Sándor Nógrádi

Sándor Nógrádi (born May 14, 1894 in Fülek , today: Slovakia ; † January 1, 1971 in Budapest ) was a Hungarian politician of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party MSZMP (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt) and Colonel General of the Hungarian People's Army (Magyar Néphadsereg) , who among others between 1955 and 1956 First Vice Minister of Defense and from 1957 to 1960 Ambassador to the People's Republic of China and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam .

Life

Education, World War I and the Hungarian Soviet Republic

Nógrádi, the son of a baker, first attended elementary school in Losonc and then high school in Szécsény , which he left after four years. He then did a ten-month apprenticeship as a baker with his father, who at the time was running a bakery in Verseg . Shortly afterwards he went to his uncle in Budapest, who worked as a printer in the Világosság Nyomdában printing house , and in 1909 began an apprenticeship in the Budapest chandelier factory Gottfried and Co. Due to a lung disease, he went back to Losonc in autumn 1911 and worked training as an electrician. After the death of his father in the spring of 1912, he became the breadwinner of the family and began working as a worker in the agricultural machinery factory in Losonc. In the evening school he took German and French lessons and in the summer of 1914 he passed the entrance examination for the commercial college in Banská Bystrica . After graduating, he became an accountant for the Losoncer agricultural machinery factory in 1915 and, due to this activity, was released from military service until the spring of 1918.

In April 1918, Nógrádi joined the 25th Infantry Regiment of the Royal Hungarian Landwehr as an officer candidate , but was no longer served at the front. After the end of the First World War he returned as an employee to the Losonc agricultural machinery factory and in November 1918 also became secretary of the local National Association of Industrial and Transport Workers IKTOSZ (Ipari és Közlekedési Tisztségviselők Országos Szövetsége) . As such, he was also involved in founding the Communist Party of Hungary KMP (Kommunisták Magyarországi Pártja) in Losonc, founded by Béla Kun , and was arrested in February 1919 as one of the organizers of the general strike in southern Slovakia . After his release he went to Budapest after Béla Kun founded the Federal Hungarian Socialist Council Republic on March 31, 1919 and initially worked at the headquarters of the IKTOSZ and as an auditor in the National Statistical Office (Országos Statisztikai Hivatal) . In May 1919 he joined the Hungarian Red Army and initially took part in the fighting in Piliscsaba before he was placed under police supervision after the collapse of the Soviet Republic on August 1, 1919 in his previous home in Losonc.

1920s and 1930s

In February 1921, Nógrádi was arrested for disseminating communist literature in Banská Bystrica and sentenced to three months' imprisonment. After his release from prison he went to Prague and became secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Youth League. After a large wave of arrests, he went into exile in Berlin with the party leadership in May 1923 . There he first worked in the editorial department of the SPD party newspaper Vorwärts and then in the office of the Communist Youth International (KJI). In October 1923 he was posted to Moscow , where he worked as a secretary in the executive office of the Communist International until September 1924 . He then went to Vienna for a short time and then to Bucharest , where he was arrested in early 1925 for communist activities and was in custody in a military prison. After he escaped during the trial, he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment in absentia.

Afterwards, Nógrádi hid in Romania for two months before returning to the Soviet Union via Moldova and studying there until 1928. In the early autumn of 1928 he returned to Czechoslovakia and worked for the German-language newspaper Vorwärts in Liberec . Due to renewed political activities, he was arrested again by the police and initially deported to Saxony and from there to Austria . In 1929 he returned to Prague and worked there until 1931, after which he held until shortly before the seizure of power of Adolf Hitler on 30 January 1933 in Berlin again lived. As secretary of the anti-fascism and anti-war committee, he met personalities such as the writers Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse , the painter and designer Francis Jourdain and Albert Norden . In the following years he was active as a representative of this committee in France , before taking part in the armed resistance against the Francoist troops of Francisco Franco on the part of the Republicans after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War .

World War II and Slovak National Uprising

After the end of the Spanish Civil War on April 1, 1939, Nógrádi initially returned to France before he returned to Moscow after the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in World War II , where he again worked for the Communist International. In 1940 he was one of the employees and supporters of Mátyás Rákosi in Moscow and for some time worked as a spokesman and editor for the radio station Kossuth Rádió . He then went to Kiev as the commander of a Hungarian partisan school and subsequently took part in the resistance movement in Slovakia and, from August 29, 1944, in the Slovak National Uprising .

On October 8, 1944 Nógrádi reached with a 20-strong group of partisans Zvolen , got there but no support from the Soviet partisan units. He then moved to the brazier near Salgótarján with a group of partisans that had grown to seventy men and camped from December 7, 1944 in the village of Karancsberény, which is part of the Salgótarján small area . After fighting with SS units on December 27, 1944, his unit joined forces with the units of the 2nd Ukrainian Front .

