János Kádár

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János Kádár (1977)

János Kádár [ ˈjaːnoʃ ˈkaːdaːr ] (born May 26, 1912 in Fiume as János Czermanik , later János Csermanek ; † July 6, 1989 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian communist politician. From 1956 to 1988 he was the first or general secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party . From 1956 to 1958 and from 1961 to 1965 he also held the office of Hungarian Prime Minister . During his lifetime the period of his political supremacy at home and abroad was referred to as the Kádár era .

Origin and childhood

János Kádár's mother, Borbála Czermanik, was of Slovak-Hungarian descent and worked as a maid. She married the father of Kádár, János Krezinger not and raised her son alone. Kádár was baptized a Catholic and carried his mother's family name.

Beginning of political career

At the age of 17, János Csermanek joined the illegal communist movement in 1929. In 1933 he was sentenced to two years in prison by the Horthy regime . He served part of his sentence in the Csillag prison in Szeged , where he met, among other things, the later Stalinist party leader Mátyás Rákosi . After his release, he initially joined the Hungarian Social Democratic Party on the instructions of the Hungarian Communist Party . In 1943 he became general secretary in the Communist Party himself, on which occasion he was given the code name János Kádár ; after 1945 he officially adopted this name.

In April 1944, Kádár was sent to Yugoslavia to establish contacts with the exiled communist leaders. He was arrested at the border, charged with hiding his identity as a fugitive soldier, and finally sentenced again to two years in prison. In November of the same year he fled and returned to Budapest, where he was appointed deputy chief of police by the Central Committee during the Soviet siege of the city . After the end of the Second World War , Kádár became secretary of the Central Committee and shortly afterwards a member of the Politburo .

In communist Hungary after 1945

From 1948 to 1950, Kádár was initially Minister of the Interior of Hungary in the Stalinist Rákosi era. In this function, he and his wife Mária Tamáska (* 1912, † 1992) were initially one of the founders and main organizers of the political secret police ÁVH , the widely feared instrument of repression and terror of the communist regime; Furthermore, in his role as Minister of the Interior, he was instrumental in the preparation of the show trial against his former party friend László Rajk (executed in 1949). Nevertheless, Kádár fell out of favor with the party leadership under Rákosi: in 1951 he was arrested and accused of supporting the (renegade) Yugoslav Communist Party leader Tito and sentenced in 1952 to life imprisonment and removed from office; only after Stalin's death, in 1953, he was released and rehabilitated under the government of Imre Nagy .

At the head of power after the 1956 popular uprising was put down

After initially participating in the Hungarian people's uprising in 1956, János Kádár changed sides and was primarily responsible for its suppression: after consultation with Moscow, he founded a government against Imre Nagy and asked the Soviet Union for military help, which soon ended the popular uprising with blood. As the new general secretary of the party, Kádár was henceforth absolute ruler in the country. Years of terror followed again (in Hungary called the time of retaliation by the communist regime, ung .: megtorlás ), which was in no way inferior to that of the early 1950s under Rákosi: several thousand people were imprisoned and tortured, over 1200 people were executed, including two Years later, in 1958, Imre Nagy too, following a secret trial - to whom Kádár only recently owed his release. The retaliation was carried out, among other things, by units of the so-called quilted jacket brigade (Hungarian: pufajkások ), which at that time had been set up on his instructions (with Soviet consent) specifically to restore the dictatorship and whose members were often recruited from the recently disbanded ÁVH - one of them was the later Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Horn .

The partial political easing in Hungary from the 1960s

During his time as party leader (1956–1988), Kádár pursued a largely pro-Soviet course in foreign policy. In return, the Soviet Union gave him greater room for maneuver domestically, which led to smaller economic and political reforms in Hungary from the 1960s onwards, known as goulash communism . For example, after the years of retaliation (see above), not only did open terror (torture, assassinations) cease from around 1960, but after the ÁVH, which was dissolved in 1956, no new political secret police were brought into being, and neither did the notorious Pufajka / Quilted Jacket Brigade no longer took action; State security tasks were taken over by the Ministry of the Interior and the 'regular' criminal authorities, although over the course of time this was increasingly limited to actual counter-espionage . In this sense, Kádár himself announced the well-known motto at a meeting of the ' Patriotic People 's Front ' in 1961 : “ Whoever is not against the People's Republic of Hungary is for it; whoever is not against the MSZMP is for it; whoever is not against the Popular Front is for it. "(Often simply quoted as:" He who is not against us is for us. ")

One of the aims of this political reform course was to increase the standard of living of the Hungarian population and, compared with some other socialist states, actually led to a higher quality of life and somewhat greater freedom. The other way around it was from then on in Moscow, especially during the later Brezhnev era, sometimes (unofficially) not welcomed when, for example, Soviet scientists were invited to Budapest.

