Imre Nagy is undoubtedly one of the towering figures in 20th-century Hungary, having had a significant impact on the current of history twice within his lifetime and again 31 years after his death. Owing to the drive for silence over the recent past by Nagy’s successor János Kádár, in an attempt to depoliticise society and therefore prevent questions about his own rise to power, Nagy's name remained absent from the public discourse in Hungary for the 30 years following his execution, even if the opposite was the case west of the iron curtain. Thus, it transpired that no comprehensive biography of Imre Nagy was written in Hungary until János M. Rainer undertook the task following the system change in 1989. As Rainer wrote in the preface, what spawned this was that after writing a brief biography for the Spanish language journal Hungría, he realised that Nagy’s life was largely unknown (p. xix).
Over the following decade, Rainer produced a two volume biography of Nagy, one covering his life from 1896–1953 published in 1996 (1), and another from 1953-1958 published in 1999 (2), totalling just under 1000 pages in length. In 2002, Rainer condensed this into a single volume under 200 pages in length, which while still useful to the scholar, is much more accessible to a non-academic audience.(3) Since its publication, Rainer’s biography has generally become considered the definitive work on Nagy’s life. The condensed version was first translated into Polish in 2004 and then into German in 2006, with the current English edition being translated from the German. Until this book was published, there was no biography of Nagy available in English published since Soviet and Hungarian archives opened with the fall of communism and system change in 1989. The work also makes use of Nagy’s own unfinished autobiography, as Rainer states that much of Nagy’s early life was unavailable from other sources.
Read Full Article »