Hungarian People's Republic

Deputy and State Secretary

In mid-January 1945 Nógrádi returned to Hungary and was elected a member of the Provisional National Assembly (Ideiglenes Nemzetgyűlés) . He was then sent by Ernő Gerő to Miskolc in order to organize the work of the Hungarian Communist Party MKP (Magyar Kommunista Párt), founded on November 5, 1944, as secretary for several counties . On May 21, 1945 he was elected a member of the Central Committee (ZK) of the KMP. On November 4, 1945 he was also elected for the first time as a member of the Hungarian Parliament (Országgyűlés) , to which he was a member until January 28, 1967. On November 23, 1945, he became State Secretary in the Ministry of Industry, where he was responsible for increasing coal production until January 16, 1947.

Previously, Nógrádi took over the head of the Central Committee department for agitation and propaganda in October 1946 and was on the III. Party congress of the MKP in January 1947 also member of the Organizing Committee of the Central Committee. At the founding congress of the party of the Hungarian working people MDP (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja) , which was formed after the merger of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary MSZDP (Magyarországi Szociáldemokrata Párt) with the MKP on June 15, 1948, he failed with his re-election to the organizing committee. However, he was re-elected to the organizing committee at the ZK plenum in November 1948.

Vice Minister of Defense and the Hungarian People's Uprising

On December 3, 1948, Nógrádi became Lieutenant General (Altábornagy) Deputy Minister of Defense and on December 13, 1948, he took over the post of Colonel General (Vezérezredes) as Deputy Head of the Political Department of the Hungarian People's Army (Magyar Néphadsereg) , which he held until January 1 1956 held. At the beginning of the 1950s, due to this function in the Hungarian People's Republic, he was largely responsible for several show and secret trials before military courts. Most recently, he served as First Vice Minister of Defense from 1955 to 1956 and thus Deputy to Defense Minister István Bata . In January 1956 he was again head of the Central Committee's department for agitation and propaganda.

On June 17, 1956, when a popular uprising was already beginning to emerge, the nationally hated Mátyás Rákosi had to resign as General Secretary of the Communist Party under Soviet pressure. In the course of the “ second de-Stalinization ”, Ernő Gerő was appointed as the new party leader. This also increased the fermenting unrest in the country, and students and intellectuals in particular found this retrograde change extremely unsatisfactory. For this reason, Nógrádi took part on June 27, 1956 at a meeting of the "Petőfi Circle" (Petőfi Kör) of political intellectuals around Georg Lukács , Tibor Déry , Géza Losonczy , Gábor, named after the poet and folk hero of the 1848/1849 revolution Sándor Petőfi Tánczos , Ferenc Mérei , Ferenc Donáth and Domokos Kosáry took part, and tried to justify the position of the new state and party leadership. After the start of the popular uprising, he became a member of the Central Military Committee of the MDP on October 26, 1956, of which he was a member until October 31, 1956. On November 2, 1956, he went on a visit to Moscow with Antal Apró , György Marosán and Károly Kiss to ask the Soviet Union for help in the fight against the insurgents. After his return, he joined the " Hungarian Revolutionary Workers and Peasants Government " formed by Prime Minister János Kádár on November 4, 1956 . After the MDP was renamed the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party MSZMP (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt) , he continued to head the Central Committee for agitation and propaganda and held this position until April 1957.

Ambassador and member of the State Presidium

Afterwards Nógrádi changed on May 1, 1957 to the Foreign Ministry and was to succeed on May 9, 1957 Agoston Szkaladan Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the People's Republic of China and was appointed as such until his dismissal in January 1960 at the same time as ambassador to the Democratic Republic Vietnam accredited . At the same time he was re-elected as a member of the Central Committee of the MSZMP at a Central Committee plenum on June 29, 1957 and belonged to it until the 8th Party Congress on November 24, 1962.

Thereafter Nógrádi was between 1963 and 1967 member of the collective state presidency (Népköztársaság Elnöki Tanácsa) . On the IX. Party congress of the MSZMP he was again elected a member of the Central Committee and belonged to it until his death. At the same time he was chairman of the Central Revision Commission from December 3, 1966 until his death on January 1, 1971.

Web links

• Entry in Történelmi Tár (Hungarian)
• Entry in the Magyar életrajzi lexicon

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nógradi initially represented Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county in parliament and from January 31, 1947 to January 28, 1967 the general list of the Hungarian Independent Popular Front MFN (Magyar Függetlenségi Népfront) and the Patriotic Popular Front HNF (Hazafias Népfront).
2. ↑ Since the previous Minister of Agriculture, Imre Dögei, who was to be his successor as ambassador, was excluded from the MSZMP Central Committee on February 12, 1960 because of "sectarian and anti-party tendencies", Nógradi remained in his ambassadorial post until he was replaced by Ferenc Martin in March 1960 .