The Imre Nagy Memorial in its former location near the Hungarian Parliament building. The memorial is now located at Jászai Mar Square, on the Buda side of the Margit Island Bridge.

Imre Nagy is a popular figure in Hungarian history, part villain, part hero. Nagy was a committed Communist who spent much of the 1930’s living in the Soviet Union, where he worked for the NKVD (Stalin’s notorious secret police, a forerunner of the KBG). There’s no question that he was responsible for the arrests of hundreds of people, and the executions of more than a dozen.

At the end of World War II Nagy returned to Hungary and served in various offices for the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP), the Soviet-controlled Communist party in Hungary. As Minister of the Interior he led the deportation of hundreds of thousands of German-speaking Hungarians before rising to become Prime Minister in 1953. Two years later Nagy was ousted from the government because of internal conflicts with Mátyás Rákosi, the General Secretary of the MDP and Hungary’s most powerful political figure.

Nagy joined in with the factions that led the anti-Soviet Hungarian Revolution on October 23,1956, and was appointed Prime Minister the next day. After barely a week in office he announced that Hungary was pulling out of the Warsaw Pact, the Eastern Bloc’s version of NATO. Was this a true repudiation of Communism, or was Nagy merely being opportunistic and attempting to regain power? We’ll never really know, because three days later the Soviet’s launched a massive invasion of Hungary, overwhelming the country in less than a week. Nagy was arrested, and sent to Romania for trail, where he was executed in 1958 and buried in an unmarked grave.

In 1989, with the Eastern Bloc teetering on the edge of collapse, Nagy’s name was rehabilitated, and he was buried in Hungary with honors.

The memorial of Nagy, standing on a bridge and looking towards the Parliament building, was created in 1996. An evocative and popular photo op for every tourist that visited Budapest, the memorial was moved to, let’s say, a less conspicuous site in December 2018.

Tags: Budapest, Communism