Formation
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 coalition government under Prime Minister Zoltán Tildy, thus frustrating soviet 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 Hungarian leader Mátyás Rákosi, famous for his use of salami tactics, to take a "line of more pronounced class struggle."
The People's Republic of Hungary was formed thereafter. 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. Hungarian communist László 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.
Read more about this topic: People's Republic Of Hungary
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