arrested and deported to Romania. On 16 June 1958, Nagy was tried and executed for treason alongside his closest allies, and his body was buried in an unmarked grave.
In June 1989, Nagy and other prominent figures of the 1956 Revolution were rehabilitated and reburied with full honours, an event that played a key role in the collapse of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party regime.
Imre Nagy was born prematurely on 7 June 1896 in the town of Kaposvár in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, to a small-town family of peasant origin. His father, József Nagy (1869–1929), was a Lutheran and a carriage driver for the lieutenant-general of Somogy county. His mother, Rozália Szabó (1877–1969), served as a maid for the lieutenant-general's wife. They both had left the countryside in their youth to work in Kaposvár. Nagy and Szabó married in January 1896. In 1902, József became a postal worker and began building a house for the family in 1907 but lost his job in 1911 and had to sell the house. He was an unskilled worker for the rest of his life.
In 1904 Nagy's family moved to Pécs before returning to Kaposvár the following year. Nagy attended a gymnasium in Kaposvár from 1907 to 1912, performing poorly. The gymnasium cancelled his tuition due to his lack of accomplishment and funding. He apprenticed as a locksmith in a small metalworking firm in Kaposvár, before moving to a factory for agricultural machinery in Losonc in northern Hungary in 1912. He returned to Kaposvár in 1913 and was given a journeyman's certificate as a metal fitter in 1914. He abandoned the job in the summer of 1914 and became a clerk at a lawyer's office, while simultaneously attending a commercial high school in Kaposvár, where his student performance was good.
After the outbreak of the First World War in July 1914, Nagy was called up for military service in the Austro-Hungarian Army in December 1914 and found fit for service. He reported for duty at the 17th Royal Hungarian Honvéd Infantry Regiment in May 1915, after the end of the school year and before he had graduated. After three months of basic training in Székesfehérvár, his unit was sent to the Italian Front in August 1915, where he was wounded in his leg at the Third Battle of the Isonzo. After convalescing in a field hospital, he was trained as a machine gunner in the 19th Machine Gun Battalion, promoted to corporal and sent to the Eastern Front in the summer of 1916.
Nagy was wounded in the leg by shrapnel and taken prisoner by the Imperial Russian Army during the Brusilov Offensive in Galicia on 29 July 1916. After healing his leg wound in a field hospital, he was taken first to Darnitsa, then to Ryazan and finally on a train transport to Siberia.
In captivity in Camp Berezovka near Lake Baikal in Siberia he participated in a Marxist discussion group until 1917. In 1918, he joined the Communist (Social Democratic) Party of the Foreign Workers of Siberia, a sub-group of the Russian Communist Party. He fought in the ranks of the Red Army from February to September 1918 during the Russian Civil War. Some sources, including the so-called "Yurovsky Document" allege Nagy and his unit were tasked with guarding the former Russian Imperial Family in Yekaterinburg. Though some historians have speculated Nagy himself was among the men in the firing squad that executed the Romanovs, Ivan Plotnikov, history professor at the Ural State University, stated per his research that the executioners were Yakov Yurovsky, Grigory Nikulin, Mikhail Medvedev (Kudrin), Peter Ermakov, Stepan Vaganov, Alexey Kabanov, Pavel Medvedev, V. N. Netrebin, and Y. M. Tselms. The White Army investigator Nikolai Sokolov claimed that the execution of the Imperial Family was carried out by a group of "Latvians led by a Jew". However, in light of Plotnikov's research, the group that carried out the execution consisted almost entirely of ethnic Russians (Nikulin, Kudrin, Ermakov, Vaganov, Kabanov, Medvedev and Netrebin) with the participation of one Jew (Yurovsky) and possibly, one Latvian (Tselms). Allegations of Nagy's presence at the Ipatiev House remains a controversial matter among biographers, and has contributed to his divisive legacy in modern Hungary.
Nagy and his unit were later encircled and he was ultimately taken prisoner by the Czechoslovak Legion in early September 1918. He escaped captivity and spent the period until February 1920 holding odd jobs in White-controlled territory near Lake Baikal. The Red Army reached Irkutsk on 7 February 1920, ending Nagy's participation in the Civil War. On 12 February 1920 he became a candidate member of the Russian Communist Party and a full-time member on 10 May. He served the rest of 1920 as a clerk for the communist Cheka secret police on matters related to prisoners of war.
After a month of training by the Cheka in subversive activities, the Hungarian Communist Party (KMP) sent Nagy along with 277 other Hungarian communists to Hungary in April 1921 to build up an underground conspiratorial network in a country where the Communist Party had been banned since 1919. Nagy reached Kaposvár in late May 1921. Upon arrival, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Hungary (MSZDP). After working temporary jobs in the rest of 1921 and early 1922, he joined the First Hungarian Insurance Company and became an office worker in Kaposvár. He became severely overweight around this time. He helped to build up the socialist movement in his hometown, to his parents' disapproval. He became secretary of the MSZDP's local branch in 1924. He was expelled from the party for advocating revolution and was placed under police surveillance. He married Mária Égető on November 28, 1925.