Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Psychonaut (talk | contribs) at 14:26, 6 September 2014 (tagging as copyright violation). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Károly Grósz [ˈkaːroj ˈɡroːs] (August 1, 1930 – January 7, 1996) was a Hungarian communist politician, who served as the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party from 1988 to 1989.

Early career

Grósz was born in Miskolc, Hungary. He joined the Communist Party in 1945 at the age of 14. The Communists took full power in 1949, and Grósz rose through the party ranks, becoming an important party leader in his native region. In 1974 he was appointed head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the governing Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party.

In 1979 Grósz was elected first secretary of the party committee of his home county. In 1984 he returned to national prominence as the head of the party committee in Budapest. At the next Party Congress in 1985, he became a member of the Politburo. In 1987, he was appointed Prime Minister of Hungary (Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Hungary - the second most powerful position after that of General Secretary) to succeed György Lázár, who had filled the post for more than eleven years. The appointment of the younger and more energetic Grósz was acclaimed both at home and abroad. As the country was facing economic troubles and growing discontent, the aging party leader János Kádár decided to resign, although originally he had planned to remain in office until 1990. In May 1988 a party conference was convened, which elected Károly Grósz as general secretary of the party at Kádár's recommendation on May 22, 1988.

Leader of Hungary

Grósz remained prime minister until 24 November 1988, when he was succeeded by Miklós Németh, a representative of the radical reformer faction. He advocated moderate and measured changes in the political and economic spheres with the aim to accomplish a careful reform of socialism without touching the latter's foundations. He liked to call this a "model change" (i.e. reforms and refinements within the Communist framework), as opposed to a total "system change", i.e. the replacement of Communism by a Western-style system.

As 1989 wore on, Grósz was increasingly sidelined by the radical reformers within the party, including Németh, Rezső Nyers, Gyula Horn and Imre Pozsgay. He tried to slow down, stop or reverse the radical changes advocated by his adversaries that were aimed at establishing a Western-type political system and market economy in Hungary. He opposed the rehabilitation of the executed Imre Nagy, Prime Minister during the 1956 revolution. Hoping to defuse the campaign to rehabilitate Nagy, Grósz broke the news of the latter's earlier NKVD ties in a speech at the September 1, 1989 meeting of the HSWP Central Committee, but those present decided not to publish the facts.

However, his fate was sealed when he agreed to meet with Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu to discuss what to do with a large number of ethnic Hungarians who had fled Romania. Many of Grósz' party colleagues thought he trusted Ceaușescu too much. He lost a good deal of authority as a result, and his standing never really recovered.