Kádár played an ambivalent role at the 1968 Prague Spring in neighboring Czechoslovakia. At first he believed that he could rely on a 'political solution' to the conflict (also because he wanted to avoid a repetition of the events of 1956) by trying to mediate between the Soviet leadership under Brezhnev and the Czechoslovak democracy movement under Alexander Dubček . led several conversations with the latter. Ultimately, however, he remained loyal to Moscow, so that Hungary was militarily involved in the suppression of the Prague Spring by the Soviet Army and troops from other Warsaw Pact states (apart from the GDR and Romania).

In the 1970s and 1980s, under Kádár, the political climate in Hungary continued to loosen, so that solid political jokes and satire could increasingly be expressed in public, for example by the famous cabaret artist Géza Hofi in numerous theater and television appearances; since the 1960s, the Stalin era under Rákosi was even more or less publicly condemned, as happened in the 1969 comedy film “ Der Zeuge ” (ung .: A tanú ). Above all, travel restrictions were eased considerably from the 1960s, as a result of which Hungarian citizens were also allowed to travel to the West under certain conditions .

The entirety of the new political course meant that János Kádár enjoyed increasing recognition at home and abroad. For his general acceptance, he benefited not least from his former arrest in 1951, especially since it enabled him to be stylized as a “ victim of Stalinism ”. The reports of his ill-treatment during his prison years were questioned by his opponents after the system change in Hungary, while the visible scars of torture on his hands supported these accounts.

Despite all the reforms and easing, one topic was taboo under Kádár until the end: the popular uprising of 1956 always had to be defamed and condemned as a “ counterrevolution ”, and the communist one-party dictatorship under the ruling MSZMP and Hungary's military presence in the Warsaw Pact were never allowed to be questioned.

The end of his power and the political change in Hungary

In May 1988, Kádár finally resigned from his position as General Secretary. Shortly thereafter, the last taboo fell : in January 1989 the party functionary Imre Pozsgay publicly called the events of 1956 a “ popular uprising ” for the first time , and on June 16 the honorable posthumous burial of Imre Nagy, who was executed at the time, Kádár opposed to his rehabilitation had vehemently denied until the very end - that he was still to witness all this and that on the day of his death, July 6, 1989, the former death sentences of 1956 were officially declared unlawful, was recognized by broad sections of the Hungarian population as a ' symbolic atonement ' of his former Shared responsibility for the crimes of the communist regime in the 1950s.

Others

Kádár was known for his simple and humble lifestyle and avoided the self-indulgence of other communist leaders, and he also had a strong aversion to corruption. Playing chess was his only hobby. He was also a heavy smoker and is said to have commented: "It is no use to anyone, but it does not harm everyone "

Desecration of the grave

Grave of János Kádárs and his wife (2006)

On May 2, 2007, Kádár's grave was desecrated in the Kerepesi temető cemetery in Budapest . Unknown perpetrators opened the metal coffin and stole parts of its remains as well as the urn containing the ashes of his widow Mária Tamáska, who died in 1992. In addition, the communist monument ' Pantheon of the Working People ' , which was erected not far from the grave in 1958, was sprayed with the words “ A murderer and traitor must not rest in holy earth, 1956-2006 ”. This is a quote from a song by the Hungarian right-wing rock band Kárpátia , whereby the two annual dates obviously refer on the one hand to Kádár's main responsibility for the suppression of the Hungarian people's uprising in 1956, and on the other hand to the unrest in Budapest on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2006 and the local police operations of the socialist Gyurcsány government. The desecration of the grave was unanimously condemned in the Hungarian parliament by all parties. In addition to the ruling MSZP , the deputy spokesman for the - at the time opposition - bourgeois-national-conservative FIDESZ , András Cser-Palkovics , said his party “ did not see the incident as a political question, but as one Question of piety ”, since the“ last rest is everyone ”. After all investigations and police searches were unsuccessful, the case was unsuccessful in November of the same year; Since then, Kádár's grave has been monitored by video camera .

