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| - Following the liberation of Hungary from Nazi Germany by the Red Army, Soviet military occupation ensued. After seizing most material assets from German hands, the Soviets tried and managed, to a certain extent, to control Hungarian political affairs. By coercion through force, when the Red Army set up police organs to persecute the opposition, assuming this would enable the Soviet Union to seize the upcoming elections, to intense communist propaganda in an attempt to legitimize their rule. The Hungarian Communist Party, despite all the efforts, was trounced, receiving only 17% of votes, by a Smallholder-led coalition under Prime Minister Zoltán Tildy, thus frustrating the Kremlin's expectations of ruling through a democratically elected government.
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| abstract
| - Following the liberation of Hungary from Nazi Germany by the Red Army, Soviet military occupation ensued. After seizing most material assets from German hands, the Soviets tried and managed, to a certain extent, to control Hungarian political affairs. By coercion through force, when the Red Army set up police organs to persecute the opposition, assuming this would enable the Soviet Union to seize the upcoming elections, to intense communist propaganda in an attempt to legitimize their rule. The Hungarian Communist Party, despite all the efforts, was trounced, receiving only 17% of votes, by a Smallholder-led coalition under Prime Minister Zoltán Tildy, thus frustrating the Kremlin's expectations of ruling through a democratically elected government. The Soviet Union, however, intervened through force once again, resulting in a puppet government that disregarded Tildy, placed communists in important ministerial positions, and imposed several restrictive measures, like banning the victorious coalition government and forcing it to yield the Interior Ministry to a nominee of the Hungarian Communist Party. Communist Interior Minister László Rajk established the ÁVH secret police, in an effort to suppress political opposition through intimidation, false accusations, imprisonment and torture. In early 1947, the Soviet Union pressed the leader of the Hungarian Communists, Mátyás Rákosi, to take a "line of more pronounced class struggle." Rákosi complied by pressuring the other parties to push out those members not willing to do the Communists' bidding, ostensibly because they were "fascists." Later on, after the Communists won full power, he referred to this practice as "salami tactics." Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy was forced to resign as prime minister in favour of a more pliant Smallholder, Lajos Dinnyés. In the elections held that year, the Communists became the largest party, but were well short of a majority. The coalition was retained with Dinnyés as prime minister. However, by this time most of the other parties' more courageous members had been pushed out, leaving them in the hands of fellow travelers. Having emasculated most of the other parties, the Communists spent the next year and a half consolidating their hold on power. This culminated in the second half of 1948. In June, the Communists forced the Social Democrats to merge with them to form the Hungarian Working People's Party. Rákosi then forced Tildy to turn over the presidency to Social Democrat-turned-Communist Árpád Szakasits. In December, Dinnyés was replaced by the leader of the Smallholders' left wing, the openly pro-Communist István Dobi. The process was more or less completed with the elections of May 1949. Voters were presented with a single list of all parties, running on a common programme. On August 18, the newly elected National Assembly passed a new constitution—a near-carbon copy of the Soviet Constitution. When it was officially promulgated on August 20, the country was renamed the People's Republic of Hungary. The same political dynamics continued through the years, with the Soviet Union pressing and maneuvering Hungarian politics through the Hungarian Communist Party, intervening whenever it needed to, through military coercion and covert operations. Rajk (who was later executed) called it "a dictatorship of the proletariat without the Soviet form" called a "people's democracy." Hungary stayed that way until the late 1980s, when turmoil broke out across the Eastern Bloc, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union's dissolution.
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