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The Two Faces: while stone-bald Matyas Rakosi engulfed the Social Democrats, and began slicing up the opposition with his "salami tactics" (a slice at a time), Nagy gave Communism its soft face. Appointed Speaker of the Hungarian Parliament, he made a reputation as a "sincere" and "earnest" speechmaker, taught agrarian science at Budapest University, published books on theology, made no protest when his daughter married a practicing Protestant clergyman. By sitting around Budapest cafes fingering his soup-strainer mustache, talking soccer and politics, hinting that there were other methods of doing things than those adopted by Russians, he cultivated "liberal" attitude, but miraculously survived when (after Tito's defection from Stalin orbit in 1948) Soviet terror struck down Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk and hundreds of other Hungarian Communists.
Nagy's lard-smooth face was needed after Stalin's death, while Soviet collective leadership was still collecting itself. Worried that Berlin riots might have chain reaction in satellites, the Russians in 1953 pulled the hated Rakosi back to Moscow, put up Nagy to head fictitious "People's Front." Nagy (called Hungary's Malenkov) condemned the previous "megalomaniac economic policy" and "exaggerated industrialization," promised workers more food, clothes, an end to "disciplinary measures." But one month after the fall of Malenkov in Russia, Nagy was denounced as a "rightist deviationist" who "encouraged nationalism and chauvinism." Reported ill (coronary thrombosis), Nagy vanished in February 1955. Rakosi was back, tougher than ever.
The Late Choice: Hungary was in a ferment that only grew with Khrushchev's posthumous "rehabilitation" of Bela Kun and Rajk. Students and intellectuals openly demanded "an end to this present regime of gendarmes and bureaucrats." The Russians sent First Deputy Premier Mikoyan down to Budapest to suggest that Rakosi take a health cure in Russia. The Russian solution: to supplant one gendarme bureaucrat by another. Old-Line Stalinist Erno Gero, the ruthless agent "Pedro" of the Spanish civil war (TIME, July 30), was pushed into the Hungarian leadership in July of this year, and told to clear his "liberalization" plans with Tito.
Gero returned from Belgrade last week, to find Budapest astir with the example of Poland's successful breakaway. Within hours after Gero's return, the revolt broke out. Desperately searching for a soft face to smile at the workers, while themselves taking the most vigorous counter-revolutionary measures, the Russians found Imre Nagy. It was his fate to be put forward too late.
While Nagy began assembling a governmental apparatus that would promise to meet the demands of the rebels, the Communist Party organization was put into the hands of a man who could be described as "Hungarian to his fingertips"—his fingernails having been ripped out by Dictator Rakosi's torturers during the anti-Titoist terror in 1951.
PARTY SECRETARY JANOS KADAR
(pronounced Kahdahr)
Born: 1912, of peasant family, in a village close to the Yugoslav border.