Hungary

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Hungarian: Magyarország [ˈmɒɟɒrorsaːɡ] ( listen)) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Romania to the east, Serbia to the south, Croatia to the southwest, Slovenia to the west, Austria to the northwest, and Ukraine to the northeast. The country's capital and largest city is Budapest. Hungary is a member of the European Union, NATO, the OECD, the Visegrád Group, and the Schengen Area. The official language is Hungarian, which is the most widely spoken non-Indo-European language in Europe.

Following the fall of Nazi Germany, Soviet troops occupied the entire country with the goal of forming Hungary into a communist satellite state of the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership selected Mátyás Rákosi to front the Stalinization of the country. As General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party and later of the Hungarian Working People's Party, he was the de facto ruler from 1949 to 1956. His government's policies of militarization, industrialization, collectivization, and war compensation led to a severe decline in living standards. In imitation of Stalin's KGB, the Rákosi government established a secret political police, the ÁVH, to enforce the new regime. The purges that followed saw approximately 350,000 officials and intellectuals imprisoned or executed from 1948 to 1956. Many freethinkers and democrats were secretly arrested and taken to inland or foreign Nazi concentration camps without any judicial sentence. According to some estimates some 600,000 Hungarians were deported to Soviet labor camps, and at least 200,000 died in captivity.[84]

After Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union pursued a program of destalinization that was inimical to Rákosi, leading to his deposition from the premiership. The following political cooling saw the ascent of Imre Nagy to the premiership, and the growing interest of students and intellectuals in political life. Nagy promised market liberalization and political openness, while Rákosi opposed both vigorously. Rákosi eventually managed to discredit Nagy and replace him with the more hard-line Ernő Gerő. Hungary joined the Warsaw Pact in May 1955, as societal dissatisfaction with the regime swelled. Following the firing on peaceful demonstrations by Soviet soldiers and secret police, and rallies throughout the country on 23 October 1956, protesters took to the streets in Budapest, initiating the 1956 Revolution. In an effort to quell the chaos, the more liberal Nagy returned as premier, promised free elections, and took Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact.

The violence nonetheless continued, as revolutionary militias sprung up against the Soviet Army and the ÁVH; the roughly 3,000-strong resistance fought Soviet tanks using Molotov cocktails and machine-pistols. Though the preponderance of the Soviets was immense they suffered heavy losses, and by 30 October 1956 most Soviet troops had withdrawn from Budapest to garrison the Hungarian countryside. For a time, the Soviet leadership was unsure how to respond to developments in Hungary, but decided to intervene to prevent Hungary from breaking away from the Soviet bloc. On 4 November reinforcements of more than 150,000 troops and 2,500 tanks entered the country from the Soviet Union.[85] Nearly 20,000 Hungarians were killed resisting the intervention, while an additional 21,600 were imprisoned afterwards for political reasons. Some 13,000 were interned and 230 brought to trial and executed. Nagy was captured, and was executed in 1958. Because borders had briefly been open, nearly a quarter of a million people had fled the country by the time the revolution was suppressed

See also Hungarian People's Republic, and Hungarian Revolution of 1956