1957: József Dudás, Hungarian Revolution wild card
January 19th, 2020 Headsman
Hungarian politician József Dudás was hanged on this date in 1957, for participation in the previous year’s abortive Hungarian Revolution.
Although he’d been a Communist in his prewar youth, Dudás won election to the postwar government on the Independent Smallholders line. This agrarian opposition party was gradually pushed out of power and eventually suppressed over the course of the late 1940s; Dudás himself ended up getting arrested and detailed for a long visit to the feared Romanian Securitate.
He’d long since been repatriated as a non-political engineer when the Hungarian Revolution briefly cracked open the horizon of possibilities in the autumn of 1956.
Dudás immediately proved himself not so non-political — and a distinct thorn in the side of the Imre Nagy government. He advocated not only for Hungarian Independence (which was also the title of his newspaper) but also for a multiparty reformulation of the Hungarian state, which was a bit much for Nagy to process during the revolution’s two-week lease on life. Dudás’s penchant for off-script revolutionary improvisations, such as putting out feelers to Soviet commanders and also having his militia lynch agents of the temporarily disempowered secret police, made him an unwelcome wild card and Nagy had him arrested shortly before Soviet tanks re-established control.
The Soviets, of course, also had no use themselves for the peasants’ party deputy who’d been trying to subvert Nagy from the right.
On this day..
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- 1767: John Williamson, cruel husband - 2018
- 1735: Alice Riley, Savannah ghost - 2017
- 1894: John Hardy, desperate little man - 2016
- 1476: Israel, the last execution of the Trent blood libel trial - 2015
- 1891: James Eubanks - 2014
- 1894: Albert F. Bomberger, for the Kreider family murders - 2013
- 1880: Prevost, predatory Parisian policeman - 2012
- Daily Triple: 1880 and death - 2012
- 1866: Martha Grinder, the Pittsburgh Borgia - 2011
- 1661: Thomas Venner and the Fifth Monarchy Men - 2010
- 1870: Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, mass murderer - 2009
- 532: Hypatius and Pompeius, for Byzantine sports riots - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,History,Hungary,Occupation and Colonialism,Politicians,Power,Revolutionaries,Russia,Treason,USSR
Tags: 1950s, 1957, cold war, communism, hungarian revolution, january 19, jozsef dudas
