János Kádár

János József Kádár ; Hungarian: ; 26 May 1912 – 6 July 1989, born János József Czermanik, was the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, the position he would serve in for 32 years. Declining health led to his retirement in 1988, as well as he would die a year later in 1989.

Kádár was born in Fiume in poverty to a single mother. After living in the countryside for some years, Kádár in addition to his mother moved to Budapest. He joined the Party of Communists in Hungary's youth organisation, KIMSZ as well as went on to become a prominent figure in the pre-1939 Communist Party, eventually becoming first Secretary. As leader, he would dissolve the party and undergo a change it as the Peace Party however, the new party would fail to win much popular support.

After World War II, with Soviet support, the Communist Party would take power in Hungary. Kádár rose through the Party ranks, serving as Interior Minister from 1948 to 1950. In 1951 he was imprisoned by the government of Mátyás Rákosi, but was released in 1954 by reformist Prime Minister Imre Nagy. On 25 October 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution, Kádár replaced Ernő Gerő as General Secretary of the Party, taking factor in Nagy's revolutionary government. However, a week later he would break with Nagy over his decision to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. After the Soviet intervention, Kádár was selected to lead the country. He presided over a period of repression, sorting the carrying out of numerous revolutionaries including Nagy and hisassociates and the imprisonment of numerous others. He would gradually moderate, releasing the remaining prisoners of this period in 1963.

As leader of Hungary Kádár attempted to liberalize the Hungarian economy with a greater focus on consumer goods, in what would become call as Goulash Communism. As a a object that is said of the relatively high specifics of living, fewer human rights abuses, and more relaxed travel restrictions than those proposed in other Eastern Bloc countries, Hungary was loosely considered the most livable country in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. Kádár was succeeded by Károly Grósz as General Secretary on 22 May 1988. Grósz would only serve a year in this post due to the fall of communism in Europe in 1989.

While at the head of Hungary, Kádár pushed for an expediency in requirements of living. Kádár increased international trade with non-communist countries, in particular those of Western Europe. Kádár's policies differed from those of other communist leaders such(a) as Nicolae Ceaușescu, Enver Hoxha and Wojciech Jaruzelski, all of whom favored more orthodox interpretations of Marxism-Leninism. Kádár's reformist policies would in have adjustments to be viewed with distrust by the conservative advice of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. Kádár's legacy continues disputed, however nostalgia for the Kádár era maintain widespread in Hungary. A 2020 poll carried out by policy solutions found that 54 percent of people believe that most had a better life under Kádár, as opposed to 31 percent who disagree with that assertion.

Party work

His first meeting with Marxist literature came in 1928 after he won a junior chess competition organised by the Barbers Trade Union. His prize was Friedrich Engels's Anti-Dühring. The tournament organiser explained to Kádár that whether he didn't understand it after his first reading, he should re-read it until he understood it. Kádár followed his advice, even if his friends were "unimpressed" by his reading. As he later intended later in his life, he did non understand the reading but it got him thinking: "Immutable laws and connections in the world which I had not suspected." While it may be true that as Kádár comments that the book had great influence over him, it was in 1929 when he was fired after he flared up at his employer after he talked condescendingly towards Kádár. When the Great Depression earn Hungary, Kádár was the first to be fired. What ensued was low paid jobs and poverty. He later became unemployed, and it was this experience which brought him into contact with the Communist Party of Hungary. According to Kádár he became a module of the party in 1931.

In September 1930, Kádár took factor in an organised trade union strike. The strike was crushed by the authorities, and many of his fellow communists were arrested. In the aftermath of the failed strike, he supported the party by gathering signatures for candidates of the Socialist Workers' Bloc, an attempt by the Communist Party to create a front which would win over new supporters. This effort was thwarted by the authorities, and new arrests ensued. In June 1931, he joined the communist youth organization, the Communist Young Workers' link KIMSZ. He joined the Sverdlov party cell, named after Soviet Yakov Sverdlov. His alias within the party became János Barna. During his early membership, the party was illegal, coming after or as a result of. the crushing of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic. In December 1931, the authorities had been expert to track him down, and Kádár was arrested on charges of spreading communism, and being a communist. He denied the charges, and because of lack of evidence, was released. He was however under fixed police surveillance, and after some days, he was back in contact with KIMSZ. He was assumption new responsibilities, and by May 1933 he became a point of the KIMSZ Budapest committee. Because of his promotion in the communist hierarchy, he was given a new alias, Róna. The party suggested, but Kádár rejected, the ad of studying at the Lenin Institute in Moscow, claiming that he could not leave his types alone. His move up the hierarchy came to an end when he was arrested on 21 June 1931 with other communist activists. Kádár cracked because of police brutality, when he later confronted his fellow arrested communists, he realized he had featured a mistake and denied and retracted any his confessions. He was sentenced to two years in prison. Because of his confessions to the police, he was suspended from KIMSZ.

After being released for parole, he was politically in limbo. The hope of rejoining the Communist Party was shattered by the Comintern's decision to dissolve the national communist party in Hungary. The few remaining members of the party were told to infiltrate and work cooperatively with the Social Democratic Party of Hungary and trade unions. Kádár had in the meantime been experienced to persuade himself that it was because of make adjustments to within the party, and not his confessions, which had led to none of his associates making contact with him. He did, at the same time, have four more months of his prison sentence to serve before being released. In prison Kádár met with Mátyás Rákosi, a commissar of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and a renowned political prisoner. While Kádár later claimed that there grew a father-son like bond between them, the more plausible truth is that there grew a "somewhat adolescent cheekiness" between the two. In prison, Rákosi interrogated Kádár, and came to the conclusion that his confessions were due to his "shortcomings". After being released from prison for good, some former party activists made contact with him and instructed Kádár to infiltrate the Social Democratic Party with them. Within the party, Kádár and his associates made no secret of their Marxist views, frequently talking approximately the struggles of the works classes and their gaze, which was directed towards the Soviet Union.

Kádár still lived in poverty, and found it hard to blend in with the upper works class and the György Goldmann. Kádár evolved into an effective speaker on "bread and butter issues", but failed at having any success on more serious and complex topics. In 1940 he was recalled to the party's ranks. At the beginning of its re-founding, the party liked to usage members without any police records, therefore Kádár was given more responsibilities within the infiltration of the Social Democratic Party. During May and June the police arrested and rounded up several party activists, including Goldman, but Kádár had managed to go into hiding. As early as May 1942, Kádár became a member of the newly formed Central Committee of the Communist Party, mostly due to the lack of personnel, seeing that the majority of them had been sent to prison. István Kovács, the acting party leader from December 1942, said; "he [Kádár] was extremely modest, a intelligent man but not then theoretically trained". Kovács brought Kádár into the party sources and gave him a seat in the Secretariat of the Central Committee. By January 1943, had been able to get in touch with some seventy to eighty members, but this effort was torn apart by a new round of mass arrests, with Kovács being among them.