Fonts

  • Selected speeches and essays. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1981
  • A strong people's power means an independent Hungary: speeches and articles. Selection from the years 1957–1959. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1961.
  • Forward on the Path of Socialism: Speeches and Articles. Selection from the years 1960–1966. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1967.
  • Speeches and writings: 1964–1971. Dietz-Verlag, Berlin 1972.
  • Socialism and Democracy in Hungary: Speeches, Articles, and Interviews, 1957–1982. Corvina-Verlag, Budapest 1984 ISBN 963-13-1887-7 .
  • The renewal of socialism in Hungary: speeches and articles from 1957–1986. Corvina-Verlag, Budapest 1987 ISBN 963-13-2601-2 .
  • For a socialist Hungary. Verlag Marxistische Blätter, Frankfurt am Main 1976 ISBN 3-88012-421-3 .

literature

  • Andreas Schmidt-Schweizer: Kádárism - the "long aftermath" of the Hungarian popular uprising ; in: Rüdiger Kipke (Ed.): Hungary 1956. On the history of a failed popular uprising ; Wiesbaden: VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006; ISBN 978-3-531-15290-5 ; Pp. 161-187.
  • Janos Jemnitz : Letter from left members of the former Social Democratic Party to Janos Kadar from November 1956, in: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Issue I / 2008.

Web links

Commons : János Kádár  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ ÁVH documentary video on YouTube , accessed on March 31, 2019. ( Hungarian )
  2. ↑ s. Documentary film "Pufajkások" on YouTube , accessed on March 31, 2019. ( Hungarian )
  3. ↑ http://www.rev.hu/html/hu/tanulmanyok/kadarrendszer/helyezkedes.html ( Memento from April 14, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-2289
  5. ↑ http://beszelo.c3.hu/cikkek/kadar-janos-es-a-pragai-tavasz
  6. ↑ ÁVH-Doku-Video Hungarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICDF16cAZ_w
  7. ^ Obituary: Janos Kadar . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1989, pp. 189 ( online - 10 July 1989 ).
  8. ↑ Kádár János Nagy Imre rehabilitásáról 1988 május on YouTube , accessed on March 31, 2019 ( Hungarian )
  9. ↑ http://index.hu/belfold/2014/06/16/nagy_imre_omega/
  10. ↑ Sarah Günther: The Spirit of 1989 - In conversation with Katalin Jánosi, the granddaughter of the revolutionary martyr Imre Nagy. Budapester Zeitung, June 16, 2019, accessed on July 17, 2019 .
  11. ^ Victor Sebestyen : Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution , page 141 (English), ISBN 0-307-27795-X
  12. ↑ Jürgen Leinemann: "It burned down like fireworks" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 1979, pp. 27 f . ( Online - September 10, 1979 ).
  13. ↑ http://www.aszabadsag.hu/cikkek/2007/23/show.php?13_kadar.html
  14. ↑ http://www.bumm.sk/archivum/2007/05/04/8797_kadar-koponyaja-is-eltunt
  15. ↑ Ex-Hungary ruler's remains stolen , BBC News of May 3, 2007
  16. ↑ Eltűntek Kádár János földi maradványai (Hungarian)
  17. ↑ A szemkilövő rendőr arca! on YouTube , accessed March 31, 2019 ( Hungarian )
  18. ↑ http://www.haon.hu/eltuntek-kadar-janos-foldi-maradvanyai/news-20070502-02252030
  19. ↑ http://hvg.hu/itthon/20070502_kadar_sirja
  20. ↑ http://www.origo.hu/itthon/20071129-lezartak-a-nyomozast-kadar-janos-sirjanak-megrongalasa-ugyeben.html
personal data
SURNAME Kádár, János
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Csermanek, János
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian communist politician
DATE OF BIRTH May 26, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Fiume
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 1989
Place of death Budapest