An editor has launched a copyright investigation involving this section. The text under investigation is currently hidden from public view, but is accessible in the page history. Please do not remove this notice or restore blanked content until the issue is resolved by an administrator, copyright clerk, or volunteer response agent. The purported copyright violation copies text from http://www.scribd.com/doc/13988893/Imre-Nagy-aka-Volodya-A-Dent-in-the-Martyr-s-Halo-by-Johanna-Granville (Copyvios report); as such, this page has been listed on the copyright problems page. Unless the copyright status of the text of this page or section is clarified and determined to be compatible with Misplaced Pages's content license, the problematic text and revisions or the entire page may be deleted one week after the time of its listing (i.e. after 14:26, 13 September 2014 (UTC)). What can I do to resolve the issue? If you hold the copyright to this text, you can license it in a manner that allows its use on Misplaced Pages. You must permit the use of your material under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Explain your intent to license the content on this article's discussion page. To confirm your permission, you can either display a notice to this effect at the site of original publication or send an e-mail from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-enwikimedia.org or a postal letter to the Wikimedia Foundation. These messages must explicitly permit use under CC BY-SA and the GFDL. See Misplaced Pages:Donating copyrighted materials. Note that articles on Misplaced Pages must be written from a neutral point of view and must be verifiable in published third-party sources; consider whether, copyright issues aside, your text is appropriate for inclusion in Misplaced Pages. You can demonstrate that this text is in the public domain or is already under a license suitable for Misplaced Pages. Explain this on this article's discussion page, with reference to evidence. Misplaced Pages:Public domain and Misplaced Pages:Compatibly licensed may assist in determining the status. Otherwise, you may rewrite this page without copyright-infringing material. Your rewrite should be placed on this page, where it will be available for an administrator or clerk to review it at the end of the listing period. Follow this link to create the temporary subpage. Please mention the rewrite upon completion on this article's discussion page. Simply modifying copyrighted text is not sufficient to avoid copyright infringement—if the original copyright violation cannot be cleanly removed or the article reverted to a prior version, it is best to write the article from scratch. (See Misplaced Pages:Close paraphrasing.) For license compliance, any content used from the original article must be properly attributed; if you use content from the original, please leave a note at the top of your rewrite saying as much. You may duplicate non-infringing text that you had contributed yourself. It is always a good idea, if rewriting, to identify the point where the copyrighted content was imported to Misplaced Pages and to check to make sure that the contributor did not add content imported from other sources. When closing investigations, clerks and administrators may find other copyright problems than the one identified. If this material is in the proposed rewrite and cannot be easily removed, the rewrite may not be usable. Steps to list an article at Misplaced Pages:Copyright problems: Add the following to the bottom of Misplaced Pages:Copyright problems/2014 September 6: * {{subst:article-cv|Károly Grósz}} from http://www.scribd.com/doc/13988893/Imre-Nagy-aka-Volodya-A-Dent-in-the-Martyr-s-Halo-by-Johanna-Granville. ~~~~ Add the following template to the talk page of the contributor of the material: {{subst:Nothanks-web|pg=Károly Grósz|url=http://www.scribd.com/doc/13988893/Imre-Nagy-aka-Volodya-A-Dent-in-the-Martyr-s-Halo-by-Johanna-Granville}} ~~~~ Place {{copyvio/bottom}} at the end of the portion you want to blank. If nominating the entire page, please place this template at the top of the page, set the "fullpage" parameter to "yes", and place {{copyvio/bottom}} at the very end of the article.

Soviet KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov had sent a dossier of incriminating KGB documents, both genuine and bogus, to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev on Friday, June 16, 1989 – the same day that several hundred thousand Hungarians gathered in Hősök tere (Heroes’ Square) in Budapest to witness the ceremonial reburial of Nagy and several other leaders of the 1956 revolt who had been tried and executed in 1958. In February 1993, when Kryuchkov's secret letter to Gorbachev was published in the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Grósz gave an interview to the Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság the following month, acknowledging that Nagy had indeed worked for the Soviet secret police in the 1930s and early 1940s.

In the summer of 1989, he became a member of a four-man collective presidency of the MSZMP, chaired by Nyers, who now outranked him. However, he opposed the radical reformers' drive to reorganize the party as a Western European-style social democratic party. He remained general secretary until October 7, when the party reorganized itself as the Hungarian Socialist Party.

Later life

The communist ("hardline") faction, led by Grósz, was defeated at the congress and refounded itself in December 1989 as a new Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, with Grósz as its first acting chairman (later renamed Workers' Party and the 'Communist Workers' Party'). The party failed to win parliamentary representation in the first multiparty election in the newly formed Republic of Hungary. These elections took place on 25 March and 8 April 1990.

In 1996, he died of kidney cancer at age 65 in Gödöllő, Hungary.

Notes

1. Sebetsyen, Victor (2009). Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire. New York City: Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-375-42532-2.
2. Johanna Granville, "Imre Nagy aka 'Volodya' – A Dent in the Martyr's Halo?", Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Spring, 1995.
3. www.electionresources.org/hu; ipu.org (Inter-Parliamentary Union)

Template:Persondata

• 1930 births
• 1996 deaths
• People from Miskolc
• Members of the Hungarian Working People's Party
• Members of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party
• Prime Ministers of Hungary
• Hungarian Communist Party politicians
• Deaths from kidney cancer