János Kádár
János József Kádár was a Hungarian Communist leader and the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, a position he held for 32 years. Declining health led to his retirement in 1988, and he died in 1989 after being hospitalized for pneumonia.
Kádár was born in Fiume in poverty to a single mother. After living in the countryside for some years, Kádár and his mother moved to Budapest. He joined the Party of Communists in Hungary's youth organization, KIMSZ, and went on to become a prominent figure in the pre-1939 Communist party, eventually becoming First Secretary. As a leader, he would dissolve the party and reorganize it as the Peace Party, but the new party failed to win much popular support.
After World War II, with Soviet support, the Communist party took 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 part in Nagy's revolutionary government. A week later, he broke with Nagy over his decision to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. After Soviet intervention in Hungary, Kádár was selected to lead the country. He ordered Nagy to be executed shortly after coming to power. He gradually moderated, releasing the majority of remaining prisoners of this period in an amnesty in 1963. His leadership was characterized by unrelenting Realpolitik; for a long time, he successfully maneuvered between Moscow's wishes, local interests and the expectations of the Western world. In an interview with a Western journalist, he called himself a "toiler for compromise".
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. During his time as leader of Hungary, Kádár pushed for an improvement in standards 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 as Nicolae Ceaușescu, Enver Hoxha, and Erich Honecker, all of whom favored more orthodox interpretations of Marxism–Leninism. Kádár's reformist policies and the increasing commercial ties to the Western World would in turn worsen relations with Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. As the leader of Hungary, Kádár attempted to liberalize the Hungarian economy with a greater focus on consumer goods, in what would become known as Goulash Communism.
Childhood
János Kádár was an illegitimate son of the soldier János Krezinger and the servant maid Borbála Csermanek. Krezinger came from a Bavarian German origin smallholder family of Pusztaszemes, Somogy County. The mother, Borbála Csermanek was born in Ógyalla to a landless Slovak father and Hungarian mother. The parents of Borbála were too poor to provide schooling for the girl, thus the teenager girl had to work as maid in various villas. Soon Borbála got a job in the popular seaside resort town Opatija. Krezinger met Borbála during his military service in Opatija, but the detailed story of how they met is unknown. Kádár only met his father once, in 1960, when Kádár was already the leader of the country.Kádár was born out of wedlock in Fiume on 26 May 1912. The infant was registered in the Italian version of his name: Giovanni Giuseppe Czermanik because he was born in the Italian-established Santo Spirito Hospital. Being an illegitimate child, the infant could only receive the Csermanek family name of his mother. Abandoned, Borbála gave birth to János in the middle of the holiday season, as no one wanted to employ a single mother with a child. Borbála went to look for Krezinger, but his family wanted nothing to do with them. She then walked ten kilometres to the city of Kapoly, where she persuaded the Bálint family to care for her child for a fee. Borbála found work in Budapest. To avoid the pronunciation problems of the Slovak-origin Czermanik name in Budapest, the family changed the orthography of their name to Csermanek.
Although Kádár's foster father, Imre Bálint, was in charge, it was Bálint's brother, Sándor Bálint, that Kádár would remember as his true foster father. While Imre served in the army during World War I, Sándor was left to take care of Kádár. Sándor was the only man Kádár had a good relationship with throughout his early childhood. Kádár started working at an early age and helped Sándor take care of his sick wife. Kádár years later recalled how his early experiences moved him towards Marxist–Leninism. He recalls how he was accused of setting a building on fire when the true culprit was the corrupt inspector's son. Suddenly in 1918, at the age of six, Borbála reclaimed him, moved him to Budapest and enrolled him in school. In school he got bullied for his bumpkin manners and his peasant talk.
Borbála worked hard to ensure that Kádár would get a good education. In the summer time, Kádár would find work in the countryside. He was seen as "alien" by his contemporaries, in the countryside they would call him a "city boy" while in the city they would call him a "country boy". Then, in 1920, Borbála got pregnant again; the father left soon. Kádár helped take care of his half-brother, Jenő. At the Cukor Street Elementary School, Kádár proved to be a bright student. He skipped school often, and his mother tried beatings to make it stop. Classes were easy for him and he skipped school to play sports. He did read often however, but his mother was unimpressed by this and sarcastically asked him if he was a "gentleman of leisure". Kádár left school at the age of fourteen in 1926. Kádár started his apprenticeship as a car mechanic. After he was turned down as a car mechanic, he started work as an apprentice of Sándor Izsák, chief Hungarian representative of Torpedo Typewriter Company in the autumn of 1927. Typewriter mechanics had a high standing among the working class, there were only 160 of them in the country.
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 if he didn't understand it after his first reading, he should re-read it again until he understood it. Kádár followed his advice, even if his friends were "unimpressed" by his reading. As he later noted later in his life, he did not 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 hit 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 member of the party in 1931.In September 1930, Kádár took part 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 attempt was thwarted by the authorities, and new arrests ensued. In June 1931, he joined the Communist youth organization, the Communist Young Workers' Association. 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, following the crushing of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic. In December 1931, the authorities had been able 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 constant police surveillance, and after some days, he was back in contact with KIMSZ. He was given new responsibilities, and by May 1933 he became a member 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 offer of studying at the Lenin Institute in Moscow, claiming that he could not leave his family alone. His advance 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 made a mistake and denied and retracted all 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 able to persuade himself that it was because of changes 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 about the struggles of the working class 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 working class and the intelligentsia. Paradoxically, his main Communist contact in the Social Democratic Party was a sculptor named 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 use 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 was extremely modest, a clever man but not then theoretically trained". Kovács brought Kádár into the party leadership 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.