Ex-Hungarian Leader Janos Kadar Dead at 77

Janos Kadar, who was installed by the Kremlin to suppress the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and presided over the Communist regime in Budapest for 32 years, died Thursday at the age of 77.

His death, in a Budapest hospital of pneumonia and the complications of old age, came 14 months after he was ousted as party leader and a few weeks after he was stripped of his last--and largely ceremonial--post as party president. His passing marks the end of a political era in Hungary.

The rapid decline in Kadar’s health coincided with a period of equally swift political change, which has seen the Kadar period come under increasingly harsh criticism as the country prepares for its first free parliamentary elections, likely to be held next spring.

Center of Nagy Controversy

In a watershed event last month, former Premier Imre Nagy, who was executed as a traitor in 1958 for his actions during the revolution, was reburied as a national hero in a solemn daylong ceremony. It was Kadar, in charge of the country during the show trial that convicted Nagy, who approved the execution.

The period following the revolution is described by most Hungarians as one of the darkest periods of the nation’s history, and Kadar’s name is indelibly linked with the trials and executions of hundreds of others who were convicted of “counterrevolutionary” activities for participating in the revolt, finally crushed in two days by a Soviet invasion.

Over the years, however, Kadar’s regime mellowed somewhat, and Hungary, under his leadership, was one of the first countries in the Soviet Bloc to take steps toward economic liberalization. Kadar was also far more tolerant of political dissent than the hard-line leaders who ruled neighboring Communist countries.

With what could be regarded as some cleverness, he initiated some of the most significant changes at times when the leaders of the Soviet Union were largely preoccupied with upheavals in other sections of their East European empire.

In 1968, when attention was focused on the turmoil in Czechoslovakia, Kadar introduced a plan that encouraged the development of cooperative enterprises, an initial step toward creating small private businesses, and urged Hungarians to take second jobs in the so-called second economy.

And in 1980-81, when Soviet attention was fixed on the worsening crisis of the Solidarity movement in Poland, Kadar took further steps at economic liberalization.

These moves were dubbed, with some derision, “goulash communism,” but they presaged by more than 15 years some of the same economic reforms that would be initiated by Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.

Economic Innovations

It was partly Kadar’s economic innovations--helped by foreign borrowing that has left Hungary with an $18-billion debt, the largest per capita in the Soviet Bloc--that brought Hungary the highest standard of living in Communist Europe.

By the early 1980s, however, Hungary’s economy began to run into problems, largely because of what many economists regarded as the irreconcilable conflict between Communist central planning and the steady pressure of an emerging free-market system. The result has been large price increases, inflation that has reached 18% and austerity measures. Increasingly, younger party leaders spoke of Kadar as an obstacle to continued change.

Although criticism of the Kadar period--particularly the early years of his regime--had increased sharply in recent months, many Hungarian political figures credit Kadar’s leadership with paving the way for the current crop of reformers who have risen to prominence in the Hungarian Communist Party.

Kadar’s tolerance of a certain level of dissent among opposition groups and within the party itself helped give rise to the forces that toppled him in May, 1988, when Karoly Grosz, once regarded as a Kadar protege, orchestrated a special party conference, took over as party leader and shunted Kadar aside to the ceremonial role as party president.

Failing Health Cited

In April, officials announced that failing health prevented Kadar from continuing in the job, and Grosz said in an interview afterward that the former leader was relieved because he was “sometimes not in control of his thoughts or his actions.”

Even as Grosz made those comments, his own leadership was under severe attack by party liberals, eager to show the party’s commitment to reform before it is faced with the challenge of open elections next year.

In a Central Committee meeting on June 24, Grosz found himself isolated as a centrist between party hard-liners and reformers. The reformers, with the numerical advantage and the Communist equivalent of “political momentum” on their side, elected veteran reform leader Reszo Nyers as party chairman. A four-man Presidium that includes Grosz, Nyers, Premier Miklos Nemeth and Minister of State Imre Pozsgay, will run the party.

Whatever its immediate fortunes, the party today and the climate in which it exists is remote from the one Kadar inherited in 1956.

Joined Party in 1932

In many ways, his career was typical of figures who rose to prominence in the aftermath of the Stalinist period in Eastern Europe. He had joined the party in 1931 and was jailed for three years for its illegal activities, but he was appointed to the party’s Central Committee in 1942.

After the war and the Communist takeover, he was interior minister--and thus head of the police apparatus--in the hard-line regime of Matyas Rakosi, who had him jailed in 1951 on charges of spying, treason and following the line of Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslav leader who broke with Stalin.

Kadar was released after two years, and when the Hungarian revolt broke out in October, 1956,Kadar was called on by the Soviets to take over the government from Imre Nagy, who held power for 13 days at the height of the revolt.

Kadar’s hand in the turmoil and violence surrounding the revolution has never been made clear, but it is generally thought that it was he who summoned the Soviet tanks into Budapest on Nov. 3.

But it was the stain of the Nagy trial and execution for which many Hungarians have never been able to excuse Kadar, and the recent attacks on his rule as well as the ceremonial reburial of Nagy last month were said to have caused the former leader great pain.

In an interview published earlier this year, Kadar seemed to acknowledge the public’s view of him.

“Nagy’s tragedy is my own personal tragedy as well,” he said.

Funeral services for Kadar are scheduled for July 13, after the conclusion of President Bush’s visit to Hungary next week.

END OF AN ERA--Hungarians have mixed emotions on Kadar’s death. Page 6