Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

(1912–89), First Secretary of the Communist Party of hungary (1956–88). Having been imprisoned under horthy de nagybánya's regime, Kádár became minister of the interior under rákosi from 1948 to 1950. He then found himself jailed again until 1954, after a Party purge. Subsequently rehabilitated, he briefly shared power with nagy during the preliminaries to the hungarian rising of 1956. As the confrontation with the soviet union worsened, Kádár abandoned his colleague and supported the red army's brutal intervention. Rewarded by khrushchev with the premiership, he reasserted the Party's authority through a regime that was initially highly repressive. However, during his thirty-year span of leadership, Kádár did shift towards promoting modest measures of economic modernization (e.g. some accommodation of private enterprise) and even of political liberalization. By the later 1980s, when the reformist gorbachev held power in Moscow, the limited scale of these changes looked increasingly inadequate to secure continuance of communist control. Shortly before the onset of the European revolutions of 1989–91, the more radical modernizers within the Hungarian party succeeded, albeit too belatedly, in obtaining Kádár's resignation. (See also communism ) ... log in or subscribe to read full text