Imre Nagy's Ultimate Sacrifice

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 Nagyâ??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 Nagyâ??s life was largely unknown (p. xix).